Indigenous Hellenisms/ Indigenous Modernities Classical Antiquity, Materiality, and Modern Greek Society
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02-Boys-Stones-c02 9780199286140–Boys (Typeset by SPi, Chennai) 19 of 31 April 6, 2009 10:30 chapter 2 .............................................................................................................. INDIGENOUS HELLENISMS/ INDIGENOUS MODERNITIES CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY, MATERIALITY, AND MODERN GREEK SOCIETY .............................................................................................................. yannis hamilakis What does it mean to live in a country that is at the same time symbolically at the centre of the western imagination and at the margins of the current geopolitical nexus? To be asked to carry the immense symbolic weight of the classical tradition, while being a modern, western European nation-state? To be subjected to constant surveillance on whether you have performed your duties as a worthy steward of the material classical past, and to various tests on whether you are a true descendant of Pericles or a ‘bastardized’ mix of Slavic and Ottoman cultures? To have to become the object of the patronizing epithet ‘Philhellenism’, as if you were a rare species in need of protection? To be the only country in the world that needs the prefix ‘modern’ in front of its name? To have to deal with both Orientalism, and its local and peculiar variant, Balkanism (Todorova 1997)? Welcome to Greece! 02-Boys-Stones-c02 9780199286140–Boys (Typeset by SPi, Chennai) 20 of 31 April 6, 2009 10:30 20 yannis hamilakis If the other chapters in this section deal with the Hellenism in the western sense, in this chapter I will attempt to briefly highlight an alternative Hellenism, indigenous Hellenism (in its various forms) as performed by intellectuals and state bureaucrats, politicians and citizens, poets and ordinary people, in Greece since the nineteenth century. In other words, I will deal with the reception, management, and recasting of the classical heritage by those people who, as the Nobel laureate poet Giorgos Seferis put it in Mythistorima, ‘woke up with this marble head in [their] hands’,a marble head that exhausts their elbows but which they do not know where to put down (Keeley and Sherrard 1981: 88). The evocation of the marble head is not accidental: my brief survey will place particular emphasis on the materiality of classical antiquity, its agency, and its embodied engagement with humans, through its physical and sensory qualities. For people living in the southern end of the Balkan peninsula, classical antiquity was never purely an abstract entity, a concept that scholars and western travellers would evoke in their writings and travelogues. For them, it always was a material and physical presence, a visible and touchable reality, in the shape of ruined build- ings, scattered objects, shattered fragments of pottery and stone; and in some cases, and more poignantly, in the shape of human bodies, either skeletons emerging out of the ground while ploughing the fields, or men and women made of marble or bronze, most naked, some with their heads or limbs missing, some complete, some so real and alive that you ‘could see their veins’, as Makrygiannis, the enigmatic nineteenth-century author and fighter of the Greek War of Independence put it (Vlahogiannis 1947: 63). For them, these were the feats of people who were there before them, different from themselves, other people, not their ancestors, but still admirable in their abilities to construct large and elaborate buildings and works of immense beauty (Hamilakis 2003). In folk stories from the nineteenth century, tales that reflect local attitudes before the ideas of nationhood became widespread, these people were the Hellenes, and their time was the ‘time of the Hellenes’, o Kairos ton Ellinon (Kakridis 1989). But in other stories, it becomes clear that this time is not conceived of in terms of a linear chronological sequence, that is as time past, linked genealogically to their own time. Some of these Hellenes are still alive, and they often engage with contemporary people in contestations of physical strength. Times past and times present, therefore, seemed to coexist in the folk imagination, prior to the establishment of western modernist temporality and its chronomet- ric devices. Moreover, in some of the descriptions of Hellenes in these stories, it becomes clear that the marble statues themselves are the Hellenes, not just the feats of past people. The statues had become entities with animate properties, human beings that even without heads could walk, and even without eyes (when marble statues were missing their painted eyes) could see. These stories, but also many other stories and practices involving antiquities (some recorded by travellers), such