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Esther Solomon (ed.), Contested antiquity. Archaeological heritage and social conflict in modern Greece and Cyprus

Thomas Kiely
p. 586-591
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Esther Solomon (ed.), Contested antiquity. Archaeological heritage and social conflict in modern Greece and Cyprus. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2021 – ISBN 978‑0‑253‑05596.

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1The study of the impact of political, social and cultural forces on modern archaeological practice and heritage management, and especially their manipulation by powerful elites, nowadays constitute an identifiable discipline in itself, drawing widely from post-modern and post-colonial approaches – broadly defined – but also from reflexive historiographies, ethnographic fieldwork and community engagement programmes, among many other approaches. Despite their heavyweight (and sometimes ponderous or even opaque) intellectual approaches, these concerns touch directly on many issues that affect the lives of the general public, from the practical realities of communities living within defined heritage landscapes, rural or urban, to the use of archaeology by elites, whether political or academic, to support or supress community identities and rights. If the 1990s witnessed a slew of research on the manipulation of heritage by nationalism and political extremism, against the backdrop of the collapse of the Communist bloc, more recent decades have seen a heightened focus on imperialism in all its forms – including the supposedly crypto-colonial nature of some modern heritage practices. Following the work of Michael Herzfeld and later of Yannis Hamilakis, the notion of crypto-colonialism has been applied widely. Particularly suspect are the globalising claims of a discipline rooted in western epistemes (and often spread through imperialism or western economic dominance), and the activities of ‘foreign’ archaeological schools and overseas research projects. Likewise, the practices and ideologies of official heritage bodies, not just in former colonial territories but also in states whose longer-term independence and national pride has relied on maintaining good relations with the Great Powers and conforming to externalist or globalised versions of their culture and heritage. More generally, attempts by elites of all kinds to control heritage is commonly analysed through the lens of the ‘authorised heritage discourse’.

2Yet, as explored by the authors in this varied and stimulating volume of papers edited by Esther Solomon, grand narratives about the nature or the value of history or material heritage of any kind are now highly debated. Arguments about what constitutes heritage, and for or by whom it is managed and interpreted, are now firmly embedded in both academic and socio-political discourse. Contested antiquity explores many of these pressing questions through a series of historical and ethnographic studies focused on Greece and Cyprus, though with a much broader relevance beyond these two areas. While Cyprus receives just one chapter to itself, and to some extent its inclusion seems something of an add‑on (see p. 36 where it is the ‘Greek past’ that seems to be the main subject), the collection as a whole provides many relevant insights for discussions of heritage on the island. Crucially, the use of antiquity in the creation and maintenance of national identity in Greece (and also Crete) began to resonate in the later 19th century emergence of a distinct Greek-Cypriot identity under British rule, with Greek institutions and laws regarding heritage regularly cited by local Cypriot elites lobbying for reforms of the island’s antiquity management. As explored by Alexandra Bounia, Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert and Polina Nikolaou (chapter 3), both British and European colonial interests and Greek Cypriot elites have valued and contested Hellenism, with archaeological practices and interpretation to some degree converging in the exploration of the same sites and through debates over the management of the same museums that have emerged since the 19th century. At the same time, the authors note that previous approaches to Cypriot heritage relied too much on the notion of conflict and ethnic division, in which archaeology has long been implicated. This has been at the expense of a much broader interrogation of the diverse strands that make up the contested heritage of the island, including the voices and agency of local people and communities across the social and economic spectrum. Cyprus certainly supplies multiple examples of the complexity and contradictions inherent in the heritage debate as a whole, and perhaps more comparative weight could have been placed on the different manifestations of conflict, division and trauma in Greece and Cyprus.

