TRANSLATING ODYSSEUS: NOLAN, PASOLINI AND CACOYANNIS

 

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has inevitably invited comparison with Uberto Pasolini's The Return. Although there is no reason to suppose that Nolan borrowed directly from Pasolini, the conceptual similarities between the two films are sufficiently striking to place them within the same modern interpretive tradition. Both depart from Homer's poem in ways that reflect contemporary concerns with trauma, memory and the moral legacy of war, while Michael Cacoyannis's adaptations of Greek tragedy appear at first glance to belong to an altogether different cinematic tradition. The contrast, however, raises a larger question than one of style or fidelity to ancient texts, inviting reflection upon what it actually means to adapt Greek myth for modern audiences. Should ancient narratives be translated into contemporary intellectual and psychological categories, or should filmmakers preserve the unfamiliar worldview from which those myths first emerged? The different answers offered by Nolan, Pasolini and Cacoyannis reveal three distinct philosophies of adaptation and, in doing so, illuminate the enduring tension between antiquity and modernity.

The film-makers’ treatment of the gods immediately reveals this divide. Homer's Odyssey is inconceivable without divine agency. Athena engineers Odysseus' return, Poseidon obstructs it, Zeus arbitrates among competing divine interests, while Circe, Calypso and the dead encountered in Hades belong to a universe in which divine action forms part of reality itself. Myth therefore functions as an explanation of the world rather than as symbolic narrative. Pasolini dismantles this cosmology almost entirely, reducing the epic to an intimate psychological drama centred upon Ithaca and the emotional consequences of war. Nolan preserves much of the poem's mythic architecture, retaining the Cyclops, Circe, Scylla, Charybdis and the descent into Hades, yet increasingly encourages audiences to interpret these encounters psychologically. Athena resembles conscience or memory, while monsters become externalisations of trauma and fear. By relocating the gods from the external world to the interior landscape of consciousness, both directors transform myth from an account of reality into a language of symbolism.

Pasolini and Nolan’s understanding of Odysseus reflects the same transformation. Homer's hero (whose name literally means “the hated one”) certainly suffers. He mourns fallen companions, longs for home and repeatedly confronts despair, yet psychological paralysis never defines him. His defining characteristic remains polytropia, the capacity to adapt continually to changing circumstances through intelligence, deception, endurance and resilience. Odysseus survives partially because the gods are divided as to his fate but mainly because he refuses to surrender to suffering. Pasolini reconstructs him almost entirely as a traumatised veteran. His Odysseus returns home emotionally exhausted, incapable of reconnecting naturally with Penelope or Telemachus and burdened by overwhelming guilt. The destruction of Troy becomes the defining event of his identity. Pasolini himself explained that Odysseus needed to recognise the deaths of Trojans and companions alike as fundamentally his responsibility. Victory offers neither glory nor fulfilment, becoming instead the source of permanent psychological injury. Nolan adopts a remarkably similar framework. His Odysseus remains physically formidable and intellectually resourceful, although these qualities increasingly serve as mechanisms for coping with profound emotional wounds. Survivor's guilt, moral injury and traumatic memory shape his journey as powerfully as monsters or storms, transforming the voyage home from an epic of endurance into a prolonged process of psychological reckoning.

There is much to admire in Nolan's achievement. Unlike Pasolini, he recovers the epic scale largely absent from modern adaptations of Homer. His monsters remain flawed yet genuinely terrifying, Odysseus’ voyage retains its vast geographical sweep and the narrative once again possesses metaphysical ambition. Psychological interpretation operates alongside spectacle rather than replacing it entirely, allowing Nolan simultaneously to satisfy the expectations of contemporary audiences while recovering something of the grandeur associated with classical epic. Even so, both films ultimately transform the Odyssey into an anti-war narrative grounded in contemporary understandings of trauma. Arguably though, where modern cinema instinctively searches for psychological causation, Greek epic searches instead for moral, civic and metaphysical causation. Characters suffer because they inhabit a world governed simultaneously by necessity, divine order and inherited obligation. Cacoyannis preserves that ontology. Nolan and Pasolini replace it with interior consciousness.

There is every reason to believe that this convergence owes less to direct influence than to broader intellectual currents. The psychologically fractured Odysseus has become increasingly prominent throughout twentieth and twenty-first century scholarship. Post-Vietnam readings of Homer, trauma theory, psychoanalytic criticism and recent translations, including Emily Wilson's influential version, have consistently emphasised memory, grief, identity and moral ambiguity over traditional heroism. Nolan and Pasolini therefore participate in an already established interpretive movement rather than creating an entirely new one. Even so, the timing remains striking. The Return appeared only two years before Nolan's The Odyssey and attracted considerable attention precisely because it stripped away the gods while reimagining Odysseus as psychologically broken. Whether through direct influence or intellectual convergence, both films belong unmistakably to the same contemporary conversation about myth, violence and memory. Yet that very convergence also highlights how distant this conversation has become from the intellectual assumptions that shaped Homer's poem.

