Abstract: The cultural heritage space of Athens was shaped and then reshaped to depict two distinct historiographical narratives. First was the narrative of Revival, which internalized Western Hellenism and Philhellenism; later, the narrative of Continuity emerged, addressing discrepancies that challenged a coherent and lasting national identity. The reconsideration of Athens' cultural heritage space to represent the latter narrative began in the early twentieth century following the expansion of the Greek kingdom and incorporated Byzantine heritage as a common feature of both the Old and the New Lands, as well as the territories claimed by Greek irredentism. Within this context, the depiction of Continuity became a heritage management priority, eventually shaping Athens' cultural heritage landscape in its present form.

Abstract: Greek American women have been celebrated in their communities as mothers, wives, teachers, and caretakers. This historiographic focus on home, church, and school endorses a patriarchal confinement in which female agency has been permitted to operate and ignores the extraordinary contribution that Greek American women have made in shaping the public sphere of art throughout the twentieth century. New research on a selection of pioneering artists who have not received proper attention places their work and lives in the context of their respective diaspora communities and their complex interactions with multiple colliding worlds. Cleo Damianakes flourished in the 1920s, and her classical figurative designs were popularized through her book covers. Ethel and Jenne Magafan came of age as social realists in the murals of the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. During the emergence of the feminist movement in the 1960s, sculptor Lynda Benglis and painter Mary Grigoriadis pioneered two radically different strategies of critique. Finally, performance artist Diamanda Galás brought her voice to the conceptual breakdown of genres in the 1980s and 1990s. Situating these Greek American women artists in the context of their Anglo Greek sisters who preceded them and of expatriate Greek artists who joined them during the Cold War prompts a reexamination of the Greek American experience. Rather than submitting to roles defined by tradition and patriarchy, the six women considered here used their Greek American voices to critique, revolutionize, and ultimately reshape the visual arts in the twentieth century.

Abstract: Representations of the Greek immigrant experience in the Hellenic Cultural Museum (HCM), a vernacular Greek American museum in Salt Lake City, Utah, commemorate the everyday life, labor struggles, and folk culture of early twentieth-century working-class Greek immigrants. As a repository of working-class memories, the museum challenges a set of dominant US immigration narratives around class and race, including the white ethnic bootstraps success model. At the same time, the museum's exhibition draws from popular narratives of Hellenism in the United States and Greece to distinguish local Greeks as a prominent community of the Intermountain West. The HCM thus oscillates between regional and nationally dominant understandings of the Greek American experience, proposing hybrid identity narratives that enrich the public narrativization of Greek America. The vernacular background of the exhibition, on the other hand, poses a set of museological challenges in terms of accessibility and inclusivity, which affect the understanding of Greek America vis-à-vis its museum representations.

Reviewed by: Condemned by Konstantinos Theotokis, and: Niki by Christos Chomenidis, and: Time Stitches by Eleni Kefala Karen Emmerich (bio) Konstantinos Theotokis, Condemned. Translated by Susan and Miltiades Matthias. Foreword by Vangelis Calotychos. River Vale, NJ: Cosmos Publishing, 2021. Pp. 157. Paper $21.95. Christos Chomenidis, Niki. Translated by Patricia Felisa Barbeito. New York: Other Press, 2023. Pp. 482. Paper $18.99. Eleni Kefala, Χρονορραφία/ Time Stitches. Translated by Peter Constantine. Dallas, TX: Phoneme Media and Deep Vellum, 2022. Pp. 199. Paper $15.95. Many of us in the field of Modern Greek Studies who teach at colleges and universities in North America have long lamented the fact that Greek language programs (where they exist at all) are often small, understaffed, and underfunded, such that only the lucky few are able to take courses beyond the second year, while more robust programs in other, more commonly taught non-English languages can offer topics courses in which students read, speak, and write primarily or exclusively in those languages. For fields like ours, translations play outsized roles; virtually no class in Modern Greek Studies could exist without them, but we remain hampered in our teaching and research alike by the paucity of readily available texts in translation, particularly of Greek-language scholarship in all the disciplines that comprise our interdisciplinary field. Still, while there are countless texts that many of us would love to see translated, and existing translations that we would love to see reprinted, the wealth of recently published English-language translations of Greek-language literary texts is a fact to be celebrated. The present review will offer brief thoughts on a few such translations, while also highlighting the work of particular translators and publishing houses that have been steadily expanding the available offerings for educators, students, and general readers. It also has the aim of encouraging all of us in the field to make a habit of familiarizing ourselves with recent publications and incorporating newly available texts into our courses: course adoptions can have a significant effect on book sales and thus on a publisher's willingness to take risks on other Greek-language works in future. For better or for worse, many publishers do still think of book sales in these terms—and the more we do as an academic community to support individual works translated from Greek, the greater the effect we will likely have on the entire field of Greek-language literature in translation. My review takes up for discussion three quite heterogeneous books: Susan and Miltiadis Matthias's translation of Konstantinos Theotokis's 1919 [End Page 114] novel Condemned (Κατάδικος), Patricia Felisa Barbeito's translation of Christos Chomenidis's 2014 novel Niki (Νίκη), and Peter Constantine's translation of Eleni Kefala's 2013 book of poetry Time Stitches (Χρονορραφία). And this heterogeny is, in a sense, the point: it invites us to think not only about how particular books can be incorporated into comparative syllabi, or even syllabi in non-literary disciplines, but also about how courses in modern Greek literature can move away from a "greatest hits" model to topical courses that use Greek-language literature as a test case but are of broader interest for a particular topic or theme. It is difficult to imagine a course in which all three of these books could logically sit together on a syllabus, but it is relatively easy to imagine a whole host of syllabi for comparative courses, reading across multiple literary traditions, on which each one of these books, or perhaps even two of them, could find a home. I begin with Susan and Miltiades Matthias's compelling translation of Theotokis's 1919 novel Condemned, published in 2021 by Cosmos Publishing, a longstanding source of Greek-language texts in translation. This translation comes to join two recent translations, by J.M.Q. Davies, of Theotokis's The Life and Death of Hangman Thomas and Corfiot Tales, thus enriching the available literature of the Greek countryside, of the Ionian islands, and of early twentieth-century Greek literature dealing with issues of justice and morality, class and gender oppression, the penal system, incarceration, and faith. Condemned would sit comfortably on syllabi alongside other works as varied as Papadiamantis's The...