3Solomon’s introduction lays the intellectual groundwork for the book as a whole, deftly weaving the author’s case studies into a much broader tapestry and rooting the content in contemporary concerns (economic hardship, migration, extremism) – like all good introductions, it is no mere summary of the contents. Dimitris Plantzos (chapter 1) uses Andreas Karkavitsas’ 1903 thinly allegorical novel The Archaeologist to ponder a long-standing concern in Greek heritage discourse – namely, the superordinate role of classical Greek antiquity, especially the version of it created in European circles, in the construction and maintenance of national identity in the face of Greece’s ambiguous relationship with its past, its neighbours and the ‘West’. In rather dense theoretical language and deploying rather contentious arguments, Plantzos explores this perception through a variety of case studies. These include the emergence of museums within a ‘western’ and ultimately crypto-colonial culture of display and interpretation that essentialise and stereotype both the past and national identity, and the exposure of archaeological sites in urban development areas and metro stations as a reflection of ‘national trauma’ (rather than simply a means used across the world of reconciling the needs of past and present). The design of the modern Greek passport illustrated with iconic representatives of Greek heritage is regarded as the ultimate ‘crypto-colonial mimicry’, where even the blue-and-white stitching dividing in two an image of the Parthenon is read by Plantzos in psychoanalytic terms as a suture connecting ancient and modern, the ‘idealized symbolic and the imaginary’. While this is a playful metaphor, like much else in the paper it also represents an example of theory running loose and wild at the expense of a more complex – or at times simply banal – realities of modern heritage management by the democratic nation state. This has to balance myriad public expectations of what heritage is and how it should be presented, both at home and internationally.

4Given that some exponents of crypto-colonial narratives imagine that we somehow exist in a form of intellectual and institutional incarceration, it’s appropriate to begin with Eleni Stefanou and Ioanna Antoniadou on the Eftapyrgio in Thessaloniki (chapter 9). Rather than highlighting the once widespread neglect of more recent mediaeval or Ottoman buildings nestling within ancient structures – the erasure of history within an official heritage discourse, a recurrent theme in this volume – they explore the uses to which the monument has been put in modern times, and the often painful and unacknowledged memories they evoke among living communities. An important Byzantine-era castle converted to a prison in 1892, the building housed a series of prisoners as late as the Colonels’ junta between 1967 and 1974. Proximity in time to its recent use in political repression represents an active, rather than constructed, community link to a heritage site with resonances well beyond the abstract (and often soft-focus) presentation of tourism.

5A dual tension can likewise be found in Styliana Galiniki’s fascinating exploration (chapter 5) of how shifting political power structures within the city of Thessaloniki and its region have significantly moulded the broader presentation of the city’s rich but often troubled history, including the loss of its ethnic minorities through mass population ‘exchanges’ and persecutions. After 1912 the city was remodelled in light of its newly-acquired status as a Greek city, and during much of the later 20th century the city’s right-wing readers deployed select aspects of its heritage (from Alexander the Great to Byzantine times) to promote a Greek nationalist agenda, further ignoring or erasing traces of Thessaloniki’s ethnically diverse Ottoman past. The shift to the left and centre beginning in the 21st century witnessed a volte-face which embraced the diverse populations of Ottoman times, now mostly vanished through conflict and genocide, in order to present the city in a modern light and encourage tourism; these policies would also serve as a model for modern multiculturalism (including that induced by migration and asylum seekers) – ‘[looking] toward the future by adopting a new approach to its pasts’ (p. 182). Yet, Galiniki seems sceptical about the end result which she regards as a selective ‘gentrification of memory’, driven by the need for urban renewal and tourism, and arguably a feel-good ‘composite history of selective parts’ (p. 183). This excludes as much as it embraces, from a myriad of twentieth-century conflicts (and their victims) to contemporary residents who cannot participate in the cultural programmes and other events that were key to the new Thessaloniki. Yet is this scepticism, or even cynicism, warranted? Her exploration makes clear that these very debates are no longer silenced, and indeed the subject of active public debate and contestation, in a way that older authorised discourses were not. Many, I suspect, would prefer a multicultural presentation of heritage, however sanitised, the mere existence of which is generative in nature and allows remembrance and reconciliation, over previously dominant ethnocentric and autocratic uses of the past.