The deeper issue concerns historical consciousness itself. Homer's Odysseus inhabits what classicists describe as a shame culture, where honour resides in public recognition, reputation, successful action and the fulfilment of one's obligations to family, companions and kingdom. Identity is established through speech, judgement and deed rather than through interior authenticity. The poem's organising principle is therefore not psychological fulfilment but kleos, the enduring renown that secures one's place within collective memory and the moral order of the community. Modern liberal societies conceive identity differently. Emotional truth, self-understanding and interior reconciliation increasingly define moral worth, with the result that Nolan and Pasolini relocate the centre of gravity from public action to private consciousness. In their films, the pursuit of kleos no longer governs Odysseus' return, yielding instead to the search for personal redemption after the devastation of war. The voyage home consequently changes from the restoration of kingship, household and public honour into the recovery of selfhood. Homer asks whether Odysseus can reclaim his place within the social and cosmic order; the modern films ask whether he can live with himself. That shift is neither accidental nor trivial, reflecting instead a civilisation that increasingly understands human beings psychologically rather than politically, communally or metaphysically.

Michael Cacoyannis offers perhaps the clearest alternative to Nolan's and Pasolini's method of adaptation. Rather than reconstructing Greek myth through contemporary psychology, he consistently trusted the philosophical assumptions of Greek tragedy itself. His celebrated trilogy of Electra, The Trojan Women and Iphigenia modernises classical tragedy without replacing its philosophical foundations. Electra preserves the ritual intensity, choral sensibility and inexorable movement towards fate that characterise Greek tragedy. The Trojan Women, produced during the Vietnam War and against the background of the Greek military dictatorship, exposes the horrors of imperial violence by trusting Euripides rather than inserting contemporary political commentary into the narrative. Iphigenia presents sacrifice as a communal and political dilemma embedded within divine obligation rather than reducing it to an individual's psychological conflict. Taken together, these films demonstrate remarkable consistency. Cacoyannis continually trusts Greek tragedy instead of rewriting it, allowing ancient assumptions to illuminate the present rather than reshaping antiquity until it mirrors contemporary concerns.

Nowhere is this clearer than in The Trojan Women. Divine justice remains woven into the tragic universe even when the gods themselves occupy relatively little screen time. Poseidon and Athena frame the action, reminding audiences that the destruction of Troy carries cosmic as well as human consequences. Fate, divine vengeance and human cruelty exist simultaneously within a coherent metaphysical order inherited directly from Greek tragedy.. Suffering possesses moral, religious and communal dimensions extending far beyond individual emotional experience. Odysseus never appears directly, yet his presence dominates the narrative through reputation alone. Euripides remembers him as the architect of the Trojan Horse, the strategist whose intelligence secured victory while inflicting catastrophic suffering upon innocent civilians. He emerges as politically calculating and morally compromised, particularly in his treatment of Hecuba and Polyxena, although he nevertheless remains recognisably Homer's Odysseus. His brilliance, ruthlessness and moral ambiguity coexist without reducing him to psychological pathology. Pasolini travels much further, internalising every moral consequence until victory itself becomes unbearable. Nolan follows a similar trajectory, although his film allows considerably greater space for external action and spectacle. Cacoyannis however, condemns war through tragedy rather than psychology.

The contrast therefore extends beyond characterisation into competing philosophies of adaptation. Pasolini translates Homer into psychology. Nolan translates myth into memory. Cacoyannis translates language, performance and cinematic form while refusing to translate the worldview itself. The essential question therefore becomes whether myth should be translated at all. Paradoxically, Cacoyannis's greater fidelity often produces the more radical cinematic experience precisely because it preserves the strangeness of antiquity. Modern viewers naturally expect characters to explain themselves psychologically. Contemporary storytelling privileges interiority, trauma, motivation and emotional self-analysis. Ancient epics seldom share these priorities. Individuals remain embedded within networks of kinship, divine obligation, civic responsibility and inherited fate. Their suffering cannot always be reduced to psychological injury because it belongs equally to family, city, cosmos and history. Cacoyannis preserves precisely this strangeness. His films resist comforting audiences with familiar explanatory frameworks, requiring them instead to inhabit a civilisation whose ethical assumptions remain profoundly foreign. That encounter possesses immense intellectual power because it refuses to collapse historical difference into contemporary experience.

Herein lies the peculiar paradox confronting every successful adaptation. The more completely it persuades audiences that it has captured Homer, the more easily it comes to stand in Homer's place. For millions, Nolan's Odysseus may become the Odysseus, just as earlier generations inherited Tennyson's or Joyce’s Ulysses or Kazantzakis' traveller. Every age therefore acquires not the ancient world itself but the antiquity it most desires. The survival of the classics depends upon ensuring that no single interpretation, however brilliant, is ever mistaken for the thing itself.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First publoshed in NKEE on Saturday 15 August 2026

DEAN KALIMNIOU

CENSUS 2026: WHEN MULTILINGUALISM HAS TO FIT THE BOX

Every census tells us as much about the assumptions of the state as it does about the people it seeks to enumerate. The questions it asks, the categories it creates and the answers it permits are never neutral. They are acts of classification, and classification is always an exercise of power. As Pierre Bourdieu reminds us, the authority to classify is itself a form of symbolic power, because those who determine the categories also determine the social reality that emerges from them. Michel Foucault would go further still, arguing that systems of knowledge do not merely observe reality but actively produce it. In that sense, a census is far more than an exercise in counting. It is an exercise in imagining the nation, deciding which identities become visible, which relationships matter and which forms of life are worthy of official recognition.

