From national panegyrics to stage scandal: Athanasios Diakos in history

On 26 March 1894 a panegyric titled ‘Athanasios Diakos in history’ was delivered at the Society of the Friends of the People. At the dusk of the nineteenth century, this speech summarized the literary programme of a nationalizing attachment to the heroes of 1821 and their romantic monumentalization. More than a century later, the theatrical scandal of Lena Kitsopoulou’s Athanasios Diakos: The Return (Greek Festival, Athens, 2012) was a typical response to the breach inflicted on the canonical meanings and the established interpretations of the myth of Diakos. Amid a national crisis, the transformation of Diakos into a modern-day kebabhouse owner who harasses his wife and his immigrant employee performed a critical transposition of the hero into a toxic unheroic present. After reviewing the histories and mythologies of Athanasios Diakos, this article discusses Kitsopoulou’s production and its reception in order to argue that the playwright called upon a dramaturgy of suspicion that threatened the credibility of a heroic past, destabilizing thereby national expectations and assumptions.

Subversive literary representations of 1821 in the Metapolitefsi (1974–81)

The article examines the afterlife of the Greek War of Independence during the Transition period in Greece (1974–81), focusing on literature. The military dictatorship (1967–74) presented itself as the heir of this national revolution. Representations of the 1821 were popularized and mediatized through film, paintings and the public spectacles organized by the regime, culminating in the 150-year anniversary in 1971. This triggered an alternative use of these representations, by songwriters, playwrights and writers who aimed to subvert them through mimicry. Focusing on three novels by young writers of the period, Yoryis Yatromanolakis’s Leimonario (The Spiritual Meadow) (1974), Nikos Platis’s Gkount mpai mister pap (‘Goodbye Mr. Pap’) (1976) and Takis Theodoropoulos’s Ο vios stin politeia tou Thodori Kotronithodorikolou (‘Life in the times of Thodoris Kotronithodorikolos’) (1977), the article examines how these young writers subverted the representations of heroism constructed by the dictatorship through the use of surrealist and avant-garde techniques. The use of pastiche, the corporeal and the fantastic by Yatromanolakis creates an alternative discourse of heroism. In the case of Platis and Theodoropoulos, surrealist techniques, and images of transgressive sexuality create a grotesque gallery of heroes, by emphasizing the hybridity and performativity of their identities. These writers also experimented with the ways in which history is represented in narrative, through reversal of temporality, the nightmarish, corporeality and the private. The article also examines the texts’ reception, at a time when new grand narratives of national history were being shaped.

Encountering a divine dance of solidarity at the Zalongo Monument

In this article, a combination of travelogue, personal narrative, archival research and cultural analysis, I contemplate the Monument to the Heroines of Zalongo, a sculpture by George Zongolopoulos that stands in the western Greek region of Epirus. It commemorates the Dance of Zalongo, a mass suicide, or heroic sacrifice, of women and children in 1803. The legend of the dance and the monument inspired by it evoke contradictory perspectives on the national identity of Greece and of Greeks that stretch back to the founding of the modern nation: the externally directed view of the philhellenes, and the introverted perspective of the Romii. Seen as an international, philhellenic cause, a mass suicide, the Souliote women’s leap signified helpless women and children, and a nation, in need of rescuing. Seen as a national, Greek narrative, a patriotic sacrifice, the Souliote women’s leap showed female warriors filled with pride and self-determination. The Dance of Zalongo has had many lives: as a nineteenth-century media event that sparked an outpouring of literature and art, a twentieth-century lifeline to the old country for Greeks in the diaspora and a twenty-first-century cultural meme bolstering resistance to economic austerity. The Zalongo Monument, a site for pilgrimage where Greek cultural memory is infused in stone and resonant in the air, recreates the presence of the dance, letting us feel what it means to be free. Visiting the monument as a philhellenic foreigner, I ponder its power as a tribute to solidarity among those everywhere who are pushed to the precipice.

The Greek War of Independence in Turkish historiography

How was the Greek War of Independence or the Greek Revolution narrated in Turkish historical texts? How did the Turkish historians’ approach to the establishment of the Greek State affect Greek–Turkish relations? On the occasion of the bicentenary of the Greek War of Independence, this article reviews the approaches of the Ottoman/Turkish historians to the Greeks, to the establishment of the Greek State and to outbreak the Greek Revolution, and demonstrates to what extent their perceptions have changed from the Ottoman period to the present day. Offering an analysis based on three historical periods (Ottoman rule to the 1920s, the 1930s to the1980s and from the 1990s to the present), the discussion highlights the prevalent approach of Turkish nationalist historiography in the 1970s and 1980s, and the influence on younger generations’ approaches to the Greek War of Independence. This article also tackles the issue of how this prevalent historiographical approach affected the Turkish–Greek relations, and conversely, how the trajectory of Turkish–Greek relations impacted the consolidation of such a narrative.

