Abstract
This paper reflects on the embrace of the Ancient world in modernity and the journey to Greece as a vehicle for their reciprocal reshaping. In the interwar period, new visual narratives emerged in Western accounts, proposing alternative contexts for Greek cultural heritage and associating regional culture with the emergence of modernism. The article investigates the mobility of modern travellers in Greece as an essential factor for the new contextualization of the country’s dominant cultural paradigm -Antiquity- as well as for the emergence of parallel narrations of the Mediterranean genius loci that examine the spatial imprint of heritage and tourism on the Greek urban, archaeological and natural environment. Western intellectuals, engineers, architects and urban planners, supported by a highly mobile network of editors, travel agencies, tourist cruises, architectural or archaeological conferences and congresses, contributed to the promotion of modern architecture and urban infrastructure in Greece. Their yet to become tourist gaze embraced the Aegean tradition, the Greek landscape and the ancient ruins as equal collocutors, initiating at the same time Greece itself into modernity. This paper traces the encounters between foreign travellers and the divergent manifestations of the country’s cultural identity in the pages of printed articles, books, travel accounts, photographic material and films. Following these documentations, the paper argues that tourism mobility gave rise to an alternative, southern modernism, whose emergence and development deviates significantly from mainstream narratives propounded by the continental historiography of modernity. Vice versa, the modern mobility networks of the South promoted the development of urban infrastructure and welfare facilities in Greece, as well as the establishment of early tourism policies, thus articulating the new national narrative of interwar Greece, based equally on classical heritage, regional culture and modern progress. The present paper is part of the research program Voyage to Greece: Mobility and modern architecture in the interwar period, where E. Athanassiou, V. Dima, V.; Karali, K. contribute as post-doctoral researchers, with P. Tournikiotis, Professor NTUA as scientific supervisor. The research is co-financed by the Greek State and the European Union.
Highlights
Qu’attendiez-vous de la Grèce? Je n’en attendais rien; j’en suis revenu autre
The perception of Greek antiquity moved from the realm of poetic imagination towards a modern visual reality, which was formed by major technical projects, the modernization of the capital city of Athens and the emergence of tourism
This paper argues that the connection between classical heritage and modernism took a twofold manifestation; on the one hand, Greek heritage—both antiquity and the Aegean/Mediterranean vernacular culture—was appropriated as matrix of western “prototypes” models, archetypes—of modernity
Summary
Qu’attendiez-vous de la Grèce? Je n’en attendais rien; j’en suis revenu autre. Raymond Queneau (1934) [1]. In the 30s, a highly mobile cosmopolitan community of intellectuals, reaching Greece by steamboats, airplanes or fast automobiles, directed its investigative gaze towards manifestations of modernity in the arts, architecture and the long-anticipated by the Greek people societal reforms This imported, modern perspective joined the new national, collective narrative, based on both classical heritage and progress, in adding cultural surplus to actual architectural evidence of materialized policies for urban and tourism development. In John Urry and Jonas Larsen’s coherent tourism theory, the tourist gaze appears as a peculiar combination that took shape and meaning in the second half of the XIX century, by the emergence of the desire for a new kind of mobility, the development of the means of collective travel and the evolution of photographic technology, all of which were fundamental components of modernity [7]. Tourism policies represent par excellence the ideological shift that took place in the 30s, implying the emergence of a critical or post-modern attitude towards heritage [9]
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