Athens

Gill John

Description

Athens is an historical anomaly. Excavations date its first settlement to over seven thousand years ago, yet it only became the capital of Greece in 1834. During the intervening centuries it was occupied by almost every mobile culture in Europe: from its earliest likely settlers, tribes from what is now Albania, to Nazi forces during the second World War, and in between by successive waves of Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Slavs, Goths, Venetians, French, Catalans, Turks, Italians, Bulgarians and the clans of various kings and tyrants of the region's early city-states.There has been a structure on its 'high city', the acropolis, since at least the bronze age, although it was subsequently altered by successive occupiers, becoming a fort, castle, temple, mosque, church and even a harem. its 'Golden age' peaked in the fifth century BCE, with the great building projects of Pericles and Themistocles, and its later history is one of a city already nostalgic for its past, although at a time when other European cities had yet to begin constructing a past. Its standing as the birthplace of democracy and western civilisation, while based in fact, is largely a romantic fantasy dreamt up by nineteenth-century north European artists and intellectuals: democracy has a checkered history in Athens, and 'western civilisation' was an amalgam of many cultures. The city now is a jigsaw of pieces from its past, where you can still walk along streets laid by Romans and Ottoman Turks, and where the city's population is almost constantly refreshed by newer waves of arrivals.John Gill's cultural guide explores the origins, development and contemporary face of Athens, offering an accessible analysis of its social history, architecture and representation in painting, literature and film. Looking at the role of religion, migration and popular culture, its in-depth coverage of the city, past and present, goes beyond conventional guidebooks to provide a fresh insight into its living identity.

Sujets

• Greece

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 14 octobre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781908493484
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title Page

ATHENS












by
John Gill




Publisher Information

First published in 2011 by
Signal Books Limited
36 Minster Road
Oxford OX4 1LY
www.signalbooks.co.uk

Digital edition converted and distributed in 2011 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com

© John Gill, 2011. The right of John Gill to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. he whole of this work, including all text and illustrations, is protected by copyright. No parts of this work may be loaded, stored, manipulated, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information, storage and retrieval system without prior written permission from the publisher, on behalf of the copyright owner.

Cover Design: Devdan Sen; Production: Devdan Sen
Cover Images: Valeria Cantone | Dreamstime.com (main photo); backover inset – Wikipedia Commons
Photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. We would also like to thank Manolis Anastasakis, heo Angelopoulos, Bios, Mikaël Delta, DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Apostolos Doxiadis, Les Amis de Xenakis, Hollwich Kushner LLC (HWKN) architects, Panos Koutras, Yorgos Lanthimos, Dimitris Lyacos, Amanda Michalopoulou, Dimitris Papaioannou, Athina Rachel Tsangari and Savina Yannatou.