This year's Australian census contains a deceptively simple question that reveals the persistence of a remarkably old way of thinking. Respondents are asked whether they speak a language other than English at home. Those who use more than one language are then instructed to nominate the one they use "most often." At first glance, the question appears entirely reasonable. Yet embedded within it is a profound assumption: that multilingualism can ultimately be reduced to a single dominant language, that one language somehow represents the authentic linguistic identity of the household while all others become secondary.

That assumption bears little resemblance to the lived experience of multilingual Australia. In my home, for example, my children are fluent in both Greek and Assyrian. They use both languages interchangeably, moving effortlessly between them, often within the same conversation, depending upon who is speaking, what is being discussed or because one thought finds its natural expression in one language rather than the other. One language carries particular memories, the other particular histories. One contains expressions that simply cannot be translated without losing something essential, while the other preserves a different inheritance altogether. They are complementary rather than competitive and coexist without requiring a hierarchy. The 2026 Australian Census nevertheless insists that I impose one.

More fundamentally, the question misunderstands multilingualism itself. Contemporary sociolinguistics has long abandoned the notion that multilingual speakers inhabit neatly separated linguistic compartments. Multilingual speakers move fluidly between languages according to context, relationship and purpose, drawing upon a shared linguistic repertoire rather than isolated systems. Language is not merely a system of vocabulary and grammar but a repertoire of relationships, negotiated daily across generations, marriages, friendships and neighbourhoods. Yet the census proceeds from an individualistic conception of language, as though it were a possession residing inside the speaker rather than a social practice existing between speakers. Languages survive because communities sustain them, not because individuals possess them in isolation. To ask me which language my children or I speak "most often" is rather like asking which member of our family we relate to most frequently. The answer depends entirely upon the circumstances, and even if it could be quantified it would reveal remarkably little about the relationships themselves.

The consequences of this perspective extend well beyond semantics. Census data informs public policy, shaping decisions about interpreting services, community language education, health care, aged care, broadcasting and funding. Smaller language communities already confronting the pressures of assimilation suddenly appear smaller still because the instrument designed to measure them has first required many of their speakers to suppress part of their linguistic reality. The resulting statistics acquire the authority of objective truth, despite having been produced through categories that have already simplified the phenomenon they purport to describe. In the official record, my children will therefore be counted as speakers of Greek because that is the language I chose to nominate, even though they are equally fluent in Assyrian. Had I made the opposite choice, they would simply have become Assyrian speakers instead. One language would always disappear. Ironically, as the smaller linguistic community, Assyrian arguably has the greater need for every speaker to be counted, yet the Census compels me to privilege one inheritance over the other.

The irony is difficult to ignore. Australia speaks endlessly of multiculturalism as one of its defining achievements. We celebrate Harmony Week, fund multicultural festivals and proudly describe ourselves as one of the world's most linguistically diverse societies. Governments encourage the maintenance of community languages while educational institutions extol the cognitive and cultural benefits of multilingualism. Yet when the nation pauses every five years to count itself, it does so through categories that continue to reflect the logic of an earlier Australia, one still influenced by the assimilationist expectation that each household ultimately possesses one principal language and one primary identity.

Official multiculturalism has become remarkably adept at celebrating diversity symbolically while disciplining it administratively. Diversity is welcomed provided it first becomes intelligible to the bureaucratic gaze. Linguistic plurality must therefore be rendered orderly, singular and statistically manageable before it can enter the official narrative of the nation.

What makes this particularly striking is the historical amnesia that underpins it. The census proceeds from an essentially European conception of the nation state, one that instinctively seeks a primary language and a singular identity. Yet the oldest linguistic traditions of this continent point in precisely the opposite direction. Before colonisation, many Aboriginal societies inhabited richly multilingual worlds, where several languages and dialects were used across kinship, ceremony, trade and Country without requiring speakers to privilege one over another. Contemporary migrant Australia has, through very different historical circumstances, recreated similarly multilingual environments in thousands of homes. It is therefore curious that the principal instrument through which Australia counts itself remains anchored in assumptions that sit more comfortably within nineteenth century European nationalism than within Australia's own linguistic history.

Benedict Anderson famously argued that nations are imagined communities. The census is one of the principal instruments through which that imagining takes place, determining which characteristics deserve measurement and which disappear beneath statistical convenience. When multilingual households are compressed into singular linguistic identities, Australia inevitably imagines itself as considerably less linguistically complex than it actually is.

The solution would hardly have been difficult. Rather than asking respondents to identify the language they use "most often," the census could simply have invited Australians to identify every language regularly spoken at home. Modern statistical analysis is perfectly capable of accommodating multiple responses. Such an approach would have produced a richer understanding of Australia's linguistic ecology, recognising multilingualism as Australians actually live it rather than reducing it to categories dictated by bureaucratic convenience. Equally perplexing, however, is the census' complete lack of interest in the many other languages Australians may know, read, write or speak beyond the home. A person may possess fluency in several languages, use them professionally, academically or socially, and yet those linguistic competencies disappear entirely from the national record because they happen not to be exercised within the domestic sphere. Those languages nevertheless represent years of education, cultural knowledge, professional expertise and engagement with the wider world, yet none of this linguistic capital appears in the statistical record. Why is the linguistic capital embodied in those languages considered unworthy of measurement? Does the state value multilingualism only insofar as it functions as a marker of ethnicity within the home, while remaining curiously indifferent to the linguistic knowledge its citizens possess and deploy in every other sphere of national life?

