PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies
Friday, May 4, 2018
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
Abstract
Political Refugees of the 1848-49 revolutions in the Kingdom of Greece: Migration, Nationalism and State-Formation in 19th Century Mediterranean
This paper investigates the arrival and stay of foreign political refugees of the 1848-49 revolutions in the Kingdom of Greece. Initially, it provides a new chapter to the transnational history of the "forty-eighters" across Europe and claims that the presence of numerous émigrés in the kingdom constituted the main impact of the European revolutions of 1848 in Greece. Furthermore, I examine political emigration in Greece in relation to broader questions concerning the nature of Greek nationalism and state-formation in the mid-19th century in a European context. Firstly, the paper revisits the romantic approach of the 19th century Mediterranean "liberal international" based on bonds of nationalist solidarity between Greeks and Italians. It thus wishes to provide a more nuanced view of the Greco-Italian relations in the period under discussion. The paper does so by showing that the refugees, who fled mostly from Italy in late 1849, did not find in Greece the long-term hospitality they anticipated. After a short halcyon period, the humanitarian crisis in the largest Greek cities (Athens, Patras, Syros) and the supposed radical political threat that the advent of the refugees triggered, pushed the Greek government to enact harsh policies against them. These measures ranged from shutting down Greece's borders to new political fugitives (1849/50); to deporting the most politicized émigrés (1852), whereas the Greek public sphere remained essentially unwilling to reverse this condition. Secondly, I argue that these counter-refugee policies contributed largely to a considerable expansion of state authority in 1850s Greece. This expansion regarded particularly stricter border controls, at least when it came to sea borders; and a renewed effort to tighten state control at an urban level and eventually secure the monopolization of violence. Such efforts constituted a direct continuation of the state-building project that the Bavarians had initiated in the 1830s. They can be even characterized as the Greek variation of the 'revolution in government' that several Western and Central European states experienced after 1848. Thirdly, bearing in mind that the exiles were always political refugees, the paper also discusses their persecutors as well, as an essential ingredient of the refugee cosmos. Thus I turn to the Great Power with the greatest interest of keeping track of the refugees, i.e. the Habsburg Empire and utilize Austrian diplomatic and political police reports from Greece to delve deeper into refugee world. To be exact, I am not only using these reports as a mere source of information, but I am attempting to uncover the basic principles and aims of the Austrian transnational intelligence system in Greece in the late 1840s and early 1850s.
Bio
Christos Aliprantis (1991) is a historian a modern Europe focusing on the history of the Habsburg Empire, Prussia and Greece from a transnational perspective in the long 19th century. He earned his BA in history and archaeology from the University of Athens (2013); an MA in Austrian history from the University of Vienna (2015) and an MA in comparative history from the Central European University in Budapest (2016). He is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge writing his dissertation on the international activity of the Austrian and Prussian secret police from 1848 to 1870 supervised by Prof. Christopher Clark. His academic interests, publications and conference presentations also concern the aftermath of Enlightened Absolutism on Austrian society and politics; migration across the Mediterranean; as well as political and scientific exchanges between Central Europe and Greece in the long 19th century.
Abstract
Greece and Spain belong to the so-called «third wave of democratization», which began with the Portuguese Carnation Revolution
in April 1974. Political scientists have had an enormous impact on the analysis of the processes of democratic transition and consolidation
of these two Mediterranean countries that took place almost during the same period, 1974-1981 for Greece and 1975-1982 for Spain, focusing
on their similarities and differences. Historians have started to investigate the Greek and Spanish case separately, in fact several scholars
working on the Spanish transition have produced very important studies. Nonetheless, the way that the regime change and the democratization
of Greece was perceived by Spain is yet not well known. The aim of this paper is to historically approach the way that the fall of the Greek
dictatorship and the begging of the Greek democratization has been perceived by Spain, using primary sources such as diplomatic documents and
reports of Spanish correspondents in Athens.
Furthermore, the way that the Spanish embassy and press interpreted the unexpected collapse of the Greek dictatorship and the first crucial
months of the establishment of the Third Hellenic Republic, which took place a year before the death of Franco and the beginning of the
Spanish democratic transition, is examined thoroughly. More specifically, emphasis is laid on the return of the exiled conservative leader
Konstantinos Karamanlis on the night of 23th to 24th of July 1974, on the first democratic elections next November and finally, on the
abolishment of the Monarchy after the referendum celebrated in December 8th of the same year. For this paper, archival material of the
Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, newspapers and journals will be used. For instance, documentation from the Spanish embassy in Athens,
which include the confidential reposts of the Spanish ambassador to the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the francoist regime, as well as a
selection of Spanish newspapers (the conservative and pro-monarchist ABC and the pro-European La Vanguardia española) and journals
(the liberal and pro-European Cambio 16 and the journal Triunfo of left-marxist tendency) that represent the different options of the
political spectrum, will be studied.
