The kouros of Keratea: Constructing subaltern pasts in

Article
The kouros of Keratea:
Constructing subaltern
pasts in contemporary
Greece
Journal of Social Archaeology
12(2) 220–244
! The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/1469605311433368
jsa.sagepub.com
Dimitris Plantzos
Department of History and Archaeology, University of Ioannina,
Greece
Abstract
Classical antiquity has been deployed in contemporary Greece as an agent of nationalidentity forging, and images of archaeological artifacts often feature in the public discourse, used to support state ideologies and promote national culture at home and
abroad. This article, however, deals with a number of recently circulated images,
designed in the margins of modern society in order to convey a defiantly anti-state
message. Such images are manipulated according to the strategies devised and repeatedly applied by nationalist rhetoric in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries,
though their outcome is markedly different: rather than promoting historical continuity
and social cohesion they create a disturbing sense of rupture. These irreverent images
are projected as ‘minority reports’ against hitherto established ideologies, challenging
their hegemony by adopting their own technologies of normalization and assimilationism. As weapons against the supremacy of the state, these performative declarations of
a peculiar anti-state nationalism seem to threaten the integrity of the nation state
considerably more than other, external forces are feared to do.
Keywords
classical antiquity, classical reception, globalization, Greece, local identities, nationalism,
postcoloniality
Corresponding author:
Dimitris Plantzos, 66 Ethnikis Antistasis Street, GR 17237 Daphne, Greece
Email: dplantzo@cc.uoi.gr
Plantzos
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A poster featuring an ancient Greek statue was widely circulated in Athens in late
March and April 2011 (Figure 1). Posters showing pieces of classical art are not
rare in contemporary Greece: ancient ruins, fragmentary statues or dilapidated
pots have been invariably used to promote anything from food and drink to the
country’s own tourist attractions. This particular poster, however, was a rather special case as it was issued to advertise the ‘Keratea Resistance Festival’, a three-day
Figure 1. Poster of the ‘Keratea Resistance Festival’ (April 2011).
Source: tribe4mian.wordpress.com.
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long series of concerts, theater performances, art exhibitions, ‘workshops’ and
other cultural events organized by local groups in a town of about 7000 inhabitants
in the south-eastern part of the Attic peninsula, approximately 40 km southeast of
the Greek capital city of Athens. Strong protests, often resorting to violence and
sabotage, erupted in the area in December 2010 following the Greek government’s
decision to build a sanitary landfill in Keratea’s vicinity (Athens News Web, 2011).
As local groups were reinforced by sympathizers from the wider region, violent
clashes with riot police ensued, while the Greek government insisted that the construction of the landfill would go ahead as planned. Night after night stones and
fire bottles (‘Molotov cocktails’) were thrown against law enforcement officers,
police cars were damaged and the area’s main thoroughfares were sabotaged in
order to prevent construction workers from accessing the site where the landfill was
to be built. At least once, the family of a local policeman was terrorized by the
‘rebels’ when they threatened to burn his home.
According to the police, by mid-April 2011, ‘approximately 1200 people participated in the clashes in various ways, throwing thousands of fire bottles against the
police’ (Souliotis and Onisenko, 2011). Given that ‘the struggle spirit of the Keratea
citizens [. . .] has no limits’ (as the Anglophone blog keeptalkinggreece, 2011, was
reporting at the time), clashes went on for several months, until the state seemed to
withdraw, perhaps temporarily, seeking to settle the matter in court. Keratea, and
especially the site of Ovriokastro (‘Fortress of the Jew’) where the landfill was to be
situated, was declared by its inhabitants to be in a state of siege, and the withdrawal of
the construction teams and police forces from the area in April 2011 was greeted by
the locals as ‘liberation’ (Sxoliastesxwrissynora, 2011). Playing with the site’s name,
they were able to declare Ovriokastro an aparto kastro (‘unconquerable fortress’). It
was in this context that ‘the largest resistance festival in Greek chronicles’, as the
Keratea festival was dubbed by its organizing committee (Roadartist, 2011), took
place and an ancient Greek statue found its way to the epicenter of modern controversy. As it happens, the statue in question is the so-called ‘kouros of Keratea’, a
statue of a youth made in the mid-sixth century BC, presumably as the funerary
monument of a young man (Figure 2). Its afterlife as the symbol of anti-state resistance in the hands of a small local community in the early twenty-first century AD
provides ample opportunity to study the ways classical heritage is received in a contemporary world where the ‘classical’ is itself in desperate need of reaffirming its
identity. The kouros was by no means a stranger to this controversy when the
poster was circulated: antiquities excavated in the area have long been employed in
the debate over the landfill and, more generally, Keratea’s exceptional standing in
modern Greek culture (Antixyta, 2011a, where the kouros is prominently featured in a
‘15-year-old struggle’ employing ‘books, art, culture’).
The kouros and the nation
The National Archaeological Museum in Athens was built between 1866 and 1889
based on plans designed by German architect Ludwig Lange, later amended by the
Plantzos
Figure 2. The kouros of Keratea (Athens, National Archaeological Museum inv. no. 1904).
Photo: author.
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father of Greek neo-classical architecture, Ernst Ziller (Kaltsas, 2007: 15–23).
