Greek Nation Research Articles

The discovery of new Greeks. The cases of Gagauz in Moldova and Pontians in Turkey

This paper constitutes an effort to depict the policies exercised by the Greek State from the 1990s till the mid-2000s vis-a-vis two ethno-linguistic groups: the Turkish-speaking Orthodox Gagauz of Moldova and the Pontic-speaking Muslims of Eastern Black Sea. In addition, an attempt is made to interpret these policies, why and how they were launched, the purposes for which they were exercised and finally what they were aiming at. Our hypothesis is that the issue is not only connected to yet one more Greek-Turkish discord. We noticed that, beyond the dispute there are reasons relevant to the way the Greek nation, the national narrative and public history in Greece are constructed. That is the reason why emphasis is placed on the public discourse developing around these two groups.

O μύθος της γενιάς του τριάντα: νεοτερικότητα, ελληνικότητα και πολιτισμική ιδεολογία by Dimitris Tziovas (review)

Reviewed by: O μύθος της γενιάς του τριάντα: νεοτερικότητα, ελληνικότητα και πολιτισμική ιδεολογία by Dimitris Tziovas Artemis Leontis Dimitris Tziovas , O μύθος της γενιάς του τριάντα: νεοτερικότητα, ελληνικότητα και πολιτισμική ιδεολογία (The Myth of the Generation of the Thirties: Modernism, Greekness and Cultural Ideology). Polis. 2011. Pp. 588 “Thousands of citizens, in the fifth day of protests, sang the ‘Axion Esti.’” That was not the headline of a newspaper reporting on political developments in Greece in the early 1960s, when the long epic poem by Odysseus Elytis, the “Axion Esti,” was set to music by composer Mikis Theodorakis. Instead it was the first story on www.koolnews.gr, www.protothema.gr, iefimerida.gr, www.inews.gr, wws.star.gr, www.ethnos.gr, and other digital news sites early Sunday morning, 16 June 2013, at the close of the fifth day of demonstrations outside the ERT news station in Agia Paraskevi, after the sudden announcement of the public news conglomerate’s closure by Prime Minister Antonis Samaras. “Thousands gathered for yet another night to express their support for the workers of ERT who lost their jobs, while the orchestra of contemporary music and the ERT choir presented the ‘Axion Esti’ in a powerful, emotional performance” (http://www.iefimerida.gr/). More than half a century has passed since Elytis wrote the “Axion Esti” to express the struggle of the Greek people for freedom and justice through periods of foreign intervention, with direct reference to events of the 1940s, when the poet, fighting against the Italians who invaded Greece through Albania, developed a strong Greek national consciousness. Although details of the history of that period have receded in public memory, this and other works by members of the “Generation of the Thirties” to which Elytis belonged still function as a cultural haven, offering a vision of communal reconciliation even under neoliberal conditions of austerity, surveillance, and relentless cuts in social and cultural programs. Young people whose horizons differ radically from those of Elytis, Seferis, and Ritsos sing musical renditions of their works to protest austerity measures. They confidently declare, “‘With words of poetry, we can fight any measures imposed on us’” (Makris 2012). What accounts for the faith they place in the power of words by men older than their grandparents? How do writers who died decades ago continue to give voice, images, and now even digital bit streams of hope to contemporary Greek social and political consciousness? O μύθος της γενιάς του τριάντα: νεοτερικότητα, ελληνικότητα, και πολιτισμική ιδεολογία,, a massive, ambitious work by Dimitris Tziovas, Professor of Modern Greek Literature at the University of Birmingham, analyzes just this phenomenon. The book offers a genealogy of the emergence of a set of beliefs surrounding the γενιά του τρίαντα, Generation of the Thirties, with a focus not on the myths its authors wrote into their work but on the constitution of the myth of the group itself and the regenerative power ascribed to it. Tziovas’s investigation follows several tacks concurrently. One traces the tangled history of the term, through a careful study of the discourses and counter-discourses produced by and about the group of writers who identified with it. For decades people have been using “Generation of the Thirties” in a broad range of contexts with full confidence in the stability of its referent. It brings to mind an all-male group of Greek writers, many of them Anatolian transplants, who began publishing in Athens a few years after the Asia Minor Catastrophe. In their youth, the group affirmed the newness [End Page 324] of their work, announcing a radical break from literary conventions that had brought Greek cultural life to a standstill. Adopting the language of modernism, they projected the problems of the Greek nation onto the aesthetic, utopian realm of art. After World War II, their work moved to the center of cultural life. Members of the group were captured in a photograph at the height of their achievement in the home of Yiorgos Theotokas in 1963. Standing in the center of the back row are Odysseus Elytis and George Seferis, the poets who achieved the greatest international recognition, flanked by critics Antonis Karantonis, K. Th. Dimaras, and Yiorgos Katsimbalis, who gave them critical support, and surrounded by Thanasis Petsalis, Elias Venezis, Stelios Xefloudas, Angelos Terzakis, Kosmas Politis, and Andreas Embeirikos. Theotokas, the author who contributed explicitly to cultivating the “myth” of their...

