In Southeastern Europe, archaeology extends beyond its traditional role as a scientific discipline, assuming a unique function as a medium for shaping alternative knowledge systems. This article explores the complex relationship between archaeology and the crafting of ancestral narratives in the region, illuminating how archaeological interpretations are employed to invent and sustain cultural identities. By analysing a range of archaeological case studies across the Balkans, this study investigates how archaeological evidence is appropriated and reshaped to advance ideological agendas, frequently diverging from established academic consensus. It contends that in Southeastern Europe, archaeology functions as a powerful instrument for legitimising territorial claims and cultural dominance, promoting narratives of continuity and primordial origins that deeply resonate within the collective psyche. Through the selective amplification of certain aspects of the past while marginalising others, archaeological discourse facilitates the construction of mythologised origin stories that reinforce nationalist ideologies and perpetuate historical tensions.

This paper discusses certain aspects of the dominant cultural heritage discourse in Greece, and their effects on the construction, preservation, and diffusion of public memory; although my case studies will not be archaeological as such, I will be discussing the materialities political power is imbued with, and the ways in which it regenerates itself at their expense (a process in which Greek archaeology often interferes). Focusing on what we generally call “alien monuments,” that is, monuments that do not form part of the hegemonic culture, the paper discusses minority legacies, as they strive to rescue themselves from centrally waged wars on memory, and oblivion.

This paper focuses on the archaeological sub-field of archaeogenetics, and the ways it may be deployed in current political discourse in order to substantiate nationalist claims of heredity as a blood-based relationship. Two case studies are discussed in order to show how, in modern Greece but also elsewhere, antique skeletal remains are seen as national relics as well as cultural icons. This generates a politically charged sort of “DNA archaeology,” only partially involving the ideas or actions of archaeology professionals but strongly affecting public receptions of, and responses to, the past. And this is because archaeogenetic discourse and its results – factual, exaggerated, or plainly fabricated – may be deployed by different stakeholders within contemporary societies in order to mobilize certain parts of the population or exclude others to the point of elimination, by means of their symbolic or even biological death.

Based on fresh archival research this article examines the exchange of Romanizing statuary between Italy and Spain during the ventennio fascista. Between 1933 and 1943, Italy and Spain exchanged copies of Roman statues as symbolic gestures, to substantiate their claims to a shared classical heritage of ‘imperial greatness’. Using press reports and documentary film excerpts the article reconstructs public events that took place in Merida, Tarragona, Palma, and Zaragoza and assesses their impact. Behind these exchanges, and public ceremonies staged on their occasion, lay the Fascist concept of romanità: an archaeologically and aesthetically charged discourse placing Late-Republican and Early-Imperial Roman heritage in the epicentre of Fascist identity politics. Through improvised public performances of romanità, classical materialities, monumental as well as spatial, were imbued with Fascist dynamics, as the past turned into the present and projected into the future. Through individual and collective performance these ceremonies embodied a primeval Fascist ideal that appeared at once spectacular and modern.

In this paper, I discuss the notion of “repatriation” of antiquities that have been illicitly excavated and exported, against the backdrop of Greece’s attempts to achieve their return. Taking the British Museum Caryatid as my primary case study, I survey recent Greek theatre plays and children’s storybooks in order to examine how the stolen statue is invariably portrayed as the nation’s missing “daughter” or “sister”, suffering in solitary exile and eagerly awaiting “her” return. Based on this discussion, I proceed to claim that the repatriation narrative serves as a means to reconfirm Greece’s whiteness, and the Greek nation’s rightful place as part of the West. Employing the methodological tools of coloniality and crypto-coloniality, as well as the parallel modern example of Egypt, I argue that it is through such attempts at partial representation that political communities in the periphery of the West imagine themselves into being.

As a discipline deeply rooted in the turbulent nation-building days of the “long 19th c.”, archaeology is closely entangled with political discourse. Modernity, however, has also effected a breed of politics carried out through the use of archaeology, and the past’s grip on the ways we perceive our present. This paper is not a discussion of the political aspects of archaeological praxis in contemporary societies but an exploration of politics carried out through an archaeological way of thinking and acting. I call this breed of archaeologically informed politics over life “Archaeopolitics”. My main case study come from present-day Greece, and South-Eastern Europe at large, though – as my first example is bound to show – what I am describing here may be observed in many other regions of the world and in a timeframe much wider than the later 20th – early 21st c.

