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The Crisis in modern Athens or the reinvention of the past
G. GIANNAKOPOULOU*
*PhD, Honorary Research Fellow, University of Glasgow, Scotland,
Post-doctorate Research Fellow – Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Greece
Abstract
The short paper given here was presented in “ENCHEPHALOS” seminar series on the 26th of November 2010 and draws its main principles from my continuous interest and research in modern Athens from the 19th century today. Even though I was prepared to present a paper on the general analyses of ‘crisis’ in classical social and sociological theory, I soon realized that it would be more fruitful, in the context of the seminar series, to introduce certain facts that sometimes remain less known outside the academic community as well as some of my own conclusions on the critical phenomena that still underline our own modern times. As such, the paper focuses on the ideas behind the rebuilding of Athens as the capital of modern Greece, as the capital of the antiquity of modern Europe as a whole, and as a capital for Germany before its unification.
Whatever merely hinted, the underlying principle of this paper is that modern post-19th century Athens was an experimental ground that expressed the Germans’ anticipation for their delayed national formation, the Europeans’ imaginary of a united Europe with a common ancestry and, of course, Greece’s own attempt to escape specifically its oriental past and to enter the family of modern and modernized new European nation states. In addressing how the representation of ancient Athens saturated its modern character and in pointing to the social construction of a particular representation of modern Athens as the classical polis in a great range of sources from 18th century philosophy to the actual architectural practices of the 19th century, the paper ultimately relates the present socio-cultural crisis to the loss of the city’s sociohistorical memories. Encephalos 2011, 48(2):62-68.
Key words: Athens, modernity, Acropolis, antiquity.
In his "Metropolis and Mental Life’, Georg Simmel establishes that a city’s clock is indicative and exemplary of its modernity,1 an observation which can provide an interesting example for the analysis of metropolitan modernity that we will discuss here in the context of post-19th century new Athens. Even though Elgin and his various actions and activities to Athens still trouble us, what is not widely known is that, after removing the Parthenon-sculptures, he "offered’ Athens its first city clock as an exchange for the sculptures. Even so, and given the insult behind the gesture, according to an 1860 guide to Athens, Elgin’s clock was also completely unreliable.2 In using Athens’ dysfunctional first city clock, we can argue that the exchange between antiquity and modernity in Athens was, from the start, a paradoxical, if not clearly a problematic experiment. Even though the project of a modern but also ancient Athens had been conceptualized long before the 19th century, its material implementation started in 1834 with the official foundation of the city as the new capital of the modern Greek state.
Although we cannot fully expand on its theoretical implications here, we can nonetheless briefly acknowledge the primary inherent tensions that lay disguised behind the concept of the modern. Whereas in more quantitative terms, modernity is often discussed in relation to the social changes as well as to the technical, industrial and technological developments associated with the processes of modernization, another school of social thought emphasizes modernity as the experience of change itself.3 Following the latter approach and based on David Frisby’s definition of modernity as the experience of the new, we will discuss why and how Athens was chosen as the capital of modern Greece. To stay with the theory just for a while, the modern is usually introduced with the birth of something new and consequently appears to mean the death of something old. In having captured the tensions and antinomies within the modern, therefore, classical sociological and social theorists have explored the modern social world as inherently contradictory and abound in phenomena that are usually presented in a state of crisis. Indeed, whatever diverse and often conflicting their theories and conclusions, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Simmel, Karl Marx, Max Weber and Walter Benjamin argue that "masks’, a "tragedy’ and a "crisis of culture’, an experience that "all that is solid melts into air’, rationalization and a collective dream conceal the fact that the past is neither dead nor buried and that modernity hides its antiquity, and this is Benjamin’s words, "like a nightmare’.4