Inter-War Ideology in Nelly’s’s Nudes: Nationalism, Fascism and the Classical Tradition

Nelly’s, or Elli Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari, produced a series of photographs in the 1920s and 1930s, which seem to idolize ancient Greece. Her themes (naked men and women, landscapes, archaeological monuments) as well as her aesthetics are indicative of contemporary political influences on her work. The main political ideologies identified in her neoclassical photos are those of Greek nationalism, Greek fascism, and German Nazism. Hers was a national and a transnational fascist aesthetic. In all instances, though, she remained consistent in following conservative (to each place) artistic movements in the choice of her themes, her techniques, and her aesthetics. Through her work and her continuous employment in governmental posts, she became an advocate of Greek nationalism and German fascism. As a consequence of her artistic choices, she soon became one of the approved artists of Metaxas’s fascist regime and a favorite of 1930s Athenian bourgeois society that viewed itself as cosmopolitan.

Ion Dragoumis and “Machiavelli”: Armed struggle, Propaganda, and Hellenization in Macedonia and Thrace (1903–1908)

Dragoumis was baptized, politically and ideologically, in the waters of one of the most violent nationalist conflicts in the modern history of the Balkans. During the Macedonian struggle, he adopted an aggressive and uncompromising nationalism with a dominant, in principle, anti-democratic and anti-Western character. Armed struggle, forcible or peaceful Hellenization, boycotting, propaganda, total mobilization of the state machine and “civil society,” conquest, and the complete sanctioning of power politics were the main features that formed Dragoumis’s political ideas and suggestions with regard to the accomplishment of Greek claims in Macedonia and Thrace. The legitimizing criteria and arguments he suggested varied according to the audience and the particular moment of their formulation. Overall, they reflected the inconsistent, irrational, and anachronistic character of Greek nationalism, which, owing to the unfavorable ethnographic, political, and diplomatic position of the Greek side, could only resort to an invented past, to the “superiority” of the Greek culture, and, finally, to social Darwinism, in order to justify its claims.

Muslim immigrants and the Greek nation: The emergence of nationalist intolerance

Faced with claims for recognising religious diversity, liberal European democracies have shifted in the last 10 years towards a more restrictive view of integration. This paper seeks to make a contribution to this line of research on how European countries deal with migration-related ethnic and religious diversity today by investigating the case of a southern country, notably Greece. Greece is an interesting case to study: it has by now 20 years of experience as a host country, but still its migrant integration policies are under-developed. In addition Greece it is currently experiencing an acute economic crisis while irregular migration towards the country is on the rise. These developments have contributed to bringing migration on to centre stage in political discourse with a concomitant rise of racist and xenophobic discourses against migrants. This paper takes, as a case study, the public Muslim prayer that took place in several squares of Athens on 18 November 2010 as a peaceful protest against the fact that Athens still does not have a formal mosque. We use this event as an opportunity for interviewing social and political actors directly or indirectly involved in it on their views regarding migration, religious diversity and their accommodation in the Greek public space. We analyse their discourse on whether and under what conditions religious diversity, Islam in particular, should be tolerated or accepted in Greek society. We propose here the notion of ‘nationalist intolerance’ to make sense of Greek discourses and propose a dynamic understanding of tolerance and intolerance as concepts that do not emanate from abstract norms but are rather negotiated in specific contexts.

