Contested Antiquity

Archaeological Heritage and Social Conflict in Modern Greece and Cyprus

Esther Solomon

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780253055972
• eBook ISBN: 9780253056009
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

While the archaeological legacies of Greece and Cyprus are often considered to represent some of the highest values of Western civilization—democracy, progress, aesthetic harmony, and rationalism—this much adored and heavily touristed heritage can quickly become the stage for clashes over identity and memory.

In Contested Antiquity, Esther Solomon curates explorations of how those who safeguard cultural heritage are confronted with the best ways to represent this heritage responsibly. How should visitors be introduced to an ancient Byzantine fortification that still holds the grim reminders of the cruel prison it was used as until the 1980s? How can foreign archaeological institutes engage with another nation's heritage in a meaningful way? What role do locals have in determining what is sacred, and can this sense of the sacred extend beyond buildings to the surrounding land?

Together, the essays featured in Contested Antiquity offer fresh insights into the ways ancient heritage is negotiated for modern times.

PART I

BETWEEN NATIONALISM, COLONIALISM, AND CRYPTO-COLONIALISM: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES AND CURRENT IMPLICATIONS

1Hellas Mon Amour

Revisiting Greece’s National “Sites of Trauma”

Dimitris Plantzos

For Lack of Anything Else

In The Archaeologist, originally published in 1903, Greek novelist Andreas Karkavitsas presents Greece as a fledgling nation-state in a lethal entanglement with its once glorious past (Karkavitsas 2002).¹ In the story, two brothers are trying to protect the land they have inherited from their famed ancestors; one brother is clever and pragmatic, and the other (“the archaeologist”) is devoted to the study of the past and its tangible remains. Whereas the latter believes that only the promotion of their common heritage will help them survive in a hostile world, the former urges his brother to “live in the present” and stop dreaming of bygone days of glory. The archaeologist’s foreign friends are interested only in the antiquities hidden on his land, and they encourage him to devote himself exclusively to the study of the past and the promotion of his property’s archaeological wealth. At the end of the novel, the archaeologist is killed when a marble statue he has excavated collapses and crushes him during the wedding of his younger brother, who then lives happily ever after with his peasant wife.

Karkavitsas’s protagonist, Aristodemus, an archaeologist by conviction and not by trade, is described as a victim of his own archaeolatry as well as of the disingenuous Graecophilia of his foreign friends, who style themselves with ancient Greek names, read old books, and rob archaeological sites in an attempt to construct a cultural genealogy for themselves. The Westernized Aristodemus seeks his own identity, as well as that of his nation, in the foreign books he reads. He is contrasted with the illiterate peasant girl Elpida (“Hope”), the protagonist’s brother’s fiancée, who (according to the text) could not possibly survive “under the eyeglasses” of the knowledgeable foreign men, but knows the truth of her origins as they have been transmitted to her from generation to generation.

To a great extent, The Archaeologist is an allegorical parody of the Altertumswissenschaft (science of antiquity or classical studies) movement and the way Greece found itself trapped in a colonial premise. Meticulous study of the classical past in all its manifestations—texts, facts, artifacts—emerged in the eighteenth century as a necessary nation-building apparatus expected to “instill self-discipline, idealism, and nobility of character” in a rising European middle class of public servants and bureaucrats (Marchand 1996, 19). In Germany in particular, this practice turned into nothing less than a cultural obsession. Greece and Rome were in effect colonized by this aggressive pursuit of historical education, turning the study of classical heritage into a device by means of which to discriminate between the classically educated upper classes and the ignorant commoners (Toner 2013). In Greece, archaeophilia (i.e., the love of things ancient) was often deployed as a yardstick for patriotism (Plantzos 2008).

