A SOVEREIGNTY OF TWO MINDS: CYPRUS AND THE POLITICS OF COEXISTENCE

The history of Cyprus is marked by division, contestation, and the perpetual struggle over competing sovereignties. Over the past century, a succession of proposals has sought to resolve the island’s entrenched conflict, none more ambitious than the Annan Plan of 2004, brokered under the auspices of the United Nations. Aiming to reunify the island within a bi-zonal, bi-communal federation, the plan laid out an elaborate constitutional framework to reconcile the aspirations and insecurities of Greek and Turkish Cypriots. Yet, while supported by the Turkish Cypriot community and endorsed internationally, it was decisively rejected by the majority of Greek Cypriots in a referendum. This rejection cannot just be understood simply as a rebuff to reconciliation. Rather it is a reflection of deep-rooted historical grievances, structural asymmetries, and anxieties about legitimacy, sovereignty, and security. As Costas M. Constantinou has argued, the postcolonial condition of Cyprus demands not merely legal resolution but recognition of the "coloniality of power" that continues to frame its geopolitics, producing asymmetrical relations masked as negotiations between equals.

The Annan Plan was a prodigious feat of legal architecture. It proposed a rotational presidency, extensive property restitution mechanisms, and demilitarisation measures. Yet it failed to reckon with the psychological economy of occupation and displacement. The plan’s perceived endorsement of the post-1974 status quo, particularly the legitimisation of settler populations and the retention of Turkish military presence, rendered it politically untenable for many Greek Cypriots. It was not merely a matter of political calculation, but of existential apprehension. As Neophytos Loizides contends, in divided societies, peace settlements must not only be fair in procedural terms but must also be perceived as substantively just by the parties involved: “The perceived fairness of institutional design must be matched by legitimacy in the eyes of the communities it seeks to unite.” The legitimacy deficit was deepened by the plan’s top-down imposition and by the absence of a broad-based reconciliation process, an omission that created the impression of imposition rather than inclusion, and of external pressure rather than local agency.

Against this modern blueprint stands a more ancient precedent: the Byzantine Arab condominium, an unlikely and often forgotten political arrangement that governed Cyprus from the seventh to the tenth century. This joint administration emerged not from treaties or referenda, but from military stalemate and imperial pragmatism. Following Arab raids in the 650s and the subsequent inability of either the Byzantine Empire or the Umayyad Caliphate to dominate the island outright, the two powers instituted a novel form of co-rule. Taxes were collected and shared between the empires; both abstained from stationing large military contingents on the island, and a delicate balance of supervision and non-intervention allowed Cypriot civil life to continue. As historian Dimitri Obolensky notes, Cyprus was neither Byzantine nor Arab, but both, and its very ambiguity was its protection. The arrangement, though foreign to modern sensibilities, permitted a kind of pluralistic governance in which ambiguity served as a stabilising force rather than a flaw.

While structurally alien to modern norms of democratic governance and self-determination, the condominium offers an instructive counterpoint to the failures of federalist solutions like the Annan Plan. It did notoperate through clarity of jurisdiction but rather, through ambiguity; not through exclusive sovereignty, but through overlapping, negotiated interests. Drawing on Foucault’s theory of governmentality, one might interpret the condominium as an early iteration of diffuse power, in which rule is exercised not by a singular sovereign, but instead, through a dynamic equilibrium of competing authorities. This interpretation destabilises the Hobbesian assumption that political order depends upon centralised authority, suggesting instead that stability can arise from negotiated coexistence. In a contemporary frame, this challenges the assumption that peace must follow from fixed, delineated sovereignties. Indeed, it suggests that hybridity, if institutionalised with safeguards and parity, may serve as a more adaptive model of governance in deeply divided societies. The condominium functioned precisely because it did not rely on homogenisation or national integration. Its ethos was pragmatic coexistence, not political resolution.

The very implausibility of resurrecting such a model for Cyprus today is what renders it compelling. The condominium embraced a form of cohabitation that deliberately suspended territorial finality. It functioned for centuries in the absence of clear borders, national identities, or even mutual trust, granted, in an era pre-nationalism and the rise of the nation-state. Its success rested not on shared narratives of belonging, but on the acknowledgement that shared administration could be more sustainable than perpetual contest. This logic resonates with the insights of Chantal Mouffe, who argues for “agonistic pluralism” as a mode of political co-existence where conflict, rather than being eliminated, is rendered non-violent through institutionalised negotiation. It also reflects the thought of James Tully, who advocates for constitutional dialogues that make room for overlapping identities and evolving forms of sovereignty. In Tully’s view, constitutionalism must be dialogic and responsive, not rooted in preordained categories but instead, in the lived realities of the peoples it seeks to govern.