Putting Politics Above Markets: Historical Background to the Greek Debt Crisis

Political clientelism and rent seeking have been the central organizing principles of Greek society since the foundation of the Greek state in the 19th century. The influence of the Eastern Orthodox Church on Greek nationalism and the legacy of the patrimonialist Ottoman empire produced a weak civil society. The result has been a disproportionately large Greek state and public bureaucracy since the 1800s that set the stage for rent-seeking struggles that have followed. Since the 1930s, political patronage has been disbursed through increases in public sector employment, regulations that limit competition, and the imposition of levies on transactions that benefit third parties. The resulting system has encouraged corruption, discouraged wealth creation and affected popular ideological narratives. The view that the state is good and that markets are bad is widespread, held across the political spectrum, and is understandable in a rent-seeking society where all activities, including market transactions, are seen as redistribution. But the realization of “putting people above markets” has deepened clientelism and produced the current national crisis.

Conspiracy Accounts as Intergroup Theories: Challenging Dominant Understandings of Social Power and Political Legitimacy

Conspiracy accounting is often regarded as an atypical, pathological form of political reasoning, and little research has considered how ordinary social actors may refer to political conspiracies in the course of argument. In this article, we consider the spontaneous use of conspiracy narratives by politically engaged Greek citizens in interview discussions of the Macedonian crisis. Analysis revealed that conspiracy narratives were typically used to challenge dominant representations that attributed the Macedonian crisis to Greek xenophobic nationalism. Specifically, conspiracy accounts were used to dispute assumptions concerning Greece's majority status by representing the political opposition as a consortium rather than a single out‐group, by recasting the threat posed to Greece as a matter of realistic rather than symbolic competition, and by extending the historical frame of reference to encompass past and prospective future threats to the Greek people and the Greek state. In conclusion, we note how the use of conspiratorial reasoning may be used to construct complex causal arguments concerning intergroup relations and to challenge dominant ideological assumptions about social hierarchy and political legitimacy. In this respect, conspiratorial reasoning might be regarded as a prototypical form of intergroup representation.

Non-apologies and prolonged silences in post-conflict settings: The case of post-colonial Cyprus

Despite the growing use of apologies in post-conflict settings, cases of non-apology remain unaddressed and continue to puzzle scholars. This article focuses on the absence of apology by non-state and anti-state actors by examining the case of the Cypriot armed group EOKA, which has refused to offer an apology to the civilian victims of its ‘anti-colonial’ struggle (1955–1959). Using field data and parliamentary debates, and drawing on comparisons, this article analyses the factors that contributed to a lack of apology. It is argued that the inherited timelessness of Greek nationalism, and the impression of a perpetual need for defence, set up textbook conditions for the development of a hegemonic discourse and prevented an apology for human rights violations.

‘That's the way they do it in Europe’: Redefining Culture in a Greek Border Region

This article aims at portraying the symbolic and material impact of cross-border and entrepreneurial EU-funded projects on the local public sphere of Evros, a Greek region bordering with Turkey. Often construed as ‘European policies’ at the local level, such projects reflect a complex interaction between the ‘European’, the ‘national’ and the ‘local’. In order to unravel the dynamics of such interaction, I focus on the case of local cultural associations. These associations stood as typical bearers of a romantic nationalist discourse; this local enactment of Greek nationalism was also related with specific forms of symbolic capital, through ostensibly ‘disinterested patriotic action’. The introduction of EU-funded projects in the local public sphere challenged such historically constructed practices. At the same time, these projects were mediated by the representatives of the Greek State and were locally appropriated as a reformulation of older national policies and funding channels. The article argues that the implementation of those projects brought about two significant changes in the local public sphere: the dissemination of cross-border policies throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and the growing importance of a new, market-oriented perception of public action, in local cultural associations.

The Psyche and the Body: Political Persecution and Gender Violence against Women in the Greek Civil War

Within the context of the Greek Civil War and the years immediately following the civil strife, the political persecution and harassment of women was distinct, as were the gendered characteristics of their repression. Because the gendered dynamics of the victimization of the female dissidents were both a form of political control as well as a source of nationalist ideology, the political exclusion and coercion of women was not merely aimed at suppressing the Left, but was also a vital part of a wider state-operated and nationalist project of appropriated "Greekness." Moreover, the repression of women partisans and activists, as imposed by the state and articulated by the national rhetoric, was acting in interdependence with a highly patriarchal order. Through the designated gender roles and the derogated status of partisans and activists as the immoral enemy, women were transformed into the ethnic and political "other" within the imagined Greek Nation.

