The translation is available (March 14th, 2025)

Places

And Hellenicity……

“Hellenicity / Greekness denotes our radical imagination which, through the experiences and education of the people, acquires a historical and social character. It does not express identity – who we are and what we do – but rather social and national self-awareness regarding our desires, needs and possibilities of emancipation from obscurantist prejudices, strengthening agency regarding the orientation and perspective of a sustainable future.” Αλεξάνδρα Δεληγιώργη / Alexandra Deligiorgi

“The historical self-awareness that the concept of Hellenicity reflects arises from our relationship with the multifaceted tradition of a centuries-old history, and this necessitates a complex and holistic approach.” Alexandra Deligiorgi

In today’s post there are two new drawings of places in Greece and elsewhere, and a short reference to Alexandra Deligiorgi’s very dense, demanding and interesting book, MODERN MIRRORS OF HELLENICITY: Ideologies and Narratives in the 20th century.

The complex and difficult debate about Hellenicity / Greekness began many centuries ago, was systematized in the mid-19th century, intensified with the generation of the 1930s, and continues to one degree or another to this day. Greekness is a dynamic phenomenon within societies in motion, and as Deligiorgi states, it is a complex, difficult concept, not stable and unchanging over time, and dangerous if it gives rise to nationalist ideas and tribalisms. Georgios Seferis argued that it includes: “characteristics of true works that will have been done by Greeks”. Mikis Theodorakis defines the concept of Greekness as an intellectual achievement, as a code and attitude to life, as a form and tool of creativity, as a collective cultural consciousness, as a strong inner feeling deeply rooted in historical memory and national experience, consisting of a set of cultural values ​​that at their center contain the Greek language and thought, the Greek ethos, art and the anthropocentric values ​​of the Greek spirit. Others point out that one way to approach the term Greekness is to observe how it functions in various socio-political and cultural contexts and what communication needs it serves. At other times, the oversimplified presentation of issues of history, philosophy, literature and art leads to its uncritical acceptance or rejection.

But what do we ultimately mean by the term Greekness? Is it the characteristics of Greek life and culture, is it a feeling or self-awareness, Greek identity or some evidence of citizenship, or the elements that a writer or artist processes to give his work a Greek colour?

The term or concept of Greekness is understood or defined differently by different people and collectives, as they have different experiences and start from different ideological starting points. There is not only one identifying description that defines Greece. There are also the residents, non-residents and expatriates, first, second and third generations of the diaspora with Greek roots. Personally, I am interested in it as a question, as a phenomenon of exploration, as a lived experience in motion. My roots are Greek, but Greece is not my birthplace. I am the synthesis of two places, languages ​​and cultures. I have lived in the country since my first year of high school, half a century. I have traveled as much and as far as I could, to get to know its natural landscape, architecture, flavors, art, past and present.

Alexandra Deligiorgi [She studied philosophy at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and sociology/ethnology at the Sorbonne, is an emeritus professor of philosophy (A.U.Th.), has published essays, philosophical studies, novels and short stories, and has been honored with the State Essay Prize and the “Nikos Themelis” Prize.] wrote the book, MODERN MIRRORS OF HELLENICITY, over the course of a decade in a phase of crisis, which, as she herself states, its future outcome for our country was less visible than it is today. She tells us that she had to read a lot about the Hellenistic period, Byzantium, the Venetian rule, the Turkish rule, and the 19th century in order to be able to converse with the texts of our emblematic 20th century authors who pondered Greekness, a concept that implies the self-awareness of the nation/people as shaped by its living relationship with a centuries-old tradition, unique in extent, variety, and depth.

In her book, she adopts historical-critical approaches to examine texts by important figures, who marked the 20th century with their ideas [about Greekness] that were the fruit of the way they perceived the tradition of Hellenism and the degree of historical self-awareness that they acquired. Their ideas, products of their reflection on the destination of modern Greece, and reproduced unexamined and without being widely discussed, acquired an emblematic character for political-ideological reasons, shaping the ideological horizon of the 20th century.

In the preface, she writes that if concepts and categories of modern thought had been assimilated and understood in time, the risk of our socio-political set;back / regression would not have been so great. She notes that without reflection on ideas and methods that we have transformed into fixed values, it is not possible for the necessary new ideas and new formations to emerge in education, theory, critical theory, politics, and economics.