Bio
Sethelos Isidoros Balios is a PhD candidate in Contemporary History at the Complutense University of Madrid. He received his BA in Political Science and History from the Panteion University of Athens and his Master in Contemporary History from the Complutense University of Madrid and the Autonomous University of Madrid. In his dissertation he examines the process of democratization in Greece and Spain from a comparative perceptive, the socialist parties and the relations between the Greek and Spanish governments during the negotiations for accession to the European Economic Community (1974-1985).
Abstract
Football Clubs, Social Changes and Political Disputes in Interwar Greece
During the interwar period, Greek society was swept by a series of demographic, political, economic and cultural changes. In the field of culture and society, technological innovations and modern trends of entertainment, lifestyle and customs emerged in the Greek urban space. Automobiles and the radio appeared, while in Athens theaters, nightclubs, and the hippodrome opened for the first time. However, despite these developments and the emergence of consumerism, which mainly concerned the upper social classes, there were large numbers of people living under conditions of extreme poverty and social exclusion, mainly because of the arrival in Greece of hundreds of thousands of refugees after the so called Asia Minor Catastrophe (1922). The social and economic inequalities often fueled political tensions, which were usually expressed through repeated electoral confrontations and the imposition of military regimes. This paper researches the impact that all these social changes and political tensions had on Greek football clubs, during the interwar period. Previously, the establishment of the first sports clubs in Greece was associated with the rise of the middle classes, whose members carried liberal perceptions and a new code of conduct (Koulouri 1997). Sports are placed in the "civilizing process", while the process of "sportization" was only possible in societies where political differences were resolved by non-violent means and where groups of citizens obeyed common acceptable rules (Elias & Dunning 1998). In this sense, football is not just a physical activity, but a social process (Holt 1990). In the case of Greece, the arrival of refugee populations and the rapid urbanization resulted in the popularization of sports. Throughout Greece, hundreds of sports clubs were founded, which mainly cultivated the new 'craze' of football (soccer). New collectivities were forged in the neighborhoods of the cities, and a new football culture was cultivated, which was fed by interwar identities that often appeared as opposing couples and interacted with each other: native-refugee, people from Athens - people from Piraeus, middle class-worker and so on. In the stadiums, along with the new folk heroes, the new phenomena of fanaticism and violence were born. The key questions raised in this paper concern the relationship between football and Greek society in the interwar period: was football a sport through which the urban masses were expressed? How did the interwar football clubs express the social and political identities of their members? Is the emergence of violence and fanaticism in football related to the outbreak of violence and political fanaticism in interwar Greek society? The research methodology draws on social and cultural history in order to understand the phenomenon of voluntary association in sports clubs. The qualitative research and the documenting of the sports clubs that were founded and operated in Greece during the period from 1922 to 1940 was carried out in archives of sports clubs, federations and sports organizations, the sports press of the time and in the archives of the Courts of First Instance of Greece.
BioAndreas Baltas is a graduate of Physical Education and Sports Science, as well as a graduate of Political Science and Public Administration of Athens University. He also holds a Master's Degree in Organization and Management of Sports Institutions and Enterprises from the University of Peloponnese. At present, he is a PhD candidate in the department of Political Science and History at Panteio University of Political and Social Sciences. The subject of his thesis is: "Refugees' sports clubs in Greece during the interwar period 1922-1940". His main scientific interests concern the social history of Modern Greek sports, the history of the Greek Orthodox communities of Asia Minor and generally the policies of memory in Modern Greek society. Indicatively, two of his publications are: Greek sports in Smyrna 1890-1922, (Athens: Balta Publishing House, 2014, Second prize of the panhellenic competition of Hestia of Nea Smyrni for books about the Greeks of Asia Minor, 2017) and Karabourna of Erythrea in Asia Minor, (Athens: Balta Publishing House, 2010, third prize in the above mentioned competition, 2014). In 2014 he was awarded by AEK Football Club for his contribution to the publication of the book "90 Years, History of AEK".
Abstract
Grassroots Welfare: Administering Solidarity in Post-Debt Crisis Greece
Amidst a contentious history of state distributions, traditional forms of welfare have been interrupted in post-debt crisis Greece.