Perhaps that is the more profound question this census raises. The issue is scarcely whether Australia is multicultural. That proposition has long since ceased to be controversial. The real question concerns who possesses the authority to define the terms upon which multiculturalism is recognised and measured. Census statistics quickly acquire the authority of objective fact, informing government policy, academic research and public understanding alike. If the assumptions embedded within those statistics fail to capture the complexity of Australia's linguistic life, they inevitably distort the picture they claim merely to describe. The greatest danger, therefore, is not that the census fails to count multilingual Australia accurately. It is that Australia comes to believe the diminished reflection of itself that the census has created.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 8 August 2026

 

ODYSSEUS: TO EPIRUS, ANTARCTICA AND BEYOND

 

Christopher Nolan's forthcoming adaptation of the Odyssey has already succeeded in directing the world's attention back towards Homer's immortal epic. Once again, audiences will accompany the king of Ithaca across the wine-dark sea, through the cave of Polyphemus, beyond the enchantments of Circe, the song of the Sirens and the terror of Scylla and Charybdis, before witnessing his long-awaited reunion with Penelope after twenty years of war and wandering. For most viewers, that homecoming will represent the conclusion of one of civilisation's greatest stories. It has done so for centuries. The return to Ithaca has become so deeply embedded within the Western imagination that it is almost impossible to conceive of Odysseus existing beyond the final lines of Homer.

It was never claimed however, that Homer had written the last chapter of Odysseus' life. The ancient Greeks themselves inherited a far richer tapestry of narratives than the two Homeric epics that fortune has preserved. Alongside the Iliad and the Odyssey stood a series of companion poems collectively known as the Epic Cycle, works that described the events preceding the Trojan War, its aftermath and the subsequent destinies of its surviving heroes. Almost all have disappeared, surviving only in fragments, summaries and quotations preserved by later authors.

The poem that continued the adventures of Odysseus bore the title Telegony. Ancient writers, however, occasionally referred to it by another name: the Thesprotis. Rather than directing attention towards Telegonus, the son of Odysseus and Circe, it directs the reader towards Thesprotia in Epirus, suggesting that the Epirote episodes occupied so central a place in the narrative that they came to define the poem itself.

The Telegony begins precisely where the Odyssey ends. The suitors have been buried, Penelope has accepted her husband and Telemachus has come into his inheritance and order appears to have been restored. Modern readers naturally interpret these events as the fulfilment of the entire narrative. Homer himself, however, had already planted the seed of another journey. During Odysseus' descent into Hades, the prophet Tiresias instructed him that, after returning home, he must once again shoulder an oar and travel inland until he reached a people so unfamiliar with the sea that they mistook the oar for a winnowing fan. Only after offering sacrifice to Poseidon in that distant place would the god's anger finally be appeased and Odysseus receive the peaceful death destined for him.

While Odyssey never records the fulfilment of that prophecy. The Telegony does. Having carried out Tiresias' command, Odysseus crosses from Ithaca to neighbouring Thesprotia, which Homer himself repeatedly presents as a familiar kingdom within the geography of his world. Indeed, while disguised as a beggar, Odysseus fabricates an elaborate tale in which he claims to have visited the Thesprotian king, who supposedly possesses knowledge of his whereabouts. Such references, which seem incidental within the Odyssey, acquire unexpected significance when read alongside the later epic. They suggest that traditions linking Odysseus with Epirus may already have circulated before the Telegony was composed.

The most remarkable aspect of the lost epic lies in what Odysseus chooses to do once he reaches Epirus. Instead of resuming his endless wandering, he remains. The queen of the Thesprotians, Callidice, becomes his wife and bears him a son, Polypoetes. Odysseus assumes the kingship of the Thesprotians and governs an Epirote kingdom, exchanging the uncertainty of the sea for the responsibilities of rule. His reign proves far from peaceful. War erupts between the Thesprotians and the neighbouring Brygoi, drawing the Olympian gods once more into mortal affairs. Athena, whose protection had accompanied Odysseus since Troy, again fights beside him. Ares champions the opposing army and Apollo intervenes before divine rivalry consumes the battlefield. Although the surviving summaries preserve only the outline of these events, they evoke an epic in which the mountains and valleys of Epirus replaced the plains of Troy as the theatre upon which gods and heroes contested the destiny of nations.

Callidice eventually dies, leaving Polypoetes to inherit the Epirote throne. Odysseus consequently returns to Ithaca, although fate has reserved one final irony for the ingenious man who escaped monsters, storms, hostile kings and the anger of the gods. During his prolonged stay with Circe, he had fathered another son, Telegonus, who, upon reaching adulthood, sets out in search of the father he has never known. A storm drives him unknowingly to Ithaca. Mistaking the island for foreign territory, he begins carrying away cattle. Enraged, Odysseus emerges to defend his kingdom and the two engage in combat without recognising one another. Telegonus kills his father with a spear tipped by the venomous spine of a stingray. Only afterwards does he discover whom he has slain. Tiresias' prophecy has been fulfilled with exquisite precision. Death has indeed come to Odysseus "from the sea," not through drowning, but through the poison of a creature taken from its depths.

