The Other Parthenon: Antiquity and National Memory at the Concentration Camp

Abstract

Abstract This incident brought home to me once again the now widely accepted idea that, in most cases, it is almost impossible for researchers to maintain the preference of distant objectified research, divorced from social experience, from emotions and feelings, both of the researcher and of her or his ‘interlocutors,’ from the ever-present, sometime painful, social memories. After all, I had decided to embark on this topic of research not only because of its obvious relevance to my wider project which forms the subject of this book, but also because of the emotive weight that it carried for me: I still remember during my childhood years in the mid to late 1970s and early 1980s, how in a village in east Crete, talk of people who ‘were sent to Makronisos’, uttered with a sense of part contempt, part fear, and in any case with that cloud of social stigma around it, used to mystify me. In later years, during my mostly literary and political encounters with the phenomenon, this mystification increased, but was also accompanied by the emotions and feelings of echoes of many painful memories and stories, mostly, it seemed, still untold. As someone who researches and teaches archaeology, one of the most intriguing aspects was the association in modern social memory of Makronisos with classical antiquity, especially with its most prominent specimen, the Parthenon. Of course, the uses of antiquity by Greek authoritarian regimes were hardly a novelty, as we saw in the previous chapter. Makronisos was different, however: not only was it linked to a period of apparent parliamentary democracy, but for reasons which will become clear later, there was until recently very little discussion on it, let alone investigation (cf. Someritis 2001).