PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Program in Hellenic Studies
Third International Graduate Student Conference in Modern Greek Studies
"Politics, Religion and Society in Modern Greece"
Wednesday May 4, 2011
NEOFYTOS DUKAS' VISUAL POEM TO KING OTTO OF GREECE
ABSTRACTModern Greek visual poetry is an interesting subject not only from the perspective of comparative studies, but also from the perspective of literary theory and genre history. In addition, it gives important insights into the socio-cultural, political and religious contexts of its production. Greek visual poetry of the late 18th and early 19th centuries is characterized by regularly being dedicated to individual high-ranking representatives of the political and ecclesiastical sphere. The panegyric character is a common feature of the genre's diachronic development, which is reinforced by the author's creative use of visuality. A particularly interesting example is a diamond-shaped poem by Neophytos Dukas (1760-1845) dedicated to King Otto I of Greece (1815-1867). Dukas' poem is of a type that was already used in the Danubian Principalities for the praise of the Phanariot princes; this poetry made use of Hellenistic forms deriving from the ancient technopaegnia of the Anthologia Graeca or from examples in Byzantine manuscripts. In addition, Dukas' poem has to be associated with the praise poetry written in the year of Otto's arrival in Greece (1833), though the rhomboid form of Dukas' poem also gives meaning to the visual dimension. Apart from considerations related to form and function of visual praise poetry and its classification in the history of the genre, contemporary political circumstances and their influence on the genre will also be examined. Using Dukas' poem as a case study, this paper will explore the question of the reception of antiquity and classicism, as well as German-Greek relations. The example in case opens up some questions: Is it simply an anachronistic continuation of the earlier practice, employed in the Phanariot context, to address rulers for pedagogic and panegyric purposes? Is it a form of government propaganda or a means of virtuous self-presentation by the scholar? These questions should be viewed critically by taking into account a further contemporary example, also a rhomboid poem.
Lilia Diamantopoulou is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Modern Greek Studies with a secondary field in Comparative Studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich (Germany). Her dissertation focuses on Greek visual and concrete poetry presenting a historical overview from the first Hellenistic technopaegnia to Byzantine or neo-classicist examples up to Seferis' calligrammes or modern hyperpoetry. One of her basic aims is to show continuities and discontinuities in the production and perception of the genre. This helps to determ ine relationships between form and content and to understand the functions of these poems. Diamantopoulou received her M.A. in Comparative Studies, Modem Greek Studies and Early Christian and Byzantine Art at LMU. During her graduate studies she participated in the exhibition "SchriftBild" in Munich and attended courses at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the University of Alma Mater in Bologna. Since October 2006 she has held a regular university teaching position at the Institute of Modem Greek Studies at LMU. In addition, as of September 2007, she is Member of the LMU Mentoring programme LM Uexee lIent and participates regularly in the summer seminar at Paros with the Institutes of Modem Greek Studies of Berlin, Hamburg and Munich.
STORIES FROM THE RECEPTION OF RENAISSANCE CRETAN LITERATURE
IN THE 18TH AND 19TH CENTURIES:
THE PUBLISHING HISTORY AND THE BASKET OF POPULAR LITERATURE
ABSTRACT
In this paper I will study the presence of the five most important literary works of the Cretan Renaissance in the 18th and 19th centuries: Apokopos, Erotokritos, Voskopoula, Erofile and Thisia tou Avraam. The dissemination of these texts in the two centuries differs. An examination of the publishing history of these works through the end of 19th century evokes various questions or conclusions. I will try to clear up the complicated relation between these works and so-called “popular literature.” The catalogues of bookstores and printing houses shed light on the matter as does the annotation on book circulation. The researcher should not muddle up all popular books (religious and educational) printed by the same editor or sold by the same merchant and should not consider different eras as one. These works function differently for the “producer” and the reader throughout the decades. It is widely known and critically accepted that scholars and church-scholars at the time thought of these works as vulgar, unavailing and finally detrimental for the Greek race. Adamantios Koraes set the example and many followed. The scholars’ mission was to enlighten their enslaved compatriots by introducing educational plans or proposals. These plans emerged from a fabricated argument: the revival of ancient Greek grandeur through the elaboration of classical texts and thoughts. A dark present time with the crutch of a glorious past, whose lawful heir is the ever-struggling enslaved Greek race. The Cretan works had no place in this agenda. Last but not least: these works were probably written by Catholics, something that would surely annoy the Orthodox church-scholars and was considered rather dangerous. In the same vein and in a complementary way, the publishing history of these works, which has not been discussed thoroughly, can tell a very interesting story. Editors’ and printers’ decision to promote these works as “popular literature” – from 1760 and after – following the examples of others (Bibliotheque Bleue, English Chapbooks and pliegos sueltos), is a rather considerable aspect that justifies the reception of Renaissance Cretan Literature as vulgar and futile.