Ziller, the Saxon architect whose aesthetic shaped much of bourgeois Greek sensibility towards the antique and the ways it can be revived within modern taste, was
ultimately responsible for the Museum’s monumental façade in the form of a fourpillared porch in full Ionic order and the building’s overall tame neo-classical
outlook (Kardamitsi-Adami, 2006; Kasimati, 2010). The Museum houses an
impressive range of ancient Greek artifacts, as well as archaeological remains of
several prehistoric cultures once active in the Aegean, generally considered as
‘Greek’ – including Cycladic figurines and vessels from the third millennium BC
and the famous Santorini frescoes from the second millennium BC. Through systematic classification, linear display and a somewhat esoteric labeling system the
artifacts in question are presented to the public as tangible evidence of the nation’s
trajectory through the ages and, ultimately, as proof – should any be needed – of
Greece’s privileged position as the owner, keeper and beneficiary of (its) classical
heritage. As Yannis Hamilakis has shown, state archaeology in Greece has been
entrusted, since the early nineteenth century, with the task of ‘rediscovering’ classical heritage so that Greeks may ‘portray themselves to themselves and to others
as the heirs of that heritage’ (Hamilakis, 2007: 76). The neo-classical ideal, created
in the royal courts and upper-middle-class mansions of Europe but happily transplanted in the desolate plains of a fledgling nation state striving to establish itself as
an agent of modernity, suggested that every scrap of ancient Greece, every pot,
statue or ruin reminded the world at large that modern Greece was the land where
it all began, where the very cradle of western civilization in fact lay. Tarnished by
the effects of globalization and the overall de-westernization of world culture,
nowadays the neo-classical aesthetic seems alive – or mechanically resuscitated in
fact – solely in Greece, where it is continuously being redeployed as a reminder of
the country’s existence. More than that, classical antiquity is employed in contemporary Greece as a disciplinary device both at home and abroad, as a forceful
reaction against the disapproving gaze of the West. Following a course already
mapped in the 1930s, and emulating cultural strategies enforced in other European
as well as non-European countries, Greek antiquity has been largely used as a
yardstick for the nation’s cohesion as well as a measure of its simultaneous
desire for and antithesis to the West (Plantzos, 2008). As a result, Greek modernity
appears at once colonialist and colonized, an essentialist identity produced through
the intensive reinvention and systematic appropriation of (its) classical past
(Hamilakis, 2007: 19–21).
One of the National Museum’s less celebrated artifacts is the ‘kouros of
Keratea’: found in 1893, the marble statue is considered to be a reworked or
unfinished specimen of sixth-century BC Athenian sculpture (Kaltsas, 2001: 46).
This, and the fragmentary state of the piece (it is missing its lower legs and arms,
and bears severe breaks along the left thigh and across the face), has kept the statue
in relative obscurity compared to some of its counterparts displayed in the same
museum. A kouros is the statue of a youth, named after the ancient Greek word for
‘boy’. The type appeared in Greek sculpture in the later seventh century BC and
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remained in circulation until the early decades of the fifth. Adopted by all major
sculpture workshops in Greece at the time – from Athens, the Peloponnese and the
Islands to the Greek cities of Asia Minor, including examples from Northern
Greece and Cyprus – the kouros, alongside its female counterpart, the kore
(‘maiden’) – are supposed to stand as symbols of human nature at its highest.
Beautiful, strong and lively, these boys cut in marble or, more rarely, cast in
bronze express the aristocratic ideals of Early Greece, at the time we usually identify as the ‘Archaic period’ (c.700–480 BC).
A beautiful body and a brave soul were the ultimate ideals of the Greek aristocracy of the Archaic period, promoting for itself a genealogy going back to the
heroic model as described by Homer (Murray, 1993: 201–219). The kouroi were
used to diffuse the aristocratic imagery and the ideology it promoted. They were
mostly set up in sanctuaries as votives or in cemeteries (as the specimen from
Keratea most certainly was) as burial monuments. Though not portraits of the
deceased men as such, the burial kouroi were thought to express the essence of their
existence. They were usually accompanied by epitaphs naming the deceased and
referring to the statue in the first person, as if it was it, the statue, addressing the
passers-by (Svenbro, 1993). In a famous example, the surviving epitaph of the
kouros found in Anavyssos, a town a few kilometers south of Keratea, invites
the viewer to ‘stand and weep’ for Kroisos – the tomb’s occupant and the statue’s
subject – whom Ares ‘destroyed as he was fighting in the front line’, protecting his
homeland (Kaltsas, 2001: 58). The kouros of Anavyssos, also exhibited in the
National Museum in Athens, displays some of the basic traits of the type: the
youth’s virility and courage, underlined by his idealized beauty and the fact of
his premature death (suggested on the sculpture by the soldier’s felt cap the boy
is shown wearing; in fact this cap is the only piece of clothing given to him). Well
brought up, virtuous and brave, plus mourned by a family with enough means to
erect these costly monuments, the youths portrayed by the kouroi represented to
the whole of Greece the qualities of their class, displaying them for anyone to see in
the open air of the community’s cemetery.
In the framework of ancient Greek culture, however, the kouros may not be
viewed outside the pederastic ethos that shaped much of Archaic Greece (Dover,
1978; Skinner, 2005: 45–147). While modern scholarship is in great difficulty
explaining a deeply disturbing possibility – that good-looking boys such as
Kroisos may in fact have been sodomized by their elders on the way to their
glorious deaths – some facts seem quite clear. Regardless of whether we side
with the postmodern/deconstructionist view that homosexuality was not an issue
in classical Greece as it is in modernity (Halperin, 1990, following Foucault, 1978)
or with the modern/historicist one that recognizes ‘Greek Love’ as a fact of life in
ancient Greece as in any society (Davidson, 2008), we are nevertheless forced to
admit that Greek statues of naked men – as well as those of splendidly dressed,
bejeweled Greek maidens – are sensual as much as they are ideal (Osborne, 2011:
27–54; Squire, 2011). Whereas the logistics of eternity seem never to have left
the minds of Greek sculptors and their patrons, the technologies of earthly love
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(from courtship to seduction to full-on sexual intercourse) prove to be part of
Greek art as much as anything. Nudity, usually reserved for men but also generally
acceptable for women after the mid-fourth century BC, was employed to attract
attention to the body, its beauty and potential, and this marked the reception of
Greek art by its contemporaries as well as by the creators of western aesthetics
since the Renaissance.