In this space, as people struggle to renegotiate rights and access to welfare, the meaning of citizenship is being rewritten through voluntary
initiatives.
Drawing upon eighteen months of fieldwork in a grassroots solidarity group in Athens, this paper examines what happens as the state
relinquishes welfare provision to volunteers, and the kind of moral subjects formed through voluntary acts of giving and receiving.
Attending to the ethnographic reality of such practices, it explores how the impetus to address poverty is transformed through the
process of administering it. If the overarching aim of the solidarity movement is to pursue social justice, in practice for my
informants what this meant was sorting through donations, folding piles of clothes, managing food stores, preparing food parcels,
organizing their allocation, and, by consequence, creating, checking and rechecking records. Political action was thus constituted
chiefly through mundane processes of collection, storage and distribution. For volunteers, these logistic stresses created a drive
towards order. At the same time, attempts to preserve collective resources in the face of incessant demands led them to rely on
increasingly austere conventions. In this manner, solidarity was subtly transformed as it became realized as a set of practical,
administrative structures.
My argument documents how efforts to ensure equal treatment through an impartial set of rules, in fact, devolved civic rights to a set of
audited needs. Rather than 'solidarity for all', administration became a way of bounding assistance, distinguishing those entitled to
help and those not. I also note how similar tensions emerged at a personal level, as individual volunteers invoked rules to insulate
themselves from the emotional demands made of them by those seeking assistance. In this way, a desire to re-personalize social relations
through solidarity, ironically, lead to disinterest and emotional apathy among volunteers. Finally, my paper reflects upon the power
which accrues to volunteers as arbitrators of welfare. Specifically, it explores how this power was rooted in their ability to define
their work as respectively ethical or mundane, as well as the ability to overlook their own rules and thereby elide moral dilemmas.
In turn, it dwells on the apparent contradiction that through their attempts to formalize solidarity, volunteers inadvertently reproduce
forms of bureaucratic discrimination similar to those they try to resist. Here, the dynamic between patronage and dependency as it relates
to allocative forms becomes clear, as part of a broader discussion on manners of giving, moral classes of person, and power in the
contemporary neoliberal moment.
Bio
Russell Henshaw is a DPhil candidate in Social Anthropology at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford, and holder of a Wolfson-Marriott ESRC scholarship. He also received his first degree at Oxford, B.A. Archaeology and Anthropology, and went on to study for an M.A. in Anthropological Research at the University of Manchester and a Diploma in Economics at the Open University (UK). His research addresses the moral complex of volunteering in the context of the ongoing liberalization of welfare states.
Abstract
The Artistic Potency of Toys or Toys qua Works of Art in Interwar Greece
Focusing on the case of Papastrateios Public School of Toys and Decorative Arts in interwar Athens (the only Toys' School in Greek history,
from which toy makers graduated), the paper explores the affinities between the discourse of the "Labour School" (Arbeitschule, L École active)
and the discourse on toys' design and construction. In particular, it intends to highlight the artistic potentiality of toys and their
potency as works of art.
The Papastrateios School, founded in the late 1920s by the League for Women's Rights in a neighborhood of Athens where refugees from Minor
Asia had settled, adopted a new approach to education. Students (boys and girls of the 12-18 years cohort, primary school graduates) were
taught in mixed classes, how to construct toys from wood, cloth, unbreakable paste, tin and paper. The school was based on two principles:
an emphasis on playing, as the joy of free movement, and labour as the expression of an autonomous will for the performance of a concrete
task. What is more, the teachers were local contemporary sculptors and painters or foreigners who had been invited to transfer Western
expertise on toy production or Greeks such as Spyros Vasileiou, Michail Tompros and Antonis Sohos who, by filtering ancient Greek and
Byzantine art, through Rodin, for example, produced "authentic" Modern Greek originals.
Drawing on the specific features of Papastrateios School, the paper explores the following questions: Given that art is characterized by a
type of freedom similar to that of playing and the free autonomous action, typical of artists, is transmitted to the apprentices both as a
method of work and as a mode of training and education, can we argue that the students' works are toys of an artistic nature? How does
children's imagination and creativity, in a non-Herbartian school, feed in and is fed by aesthetics? Do toys become instantiations of high
art and conduits of "paideia" ("Bildung")? Finally, can we claim that the School stopped producing artistic toys, or toys in general, and
moved to another direction (Papastrateios Public School of Apparel and Decoration) when, in the late 1930s, it abandoned the pedagogical
principles of the Labour School?
