A Singular Antiquity: Archaeology and Hellenic Identity in Twentieth-century Greece

The reception of Classical antiquity by modern Greek society was subject to a complex historical process, now in need of rigorous reappraisal. In the course of the twentieth century, Greek intellectuals constructed their own readings of the past, based on the notion of an uninterrupted continuity in the history of the Hellenic nation. Archaeology was essential in that process, be that in its official guise, patronized primarily by the state, or in any one of its many permutations ranging from highly aestheticized approaches to the essence of Greece to less sophisticated expressions verging on folklore. Archaeology in Greece has proved an agent of intellectual advancement as well as a privileged participant in a heated debate on culture, heritage, and national identity, all projected against the inevitable backdrop of an unmediated past. Although this development is not peculiar to Greece, the Greek case constitutes an eloquent example of the way the vestiges of the past may be used to enhance the national imaginings, in a country whose antiquity is explicitly (if paradoxically) evoked as a proof of its modernity. A Singular Antiquity brings together - for the first time on such a scale and with such breadth of coverage - archaeologists, historians, cultural anthropologists, as well as historians of literature, art, and architecture, in order to discuss the ways in which archaeology has established itself as an authoritative cultural agent in modern Greece: as an academic discipline, as an educational practice, as the producer and at the same time the consumer of a multileveled cultural reality. The book reveals the intricate network of Greek archaeologies, or rather the archaeologies of Greek modernity (and within it): academic and institutional, or alternative, habitual, indigenous.