When Johann Joachim Winckelmann cast his homoerotic gaze onto Greek
sculpture – admittedly not the abstract and primitive-looking kouroi but the heavily
idealized second-hand versions of classical sculpture as copied for Roman clientele
in the first centuries AD – it all seemed to be making perfect sense (Potts, 2000:
113–144). Those bodies were able to function both as cultural symbols and objects
of desire, and this was, according to Winckelmann’s strongly Romantic views, the
essence of Greek art, as well as the secret of its success. Pederastic imagery was thus
gradually admitted into the mainstream; after all, western culture was where
women were also allowed to cast their own erotic gazes towards their own objects
of desire. Somehow, however, the kouroi have never managed to escape their
homosexual connotations as we are reminded by a GayMap of Athens, Mykonos
and Thessaloniki published in 2011: featuring the kouros of Anavyssos on the cover,
it allows its user to interchange the image of the statue with one of a present-day
underwear model lurking behind it (Figure 3).
In mainstream Greek culture, classical statuary functions, needless to say, as
guarantor of the nation’s longevity and reminder of Greece’s exceptional outlook:
a procession of ‘Kroisos-lookalikes’ greeted an unsuspecting international audience during the opening ceremony of the Athens 2004 Olympic Games, raising
more than a few eyebrows at such unabashed display of full frontal nudity
(Figure 4). In true Winckelmann-esque fashion, the parade equated (classical)
Greek art with the totality of Greek culture – classical as well as prehistoric,
post-antique or contemporary even – restating the by then well-rehearsed arguments of historical continuity and aesthetic affinity with the nation’s classical
heritage (Plantzos, 2008: 11–14). Such visual or verbal rhetoric is the expression
of a centrally designed and deployed elite nationalism subordinating all other
regions and all other ideas to the needs and ideas of the capital: as it was
Athenian rather than Greek art that took precedent in the 2004 Olympic pageant,
so it is the Acropolis that stands for all things Greek on the cover of the GayMap
2011 as in so many other publications (Yalouri, 2001: 77–100), and it is the
metropolitan, ‘national’ museum in Athens where the kouroi from Anavyssos
and Keratea (as well as so many antiquities from Mycenae, Santorini and the
rest of Greece) are kept in order to compose a coherent, authoritative and selfassured nationalist narrative. Homosexuality and pederasty are of course
nowhere to be found in modern state discourse. Ancient Greeks have been
severely down-sexed in this aspect: no initiation bonds, no ‘Army of Lovers’,
no male-to-male prostitution (it is no wonder then that James Davidson finds
that only in modern Greece some seem to believe that ‘Greek men just held
hands’; 2008: 122).
Plantzos
Figure 3. Gay Map 2011 featuring the kouros of Anavyssos next to the Parthenon
(May 2011).
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Figure 4. Greek athletes posing as kouroi at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in
Athens (August 2004). Source: Athens 2004 – Michalis Toubis S.A.
To this quasi-colonization of images as well as ideas by the national state,
the inhabitants of Keratea react by attempting a colonization of their own. A
systematic attempt to re-appropriate their native kouros is in process, expressed
through the poster mentioned earlier (Figure 1) and other means to be discussed
in the following sections of this article. This attempt at redefining a local cultural
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identity – as opposed to a national one – as well as renegotiating the relationship
between people, things, and the state is symptomatic of a deep cultural crisis
in Greek society, one that the recent economic crisis has brought out in the
open: as social cohesion is crumbling under the pressure of economic collapse
and the inability of hitherto powerful ideologies to safeguard national unity,
state archaeology (centrally controlled notions regarding the nation’s history
and its remains) is replaced by local archaeologies, counter-discourses that question
the validity of the old narratives and threaten their very core. As a discourse controlled by the national state, archaeology is deployed as a purely pedagogical
device using the distant past in order to inform, instruct and discipline the present.
As Homi Bhabha has observed, this creates a tension of temporal rather
than historical nature within what he calls ‘the locality of culture’ (1994:
199–244). The narrative address of the nation is thus threatened by a performative
representation of the cultural and the social, a counter-narrative that challenges the
nation’s monolithic qualities. This makes the nation appear as a split image
of itself:
. . . a form of living that is more complex than ‘community’; more symbolic than
‘society’; [. . .] more hybrid in the articulation of cultural differences
and identifications – gender, race or class – than can be represented in any hierarchical
or binary restructuring of social antagonism. (1994: 200–201)
It might be worth our while to investigate how the kouros of Keratea could allow us to
chart this tension between the pedagogical and the performative within Greek society.
Greece between the local and the global
The establishment of Greece as a ‘model kingdom’ in the 1830s, a modern nation
state of highly idealistic conception albeit endowed with a rather grim predicament,
unleashed a considerable amount of political capital. Its management was negotiated between the Bavarian aristocracy, transplanted in Greece on the appointment
of King Otto as the country’s first monarch, on the one hand and the Greek elites
on the other, themselves newly arrived from other parts of Europe or the Ottoman
Empire itself, where they had cultivated a national identity inspired by their own
versions of the Enlightenment, mixed with generous servings of German
Romanticism (Herzfeld, 1986; Skopetea, 1988). As soon as the new state was inaugurated, however, it became abundantly clear to anyone involved that it could not
possibly fulfill its ostensibly Philhellenic, deeply Orientalist and – quite frankly –
utopian destiny. Greece’s inability to espouse modernity (mostly because it could
not truly measure up to the standards set by the phantasm of classical Hellas to
which the modern state owed its existence) exasperated its former supporters who
were now feeling that the country’s modernity was destined to remain ‘incomplete’
(Gourgouris, 1996: 122–154). Accusations of incomplete or inadequate modernity
are not of course uncommon in colonialist rhetoric deployed against insubordinate
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natives refusing to be modernized – be they Greek, Indian, Egyptian or Brazilian
(Buell, 1994: 325–343). Throughout the twentieth century, national peripheral cultures retaliated through the promotion of their exceptional value, usually rooted on
a largely invented historical past and an impressive array of cultural remains. These
disciplinary measures were taken simultaneously abroad and at home where the
local intellectuals were invariably faced with an amorphous mass of backward,
uneducated, deplorably cultureless and thoroughly un-modern peasantry forming
the population of which they were posing as leaders. Ironically enough, it was the
culture of this backward peasantry that these self-appointed intelligentsias were
using – suitably edited for general consumption, of course – in order to prove their
country’s (and their own) international significance and forge a mutually exclusive
national identity (Herzfeld, 1987: 1–27).