This presentation, which draws upon my dissertation, traces the trajectory of Greek toys that, so far, has received limited academic
historical treatment. Interdisciplinary in its approach the research uses tools provided by history, anthropology, art theory and
education to illuminate the Greek case and to integrate it in the fairly poor international literature. My research is based on primary
archival resources -primarily from the Papastrateios School-, which it combines with a number of other sources: paintings and sculptures
of the era, literary works of the "thirties" and the "twenties" "generation", the interwar puppet show and artifacts from museums and
exhibitions. Last but not least, it locates this analysis within the variegated debates about toys and art among intellectuals of the era.
Bio
Krystallia Markaki holds a BA in History and Archaeology (2006) from the School of Philosophy of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, an MA in Modern and Contemporary History (2015) from the Department of Political Science and History of the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences and is currently a PhD candidate in the same Department (Dissertation title: Playing with playthings during the interwar era-A transnational Greekness). Since 2016, her research is funded by the State Scholarships Foundation.
Abstract
A Greek Immigrant's Integration into the Parisian Art World during the Interwar Period: The Case of Tériade
Tériade (Efstratios Eleftheriadis, 1897-1983), a Greek from Mytilene, who arrived in Paris in 1917 and spent the rest of his
life there, is best known and appreciated as the publisher of the art journal Verve, a series of artists' books by famous painters,
such as Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall, and other luxurious publications (1937-1975). However, Tériade started his
career and made a name in the art press as an art critic. Between 1926 and 1936, he published over 400 articles, in which he
passionately defended modern art. These were published in numerous journals and newspapers in France, but also in Belgium, Germany,
Greece, Spain and Argentina. As co-editor of the arts section of L'Intransigeant, one of Paris's largest dailies, artistic director
of the journal Minotaure,
co-publisher of the 'little magazine' La bête noire and artistic consultant for the travel magazine Le voyage
en Grèce, he was able to further increase his leverage in the art world. By 1937 Tériade had accumulated the necessary symbolic and
relational capital in the art press milieu to establish his own publishing house, Verve, which was originally financed by the publisher
of Esquire, David Smart. Tériade's publishing activity has attracted some scholarly attention, but the early years of his career, his
writings which reflect the major debates on art in France of his time, his network(s), his mediating role for the promotion of modern art,
as well as his ambiguous relationship with Greece and Greek art, remain largely uninvestigated.
Combining art historical and sociological methodological interpretations of the art world, focusing on the conceptual tools of art networks
and art mediators, and utilizing unpublished archival material, this paper will problematize Tériade's integration into the Parisian art
milieu in the interwar period. More specifically, it will argue that, even though originally he was associated with the circle of Greek
intellectuals and artists in Montparnasse which enabled him to start working as an art critic in the reputable journal Cahiers d'art of
his fellow Greek Christian Zervos, Tériade soon chose to distance himself from them as he was becoming more integrated into the French
milieu and the major art networks of Paris. Furthermore, in his art critical texts he espoused the dominant French cultural discourse
arguing for the superiority of French art and its beneficial effect on foreign artists who lived in Paris. In his role as a mediator,
he exhibited minimal support for Modern Greek artists, even though he supported other non-French painters and sculptors. Instead, he
promoted the image of an atemporal, utopian Greece in the way that a French Philhellene would do, arguing that French art was heir to
the values of ancient Greek art. Overall, the paper will argue that the case of Tériade as an ambitious art mediator in interwar Paris
reveals the intricacies of identities and the complexities of integration into a foreign environment.
Bio
Poppy Sfakianaki is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the Department of History and Archaeology of the University of Crete. She holds a B.A. in History and Archaeology and an M.A. in Art History from the same University. During her M.A. studies she received scholarships from the Greek State's Scholarship Foundation (I.K.Y.) and the Institute for Mediterranean Studies/FO.R.T.H., while archival research for her dissertation in Paris was funded by The Panayotis and Effie Michelis Foundation. Her dissertation, under the supervision of Professor Evgenios Matthiopoulos, examines the mediating activity of Tériade (Efstratios Eleftheriadis, 1897-1983) as an art critic and publisher who defended modern art in the Parisian art world. Through his case she highlights the importance of mediators as well as of networks of artists, critics, publishers, dealers and collectors in art production and diffusion, and the complex matrix of interactions and interdependencies among actors of the art world on the basis of aesthetic principles and issues of financial and social recognition. She has given papers in international conferences and has published articles on Tériade and the French art press of the twentieth century. Currently she works as a research assistant at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies/FO.R.T.H.
Last updated 4/6/2017