Presented in The Archaeologist as a valuable piece of farmland, Greece is also described as a country threatened with extinction at the hands of its persistently hostile neighbors. In the novel, the Turks and the Bulgarians are thinly disguised as such unfriendly “friends,” divided from Aristodemus’s family by centuries-old feuds. The Germans, the British, and the French are portrayed as well-educated archaeophiles who compliment the protagonist on his cultural heritage and advise him on its management but are there to further their own cultural and political interests. Throughout the nineteenth century, Greek ruins were appropriated by foreign archaeological expeditions led primarily by the French and the Germans. These groups often insisted on their rights to export a selection of archaeological finds made on Greek soil to their countries of origin. Fierce debates between Greece and several European states over the ownership of artifacts ensued, as well as vociferous discussions within Greece itself (Kalpaxis 1996). In the novel, Aristodemus’s Greece is in dire need of any help it can get from powerful foreigners, and its glorious past is presented as the only reason they would think of offering Greece their support in return. Obliging to his friends and impatient with members of his own household who fail to see the importance of such heritage, Karkavitsas’s hero tries to strengthen the ties of his land’s archaeological finds to the minds and hearts of these eloquent dilettantes: “a rare manuscript each and some marbles from our digs” are his parting gifts to them, in the hope that “the ancestors will remind you a bit of their successors” (Karkavitsas 2002, 85).

What Karkavitsas is describing in his novel, therefore, is his country’s past as an intellectual colony. Greece as a modern nation-state was constructed from scratch, based on a neoclassical model aiming at the creation of a brave new political and cultural world. What this entailed was a systematic colonization of Greece’s classical past as, in the words of Neni Panourgiá, “the gaze towards the future passes through a re-articulation, a re-formation and repossession of an antique ideality” (Panourgiá 2004, 167). According to this scholar, “what was at stake [in the establishment of neoclassicism as the Greek cultural modality par excellence], not only in Greece but throughout Europe, was the institution of modernity itself and in that process what we encounter in Greek neoclassicism is the process of transformation of place into space: Greece became the European pla(y)cespace” (Panourgiá 2004, 177). At the same time, I would add, Greece became Europe’s heterotopic site of origins as well as cultural playground.² Greece has been endowed ever since with the practice of aestheticizing its past, now quite stereotypical, as a new form of governmentality, as a tool by means of which to forge and discipline the national subject. However, to Karkavitsas and many other Greek intellectuals active across the entire span of the twentieth century, this process was quite traumatic because it promoted Greece’s Hellenic past over its more recent Byzantine and folk cultures—its very “soul,” as these are called in The Archaeologist. More to the point, it rendered Greece and its citizenry into the cultural (and political) domain of other nations: philhellenism, Graecophilia and other such modern vices allowed Greece’s foes, disguised as friends, to forge and discipline the inhabitants of Greece into modern supranational subjects, expected to commit themselves to Europe’s political projects at the same time they were curating Europe’s archaeological past.

This agenda is illustrated at one point in The Archaeologist, when the protagonist’s foreign friends assure him that what the Greeks have to do is to “dig the soil and amass every stone belonging to the age [of the ancients]. To open museums and schools, and nothing else” (Karkavitsas 2002, 18). In his novel, therefore, Karkavitsas put forward what he believed to be a new strategy for the nation: to redefine Greece’s temporality as a living culture rather than a fossilized essence suitable only for museums and libraries. Consequently, he urged his contemporaries to promote national continuity rather than neoclassical revival.

By the time Karkavitsas was writing his novel, however, all major Athenian museums, and many regional ones, were already up and running: the National Archaeological Museum, the Acropolis Museum, the Numismatics Museum, and the Epigraphic Museum in Athens, as well as the museums at Olympia, Sparta, Epidaurus, and so on. Four museums were founded in the year 1900 alone: Corinth, Thera, Chalkis, and Mykonos. From 1903 to 1906, nine more were planned to be added, three every year, including the museums at Delphi, Nauplion, Delos, Heraklion, and Volos (Gazi 2008). These museums did what museums are expected to do across the globe: they collected, conserved, preserved, displayed, and explained archaeological artifacts in their domain as tangible evidence substantiating the nation’s long, linear, uninterrupted, and exceptional history over the millennia (fig. 1.1). Their tactics and their rhetoric reflect Western expectations of the Greeks as curators of their past, as well as the Greeks’ own pride in securing the job.