As Frederick Buell has shown in his discussion of India, Japan and other cultures in the periphery of western modernity, such essentializing strategies deployed
on behalf of a specific country’s intellectuals are meant to promote cultural continuity as a weapon against their nation’s foes and at the same time pose it as a
question central to their people’s existence. In Greece these efforts were largely
systematized by the so-called 1930s generation, whose initiative managed to create
new ways of thinking ‘Greekness’ within the framework of ‘modernity’ and the
‘West’ (Leontis, 1995; Tziovas, 1989, 2011). Combining the national with the
modern in a new aesthetic form that would be acceptable both at home and
abroad was the task undertaken by the intellectuals of the 1930s generation at
the same time when similar movements were developing elsewhere (Colla, 2007:
234–272; Mitter, 2007). In most of those cases the national self is composed by a
fusion of natural environment with the sense of a long and significant historical
past. In the case of Greece (though also in those of Egypt or Italy, for example),
antiquities were enlisted to supply the visual links to the nation’s past since they
formed part of the natural landscape the nation could be seen to inhabit (Plantzos,
2008: 20–26). Archaeological artifacts, in particular, like the kouroi from
Anavyssos and Keratea or the numerous bronzes discovered in the depths of the
Aegean Sea (Kaltsas, 2007: 276–279), were thought to verify the nation’s ties both
to its land and its history as they were gradually being unburied from the very soil
such grossly romanticized rhetoric was praising.
In Greece, this kind of concern with the territoriality of the nation, what
Thongchai Winichakul has called with reference to nineteenth-century Siam a
nation’s ‘Geo-Body’ (Thongchai, 1994: esp. 16–19,164–174), has now become commonplace. Long before the emotive response to the land displayed ad nauseam by
the members of the 1930s generation and other intellectuals and artists since their
time, the invention of Greek national space as a ‘natural entity’ to which Greeks
belong emotionally and spiritually (Sack, 1986) had led to the creation of a monumental national landscape reinforcing the state’s cohesion and representing its
political substance, let alone its historical destiny (Peckham, 2001: 21–37).
The rediscovery of Hellas by the West, albeit on the soil now inhabited by
contemporary Greeks, was part of a project on self-awareness, as well as an act
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of ‘cultural forgetting’, whereby affiliation led to appropriation and exclusion of
the ‘natives’ who thus found they had been given a cultural ideal only to be robbed
of it (Goldhill, 2011: 9–17; Marchand, 1996). If modern Greece was the result of
the colonization of classical antiquity by western European Philhellenism, its survival came quickly to depend on the counter-colonization of ‘its’ heritage against
those competing for its ownership (of course this enterprise was always advertised
as mere ‘de-colonization’, history’s liberation from the overbearing control of
the West, with the debate over the ‘repatriation’ of the Elgin marbles being the
most famous example: see Hamilakis, 2007: 243–286). To this end, Greece undertakes its own archaeology as a means of surviving in a rapidly changing world
system and – ultimately – claiming new kinds of centrality in it. Archaeology is in
charge of the production of ancient cultural remains and modern landscapes as
cultural topoi, sites of national convergence and (often enough as we shall see in the
next section) conflict. These are promoted as the nation’s eternal contribution to
world civilization as well as the country’s temporal attractions that render it unique
world wide. In other words, the Greeks have realized that in order to decolonize
(their) classical heritage they need to colonize it anew. As a national project,
archaeology in Greece therefore acquires an emancipatory role. And, as several
theoreticians writing on nationalism in the 1990s pointed out, the nation becomes
sovereign precisely at the moment when its modernity is ‘imagined’ or ‘invented’ on
the basis of its antiquity, and its sovereignty stands even when the state is under
the political, economic, or cultural control of a distant metropolis (Chatterjee,
1993: 3–13, on Anderson, 1991).
Even though self-generated cultural stereotypes tend to backfire from time to
time (how many modern Greeks do we know who can actually pass as kouroi?),
they still form a great part of a country’s identity: admittedly, it is difficult to think
of Greece without its Parthenon, its sun and its sea – and this might not be a bad
thing altogether. In a famously irreverent paper published in 2002, Michael
Herzfeld – inspired, to a certain extent, by Thongchai’s exploration of Thai nationhood through the geographical discourses that shaped Siam – described Greece
(which he compared to countries such as Thailand, Japan or Mexico) as a ‘cryptocolony’, a ‘buffer zone between the colonized lands and those as yet untamed’
(Herzfeld, 2002: 900). ‘Crypto-colonies’ are only nominally independent: although
they were never colonized in the strict historical sense, they appear to be constantly
feeling the need to revolt against the political, economic and cultural supremacy of
the West. Itself a product of neo-classicism, Greece feels that ‘its’ heritage must be
reclaimed. The ideological strategies deployed by Greek intellectuals such as those
of the 1930s generation and their followers to the present day, as well as the standard political rhetoric of the state, are meant to underline the cultural debt owed to
Greece by the West, thus balancing the country’s real or perceived shortcomings.
