Although the rich and diverse non-ceramic material culture of nineteenth - and twentieth - century Greece deserves fuller attention than we here have space for, there is a variety of topics which a future Early Modern Archaeology of Greece should include. Dress and furniture are increasingly well represented in museums such as the refurbished Benaki in Athens and we are able to study these topics further in well-illustrated books. For dress, see Papantoniou (1996), Anon. (2006), Broufas and Raftis (1993). These studies inform us on the one hand of the trend known throughout Southern Europe and the Eastern
Mediterranean of the “Westernization” of clothes, and the trickle-down effect as first the wealthy and more educated emulate bourgeois lifestyles ofWestern and Central Europe, before they reach all classes. On the other hand, they also show the persistence of distinct local folk costumes in the Greek provinces, recognizable down to village level (Color Plate 22.4). Originally regional folk costumes included both everyday and special occasion clothes, but increasingly they became confined to the latter, and most recently they tend to appear for “cultural events” which have lost their real identity as celebrations of living local traditions. For archaeologists, these relations between material culture and society are of great importance, not only for an Archaeology of the Recent Past, but to illuminate comparable changes in much earlier periods. The mixing of materials and cultural influences on the very distinctive formal dress of each Greek village opens up major insights into concepts of identity, population contacts, and the globalization of textile fabrics. Of special interest is the mixture of Western and Eastern dress in recent centuries in the Cyclades, marked by strong influences from Venice and the Ottoman world (Vionis 2003) and the much longer wearing of Italian and other West European clothes (at least amongst the middle and upper classes) on the Venetian Ionian Islands (Theotoky 1998).
An overlap between dress and furnishings comes with the study of embroideries and jewelry to be worn on the body or for the latter also placed on house furniture, also rich in social and economic meanings. For studies of the post-Medieval and Early Modern period see Zora (1981), Trilling (1983), and Vionis (2005).
Dress of course offers one of several pathways into the study of the construction of the modern Greek nation, in which many ethnic or religious minorities have been absorbed into a culture centering on Greek Orthodox populations (Bintliff 2003, Karakasidou 1997). A prominent example is the wearing of a short kilt by the Greek National Guard, which is actually derived from Greek Albanian male dress (Biris 1998). For the archaeologist tracing village histories, a relevant and striking observation is the policy within the new Greek state, frequently solicited by these communities themselves, to “ethnically cleanse” place-names denoting non-Greek settlers, for example of Albanian or Slav origin,
Figure 22.4a Surviving remains from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of the Lake Copais Company’s establishment, Haliartos. Offices and barns for the produce of the drained lake.
Author.
Figure 22.4b Surviving remains from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of the Lake Copais Company’s establishment, Haliartos. The “bungalow villas” for the clerical-supervisor class of expatriates.
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Replacing them with a Classical toponym from the neighborhood (Alexandri 2002).
Furniture and fixed house furnishings are also a fruitful area to combine existing folklore analyses with an archaeological approach. Mobile furniture is introduced by Darzenta-Gorgia (2000) and fixed furnishings in Kizis (1994) and Philippides (1999).
Early Modern Greek burial traditions have been studied in a pioneer ethnoarchaeological study (Tzortzopoulou-Gregory 2008), sensitive to historical processes. From a database of more than 2000 graves in Corinthia and Kythera it is argued that current village cemeteries are essentially new foundations since the founding of the Greek state, when relocations outside communities were enforced from earlier graveyards within villages. Early simple graves were replaced in the twentieth century by stone monuments usually of some sophistication, reflecting rising incomes and Western influence to commemorate family members. The author significantly links the monumentalization of graves (Color Plate 22.5b) with the equivalent rise in sophistication of houses over the same period.
The study of mobile art can also be incorporated. One published example could be mentioned. Mykoniatis (1986) in a thoughtful study of plaster busts and statues of the period 1833—1862 suggests that the cheapness and flexibility of plaster sculpture (compared to marble) ideally suited the needs of contemporary patrons. There was an enthusiasm for reviving ancient Greek art and a desire for affordable new works in Neoclassical styles which this material could match. Important individuals in Early Modern Greek life, as well as Neoclassical compositions of an historicist nature, celebrated the “rebirth of Greece” through expressing in art its favored identity as the inheritor of ancient glory. There is also a striking link between the purity of white nineteenth-century plaster casts and new marble statues and the contemporary enthusiasm for seeing Classical temples and sculpture as equally idealized in their lack of naturalistic colors. This was despite clear evidence by this time for the high degree of color in ancient Greek artworks (Lowenthal 1988).
A mansion filled with Early Modern artworks with a unique origin lies today on the rural fringes of the town of Corfu: the Achilleion (Dierichs 2004). The wife of the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph, Elisabeth (popularly called Sissi) had it constructed as a summer retreat in 1891. By this late date, the mixture of styles associated with a retrospective Romanticism had replaced pure Neoclassicism as a favored architecture for the upper and middle classes. The design of the villa and its decor are thus harmonious but culturally mixed. The mansion exterior mixes Baroque and Renaissance with wings like a Greco-Roman villa, while inside there are walls with imitation Pompeian wall-paintings and others with contemporary Romantic realist art depicting Classical subjects. The halls and gardens are filled with imitation Greco-Roman art and nineteenth-century heroic fantasy figures of Sissi’s favorite myth-hero Achilles (Color Plate 22.5a). After Sissi’s assassination in 1898 it was bought by the German Emperor Wilhelm. The German court was conveyed here for periods of holiday residence by boat from the head of the Adriatic, while from this mansion many of the dramatic affairs of the final years of the German Empire were played out. The building and its fascinating display of imagination concretized for foreign philhellenes (admirers of Greece), marks the steady rise in Greece’s function as a potential “Disneyland” where the idealized “Other” could be encountered or resurrected in the original soil of myth.
This amputation of the intervening millennia between Classical and Modern Greece is a central aspect of the use of “symbolic capital” to homogenize the young nation around an inspiring image of its former greatness. Thus might Greece’s greatness be revived after the intervening periods of foreign domination (Lowenthal 1988, Mouliou 1994, 2009). Seemingly essential to this aim was the permanent destruction of intervening material culture: between 1836 and the end of the nineteenth century the Athens Acropolis was “cleansed” not only of its Ottoman and Frankish but also its Byzantine and Early Christian monuments (Hurwit 1999). Doukellis (2004) underlines how the very recent pedestrian precinct around the Acropolis creates the townscape as a picture, movement through which signposts key monuments in the city’s Classical cultural identity. Bastea (2003) recalls growing up in Thessaloniki with an instinctive admiration for its mosques and traditional houses in the Upper Town, yet her formal education counter-intuitively allowed her to feel that the homogeneous Greek city had always been essentially the same since its foundation in the fourth century BC. The rich multicultural world of the pre-Second WorldWar city had effectively been erased from the collective memory of most of its inhabitants.
In a parallel fashion, ethnographer Hamish Forbes (2009) explains how most inhabitants in traditional Greek rural farming villages still possess a limited historical perspective, in which the detailed past ends with their grandparents’ generation, after which local legend merges every other era. Indeed for them, the “Acropolis-focused” history of schoolbooks and national culture is a remote object divorced from their landscape and their communities’ history. Such provincial communities instead increasingly identify with local historical or even legendary events that can be celebrated within their own localities.
World History
