jgmc 3 (1) pp.

3–29 Intellect Limited 2017

Journal of Greek Media & Culture

Volume 3 Number 1
© 2017 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jgmc.3.1.3_1

DIMITRIS PLANTZOS
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

Caryatids lost and regained:

Rebranding the classical body
in contemporary Greece

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article examines patterns of reception through which a particular type of classical culture
classical sculpture – the Caryatid – has been accepted into the cultural life of neoclassicism
contemporary Greece. Loved by neoclassical architecture, though also promi- cultural logoization
nent in Modern Greek design, as well as contemporary literature, the Caryatid postcolonial Greece
serves alongside a limited stock of other classical monuments as a logo for the kitsch
country and the Greeks at large, especially when referring to their relations with parody
their fellow Europeans. In contemporary Greek culture, Caryatids are deployed as
symbols of Greekness as well as a means to achieve the nation’s cultural emanci-
pation against the supremacy of western, globalized modernity. Often derided as
mere symptoms of colonial mimicry, through their inherent qualities of parody and
subversiveness, such uses may sometimes prove unexpectedly successful in under-
mining modernity and its templates.

‘O SISTER WHERE ART THOU’

Seven Greek women, dressed in what seemed to be ‘classical Hellenic’ attire,
crossed the streets of London on a sunny Saturday afternoon in June 2015, and
entered a rather unsuspecting British Museum (Figures 1 and 2; see, among

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 Dimitris Plantzos

1. See Yalouri (2001: 68–69,

146) for the survival of
this fable, and Gotsi
(2015) for a recent
overview of nineteenth-
and early twentieth-
century renderings of
the legend.

Figure 1:  Caryatids in London. ©Yiannis Katsaris.

other Greek media, Avgi 2014; Lifo 2014; To Vima 2014). Six of them were
dressed in white and made up so as to look like marble statues coming alive,
whereas the seventh, acting as their leader, was wearing a different, though
still antique-like garment, and was crowned with a laurel wreath. Upon enter-
ing the museum galleries, and after a staged ‘search’ for one of the statues on
display, the squad of revived statues hosted a ritual of sorts involving some
supposedly meaningful steps, gestures and gazes. The statue in question was,
predictably, Greece’s ‘lost daughter’, one of the six by now world-famous
Caryatids that once adorned the Erechtheion, an Ionic Athenian temple of
the later fifth century BC, erected on the Acropolis as the lavishly decorated
counterpart of a more austere Parthenon. Taken by Lord Elgin to England in
the beginning of the nineteenth century, alongside most of what was consid-
ered worthwhile among the sculptural embellishments of the Parthenon and
other significant buildings nearby, the marble maiden has emerged in Greek
popular imagination as an abducted sister, a Greek soul imprisoned in rainy
London, away from the life-giving, heart-warming Athenian sun (Hamilakis
2007: 279–80). As Greek folklore would have it, according to a nineteenth-
century tradition first recorded by Clarke (1814: 484) and later preserved by
Nikolaos Politis, ‘when they (that is: Elgin’s men) tried to extract the remaining
five from the monument, they heard them wailing in sadness, calling for their
sister’; and even when those efforts were abandoned, ‘many people, living
under the fortress (i.e. the Acropolis), kept hearing the marble maidens crying
in the night over the abduction of their sister’ (Politis 1994: 57).1 This is the
tradition the performance in the British Museum was trying to evoke in its
oddly stagey way: the six statues are the children of Greece who are begging
to be reunited. The six Greek women dressed in white (though, technically,
they ought to have been five) embody classical statuary in a way that by now
tends to become commonplace in contemporary Greek culture. And the
seventh woman, the internationally renowned soprano Sonia Theodoridou
who was credited with the original idea as well the artistic directorship of the

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 Caryatids lost and regained

2. A full photographic
account of the
event was originally
publicized by
Theodoridou and
Orfanidis (2014),
through a Facebook
account, which has
now been deleted.

3. Officially, the Greek

government first asked
for the restitution
of the ‘Parthenon’
marbles (in fact
however including
in its claim the
Erechtheion Caryatid
and other antiquities
from the Acropolis and
its environs taken by
Elgin) in 1982, when
Melina Merkouri, in her
capacity as Greece’s
Minister for Culture,
brought the matter
to the attention of
UNESCO. The campaign
has been pursued ever
Figure 2:  The lost sister. ©Sonia Theodoridou. since, with fluctuating
intensity and frequent
shifts in strategy.
whole enterprise, was presumably posing as ‘mother Greece’, anxious to bring
her long-lost child back home.2
The belief that classical statuary embodies the diachronic qualities of
Greekness, and thus that its modern revival regenerates Greece as a contem-
porary paragon of global culture – universally recognizable as well as locally
defined – has consistently fed such repatriation claims, and at the same time
has benefitted from them.3 The ‘exiled’, ‘imprisoned’ Caryatid stands, it would
seem, as a constant reminder of the West’s debt to Greece while voices for
its return seem to get louder in times such as the current recession, when
many in the West question the country’s commitment to modernity and its
values. ‘I was born in Greece; My sisters are there’ claims the British Museum
Caryatid in an international campaign designed and executed by photogra-
pher Ares Kalogeropoulos in 2012 (Kotseli 2012), to conclude: ‘I am Greek
and I want to go home’. Photographed alongside many more classical statues
(some of which were actually found in present-day Turkey), the Erechtheion
Caryatid is supposed to reclaim ‘her’ ethnicity, suggesting that the nation that
created ‘her’ is still alive (Figure 3). Hence, by accusing ‘the West’ of colonizing
Hellenic antiquity (some of the statues in the campaign appear ‘imprisoned’
behind bars), Kalogeropoulos wishes to claim new forms of centrality in the
world stage for his country: peripheral Greece thus attempts to provincialize
its colonists by claiming the moral (which in this case rhymes with ‘cultural’)
high ground. This is a concept I will be exploring below; in the meantime,
however, it is worth noting how such performative gestures toy with the
idea of statues acting as human beings. And although many Greeks, notably
poets, imagined themselves as modern Pygmalions already in mid-nineteenth
century (see Giannakopoulou 2007), in recent years this scheme has been
reversed: statues appear ‘always already’ alive, and hopefully able to revive a
long-dormant nation. Whereas in ancient Greece, as in many other antique
or premodern cultures, statues were invariably seen as totems imbued with

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 Dimitris Plantzos

4. A totem is a sacred
object endowed with
its own materiality,
which enables
communication
between the world
of the spirits and the
world of humans;
not human as such,
totems are recognized
by animistic religions
across the globe as
distributors of spiritual
power on the one hand
and human reverence
on the other, thus
forging a triangular
relation between man,
spirit and the mediator
between the two ­
(Lévi-Strauss 1962).