As the world economic crisis of 2008 seemed to loom over Greece, eventually
leading to a combined EU-IMF intervention in early 2010, the country’s international standing, as well as social peace within its borders, faced significant challenges. Greece’s neo-classical dream was heavily criticized – indeed, ridiculed – by
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friends and foes alike who became more and more aggravated with the unreliable
debtor in their midst, as if the centuries-old tyranny of classical heritage (all those
names and dates, not to mention the teaching of dead languages successive generations of schoolchildren worldwide had to endure) finally ended in a cloud of
smoke. (Admittedly, the nastiest offence was instigated by the German magazine
Focus in early 2010 when it published on its cover a digitally manipulated image of
Venus de Milo showing the middle finger under the overhead ‘Deceivers in the
European Family’; GR Reporter, 2010.) To the onslaught of criticism, the Greek
authorities and the country’s intellectuals retaliated (mostly) with pompous archaeophile rhetoric and further reminding of the classical past, as with the opening and
promotion of the new museum for the Acropolis (Plantzos, 2011). As Europe’s
former colonial powers are increasingly called in to supervise Greece’s attempts to
modernize its economy (in what to some may seem a futile battle against a staggering public deficit and the inevitable predicament of a debt service default), many
Greeks – encouraged by the heavy-going rhetoric of some of the country’s most
high-profiled intellectuals – seem to realize that their country’s nominal independence is in fact contingent on the political instruction and financial support of the
very foreigners they are brought up to despise. ‘Nous devenons une colonie de
Bruxelles’, said Greek psychiatrist Dimitris Ploumidis to French daily Le Monde
in October 2011 (Le Monde, 2011).
While the Greek state was fighting not to lose any more credibility abroad, it
was beginning to face strong resistance from interested parties at home, resenting
most of the economic and administrative reforms the country’s (‘colonialist’) debtors were suggesting – or ‘demanding’, depending on who your source is. Workers’
unions, various minorities or entire regions raised their voice, often their hands as
well, against the state they accused of ‘unpatriotic behavior’ or even ‘treason’ (see
the essays in Papailias, 2011). In the case of Keratea the revolt involved reclaiming
the local archaeological heritage as if its people realized that emphasis on continuity between ancient and modern Greece is essential if only in order to remind the
world that the country is still inhabited (Herzfeld, 2002: 919).
Inhabited by whom? A significant facet in the Keratea conflict is the way the
local population puts forward its ethnic disassociation from the Greek national
body. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the inhabitants of
the Messogeia (‘inland’) area in Attica, where Keratea is situated, identified themselves as Arvanites, a population group originating from Albanian settlers who
moved towards the southern parts of Greece (Boeotia, Attica, Peloponnese and
the Islands) at different times between the thirteenth and the sixteenth century AD
(Jochalas, 1971). Their chief distinguishing feature is their language, Arvanitika, an
Albanian dialect. In the course of the twentieth century, Arvanites underwent a
process of assimilation and for several decades have been identifying themselves as
Greeks. This assimilation was part of the long process of Hellenization of modern
Greece as a nation state in the late nineteenth and throughout the twentieth century, during which ‘Hellenic’ cultural characteristics were retrospectively imposed
on the local populations regardless of their individual traditions, while at the same
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time certain appealing traits of local culture (such as particular types of dress, food
or architecture) were usurped by the metropolitan elites seeking to embellish their
recent past (see Bintliff, 2003; Gefou-Madianou, 1999). Though dormant, some of
these cultural features, such as the Arvanitika language and the collective memory
of non-Greek dissent, can be reactivated whenever the community feels threatened.
As Dimitra Gefou-Madianou has argued, the Mesogitic communities have been
grossly marginalized by the Athenian elites; this has led them, however, to articulate a quite aggressive counter-discourse, in an attempt to claim back their own
traditions, thus asserting their cultural superiority against Athens (1999: 428–429).
Such counter-discourses are evident in the rhetoric surrounding the Keratea
conflict, which seeks to attribute the bellicose nature of its inhabitants to their
ethnic differentiation, thus justifying their cries for ‘liberation’ against the oppressive state: in a short audio clip widely circulated in February 2011 through
YouTube and other social media, an eight-year-old girl identifying herself as
Irene (a common Greek name meaning ‘Peace’) is heard saying, in Greek,
. . . my name is Irene but down here we are having war. [. . .] I am not afraid [i.e. of the
riot police] because I am an Arvanitissa. The Arvanites are not afraid, they will never
be afraid, and they were never afraid in the past. [. . .] I’m here because I want to
participate in the fight. (Forkeratea, 2011)
Forging a local identity thus becomes a risky business (Irene describes at length
riot police firing stun grenades outside her home), a thrilling adventure involving
healthy portions of a suitable past, duly symbolized by carefully selected iconic
artifacts: an electronic ‘Christmas card’ issued by the blog Antixyta (‘anti-landfill’)
in December 2010, thus a few months before the poster discussed in the beginning
of this article, features the Keratea kouros in anti-gas gear and Santa Claus cap
(Figure 5). The inscription ‘Merry X.MAT.s’ alludes to Greek riot police (known
as ‘MAT’ after its initials) and the mask to their alleged abuse of tear gas against
activists. Although no fire bottles are in sight, we may assume that the kouros is
conscripted in the fight against the (alien) central state, ready to fight for his place
of birth, and at the same time mocking the state’s arsenal – he is well prepared and,
like Irene, ‘not afraid’! A few months later, following an outburst of violent clashes
between activists and the police in Athens’ central Syndagma Square on 28–29
June, one of the square’s statues, a bronze wrestler in classicizing style erected in
1884, was found ‘disguised’ like an activist: the boy, originally naked in true Greek
fashion, was now given a cyclist’s helmet, a red-scarf (presumably to protect him
from tear gas), and a fire bottle (Figure 6).
