Modern Greek Historiography (19742000): The Era of Tradition from Dictatorship to Democracy (original) (raw)
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Students in present-day Greek schools are taught History as a biography of the Greek nation from the Mycenaean times to the present. Over the course of three millennia, the Greek nation has experienced three periods of cultural flourishing and political autonomy: (i) the period of Antiquity (from the times of legendary King Agamemnon to those of Alexander the Great), (ii) the Byzantine period (from Justinian's ascension in the 6th century to the Fall of Constantinople in 1453), and (iii) the modern era (from the War of Independence in 1821 to the present day). However, in this article we argue that in the 19 th century the history taught in Greek schools differed substantially from the tripartite schema described above. In support of our thesis, we examine the most popular school textbook of the 19 th century, O Gerostathis, by Leon Melas. In the Gerostathis, the history of the Greek nation is identified with that of Classical Greece (i.e. from the 6 th century BC to the 4 th century BC), which is held up as an exemplary era worthy of emulation. In contrast, the rise of Macedon under Philip II signals the cultural decline of the Greeks and the loss of their political autonomy, which was not regained for two millennia, until the 1821 national revolution. In that period, the Greek nation ceased not to exist, but survived as a subjugate of the Macedonians, the Romans, and finally the Ottomans. The Byzantine, on the other hand, is described as an unremarkable period of decadence that is only worth mentioning in relation to its final period, that of the Palaeologus dynasty, which bestowed upon the Greeks a legacy of resistance against the Ottomans. We argue that the above reading of the Greek past owed much to the Enlightenment, which as an intellectual movement still exerted a powerful influence (albeit to a gradually diminishing degree) on Greek intellectuals up to the latter third of the 19 th century.
The Greek Historiography of the 1940s. A Reassessment
This article is a presentation and assessment of Greek historiography and public memory regarding the period of occupation, resistance, and civil war during the 1940s. It examines historical production and culture from the first postwar years until 1989 and explains the relation between the changing visions of the past and political developments in Greece. In addition, the article evaluates works published after 2000, in order to discuss new questions that were raised and the ensuing debates. The article concludes by addressing themes that can revitalize the study of the 1940s, regarding the analytical framework, the territorial and social dimension, the notion of state and governmentality, and the issue of memory and public history.
TEMES Encounters with Modernity: Greek Historiogra-phy Since 1974
Encounters with Modernity: Greek Historiography Since 1974 Antonis Liakos UNIVERSITAT D'ATENES f we were to discuss only one theme in mainstream historiography since 1974, this would be the way in which "modernity" has been conceptualized and, at the same time, criticized and contested. If mainstream historiography has to do with modernity, modern Greek historiography has to do with modernization. This encounter with modernity, in one form or another, is a common feature of Postcolonial theories. However, in contrast to these theories, where the principal aim is the critique of the concept of modernization, in Greek scholarship modernity, modernization (and Westernization) have far more positive meanings. In the last quarter of the 20 th century, Greek society has entered a new phase. With the fall of the dictatorship in 1974 ended a long period of political turmoil, cleavage, and serious restriction to intellectual life. Thus, the past twenty-five years have not simply been a new phase of development for Greek historical studies. In this period the community of historians and the framework of historiographical research were formed. Like other national historiographies that take shape at the intersection between international developments in the discipline and the political and I Encounters with Modernity: Greek Historiography Since 1974 109 social realities of the particular society, the course of Greek historical studies has shown both convergences and divergences from mainstream historiographical trends.
The Enlightenment and the Greek cultural tradition
History of European Ideas, 2010
In this paper I attempt to situate the expression of the secular culture of the Enlightenment in the Greek context into the broader intellectual and spiritual tradition defined by the Greek language. The analysis points at the breaks introduced into this tradition by the Enlightenment (in historical and geographical conceptions, in scientific and political thought and in the understanding of the classics) but it also argues that despite its novelty the Enlightenment shared a considerable heritage with the broader Orthodox religious culture into which it was transmitted in Southeastern Europe. This point is illustrated by reference to biographical evidence, supplied by the life histories of three important exponents of the Enlightenment writing in Greek (E. Voulgaris, Iosipos Moisiodax and N. Doukas). The complex relation between the Enlightenment and earlier Greek intellectual traditions is underlined in conclusion.
