My Images of SEE – 15:34, Tue 9th August

Our last day in Thessaloniki today, so we packed up and left our quaint hotel room for the last time. The hotel kindly kept our bags for us until later. We set off walking in the mild heat towards the White Tower, going via backstreets to keep in the shade. We decided to stop in Starbucks for an hour to pass time and read. Even Starbucks wasn’t a no-go area for the street sellers.

At 12:00 we departed for the Museum of Byzantine History, near to the Archeological Museum and adjacent to City Hall. For €4 apiece we wondered around a well laid out exhibition and architecturally easy to walk building. We saw paintings, mosaics, coins, tombs, photo’s of digs, kitchenware etc. All very interesting. It had a definite ‘Macedonian’ edge to it as opposed to a ‘Greek’ theme.

We left just after 13:00 and walked back to the White Tower. Local police were still monitoring the area in anticipation of a repeat of recent protests. We walked along the front to a small café and ordered food. One thing I noticed more and more was the Greek passion for smoking. Everywhere we were, people lit up. A filthy habit. The waiter apologized as the oven failed to start, so my pizza was late. Liam’s Greek Salad looked lovely.

We then left. I was convinced I saw a ‘Spar’ shop, so we walked the length of the shopping street, past the Ladidika area. I must have been mistaken, as there was no shop. So we meandered back to Aristotle Square, then up to the park further up the hill for the last hour before picking up our luggage.

My current thoughts on my visit to the Byzantine Museum, and the observation of the ‘Macedonian’ presentation of history on show, continues my observations made in a previous post – that of nation building in the new state of Greece, and nationalism as a goal and process.

To put the first idea of nation building in context, the modern interest in Greece began around 200-300 years ago, and revolved around the West’s rediscovered fascination with Hellenism. This connected Ancient Greek writers, philosophy, architecture, etc, to the present and was dubbed Philhellenism. This developing sense of common Greekness allowed the disparate populations to become even more strongly identified as Greek across the Ottoman Empire and claim almost 2,000 years of common descent. The Orthodox Church acted as the strongest pillar of unity via the millet system at the time. However, only a small grouping pursued this idea. Indeed the first hope of a Greek state was actually in the Ottoman vassal Danubian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. The Phanariots – Greeks who lived in a quarter of Constantinople and exercised great power in the Ottoman administration – ruled here and were seen as harbourers of Greek culture. An initial revolt there, soon suppressed, led to the uprising surfacing in the area now occupied in contemporary southern Greece.

Concepts of time and space shifted to allow for the perennial linking of modern Greeks to the Ancients and for the disparate groups to sense their commonality even over distances. Whilst not disputing that culturally similar tribes of Greeks existed prior to modernity, the fact is that only by a small group being able to (re)invent and communicate a national Greek narrative could people gain a sense of belonging to similarly defined peoples across space and time. But only the tools that states possess could accelerate these processes to ‘awaken’ those not already so. Education, a bureaucracy, the ability to communicate swiftly, all lent themselves to expanding the notion of a Greek national identity. But I’m getting ahead of myself as this is nationalism as a process.

Nationalism as a goal, according to Eric Hobsbawm, seeks to make the nation and the state congruent. And social constructivist authors, like Hobsbawm, all agree on the order in which this occurs. “Nations do not make states and nationalisms but the other way around”. So in the 1830s a Greek state was established not by a mass uprising of all Greek nationals, but by small segments of the population possessing nationalism as an ideal to achieve a national state for Greeks, as they saw them in their definition of what it meant to be Greek.

Yet by the 1830s, they had their state but it was in no way homogenous or national. The reality on the ground shows the folly in such nationalising and homogenising projects led by Greek nationalists – Greece at present still has Albanian, Turkish, Bulgarian and Macedonian minorities, however they are recorded or treated. Prior to World War Two it was in effect a multinational state. Thus nationalism as a goal, taken up by Greek nationalists, sought to create a homogenous Greek nation-state. But only by possessing a state could homogenisation take place.

Going back to the concept of time, opens up another observation. The link to Ancient Greek was only one era of history the Greek nationalists drew on. Many eras and empires existed between these two snapshots in time: Roman, Byzantine, Macedonian, and Ottoman. E. H Carr’s quote, that millions have crossed the Rubicon but it was Julius Caesar’s crossing that history documents, highlights’ the selective nature of historians (and through them nationalists) to mould their national narrative. This selectivity, by different people for different purposes, results in differing interpretations or frames which one can present a version of history by highlighting certain events or eras (or avoiding events and eras altogether). One example is Greek nationalists erasing Greece’s Ottoman past, as evidenced in Thessaloniki mentioned previously, as it did not fit their national narrative.

Conversely, at the start and end of the 20^th century, Greece laid claim to a Macedonian past centred on the ancient Kingdom of Macedon. However the Republic of Macedonia also laid claim to this. So we have a resulting conflict by two nations over one period of history in time and space (territory), both of which are seeking it solely for themselves. The recent Greek reasoning stems less from their historical claim to this heritage (which does play its part), and more from the desire to deprive the Republic of Macedonia of it as they see them utilizing it for territorial claims upon Greece. This dispute is still present today with the withholding of NATO membership and

EU accession talks.

I will discuss further the issue of disputed claims to history later on in this blog, but I wanted to give a flavour of how museums, whether archaeological, historical, national or even city focussed, all have a function in providing a narrative. More often than not it is presenting the national narrative of the state within which the museum resides.