The disappearance of the Telegony represents one of antiquity's great literary losses. Homer's poems survived because they became the foundation of Greek education, copied continuously by generations of scholars and scribes who regarded them as unsurpassable masterpieces. The companion epics gradually vanished, dismissed as supplementary works whose stories could be summarised rather than preserved in their entirety. The consequence for Epirus proved particularly unfortunate. An entire chapter of its mythological inheritance disappeared from popular consciousness, leaving visitors free to admire Dodona, the Acheron and the landscapes of Thesprotia without realising that ancient tradition once regarded them as the setting of Odysseus' last kingdom.

Yet Odysseus has always resisted confinement within a single ending. The restlessness that defines his character has repeatedly inspired writers to imagine further journeys, none more ambitious than the monumental sequel composed by Nikos Kazantzakis. Published in 1938 after years of painstaking revision, The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel extends to 33,333 verses, making it one of the longest poems in modern European literature. If the anonymous author of the Telegony sought to continue Homer's narrative within the geographical world of Greek myth, Kazantzakis transformed Odysseus into the embodiment of humanity's unending spiritual quest.

Kazantzakis begins where Homer concludes, although his hero rapidly discovers that peace has become intolerable. The violence required to recover Ithaca has rendered ordinary domestic life impossible. Odysseus himself cannot endure stillness, while those around him struggle to live beside a man shaped by decades of conflict. He voluntarily abandons the home for which he once sacrificed everything and sets sail once more, compelled less by external necessity than by an insatiable hunger for experience and self-transcendence.

His subsequent journey bears little resemblance to anything found in ancient epic. He travels first to Sparta in an attempt to rescue Helen, whose beauty had once consumed the Greek world. From there he proceeds to Crete, where political conspiracy overturns the established order. Helen abandons him in favour of a blonde barbarian, symbolising the relentless displacement of old civilisations by new historical forces and the fact that blondes get all the fun. Egypt follows, convulsed by a workers' uprising, before Odysseus journeys ever deeper into Africa along the Nile to its legendary source. There he ascends a mountain seeking communion with God and descends convinced that he has discovered a new spiritual revelation. His companions establish a city founded upon the commandments of this faith, only for an earthquake almost immediately to reduce it to ruins. The catastrophe forces Odysseus to confront the inadequacy of every human attempt to impose permanence upon a transient world.

From this point onwards, Kazantzakis' hero increasingly abandons the role of conqueror in favour of that of seeker. As the journey becomes increasingly philosophical, Odysseus encounters allegorical incarnations of the Buddha, Don Quixote and Christ, allowing Kazantzakis to explore competing ideals of renunciation, idealism and sacrifice. Each encounter constitutes a philosophical dialogue rather than a conventional episode of adventure, allowing Kazantzakis to explore competing visions of faith, freedom, sacrifice and redemption through the figure of the most celebrated wanderer in Greek literature.

The poem eventually carries Odysseus as far as Antarctica, where he spends a year living among its inhabitants before an immense iceberg crushes him beneath its frozen mass. His death possesses none of the tragic finality associated with the Telegony. For Kazantzakis, existence acquires meaning through continual struggle rather than ultimate achievement. The value of the journey resides in striving itself. Death therefore becomes liberation, dissolving the individual into the universal life of creation and completing the endless search that has defined Odysseus from the moment he first departed for Troy.

The contrast between these two sequels could scarcely be greater. The Telegony anchors Odysseus firmly within the historical and mythological landscape of Epirus, presenting him as king, husband, father and founder of an Epirote dynasty. Kazantzakis strips away every political and domestic attachment, converting him into the archetypal pilgrim whose only true homeland lies beyond geography. Yet both works share a conviction absent from many modern retellings. Neither accepts that Ithaca constituted the end of Odysseus' story. Each insists that the hero's defining quality was perpetual movement, whether across the mountains of Epirus or towards the furthest limits of the human spirit.

Christopher Nolan's film has undoubtedly returned Homer's Odyssey to the centre of contemporary culture. Millions will once again follow the king of Ithaca until his ship at last reaches familiar shores. Those willing to look beyond Homer's closing verses, however, will discover another Odyssey waiting to be remembered. It begins across the narrow waters of the Ionian Sea, beneath the sacred oaks of Dodona and among the valleys of Thesprotia, where ancient tradition placed the last kingdom of Odysseus. From there, centuries later, Nikos Kazantzakis would send the same restless hero beyond every horizon imaginable, reminding us that some journeys possess no final destination because they reflect the inexhaustible restlessness of humanity itself.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 1 August 2026

PARAGON PARAMNESIA

 

The Paragon Cafe is an architectural monument, a social document and a material expression of the way Greek migrants entered Australian society. Through the work of Effy Alexakis and Leonard Janiszewski, whose painstaking documentation of the Greek café phenomenon rescued an entire chapter of migrant history from oblivion, the Paragon has become one of the defining symbols of Greek Australia. Its significance, however, extends beyond architecture and hospitality because it exposes a revealing asymmetry in Greek-Australian memory. Our community has maintained certain inheritances with extraordinary tenacity while allowing many of the material settings in which Australian lives were fashioned to recede towards obscurity, as though the civilisation carried across the sea possessed an unquestioned historical authority denied to the places where migration assumed lived form.