In relation to Athenian modernity specifically, this would mean or at least imply that the city’s present appeared in no way related to its past, that whilst the new city of the 19th century would require its newness to be affirmed by a dissociation with its past, in practice, the modern Athens of the 19th and 20th centuries disguised the fact that their modernity was – as it perhaps still is – constantly located in a dialectical relationship with antiquity. In fact, we can argue that part of the current socio-political and political crisis in Greece and Athens today has its roots in a crisis, alienation and "disenchantment’ that was detected long before Athens became a capital city. Whereas the nineteenth century appeared increasingly disappointed with the present, and this was usually due to a contrast between the present and the past, modern Europe started to search for origins. Classical Athens became the prototype, the ideal past with which the moderns of the 18th and 19th century contrasted and compared their own circumstances. Even though such a contest is not limited to these periods, it nonetheless took a more generalized form and became evident in the work of many scholars, including social theorists, architectural and art historians, political theorists, philosophers and historians. In a way, therefore, the search and thirst for newness expressed in Faust’s desire to become young again also implied an early disappointment with a social world that had failed to fulfil the promises of the enlightenment, a world that had failed, as many saw it, to surpass "the glory that was Greece’.5 Largely influenced by such rhetoric, Athens came to satisfy Europe’s search for ancestry. Our main argument, therefore, is that Athens became a capital in order to provide an image of the antiquity of European capitalist metropolitan modernity as a whole. In building modern Athens on the foundations of the classical polis, 19th-century Europeans attempted to re-enchant their own modern world. This may explain a couple of circumstances associated with the modern world of the 19th century.
First, the obsessive search for the ancestral origins of European civilization. Second, and this follows directly from the previous, the construction of the grand narrative called European history and civilization. Third, the foundation of the nation-states, and fourth, the emergence of the bourgeoisie that often supports and is supported by the state. These four phenomena point to a particular relation to the past which is seen as the ancestor of the present. What is interesting is that from the 18th century onwards, this past was more often than not identified with Greece, that Greek antiquity was ultimately usually treated as synonymous to classical Athenian antiquity. What is amazing, however, is that what we came to know as the golden century of Athens and as the "cradle’ of western European civilization is a fifty-year fragment of the city’s 6000 years recorded history. Hence, what introduces Athens as an important component of European metropolitan modernity is the very bizarre and quite disturbing phenomenon of a conscious selection, manipulation, and exploitation of a very specific fragment of social and historical time.
Although this is not to say that that this is an insignificant fragment, the emphasis on the dialectic between modernity and antiquity is even more problematic than we initially assume. In attempting to partly solve this problem, we have introduced yet dialectic, this time between modernity and a modern antiquity. In general, modern antiquity is the product of a careful and conscious selection and promotion of a socially constructed image of the past. Theoretically, it implies the rewriting of history as well as a very limited social memory. For instance, if it is a question of the ancestry of modern governments, Western Europe focuses on Periclean Athens and not Sparta because Periclean Athens was the first "democratic’ model. This model was deemed as a much more suitable ancestor for the modern state that claimed to be enlightened and democratic. As for social memory, modern antiquity glorifies the memory of Periclean Athens whilst obscuring if not annihilating the memory of say Byzantine or Franco-Venetian Athens. On the practical level, modern antiquity means the construction of a social space that immediately reminds us of a very specific image of a selected and reified past. An example of this would be the frantic rise, in the 19th century, of a kind of a neoclassical architecture that imitated the Doric style – that is the dominant style of the Parthenon – for a great majority of public buildings such as Parliaments, Universities, Libraries, etc. Finally, modern antiquity can be defined as a representation of the past that is unthreatening to the modern.
What is very strange in the literature on city building in the 19th century is that the name of Athens usually appears as a reference to the "classical’ polis. In effect, modern Athens is greatly missing, and so we often forget that Athens itself is a capital of the 19th century, itself exploiting the very same conception of antiquity that many other European capitals, such as Vienna and Berlin for example, used in order to embellish their own new face. To understand what is unique about Athens and what distinguishes it from other capitals in this context, we need to understand how easy or how difficult it was for modern Athens to be built not merely like classical Athens as in the case of other capitals, but rather as the classical city itself on the very same place. As a clear indication of its relation to Europe, "new’ Athens was in its greatest part built symbolically and practically not by Greeks themselves, but from other Europeans, mostly Bavarians and Prussians. This also means that modern antiquity was initially constructed by non-Greeks.