The modern international system, with its rigid conception of unitary state sovereignty, offers little room for such arrangements. Yet examples exist, albeit rare and fraught. The Anglo-French condominium in the New Hebrides (present-day Vanuatu) endured from 1906 until independence in 1980, despite absurd levels of bureaucratic duplication. In Sudan, the Anglo-Egyptian condominium governed from 1899 until decolonisation in 1956, though it was marked by stark inequalities and British dominance. Both cases illustrate that joint sovereignty is feasible but must be grounded in clearly defined responsibilities, mutual consent, and, critically, attention to the voice and dignity of the local population. Scholars such as Susan Pedersen and Martin Thomas have shown that while these arrangements were often rife with contradictions, they could function with stability when major powers maintained balanced interests and local actors were not excluded entirely from participation.

Applying this to Cyprus would require a radical shift in political imagination. It would entail that Greece and Turkey relinquish the posture of patrons of ethnonational claims and instead assume the role of custodians of a pluralistic future for the island. Their role should be to enable a framework wherein Cypriots themselves forge a shared polity, one that preserves communal identities while resisting ethno-territorial fragmentation. Such a vision does not require the wholesale resurrection of the Byzantine-Arab model, though it may draw upon its guiding principle: that overlapping sovereignties can, under certain conditions, stabilise where binary rule has failed. This would involve a move away from a discourse of zero-sum ownership and toward one of mutual stewardship. It would also demand courage from all parties to let go of the comfort of fixed identities in favour of a more fluid political belonging.

There are, of course, profound risks in proposing this. Any contemporary condominium would be scrutinised for signs of neo-imperialism, a return to protectorate governance, or the erosion of the Republic of Cyprus’s hard-won international legitimacy. Moreover, it would have to overcome entrenched narratives of betrayal, displacement, and mistrust. Yet as the Cyprus problem grows increasingly intractable, and as reunification recedes from the horizon, the imaginative space for alternative models must expand. As Kalypso Nicolaïdis notes, pluralist forms of sovereignty must contend with emotional attachments to nationhood, but they also offer a pathway for disaggregating authority without erasing identity. Cyprus, therefore, need not choose between the nation-state and the void, but can chart a course through the grey zones of shared sovereignty.

Rather than replicating the failures of the past or settling into the impasse of the present, Cyprus might reclaim its position as a site of political innovation. The Annan Plan offered a comprehensive and technical model of resolution, but underestimated the depth of historical memory and the affective dimensions of sovereignty. The Byzantine Arab condominium, for all its anachronism, invites us to reconsider the very architecture of rule, to loosen the hold of binary logic, and to envisage political arrangements not predicated on exclusive ownership. Perhaps the time has come to reimagine sovereignty not as indivisible, but as participatory and relational.

Cyprus has always existed at the confluence of empires, a terrain of competing visions and overlapping claims. It need not remain suspended in the melancholy of division. As Edward Said reminds us, “exile is strangely compelling to think about, but terrible to experience.” Cyprus has endured a long exile from unity, hemmed in by the certainties of international law and the inflexibility of nationalist myth. Perhaps, by reviving the memory of shared rule and by reimagining the ethics of cohabitation, the island may yet find a path forward, neither as partitioned nor as absorbed, but as plural, complex, and sovereign in a new key.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday, 26 July 2025

LIGHT AND MORE LIGHT: THE GREEK IMPRESSIONISTS

 

The recent exhibition of French Impressionist masterpieces at the National Gallery of Victoria, replete with ethereal tableaux of sunlit seascapes, perfumed gardens, and the fleeting splendours of modern life as captured by Monet, Renoir, and their contemporaries, has not only reaffirmed the enduring allure of this revolutionary artistic movement but has also, perhaps unwittingly, rekindled a latent question: where is the Hellenic presence in this radiant dialectic of light and colour? Among Monet’s translucent visions of Antibes, Renoir’s effulgent Mediterranean bays, and Cézanne’s sun-scorched Provençal orchards, there pulses a sensibility kindred to the Aegean, one that intimates, though never articulates, a Hellenic gaze. One leaves the gallery imbued with a sense of something glimpsed but unspoken, something familiar yet absent, a silence wherein the Greek response to the aesthetic revolution of Impressionism ought to have been inscribed.

This omission, however, is not the result of a historical void but rather of historiographical oversight. For Greece, emerging from the crucible of revolution and imperial unravelling in the nineteenth century, did indeed cultivate its own Impressionists, painters who, though inspired by the same Parisian ethos of optical immediacy and atmospheric sensation, articulated through their art a profoundly indigenous engagement with light, place, and national identity. Greek Impressionism did not proceed as a passive imitation of foreign aesthetic currents, but as a luminous act of reappropriation, in which the palette of the West was applied to the particular topography of Hellenic experience.