Greek-Australians’ historical identity is inextricably linked to the monuments it constructs to commemorate it. Statues of Leonidas in Brunswick and Spyridon Louis in Brighton-Le-Sands testify to a historical imagination whose axis continues to point towards the eastern Mediterranean despite distance, prosperity and the passing of generations. Meanwhile the cafés whose terrazzo floors were scrubbed before dawn, the milk bars where children completed homework between customers, the fish shops, and other businesses through which families accumulated modest fortunes, learnt unfamiliar customs and gradually altered Australian society have occupied a far less secure position within communal memory. Such imbalance can easily be mistaken for indifference, although migration rarely permits explanations of such simplicity. Scholars describe the amnesia migration inevitably produces, although the term signifies a continual work of internal editing rather than simple forgetting.

The Paragon therefore occupies an uneasy position within Greek-Australian consciousness because it belongs to the Australia migrants created, or rather reacted and adapted to, rather than the Greece they carried within themselves. Communities readily commemorate battlefields, temples, and national heroes because these places arrive already invested with symbolic meaning. Workplaces acquire significance only retrospectively, once historical confidence has developed sufficiently to recognise that the deepest archives of migration frequently reside inside ordinary buildings, and of course, once the mainstream has afforded them heritage status.

Maurice Halbwachs observed that collective memory develops through social frameworks rather than private recollection: it is families, churches and associations that determine which aspects of the past deserve remembrance and that provide the interpretive language through which they are understood. Coupled with this is the need for communities to shape their memories in such a way as to appeal to the dominant group. Choosing to emphasise our ancient past rather than our immediate past, is a case in point. Given the immensity of the past it inherited, and the respect it was traditionally afforded by the ruling class, comparatively little institutional energy was devoted to recording the material history of Greek-Australia itself. The community consequently developed an exceptionally rich vocabulary for explaining where it came from and a comparatively modest one for explaining what it became, treating migration primarily as a passage between two stable identities instead of recognising it as a historical condition that generated its own places, practices and traditions.

There is a further asymmetry within this pattern of remembrance. The vernacular monuments migration produced, including cafés, milk bars and oyster saloons, overwhelmingly commemorate the petty bourgeoisie: the family that owned the counter rather than the family that worked on another person’s assembly line. The café lends itself to a narrative of advancement culminating in ownership, while the factory records wages earned under someone else’s name and offers no comparable conclusion of independence or ascent. Recovering the proletarian dimension of Greek-Australian history therefore requires an acknowledgment that the counter photographs beautifully, whereas the factory floor rarely enters the commemorative frame.

The present condition of the Paragon gives this argument particular urgency. The building has stood empty since 2018, its interior increasingly exposed to water damage, mould, graffiti and squatters, while the New South Wales government has been obliged to bring its owner before the Land and Environment Court. A place capable of embodying an entire chapter of migrant history is consequently deteriorating while questions of ownership, responsibility and intervention remain unresolved.

Australians encountered Greek hospitality long before many consciously encountered Greek culture, and commerce became one of the principal means through which migrants participated in public life while maintaining continuity within the family. That participation demanded constant adjustment. Menus accommodated Australian tastes, accents softened, Greek conversations paused when customers entered, “Greek” looking staff receded into the obscurity of the kitchen, unfamiliar ingredients disappeared, and innumerable small concessions accumulated into a disciplined performance of acceptability.

Customers and proprietors consequently remember the same rooms through fundamentally different emotional frameworks. Patrons recall polished counters, milkshakes, familiar faces and establishments whose reassuring permanence appeared effortless. Families remember relentless work. Cafés commonly operated from early morning until late at night, seven days a week, while entire households lived behind their businesses and children completed homework between serving customers. The café functioned simultaneously as workplace, home, financial gamble, social interface and instrument of intergenerational advancement, compressing almost every dimension of family existence into a single building.

Psychology further helps explain why such places have rarely become central objects of collective remembrance. Experiences dominated by exhaustion, exclusion and continual vigilance seldom become cherished memories once they have fulfilled their purpose. For many Greek migrants, the café existed precisely so that their children would never spend their own lives behind its counter. Success therefore carried an implicit desire to leave that world behind. Remembering required a return to sacrifice, fatigue and the discipline of continual adaptation, whereas forgetting allowed suffering to acquire meaning without demanding perpetual recollection. Trauma shaped collective memory by influencing which experiences could be narrated with pride, which survived through euphemism and which gradually receded from communal consciousness.

If the Paragon survives, it will retain something increasingly rare: an opportunity to encounter migration as lived experience rather than retrospective narrative. Its significance lies precisely in refusing to separate enterprise from fatigue, adaptation from continuity, or public success from private sacrifice. Few surviving places still possess that capacity.

Restoration as a living museum of Greek-Australian migration presents a practical means of conserving both the building and the history it embodies. The service of beverages could coexist with exhibitions interpreting the history of Greek cafés across Australia, while the photographic archive assembled by Effy Alexakis and Leonard Janiszewski could be presented alongside oral histories, family collections and objects rescued from establishments that have disappeared. An honest account should also include the factory floors and wage labour that produced no comparable architectural monument. Standing before the Paragon’s marble counters, decorative ceilings and Art Deco interiors, visitors could encounter the relationship between enterprise, family labour, assimilation, hospitality and belonging in physical form.