Ένα νέο βιβλίο πολιτισμικής θεωρίας, αφιερωμένο στη συνύφανση της αρχαιολογίας και της αρχαιοφιλίας με τον πολιτικό λόγο, επίσημο και ανεπίσημο, στην Ελλάδα του 21ου αι. Σύμφωνα με τον συγγραφέα, η αρχαιοπολιτική αναδύεται ως μια σύνθετη μορφή βιοπολιτικής, εδραιωμένη στην πεποίθηση ότι οι υλικότητες του παρελθόντος καθορίζουν τον τρόπο που βιώνουμε το παρόν. Υπό αυτήν την έννοια, η αρχαιολογία συμβάλλει στη συγκρότηση του εθνικού βιο-προτύπου, οργανώνοντας τα σώματα των εθνικών υποκειμένων και καθορίζοντας τους τρόπους με τους οποίους οι πολίτες θα αφομοιώσουν αφηγήματα του εθνικού παρελθόντος στο δικό τους παρόν. Έτσι, η αρχαιοπολιτική συμβάλλει στον βιολογικό καθαρμό του εθνικού σώματος και στην αναγνώριση της κλασικής αρχαιότητας ως μιας λευκής πολιτισμικής κληρονομιάς.

Dedicated to the historical and cultural heritage of Lemnos, the book offers a new, valid, concise and accessible history of this unique Greek island in the Northeast Aegean. Based on historical and mythological sources, archaeological finds, important remains of ancient Greek, medieval and modern art, narratives and chronicles, engravings, drawings, photographs and other archival material, the author sketches in 250 pages and with the help of about 200 images, the history of Lemnos from the depths of the Aegean prehistory to the present day. In its pages, readers will find important information about the society, the economy, the political life, the art and the intellectual creation of the island over time, from the first nomadic settlements during the late Paleolithic period (ca. 10,500 BC), until today: with extensive accounts of the prehistoric cities of Poliochni and Myrina, the important site of Koukonisi, Hephaestia and Kaveirion during the Archaic and Classical period (7th-4th century BC), Lemnos of the Hellenistic and Roman years, Lemnos as a Byzantine, Venetian, and Ottoman possession, but also the adventures of the island and its inhabitants from the liberation of 1912-13 onwards.

Αφιερωμένο στην ιστορική και πολιτιστική κληρονομιά της Λήμνου, το βιβλίο προσφέρει μια νέα, έγκυρη, ευσύνοπτη και προσιτή στον αναγνώστη ιστορία του μοναδικού αυτού ελληνικού νησιού στο Βορειοανατολικό Αιγαίο. Με βάση ιστορικές και μυθογραφικές πηγές, αρχαιολογικά ευρήματα, σημαντικά κατάλοιπα της αρχαίας ελληνικής, μεσαιωνικής, και νεότερης τέχνης, διηγήσεις και χρονικά, γκραβούρες, σχέδια, φωτογραφίες και άλλο αρχειακό υλικό, ο συγγραφέας σκιαγραφεί σε 250 σελίδες και με τη βοήθεια 200 περίπου εικόνων, την ιστορία της Λήμνου από τα βάθη της αιγιακής προϊστορίας έως τις μέρες μας. Στο Χρονικό της Λήμνου, η μακραίωνη ιστορία ενός σχετικά άγνωστου και κάπως αγνοημένου μέχρι πρόσφατα νησιού του Αιγαίου μετατρέπεται σε συναρπαστικό αφήγημα, ένα πραγματικό χρονικό για τον τόπο και τους ανθρώπους του. Στις σελίδες του, οι αναγνώστες θα βρουν σημαντικές πληροφορίες για την κοινωνία, την οικονομία, την πολιτική ζωή, την τέχνη και την πνευματική δημιουργία του νησιού διαχρονικά, από τις πρώτες νομαδικές εγκαταστάσεις κατά την ύστερη Παλαιολιθική περίοδο (περ. 10.500 π.Χ.), μέχρι σήμερα: με εκτενείς αναφορές στις προϊστορικές πόλεις της Πολιόχνης και της Μύρινας, στο σημαντικό Κουκονήσι, την Ηφαιστία και το Καβείριο κατά την Αρχαϊκή και την Κλασική περίοδο (7ος-4ος αι. π.Χ.), τη Λήμνο των ελληνιστικών και ρωμαϊκών χρόνων, τη Λήμνο ως Βυζαντινή, Βενετική, και Οθωμανική κτήση, αλλά και τις περιπέτειες του νησιού και των κατοίκων του από την απελευθέρωση του 1912-13 και μετά. Αναδεικνύεται, τέλος, η Λήμνος του σήμερα: τόποι ιστορικής σημασίας, αρχαιολογικοί χώροι και μουσεία, αλλά και τοποθεσίες φυσικού κάλλους, γεωλογικά μνημεία και θέσεις οικολογικού ενδιαφέροντος, παραλίες και παραδοσιακοί οικισμοί. Ακόμη, γίνονται αναφορές στην άυλη και την γαστρονομική κληρονομιά του νησιού, αλλά και τη μουσική και χορευτική παράδοση που αναβιώνει ώς τις μέρες μας.