As Thongchai has shown, symbols employed in cultural wars over identity are
endowed with the inherent potential for multiple signification (1994: 170–171). It is
often the case, and Greece is certainly not an exception here, that specific symbolic
elements can be claimed by different groups which proceed to invest them with
novel (or revived) meanings and significations. Eastern Attica is a case in point,
where local retsina wine, once a symbol of un-Hellenic backwardness, has been
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Journal of Social Archaeology 12(2)
Figure 5. ‘Merry X.MAT.s’. An electronic Christmas card issued by the Antixyta blog
in December 2010. Source: antixyta.blogspot.com.
subsequently elevated into a vital element of Greekness (Gefou-Madianou, 1999).
Food, in general, has been found to have been essential in the production of
national or ethnic identities in the margins of the hegemonic discourse in Greece,
catering for the ethnically different or the marginalized, within a wider framework
of multiculturalism and globalization (e.g. Yiakoumaki, 2006). This is where indigenous archaeologies, created by local communities in response to particular needs
or contingencies and in conflict with the centrality of the official archaeological
Plantzos
235
Figure 6. Athens, Syndagma Square. A neo-classical statue of a youth disguised as an activist
in June 2011. Photo: poliplane.
discourse, find their application. Though appropriated by Hellenism, and the
modern state’s neo-classical aspirations, the Keratea kouros is reclaimed with a
vengeance. Its emergence from the soil of Keratea makes the statue part of the
local culture, even though the latter is the proud offspring of later settlers! In this
constant dialectic of re- and de-appropriation, individual features of the ancient
artifact are singled out in order to be highlighted or, in contrast, silenced. The boy,
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Journal of Social Archaeology 12(2)
on whose grave the kouros once stood, died (one wants to presume) a glorious
death fighting for his home territory, so he is a convenient champion of the presentday inhabitants fighting for the integrity of the very same soil. So far so good. On
the other hand, the boy must have been an aristocrat and he was certainly of no
Albanian extraction, so these features are edited out. Moreover, he was quite possibly engaging in pederasty but one had better leave sleeping dogs lie. What this
exercise seems to show is that the epicenter of the symbolism at work here is the
recently discovered artifact, not its cultural history before its burial: the ancient
owner of the kouros, the man who made ‘him’, those who paid for the statue and
those who gazed at it then, do not come into the modern equation. Meaning seems
to be generated by present retellings of the artifact’s story (not by the rewriting of
its history many of us deplore). And the agency this meaning is imbued with lies
with the statue itself, unearthed – in fact reborn – in the not-so-distant past as if in
order to confirm the rights of the area’s present inhabitants to their land (and to an
exceptional cultural identity).
This blatant display of non-linearity on behalf of a local community, such as
Keratea, building its own cultural tradition based on the availability of stock myths
and icons, might seem as mere opportunism to an academic trained to assess cultural phenomena based on measurable quantities and facts that may reasonably be
established. As the poster in Figure 5 shows, however, the idea of playful mockery
of the very icons one venerates is not entirely strange to those who ‘fight for
Keratea’. Nor is the inherent irony of the whole exercise altogether missed by
the modern users of the kouros, or of the boy in Figure 6. Random as it may
seem, the mixing of ancient and modern stereotypes on masculinity as a synonym
for fighting spirit with a relaxed parodying of these same stereotypes may prove
extremely subversive. Self-parody works for its instigators, and the joke is invariably on ‘the other guy’, in this case the central state whose national image depends
on the integrity of the neo-classical premise on which this image rests (and which
the state, through its official representatives, takes rather too seriously). By allowing himself to appear in combat gear, the Keratea kouros clearly states his affiliations and sympathies, turning against the central state and its official archaeologies
holding him hostage in the metropolitan National Museum in Athens, alongside
his ‘brothers’, the other kouroi from the Mesogitic plain. Historical awareness, as
well as the performance of history, has been a task increasingly offered or claimed
by the mass public throughout the twentieth century, thus seizing history and
archaeology from the hands of the academy and its hitherto privileged representatives. This has led to novel, albeit academically ‘unsound’, modes through which
to express one’s relationship to temporality and history, mostly through difference
and irony. All images discussed in this article are the products of a certain ‘double
vision’; they carry an inherent ambivalence towards the past, and – as Stephen
Bann has shown – ought to be viewed as exhibits in what he termed the ‘Ironic
Museum’ (1995).
It seems, therefore, that crypto-colonial discourses are constantly reinvented and
redeployed, not only by Greece’s hegemonic intellectuals against the cultural and
Plantzos
237
political superiority of the West, but also by local communities imagining the state
to which they belong as an evil stepmother. The ways that crypto-colonial and
nationalist discourses are deployed even within the national state, so that ethnic or
cultural minorities may be provided with the means necessary in order to satisfy
their particularist needs, are the topic of the last section in this article.
National vs cultural landscapes
On 22 March 2011, students from the School of Fine Arts in Athens joined
the protests against the landfill by creating a replica of the Keratea kouros out
of recycled refuse which they displayed at the square in front of the National
Archaeological Museum where the original statue is kept (Antixyta, 2011b).