Reviewed by: Venizelos: The Making of a Greek Statesman, 1864–1914 by Michael Llewellyn-Smith Spyridon G. Ploumidis (bio) Michael Llewellyn-Smith, Venizelos: The Making of a Greek Statesman, 1864– 1914. London: Hurst, 2021. Pp. xx + 516. 50 illustrations, 4 maps. Cloth £30.00. Eleftherios Venizelos (1864–1936) was the outstanding Greek statesman of the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Crete and summoned to Athens in 1910 by a group of military officers, Venizelos dominated the Greek political scene and led his country through a turbulent period of reforms and wars that doubled Greece’s territory and population. During the years of the First World War, however, Venizelos’s political career was overshadowed by a showdown with King Constantine, a political polarization known as the National Schism, and self-exile to Paris. After 1915 Venizelos became, for all his charisma, a contested figure and anathema to his monarchist fellow countrymen. Well versed in the teachings of the founders of the French Third Republic (1870–1940) and a profound admirer of French radical leaders Léon Gambetta and Georges Clemenceau, Venizelos attempted to reform Greek politics along the lines of French radicalism and republicanism. His uncompromising patriotism and fervent nationalism bore spectacular results in the Treaty of Sèvres (1920), which brought an end to the Ottoman Empire and shaped his glorified memory. [End Page 304] Sir Michael Llewellyn-Smith, a former British Ambassador in Athens, examines Venizelos’s early years in Cretan politics, his entry onto the center stage of Greek politics, and his gradual development into a renowned statesman. As Llewellyn-Smith notes in the introduction (2–3), his special interest in Venizelos dates back to the late 1960s, when he wrote his widely cited study of Greece’s military campaign and debacle in Asia Minor (1919–1922) (Llewellyn Smith 1998). Llewellyn-Smith’s voluminous biography of Venizelos is well researched, relying on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, and complements existing accounts of the life of the Greek statesman (e.g., Stefanou 1977; Papadakis 2017). The author highlights and offers valuable insights into Venizelos’s charisma and elevated standing on Europe’s political scene. Venizelos was not by any means an ordinary man. As Llewellyn-Smith stresses (6), he pushed Greece’s boat “up against the currents of history” and “without him Greece would be different” and very much worse off. To make this point, the book thoroughly illuminates Venizelos’s political thought and mastery and traces his fateful friendship with David Lloyd George, which stimulated his ambitious foreign policies. A second volume will complete his story with the Great War, the postwar peace settlement, Greece’s Asia Minor campaign, and Venizelos’s later years in the office of prime minister. The book is divided into three parts and forty-three chapters. Part 1 provides the historical background to Venizelos’s early career in Cretan politics. Venizelos’s family history, studies at the University of Athens, apprenticeships in law and journalism, love life, and marriage are the backdrop to his engagement in the political affairs of his native island, which became autonomous in 1898 under the rule of Prince George of Greece. Nationalist politics and the Enosis (union of Crete with Greece) movement were the main vehicles through which Venizelos built his public image and political vocation. His involvement in the Akrotiri and Therissos uprisings of 1897 and 1905 turned him into a first-rank national hero and champion of all Greeks. In addition to his violent confrontation with the Ottoman Empire, Venizelos’s fame was also greatly bolstered by his relentless anti-monarchism. The “revolution” at Therissos, the author notes, was not only a blow to the prince’s “despotism” but a diplomatic achievement, since it bound Crete’s protecting powers to a process that promoted union with Greece (161). The ousting of Prince George from Crete in September 1906 was another triumph of Venizelist radical policies. As Llewellyn-Smith notes, “[Venizelos] was becoming a hero to young radicals, and correspondingly an object of fear to the royals and their followers” (163). His feud with a prominent member of the Greek royal family (the second son of King George I) foreshadowed the...