To stay with the problems associated with the building of the "new’ Athens of the 19th century, we gradually see a continuous fragmentation of the past that ultimately meant the identification of Periclean Athens with the antiquities and especially the Parthenon. The major actors in the process can be divided in two categories. First, 18th century German scholars, such as Humboldt, Goethe and Schiller who wrote extensively on classics, aesthetics, and culture, but never visited Athens. In this case, the city remained something of a mythical figure. Secondly, 18th and 19th century travellers to Athens who, were usually artists, diplomats, or sometimes spies, mostly British, French and American. In each of these cases, Athens is almost always identified with the Acropolis and especially with the Parthenon. Even though the title may be say a description of Athens, the book is usually limited to the description and measurement of antiquities. Modern antiquity, in other words, is also characterized by an unmistaken abstraction. Nevertheless, there is one major difference between 18th and 19th century travellers in that the former were soon proven to be great "collectors’ of antiquity, an attitude that changed considerably in the 19th century – in the 19th century, the classical Acropolis was perceived as a more sacred object than it was in the 18th century. Such examples of the symbolic reconstruction of antiquity are very interesting but they cannot easily overshadow the importance of the practical construction of such a manipulated representation of the past. A brief historical overview may prove illuminating.
Even though Greece was declared a free and sovereign nation as early as 1827, Athens was officially declared as the capital seven years later, on the 11th of February 1834. This capital, however, was built in order to give a built form to a Western European imaginary of modern Athens as Europe’s past. In undermining Russia’s power over the new capital, Britain, France, and the pre-unification Germanic nations maintained that Greece should abandon its religious affiliations with Russia. Greece could be Christian, but Athens should not be distinctively Orthodox. Before anything else, the modern capital "ought to’ be ancient and so Athens became the capital of Greece in an admittedly strange way. Otto and the government did not officially settle in the city until the 1st of December 1834 and yet Leo von Klenze, Ludwig’s favourite architect, designed a ceremony in order to welcome the king in the capital as well as to simultaneously inaugurate the Parthenon as an official ancient monument.6 The ceremony took place on the Acropolis on the 28th of August 1834, which means that modern Athens and Europe had an official ancient monument five months before the capital had an official government. In having an internationally admired official ancient monument, Athens became the capital in the most symbolical way possible. More than that, Athens’ modern monuments were constructed when its ancient monuments were in fact reconstructed. The first plans for the city dreamt of government buildings close to the Acropolis. In fact, one of them proposed the building of the palace on the Acropolis. This plan was designed in 1834, by Schinkel, one of the dominant figures of nineteenth-century Prussian architecture and the teacher of Kleanthes and Schaubert, the architects of the first authorized plan for new Athens. Schinkel’s plan was too expensive and, above all, it contrasted Ludwig’s firm belief on the sanctity of the monument.
Although the redefinition of the past was acutely felt in the city itself with the demolition, in the nineteenth century, of almost one hundred Byzantine and post-Byzantine churches, we will spend the time left in discussing how antiquity itself was redefined. Today’s Parthenon is the 3rd temple built on the Acropolis, we could say that it is the 4th, but the official counting says 3 and it is this "temple’ that we are interested in here, originally built between 447 and 432 BC. When we look at the Parthenon we admittedly, and we remain very ambivalent despite what will follow, feel a touch of eternity. It seems like a true wonder that the Parthenon still stands intact after all these ages. Well it stands, yes, but far from intact. These are some images of the Parthenon that don’t exist any more. In the 6th century AD, the Parthenon was converted into a Christian Church. In 1206 it became the Church of a Latin Archbishop and in 1458 it was converted into a Muslim mosque. The most important damage to the Parthenon before the 19th century – and that is given Elgin’s intimate relations with the monument – is the explosion of 1687 during the Turkish-Venetian War.