According to their statements to the Greek press, by using plastic and other
ephemeral and humble materials collected from the garbage, the young students wished to convey to the public their own understanding of the way the
central state treats Greece’s ancient culture: like a ‘heap of garbage’
(Eleftherotypia, 2011). Arguing that society develops through ‘culture’ and
not through ‘state bureaucracy’, the activists managed to hit their enemy
where it hurts. Claiming that the area of Ovriokastro is an archaeological
site, and connecting the kouros with it – though its actual findspot is unrelated
– the activists made the most of the potential carried by cultural imagery. For
a loss to be articulated, mourned, and ultimately avenged, a territorial entity
has to be invented, a cultural identity forged, and a continuous historical past,
preferably one associated with a particularly meaningful natural and cultural
setting, has to be constructed in retrospect. The kouros is thus constructed as
an emblem of local exceptionalism: even though the statue is not the sole
artifact ever discovered in the area, not even the only kouros or the most
important one for that matter, it features exclusively on material released by
the activists. Needless to say, the students’ protest was widely covered by blogs
championing the anti-landfill cause. By reiterating the all too familiar by now
romanticized notions of a people’s ties with ‘its’ soil, the people of Keratea
managed to inverse the process of a land’s nationalization, in a way constructing the central state as a colonial power threatening the political and cultural
freedom of a people over whom it has no legitimate authority.
Keratea is thus reinvented as a cultural landscape, where the community’s
‘authentic’ culture is kept alive. Cultural landscapes, be they natural or manmade monuments, archaeological sites, places of real or imaginary historical significance, are launched as loci of collective memory. Antiquity is exploited by
communities as part of their cultural capital, in order to tackle challenges on
many levels – regional, national, and global (Fortunati and Lamberti, 2010).
Institutional archaeology, though by definition in charge of such historical and
spatial production, is questioned in Keratea as a colonial agent: by displaying
the recycled kouros outside the National Museum, the activists challenge the
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state’s hold over local pasts. This way, sites, monuments and their interpretations
enter the collective imaginary only to be renegotiated and reshaped.
The empowerment of the local Geo-Body through intensive appropriation of the
soil it inhabits and the relics it has come to possess strengthens the sense of
common identity (national, local, communal, or other) and renders its fetishism
irresistible (Anderson, 1991: 131–132; Thongchai, 1994: 131).
Even though the integrity of the landscape (historical and natural) seems to
have been turned into a site of conflict between the central state and several local
communities in Greece, such as Keratea, the latter appear to have abused the
land they occupy as much as the state is alleged to be intending to do. Eastern
Attica, where Keratea is situated, emerges as the champion in what in Greek is
called authaireti domisi; that is, building without state permission (a permit issued
by the state is ostensibly required for any kind of building work in the country).
In Keratea, in particular, it would appear that unauthorized building is the norm
rather than the exception, with an estimated 22,000 buildings out of a total of
27,000 currently existing in the area (that is a staggering 80% overall) lacking the
necessary legal authorization (and of course exempted from state and municipal
taxes, local rates or any kind of contribution to an otherwise much promoted
communal life; see Forkeratea, 2009). Rather than being treated as a source of
collective shame or a problem that needs to be addressed according to state law
and common sense, illegal building has acquired in recent years, especially in
communities such as Keratea where it appears most widespread, the status of
yet another form of anti-state protest (and yet another demonstration of ethnic
diversity, a sort of ‘Arvanites vs Hellenic Greeks’ discourse over land use). Illegal
building is often featured in the strong rhetoric of dissidence widely employed by
local communities against a central state they perceive as alien and illegitimate.
Voiced as expressions of an often violent anti-state, anti-western and ultimately
anti-modern anger, such rhetoric threatens the neo-classical foundations of
modern Greece and at the same time, quite ironically, confirms those suspecting
both the state and its subjects of an ‘incomplete’ commitment to modernity and
its goals. Although such outbursts of disobedience (refusal to pay motorway tolls
and metro fares, vandalizing state monuments and sabotaging public infrastructure; see Dalakoglou in Papailias, 2011) have in Greece as well as elsewhere been
dismissed as emotive, irrational and alarmingly apolitical responses to the current
‘state of things’ that are unsuitable to a modern society’s needs and aspirations, it
could be argued that it is through such expressions of public angst that new
political subjects arise, as well as their modes of representation (Gavriilidis,
2009; see also Gallant, 1995; Gourgouris, 2011). Despite the danger of succumbing to the inherent Romanticism of these projects, we must admit their efficiency
in communication, especially with modern technologies such as mobile phones
and the internet, and their ability to appropriate, rehabilitate and relaunch imageries devised previously and for different causes. As the examples discussed here
show, these strategies are proving instrumental for the construction of cultural
and political identities in the margins of modernity.
Plantzos
239
From national art to cultural displacement
The new subjects emerging from the cracks of the nation state, be they localist GeoBodies and communities defined by ethnic background such as that activated in
Keratea or collectives identified by gender or sexuality, have devised novel ways of
appropriating ‘national’ art, ways that would appear suitable to their social marginality. National art is by definition used as a pedagogical device, aiming to produce and discipline the national subject. Classical art in Greece, as well as other
forms of traditional art such as Byzantine or folk art, has been liberally employed
in the formation of a modern Greek identity that was thought suitable to the
nation’s needs. As a disciplinary tool, the classical aesthetic – the advocated
supremacy of the classical in all expressions of modern life – has systematically
been deployed as a top-down intervention against those ideological discourses
threatening (or seemingly so) the integrity of the national ideological framework
by advantaging unevenness and difference within the national body (rather than a
much advertised hegemonic normality). Even though these new, peripheral appropriations of classical art (the Keratea kouros on ‘resistance’ posters, the Anavyssos
kouros on gay pamphlets) employ pretty much the same old techniques of cultural
appropriation (namely promoting the image and presuming the ideas it is supposed
to convey), they realize a significant change in the standard discourse on classical
culture, perhaps one imperceptible to its very instigators. In the words of Homi
Bhabha again, such appropriation of hegemonic culture by the social margins
. . . forces us to confront the concept of culture outside objets d’art or beyond the
canonization of the ‘idea’ of aesthetics, to engage with culture as an uneven, incomplete production of meaning and value [. . .] produced in the act of social survival.