Alexander Katsigiannis is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Modern Greek Studies at the University of Crete. Born in Athens, Greece, in 1983, he holds a B.A. in Theatrical Studies (National and Kapodestrian University of Athens) and an M.A. in Modern Greek Studies (University of Crete). He is currently working on his doctoral thesis, entitled The Reception of Renaissance Cretan Literature in the 19th century: Criticism, Literature. His critical edition on Constantine Manos’ Ta kata Kleanthen kai Abrocomen, Ponema Poimenikon (1801) is forthcoming, and he has published on pastoral literature in the Neohellenic Enlightenment. His research interests focus on the production, reception and use of Modern Greek literature in the 19th century.
BETWEEN THE CHURCH AND THE PALACE:
THE FACULTY OF LAW OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ATHENS, THE PROBLEM OF SOVEREIGNTY AND THE RISE OF LEGAL ORDER (1837-1875)
ABSTRACT
Greek political historiography of the 19th century has been mainly preoccupied with the history of the state. Following a narrative of the ‘successful’ rise of the state, the stress has been put on institutional developments and the construction of administrative apparatuses. Even critiques of this narrative have undermined it by just postponing the start date to the early 20th century. This paper proposes a different perspective by telling the story of sovereignty, as perceived and developed in the course of the 19th century. The concept of sovereignty poses the problem of the relationship of political power to other forms of authority without losing sight of the complex, uneven, and unfinished aspects of state making. From this perspective the central issue of the paper revolves around the way that legal order came gradually from the 1840s onwards to replace monarchical and religious authority as the most important source of political legitimacy. As far as agency is concerned the Faculty of Law and its people – the professors – are considered instrumental. The role of the professors – intellectuals avant la lettre – was not confined within the law school but extended to the bar, the bench, the press, the parliament, and the cabinet, comprising generally most of the domains of the public sphere. From 1837 to 1875, through the national assemblies and the settling of the Church question, Greek intellectual and political life became saturated with the law. Major issues were sometimes addressed in legal theory and in legal practice (especially in the Supreme Court) sometimes long before they received, if at all, formal dressing as statutes. The underlying premise of this paper is that nation-states were not just created in battlefields, parliamentary debates and diplomatic negotiations, but also in courtrooms and bureaucratic offices where the state’s and the nation’s claims to power were expressed.
Michael Sotiropoulos is a doctoral candidate at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Ehess) in Paris. He holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Athens, an M.A. in Modern History and Culture from the University of York and a D.E.A. in History and Civilization from Ehess. He is currently working on his doctoral thesis on the professors of the Athens Law School, focusing on the influence transnational intellectual networks have on the formation of academic elites. His research interests include the role of institutions of higher learning in the formation of the Greek state, questions dealing with the intellectual history of Southern Europe in a comparative perspective, and the role of political ideologies and legal theory and practice in new and emerging states during the 19th century.
