Languages, Identities and Cultural Transfers

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Complex Formation ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Greek Language ◽  
Vernacular Literature ◽  
Modern Greek ◽  
Human Aspects ◽  
Modern Greece ◽  
Of Greece ◽  
Cultural Transfers

What was the perception of Greece in Europe during the later nineteenth century, when the attraction of romantic philhellenism had waned? This volume focuses on the reception of medieval and modern Greece in the European press, rigorously analysing journals and newspapers published in England, France, Germany, Italy, and The Netherlands. The essays here suggest that reactions to the Greek state's progress and irredentist desires were followed among the European intelligentsia. Concurrently, new scholarship on the historical development of the Greek language and vernacular literature enhanced the image of medieval and modern Greece. This volume's contributors consider the press's role in this Europe-wide exchange of ideas, explore the links between romantic and late philhellenism and highlight the scholarly nature of the latter. Moreover, they highlight the human aspects of cultural transfers by focusing on networks of mediators, publishers and scholarly collaborators. This context enhances our understanding of both the creation of Hellenic studies and the complex formation of the modern Greek identity.

scholarly journals What is not so (E)strange about Greek as a Balkan Language

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 57-83
Author(s):  
Brian Daniel Joseph
Keyword(s):  
Greek Language ◽  
Greek Orthodox ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Modern Greek ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
Speakers Of Other Languages ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Greece ◽  
Of Greece

In a 2013 lecture at Princeton University, distinguished historian Professor Basil Gounaris suggested that in the 19th‒20th centuries there was a “troubled relationship” between Greece and the Balkans, and a process of “estrangement” associated with “the transformation of the Greek-orthodox society itself into a Modern Greek nation”. This is all very well and good as far as the 19th and 20th centuries are concerned, and as far as the cultural and political side of the development of modern Greece are concerned, but there is a longer history of engagement between Greek peoples and the Balkans and other dimensions to that history. In particular, from a linguistic standpoint, the interactions between Greek speakers and speakers of other languages in the Balkans—Albanian, Slavic, Romance, Indic, and Turkish in particular—had profound effects on the Greek language that last to this very day. Accordingly, I present here a side of Greece, namely the Greek language, that is not estranged from the Balkans, and explore the ways in which Greek has been affected by, and has influenced, other Balkan languages and the ways in which it can be considered to be a Balkan language.

The Developmental Trajectory of the Greek State

2020 ◽  
pp. 22-37
Author(s):  
Stathis N. Kalyvas
Keyword(s):  
Historical Development ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Debt Crisis ◽  
Developmental Trajectory ◽  
Institutional Constraints ◽  
Modern Greek ◽  
Peripheral Position ◽  
Economic Boom ◽  
Early Late ◽  
Of Greece

Greece’s historical development gives credence to two competing narratives. The first identifies Greece as a small and vulnerable nation, one marked by crises and failure. The second narrative acknowledges the success of nation-building—indeed, the metamorphosis of Greece—having come through exceptional challenges. To reconcile these two narratives, I draw upon neo-Marxist political economy—which stresses its ‘semi-peripheral’ position in the global economy—and build on recent studies that focus more on the domestic institutional constraints on development. I disaggregate Modern Greek history into seven, intertwined, political and economic ‘boom, bust, and bailout’ cycles. Greece is an ‘early late modernizer’, to borrow Seymour Martin Lipset’s formulation. As one of the early ‘new nations’ on the European stage, Greece attempted a number of highly visible and risky modernization leaps intended to reduce the gap that separated it from the more advanced states of the continent. Predictably, these leaps and their failures attracted considerable global attention, way out of proportion to the country’s size, resources, or strategic importance. They did so due to the perception that its modernization effort was deeply intertwined with processes of much broader historical and global significance; the stakes were high, hence the need for some sort of intervention. That these foreign interventions ultimately turned out to be favourable to Greece should not detract from the fact that they were often perceived negatively in Greece. The recent debt crisis is part of a similar pattern and a Greek recovery would validate this interpretation.

scholarly journals Secularism in Context: The Relations between the Greek State and the Church of Greece in Crisis

2009 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evangelos Karagiannis
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Orthodox Church ◽  
Modern Greek ◽  
Structural Weakness ◽  
Single Pattern ◽  
Modern Greece ◽  
The Church ◽  
Of Greece

AbstractThe present article addresses the question of secularism in Greece. It discusses the prevalent modernist and civilisationist explanations of the recent crisis in state-church relations in Greece. Based on the idea that there is neither a single route to, nor a single pattern of, modernity and secularism, the article argues that the entanglement between state and church in modern Greece does not necessarily indicate either incomplete modernity or incomplete secularism. The paper emphasises both the structural weakness of the Orthodox Church in the modern Greek state and the secularisation of the church's ideology as core dimensions of the particular pattern of secularism in this country. The recent crisis is interpreted as a result of the twofold challenge of democratisation and globalisation that this historically grown pattern of secularism is facing over the last decades. Further, the article seeks to demonstrate that the nationalist stance of the Church of Greece should not be seen as persistent blind traditionalism and anti-modernism.