Figure 3:  I am Greek and I want to go home. ©Ares Kalogeropoulos Photography

& Arts.

their own agency (Gell 1998: 96–154),4 in Greek folklore and its many modern
and postmodern survivals and revivals, statues like the Caryatids are perceived
as people, enabled with the power of direct communication with their kin –
modern Greeks themselves. In that, I would argue that for the Greek national
imaginary, classical Caryatids and their offspring are cast as anthropic rather
than totemic ontologies, full-blooded, almost human creatures empowered by
their classical pedigree and at the same time empowering their not-so-distant
modern Greek descendants. This way, Pygmalion’s neoclassical poise seems
to have been replaced by a demonstrably neo-romantic attitude, which styles
itself as the revival of Greece’s premodern folklore.
Two recent Greek plays, both casting Caryatids reincarnated, make use
of the idea that reviving the nation’s past safeguards its future. In The Sixth
Caryatid by Antonis and Konstantinos Koufalis, premiered in Athens in 2012,
a Greek tourist guide, Eleni Voutira, is keeping guard at the New Acropolis
Museum where the five remaining Caryatids are now housed, waiting in
vain for the sixth sister to ‘come back home’. (The five statues were taken
off the monument in the 1970s when air pollution posed a direct threat
to their survival and since 2009 are to be seen in the lavish New Acropolis
Museum, where a space has been prominently left for the sixth statue, still
in London.) As her own home, a nineteenth-century neoclassical house, is
threatened with demolition, the play’s heroine reminisces over her own life
while contemplating the fate of her homeland. Agonizing on the ‘edge of
patriotism’ as the play’s press release stated (Elculture.gr 2012), the solitary
Greek woman relives moments from her life as a tourist guide, until her ‘faith
in the past and her roots will bring her face to face with a dystopic present
and threatening future, as well as collective memory and responsibility, as
reflected in the moon of Attica and the exceptional forms of the Caryatids’
(To Vima 2012). Playing with different modes of embodiment (the protago-
nist believes the sixth Caryatid to be alive and awaiting her return to Athens
while at the same time she is posing as an incarnation of the missing statue),
the play was promoted as ‘a farewell to a Greece disappearing forever’; in
that, it seems to be addressing its audience’s frustrations at a time of reces-
sion, when confidence in national culture seems waning. Imagined as the

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 Caryatids lost and regained

soul of the Greek Volk, the exiled statue is the subject of collective nostalgia as 5. This is also the case
with a number of
well as the agent of the nation’s resilience. children’s books where
Greece as a modern dystopia where uncultured tourists come to consume the Caryatids and their
classical culture among other commodities is the topic of Our Sister Lives ‘missing sister’ are cast
as the protagonists; for
in London, a 2011 play by Yiannis Souliotis (2011). There, the five remain- a discussion, see Gotsi
ing Caryatids are still at home on the Erechtheion, each sporting a different (2015).
character (the ‘Old’, the ‘Parvenue’, the ‘Intellectual’, the ‘Modern’, the ‘Petit-
bourgeois’), waiting to be transferred to the Museum (which they consider,
disdainfully, as their ‘retirement home’). Finally, the sixth Caryatid (the ‘Émigrée’)
appears, having forgotten her homeland and speaking broken Greek. Written as
a sarcastic comment on contemporary Greece, which the author believes has
abandoned its time-honoured traditions in favour of an ill-fitting modernity, the
play in fact fails to further any of its goals; it is however a useful reminder that
classical statuary is consistently enlisted as the embodiment of diachronic Greek
exception. As such, these repetitive narratives of lost sisters and missing daugh-
ters are targeting a national rather than an international audience.5
This would explain why, as publicity stands go, the British Museum
performance staged by Theodoridou did not prove particularly success-
ful. No one seemed to notice the comings and goings inside the Museum,
and although a further ritual involving more posturing all’antica, this time
however followed by generous helpings of Greek folk singing and dancing,
was also part of the proceedings that day, it was only the Greek media back
home that cast a thoroughly approving gaze to the initiative before it was
well and truly forgotten. London continued to turn a deaf ear, it would seem,
to the lament of the Greek maidens, though not for the reasons one might
have guessed (guilty conscience over Elgin’s past atrocity, for one, or blatant
cynicism, even, as an answer to an alleged Greek ploy to drain museums in
England in order to make Greek ones more attractive). In the heart of cosmo-
politan, aggressively globalized London, where multiculturalism seems to be
the name of the game, the Greek tears over a missing statue seemed out of
place: designed as a libation to national exception, cultural difference, and an
intellectual genealogy promoted as superior to all others, the Caryatid perfor-
mance fell flat on its face simply because it was playing with yesterday’s rules.
(As a matter of fact, while parading their antique selves through the British
Museum at a time when many foreign visitors felt free to stroll through the
galleries in their own dhotis, saris, chadors and kangas, these theatrically
costumed Greek maidens were neither the more exceptional nor the more
exotic presences there.)
I decided to begin my article with this by now long-forgotten incident,
not because I feel it merits particular attention, but because it illustrates
how certain gestures of embodying the antique have become stereotypical
in the way contemporary Greeks choose to represent themselves in relation
to a classical past they defiantly describe as their own. The establishment of
Greece as a modern nation state in the earlier half of the nineteenth century
has now been aptly described as a sort of colonization of the classical ideal in
order to exercise power over the current inhabitants of the land where Hellas
once had flourished (Panourgiá 2004; Hamilakis 2007: 57–123; Plantzos 2008).
Idealized by the western elites as their intellectual genealogy, Greek antiqui-
ties were eventually idolized by the Greeks themselves as their only tangible
link with their past, and treasured as the sole proof of their nation’s antiquity
(Hamilakis 2009: 25). Hence, the abduction of the so-called Elgin marbles was
seen as much more than mere theft of a valuable treasure while the nation

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 Dimitris Plantzos

6. An early example of was looking elsewhere; it became a parable for the West’s repeated injustices
this archaeopolitical
sensibility, also
towards Greece, a source of perennial frustration and deep national trauma
involving the British (cf. Hamilakis 2007: 243–86). The performances mentioned so far illustrate
Museum Caryatid, the extent to which classicism has been imposed as a cultural template upon
is the 1956 poem by
Kiki Dimoula, titled Modern Greek thinking about the past and – most crucially – the present.
British Museum (Elgin’s They draw from an intellectual history assuming their emancipatory qualities,
marbles); see Gotsi as well as the organic connection between the materiality of classical culture
(2016).
and present Greek realities.6
In turning, therefore, to a discussion of Caryatids lost and found in
contemporary Greek culture, we need to keep in mind that, thanks perhaps to
Lord Elgin, a Caryatid is not merely yet another Greek maiden. What has been
explored so far illustrates the uses of the type in contemporary Greek culture
as a symbol of Greekness (or, indeed, its logo), and more specifically as an
embodiment of those inherently Greek qualities that render classical culture
exclusively Hellenic.