Deligiorgi states that in the suffocating climate of the new bankruptcy that began in 2010, the question began to loom about why we had been convinced that it made no sense to learn what the Greece of Nature, History, and Poetry was for Greek thinkers during the two centuries of its independence. A climate of complacency and self-satisfaction prevailed, especially after 1980, but for countries like Greece, our relationship with what we inherited from the centuries-old past and historical self-awareness are crucial issues and require a reassessment in multiple fields of Greek literature. The issue is complex as there is a centuries-old history as reflected in the texts of Greek or Hellenized historians, poets, philosophers and theorists, who have immortalized moments or periods of “a historical continuity pierced by discontinuities, ruptures or cuts”.

A complete analysis of all the components of Hellenicity is a difficult task, since it involves almost all the humanities from linguistics and cultural studies, to the criticism of ideological formations, history and the history of literature. The historical self-awareness that the concept of Greekness reflects arises from our relationship with the multifaceted tradition of a centuries-old history and this makes a complex and holistic approach necessary. The historical self-awareness of society depends on the conditions and the turn of events in the national and broader space-time of world history. The author explains that self-awareness is a stage of self-knowledge. Since, apart from the knowledge of the self and the singularity of the individuals and the peoples that they constitute, it also implies their self-awareness, their consciousness, that is, of their possibilities and limits in terms of shaping perceptions, attitudes, morals, behaviours and actions, within the framework of the national whole they constitute, and their interconnection with broader or narrower political formations [empires, global superpowers, federations or confederations of nation-states].

The self-awareness of a people, that is, the awareness of its future, Deligiorgi argues, is the awareness of its potential direction as a nation-state within the global historical movement. In times of crisis, the more powerless a people or nation is, the less it can choose its direction. When a country ignores the limits of its hetero-determination and its possibilities for self-determination, it is not easy to consider what its fate might be in phases of historical turning points that require its redesign. This results in “the exhaustion of the reserves of its future and the wish that it may not be dissolved, sometimes with prayers for the miracle and sometimes with praises of the miracle worker to whom it entrusts /assigns this.”

A difficulty in clarifying the relationship between tradition and historical self-awareness also stems from the fact that tradition, as well as self-perception, are perceived from different individual and collective perspectives, and furthermore, they are dynamic phenomena and not unchanging. When individual and collective subjectivity simply copies tradition without elaboration, it turns it into a lever of regression, and as a result prejudices, errors, entanglements and ignorance are perpetuated, from one generation to another, without enriching, renewing and reshaping the inherited.

The author also describes how when the past becomes a kind of fossil, it becomes the alibi for historical amnesia and undermines the process of individual and collective self-awareness and agency. She argues that this practice of dehistoricizing time has legitimized the degradation and marginalization of humanities studies, from 1970 onwards, facilitating the transformation of education [παιδεία] into training, and the learning process into vocational training programs.

However, without self-awareness and the reflection it requires, we cannot move to a different reality than the one we live in now, in conditions of surveillance and risk of the country of debt that we have become, and which ultimately condenses the experience of post-war, post-civil war, post-dictatorship and memorandum Greece. Apathy, nihilistic and cynical individualism, as well as confusion about what we are and what we want to become, make it difficult to manage issues of national sovereignty, economy, education, etc.

Deligiorgi also points out that, with few exceptions, the emphasis usually falls on one aspect of our tradition or its opposite, giving rise to the formation of ideological and political positions incompatible with the long history of our Hellenic Eastern and Hellenic Western tradition up to the present day, in the phase of globalization and revisionism. For example, ideas such as: “Greater” or “New” Greece, historical continuity or discontinuity, Hellenic centrism or cosmopolitanism, West or East, Orthodoxy or secularization, scholar or folk tradition…. have been consolidated and transformed into entangled ideologies or cultural stereotypes, resulting in the contradictions being internalized as unbridgeable gaps, and thus, creating the ideological vacuum with which we move in the vortex of circumstances,  the international situation and the highly fluid alliances.” Regarding the conflict between indigenous and heterochthones, Deligiorgi notes on page 50, “The new pseudo-dilemmas seemed to rekindle the conflict between heterochthones and indigenous that was caused by the hunt for positions to man the administrative mechanisms of the state, in the early years of its establishment…” However, there is also the path of dialectical synthesis of oppositions, contradictions and pseudo-schisms, such as, scholar and popular tradition, West and East, xenocentrism or xenophobia, indigenous or heterochthones, and other patterns of mutual exclusion.