Athens besieged: Greek and Ottoman perceptions of shifting space during the Greek Revolution of 1821

This article explores aspects of the quotidian history of space in the Greek Revolution of 1821, using as a case study the transitional events of the siege of the Acropolis by the Ottoman army in 1826 and the recapturing of the city of Athens. Through a thorough study of space as embodied knowledge grounded in the dynamic interaction between humans and material culture, it identifies the shifts in the Athenian landscape during this period. Its findings are based on primary textual and visual sources pertaining to warfare, which are juxtaposed to the Greek and Ottoman emerging official perceptions of the significance of the city of Athens as a political and imaginary objective. The article deploys a phenomenological analysis of space that foregrounds the everyday experiential dimensions and is highly relevant in understanding the ideological and political complexities and implications of the shifting spatialities of the revolutionary period.

Athens ’21: Undoing the demos in the year of the pandemic

This article is presented in the form of an illustrated memoire from the Greek bicentenary day (25 March 2021) and the way it was celebrated in Athens. As the Greek capital was under strict lockdown at the time, in view of the COVID-19 pandemic, most of the festivities were cancelled, with the exception of a military parade carried out through empty streets. The city’s desolate landscape on that most symbolic day helps rethink Greek biopolitics in the days of post-democracy.

Means and beginnings: Voicing revolution in Solomos’s early work

In this article I read the figurations of poetic voice in Solomos’s early lyric ‘Spiligga’ as a testing site for the conceptualization of the Greek Revolution as a modern political event. Perusing its thematic, intertextual and formal strategies, I argue that two distinct poetic voices are operative in the poem. The first model is commensurate with the voice of nature. The second is a medium of reflective and expressive human speech able to herald the revolution. In order to ascertain the political significance of this juxtaposition, I procure insights from seminal studies in intellectual history that outline the transformations of the term ‘revolution’ at the turn of the eighteenth century (Arendt, Koselleck). The period’s new understanding of the term as an absolute and inaugurating break from an existing state of affairs (which supplanted the previous meaning of revolution as quasi-natural experience that precludes innovation) illuminates the juxtaposition by Solomos of the two models of voice: they represent the revolutionary fissure as an exit from the state of nature and as the innovation of a new order. This reading not only elucidates the encounter of modern revolution and poetry in ‘Spiligga’ but also establishes the latter as a necessary starting point for the examination of this encounter in Solomos’s later works.

Real and imagined Greek women in Victorian perceptions of ‘1821’

The article explores the reception of ‘1821’ in Victorian popular culture, focusing on the representation of Greek women in stories published in contemporary periodicals. The two dominant tropes of Greek womanhood that emerge in popular fiction and poetry published from the 1830s to the 1890s – the captive harem slave and the intrepid warrior – arouse sympathy for the enslaved women but also evoke liberal ideas on women’s national and social roles. These texts foreground the position of Greek women within a nineteenth-century social context and imbue in them virtues and conflicts such as radicalism, the enfranchisement of women and middle-class domesticity that concerned Britain as much as Greece. Greek women, as represented in these stories, construct a Victorian narrative of ‘1821’ and of the Greek nation that oscillates between familiarity and strangeness, freedom and enslavement, real and imaginary. These largely neglected texts challenge traditional definitions of philhellenism, which depended on the legacy of ancient Greece as justification for the cause of the country’s liberation, and instead construct new myths about Greece, participating in the discursive production of its national fantasy. They also provide the opportunity of reconsidering the cultural position of Modern Greece in the Victorian period beyond the division between Hellenism and Orientalism.

A revolution of one’s own: Elizabeth Edmonds translates the Greek War of Independence

In the wake of a ‘crushing sorrow’ at the age of 50, Elizabeth Edmonds (c.1821–1907) turned to Modern Greece for a solution. After four months’ stay in Athens in 1880, she returned to London a confirmed Philhellene. Her connections in Athens saw her engaging with the emergent Athenian generation of the 1880s; Palamas, Karkavitsas, Drosinis, Xenopoulos and Vizyinos were published in English translation long before they became figures of the Greek establishment. Edmonds’s links to Oscar Wilde and the diplomat Ioannis Gennadios put her in a fine position from which to promote the Greek cause in Britain. It is widely known that the Cretan Insurrection generated a ripple effect that prompted writers to return to events of 1821. My argument is that Edmonds did so with more subtlety than most. By translating Greek poetry and writing detailed articles, as well as publishing her own fiction inspired by the earlier revolution, Edmonds began to drip-feed a Philhellenism more in keeping with her own times to a British audience. The lives of Rhigas Feraios, Theodoros Kolokotronis and Bouboulina all emerged in Edmonds’s writing, along with the warrior figure of the andreiomeni lygeri. This article traces the development of Greek independence in Edmonds’s writing, from early fiction to later translation work. Through a consideration of this material, and Edmonds’s own correspondence, the article explores how the War of Independence served belatedly to give Edmonds a sense of voice and vocation.