The Birth of Music Criticism in Greece: The Case of the Historian Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos

The birth of music criticism in Greece is connected with the creation of the Greek state and the consequent reception of opera in Athens, its capital. In the newly formed Greek society, opera was not only considered as a cultural fact, but also as the principal symbol of the European lifestyle, which stood as a model for the new citizens of the European community. The young Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, before becoming the principal founder of the Greek nationalist historiography, published a number of music reviews on the opera performances in Athens in 1840, eager to contribute to the musical cultivation of his compatriots. According to his opinion, opera, thanks to its aesthetic quality, but mainly because of its universal influence (which goes beyond nations and classes) was the appropriate means to ‘mould’ the musical taste of the Greek nation. Paparrigopoulos’ insistence on Italian opera as the vehicle which could introduce the Greeks to the musical profile of European civilization is significant for his ideas on the cultural identity of his nation. In these early writings of the future historian we can distinguish the main topics of his later theory.

Music in the Imaginary Worlds of the Greek Nation: Greek Art Music during the Nineteenth-Century's fin de siécle (1880s–1910s)

This essay analyzes ways in which music becomes attached to the growing demand for national culture by the Greek middle class since the last decades of the nineteenth century.In modern Greece of that period, the predominant notions of ‘historic continuity’ and ‘Hellenism’, or ‘Greekness’, interpret Greek history as an uninterrupted evolution from the classical past to Byzantium. In terms of music, continuity was believed to be found from ancient Greek music to Byzantine hymns and folk songs. This theory, supported by important scholars and composers both in Greece and abroad, placed tradition in a privileged position both in composition and reception of music; composers incorporated rhythms, scales and the character of Greek folk songs and Byzantine hymns in their works and the middle-class audience was eager to accept folkloristic styles and the embodiment of tradition in art music because they reflected the notion of ‘national’. Musically, the theory of ‘historic continuity’ was strengthened by the links between German romanticism and attitudes to ancient culture. Moreover, German models, or the organic romantic perception of music, influenced representatives of the so-called National School of Music; the consequence was a growing alienation from Italian music in terms of offering aesthetic standards to composition and reception.

Behold the raking geison: the new Acropolis Museum and its context-free archaeologies

In December 1834 Athens became the capital city of the newly founded Hellenic Kingdom. King Otto, the Bavarian prince whose political and cultural initiative shaped much of what modern Greece is today, sought to design the new city inspired by the heavily idealised model of Classical Hellas (see Bastea 2000). The emerging capital was from the outset conceived as aheterotopiaof Hellenism, a Foucauldian 'other space' devoted to Western Classicism in view of the Classical ruins it preserved. The Acropolis became, naturally, the focal point of this effort. At the same time, however, and as Greek nationalist strategies were beginning to unfold, Classical antiquity became a disputedtopos,a cultural identity of sorts contested between Greece on the one hand and the 'Western world' on the other (see Yalouri 2001: 77–100). Archaeological sites thus became disputed spaces, claimed by various interested parties of national or supra-national authority wishing to impose their own views on how they should be managed — and to what ends (Loukaki 2008). The Acropolis was duly cleansed from any non-Classical antiquities and began to be constructed as an authentic Classical space, anationalproject still in progress. As Artemis Leontis has argued in her discussion of Greece as a heterotopic 'culture of ruins', the Acropolis of Athens, now repossessed by architectural renovation and scholarly interest, functions'as a symbol not of Greece's ancient glory but of its modern predicament'(Leontis 1995: 40–66; see also McNeal 1991; Hamilakis 2007: 85–99).