To comprehend the emergence of Greek Impressionism is to peer into the shifting soul of a nascent nation. Following the hard-won independence from Ottoman dominion, the modern Greek state found itself engaged in an epic endeavour of cultural reclamation. Visual art, alongside the reconstitution of language, education, and public ceremony, became a pivotal vehicle for asserting the continuity of modern Hellenism with its classical antecedents. In this context, the prevailing artistic orthodoxy was Neoclassicism, upheld with near-doctrinal rigidity by the so-called Munich School, whose exponents, trained in the ateliers of Germany, populated their canvases with allegories drawn from antiquity and tableaux exalting the Greek War of Independence.

Yet as the nineteenth century waned and the sun of the twentieth began its slow ascent, a younger generation of Greek artists began to resist the constraints of didactic historicism. Many turned their eyes toward Paris, that fecund crucible of modern art, where they encountered Impressionism in full flower. There, in the cafés and salons of the Left Bank, in the gardens of Montmartre and along the Seine, they came into contact with a visual language that privileged sensation over symbol, immediacy over monumentality, and light itself as both subject and medium. What they beheld was not merely a technique but a revelation: a way of painting the world as it was seen and felt, not as it was remembered or codified.

Nevertheless, the Greek artists who absorbed the tenets of Impressionism did not do so without discernment. Where the French had turned their gaze upon the ephemeral pleasures of the city, its boulevards, cafés, and leisure, the Greeks brought their focus to the enduring rhythms of the countryside, the insistent brilliance of the Aegean sun, the play of shadow across whitewashed stone, and the repose of domestic life. In so doing, they created an art that was at once modern and rooted, international in its methods yet profoundly Hellenic in its substance.

The ideology underpinning Greek Impressionism is best apprehended not as a manifesto, for none was issued, nor as a school, for no formal cohesion existed, but as an ethos, a mood, a chromatic attitude toward the world. It is an art that seeks to render the ineffable, to depict not merely what lies before the eye but the shimmer of memory, the tremor of place, the warmth of afternoon falling upon a marble sill. It constitutes a deliberate turning away from the heroic and monumental toward the quotidian and atmospheric, affirming in each stroke of the brush a new vision of Hellenic identity grounded in lived experience rather than mythic abstraction.

This reorientation did not signal a retreat from the national idea, but rather a subtle refinement of it. In depicting a shepherd beneath Mount Penteli, a woman in repose beneath a fig tree, or the cerulean undulation of a fishing boat in an island harbour, the Greek Impressionists were not abandoning the narrative of nationhood; they were enriching it, endowing it with intimacy, with light, with breath.

Among these artists, the figure of Periklis Pantazis stands preeminent as the most faithful, in both technique and temperament, to the spirit of the French Impressionists. Born in Athens and trained in Paris under the tutelage of Gustave Courbet and Gustave Boulanger, Pantazis later established himself in Brussels, where he fell under the influence of Belgian realism and the avant-garde. His oeuvre, though tragically curtailed by premature death, reveals a masterful command of atmospheric nuance.

In his celebrated Woman with a White Cap, Pantazis evokes the quiet poetry of domestic interiority. The figure, her features softened by a haze of afternoon light, is rendered with a lyricism that rivals the tender moments of Degas or Berthe Morisot. Similarly, his Still Life with Fish transcends its humble subject through a vibrant choreography of colour and form, transforming the ordinary into the sublime. In Pantazis, the Mediterranean palette fuses with northern technique to produce something entirely original, a luminous hybrid of place and method.

Another towering presence is that of Konstantinos Parthenis, whose idiosyncratic vision straddled the realms of Impressionism, Symbolism, and metaphysical introspection. Born in Alexandria and educated in Vienna, Parthenis was both painter and philosopher, seeker and seer. His early works, such as The Harbour of Corfu, evidence a delicate Impressionist brush, but one inflected with spiritual yearning. In The Garden of the Nuns, one detects not only the ambient interplay of light and foliage, but also a deeper allegorical resonance, as though the scene were transfigured by the contemplative gaze of Byzantine iconography.

Parthenis’s engagement with Impressionism was never merely ocular. It was spiritual, an attempt to reveal the numinous through the visible, to paint what light suggests but does not declare. His subsequent turn toward modernist and religious imagery should not obscure this earlier period, in which his brush rendered not the materiality of the world alone but its metaphysical aura.