THE ‘I’ OF GREECE

The performances discussed in the previous section make liberal use of a stock
of stereotypical metaphors so deeply embedded into contemporary Greek
culture as to have become an integral part of it. In many ways, such archaeo-
latric rituals present themselves as a necessary trope in contemporary Greek
intellectual life. In what follows I will be discussing a few key examples of
the use of the Caryatid as a symbol of Greece as well as a personification of
Greekness in order to investigate the cultural parameters of such use, as well
as the implicit ideologies they carry; furthermore, I will revisit some specific
examples where a particular tension is evident, this time between different
stakeholders of classical culture within Greece itself.
A classical Caryatid, covered in a surrealistic, electric-blue light and
fitted with bright white bulbs, was chosen as the star of Athens’ nineteenth
International Film Festival (Nihtes Premieras, ‘Opening Nights’) hosted in
September 2013 (Figure 4); a swarm of colourful butterflies was seen fluttering
about, in an otherwise barren landscape of brownish dirt, dotted with a single
cactus bush (Nihtes Premieras 2013; Consuming Greek Antiquity 2013). The
statue, blue paintjob and white bulbs notwithstanding, is immediately recog-
nizable as an exact copy of the Caryatids from the Erechtheion. Since classical
imagery has long now been used as a symbol of Athens or even Greece at
large, this particular poster does not seem to add a great deal to a persistent
tradition of such uses suggesting the direct links of modern Greece to what
is generally assumed to be its classical roots (see, in general, Plantzos 2008;
Hamilakis 2007: 1–25; Hamilakis and Yalouri 1996). The Athenian film-festival
poster, however, stands out as it makes a conscious effort to combine clas-
sical art with the soil that ostensibly created it – the earth of Attica with its
own exceptional beauty and significance – and at the same time with current
Athenian/Greek culture. In its effort to pay homage to both its hosting city
and its history, while at the same time trying to share some of its global fame,
the festival is thus attempting to establish a space and time continuum where
Greek modernity appears as the natural development of classical (pretty
much Greek, pretty much Athenian) antiquity. In this respect, the 2013 poster
adds yet another instance to an age-long usage of this particular motif, the
Athenian Caryatid, as a symbol of classical culture and its meaningful, though
quite eclectic ties to Modern Greece.

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 Caryatids lost and regained

Figure 4:  Opening Nights 2013. ©www.aiff.gr.

The Athens film-festival poster may easily be found guilty of what

Anderson (1991: 181–83) has called, since 1991, ‘the profaning processes’
through which the past, and its tangible remains, can be conquered, colonized
so to speak, in order to serve a modern state’s effort to create ‘alternative
legitimacies’ against the pervasive imagination of its colonists. Museumized
through archaeological purification, touristic exploitation, and an ever so
evocative nationalist rhetoric, cultural remains of a nation’s imagined past are
deployed as ‘logos’ of that nation’s current state of affairs; this kind of archae-
ology, Anderson continues, abetted by our age of mechanical reproduction, is
‘profoundly political’ though at such a deep level as to become ‘normal and
everyday’ (Anderson 1991: 183). Cultural logoization has proved extremely
useful when constructing national identities, as it may be deployed in order

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 Dimitris Plantzos

to link, irrevocably, a people with the soil it currently occupies through the
highly charged symbols provided by material culture, inevitably represented
as ‘national treasure’. As has been explained by Thai historian Thongchai
Winichakul ([1994] 1997: 128–39), this powerful mix of territorialism with a
certain ‘fetishism of nationhood’ has led to the emergence of what he calls
a nation’s ‘Geo-Body’, a natural entity that is, to which a nation’s subjects
are brought up to belong emotionally and spiritually, even if their biological
blueprint may tell us a different story.
Hence, no one seemed to mind in Athens back in September 2013, when
a piece of classical sculpture was appropriated in order to suggest Greekness –
in fact ‘Athenian-ness’: the marble statue, engendered as an Athenian maiden
in ceremonial procession, was perfectly acceptable, it seems, as the hostess of
the festival; she had any right to be there, as did we, modern Greeks albeit
of classical pedigree, the ones who although did not quite invent cinematog-
raphy as such, nevertheless provided the modern world with the name of its
seventh art, having of course created the other six in the first place. Referring
to the technology of filming, the Athenian Caryatid appears on the poster
as a negative image of itself: unconsciously, the designer creates a cultural
comment of much deeper than its intended significance, which I would like to
explore in what follows.
In the poster, the Caryatid stands as a representation of the Greek/
Athenian Geo-Body, a cultural-cum-natural topos where the nation’s poten-
tials and aspirations may be seen to converge: she is here because she is
distinguished, significant and globally accepted as ‘classical’, which is exactly
what the Athenian International Film Festival is hoping to become. A troop of
six revived Caryatids took part in the historical pageant that opened the 2004
Olympic Games in Athens, in a ceremony where Greek history – or rather its
artistic fingerprint – underwent a process of systematic logoization in order
to connect Modern Greece with its former glories despite its current predica-
ments (Plantzos 2008: 11–14, with Figures 1–4). That ceremony, directed and
choreographed by Dimitris Papaioannou, made a systematic use of highly
idealized classical iconography in order to perform a ritual re-enactment of
Greece’s past by way of reaffirming the country’s relevance as a modern nation
state. The 2004 ceremony may be seen, furthermore, as the precedent of Sonia
Theodoridou’s performance at the British Museum 10 years later, where
however the point was lost in the grossly stereotypical fashion in which the
stunt was designed and executed.
On the other hand, being a Caryatid is not exactly good news for a young
woman. According to our most coherent source on the type’s significance,
Roman architect Vitruvius writing in the first century BC, the Erechtheion
Caryatids stood for the enslaved maidens of the Peloponnesian town of
Karyai, near Sparta, who paid with their freedom their town’s siding with the
enemy during the Persian Wars (De architectura, 1.1.5). Caryatids, however,
were featured in Greek buildings long before that, and in all likelihood they
were yet another import from the Near East. A Caryatid in Greek architec-
ture appears as a nameless creature, lavishly dressed and bejewelled, though
sentenced to carry in perpetuity the roof of a building, which, in any case,
seems to be more important than she is. In Neoclassicism, however, a Caryatid
is empowered – despite its predicament of a life in slavery – by the very allure
of the Classical, by her enviable Graeco-Roman pedigree and her associations
with the Athenian Acropolis. Thus, Vasso Papandreou, Greece’s European
Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion between 1989

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 Caryatids lost and regained

and 1992, must have been flattered to be shown as a Caryatid to ‘Demokratia’

by the Times in 1989 (cf. Giotaki 2013), next to Margaret Thatcher, quite ironi-
cally, at the height of their formidable confrontation over the Social Charter,
introduced by Papandreou but rejected by Thatcher as a ‘socialist’ charter, only
to be signed by the United Kingdom under Tony Blair in 1997.
The Caryatids’ resurrection under Neoclassicism and the Greek revival
movement carried all the symbolisms of cultural appropriation and, in fact,
colonization. The twin Caryatid porches attached to the thoroughly neoclas-
sical Church of St Pancras in Central London (Figure 5), built by William and
Henry Inwood between 1819 and 1822, are particularly important as they
are among the first to have been inspired directly from the ruins of Athens
and not derived from the long tradition of the type’s post-classical and post-
antique reception. They stand as icons of a newly-found cultural genealogy

Figure 5:  London, St Pancras: the Caryatids. ©Author.

