Lost Worlds of Ancient and Modern Gilbert Bagnani: The Adventures of a Young Italo-Canadian Archaeologist in Greece, 1921- 1924 by D. J. Ian Begg

By day, young Gilbert Bagnani studied archaeology in Greece, but by night he socialized with the elite of Athenian society. Secretly writing for the Morning Post in , he witnessed both antebellum Athens in 1921 and the catastrophic collapse of Christian civilization in western Anatolia in 1922. While there have been many accounts by refugees of the disastrous flight from Smyrna, few have been written from the perspective of the west side of the Aegean. The flood of a million refugees to Greece brought in its wake a military coup in Athens, the exile of the Greek and the execution or imprisonment of politicians whom Gilbert knew. Gilbert’s weekly letters to his mother in reveal his Odyssey-like adventures on a voyage of discovery through the origins of western civilization. As an archaeologist in Greece, he traveled through time seeing history repeat itself: Minoan Knossos, Byzantine Constantinople, and Ottoman Smyrna were all violently destroyed, but the Ian Begg studied archaeology in Greece at survivors escaped to the new worlds of , the American School of Classical Studies in Renaissance Venice, and modern Greece. Athens. For this book, the author retraced Gilbert Bagnani’s footsteps around Greece, At Smyrna in the twentieth century, history was written the Aegean, Turkey, and Libya. He has not not only by the victors but was also recorded by the victims. only participated in excavations in Sicily, At the same time, however, the twentieth century itself was Greece, Crete, and Egypt, but also initiated a so filled with reports of ethnic cleansings on such a scale survey on the island of Karpathos especially that the reports brutalized the humanity of the supposedly for the chapter in this volume. civilized people reading about them, and the tragedy of Smyrna disappeared from public awareness between the cataclysmic upheavals of the First and Second World Wars.

380 pages | Archaeopress Publishing | Series: Archaeological Lives Hardback (October 2020) | ISBN 9781789694529 | $40.00. Special Offer $32.00

70 Enterprise Drive, Suite 2 • Bristol, CT 06010, USA Distributor of phone: (+1) 860 584 6546 • fax: (+1) 860 516 4873 Scholarly Books www.isdistribution.com • [email protected] “Gilbert comes across as a fascinating character, who encountered the Levant at a critical time for both the Greece of and the Turkey of Mustapha Kemal Atatürk. . . . As a member of the Italian School of Archaeology in Athens he travelled around Greece and the islands and found himself in Asia Minor at a critical phase of the Greek occupation and Kemal’s war of independence. All this and much more is described in Gilbert’s letters to his mother. His grasp of local and international politics was impressive. He and Begg paint sparkling pen pictures of personalities such as Bosdari, the Italian ambassador during the Great War, and later Governor of the Dodecanese, Prince Demidoff the Russian ambassador, Harold Lamb the British Consul at Smyrna and family, Greek personalities such as Stratos, Kalapothakis, Karapanos, and colleagues at the Italian School. Gilbert emerges as clever, sometimes arrogant, fascinated by people especially from high society, and with a weakness for royalty. Begg does him justice in a well sourced book. This is a lively account of a formidable personality, scholar, and archaeologist in the making. The black and white photographs by Gilbert himself are excellent.” — Sir Michael Llewellyn Smith, British Ambassador to Greece, 1996–1999

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70 Enterprise Drive, Suite 2 • Bristol, CT 06010, USA Distributor of phone: (+1) 860 584 6546 • fax: (+1) 860 516 4873 Scholarly Books www.isdistribution.com • [email protected]