Dimitris Tziovas is Professor of Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham. He has served as Director of the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham and as Secretary of the European Association of Modern Greek Studies. He is the author of The Other Self: Selfhood and Society in Modern Greek Fiction (2003) and editor of Re-imagining the Past: Antiquity and Modern Greek Culture (2014).
At last a book in English on the Greek crisis that goes beyond the narrowly economic. These chapters conjure up recent Greek experience reflected in the country's music, street art, fiction, museums, rural life and many other aspects.
Professor Robert Holland, Centre for Hellenic Studies, King's College London
Ever since Greece was engulfed by financial crisis in 2010, the country has been a test-bed for the viability of European political and financial institutions. This book is a must-read for anyone seeking to get behind the headlines and understand the dynamics of living with unprecedented austerity and the extraordinary range of creative strategies evolved during a blighted decade to cope and perhaps overcome the worst of the effects. The expertise of contributors ranges across a broad crosssection of culture, from history and archaeology to street art and responses on social media. The chapters that make up this book show how the effects of seven years of austerity have seeped into every aspect of the lives of Greeks, with effects that cannot be fully predicted but may well be irreversible. At the same time they offer timely and fascinating intimations of both warning and hope for all of us, worldwide, whose lives continue to be affected by fall-out from the global crash of 2008.
Roderick Beaton, Koraes Professor of Modern Greek & Byzantine History, Language and Literature, King's College London
Our preference for economic thinking has undervalued the role of culture as an agent of change. This is certainly true in Greece where the crisis of the past decade has been perceived primarily as an economic phenomenon. Greece in Crisis positions itself against this tendency in scholarship. Constituting the first volume to study the cultural dimensions of the current crisis, it brings attention to questions of identity, literary production, film, street art, diaspora, brain drain and archaeology. In trying to integrate culture and the economy, the authors of these essays show that we cannot understand the one without the other.
Gregory Jusdanis, Humanities Distinguished Professor, Ohio State University
GREECE IN
CRISIS
The Cultural Politics of Austerity
Edited by
D IMITRIS T ZIOVAS
Published in 2017 by
I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd
London New York
www.ibtauris.com
Copyright Editorial Selection Dimitris Tziovas
Copyright Individual Chapters 2017 Yiorgos Anagnostou, Patricia Felisa Barbeito, Maria Boletsi, Andromache Gazi, Dionysis Goutsos, Ourania Hatzidaki, Lois Labrianidis, Katerina Levidou, Lydia Papadimitriou, Dimitris Plantzos, Manolis Pratsinakis, Julia Tulke, Dimitris Tziovas, Trine Stauning Willert
The right of Dimitris Tziovas to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted by the editor in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions.
References to websites were correct at the time of writing.
International Library of Historical Studies 108
ISBN: 978 1 78453 845 3
eISBN: 978 1 78672 252 2
ePDF: 978 1 78673 252 1
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available
The chapters in this volume were commissioned or delivered at a workshop held in May 2015 at the University of Birmingham as part of a research network project sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) on The cultural politics of the Greek crisis [grant number AH/L01498X/1].
CONTENTS
Dimitris Tziovas
Dimitris Tziovas
Dimitris Plantzos
Lois Labrianidis and Manolis Pratsinakis
Yiorgos Anagnostou
Lydia Papadimitriou
Andromache Gazi
Katerina Levidou
Julia Tulke
Trine Stauning Willert
Patricia Felisa Barbeito
Maria Boletsi
Dionysis Goutsos and Ourania Hatzidaki
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Figures
Illustration by Robert Venables (The Economist, 4 February 2010)
Illustration by Robert Venables (The Economist, 4 February 2010)
The National Technical University (Athens Polytechnic)
I wish you could learn something useful from the past. Paste-up by Dimitris Taxis in Kerameikos, Athens
Early days of the Amphipolis dig in August 2014
The feet of one of the Amphipolis Caryatids as featured in a government press release upon their discovery
Ilias Makris, Untitled. Kathimerini, 29 January 2016
The Amphipolis tomb occupant as imagined by the Greek press in 2014
The Academy of Athens covered in political slogans, 2013
Nein [No], mural by the artist N-grams in the vicinity of the campus of the Athens School of Fine Arts, 2015
Paste-up by Dimitris Taxis in Kerameikos, 2013
Loser, mural by artist Achilles in Kerameikos, 2015
Welcome to the Civilization of Fear, mural by Sidron and NDA in Omonia
Version of the wall-writing vasanizomai in Stadiou Street, Athens, 2014
Version of the wall-writing lathos in Kerameikos/Gkazi, Athens, 2013
Charts
Unemployment levels in Greece by educational attainment
Percentage of postgraduate emigrants by decade of emigration
Annual numbers of museum visitors, 20082015
Visitors to archaeological museums (excl. Acropolis museum), 20082015
Non-resident arrivals in Greece, 20082015
Tables
Overall box office takings in Greece
Comparison between overall admissions and Greek film admissions
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Yiorgos Anagnostou is Professor in the Modern Greek Programme at The Ohio State University. His research interests include Greek transnational studies and American ethnic studies, with an emphasis on Greek America. He has published in a range of scholarly journals and is the author of Contours of White Ethnicity: Popular Ethnography and the Making of Usable Pasts in Greek America (2009, forthcoming in Greek). He has published two poetry collections, (2012) and