If “the past is a foreign country”, then Greece’s classical past could be described – and it has been – as an ideal, as well as idyllic land, colonized by the West. This paper employs post-colonial theory combined with discussions of trauma as a historical agent in order to investigate ways in which contemporary Greek museums and archaeological sites strive to attract the colonial gaze by reclaiming ownership of the nation’s (neo)-classical past; at the same time, however, this exercise may be seen as an effort to alleviate the pains of modernity as experienced by a people who has never overcome the trauma of its separation from its famed antiquity. As a result, Greek archaeological spaces – both museums and sites – can be described as “sites of trauma”, as the placescapes where the unlived experiences of an imagined past become revived. A number of examples are discussed, including the Benaki and Acropolis Museums, as well as several clusters of antiquities preserved “in situ”, mostly within the urban grid or incorporated in buildings and other structures, such as Athenian metro stations. Such cases of incidental archaeology, the paper contends, are devised in order to suture, in the psychoanalytical sense of the term, Greek national imaginary onto the very sites where the nation experienced the trauma of its separation from its past.

From the onset of the so-called “Greek crisis” (a sovereign-debt default in late 2009 and the subsequent, and ongoing, attempts on behalf of successive Greek governments at securing adequate bailout aid from the EU and the IMF), a new breed of biopolitics seems to have been in place. Classical antiquity has always played a crucial part in the forging of modern Greek social and cultural identities; in the framework of the “Greek crisis”, however, classical heritage and its visual output has been used both as an emancipatory tool against the country’s debtors as well as a disciplinary device on behalf of its critics. In this paper, a number of earlier and more recent Athenian graffiti will be discussed, directly or indirectly incorporating themes from Greek art in order to express their makers’ sentiments – as well as the frustrations of their public at large. Contrasting unauthorized examples of Athenian street art with some centrally-sponsored recent examples also employing classicizing imageries, the paper will explore the ways in which classical heritage finds itself entangled with the neoliberal biopolitics at work in Greece since 2009.

A special issue of the Journal of Greek Media and Culture (5.2), edited by Dimitris Plantzos. With a special focus on the city of Athens and its current predicament of austerity, recession and precarity, the issue brings together cultural historians, social anthropologists, urban archaeologists and contemporary artists in order to compose ‘a Greek archaeology of the present’. The new special issue includes articles by Penelope Papailias, Neni Panourgiá, Stelios Lekakis, Charis Kanellopoulou, Faidon Moudopoulos and Dimitris Giannakis; a visual essay by Penelope Petsini; and a viewpoint-piece by novelist Christos Chrissopoulos. This new collection of articles and essays attempts a re-charting of Athens as a city in the process of spatial and social restructuring; as a field of cultural expression, as well as a deeply traumatized, multi-cultural community in awe of its own urbanization. To this end, individual contributions explore the biopolitics of the ‘Greek crisis’; the gentrification of urban space; the commodification of cultural life; the restructuring of public memory; the renegotiation of collective histories within an urban setting.

