PART7: Technology & the Home

Review of The Creation Of Modern Athens: Planning The Myth, by Eleni Bastéa
by Ioanna Theocharopoulou

Fig 1: Front cover, featuring "Arrival of King Otto of Greece in Athens on January 12, 1835" by Peter Hess.
Munich, Neue Pinakothek. Photo: Joachim Blauel, Artothek, Munich. Used with permission from Cambridge University Press.

One of the most significant themes that comes across in Eleni Bastéa's "The Creation of Modern Athens: Planning the Myth" is the role played by
architecture and urbanism in the creation of the modern Greek nation. During the nineteenth century, improvements in the city of Athens, its buildings and infrastructure were more than mere technical achievements. They symbolized the "recovery" or "awakening" of the whole Greek nation. As the author explains, "analyzing the competing priorities and allegiances with regards to civic architecture we can literally observe the building of a nation reflected in the building of its institutions." [p 148]. In exploring these issues she discusses the often conflicting ideas of "becoming European" while searching for "Greekness". One of the ways that architecture and urbanism contributed to the formation of a new national character was by verifying the distance Greece had moved away from the "East" (and particularly the Ottoman past) by becoming all the more closer to an ideal or idealized "West" (Europe). Bastéa demonstrates the ways that architecture and urban planning became essential tools for the creation of an often fragile sense of national identity and served as symbols of national rebirth.

In the first chapters, Bastéa guides us through the complex political and diplomatic map of modern Greece while also giving us a sense of the changes that were taking place within Greek culture and society. Her succinct and comprehensive outline of the major historical events is extremely successful in conveying the main issues that ultimately became the background to urban developments. Thus, we learn about the tensions between the Greeks and the Bavarians who held key positions in the government in the first years of Otto's reign. She also discusses the "Great Idea" or Greece's dreams of enlarging its territory to the boundaries of the what had been the Byzantine Empire. One objective of this plan was to re-Hellenize Istanbul (Constantinople or "The City"), the Empire's capital and seat of the Orthodox Patriarchite. More directly connected to urbanization were the major public works initiated by visionary Prime Minister Charilaos Trikoupis. His modernization program included building roads, railway lines, harbors, bridges and the opening of the Corinth Canal. Much of this infrastructure was constructed in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Bastéa writes: "Planning came to signify national progress. In fact new buildings and streets were often the only bright spots in the horizon --visible markers of progress and success [...] And [...] the government initiated and controlled space, just as it controlled the development of the Greek language, history and religion." (p 43).

Yet, this nation building project was not without its conflicts and
contradictions. Bastéa's study is made more compelling by her exploration of these. Greeks felt they had to make a leap "from barbarity to civilization." This leap and the corresponding desire to be identified with the West, was "never monolithic and uncontested". The author notes that "many of the leading Greek intellectuals, while usually trained in the West themselves, cautioned against an indiscriminate and wholesale imitation of the West; while "the Bavarians were criticized for assuming Greece to be a tabula rasa." (p 39). The author often interjects her text with lively and evocative fragments from the contemporary Athenian press. In fact, she uses the press as a key method of analysis by noting the ways in which private citizens voiced their criticism and even resistance to the official nation-building efforts. For instance, she mentions the slightly ironic comment from the Athenian newspaper "Aion" of 1858: "We have no ships, no army, no roads, but soon we will have an Academy. Turkey, beware!" [p 160]. This particular comment is indicative of the symbolic power of the neoclassical architecture of the Academy building by Theophile Hansen, as a marker of Greece's "progress" and to a so-called return to her own past.

Fig 2: Back cover image: P. Mathiopoulos, "University Avenue, 1900". Photo Courtesy of the Athenian Club, Athens. Used with permission from Cambridge University Press.

