[MGSA-L] Event at Yale: Nov. 29: Public History and the Greek dictatorship

[Syrimis, George]

Thursday, November 29, 5:00 PM


Dimitrios Antoniou
Hannah Seeger Davis Fellow, Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, Princeton University


“Imagining the ‘True Vow’: Urban Planners, Dictatorial Ghosts, and the Making of Public History”


Abstract:
On September 30, 1969 the Greek military regime launched an architectural contest to at last build The Nation’s Vow (Táma tou Éthnous), a church that the participants of the Fourth National Assembly of 1829 had pledged to construct in return for Greek liberation from the Ottoman Empire. For the colonels, building the church would signify the country’s new glories, the dictatorship's capacity to rebrand urban space, and the triumphant merger of nationalism, the classical past, and Orthodoxy. Despite the Junta’s efforts, the Táma would remain unrealized. This paper offers an ethnographic study of a controversial site of fantasy and its long history. In particular, it explores how the urban planer Konstantinos Doxiadis imagined the Táma tou Éthnous. Taking his monograph The True Vow as a conceptual point of departure, the paper considers the dictatorial legacy and the place of silence, resistance, and complicity in Greece today.


Luce hall 202, 34 Hillhouse Avenue
(Free parking next to Rozenkranz Hall on 115 Prospect street after 4:00 pm)
The talk is free and open to the public.

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The activities of the Hellenic Studies Program are generously funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Center for Hellenic Studies at Yale University.
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