Archaeology and Hellenic identity, 1896-2004: the frustrated vision

On the Social Construction of Hellenism Cold War Narratives of Modernity, Development and Democracy for Greece

“…One may talk about another instance of “colonization of the ideal,” as Neni Panourgia has succinctly described the European identity formulation process against the cultural prototype of Classical Greece (2004), a process which bears many similarities to subsequent appropriations by the Greek state in its own efforts to articulate an official national narrative (Kotsakis 1998; Plantzos 2008). The Americans had wrestled with the ancients as well in their aesthetic and philosophical quests and in their efforts to find the most virtuous political system appropriate for their nation of states (Richard 1994; Winterer 2002), or, as Bernard Bailyn suggests (1992), employed them to window‐dress their political thought.…”

The kouros of Keratea: Constructing subaltern pasts in contemporary Greece

“…More than that, classical antiquity is employed in contemporary Greece as a disciplinary device both at home and abroad, as a forceful reaction against the disapproving gaze of the West. Following a course already mapped in the 1930s, and emulating cultural strategies enforced in other European as well as non-European countries, Greek antiquity has been largely used as a yardstick for the nation’s cohesion as well as a measure of its simultaneous desire for and antithesis to the West (Plantzos, 2008). As a result, Greek modernity appears at once colonialist and colonized, an essentialist identity produced through the intensive reinvention and systematic appropriation of (its) classical past (Hamilakis, 2007: 19–21).…”

“…In mainstream Greek culture, classical statuary functions, needless to say, as guarantor of the nation’s longevity and reminder of Greece’s exceptional outlook: a procession of ‘Kroisos-lookalikes’ greeted an unsuspecting international audience during the opening ceremony of the Athens 2004 Olympic Games, raising more than a few eyebrows at such unabashed display of full frontal nudity (Figure 4). In true Winckelmann-esque fashion, the parade equated (classical) Greek art with the totality of Greek culture – classical as well as prehistoric, post-antique or contemporary even – restating the by then well-rehearsed arguments of historical continuity and aesthetic affinity with the nation’s classical heritage (Plantzos, 2008: 11–14). Such visual or verbal rhetoric is the expression of a centrally designed and deployed elite nationalism subordinating all other regions and all other ideas to the needs and ideas of the capital: as it was Athenian rather than Greek art that took precedent in the 2004 Olympic pageant, so it is the Acropolis that stands for all things Greek on the cover of the GayMap 2011 as in so many other publications (Yalouri, 2001: 77–100), and it is the metropolitan, ‘national’ museum in Athens where the kouroi from Anavyssos and Keratea (as well as so many antiquities from Mycenae, Santorini and the rest of Greece) are kept in order to compose a coherent, authoritative and self-assured nationalist narrative.…”

“…In most of those cases the national self is composed by a fusion of natural environment with the sense of a long and significant historical past. In the case of Greece (though also in those of Egypt or Italy, for example), antiquities were enlisted to supply the visual links to the nation’s past since they formed part of the natural landscape the nation could be seen to inhabit (Plantzos, 2008: 20–26). Archaeological artifacts, in particular, like the kouroi from Anavyssos and Keratea or the numerous bronzes discovered in the depths of the Aegean Sea (Kaltsas, 2007: 276–279), were thought to verify the nation’s ties both to its land and its history as they were gradually being unburied from the very soil such grossly romanticized rhetoric was praising.…”

Η Στρατηγική Μάρκετινγκ Μουσείων Ως Στοιχείο Ανάπτυξης Των Ελληνικών Τουριστικών Προορισμών

“…Η πλειοψηφία των αρνητικών συνεπειών του τουρισµού, οφείλονται κυρίως στον µαζικό τουρισµό, λόγω του µεγάλου αριθµού τουριστών σε συγκεκριµένη τοποθεσία, µε µεγάλες επενδύσεις σε σύντοµο χρόνο και χωρίς τον κατάλληλο σχεδιασµό (Andriotis, 2006 . Μερικές περιστασιακές συνεργασίες έχουν λάβει χώρα, αλλά δεν υπάρχει στρατηγικός σχεδιασµός για την πολιτιστική και τουριστική ανάπτυξη (Plantzos, 2008;Phillipides, 2008;Mazower, 2008). (Goulding, 2000;Tobelem, 1998).…”