A greatly contested issue in Athens, and Greece for that matter, is the fact that the foreign founders of modern Athens cooperated with a number of Greek – usually non-Athenian and this is very important – architects and archaeologists in what came to be known as the clearance or cleansing of the Acropolis. As K.H. Bires has maintained, if we exclude travellers who have left us with images of the Acropolis before the clearance of the site, the government and its officials disdained from even documenting what they were demolishing. Despite the loud cries of some Athenians, including Kambourglou, that their history was being destroyed, the rebuilding of a new Athens in the 19th century meant that, in following the principles of 19th century metropolitan modernity, Athens was to be remembered only in terms of the 50-years period of Periclean rule. In effect, what was to be forgotten, apart from the years before the Periclean polis, was that Athens had once been a Byzantine, Frankish, Turkish, and Venetian province. As a result of this requirement, the Parthenon has suffered five periods of restorations in the 19th century alone. Nevertheless, we should not assume that all Athenians or all Greeks opposed the demolitions. On the contrary, many Greeks adopted the Bavarians’ belief that the cleansing of the Acropolis would actually free the city from the memory of long and painful centuries.
1834 Athens was not, what the Bavarians thought it would or should be. During his first visit to Athens, Ludwig Ross, the archaeologist who was entrusted with the clearance of the Acropolis said that: “This is not [Athens]. This is a uniquely horrible accumulation of ruins, an amorphous, uniform grey-green mass of ash and dust.”7 One year later, in his celebration of the Acropolis as an official monument, Klenze, proclaimed that in order for Athens to become what it ought to be, the Acropolis and the city should be "cleansed’. Despite most architects’ and archaeologists’ celebrations, however, there were some who lamented the loss of the city’s socio-historical memory. Although he too suggested that what may have been important for history was not equally important for art history and that the Parthenon was aesthetically superior to the minaret, Kambouroglou was persistently arguing that: “When these ruins are restored, there will not be a Parthenon any more”. This is a main problem with Athenian modernity. In Greek, a monument, mnemeion, means memory site. In this respect, whilst the Bavarians cleared what they saw as a ruin in order to transform it into a monument, the pre-1834 Acropolis was actually a monument that was later deprived of its meaning and was, therefore, ruined.
Even though in the end, we could argue that the past was revived in order to celebrate the modern, as far as Athens was concerned for the greatest part of the nineteenth and twentieth century, modern Athenians were often oppressed by the ancients with whom they "ought to’ be equal. We should make no mistake – the restoration of the Acropolis was simultaneous with the rebuilding of new Athens as the city of the Acropolis. Ludwig Ross who cleared the Acropolis was a good friend of Kleanthes and Schaubert. Leo von Klenze who revised Kleanthes and Schaubert’s plan largely defined the character of 19th century Athens, a great part of which we still experience in the city today. Christian and Theophile Hansen who visited the Parthenon daily and who were involved in the cleansing of the Sacred Rock built the "Athenian’ Trilogy, namely the Academy, the University, and the Library, which, still retain their original use and which remain the three most dominant modern Athenian monuments. As for how this may practically transcend the idea of Athens in the rest of Europe, Leo von Klenze is also the man who transformed new Munich, the capital of Bavaria – and later Nazism – with public buildings such as museums, whilst Theophile Hansen inaugurated the Academy-simile Parliament of new Vienna. As for Athens, however manipulated, dispersed and ambivalent it may be, it still has its Parthenon and hopes that it will one day remember its true history.
Although the project of redefining antiquity was undoubtedly dubious, the ruling class of every generation chooses the past that will supposedly best glorify its present. Long before the Bavarians, the Byzantines had even more passionately attempted to erase the memory of classical Athens in order to introduce, or to impose, the new faith. What we can try to remember, for our own modernity and our own modern times, is that the past that often haunts us still awaits us, not to invent or re-invent it, but rather to discover it.
FOOTNOTES
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