The Heromartyrs of Cyprus: National Museums as Greek Orthodox Hagiographical Media

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn 1961, a “Museum of the Struggle” was created to remember and glorify the heroes of the Greek Cypriot anticolonial war (1955–1959). The museum functions, this article argues, as an apparatus of hagiographical mediation, rendering for local and international publics an aura of sanctification around the war’s fallen fighters. Such an impression is generated by the museum’s spatial mise-en-scène, its progressive orientation of visitors who move through its halls, its ways of curating belongings and images of the dead, its narrative construction of the life and conduct of the fighters, and its subtle evocation of traditional saintly patronage associated with the island’s communities. Drawing on original fieldwork in Cyprus between 2012 and 2018, the article treats the musealization of the Greek-Cypriot national struggle as a tight lens through which to consider the diversity of processes by which modern Orthodox Christians in (post)colonial situations construe, commemorate, and maintain relationships with holiness. In particular, it finds that the celebration of the dead anticolonial fighters as “heromartyrs” (ērōomartyres) serves to constitute a distinctive category of Christian martyrdom that infuses a post-Byzantine martyriological identity with the imagination of ancient Greek heroic virtue and epic violence.