On the Existence of National Identity Before 'Imagined Communities': The Example of the Assyrians of Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and Persia

Studies on nationalism and the emergence of modern ethnic identities rarely examine sources dating from the period between 0 CE (A.D.) and 1453 CE, or the period between the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the mid-first millennium BCE and the Age of Discovery in the mid-second millennium CE. Testing generally accepted theories of national and ethnic distinctiveness against these sources reveals that a similar case exists for the existence of an Assyrian identity and nation as for a Greek, Kurdish, Jewish, or Persian identity or nation. Assyrian populations, religions, and political formations survived in present-day Iraq, Iran, and Turkey from 0 CE well into the 1800s CE. Commentators on modern nationalism in relation to Assyrian identity have assumed, with little evidence, that the non-Arab, non-Jewish peoples of the East lacked the agency or the intellect to maintain a consistent identity or national movement, and that these peoples relied in their ignorance and indolence on the theories of Western missionaries and colonial officials. In the 1980s, a new generation of scholars emerged who posited that nations and peoples emerged in conjunction with modern capitalistic cultural forms and secular nationalistic liberalism. The new theory of imagined communities represented a departure from a long tradition of historical and cultural work which assumed nations and peoples as subjects of analysis without critically examining the linguistic, cultural, or religious foundation of these groups of individuals or families. This new theory, however, has the risk of degenerating into a vulgar instrumentalism, which speculates that identity entrepreneurs can manufacture ethnic, racial, or religious identity for their own purposes and little objective foundation. Thus, more recent research points out the flaws in grounding national and ethnic distinctions in modern nationalism by compiling evidence that nations and peoples perceived themselves and were perceived as such by other collectivities, long before the rise of European humanism or the Enlightenment. This study attempts to show that the longevity and diversity of national and ethnic distinctions undermine a one-size-fits-all explanation of such distinctions in the manner of Benedict Anderson’s “Imagined Communities.” The evidence from the Assyrian case suggests that the undifferentiated hordes of Asia did not coalesce and order themselves in modern times and under Western influence into nations created and sustained by advanced technology. This “Imagined Communities” narrative suffers from hindsight bias and an exaggerated Eurocentrism. It also insults and infantilizes the peoples and nations of premodern eras and non-Western regions by assuming they lacked the intelligence with which modern Europeans constructed national cultures, laws, literatures, schools, and economies. Historians have long since disproved such ideas. By examining translations of and academic commentary on Aramaic, Greek, Roman, and Persian literature and inscriptions, among other sources, this Essay demonstrates that the British Empire invented neither the modern Assyrians as a people, nor the territory of modern Assyria that was considered for statehood by the League of Nations after World War I. Rather, the identification of present-day northern Iraq, northwestern Persia, and southeastern Turkey as “Assyria” draws support from the Middle Assyrian and Neo-Assyrian usage of the second and third millennia BCE, and the Greek, Roman, Persian, and Aramaic usage in the first millennium CE. Finally, the contribution of ancient Assyria to the cultures, languages, and religions of the non-Muslim populations of contemporary Iran, Iraq, and Turkey may no longer be doubted, especially when it comes to the Assyrian Christians, Mandaeans, and Yezidis. This ancient contribution is present in these peoples' daily vocabularies, place-names, and indigenous beliefs. [Please e-mail the author for the complete draft.]

Steven B. Bowman, The Agony of Greek Jews, 1940-1945 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 344 pp., cloth $55.00, e-book

Few scholars have worked specifically on the Holocaust in Greece. Fortunately, Steven Bowman combines almost thirty-five years of research on the subject with a solid knowledge of the general history of the Jewish people in the Eastern Mediterranean. In his recent comprehensive study Bowman presents a fascinating yet neglected subject. Bowman's close-knit narrative and arguments draw upon diverse primary sources and a vast secondary and memoir literature to afford the most complete chronicle to date of the Holocaust of Greek Jewry. Bowman's first two chapters present the sociopolitical context emerging after the transfer of territories from the multiethnic, multi-religious, but declining Ottoman Empire to the integral Greek nation state. In that new situation old Sephardic and Romaniot Jewish communities, and most important, in 1913, the Jewish community of Salonica, suddenly found themselves bereft of the sanctuary they had enjoyed under Ottoman rule. The interwar years afforded them little time to assimilate an autonomous and religiously-structured identity into the new ethnic and political order. Bowman describes the vicissitudes of the Greek Jewish communities facing the interwar Hellenization in areas of language, religion, and education, the refugee crisis after World War I, and interwar antisemitism. He assesses the Jewish view that antisemitism might subside as in past episodes, the loyalty the Jewish community therefore demonstrated to consecutive governments, and the Germans' subsequent exploitation of this stance. In chapter four Bowman seeks to elucidate the formulation of the Nazis' plans for eliminating Greek Jewry, and in particular their manipulation of the Jewish leadership in Salonica and other communities to deceive the entire community. The large Jewish population of Salonica, which seemed the most difficult to integrate into the modern Greek state, occupies a prominent place in his chronicle due to its importance as a center of the diverse Sephardic culture of the Balkans.