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 Dimitris Plantzos

for the British upper and middle classes; in a sense, they are meant to provide
the West with the intellectual, cultural and political ethos of Classical Greece
and Rome, an ethos pretty much invented by the western elites themselves.
Since the Inwoods had not yet set foot on the Acropolis at the time they were
designing St Pancras, they had to find their inspiration in the detailed archi-
tectural drawings produced by the Grand-Tourists of the time, such as James
Stuart and Nicholas Revett, who had visited Athens only a few years earlier,
with exactly that purpose in mind: to communicate the morphology of classi-
cal architecture as an arch-prototype for a new era (Stoneman 2010: 110–35;
Redford 2008: 44–82, with fig. 2.27).
This was a time when neoclassical forms are universally employed in
buildings associated with the regime – from palaces and houses of parliament
to courthouses, schools and banks. It seems that those magnificently adorned
temples of an emerging liberal democracy had to find themselves an iconic
precedent in order to promote their constituent ideology. Take the Caryatids
decorating, eight at a time, the north and south porches of the Austrian
Parliament Building in Vienna, built by Danish architect Theophil Edvard von
Hansen between 1874 and 1883 (Figure 6; see Cassimatis 2014). As a resident
in Athens since 1837, Hansen had studied classical and neoclassical architec-
ture in great depth and as a matter of fact by the time he was commissioned
to build the Austrian Parliament Building, he had already designed the Athens
Observatory (1842) and the Athens Academy (1856), and was about to do the
same with the National Library of Greece (1888). His Austrian Parliament
Building pays direct homage to the Erechtheion, whose northern portico is
quoting almost verbatim – something already seen in the Athens Academy.
The Caryatids on the side porches might therefore seem like an unneces-
sary digression had they not been included in a building directly associated
with the idea of political representation. This is, undoubtedly, a long moment
of shift in cultural vision among Europeans, a time when Graeco-Roman

Figure 6:  Vienna, the House of Parliament. ©Wikipedia Commons.

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 Caryatids lost and regained

antiquity seems to become directly relevant to the present. Those otherwise

antiquated images are able to generate a cultural discourse that inspires those
interested in political reform and the ultimate triumph of modernity.
Hansen’s double casting as both a European and a Greek architect (he
was one of the most prolific and most influential exponents of what has
now been termed ‘Athenian Neoclassicism’) suggests a crucial point in the
history of those iconic neoclassical forms, when they suddenly appear split in
themselves. Neoclassicism came to Greece pretty much as an afterthought,
and only after it had reached its maturity in Western Europe (Philippides
2007: 44–70; Biris and Kardamitsi-Adami 2001: 27–170). The choice to make
Athens the capital of the newly founded kingdom in 1834 was an act of
‘archaeology rather than politics’ as the French novelist, publicist and journal-
ist Edmond About was quick to point out at the time (quoted in Philippides
2007: 44). The new capital was imagined by Bavarian bureaucrats and the
architects they commissioned as an architectural heterotopia of revived clas-
sical orders (Bastéa 2000). Athens and Greece at large came to endorse the
new form precisely because it looked so old and, furthermore, appeared to be
‘normal and everyday’. Soon enough Greek architects and their patrons were
to accept Neoclassicism as a bona fide ‘Greek’, or rather ‘Hellenic’ architec-
tural mode, one that, besides its other uses, served as a continuous reminder
to the West of its cultural debt to Greece. (In this kind of discourse ‘Classical’
is taken to mean exclusively ‘Greek’.) Consequently, with Neoclassicism,
Greece is constructing an image for its own culture based on stereotypical
– in fact iconic – imageries created elsewhere in order to serve different agen-
das. See how in The Sixth Caryatid discussed in the first section of this arti-
cle the protagonist, presented as the reincarnation of the famous classical
statue, lives in a neoclassical house in danger of being demolished: in this
rather facile metaphor, Greece is presented as a physical entity unchanged
over the years, its classical/neoclassical identity being severely threatened by
the onslaught of modernity. Whereas it may be argued that the neoclassi-
cal model was created in order to contain Greek culture and represent it in
ways the West would find appropriate, convenient and easily translatable,
in Greece itself Neoclassicism has been seen as a weapon for the country’s
emancipation.
What I have just described is what Herzfeld (2002) has aptly called ‘crypto-
colonialism’ – the state of a nation’s nominal independence while under the
strict political and cultural influence and guidance of the West. As Herzfeld
notes, ‘crypto-colonies’ tend to adopt, as symbols of their own emancipation,
imageries and schemes that have in fact been forged by their colonists in order
to define and control them as colonies in the first place. Crypto-colonialism is
in many ways a form of what Homi Bhabha has described, referring to actual
colonies such as India, as ‘colonial mimicry’ (Bhabha 1994: 121–31): a desire to
emerge as ‘authentic’, as he put it, through a process of writing and repetition,
thus leading to ‘the final irony of partial representation’ (Bhabha 1994: 126).
Crypto-colonial mimicry, when referring to quasi-colonized lands such as
Greece or Thailand, undermines the authority of representation as it may be
seen to generate new, unexpected and unauthorized versions of the authentic,
albeit claiming their own authenticity through a process of constant rewriting.
Whereas, to return to our example, the Greek Revival colonizes Caryatids (who
started out as depictions of enslavement) as a way to construct a newly-imag-
ined cultural genealogy, the latter are reappropriated by Greek architecture in
the later nineteenth century, when they may be seen decorating aristocratic

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 Dimitris Plantzos

mansions, theatres, banks and hotels, not so much as a way to suggest their
owners’ affinity with Greek antiquity per se rather than as a proof of their
entitlement to that claim. As a result, cultural logoization completes its crypto-
colonial cycle: an architectural form that is reconstructed outside Greece is
endorsed by the local elites in search of those logos, which the West would be
ready to accept as culturally meaningful.
Such reversed images, resulting from this process of constant rewriting that
is inherent in cultural counter-colonization, act as agents of subversion, cultural
as well as political, in effect generating instances of parody, albeit quite unin-
tentional at that. Defined by theorist Hutcheon (1988: 26) ‘as repetition with
critical distance that allows ironic signalling of difference at the very heart of
similarity’, parody in postmodernity may be thought to thrive on intertextuality
and self-reflexivity to such an extent that it may be often taken as borderline
comic criticism or even ridicule (see Rose 1993: 240). Modern Greek Caryatids
are re-Hellenized versions of imageries created by western classicism in order
to substantiate the West’s own Hellenism. Toying with narratives of abduction,
emigration and exile, as well as by readopting neoclassical iconographies to the
point of rendering them unrecognizable, artists and publicists in contemporary
Greece wish to expose their nation’s foreign friends to new, re-authenticated
versions of a classical imagery already well known to them; as the viewpoint
shifts, however, the result is not – as one would have hoped – of awe and
amazement, but of a somewhat unpleasant joke.
By repeating this exercise in cultural reversal more than once, thus
constantly shifting the viewpoint through which the original gesture of appro-
priation was supposed to work, we are led to Bhabha’s partial representa-
tion, where both the gesture and its instigators seem out of place. Cultural
authenticity thus renders itself into a sort of ‘blank parody, a statue with blind
eyeballs’, as Marxist political theorist Jameson (2003: 17) would call the result
of such repetitive processes of cultural appropriation, quotation and pastiche.
The systematic deployment of classical imageries in contemporary Greece,
meant to satisfy the nation’s need to consume classical antiquity both as
regards its foreign friends and antagonists as well as within itself, has been
creating and recycling such instances of ‘Greek pastiche’ to the extent that
the original need for the nation to reconfirm its ties to the past is lost under
an overflow of stereotypical images, now almost completely rendered void of
meaning. Still, they persist precisely because they address a home crowd so
to speak, their makers themselves rather than their supposed audience: as
already remarked, the ‘walking, breathing statues’ in the examples discussed
here are meant to move their fellow Greeks rather than any foreigners, the
same way St Pancrass’s Caryatids may have moved a Londoner of the early
nineteenth century (or even a present-day one) whilst for a contemporary
Greek tourist they might seem frightfully out of place.