6Both Greece and Cyprus have certainly attracted the interest of successive waves of archaeologists, including those for whom the physical as well as the intellectual possession of their pasts has been important. Niki Sakka’s valuable contribution on the treatment of the finds from the Swedish expedition to Asine in the 1920s and 1930s (chapter 2) highlights the very different expectations of foreign archaeologists, the relevant archaeological authorities and the latter’s political leaders – long-term loans or even donations of duplicates as opposed to complete retention of inalienable national resources. Yet the latter legal principle was characterised by ambiguity, where the long-standing problem about the nature of ‘duplicates’, originating in the debates over the German excavation concession at Olympia in 1874, allowed states – Greece, but also Crete and Turkey and indeed Cyprus – to get around strict laws forbidding the export or commercialisation (though exchange) of cultural material or the dividing up of archaeological assemblages. Sakka’s paper explores how archaeological material was viewed by diverging voices within the same country. Exportation and donation/exchange of material from Asine was anathema to some leaders, both scholars and politicians; but for others, including some in the Foreign Ministry, it provided a means of generating cultural and diplomatic capital for Greece at a difficult period in its economic and political recovery after the traumas of the war with Turkey. Ultimately, the demands of the Greek archaeological authorities mark the strengthening of sovereignty over archaeological finds which previously had been applied in a much looser or inconsistent way. Although not mentioned by Sakka, the Asine case also puts into broader context the extremely generous share of finds granted to the Swedish Cyprus Expedition in 1931 and the different outcomes based on conflicting understanding and application of partage – one sanctioned and then rescinded by a national sovereign state following public concern, the other (prompted by a member of the Greek Cypriot elite, Loukas Pierides) an expression of the broader pattern of colonial partage found throughout the Near East at this time which persisted until its abolition in 1964 by the Republic of Cyprus. Sakka’s discussion of the relationship between the Swedish excavators and the local population, the second part of her paper, likewise has many parallels in the memorable accounts of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition. Within the framework of this book, both excavations were para-colonial in nature, and sometimes stereotyped the communities among whom they worked, yet they nonetheless contributed much to the archaeological and ethnographic record of their respective areas of interest.

7Asine’s relatively modest ancient remains attracted Swedish excavators who were looking for a classical Greek site. Andromache Gazi (chapter 8) by contrast focuses attention on one of the most famous heritage sites in the entire world, the Athenian acropolis, in the context of the debate about ‘heritage erasure’ in democratic peacetime contexts – rather than conflict zones, as is often the case. Here the illuminating discussion is not about the impressive programme of restoration work carried on in previous decades, or the longstanding debates about the Parthenon sculpture – both key indices of the central role occupied by these monuments within national identity and official heritage discourses. Rather, it explores how this iconic monument co‑exists within the evolving landscape of modern Athens and the wider debate over how much the Hellenic past continues to dominate national identity. It focuses on the controversy that arose when, in the course of the construction of the new Acropolis Museum, the demolition of several noteworthy 1930s structures was proposed, in the opinion of its supporters, to improve the overall context and indivisibility with the Acropolis. Crucially, this was not simply an argument between civic leaders, architects and developers, on the one hand, and heritage professionals, conservationists and members of the general public on the other. Instead, it created fault lines within entire political and professional communities about the nature and purpose, but also the limits, of conservation and heritage management in a living city (and country) with superabundant history. A similar theme emerges in a rather different way in the discussion of Eleana Yalouri and Elpida Rikou (chapter 10) on exhibitions of contemporary art installed within ancient sites, in a country where, they argue, modern art was once dominated by the classical tradition. Modern idioms have emerged as a means of critiquing the hegemony of traditional uses of the classical part. However transformative and transgressive, they manage to question and respect the inherited past at the same time – and essential requirement of inhibiting landscapes where history is superabundant.

