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  5. Volume 10, Issue 1, 2024

Journal of Greek Media & Culture - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2024

Volume 10, Issue 1

Volume 10, Issue 1, 2024

Language: English
  • Articles

      • ‘Greek Gypsies’, Greek dress and a blockade in the 1886 British press

        https://doi.org/10.1386/jgmc_00085_1

        Ninety-nine Roma from the periphery of Europe arrived in Britain in July 1886. They were called the ‘Greek Gypsies’ in the contemporary press and hailed from all parts of Greece and European Turkey, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania and the Asia Minor coast, at a time when Europe was under a ‘Balkan crisis’. The ‘Greek’ epithet affixed to the foreign travellers in the 1886 British press was effectively an umbrella term for the ‘Graeco-Turkish corner of Europe’. It also associated a transnational group with Greece, a single, defiant nation over which the Powers had already asserted their dominance with a naval blockade in the spring of 1886. This article explores the political climate of 1886 in regards to Greece, the narrative of the ‘Greek Gypsies’ in the British press and the depiction of modern Greeks in the same year to show that, like the ‘Gypsies’, the Greeks physically and culturally represented at the time an Other both familiar, exotic and a supposed threat to Europe’s stability that Victorian Britain could not accommodate.

    • The archaeologist king: Paul of Greece and Greek heritage tourism (1952–54)

      https://doi.org/10.1386/jgmc_00086_1

      During the early post-war period, American economic intervention in Greece played a central role in transforming the country’s classical past into a modern tourist asset. As a result, Greek institutions and investors used ancient monuments to create the necessary infrastructure for the emerging tourist movement. The Greek monarchy actively participated in this modernization process by engaging in cultural experiences, which aimed to transform Greek heritage into a desirable tourist product for the western camp during the Cold War period. The Greek monarchy was at the centre of this sociocultural development engaging with the nationalist reflexes of Greek society. By embracing the discourse of (‘national mindedness’), King Paul of Greece (1947–64) and Queen Frederica provided royal sanction for the nationalist uses of classical antiquities and Greece as a that could offer an exceptional experience to visitors. To strengthen these assertions, Paul assumed the role of the archaeologist and tour guide, showcasing the cosmopolitan allure Greek antiquities radiated and presenting Greece as a fashionable and appealing tourist destination. This article argues that the Greek monarchs’ intervention in the archaeological excavations at Mycenae (1952), as well as the royal cruise around Greek islands and monuments (1954) reflected the sociopolitical developments of the period and the monarchs’ engagement with the country’s cultural affairs.

    • Revisiting literary magazines through typographic aesthetics: The case of (1986–2012)

      https://doi.org/10.1386/jgmc_00087_1

      This article is concerned with the twofold identity of the literary magazine: as a material object, endowed with specific visual and tactile characteristics, and as a textual medium, active in the intellectual sphere. Moving beyond the traditional dichotomy between form and content and following a phenomenological approach, I examine the literary magazine as a multi-layered structure whose visual features (illustration, binding, vignettes and margins) work along its seemingly invisible aspects (form and content of text). I focus on magazine (1986–2012) and employing the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I attempt to conceive the literary magazine as a living body, an expressive space capable of accommodating divergent experiences and meanings. Inquiring into the typographic aesthetics of the literary magazine, I also probe the boundaries separating discourse and image, and query their supposed autonomy.

    • Athens as socio-material enactments: Experiencing the city through an art walk

      https://doi.org/10.1386/jgmc_00089_1

      In this article, I expand on the characterization of the city of Athens as a palimpsest. I embark on an analysis of the kaleidoscopic dynamics of the Greek capital, where contradictory elements can be traced. I draw on my ethnographic work on artistic practices in Athens to work towards a conceptualization of the city as multiple precarious enactments emerging simultaneously. As a way into this analysis, I follow an artistic guided walk, performed by the artist Aris Papadopoulos before an audience in the summer of 2020, throughout central parts of Athens. By describing scenes from this art walk, incoherencies emerge that, as I will argue, point to interfering and overlapping enactments of the same city. I adopt a science and technology studies approach to analyse how varying practices interweave into specific enactments. It is hoped that this approach can help us understand that no singular (and therefore reductive) representation of Athens is being sustained or promoted. Instead, it allows for inconsistencies and heterogeneous elements to come out and for silenced voices to be heard.

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