TARIH-I AYASOFYA:
AN INQUIRY ON OTTOMAN GREEK ORTHODOX INTELLECTUALS THROUGH
ARCHITECTURAL HISTORIOGRAPHY
ABSTRACT
The well-known “long” 19th century was a period of transformation for the Ottoman State as well as its subjects, including the Greek-Orthodox community. It was mostly after the declaration of the Reform Edict in 1856 that the structure of the “millet system” had been reformed. Due to these changes, which were accompanied by general transformations within the Empire, the social position and the role played by members of Non-Muslim millets, including the Greek Orthodox, had altered. In particular, the increasing role of Greek Orthodox intellectuals in both Ottoman intellectual life and state administration was a result of those rapid developments. Aleksander Kostantinidis, a member of the Greek Orthodox community in Istanbul and the author of the article “Tarih-i Ayasofya,” was among the intellectuals of 19th-century Ottoman bureaucracy. He was among the members of the Tercüme Odası (Translation Chamber) that was established in 1832 in order to serve to the needs of bureaucracy both for learning foreign languages and for official translations. The Tercüme Odası also became a school for the “westernized Ottoman statesmen” hommes de letters. There were also Ottoman Greek Orthodox intellectuals among the apprentices of this institution. Kostantinidis’s “Tarih-i Ayasofya” first appeared in 1868 in the journal named Mecmua-i Fünun (Journal of Science) published by the Cemiyyet-i İlmiyye-i Osmaniyye (Ottoman Society of Science). The Cemiyyet was founded in 1861 by Münif Paşa and aimed to encourage scientific study by publishing books and translations and providing mediums for introducing Western knowledge on science. Kostantinidis, whom Strauss described as the “most competent Greek Ottoman scholar of nineteenth century,” was a member of the Cemiyyet and published several other articles in the Mecmua. This paper aims, through the article Tarih-i Ayasofya, to trace the contribution of Greek Orthodox intellectuals to debates about architecture, architectural heritage and ideology of nationalism in the late 19th-century Ottoman context. The article will be reevaluated in order to provide a methodology to analyze the Constantinopolitan Greek Orthodox perception of art, architecture and urban developments, notions of architectural history and theory, the discourse on architectural and urban heritage, and the relation of architecture to that of identity formation.
BIO
Firuzan Melike Sümertaş graduated from the Department of Architecture at the Middle East Technical University in 2003 and completed her M.A. at the same university in the field of Architectural History in 2006. She has been a doctoral candidate at Bogazici University, in the Department of History since 2008. She has also worked as an instructor in the Department of Architecture at the Anadolu University (Eskisehir, Turkey). She is currently living in Rethymno, Crete, Greece, and conducting research at University of Crete in the Department of Archeology and History. The main focus of her dissertation is the perception, discourse, and practice of architecture and urban developments and urban heritage in late 19th-century Ottoman context, within the Greek Orthodox community of Istanbul.
Joshua Michael White
ABSTRACT
In the spring of 1574, a detachment of Ottoman naval irregulars, levend, descended on the Aegean island of Naxos. Disembarking a raiding party on the shore, the levend snatched as many women and children as they could before setting course for the Anatolian coast, where they sold the captives as slaves to waiting buyers. Amphibious slave-raiding was nothing new in the early modern Mediterranean, and it helped feed the demand for slaves in Ottoman markets. But Naxos was not an enemy territory, nor was it a possession of one of the Ottomans’ Christian treaty partners. Naxos was an Ottoman island in 1574, and its inhabitants were tax-paying Ottoman subjects. In terms of both Islamic and Ottoman law, the enslavement of non-Muslim Ottoman subjects, zimmis, was patently illegal. Although this was not a new problem, in the fog of war surrounding the 1570-1573 conflict with Venice and in its aftermath, incidents such as that at Naxos became tragically common in the Aegean. As the reliance on levend for maritime defense and intelligence increased in the years following the 1571 defeat at Lepanto, so too did the number of recorded cases of pirates abducting Ottoman subjects and selling them in Anatolian markets as if they were legally enslaved “enemy infidels.” This paper looks at the experience of Ottoman Greeks illegally enslaved in the Aegean at this pivotal moment and the efforts made by the Ottoman central administration, once informed of events, to find and free its subjects. Describing in detail the Naxos affair and the massive, drawn-out search it spurred, I ask what these sorts of cases can tell us about the relationship between the Ottoman center and its Aegean possessions, the legal tension between subjecthood and religious identity, and the state’s attempts to regulate the hugely important and profitable slave trade. I conclude by asking what might be different, and why, about the trade in illegal captives in the Aegean and the Ottoman administrative response to it, between this and later periods, and in comparison to other coastal parts of the empire.
Joshua Michael White is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Michigan. He also holds an M.A. in History from the same institution (2007), a certificate in Arabic from the CASA program at the American University in Cairo (2005), and a B.A. in History and Islamic and Near Eastern Studies from Washington University in St. Louis (2004). He has conducted research in archives and libraries in Istanbul and Venice with the support of fellowships from ARIT (2008), Fulbright-Hays (2008-2009), and the Rackham Graduate School (2010), and he is currently writing his dissertation, Catch and Release: Piracy, Slavery, and Law in the Early Modern Ottoman Mediterranean, on the impact of pirate slave-raiding in the late sixteenth and seventeenth-century Eastern Mediterranean from the Ottoman perspective.
Last updated 4/22/11