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This article, covering the roughly decade-long ‘Greek crisis’ (2008–2018), uses official statistics in order to examine the effects the prolonged recession has had on archaeology in Greece. As the data show, although revenues from museums and archaeological sites have risen considerably (a side effect of ‘crisis tourism’, among other factors), state spending on archaeological research is insufficient. Furthermore, the steady collapse of the state apparatus during this long decade has seriously affected archaeology and the ways it is practised in the country, ultimately leading to the loss of an entire generation of Greek archaeologists.

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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 a heterotopia of 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 disputed topos, 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, a national project 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).

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