A GAME OF ARCHAEOPOLITICS
As the previous sections  have shown, Caryatids have been reinvented in
Greek modernity as symbols of the nation’s past as well as a potent reminder
of Greece’s integral connection with that past. And since both the type and
its symbolic baggage also form a part of a strategy on behalf of western elites
to legitimize their claims on classical heritage, modern Greek appropria-
tions of it may be seen to derive from a need to decolonize that heritage in
order to proclaim it exclusively ‘Greek’. This might help explain, to a certain

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 Caryatids lost and regained

extent at least, the sensation caused in Greece in September 2014, when a

state excavation in the area of the Macedonian town of Amphipolis revealed
a pair of Caryatids guarding what seemed at a time to be the monumental
tomb of some great historical personality of the fourth century BC (Figure 7;
cf. the BBC report, Christides 2014; History Channel: Pruitt 2014, and so on).
Although the tumulus had been known since the 1960s, new investigations
were begun in 2012, with the new excavators claiming that the tomb presum-
ably hiding in it contained the remains of a member of the Macedonian royal
family at the time of Alexander the Great. They often alluded to Roxanne,
Alexander’s widow, and her son, his heir, who were both executed not too
long after his own death in 323 BC. The fact that Alexander himself had died
in faraway Babylon and was known to have been buried in Egypt did not
prevent some, including many local authorities and people in the media, from
assuming this to be in fact the elusive tomb of the Great Macedonian, espe-
cially when in August 2014 the first spectacular finds came to light, includ-
ing a pair of Sphinxes guarding what was then reported to be ‘the greatest
burial monument in the world’. Hoping to capitalize on a spectacular discov-
ery, which had not quite happened yet, the Greek Prime Minister at the time
rushed to the excavation site in the middle of August, asserting that ‘the land
of our Macedonia keeps offering us new sensations and new surprises, reveal-
ing from its visceral depths unique treasures which compose, weave together
this unique mosaic of our Hellenic history, for which all Greeks are extremely
proud’. At about the same time, the then Minister for Culture maintained that,
indeed, the nation had been waiting for this tomb for 2300 years, presumably
in order to proceed with the disinterment of the remains of some magnificent
forefather (Plantzos 2014; Hamilakis 2016). Suddenly, the rhetoric of racial
and cultural autochthony, nationalist exception, and political introversion
re-emerged through the trenches supervised by national archaeology, in an

Figure 7:  Amphipolis Caryatid. ©Greek Ministry of Culture.

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 Dimitris Plantzos

effort to show that the Greek nation is the (sole) inheritor of classical culture
and its most efficient owner as well as conservator.
The discovery of the two Caryatids in Amphipolis, however, was when
Greece seemed to become reunited with its long-dormant Geo-Body (cf.
Petrakis 2014). The two statues seemed to suggest a direct connection between
Hellenistic Macedonia and Classical Athens: the latter, imagined by Greeks
and westerners alike as the formidable ancestor of anything worth noticing
around us – from democratic representation to artistic nudity – could now be
shown to be a vital source of inspiration of the former. And as Macedonian
ancestry is systematically claimed, in the last 20 years or so, by other Balkan
nations as well (cf. Kotsakis 1998), the superficial connection between the
two sets of Caryatids seemed, to the eyes of many Greek nationalists at least,
to settle the matter once and for all. Having established, albeit in a rather
haphazard and thoroughly unhistorical manner, that ‘Caryatids’ mean ‘Athens’,
suddenly Macedonia could be shown to be more akin to the majestic Greek
metropolis than some northern neighbours might be willing to accept. At the
same time, the discovery of those thoroughly classical Caryatids outside of
Athens seemed to contest the primacy of the capital as a symbol of classical
culture, a point to which I will return below.
As soon as the two Caryatids from Amphipolis were revealed in their
entirety, the Greek media – encouraged by members of the excavation team
specifically appointed by the Ministry in order to act as public relations offi-
cials in matters ‘pertaining to the tomb’ – seemed to focus rather unduly on a
stylistic detail clearly visible on the statues’ feet (Figure 8): the fact that they
featured the so-called ‘Greek toe’, an anatomic disorder of the metatarsal bones,
whereby the first metatarsal, the one behind the phalange of the hallux (the
‘big toe’), is short compared with the second metatarsal, that is the one behind
the ‘pointer toe’ next to it. Scientifically known as ‘Morton’s toe’, from the name
of the American orthopaedic Dudley Joy Morton (1884–1960), who originally
described it (Morton 1927), this defect, which has been shown affecting 10 per
cent of the world population, has in recent Greek folklore become yet another
source of national pride as it seems to stand as proof of national purity and
exception. Despite the fact that no-one could reasonably argue that 10 per cent
of the world population are Greeks, many in Greece like to turn an anatomi-
cal defect into a source of national pride (actually the usual description of this
condition is that the second toe is longer than the first and not the other way
round) and the newly found Caryatids from Amphipolis rekindled a discussion
that was going on for some time (cf. the Greek blog Sgouropoulou 2014). And
this, despite the fact that Roman statuary commonly features the ‘Greek foot’ as
a treasured stylistic motif, or the more disturbing observation that many Greek
statues do not.
What the Amphipolis Caryatids seemed to be doing therefore was to
confirm modern Greece’s racial and cultural ties with classical Hellas, its
phantasmic forefather. Classical Greece thus emerges as a site of conflict from
these episodes of the country’s recent cultural history, as the bone of conten-
tion between ‘rightful owners’ and ‘sly usurpers’, and as Greece’s national
treasure – as well as its passport to modernity. Quite unsurprisingly, the stere-
otypical notion of Greece as the cradle of western civilization in view of its
(supposed) classical genealogy is turned on its head by the country’s critics,
especially since the onset of the more recent government-debt crisis. For as
one can easily observe, in the case of the current recession, the crisis itself
is almost never discussed as a serious problem that needs to be addressed,