Whether such projects remain aspirations or become realities ultimately depends upon the priorities communities set for themselves. Every generation inherits institutions, resources and responsibilities created by those who came before it. The measure of historical maturity lies not simply in carrying forward what has been inherited, but in recognising when the time has come to record the history that inheritance itself produced.

Members of our community has ineffectually attempted to “save” the building before. However, the debate surrounding the proceeds from the sale of Hellenic Village at Austral gives these questions an immediacy they have never previously possessed. The community now finds itself responsible for an inheritance approaching one hundred and twenty million dollars, wealth accumulated through the very history this essay has sought to recover. Inevitably, discussion has centred upon governance, accountability and distribution. Another question nevertheless deserves a place beside them. Every inheritance carries with it an understanding of the past, whether articulated or assumed. The decisions made today will determine not only how that inheritance is spent, but what history it ultimately serves.

If Greek Australia chooses to protect the material record of its own experience, it will finally acknowledge that the Australian chapter of its history deserves to stand alongside the civilisational inheritance that preceded it. The question is no longer whether the community possesses the means to do so. It is whether it possesses the historical confidence to do justice to that history in all its complexity, resisting the temptation to remember only those parts that flatter it while allowing the rest to disappear.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 25 July 2026.

THE AFTERLIFE OF IMAGES

Few questions possess greater capacity to animate the political imagination than those concerning the ownership of land, for territory has seldom been understood merely as an economic commodity capable of valuation according to the arithmetic of the marketplace. It is memory rendered geographical, ancestry translated into landscape and civilisation sedimented into stone, so that discussions concerning foreign acquisition invariably awaken deeper meditations upon sovereignty, belonging and historical continuity. Greece has wrestled with these questions throughout the modern era, while Australians periodically rediscover comparable anxieties whenever overseas investors purchase agricultural holdings, strategic infrastructure or residential property. Such controversies belong naturally within democratic societyies, where competing understandings of the public interest contend through legislation, public debate and electoral choice. A different set of questions arises, however, when the language of economics yields imperceptibly to the language of ethnicity, and when the purchaser ceases to be an investor participating in the ordinary operation of the market and instead becomes the embodiment of an entire people.

                                                  

Recent posters circulated by the Democritus Workers League invite reflection upon precisely such a transition. Their subject matter lies comfortably within the bounds of legitimate political discourse. Attention is drawn here, therefore, neither to the legitimacy of those concerns nor to the motives of those responsible for the posters, which remain known only to themselves, but to the symbolic vocabulary through which those concerns are expressed. Images possess genealogies every bit as intricate as texts. They preserve visual memories accumulated across generations, often surviving the historical circumstances that first endowed them with meaning.

The first poster announces itself beneath the emphatic declaration Under New Ownership. Dominating the composition stands the Parthenon, rendered unstable, its pediment fractured and its columns inclined sufficiently to suggest that the monument itself has begun to yield before an invisible force. Beneath this iconic structure appears a quotation attributed to Kathimerini, asserting that “Israeli and other funds are massively buying up beaches, neighbourhoods and villages, turning their residents into migrants in their own land,” while, almost unnoticed at the base of the composition, a discarded Greek flag lies abandoned upon the ground, completing visually the narrative already advanced in words. The companion poster presents an equally arresting image. Across the outline of Cyprus, stamped with the single word Sold, an enormous arm clothed unmistakably in the Israeli flag extends across the island beneath the question: Is Cyprus the New Israeli Colony?

Read independently, each poster expresses apprehension concerning foreign investment. Viewed together, however, they construct a broader narrative in which commercial transactions undergo a subtle transmutation into collective historical agency. Individual purchasers disappear from view. Distinctions separating governments from private citizens, corporations from investment funds and isolated transactions from coordinated intention gradually dissolve until the viewer confronts a singular protagonist whose economic activity assumes the appearance of national purpose. The argument consequently ceases to concern property in any conventional sense, referencing instead patrimony, identity and civilisational continuity, articulated through an iconography whose emotional resonance extends well beyond its literal content.

The Parthenon occupies the symbolic centre of that visual grammar. No informed observer imagines that the monument itself could ever become the object of commercial exchange. Protected by Greek law, preserved under international convention and recognised throughout the world as part of humanity's common inheritance, it exists altogether beyond the marketplace invoked by the accompanying quotation. Its appearance therefore cannot plausibly be descriptive. It can only be symbolic. The image invites the viewer to collapse the distinction between private real estate and Greece itself until the acquisition of beaches and apartment blocks acquires the emotional significance of purchasing Hellenic civilisation. As George Mosse observed, monuments gradually cease to function merely as architecture and become repositories of collective memory through which nations imagine themselves. Few monuments perform that function more completely than the Parthenon.

The quotation attributed to Kathimerini performs a subtler rhetorical function. By borrowing the authority of an established newspaper, the poster presents its visual argument with the appearance of documentary objectivity. The viewer is encouraged to receive the accompanying symbolism as the natural illustration of an independently verified reality rather than as an interpretation of it. The leaning Parthenon and discarded flag therefore appear less as rhetorical devices than as the inevitable visual consequences of facts already established elsewhere.