Introduction

Athens may share an address with its glorious past, but the city today is largely an invention of the most recent 180 years of that history, roughly the age of the modern Greek state. Most historians regard this period, when they consider it at all, as an addendum or appendix to the main narrative, which for some ended over 2600 years ago with the death of Pericles. For the city’s four million inhabitants, of course, those 180 years are the main narrative. It is the period in which Greece invented itself as Greece, with Athens as its new capital; when it founded a constitution, constructed a parliament, wrote a legal system, built its first universities, hospitals, museums, galleries and libraries, and published two contradictory dictionaries of its language. While the ancient architecture and statuary have been there for three thousand years and are not going anywhere any time soon, the city is rapidly accelerating into its future. It is in the spaces between the past, present and future that we find the living Athens.
The opening decades of the twenty-first century are interesting times to be in Athens, not least in the sense of the apocryphal “Chinese” curse parading as a good luck wish. In Athenian chronology, however, if we measure it from the Golden Age of Pericles, this is the city’s 26th century, a longevity to which few other cities can lay claim. his leads us inevitably to a paradox: much of its history during those twenty-six centuries is, if not exactly blank, then largely silent, and at one point at least, in the late sixteenth century, Athens disappeared, briefly, o ff the cultural map of the European landmass altogether. While this book considers the ancient and classical periods, and even dips briefly into geological time, it addresses itself chiefly to those 180 years, and in particular the past half-century of Athenian history and culture.
The last thing the world, or Athens, need is another book about the splendours of ancient Greece. Age, scholarly bias and the tourism industry have made its antiquities the key reason for visiting Athens, usually at the expense of newer cultural phenomena - to highlight a
few random examples: the paintings of either its Impressionist or Cubist schools; its art nouveau and deco architecture and more recent examples of modernism and post-modernism (and this in a city that has yet to acquire a proper skyscraper); generations of world-class writers who have gone untranslated into other languages; an even newer new wave of young filmmakers who are barely out of their teens; an underground music scene that is rewriting the rules of electronica as laid down in Detroit and Düsseldorf. What follows is a primer to this modern, living Athens, and its raison d ’etre is simple: its author has never found a book that told him about these things and others besides.
This is not to attempt an equivalence between the modern and the ancient, merely to note that a city without a present and a future is a city in danger of becoming a theme park, and Athens is too interesting a city to be abandoned to nostalgia. Athens has, in fact, already experienced two bouts of nostalgia for its own past: around the third century BCE, before there was anywhere else in Europe to be nostalgic about; and in the nineteenth century, when it was gripped by what might be described an early example of postmodern nostalgia and began re-importing its own past - from Germany. Another bout would be three too many.
While some Greek historians have been busy burning bridges with the ancient past - to the extent, for example, of asserting that classical Athenian democracy, such as it was, bears no relation to the modern version - the past has a habit of rebuilding those bridges under cover of darkness. Two current controversies in both Athens and Greece - the status of the sizeable Muslim minority and the treatment of refugees - overlook the historical fact that Athens has been a racially mixed city since its earliest days. he city was probably founded by immigrants (according to Plutarch, no less a founding figure than hemistocles was a foreign upstart) and thrived on the complex patterns of migration and trade across the Mediterranean through the centuries. Its contemporary cultural mix, in which the Muslim community represents less than one of the six per cent resident non-Greeks in a constellation of ethnic groups from Af rica, Asia, Eastern and Northern Europe, the Middle East, South America and elsewhere, is probably little di ff erent from that at the time when hemistocles thought it would be a good idea to build a surrounding wall to protect the city’s cultural mix from the barbarians outside.
Athenian thinkers during those 180 years of its modern history, from nineteenth-century revolutionaries to twenty-first-century queer psychogeographers, have all tussled with a conundrum that has persisted through three millennia: how to retain the best of the past while also embracing the possibilities of the future. Current events in both capital and country may seem to have put the immediate future on hold, but they have twenty-six centuries of the past pressing them into the future, and whatever the short-term may hold, Athens will emerge one way or another. As an unlikely refugee who himself washed up on a beach near Athens in the 1990s, the late Jacques Derrida, wrote, with deliberate ambiguity, “Athens, still remains.”






Contours

Geography and History


Athens is defined by the mountains and sea that surround it, and by the tectonic movement and erosion that carved this jumble of low hills in the centre of the Attica Plain. Its central geological feature, the Acropolis or “higher city” (from the Greek akron, which can mean higher, top or extremity, and polis, city) is, like the hills that surround it, part of a nappe or kippe of limestone, an outcrop of rock formed by tectonic movement, here weathered over the sixty to one hundred million years since the rock formed in the Late Cretaceous period. A nappe, specifically, is a geological feature that has been shunted some way from its original position by tectonic forces. The Acropolis rock actually started out near Mount Hymettus, fifteen miles east of its current position, and is creeping very slowly westwards. In another sixty to one hundred million years, it will be a pretty islet somewhere off Piraeus or Cape Sounion, although by then the tectonic subduction that is causing mainland Greece to sink into the sea may have tugged Athens beneath the waves.
It is these hills that give parts of central Athens, such as modernday Kolonaki, the appearance of a Mediterranean San Francisco - or, indeed, the steeper parts of Glasgow. In the case of the Acropolis, its modern shape is also due to more recent human engineering, particularly infills of local sandstone and Athens schist, in preparation for the building projects of the Golden Age, which we might date to Pericles’ rule between 461 and 429 BCE. Some of this prehistoric landfill, scuffed to a shine by millions of visitors’ shoes over the centuries, is over forty feet deep: perhaps a necessary measure to support the fantastic feats of engineering that lofted the huge columns and pediments of the Parthenon temple some 512 feet above sea level and into the sky. While barely half a mountain, on a clear day it offers views as far as the island of Poros, 35 miles away as the crow flies. So prominent is it from the sea that the city’s early navies used to take a sighting on the light glinting off a statue of the goddess Athena on the Acropolis as they navigated their way home.
For most of the eight thousand years that humans have used the Acropolis hill, the Acropolis was Athens, and on at least one occasion it was abandoned entirely, only to be re-inhabited later. The earliest archaeological finds around the Acropolis complex have dated its oldest structure, remnants of a large temple dedicated to Athena Polias, protector of the city, to the sixth century BCE. It is likely that the area would have been settled as far back as the Greek Neolithic period before the sixth millennium BCE - the Acropolis rock is pocked with very troglodyte-friendly caves - but as successive occupiers have pointed out through