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 Caryatids lost and regained

Figure 8:  Amphipolis Caryatid (feet). ©Greek Ministry of Culture.

but as an unfortunate, albeit inevitable symptom of the country’s inherent

structural and cultural deficiencies – from political clientelism to a chronic
lack of enthusiasm towards modernity. Ever since its establishment as a
modern nation state, Greece has been invariably accused of ‘belated’, ‘incom-
plete’ and at any rate ‘inadequate’ modernity (see Jusdanis 1991; Gourgouris
1996: 64–89, 122–28), and a number of cultural stereotypes – such as that of
the lazy, backward-looking and unrefined Oriental – have been employed in
order to re-enforce precisely that notion. Inevitably, Greece’s current undera-
chievement is projected against the backdrop of Neoclassicism: a system of
thought based exactly on the Orientalist, racist and sexist notions of a white,

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 Dimitris Plantzos

male, superior culture in triumph over any cultural misfit. And it is precisely
as misfits that the Greeks are being castigated by their critics, with classical
imagery been invariably used to underline their cultural shortcomings: ancient
Greek columns and statues, marble temples and clay vases, Zeuses, Venuses
and Discoboloi, all symbols of a (supposedly) once glorious past, are now
deployed in order to suggest the country’s modern predicament, as the Greeks
themselves are branded ‘cheats’, ‘thieves’ and ‘sleaze-bums’, rather unfit to be
true members of the European family and, at any rate, thoroughly unmod-
ern (see the survey in Consuming Greek Antiquity 2012a; Talalay 2013). And
of course, the Acropolis, deployed as a geographical as well as cultural land-
mark, and in effect as a yardstick by means of which to establish the country’s
compliance with its neoclassical promise – a task contemporary Greece seems
to be failing on all counts. And it is precisely this deployment of visual images
that drives the sour point home: for contemporary Greece has invested a lot of
its effort, its own as well as other people’s money, a lot of its cultural energy,
as it were, during the last 200 years in order to appear worthy of its classi-
cal heritage. Restoration, enhancement and promotion of its ruins have been
thought to guarantee, besides the increase of tourism, the rehabilitation of the
country as a great modern nation.
Right when Amphipolis seemed to be working as a way into the future
for contemporary Greeks, their country’s economic and social predicaments
seemed pretty bleak indeed: with unemployment calculated at almost 28 per
cent in September 2013, and unemployment for the 18–24 age group reaching
a staggering 60.8 per cent in February of that year, the International Federation
for Human Rights was right to point out in late 2014 that austerity in Greece
caused grievous social injustice, as a human rights – besides economic – all-
out failure. With almost 1.5 million Greeks unemployed, statistics showed
that their chances to return to work had decreased from 25 per cent on the
outbreak of the crisis to 15 per cent in 2013, owing to strict austerity policies
imposed by the country’s debtors (Hellenic League for Human Rights 2014; cf.
Eurostat 2015 and LIBE 2015). Suddenly, therefore, the Amphipolis Caryatids
seemed to help the Greek public at large in an effort to put together a Classics
in a state of precarity, a precarious Classics so to speak: they emerged from the
Greek soil as spectacular reminders of past Greek splendour as well as if to
suggest that, despite its faltering economy, Greece remains the sole inheritor
of classical culture, as well as its most efficient curator. Produced through an
intricate web of symbolisms, the Amphipolis Caryatids were welcomed as two
archaeological artefacts, both embodied and engendered, that could personify
Greek exceptionalism, at once suggesting the power of classical Athenian art
and its far-reaching significance. As a Greek blogger was arguing in September
2014,‘Greece’s holy god is giving back to [the Greek people] what Elgin’s thefts
had taken away’ (Sociologyalert 2014). Or, as publicist Karalis (2014) was argu-
ing in September 2014, ‘Amphipolis is a godsend emerging from the bowels of
Greek earth, and a reminder […] to the Greek government to ask for at least
the return of the sixth Caryatid, the one Elgin abducted, and is now standing
on her own, for two centuries, in the British Museum, away from Athens’. As
Athens emerged from the crisis as a ruined city and a failed capital, unworthy
of the great Nation it was built to serve, the discovery at Amphipolis seemed
to settle an old discrepancy. It is as if the Olympic re-enactments of 2004, as
well as Sonia Theodoridou’s quest for the Caryatids’ stolen sister 10 years later,
were answered by the unearthing of the Amphipolis statues: as an epiphany
heralding the consummation of the classical promise.

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 Caryatids lost and regained

This creates a shaky Classics based on crypto-colonial mimicry, whereby 7. The owner of the
house, modesty
the colonial subject refuses to accept taxonomies enforced from above, at successful Greek
the same time however trying to better its colonisers by improving on their sculptor Ioannis
own game. Mimicry, certainly, generates hybridity and symbols are provided Karakatsanis (1857–
1906), was the creator
with an inherent potential for multiple signification. This is an old Barthean of the two statues,
concept (Barthes 1972: 206–7), well exploited by cultural historians in the last acting thus as the
20 years or so. It is this kind of hybridity that often turns cultural appropriation conduit between the
neoclassical tradition,
into unintentional parody, as discussed above. According to Bhabha (1994: which he served in his
55), such demonstrations of cultural hybridity generate, quite inadvertently, career, and the neo-
Hellenic reality of his
what he described as a ‘Third Space of enunciation’, a place unrepresentable own neighbourhood.
in itself where ‘the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity Not surprisingly, the
or fixity’. Cultural hybridity therefore displaces the given structured narratives two maidens inspired
an urban legend of
and upsets their time – so far perceived as linear and homogeneous. In the their own: as related
cultural battle that ensues, over the manipulation of symbols and who gets to by a later owner of
take control of their signification, certain meanings become eliminated while the building, a barber
named Panagiotis
others are reasserted. It is all a game of colonizations (Europe’s colonization Kritikakos, the two
of Greece and Greece’s colonization of its own past) fiercely combating one statues represented a
previous owner’s dead
another (cf. Plantzos 2012). daughters (who, at
The rehabilitation of Neoclassicism as an architectural form native to least according to one
Greece meant that it was soon claimed by the lower middle and even the version of the fable,
had been poisoned by
working classes; anonymous masons and their clients were now able to adopt their stepmother! See
the pompous architectural vocabulary constructed by the upper classes for their Michani toy Xronoy
own use, thus contributing to Neoclassicism’s diffusion, as well as its inevi- 2015. The house
features in at least one
table trivialization. The two Caryatids adorning the balcony of a small, two- example of modern
storey house in what at the time was Athens’ working-class district (Figure 9),7 Greek literature,
Kostas Tachtsis’ To
soon became the emblems of a newly-found Greek charm, appealing to Trito Stefani/The Third
everyone: from anonymous photographers in the early twentieth century, to Wedding (1962), as the
Henri Cartier-Bresson who took a famous photograph of this house in 1953 paternal home of Ekavi,
one of the novel’s two
(Magnum Photos 2015) and to Yannis Tsarouchis who had used it in one of his central heroines.
paintings the previous year and was going to return to it in his later work (cf.
Michani toy Hronoy 2015), the two Athenian maidens of low birth were by the
mid-twentieth century considered to be the emblems of Greece’s neoclassical
dream, and have often been used as logos in the campaign against its demise.
Through the reappropriation of its Caryatids, as well as that of other classical
forms, Athens has as a result reinvented itself, as a topos where memories of
the classical may still be found lurking on any street, as a cultural landscape
threatened by western-like urbanism and its discontents. Today, the Caryatid
House stands on its own, brightly renovated in time for the 2004 Olympic
Games, in a state of pristine reconstruction, in a sense collapsing the city’s
present into its past, recent and antique. The violent graffiti on its lower walls,
however, blatantly indifferent to the charm of the maidens decorating the
balcony above, or rather directly hostile towards it, tell us a different story:
that Greece’s neoclassical dream is not shared by all. Often perceived as an
ideological apparatus of state surveillance and control, Neoclassical aesthetics
is either literally or metaphorically attacked by anti-state activism in Greece,
especially in the crisis years (cf. Plantzos 2012: 229–37).
A further example of such usage takes us to another area of this ‘Third
Space of enunciation’ we have been exploring: the place occupied by local
communities within the nation state, claiming parts of the national tradition
as their own in an effort to reassert their cultural exceptionality against the
metropolitan centre. Let us have a look, then, at a bizarre structure erected
sometime in the mid-1980s just outside the modern village of Karyai in