By the mid-1920s, however, a new attitude toward the collecting and displaying of national treasures was emerging, as can be demonstrated by the case of the Benaki Museum (first established in 1926), where Greek—indeed, Hellenic—culture is perceived as an organic entity, its lifetime spanning from time immemorial (in fact, from a time before Hellenism itself) to the threshold of the third millennium (fig. 1.2). This narrative persists to the present day: according to the museum’s official guidebook, published in 2000, its visitors “will follow, step by step, the historical development of Hellenism as it unfolds through the millennia” (Delivorrias 2000, 27). Describing Greek history as an “exciting journey” and a “true epic,” this text explains how modern Greece undertakes its own archaeology: as a soul-searching exercise dealing with the traumas of the past, ultimately confirming Greek exceptionalism. The museum’s website, moreover, claims that its collections illustrate “the character of the Greek world through a spectacular historical panorama.”³ According to the same blurb, the time span covered by the exhibition runs “from antiquity and the age of Roman domination to the medieval Byzantine period, from the fall of Constantinople (1453) and the centuries of Frankish and Ottoman occupation to the outbreak of the struggle for independence in 1821, and from the formation of the modern state of Greece (1830) down to 1922, the year in which the Asia Minor disaster took place.” Clearly, according to this text, only the contributions of the Hellenes to Greek culture and art are considered legitimate throughout the history of the nation; all others are portrayed as barbarian conquerors waiting to be charmed by the Greek spirit rather than being likely to advance it. The now refurbished permanent exhibition at the museum spans from Cycladic art to a Karagöz screen and figures, a specter (as its Cycladic counterpart) of another culture familiarized by the Greeks through tradition, translation, and inertia. The collection is scattered around the museum’s branches and satellite buildings and includes the two Nobels and the one Lenin prize won by Greeks, all for poetry; one of the very few Greek Oscars (for Zorba the Greek); and other such national memorabilia. It is a Hellenic panorama indeed, exploring as well as exploiting the nation’s past for whatever it’s worth, and at the same time displaying Greece as either a traumatic adventure in the unfriendly seas of world history, or as a response to an unforgiving, albeit forgetful, colonial gaze inspecting modern Greece from a Western viewpoint.

Fig. 1.1. Corinth, the Archaeological Museum in the 1910s. Courtesy of American School of Classical Studies at Athens.

Fig. 1.2. Athens, the Benaki Museum; classical and medieval galleries. Photo by D. Plantzos.

The success of this policy is confirmed by the public’s enthusiastic embrace of the museum’s continuous appeals for funding and donations; bequests of single items or entire collections are the top source of enrichment for its holdings. What started in the 1920s as a top-down attempt to construct an audience responsive to cultural coaching has now, a century later, created a driving force behind the museum’s often improvised, largely countertheoretical, and defiantly old-fashioned strategies at interpreting contemporary Greece through its material past. For in the last thirty years or so, we have come to realize that rather than serving as mere illustrators of a people’s “character,” museums create a nation’s past through a complicated, though quite intelligible, system of narratives they deploy on its behalf (Hooper-Greenhill 1992; Bennett 1995). We now understand that discovery, classification, interpretation, and conservation are far from self-evident procedures; they construct both the nation’s past and the nation itself as the guardian of that past. In the words of Benedict Anderson, “museums, and the museumizing imagination, are both profoundly political” (Anderson 1991, 178). Through careful selection of certain elements of the past and the elimination of others, museums engage in a rather unsophisticated play of historical remembering, as well as forgetting, in order to produce a viable national identity. More than constructing a nation’s sense of itself, museums tend to construct their own viewers, be they nationals or tourists, as subjects of a logocentric, elitist, privileged discourse bequeathed by the Enlightenment. In their efforts to construct their visitors as subjects of their own rhetoric, museums are thus able to forge and promote a hegemonic version of national identity based on what are seen as appropriate narratives regarding the nation’s past.

The fashion through which modern Greece chooses to display its classical heritage illustrates the persistent ambivalence in the way the country faces the world to the present day, as well as the strategies deployed by contemporary Greeks to claim classical tradition as their national property. As Stathis Gourgouris has observed, contemporary Greek culture “becomes characteristically insular, experiencing itself as both superior and inferior to Western culture, being both xenophobic and xenomanic, believing itself to be the most privileged and the most oppressed” (Gourgouris 1996, 276). Reiterating modern Greece’s connection to its classical past—stereotypically advertised as Europe’s own genealogy—creates a pattern of repetitive reenactment, what Sigmund Freud described as an inexplicably persistent history of suffering, and what he clinically termed as “trauma.” In a seminal study of historical tra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Contested Antiquity in Greece and Cyprus
• Part I: Between Nationalism, Colonialism, and Crypto-Colonialism: Historical Perspectives and Current Implications
• Part II: Spatial Metaphors and Ethnographic Observations: Heritage, Memory, and Dissonance
• Part III: Competing Pasts
• Dedication
• Index