The Greek Gloom and the December 2008 Uprising

This paper employs the notion of apparatus of capture in the context of the historical formation and transformations of the Greek nation state. The aim is to demystify the overcoding poles of political sovereignty as they are expressed in different chronological periods and to sketch an analysis of the appropriations of social living forms, social movements and war machines into regimes of signs. The term war machine is deployed as a key term for grasping the variables of content and the variables of expression that are encountered in the different historical circumstances. The order word modernisation illustrates not only the machinic enslavement but also new social subjections within a society of the spectacle and global capital. The account given here of the December 2008 uprising in Greece offers an insight into the political event and attempts a pragmatic analysis of the December war machine.

The Greek Gloom and the December 2008 Uprising

This paper employs the notion of apparatus of capture in the context of the historical formation and transformations of the Greek nation state. The aim is to demystify the overcoding poles of political sovereignty as they are expressed in different chronological periods and to sketch an analysis of the appropriations of social living forms, social movements and war machines into regimes of signs. The term war machine is deployed as a key term for grasping the variables of content and the variables of expression that are encountered in the different historical circumstances. The order word modernisation illustrates not only the machinic enslavement but also new social subjections within a society of the spectacle and global capital. The account given here of the December 2008 uprising in Greece offers an insight into the political event and attempts a pragmatic analysis of the December war machine.

Stirring the Greek Nation: Political Culture, Irredentism and Anti-Americanism in Post-War Greece, 1945-1967 (review)

Stirring the Greek Nation: Political Culture, Irredentism and Anti-Americanism in Post-War Greece, 1945-1967 (review)

Concept of the Intermediate Olympic Games of 1906: Continuity with the Past Olympics

Recently, some scholars confirm that the IOC officially approved the Intermediate Olympics of 1906 and made a decision to hold them. It has also been pointed out that the Intermediate Olympic Games contributed to restoring confidence in the IOC following the failures of the 1900 and 1904 Games, which were held as a part of the World Fair. Many IOC members approved the Intermediate Games despite the opposition by Coubertin, and this fact suggests that the Games had a concept with which most of the IOC members agreed with other than Greek nationalism. This research seeks to identify and clarify the concept of holding the Intermediate Olympic Games. The following conclusions were reached. Many of the members of the IOC in the initial stage supported holding the Olympic Games in Greece in the intermediate years. This was because it emphasized the continuity with the ancient Olympics as a historical presence. The Panathenaic Stadium was a symbol of the continuity with the ancient games. Also, many of the IOC members understood the relationship with the Greek Olympia Games held in the nineteenth century. Respect for Crown Prince Constantine, who supported the Olympia Games and devotedly worked for the 1896 Olympic Games, was also a reason for their approval. Because of the concept of continuity with the past Olympics, the 1901 IOC session unanimously approved holding the Intermediate Olympic Games in Greece, leading to the 1906 Olympic Games.

Greeks under European colonial rule: national allegiance and imperial loyalty

How to narrate the experience of the Greeks who lived under European colonial rule? Greek nationalist historiography ignores the colonial dimension and links this experience to the grand narrative of the struggle of unredeemed Greeks against foreign domination. By contrast, revisionist accounts challenge the pervasiveness of ‘national sentiment’ among subjected Greeks and stress the coercive nature of nationalism. Based on micro-analyses of cases drawn from Cyprus under British rule and the Dodecanese under Italian rule in the 1930s, an assessment is made of the practical significance, in the daily lives of these colonial subjects, of the conflicting imperatives of national allegiance and imperial loyalty.