Abstract
Christina Koulouri’s Historical Memory in Greece, 1821–1930: Performing the Past in the Present provides innovative interpretive tools for understanding the cultural memory of the nineteenth century, the first century of the Greek nation-state. This was a catalytic period for contemporary national identity and memory in which the canon of cultural memory that continues to define Greek national identity was formed. The period examined begins with the modern Greek state’s 1821 birth and ends with the 1930 centennial celebration of Greek independence.
The book seeks to contribute a broad understanding of the dynamics of the transnational study of the past—specifically, nineteenth-century cultural memory—by exploring historical consciousness through visual historical culture in Greece and Western Europe. It aims to comprehend the transnational European dimension of the cultural phenomena of commemorating and representing the past. Koulouri investigates how the past was represented, staged, performed, and mainly consumed in Greece’s public sphere in comparison with Western European models, primarily the French, German, and English versions.
In the introduction, the author outlines the book’s major questions: How did Greek society commemorate its recent past—the Greek Revolution and the “war decade” (1912–1922)—and its distant past (antiquity and Byzantium)? How was cultural memory linked to military experiences (victory/defeat, mass death and mourning, heroes and martyrs)? How did interpreting and giving meaning to the past become an object of negotiation and conflict among local and social groups?
Koulouri draws her theory from memory studies and interdisciplinary studies of nationalism and national identity. Building on Jan Assmann’s work on cultural memory, which “deliberately places emphasis on the link between memory and identity” (p. 4), the book explores cultural practices, visual representations, and performances of the past in the public domain through a wide array of commemoration practices. As Koulouri states, studying the cultural memory of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries requires a complex analytical frame, especially since ethnographic and oral history methods are not applicable to this period (p. xi), and new “layers” of historical memory were added continuously (p. 6). Thus, in line with Raphael Samuel’s theoretical approach, the author maintains that “the irrational, emotional perception of the past through images is much stronger than the rational understanding of it through sources” (p. xi, 7).
The work’s most original aspect is that, following Abby Warburg’s method, it employs a wide range of publicly visible yet non-textual visual and performative sources: oil paintings, lithographs, photographs, monuments, commemorations and national holidays, historical pageantry, tableaux vivants, revivals of ancient dramas and customs, parades, and popular commercial spectacles, such as shadow theater. The author’s source selection reflects the perception of cultural memory as a field bounded by the sentimental, irrational reception of mythological narratives told through images, which function as historical agents that actively shape perceptions of historicity and temporality.
The book consists of nine chapters that expand on the subject both chronologically and thematically. The first and second chapters focus on images and sculptures from 1821 through 1930, emphasizing the nineteenth century, when political clashes, social changes, and cultural exchanges shaped a visual canon of the Greek Revolution’s cultural memory. This visual canon was composed of the familiar “philhellenic gaze”; dynasty politics; local Greek rivalries that had erupted during the revolution; relations between the Crown and political parties and the opposition’s efforts against them; conflicts between social and local elites; and internal power relations within the Greek kingdom (p. 39). Koulouri perceives an early form of memory politics that served to preserve the then-nascent nation-state’s cohesion at the time and validate its core hierarchy and power relations. In the collective memory, the Greek War of Independence had a dominant glorious side but also a traumatic aspect associated with the civil wars. However, “pre-memories” or “cultural templates,” such as the schemata derived from the French Revolution, folktales from the Fall of Constantinople, the seventeenth-century Turko-Venetian wars, Western allegories of the ancient Persian Wars, and the cultural motif of the conflict between Christianity and Islam during antiquity, as well as Western aesthetic canons, offered a fundamental reference point for how both Western Europeans and Greek revolutionaries perceived the Greek Revolution (p. 27, 45). Koulouri’s work is also highly original in its understanding of how the lower social classes “remembered” the Revolution of 1821 through popular lithographs and folk paintings.
The second chapter uses monuments to discuss how the Greek state developed and implemented memory policies. Until the 1860s, monuments in Greece were rare for a number of reasons: financial constraints; a sense of the Revolution’s pending completion; and ancient statues’ imposing material presence. Because of the state’s marginal role, public and private institutions took the initiative to compose a canon of heroic figures, which was standardized in the 1880s. Koulouri shows that this canon’s creation was the battlefield where rival groups tried to hegemonize their own versions of the past: autochthonous and heterochthonous Greeks or Moreots (from the Peloponnese) and Rumeliots (from southern mainland Greece). The author offers the extremely interesting insight that the official memory of the revolution, a field of political negotiation among various social groups, determined who was considered a Greek citizen, thereby linking memory and identity in a purely practical way (p. 78).
Similarly, in the third chapter, Koulouri explores historical popular culture through panoramic paintings, which contributed to democratizing access to history and made the spectators feel like an “eyewitness to the past” (p. 124). Panoramas were intended to bolster patriotism through the depiction of battle subjects and achieved great success in Europe, particularly those portraying subjects from the Greek Revolution and especially the Naval Battle of Navarino, due to its political dimensions, concurrent memory as European civilization’s victory over Islam, and major relevance in the news. In contrast, in Greece, only smaller portable panoramas succeeded because of the lack of urbanization, artists, businessmen, and the prior existence of other popular spectacles, such as Karagiozis shadow theater. These portable panoramas contributed to shaping the cultural memory of Greece’s 1897 defeat in the war against Turkey. They fueled a collective fantasy based on heroic images of the war (p. 145), serving to recover military prestige, as they did in Germany and France as well.