Jugate portraits on coinage and jewellery of the Hellenistic periodJugate representations of divine or royal couples appear often on coins and sealsin Graeco-Roman art. Putting an emphasis on dynastic integrity and continuity –derived from the model of their divine predecessors– the kings of the Hellenisticperiod (and particularly so the Ptolemies of Egypt) are shown next to their consortsas guarantors for the production of lawful heirs. As their divine model –devised,evidently, by themselves in anticipation of the symbolism they wished to put forward–they most commonly used Sarapis and Isis, a couple known to us from coins, sealsand other such portable media, as well as a remote counterpart in the face of Zeusand Dione, a divine couple known from the coins and seals of Epirus.The emblematic value of coins or jewels employed as seals, such as engravedgemstones and signet rings, stresses the symbolism of the jugate scheme, renderingthe image into an agent for Hellenistic kingship ideology. The type’s adoption byRoman Imperial couples strengthened its ideological content and guaranteed itssurvival well into modernity.

This article, covering the roughly decade-long “Greek crisis” (2008-2018), uses official statistics in order to examine the effects the prolonged recession had for archaeology in Greece. As the data show, although revenues from museums and archaeological sites are in considerable rise (a side effect of “crisis tourism” among other factors), state spending on archaeological research is lacking; furthermore, the steady collapse of the state apparatus during this long decade has seriously affected archaeology and the ways it is practiced in the country, ultimately leading to the loss of an entire generation of Greek archaeologists.

This innovative, fresh look on Greek painting combines a standard, comprehensive survey of the material record – wall-paintings, painted panels, or slabs – with an in-depth exploration of the ways in which the Greeks themselves appreciated this demanding art. The book dwells on techniques, styles, themes, and masters, as well as their admirers, clients, and critics. At the same time, the author discusses recent breakthroughs in archaeology, cultural studies, and art history in order to offer a well-rounded picture of a unique phenomenon in Greek culture, a celebrated art that enjoyed a long afterlife. In this respect, this book is unique in its kind as it reflects new, multidisciplinary scholarly approaches to the material record which it combines with a more traditional, art-historical exploration. Drawing on a wide range of ancient authorities – from Plato and Xenophon to Cicero, Pliny, Lucian, and Philostratus – the author discusses the surviving works within their chronological framework and under the light of recent discoveries. After a wide-ranging discussion of painting in Bronze-Age Greece (Cyclades, Crete, Santorini, Mycenaean Greece), the book establishes a highly readable narrative of all technical, stylistic, iconographical and aesthetic developments through the Archaic, the Classical, and the Hellenistic period, before it culminates with the study of Graeco-Roman painting in the 2nd-3rd c. AD. The study thus covers all significant milestones in the development of Greek painting from the prehistoric through to the Roman era, as well as most surviving works (including many lesser known or recently discovered ones); it also pays tribute to the oeuvre and individual contributions of most great masters of antiquity. The book’s introduction offers a thorough account of the techniques and materials employed in ancient painting, alongside contemporary technical, scientific, and theoretical approaches to its study. The text is fully illustrated in color, and accompanied by an extensive bibliography and index. The Art of Painting in Ancient Greece is a scholarly monograph that would interest all Greek-art enthusiasts, archaeology and art-history students, as well as any academic working on classical Greece.