8Moving from the metropoleis of Athens and Thessaloniki to the remote countryside, and indeed one of the navel’s of an imagined Greek identity, Katerina Konstantinou’s essay on the oracle of Dodona (chapter 6) highlights the tensions between the claims made on its archaeology for the purposes of defining and rooting Greek national origins – given Dodona’s status as one of the cradles of Greek religion – and the local identities and histories within a highly distinctive but economically somewhat marginalised part of Greece. Rather than being diametrically opposed, these identities and stances have been interwoven within in the context of official education and the needs of tourism. Konstantinou combines histories of excavation and interpretation – starting with local scholar Konstaninos Carapanos and Dimitris Evaggelidis, whose work strove to place the area firmly within the Greek nation (very much within the authorised heritage discourse of Hellenism) – with fascinating insights on the complex modern use and appreciation of the theatre at Dodona. As with many parts of Greece and Cyprus, official and metropolitan concerns sit – sometimes uneasily – alongside regional and local issues, especially given the needs of tourism or economic development and, indeed, growing urges for regional definition or autonomy. Aris Anagnostopoulos (chapter 7) takes the reader to Poros and Crete to explore the ambiguous nature of the ‘Archaeological Protection Zone’. These reflect both the totalising claims of the state to protect heritage remains and the law’s inability to even partially assert itself (and even to contribute to the decline and abandonment of landscapes thus designated). Unfortunately, potentially insightful ethnographic case studies and human stories are buried, not so much so such beneath the “utopian sediment… at the core of every imaginary heterotopia” (p. 239) – on which Anagnostopoulos claims to focus in order to reveal the realities of living in such zones in the face of official policy and practice – as under a quite immovable accumulation of verbal and intellectual rubble. Parts of the text are quite impenetrable.

9The very nature of the arguments pursued throughout this book, that heritage defies easy classification or control by any group, and that no part of the political or ethnic spectrum is free from criticism, introduces a healthy and necessary degree of thoughtfulness to the debate. The editor and authors are especially to be thanked for bringing to the attention of anglophone audiences a large amount of Greek-language scholarship. Here too one should note Marlen Moliou’s examination in chapter 4 of media coverage of archaeology in the post-World War II years. This is a subject that would repay greater attention in Cyprus where heritage has been debated and contested in popular media and multiple language traditions from the beginnings of British rule down to the present day, quite as much as in academic circles. Regardless of the potential language barrier within an anglophone-dominated world, including in academia, this represents the ever-increasing size of the discourse (not just scholarship) which even the most assiduous student would find it hard to read, let alone digest critically.

10At the same time, while the book abounds in many fascinating case studies, some of the papers are cast in extremely dense theoretical language and expression, which at a minimum could have been better edited for clarity. This represents an authorised heritage discourse in itself, requiring both a knowledge of – and arguably an adherence to – contemporary sociology and philosophy of heritage (and at times their associated political stances). Like much rarefied intellectual discourse of this nature, it is often highly exclusionary in nature, and certainly unlikely to feature in the interpretative texts offered to diverse visitors in heritage sites whose inclusion is – or should be – a key outcome of these very debates. To be fair, this is not the purpose of this book. But for its insights to reach a general audience and address the needs of the people to whom it matters most – the marginalised and underrepresented or voiceless – it would benefit from a more accessible language and, crucially, an awareness of the power inherent in its own words and positioning. The persistent reader will gain much from the specific case studies which represent the best aspects of this volume, but – to borrow Nietzsche – it’s a pity so many words stand in the way of human realities and histories.

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Thomas Kiely, « Esther Solomon (ed.), Contested antiquity. Archaeological heritage and social conflict in modern Greece and Cyprus »Cahiers du Centre d’Études Chypriotes, 54 | 2024, 586-591.

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Thomas Kiely, « Esther Solomon (ed.), Contested antiquity. Archaeological heritage and social conflict in modern Greece and Cyprus »Cahiers du Centre d’Études Chypriotes [En ligne], 54 | 2024, mis en ligne le 30 octobre 2024, consulté le 23 avril 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/cchyp/1780 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12lsy

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