(1994: 246–247)
When deployed by the state, the kouros of Keratea conveys a sense of national
antiquity, continuity and cohesion, a sense of self-proven importance at once
advertised abroad and at home. As seen above (Figure 4), the kouros has been
effectively used as a simulacrum of national prowess, as a logo promoting state
patrimony (Anderson, 1991: 182). In the hands of the Keratea ‘rebels’ or the Greek
gay community, on the other hand, the kouroi are still used as logos, employed as
they are in thoroughly unimaginative ways, monotonously repeating nationalist
uses of imagery since the nineteenth century. Yet, these ‘new’ images manage to
convey a sense of irreverence and uneasiness, coming across as uncomfortable or
disturbing – and taking culture to the streets (as the Christmas card in Figure 5
has done).
Whereas in Keratea the activist discourse places an emphasis on the kouros’s
masculine qualities – he is now as able to fight and overwhelm his opponent as he
was then, even if he has to fight to the death – GayMap 2011 chooses a different
course: that virility is still an issue goes without saying, though in the Map the idea
of getting in touch with Greece’s historical self acquires a wholly different meaning.
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Journal of Social Archaeology 12(2)
Mapping the nation, we are told, has been essential in its making (or ‘imagining’) as
a historical agent, so we are entitled to think that GayMap maps Greece as a queer
nation instead, still awesomely ancient and solidly historical, though able to afford
modern glories as well, if only one ventures to explore the back alleys of downtown
Athens or Mykonos. A modern collective identity is thus confirmed through the
imagining of a collective past. Archaeology is declassicalized, and history is performed rather than recited in an attempt to articulate a solid, emphatically assertive
sexual subjectivity (Bravmann, 1997: 97–121). More to the point, the ironic treatment of the iconic kouros on the Map’s cover seems to claim, quite convincingly,
and in a thoroughly unmodern way, that if some mainstream images employing
antiquity in order to advertise national continuity seem to us somewhat queer
(Figure 4), that is because they are.
What the Keratea and GayMap images have in common, besides their use of the
same type of archaeological artifact, is a subversive determination to re-enact culture as a weapon against the forces of normalization employed by metropolitan
authority. In that sense, they share a visible element of queerness: they both adopt
a performative, highly ironic and devastatingly playful approach to classical culture, a culture that is by now thoroughly sanctified by both the nationalist rhetoric
within Greece and the neo-classical aesthetic patented in the West. Even though
this kind of appropriation might be easily dismissed as unwarranted trivialization
of classical imagery, it ought to be assessed as an attempt to organize a new technology of cultural identity. Through their recolonized images, the kouroi are rendered into ‘entangled objects’ (Thomas, 1991), artifacts actively recontextualized,
re-authored even, used to articulate new cultural significations dedicated to a frustrated attempt at quasi-nationalist emancipation. With their meaning of national
excellence assumed to be manifest to all, the kouroi as displayed at the National
Museum in Athens or the posters in Keratea (not to mention the GayMap cover)
draw upon different genealogies of representation in order to achieve different,
indeed opposite goals. More than confirming James Clifford’s old suspicion that,
perhaps, ‘we should attempt to think of cultures not as organically unified or
traditionally continuous but rather as negotiated, present processes’ (1988: 273),
these discursive formations, articulated as ‘minority reports’ at once separate and
separatist, can be seen to deal a fatal blow to the central state’s assimilationist
rhetoric of neo-classical normativity.
Whereas state archaeology in Greece has to prove the historicity of the classical
past in order to substantiate the ‘Western-ness’ of the Greek present, the minority
histories recounted by the kouroi as analyzed in this article lead to the construction
of a different, emancipatory version of the same past, one we could call ‘subaltern’
(Chakrabarty, 2008: 97–113). Subaltern pasts are performative reconstructions of
narratives hitherto accepted as ‘major’, hegemonic, by socially or culturally marginal groups. Hijacked away from the dominant institutions that once deployed
them as agents of normalization, these reconstructed narratives are used to destroy
the very sense of cultural inertia they were so instrumental in creating. Culture,
rather than being a safe haven of national convergence, is turned once again into a
Plantzos
241
site of conflict and national art becomes a key weapon in anti-state nationalism. If
the nation state is – as many fear and some might even wish – finally reaching its
historical termination, this ought not to be attributed to the evil forces of globalization, as standard nationalistic rhetoric would have it, but to the replication of
nationalism’s irresistible strategies of cultural appropriation by its former subjects,
wishing to counter-colonize their vital space within the national geographical or
cultural territory. Quite unthinkably, the kouroi shed the dust of neo-classical
admiration clouding their primitive appeal and emerge as enunciators of cultural
identities in the making. More than cultural symbols, these newly authored bodies
seem desirable once again. And Winckelmann is, presumably, smiling in his grave.
Acknowledgements
Michael Herzfeld and Dimitris Papanikolaou discussed with me different aspects of this
topic while my work was in progress. Angeliki Koufou made a number of useful suggestions,
and Panos Tsaligopoulos read an earlier version of this article. Finally, three anonymous
reviewers offered invaluable comments on previous drafts. I am grateful to them all, as well
as to the JSA editor, for their help.
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Author Biography
Dimitris Plantzos is Assistant Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University
of Ioannina and co-director of the Argos Orestikon Excavation Project in the
Prefecture of Kastoria, Greece (http://www.argosorestikonproject.org/). He has
published on Greek art, the development of classical archaeology in the twentieth
century, and on modern receptions of classical heritage. His current research examines official and unofficial archaeologies in contemporary Greece and the ways
these are deployed as emancipatory devices at home and abroad.