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 Dimitris Plantzos

Figure 9:  Caryatid House, Athens. ©Author.

Laconia (Figure 10). In contrast with anything we have seen so far, this is not
somebody’s house – however lavish or humble, sophisticated or silly-looking;
it is neither a bank, nor a hotel, a school or a church. It is an exact copy of the
Erechtheion, logoized however to its bare essentials: only the world-famous
Caryatid porch has made it here, without the temple it used to lead to on the
Acropolis, back in the day. Present-day Karyai entered modernity as Arachova
(a Slavic place-name in fact translating the earlier Greek, which means
‘chestnut-trees’) but reinvented itself as the Caryatids’ birthplace accord-
ing to Vitruvius. Refashioning Greek modernity on the trace of antiquity was
a very common practice in the twentieth century, when many place-names
were Hellenized in an effort to eradicate the memory of Ottoman occupation
or, more significantly, the historical presence and cultural influence of ethnic
‘Others’, such as the Slavs, who could not be seen to have affected Greek
national identity. The monument was erected on the initiative of the village’s

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 Caryatids lost and regained

Figure 10:  Caryatid porch, Karyai. ©Marlen Mouliou.

diasporic community ‘as a symbol signifying the connection of the present to

the glorious past of the place’ (Karyes 2015).
In Karyai, therefore, the village’s diaspora is trying to surpass Athens and
its antiquity, in an attempt to reappropriate a globally acclaimed symbol,
which made Athens what it is. According to the claim put forward by the six
Caryatids left standing in the middle of nowhere just outside a present-day
village in South Peloponnese, part of Athens’ charm, sophistication and classi-
cal superiority is due to ‘the glorious past of the place’. The Caryatid porch in
Karyai, as a result, odd and completely out of place as it may seem, stands as a
three-dimensional campaign logo aimed to substantiate this claim against the
cultural supremacy of a forgetful metropolis. And this, in fact, would appear
to be crypto-colonialism’s hidden contradiction: it may be defeated only as
long as it remains unresolved. If Greece is a political community imagined
by its members as Anderson would argue, it is brought into being precisely
at the moment when Sonia Theodoridou enters the British Museum dressed
as Mother Hellas looking for a lost daughter, or when a Greek photogra-
pher claims, on behalf of his people, ownership of a bunch of Greek antiq-
uities (even if some of them may well belong to Modern Turkey). And this is
why such gestures are deemed successful even when only noticed by those
who attempt them: Theodoridou’s and Kalogeropoulos’s publicity stunts
triggered the emancipatory drive built in the heart of Greek nationalism, in
the same way the Amphipolis discovery seemed to herald that emancipa-
tion once and for all. Crypto-colonial defiance, therefore, is not a game of
rhetoric but one of performative gestures. It is through these performances
that the nation achieves and cements its sovereignty, even when the state
is under the political or economic control of the West (be that the European
Union or the International Monetary Fund), even under the cultural suprem-
acy of such metropolitan centres as London, Paris or New York. If the British
Museum were to return the Elgin marbles tomorrow, or Athens to acknowl-
edge its cultural debt to the Peloponnese, the crypto-colonial conundrum

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 Dimitris Plantzos

might  – m ­ omentarily  – appear at long last resolved, though through the

implicit admission of its ultimate success.
Antiquity, as a result, remains in relevance as long as it presents itself as
a suitable candidate for logoization, national or localized. And quite signifi-
cantly, every new user of those tired old images is able to tweak their ‘authen-
tic’ meaning according to new uses. It is in this context that I would like to
revisit a couple of recent examples in Greek architecture, which seem to have
gone unnoticed by systematic criticism, or rather rejected as neo-Hellenic
kitsch, merely insignificant essays in national or local pride. Figures 11 and 12
feature an apartment building in Egaleo, one of Athens’ working-class neigh-
bourhoods, which in the 1920s provided housing to many of the Greek refu-
gees from Asia Minor. Described as a ‘modern Greek architectural eyesore’ by
an unforgiving blogger (Consuming Greek Antiquity 2012b), the original house,

Figure 11:  ‘Antique’ block of flats in Egaleo, Athens. ©Author.

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 Caryatids lost and regained

8. The notion of a
‘meta-syntax’ within
the value system of
art as a development
from kitsch was first
explored by Austrian
modernist Broch
(2002: 3–40) in the
1930s, and has been
lately reintroduced
to cultural history, cf.
Williams (2013: 56–57).

Figure 12:  Caryatid on the balcony (detail of fig. 11). ©Author.

built sometime after 2000, has had a number of spinoffs in the same or differ-
ent areas of Athens.
The aggressive archaeolatry of the Egaleo houses trivializes classicism
to such an extent as to produce a kitsch version of it – or rather what to
many residents or visitors to Greece must be familiar as neo-Hellenic meta-
kitsch:8 whereas overdone kitsch imagery is supposed to trigger a reflexive
emotional reaction to its viewers (Kulka 1996: 26), the highly charged clas-
sicism proposed by the Egaleo houses, like the fondly archaeolatric imagery
encountered in any Greek souvenir shop, as well as – I would argue – any
of the images and performances I discussed in this article, overdo their