The book’s fourth and fifth chapters innovatively analyze the “new” and “old past[s].” The author argues that the “new past” incorporated all subsequent military events until the Asia Minor Catastrophe (1922) and was perceived as a continuation of the Revolution. Koulouri assesses royal memory politics’ failure to gain legitimacy through her analysis of ritual acts, depictions of the ruler, and monuments, and she juxtaposes the Greek case alongside other European cases, where European rulers ensured that their citizens were as loyal to the monarchy as they were to the fatherland (pp. 152–155). In contrast, the Greek interwar military regimes successfully standardized the memory of the war—a process that closely paralleled the First World War’s significance in European memory—by emphasizing an invented heroic past full of “triumphs” and silencing the traumatic memory of defeat and displacement. Simultaneously, the author observes the war memory’s democratization in the shift from commemorating the eponymous to the anonymous victims and in the creation of new cultural affinities among those who participated in irredentist wars, including youths, Macedonian fighters, war veterans and Asia Minor refugees, who often had different and rival historicities of the war (p. 174). Incorporating the “old past”—mainly antiquity and Byzantium—into national history and memory symbolically served the Greek state’s formation by imparting the idea of a national historical continuum and by legitimizing the monarchy according to Western Europe’s exclusive colonialist appropriations of classical antiquity from the eighteenth century onward (p. 185). The novelty that Koulouri introduces here is that while Greeks perceived ancient Greece’s past as “otherness,” the Byzantine past was “familiar” to them (p. 202); that is, it had not yet been transformed into a past because its materiality—the churches—were not seen as historical remnants but as vivid parts of everyday life. All memory specialists should bear this point in mind: if materiality is perceived as an element of identity, it is familiar and timeless and resists becoming past. Paradoxically, when the Asia Minor Catastrophe refugees were expelled from Byzantium’s historical space, Byzantium became both a past and a lost homeland at once (p. 174, 222).
The following chapters address the staging of history, cultural practices that offered emotional connection, reappropriation, and re-enactment of the “old” and the “new past[s].” Koulouri thoroughly examines performances, which reproduced the past to embody past experience, “regenerate” Greek civilization, and establish a sense of historical continuity between ancient and modern Greeks, as in the tableaux vivants, the first modern Olympic Games, theatrical performances of ancient dramas, and Delphic Festivals. Similarly, Koulouri explores the materiality of clothes and costumes as representations of historical identity, performances of the historical past, and aspects of antiquity that survived through popular culture (p. 276, 380). For example, the author argues that the traditional “fustanella” became a metonym for the Revolution and national identity. Despite the lack of sources, Koulouri poses a fascinating hypothesis about the cultural memory of the rural population and urban lower classes, based on newspaper articles and the texts from Karagiozis shadow theater. The history represented in the contemporary popular spectacles consumed by the aforementioned classes did not differ much from the scholarly and school history available to the upper classes (p. 300).
In the next chapter, the author analyzes “the staging of history”: the ritualistic use of the national past in marches, parades, and processions to solidify national identity. Koulouri’s analysis enriches our knowledge of how royal processions became military parades with the active participation and militarization of voluntary associations, university students, and pupils, thereby redefining national celebrations throughout Europe by linking their collective identities to the nation (p. 317). Simultaneously, historical pageants introduced corporeality into mnemonic rituals, facilitating active recollection of the past (p. 322). In the Greek case, history’s transformation into spectacle and the past’s revival through historical pageantry and the tableaux vivants was a female business, “a staged gendered cultural memory,” unlike elsewhere in Europe. While the Lyceum of Greek Women performed national memory that aligned with the dominant narrative and held a conservative view of women’s roles, they represented the first phase of Greece’s women’s movement (p. 328, 378).
The concluding chapter thoroughly examines the activities around the centennial of Greek independence (1930), which was postponed due to the Asia Minor Catastrophe. Koulouri contributes to the analysis of how the state recognized local historical events as nationally significant by identifying a series of factors: pressure from members of parliament, the mobilization of municipal authorities, the existence of a dynamic local social elite, the iteration of a region as a mnemonic topos in the canon of national history, and claims to such recognition and the presence (or absence) of a critical mass of veterans and those disabled by war (p. 352). Similarly, as Koulouri concludes, women managed to nationalize the “feminism of the Greek Revolution,” as represented by revolutionary heroines, and integrate it into the national continuity scheme to gain their own emancipation.
Most studies on nineteenth-century cultural memory explore its link with national identity through historical commemorations and monument-building or textual sources (Coleman, 2014; Cramer, 2007; Harrow and Watts, 2012). Koulouri, however, demonstrates that commemorative consumption in the nineteenth century was a multisensual and multimedia experience (Beiner, 2020: viii); she shows that visual culture is a useful category of historical analysis (Schwartz and Przyblyski, 2004) by engaging with previously neglected manifestations of cultural memory, such as historical pageantry, tableaux vivants, revivals of ancient dramas and customs. Thus, this book’s great strength is its ability to translate the details of these visual and performative sources into convincing conclusions about how those involved understood their own identity as Greeks.
This methodological insight is particularly useful for our understanding of the nineteenth century, the age of the “invention of tradition,” when the search for national traditions and national cultural memories to sustain them manifested as constructing national monuments and devising national rituals through images. Koulouri invites us to also think of images as a source for studying the past and conceptions of historicity and temporality, as active creators of the terms through which viewers come to understand pastness (Hartog, 2015; see, for example, the perception of the Byzantine past in the Greek case). In this way, Koulouri follows Reinhart Koselleck, who turned to the eighteenth century as a pivotal moment in the history of historical consciousness and found paintings to be remarkably useful sources for understanding such consciousness (Koselleck, 1981).
This particular function of visual culture merits scholarly attention, both to determine how to use visuality effectively as a historical source and to detect what new insights it can provide for the conceptualization of historical time at a given moment in a particular place. Thus, the book challenges us to examine practices of visual historical culture in other periods and traditions, in other regions and at different times, to develop the promise of this approach more fully.