as those that attribute emotive reactions to ancient, especially anthropomorphic objects, and the practice of reusing ancient architectural parts and objects such 02-Boys-Stones-c02 9780199286140–Boys (Typeset by SPi, Chennai) 21 of 31 April 6, 2009 10:30 indigenous hellenisms/indigenous modernities 21 as reliefs and inscriptions in contemporary buildings, be it churches or houses (the tradition of spolia), often in places of prominence, such as the outer walls of churches or above the entrances of houses, speak of an intimate relation with the material past (Papalexandrou 2003). This is an alternative indigenous archaeology, involving practices of recovery, care, exhibition (in houses and churches and other places of worship, not museums), interpretation; an archaeology that also included ‘destruction’ (when using marbles as raw material to produce lime, for example), or rather reincorporation into the web of daily life; an archaeology based on a non- western conception of temporality and materiality, although the increasing number of western travellers to Greece who were seeking antiquities, especially in the eight- eenth and nineteenth centuries, and the impact of western Hellenism through the work of local intellectuals, would have, no doubt, influenced and shaped this native archaeology. Yet, things were destined to change, as Greece was incorporated into the western European world-system. The nation-state of Greece was founded at the intersection of a number of historical contingencies. Since the mid-fifteenth century ce,the area we now call Greece was under the Ottoman Empire, composed of many ethnic and religious groups which were organized on the basis of the millet: the system whereby the basic form of identification was religion, not language, and certainly not any national or even ethnic self-identification. The Greek language, however, enjoyed a privileged position, partly because it was the language of the Bible, partly because it was the lingua franca for many administrators, but also because it was the language of the new social class which emerged in south-eastern Europe from the seventeenth century and whose economic base was trade and seafaring, rather than the land. In the Babel of languages, religions, and ethnic groups of the Balkans at the time, Greek provided a convenient medium of communication for the physically mobile and upward moving new social classes (Stoianovich 1960; Roudometof 1998). Christian Orthodox people belonged to the millet-i Rum,and progressively, Greek became the dominant means of communication amongst the members of the millet, who were called by others and were calling themselves Romioi. Interestingly, the term ‘Hellene’ still signified for most people the pagan classical tradition, and it was a term that especially the clergy was keen to eliminate. Certain evocations of the term ‘Hellene’ by Byzantine scholars (e.g. in the twelfth century) contained some elements of contemporary ethnic identification, but it never acquired widespread currency, it ‘never really “caught” on’ (Beaton 2007: 93). The Hellenes were destined to become ancestors in the decades prior to the Greek War of Independence, through the concentrated effort of the Greek-speaking merchants and scholars who were educated in the West or were involved in trade and financial transactions with western countries, and of western Hellenists and travellers, combined with the political desires of European powers to expand their zone of influence into the territories of the Ottoman Empire. The Greek speak- ing merchant-intellectuals (and the roles were often combined, as for example 02-Boys-Stones-c02 9780199286140–Boys (Typeset by SPi, Chennai) 22 of 31 April 6, 2009 10:30 22 yannis hamilakis in Adamandios Koraïs, the most prominent intellectual of what would come to be called the Greek Enlightenment: Dimaras 1977;Jeffreys 1985;Clogg2003) came into contact with western Hellenism and started identifying themselves as Hellenes, the direct descendants of ancient Greeks, so admired by the western intellectual and political elites. These Greeks imported into the area of present- day Greece, together with trade goods and financial capital, the symbolic capi- tal of Hellenism, and dreamed of the new imagined community of the Hellenic Nation as the resurrected Hellas of classical times. In translating ancient Greek authors, in naming their merchant ships with ancient Greek names, in training teachers who would teach pupils their true destiny, and in baptizing children with ancient Greek names (Politis 1993), they forged a future for the area: a future of a national state, a community based on ethnic self-identification and on ancestral glory, a homogenized national community, in place of the multi-ethnic and multilingual communities structured around religious faith. The fighters of the War of Independence now started