Społeczeństwo holenderskie i los Żydów: skomplikowana historia

2016 ◽  
pp. 425-434
Author(s):  
Dan Michman
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Southern Europe ◽  
Dutch Society ◽  
Nazi Occupation ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Western European ◽  
Post War ◽  
Of Greece

The percentage of victimization of Dutch Jewry during the Shoah is the highest of Western, Central and Southern Europe (except, perhaps of Greece), and close to the Polish one: 75%, more than 104.000 souls. The question of disproportion between the apparent favorable status of the Jews in society – they had acquired emancipation in 1796 - and the disastrous outcome of the Nazi occupation as compared to other countries in general and Western European in particular has haunted Dutch historiography of the Shoah. Who should be blamed for that outcome: the perpetrators, i.e. the Germans, the bystanders, i.e. the Dutch or the victims, i.e. the Dutch Jews? The article first surveys the answers given to this question since the beginnings of Dutch Holocaust historiography in the immediate post-war period until the debates of today and the factors that influenced the shaping of some basic perceptions on “Dutch society and the Jews”. It then proceeds to detailing several facts from the Holocaust period that are essential for an evaluation of gentile attitudes. The article concludes with the observation that – in spite of ongoing debates – the overall picture which has accumulated after decades of research will not essentially being altered. Although the Holocaust was initiated, planned and carried out from Berlin, and although a considerable number of Dutchmen helped and hid Jews and the majority definitely despised the Germans, considerable parts of Dutch society contributed to the disastrous outcome of the Jewish lot in the Netherlands – through a high amount of servility towards the German authorities, through indifference when Jewish fellow-citizens were persecuted, through economically benefiting from the persecution and from the disappearance of Jewish neighbors, and through actual collaboration (stemming from a variety of reasons). Consequently, the picture of the Holocaust in the Netherlands is multi-dimensional, but altogether puzzling and not favorable.

scholarly journals Discriminating the registers and styles in the modern Greek language

2000 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Tambouratzis ◽  
Stella Markantonatou ◽  
Nikolaos Hairetakis ◽  
Marina Vassiliou ◽  
Dimitrios Tambouratzis ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Greek Language ◽  
Modern Greek

‘Communal Hellenism’ and ancient tragedy performances in Greece (1975–95): The ritual quest

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Efthymios Kaltsounas ◽  
Tonia Karaoglou ◽  
Natalie Minioti ◽  
Eleni Papazoglou
Keyword(s):  
Audience Reception ◽  
Collective Consciousness ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
Modern Greek ◽  
The Press ◽  
Cultural Movements ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Folk Ritual ◽  
Ancient Drama ◽  
Of Greece

For the better part of the twentieth century, the quest for a ‘Greek’ continuity in the so-called revival of ancient drama in Greece was inextricably linked to what is termed and studied in this paper as a Ritual Quest. Rituality was understood in two forms: one was aesthetic and neoclassicist in its hermeneutic and performative codes, which were established and recycled – and as such: ritualized – in ancient tragedy productions of the National Theatre of Greece from the 1930s to the 1970s; the other, cultivated mainly during the 1980s, was cultural and centred around the idea that continuity can be traced and explored through the direct employment of Byzantine and folk ritual elements. Both aimed at eliciting the cohesive collective response of their spectators: their turning into a liminal ritual community. This was a community tied together under an ethnocentric identity, that of Greeks participating in a Greek (theatrical) phenomenon. At first through neoclassicism, then through folklore, this artistic phenomenon was seen as documenting a diachronic and essentially political modern Greek desideratum: continuity with the ancient past. Such developments were in tune with broader cultural movements in the period under study, which were reflected on the common imaginings of Antiquity in the modern Greek collective – consciousness – a sort of ‘Communal Hellenism’. The press reception of performances, apart from being a productive vehicle for the study of the productions as such, provides indispensable indexes to audience reception. Through the study of theatre reviews, we propose to explore the crucial shifts registered in the definition of Greekness and its dynamic connections to Antiquity.

1. On the Philological Genius and Character of the Neo-Hellenic Dialect

1875 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 31-31
Author(s):  
Blackie
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Present State ◽  
Historical Review ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
The Other ◽  
Greek Language ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Of Greece

The Author showed by a historical review of the fortunes of Greece, through the Middle Ages, and under the successive influences of Turkish conquest and Turkish oppression, how the Greek language had escaped corruption to the degree that would have caused the birth of a new language in the way that Italian and the other Roman languages grew out of Latin. He then analysed the modern language, as it existed in current popular literature before the time of Coraes, that is, from the time of Theodore Ptochoprodromus to nearly the end of the last century, and showed that the losses and curtailments which it had unquestionably suffered in the course of so many centuries, were not such as materially to impair the strength and beauty of the language, which in its present state was partly to be regarded as a living bridge betwixt the present and the past, and as an altogether unique phenomenon in the history of human speech.

scholarly journals "Akritas" – Nikos Kazantzakis' Little-Known Unrealized Epic Project

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 45-54
Author(s):  
Michał Bzinkowski
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Byzantine Empire ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Modern Greek ◽  
Epic Poem ◽  
Magnum Opus ◽  
Modern Greece ◽  
Different Sources

Kazantzakis’ Odyssey – apart from the abundance of philosophical as well as ideological influences of many different sources which the writer tried to unify into a universal cosmotheory – constitutes a large-scale attempt by a Modern Greek writer to respond to Homeric epic. Yet, the author of Zorba the Greek sketched another epic composition that, according to his vision, aimed at reaching further than his magnum opus. His ambition was to encompass the long-lasting period between Ancient and Modern Greece, namely that of the Byzantine empire and its radiating influence on Greek consciousness and identity. He entitled his project Akritas, thus directly alluding to the only epic poem in Byzantine Greek literature, Digenes Akritas, and its protagonist as well as to acritic songs from Cyprus, where the latter’s name appears. In the present paper I would like to shed some light on Kazantzakis’ approach to Byzantium and its significance in defining the Greek identity through this unfinished sketch that the writer in fact never began.

scholarly journals METHODS OF USING IMMERSION TEACHING MODERN GREEK LANGUAGE IN A HIGHER EDUCATION

2016 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
pp. 73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalya Voyevutko ◽  
Olena Kuligina
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Greek Language ◽  
Modern Greek
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