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 Dimitris Plantzos

admiration for the cultural tradition they ostensibly serve to such an extent
as to end up rivalling it. Far from merely an abusive term suggesting ‘poor
taste’ or ‘low culture’ kitsch has been shown to constitute an ‘elective aesthetic’
(Atkinson 2007: 524), thus undermining the long-standing, and utterly unpro-
ductive, binaries of good/bad art or high/low culture. Initiatives such as those
discussed here are not merely meant to appropriate the tradition they admire
so much, but also, crucially, to reclaim it from any prior stakeholders. Meta-
kitsch is born at the point where even the very critique of kitsch as repetitive,
comforting garbage becomes trivialized, and critics appear redundant them-
selves. Theodoridou’s living Caryatids are meant to look more ‘Hellenic’ than
anything London could produce, and the Amphipolis Caryatids are seen by
the national imaginary as more classical – or indeed ‘Athenian’ – than the ones
in the Acropolis Museum; their point of reference is the very act of reference
itself, not any high-end original. Rather than ‘support our basic sentiments
and beliefs’, as kitsch is accused of doing (Kulka 1996: 27; cf. Binkley 2000),
meta-kitsch disturbs the earlier state of balance and undermines established
authority. As many of the examples discussed here have shown, this kind
of excessiveness, campish role playing and highly decorative drive, generate
subversive, if unintentional, parodies of their chosen subject (cf. Sontag 2009).
The outcome of this game of conflicting imageries is perfectly exemplified by
the Egaleo houses, as I will show in the paragraphs that follow.
A main characteristic of the Egaleo houses and many of their imitators are
the Caryatid-posts supporting the balconies (as in Figure 13). Heavily ornate
and massively overdone, these buildings manage to reverse the colonial
appropriation of classical culture – in the face of its art – by reappropriating it
with a vengeance. They invade our sensory realm through their ‘art’, which is
‘deliberately designed to move us, by presenting a well-selected and perhaps
much-edited version of some […] aspect of our shared experience’ (Solomon
1991: 12). As such, the two buildings seem oblivious to what has gone before;

Figure 13:  Caryatid porch in Egaleo, Athens. ©Author.

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 Caryatids lost and regained

what they appear to be doing is a fresh rewriting of the history of classicist

architecture – from the portentous magnificence of the Greek revival to the
private charm of Athenian Neoclassicism. Certainly, to our sophisticated eyes
they may look crass, ridiculous and unquestionably ugly. Still, their assumed
mission is not to operate within our own field of vision but in what we have
already described as Bhabha’s (1994: 54) ‘Third Space of enunciation’, where
meaning and reference become ambivalent and the ‘mirror of representation
in which cultural knowledge is customarily revealed as an integrated, open,
expanding code’ is smashed.
In view of their banalité, which defies the established authority of classi-
cal aesthetics, the Egaleo Caryatids (Figures 12 and 13) upset the neoclassi-
cal continuity that buildings like the house in Figure 9 attempt to establish:
an uninterrupted story of national aesthetics linking Greece’s humble present
with her glorious past. In doing so, they maintain that classical architecture is
still alive in contemporary Greece, with no intervention needed from western-
born and western-fed Neoclassicism or any other alien influence. In Egaleo, as
a result, Greece’s classical past is decolonized through the menace of uninten-
tional parody. Unbeknown, one assumes, to their makers and owners, these
everyday buildings (housing ordinary Athenian families and not embassies,
courthouses or banks) generate a mercilessly ironic reading – indeed a rewrit-
ing – of the neoclassicist project. Through the mimicking of the classical, or
rather its systematic revival, reinvention and redeployment by those who claim
to be its rightful owners, they produce a powerful parody of both the classical
per se and modernity’s neoclassical pretentions, western and peripheral. What
they do in fact is generate a ‘double vision’, which undermines the authority of
representation; a new cultural landscape, where different writings and read-
ings of the past are allowed to emerge. According to a marble slab on one of
the Egaleo houses, completed in 2012, its owners declare that their mission is
to ‘maintain the truth of the ancients’, as a ‘solemn duty and symbolic value’ in
honour of their ‘ancient men and ancestors and their ideals’, thus bypassing
a few hundred years of classicist tradition in order to reunite with a classical
antiquity, which they imagine as authentic and untarnished by the cultural
noise of western modernity. Although they had no way of knowing it, the
discovery of the Amphipolis Caryatids seems to have confirmed their convic-
tion in a bizarrely retrospective manner, as it could be seen to strengthen their
certainty about the figure of the Caryatid being the logo of national continuity,
as well as guarantee of the nation’s historical persistence.
In this article I used Anderson’s concept of cultural logoization in order
to explore the ways in which an iconic form of classical sculpture has been
reconstructed into a symbol of Greek modernity. Since Caryatids have long
now been deployed as symbols of the West’s supremacy over the Orient
(which invariably includes Greece), their use by the modern Greek social
imaginary presupposed their being claimed from their western ‘captors’, both
allegorically and literally. As a result, this newly-forged symbol was system-
atically enriched through standard Geo-Body technologies while at the same
time remained subject to a strict crypto-colonial regime. This process inevi-
tably creates instances of mistranslation, miscomprehension and, in effect,
unintentional parody, which on the one hand act as an emancipatory agent
inside Greece and, on the other, for the country’s critics seem to confirm its
‘Otherness’. Redeploying classical imagery as a parody of itself suggests that
logoized cultural symbols transcend the word/image axis. Classical icons like
the Caryatids we examined in this article, and the performances of neoclassical

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 Dimitris Plantzos

ethos they generate, carry the materiality of their presence, their antiquity and
their gender into a three-dimensional space, a ‘real topos’ as it were, inhabited
and lived-in by us, its present occupants. Much more than mere onlookers,
we are sharing the performative qualities of such spaces, as they encourage
us – or demand from us even – to enact our cultural identities, our intellectual
genealogies, our national and personal times. Though ancient and established,
they become alive with tension and instability.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Parts of this article were presented at a symposium on ‘The Rhetoric of
Images’ organized by the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation
at King’s College, London in November 2013 and at the British School at
Athens in February 2015. I am thankful to both institutions, as well as Antonis
Papadimitriou, Ioannis Metaxas, Michael Squire and Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis
for the respective invitations. I am also grateful to Georgia Gotsi for discussing
with me the early tradition on the Caryatids, Marlen Mouliou for the photo-
graph in Figure 10, and to the Journal’s editors and anonymous referees for a
number of helpful remarks and suggestions.
All reasonable effort has been made to contact the holders of copyright
of Figures 1–13. Any omissions will be rectified in future printings if notice is
given to the publisher.

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SUGGESTED CITATION
Plantzos, D. (2017), ‘Caryatids lost and regained: Rebranding the classical body
in contemporary Greece’, Journal of Greek Media & Culture, 3: 1, pp. 3–29,
doi: 10.1386/jgmc.3.1.3_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Dimitris Plantzos is an associate professor of classical archaeology at the
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He has written on Greek art
and archaeology, archaeological theory and classical reception. His latest book,
To Prosfato Mellon (The Recent Future), published by Nefeli in Athens, Greece,
discusses the biopolitical uses of classical antiquity in contemporary Greece.
Many of his publications may be accessed through his page on Academia.edu.
Contact: Department of History and Archaeology. National and Kapodistrian
University of Athens, Zografou Campus, GR 15784 Athens, Greece.
E-mail: dkplantzos@arch.uoa.gr

Dimitris Plantzos has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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