Το νέο βιβλίο του Δημήτρη Πλάντζου προσφέρει μια εμπεριστατωμένη επισκόπηση της αρχαίας ελληνικής ζωγραφικής μέσα από τα σωζόμενα μνημεία. Παράλληλα, επιχειρεί μια μοναδική στο είδος της διεπιστημονική μελέτη των αρχαιολογικών καταλοίπων μέσα από τις φιλοσοφικές αντιλήψεις και θεωρητικές προσεγγίσεις τόσο της αρχαιότητας όσο και του καιρού μας. Με τη βοήθεια των αρχαίων φιλολογικών πηγών – από τον Πλάτωνα και τον Ξενοφώντα στον Κικέρωνα, τον Πλίνιο, τον Λουκιανό και τον Φιλόστρατο – ο συγγραφέας αναλύει εικονογραφικές και τεχνοτροπικές τάσεις της αρχαίας ζωγραφικής, επανεξετάζοντας παράλληλα και τις απόψεις της σύγχρονης έρευνας. Με συχνές αναφορές στην ιστορία της τέχνης, την ανθρωπολογία, την ψυχανάλυση, και τις πολιτισμικές σπουδές, το βιβλίο προτείνει μια νέα, ρηξικέλευθη ματιά στον κόσμο της αρχαιοελληνικής ζωγραφικής. Μετά από μια συνοπτική αναφορά στην ελλαδική ζωγραφική της Εποχής του Χαλκού (Κυκλάδες, Κρήτη, Θήρα, Μυκηναϊκή Ελλάδα), το βιβλίο καλύπτει τις τεχνικές, τεχνοτροπικές, εικονογραφικές και αισθητικές εξελίξεις κατά την Αρχαϊκή, την Κλασική, και την Ελληνιστική περίοδο, για να ολοκληρωθεί με τη μελέτη της ζωγραφικής του ελληνορωμαϊκού κόσμου, έως τον 2ο-3ο αι. μ.Χ. Καλύπτονται έτσι όχι μόνον οι σημαντικότερες περίοδοι της ελληνικής ζωγραφικής από τους προϊστορικούς έως και τους ρωμαϊκούς χρόνους, αλλά και όλα τα περισσότερο ή και λιγότερο γνωστά έργα, καθώς και το έργο των σημαντικότερων ζωγράφων της αρχαιότητας. Η εισαγωγή της μελέτης παρουσιάζει συνοπτικά τα υλικά και τις μεθόδους της αρχαίας ζωγραφικής, ενώ παράλληλα αναλύει τις σύγχρονες τεχνικές και θεωρητικές ερευνητικές μεθόδους. Το κείμενο συνοδεύεται από εξαντλητική έγχρωμη εικονογράφηση, πλήρη βιβλιογραφία, και ευρετήριο. Η μελέτη Η τέχνη της ζωγραφικής στον αρχαιοελληνικό κόσμο απευθύνεται στους θαυμαστές της αρχαίας ελληνικής τέχνης, στους μελετητές της κλασικής αρχαιότητας, στους φοιτητές αρχαιολογίας και ιστορίας της τέχνης, και σε κάθε αρχαιόφιλο, Έλληνα ή ξένο (καθώς κυκλοφορεί παράλληλα και στην αγγλική γλώσσα).

This article examines patterns of reception through which a particular type of classical sculpture – the Caryatid – has been accepted into the cultural life of contemporary Greece. Loved by neoclassical architecture, though also prominent in Modern Greek design, as well as contemporary poetry and drama, the Caryatid serves as a logo for the country and the Greeks at large, especially when referring to their relations with their fellow-Europeans. In contemporary Greek culture, Caryatids are deployed as symbols of Greekness as well as a means to achieve the nation’s cultural emancipation against the supremacy of western, globalised modernity. Often derided as mere symptoms of colonial mimicry, through their inherent qualities of parody and subversiveness, such uses may sometimes prove unexpectedly successful in undermining modernity and its templates.

In June 1946 George Seferis, the eminent Greek poet who was goingto become the Nobel-laureate patriarch of Greek modernist poetry by1963, witnessed the re-excavation of the statues and vases until thenhidden in the vaults of the National Museum in Athens in order toprevent their damage, or looting, by the Germans during the occupation.As he observes the bronze statue of Zeus, a fifth-century BC work thatis still considered one of the masterpieces in the Museum’s collectionand of Greek art at large, the poet fantasizes the god’s lovemaking witha woman whom Seferis himself “would love”, as he unashamedly informsus in his diary from that day. In the paper, I use the concept ofhomosociality in order to explore the ways in which Seferis and manyof his contemporaries view classical antiquity and proceed to deploy itas a bio-political tool in order to claim a centralized role in Greekintellectual and political life. To this end, I re-visit Seferis’s two chief“archaeological” poems –The King of Asine and Engomi – in an effortto investigate the ways in which his sensory archaeologies manifestthemselves.

A publicity campaign run in Athens by the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation in October 2013 in order to advertise its acquisition of the Cavafy Archive, until then lying in relevant obscurity, turned into a media disaster when critics and members of the public protested against what they argued was a misquoting of the highly revered Alexandrian. In this paper, I am looking at this rather entertaining story of misunderstood intentions in order to suggest that even though Cavafy himself may be shown to have enjoyed history as fragmented experience, and despite the fact that the modern archive is one of often conflicting partialities rather than one of completeness, we, as consumers of Cavafy’s oeuvre, tend to sustain his long-established position as a paragon of Greek culture, canonised through his own nonconformity. As a typical case of ‘archive fever’, the events described here confirm the political specificity of any literary discourse, even when conducted out of context (or especially so).

A Singular Antiquity is an attempt to investigate the ideological strategies, somewhat improvised yet at times quite effective, through which the materiality of Greek archaeology has been employed as the foundation for the metaphysics of Greekness.