What is it about?
The Asia Minor Catastrophe (1922) and the collapse of the Hellenic Great Idea caused a deep ideological and cultural void in Grecce. This void opened up space for innovation and fed the longing for “new beginnings”. Various new projects emerged from all the sides of the political and ideological spectrum to fill the void, having as a common denominator a “modernist ethos” of regeneration, rejuvenation, and revitalization against decadence and degeneration.
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Why is it important?
As Maria Todorova (2009) points out, the Balkans – and Greece among them – should not be conceptualized in terms of primitivity and backwardness, then a hermeneutical perspective opens up for moving beyond orientalism, self-victimization, and teleological conceptions of modernity. From this perspective, it is worth studying how the modernist dynamics enter, interact, and are transformed in peripheral regions, such as Greece. The study of such dynamics may contribute to a broader international and transnational history of modernism in the twentieth century.
Perspectives
Beginning from such premises, the paper attempts to identify how all these projects emerged, converged, and clashed with each other. It particularly focuses on the projects formulated by prominent politicians and their circles, like Eleftherios Venizelos and Ioannis Metaxas, as well as distinguished intellectuals, technocrats, engineers, and industrialists, and attempts to address the following questions: How did they conceive their then current condition? On what basis were the “new beginnings” proposed, and what were the concomitant political, cultural, and economic “proper” directions and orientations? In what terms did they describe their opponents and what were the implicit or explicit intersections between them?
VASSILIOS BOGIATZIS
Panteion Panepistemio Koinonikon kai Politikon Epistemon
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Great Idea is Dead, Long Live the Great Ideas, East Central Europe, November 2021, Brill Deutschland GmbH,
DOI: 10.30965/18763308-48020007.
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