The second poster employs a different symbolic strategy, although it arrives at a remarkably similar destination. The visual burden of explaining economic change no longer falls upon a national monument. Instead, it is assumed by a single outstretched arm clothed unmistakably in the Israeli flag, reaching across Cyprus with an assurance that renders invisible every intermediary ordinarily associated with the purchase of land. Conveyancers, real estate agents and private investors disappear. In their place stands Israel itself. The Star of David, functioning simultaneously as the contemporary emblem of the State of Israel and one of Judaism's oldest religious symbols, assumes responsibility for representing an entire economic process. The distinction between state, nation, religion and private enterprise is thereby compressed into a single image.

The accompanying question, Is Cyprus the New Israeli Colony?, completes that symbolic transformation. The language of colonisation performs a significant rhetorical function, for colonies are established by states rather than private citizens. The image invites the viewer to understand ordinary market activity through the moral vocabulary of dispossession, occupation and imperial ambition. It is an extraordinarily powerful visual move because it substitutes intention for complexity. Rather than asking whether individual investors have entered a particular market for a multiplicity of reasons, the poster proposes a singular historical narrative in which acquisition itself appears directed towards the establishment of a colony. Even the typography contributes to this symbolic economy. Although the accompanying text is written in English, its angular letterforms evoke the Hebrew script, establishing an association with Jewish identity before the words themselves have been fully read.

Roland Barthes, in his Mythologies, argued that myth rarely invents falsehood. Its greater achievement consists in emptying history of complexity until ideology assumes the appearance of common sense. A multitude of unrelated events is distilled into a narrative so intuitively persuasive that its constructed nature almost disappears from view. His insight also draws attention to what the posters choose to omit. Foreign investment in Greece and Cyprus has long involved a multiplicity of actors, each provoking differing degrees of public debate. Yet this broader phenomenon is visually condensed into a single national symbol. Such selectivity does not diminish the legitimacy of questioning Israeli investment. It does, however, invite reflection upon why one particular state has become the visual metonym through which a far more complex economic reality is rendered intelligible.

Images endure. The cultural historian Aby Warburg devoted much of his life’s work to tracing what he described as the Nachleben, the afterlife of images, whereby visual motifs survive across centuries because they preserve emotional formulae capable of being adapted to successive historical circumstances. Images remember even when those who reproduce them have forgotten what they once signified.

Viewed through Warburg’s lens, these posters disclose a visual genealogy extending well beyond contemporary disputes concerning property ownership. The grasping hand stretching across a national map, the suggestion that countries may be subdued through wealth rather than force, the transformation of economic activity into collective national behaviour and the implication that an ancient civilisation stands upon the threshold of purchase all belong to an iconographic repertoire that European audiences have encountered before. Their persuasive force derives precisely from that familiarity, for they awaken visual memories whose origins may have faded from conscious recollection while continuing to shape the ways in which contemporary audiences interpret political reality.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt observed that one of the defining characteristics of modern antisemitism lay in its capacity to transform Jews from individuals into abstractions. They ceased to appear as neighbours, merchants, professionals or citizens participating in the ordinary plurality of society and instead became symbols representing finance, capitalism and hidden power. Individual lives disappeared beneath the fiction of a singular historical actor pursuing a unified purpose. Her insight extends well beyond the historical circumstances that produced it, constituting a warning about the ease with which political discourse may substitute symbolic categories for living human beings.

Whether consciously or otherwise, the visual logic of these posters risks inviting precisely such a substitution. Israelis cease to appear as individual investors participating, alongside countless others, within ordinary legal markets. Their place is occupied by Israel itself, represented as a singular economic protagonist whose actions assume the appearance of collective historical intention. The transition occurs through imagery rather than explicit assertion, visual rhetoric proving more enduring than verbal argument precisely because it operates beneath the threshold of conscious analysis.

History demonstrates where such symbolic habits have previously led. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, European antisemitic imagery repeatedly associated Jews with commerce, finance and property acquisition, presenting economic activity as evidence of collective ambition rather than individual enterprise. The grasping hand extending across maps, the suggestion that nations might be conquered through wealth rather than armies, and the portrayal of invisible economic power formed a recurring visual vocabulary, finding some of its most notorious expressions in the propaganda of the Third Reich. To recognise that these motifs possess an identifiable history is emphatically different from asserting that the Democritus Workers League occupies the same ideological universe, nor does it warrant attributing antisemitic motives to those responsible for these posters. Images nevertheless possess histories independent of intention, and those histories remain open to examination irrespective of the motives of those who reproduce them.

Once an image enters the public sphere it acquires meanings extending beyond those originally invested in it, particularly where long-established symbolic traditions remain capable of shaping contemporary perception. It is therefore entirely legitimate to ask whether imagery of this kind, whatever its purpose, risks reproducing visual conventions whose historical associations many observers could scarcely be expected to overlook.

That question assumes particular significance within Australia, whose multicultural settlement depends upon an enduring distinction between governments and peoples, public policy and inherited identity. Criticism of the policies of the State of Israel belongs fully within democratic discourse, just as criticism of any other State does. Equally indispensable is the discipline of resisting imagery that encourages entire peoples to become symbols of abstract historical forces. Democracies flourish when arguments remain directed towards identifiable policies and discernible actors rather than inherited identities.

Ultimately, the significance of these posters lies less in the proposition they advance than in the visual language through which that proposition is expressed. Political disagreements come and go. Images endure. They preserve older associations and carry historical memories into new controversies. The iconography deployed here has a history. It is a history humanity has good reason to remember.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 18 July 2026