Abstract: The Lambrakis Youth Movement in early 1960s Greece, although grounded in the nation’s post-Civil War political and social framework and oriented toward the future—trying to create a society of freedom, national independence, and social justice—nevertheless made memory and memory work an important aspect of its activism. More specifically, the Youth Movement cultivated a new memory and historical culture, and it was only through this process that the imagining of an alternative political and social future became possible. Memory is important not only for its symbolic content but for its relationship to the emergence of new identities.

Reviewed by: ReFocus: The Films of Antoinetta Angelidi ed. by Penny Bouska and Sotiris Petridis Marios Psaras (bio) Penny Bouska and Sotiris Petridis, editors, ReFocus: The Films of Antoinetta Angelidi. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023. Pp. xiii + 238. 25 B&W images. Hardback £90.00. Penny Bouska and Sotiris Petridis’s edited volume The Films of Antoinetta Angelidi is the latest addition to the esteemed ReFocus: The International Directors Series from Edinburgh University Press. The series is dedicated to both renowned and overlooked film directors from world cinema, and its subjects range from Andrei Tarkovsky to Xavier Dolan, François Ozon, and Lucrecia Martel. Antoinetta Angelidi’s work has been discussed and examined in a number of substantial Greek works, including her own essays and interviews and the eponymous publication accompanying a retrospective of her work at the 46th Thessaloniki Film Festival (Theodoraki 2005). The present volume is, however, the first book-length study in English of Angelidi’s oeuvre, and it aims at establishing her within an illustrious lineup of international auteurs while also filling a gap in English-language literature on Greek cinema, which in recent years has mainly focused on the so-called Greek Weird Wave and its main representatives (e.g., Psaras 2016; Papanikolaou 2020; Falvey 2022). Through a fascinating anthology of meditative analyses and interpretations that bring a range of methodological and theoretical approaches to bear on Angelidi’s filmic—and other—work, the volume casts a spotlight on Greek cinema’s perhaps most idiosyncratic voice, one that has, in fact, largely influenced the subversive themes and forms of the Weird Wave. Such attention is only fair, given the rare complexity of the formal experimentation and thematic preoccupations found in Angelidi’s body of work. The book begins with a “Prolegomenon” by Penny Bouska, whose title alone anticipates the collection’s predilection for a deep dive into the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of Angelidi’s oeuvre. In this concise yet dense introduction, Bouska collects rich biographical information from private conversations, interviews, and the filmmaker’s personal archives, shedding light on the events and people who influenced Angelidi to become a pioneer of political avant-garde cinema and visual arts in Greece. From her politically [End Page 310] engaged parents, to the turbulent sociopolitical context of her student years, to her self-exile—to avoid arrest by the Greek junta regime—to France, where she was able to study alongside Christian Metz and Thierry Kuntzel, Angelidi’s formative years were characterized by an amalgam of theoretical, political, and artistic influences which established her as a unique artist and intellectual. Bouska pays attention to Angelidi’s theoretical work insofar as it illuminates the concepts that underlie her artistic output, especially her preoccupations with the formalist mechanism of defamiliarization, the psychical mechanism of the uncanny, and Freud’s psychoanalytic exegesis of dreams. The editors divide the book’s nine chapters into three main parts—“Feminism and the Avant-Garde,” “Concepts and Interpretations,” and “Means and Media”—according to their thematic focus and methodological approach. The first part focuses on the two key theoretical and aesthetic movements within which Angelidi’s work emerged and evolved—namely post-structural feminism and the avant-garde—and it examines the interrelation between the two in her practices and ideology. In the first chapter, “Weird Mothers: The Feminist Uncanniness of Antoinetta Angelidi’s Topos,” Angelidi’s daughter and long-term collaborator, Rea Wallden, identifies the avant-garde practice of uncanniness as strategic for Angelidi’s feminist politics. Wallden considers the filmmaker’s second feature, Topos (1985), as an exemplary case of Angelidi’s employment of uncanniness as a feminist avant-garde strategy, focusing on the figure of the uncanny mother and the ways in which it questions and restructures the temporal and spatial aspects of female subjectivity and representation. In the second chapter, “ ‘Every Element in a Film Narrates’: The Complex Language of Heterogeneity in Idées Fixes / Dies Irae as a (Feminist) Critique to the Practice of Methodological Categorisation in Avant-Garde Film History,” Fil Ieropoulos identifies the heterogenous avant-garde practices and antithetical traditions that inform Angelidi’s first feature, and which the experimental filmmaker masterfully combines through juxtaposition, synthesis, and...