Athens was chosen as the capital city in a bold move that directly connected the new Greece to its ancient past. Although the 1821-27 War of Independence had ended four hundred years of Ottoman rule, the Greeks of the nineteenth century were left without a strong sense of national identity. The years of Ottoman oppression had disconnected the nineteenth century Greeks from their ancient roots. Evidence of this condition was found in the condition of early nineteenth century Athens, a decrepit town of ruins. Although to us Athens may seem like the most appropriate site, it was not everyone's first choice for a capital. In 1835 the newspaper Athena lamented: "To tell the truth, the seat of the Greek state does not at all differ from an African or a Turkish city." (P 11) That Athens was eventually chosen as the capital may be indicative of both European political influence and the conceptual power of the romantic movement of "philhellenism."¹ On the advice of his father King Ludwig I of Bavaria, the young Prince Frederick Otto of Wittelsbach was crowned the first King of the Hellenes in Athens in December 1834. He immediately began to turn the small provincial city of 6,000 inhabitants into a new and glorious capital. He wanted to see its classical past reborn or "revived" along with the birth of the new state.

Thus, a sense of national pride was awakened by the creation of the first "neoclassical" public buildings (Royal Palace, Academy, National Library, University, Archaeological Museum, the Arsakion School) that appeared in Athens soon after Otto's ascent to the throne. The issue of neoclassical architecture as it was introduced by the Germans or German- educated architects during the early years of the Greek state was an ideologically loaded one. Bastéa does not fully explore the strange conceptual back and forth between German and Greek culture as it was expressed through the medium of architecture. She concentrates instead on providing much needed but primarily descriptive analysis of the main projects and protagonists of the development of modern Athens.

Another approach would have paid more attention to the processes of identification and desire not only on the part of the Greeks towards the "Europeans" but also of the Europeans, particularly the Germans, to be identified culturally with classical Greece. Whereas Greece had been physically colonized by a mighty Eastern empire, in the nineteenth century the Europeans were colonizing the memory of classical Greece. This sentiment was succinctly expressed by Wilhelm von Humboldt, Prussian patron of the arts, philologist and politician, when he proclaimed: "in the Greeks alone we find the ideal of that which we ourselves should like to be and produce [...] They move us not with compulsion to be more like them but with inspiration to be more ourselves"². In turn, during the early years of the Greek state, Greek architects and patrons were only too happy to uncritically accept a European interpretation of classical Greece as their own rightful heritage. Therefore, it is somewhat disappointing that Bastéa does not introduce the concept of colonial studies.

Bastéa gives a valuable and richly documented account of public life and monuments and their role in the establishment of Greek national identity. But her book would have greatly benefited from a larger contextualization of the Greek examples. For instance, why does Bastéa propose in her study of "Modern Athens" that "the broader questions of modernity and modernism fall largely outside the territory of this study"? [P 188] Perhaps this is due to lack of space. In addition, there are several new works of literature, politics and psychoanalysis that focus particularly on Greece and explore questions of cultural identity. This attests to the richness of this field as a topic of investigation and some of these could have enriched Bastea's more specifically architectural study. Two that cover similar ground with very different emphases are Artemis Leontis' Topographies of Hellenism. Mapping the Homeland (1995) and Stathis Gourgouris' Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization and the Institution of Modern Greece (1996).

Still, "The Creation of Modern Athens: Planning The Myth" is a truly insightful work. It is also a necessary book for any scholar of modern Greece and nineteenth century European architecture and urbanism. Bastéa's well-documented study is a significant contribution to the still underesearched topic of the architectural culture of modern Greece.

Notes:

1. While this term was first used by Herodotus to characterize King Amasin of Egypt who was friendly to the Greeks, it took on a more specific meaning during the 18th century. The "love towards Greeks or Greece" by the Europeans had to do with supporting the cause of Greek independence based on various motives but mainly upon an admiration of ancient Greek culture which inspired a positive and popular approval and support to the Greek cause in Europe. Among famous European Philhellenes were Lord Byron, Goethe, Shelley, Pushkin and Delacroix.

2. Wilhelm von Humboldt in Geschichte des Verfalls und Unterganges der griechischen Freistaaten, 1807, as cited in Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization and the Institution of Modern Greece, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996, p. 123.