2023
Greek historiography underlines the impact of the Enlightenment on the Greek national movement, as introduced by Greek scholars of the diaspora, such as Katartzis, Misiodax, Korais and Feraios. However, the so-called “Greek Enlightenment” was seen as playing a marginal role in the long run, especially in the formation of the new nation-state’s institutions and the 19th and 20th century political culture, due to the predominance of conservative and paternalistic social structures and to the influence of the Orthodox Church. In the 1990s and early 2000s, political scientist N. Diamandouros proposed a binary model of political analysis based on the assumption of a persisting “cultural dualism” in Greece, opposing a dynamic, progressive, Western-oriented and rational political culture, influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment, to another reflecting a rather backward, conservative, “underdog” identity, influenced by the Ottoman and Byzantine authoritarian traditions and the communitarian spirit of Orthodox Christianity. During the last decade, this approach seems to have led to a more extreme conclusion. As the unconditional supporters of the European integration and of the (institutional) “modernisation” agenda lost their previous hegemonic position in the Greek public sphere, a new theme emerged in public discourse, according to which the on-going economic and political crisis is explained by the fact that Greece “has not gone through the Enlightenment”. This phrase has especially become a motto of the (neo)liberal discourse on the Greek crisis, reproduced in a stereotypical way in hundreds of texts and comments in the media. It is used as an explanation for almost all the “deficiencies” of the Greek political system, namely the resistance vis-a-vis structural reforms, clientelist politics, the popularity of radical ideologies, the rise of euroscepticism, nationalism and xenophobia, and ultimately for all forms of “populism”. The framing of the crisis in these terms draws from an essentialist definition of “Europe”, and the alleged “rationality” of the “Western” culture, while ignoring similar trends in the EU and the US. This paper proposes a discussion of the uses of the “Enlightenment deficit” stereotype in Greek public discourse, its equation with “irrationality”, and a genealogy of the appearance and diffusion of this analytical frame by specific scholars and public intellectuals, in the context of the Greek crisis, namely Stelios Ramfos and Hélène Ahrweiler.
Three Books on Modern Greek Enlightenment
2015
A widespread trend in Enlightenment studies is to emphasize the particular ‘na- tional contexts’ within which key ideas were disseminated and appropriated during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This may be one way to read the three books under review: on one level they appear to look at how three em- blematic figures of Modern Greek Enlightenment (Adamantios Korais, Iosipos Moisiodax, and Veniamin Lesvios) transmitted ideological and philosophical tenets of Western modernity to the non-Western context of a country under construction: nineteenth-century Greece. Yet there is much more at work here. On closer study, these books collectively take an important step by suggest- ing a reversal of perspectives. The desideratum is an approach that no longer considers the Modern Greek Enlightenment (roughly extending from to ) as an a priori peripheral and dependent movement, but rather as a vehicle for elaborating on aspects of the Enlightenment as a transcultural phe- nomenon. Seen in this light, the space of the Modern Greek Enlightenment is not primarily geographical or geopolitical, but cultural and intellectual. Owing to the fluidity of borders and the mobility of intellectual agents inherited from the Ottoman imperial structures, the impact of the Modern Greek Enlightenment stretches across a vast area from south-eastern Europe to Asia Minor and from Transylvania to Kydonies. Interestingly, the same is true of the ideological and religious opponent of Enlightenment intellectual constella- tions in the Balkan peninsula: Orthodox Neo-Palamism. This spread from Mount Athos to Romania, offering a competing version of transnationalism and illumination with roots in Hesychast theology, rather than in the West. The emerging tension tested the application of Enlightenment ideas in ways alien to the West and shaped the outlook of intellectuals who are perhaps little known, but who merit a unique place in the broadly construed canon of Enlightenment thought.