Reviewed by: The Greek Connection: The Life of Elias Demetracopoulos and the Untold Story of Watergate by James H. Barron, and: Ένα σκοτεινό δωμάτιο, 1967–1974: Ο Ιωαννίδης και η παγίδα της Κύπρου—Τα πετρέλαια στο Αιγαίο—Ο ρόλος των Αμερικανών [A dark room, 1967–1974: Ioannidis and the Cyprus trap—Aegean oil—The role of the Americans]. by Alexis Papahelas (Αλέξης Παπαχελάς) Konstantina E. Botsiou (bio) James H. Barron, The Greek Connection: The Life of Elias Demetracopoulos and the Untold Story of Watergate. New York: Melville House. 2020. Pp. xiii + 482. 21 illustrations. Hardcover $31.67. Alexis Papahelas (Αλέξης Παπαχελάς), Ένα σκοτεινό δωμάτιο, 1967–1974: Ο Ιωαννίδης και η παγίδα της Κύπρου—Τα πετρέλαια στο Αιγαίο—Ο ρόλος των Αμερικανών[A dark room, 1967–1974: Ioannidis and the Cyprus trap—Aegean oil—The role of the Americans]. Athens: Metechmio, 2021. Pp. 630. Cloth €18.90. Due to a scarcity of archival sources and the aversion of historians, the foreign and defense policies of the seven-year Greek military dictatorship (1967–1974) have not been systematically researched. Although more widely explored than most of the dictatorship’s foreign connections, Greek-American relations during this period are no exception to the rule. Ideologically driven interpretations or “what ifs” hardly substitute for structured analyses of alliances, animosities, and political decisions. As a matter of fact, they strengthen the superficial perception of the junta as a tragic parenthesis in the history of postwar Greece. This tendency is changing, however, and two recent publications are especially noteworthy. James H. Barron and Alexis Papahelas both present detailed accounts of the dictators’ worldviews and actions. They also offer thorough overviews of the Greek political ecosystem in the 1950s and 1960s, where the future dictators thrived. Various continuities and discontinuities with the earlier period place the dictatorship in a historical context driven by anticommunism—and its local version, εθνικοφροσύνη (ethnikofrosyni)—which the colonels took up as their mission when Greek politicians loosened their grip in the era of international détente. Committed to the zeitgeist of bipolarity, the colonels baptized personal competitors as enemies of the state. Barron’s story of Elias Demetracopoulos’s multiple persecutions by Greek and American officials before and during the dictatorship captivates the reader. Demetracopoulos suffered the various types of character assassination that an [End Page 137] assertive journalist posing inconvenient questions would undergo. A prominent example of his research concerned the stationing of nuclear missiles on Greek soil as a result of the “Sputnik effect.” Demetracopoulos maintained many doubts about the Greek government’s denial of any participation in the US program of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), which had involved Italy and Turkey before the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. He believed that Greek participation in the ICBM program would be vital for alleviating the West’s feeling of technological inferiority after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite, which suggested that the American soil became vulnerable to a potential Soviet attack (105–110). The refusal to accept the Greek government’s denials severely damaged Demetracopoulos’s relations with the Greek premier Konstantinos Karamanlis (1955–1963). Similar difficulties awaited Demetracopoulos in the US. His close ties with top American public figures were frequently undermined by unforgiving cold warriors who saw in Demetracopoulos a threat to the dominant narrative of law and order. These contradictions underscore the difference that personality can make in any given historical situation. Barron paints a comprehensive portrait of Demetracopoulos, a devoted journalist who earned exceptional resistance credentials as a teenager during the Axis occupation. He later spent his adult life in the twilight zone between censure and shelter by Greek and American agencies and individuals who ranged from committed friends and acquaintances to various top politicians such as Konstantinos Karamanlis, George Papandreou, and Ted Kennedy. In the 1950s, Demetracopoulos had built a reputation as a trustworthy liaison between the Greek media and the American community in Greece. Shortly after the establishment of the military dictatorship he sought refuge in the US via Denmark, acting out of a justified fear that assassination attempts would no longer be limited to his character. Barron’s book stresses for American audiences the Greek dimension of the Watergate scandal. Fate reserved for Demetracopoulos a crucial part in the history of both the junta and the Nixon administration, since it was he who came to reveal the Nixon administration’s “Greek connection.” According to his reports at the...