The Paris-based Iakovos Rizos presents a more urbane dimension of Greek Impressionism, one oriented less toward landscape than toward interiority. His paintings, often of women engaged in quiet reverie, combine the compositional elegance of Manet with a distinctly Mediterranean intimacy. In Young Woman Reading, a shaft of sunlight falls gently upon the subject’s lap, illuminating not only the folds of her gown but the texture of silence itself. The restraint of Rizos’s brush, more refined than broken, suggests an Impressionism tempered by classical clarity.

Rizos’s contribution lies in his affirmation of the domestic and the feminine as worthy subjects of high art, and in his capacity to suffuse these interiors with a light not merely physical but emotional. His art is one of stillness and suggestion, of elegance suffused with quietude.

In Thalia Flora-Karavia we encounter a singular figure, not only for being a woman in a predominantly male artistic world, but also for her vast geographical scope and ethnographic sensitivity. Educated in Munich and widely travelled throughout Asia Minor, the Balkans, and Egypt, she applied Impressionist technique to subjects far removed from Parisian boulevards. In Women of Cairo, she depicts with unflinching warmth and acuity the cultural plurality of the Levantine world, her palette fluid, her brush unburdened by exoticism.

Flora-Karavia also distinguished herself as a war artist, capturing the human cost of conflict during the Balkan Wars. Her swift sketches of soldiers and refugees, rendered in pastel or oil, combine journalistic immediacy with painterly compassion. In her hands, Impressionism becomes a mode of witnessing, of attending to the overlooked and the endangered with luminous fidelity.

Georgios Roilos, initially an adherent of the academic Munich style, underwent a gradual transformation that brought him into the orbit of Impressionism. As a pedagogue at the Athens School of Fine Arts, he played a pivotal role in disseminating new visual approaches to a younger generation. His painting The Conversation exemplifies his mature synthesis: two women beneath a pergola, the dappled light filtering through vine leaves onto their garments and skin, the moment unremarkable yet imbued with a profound psychological resonance.

Roilos, more than a painter, was a transmitter of vision, a midwife to the evolving eye of Greek art. His legacy lies not only in his own canvases but in the sensibility he cultivated among his students, a sensibility receptive to light, to nuance, to the quiet profundity of everyday life.

Greek Impressionism never coalesced into a movement in the formal sense. It issued no polemics, no manifestos. Yet its impact upon the cultural imagination of Greece was immense. It signalled a shift from the monumental to the intimate, from the allegorical to the atmospheric, from the fixed icon to the ephemeral impression. It offered a new visual idiom through which Greece could contemplate itself, not as the static heir of antiquity, but as a living, breathing presence in the modern world.

The legacy of the Greek Impressionists lies in their capacity to refract light not only through pigment but through history, to allow the nation to behold its own landscape, its own people, its own interior world with fresh and unguarded eyes. Their paintings are not merely aesthetic artefacts. They are meditations on presence, on memory, on the profound resonance of the seen and the felt. And thus, while the Mediterranean may have shimmered evocatively through the masterworks of Monet and Renoir, glimpsed as a luminous abstraction or as the distant promise of warmth, it is through the canvases of Pantazis, Parthenis, Flora Karavia, Rizos, and Roilos that the much vaunted Greek light is not merely remembered but enriched, not only celebrated but deepened. In their hands, it becomes not a borrowed motif but a native radiance, rendered with intimacy, suffused with ancestral memory, and imbued with an enduring Hellenic eloquence.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday, 19 July 2025

ON THE SHORES OF INNER CARTOGRAPHY: PIERENRICO GOTTERO'S: THE STRENGTH OF FRAGILE DAYS

 

In The Strength of Fragile Days, Pierenrico Gottero offers us not simply a novel but a contemplative elegy, an inward odyssey of subtle psychological depth, lyrical grace, and spiritual inquiry. At first glance, it may appear to chart a familiar course: a man adrift, a geographical escape, a redemptive Mediterranean backdrop. But this is a narrative that resists clichés, deftly deconstructing the seductive myth of escape, revealing instead a deeper truth: that no external paradise can substitute for the inner labour of becoming. Greece, the ostensible destination, is not salvation. Rather, it is the mirror that compels the protagonist to confront himself, and Corfu, that mythopoetic island bathed in myth and light, becomes the symbolic threshold where the self is stripped, examined, and remade.

 

At the heart of this reflective narrative is Marco Lentini, a young man burdened by the invisible scaffolding of expectations, disenchanted with a life dictated by convention. As Gottero frames it in the novel’s opening conceit, Marco's departure to Greece is never truly about fleeing from the world. Rather, it is about “moving toward himself.” The novel interrogates the very notion of escape. In an implicit response to Henri Laborit’s famed dictum: “In times like these, escape is the only way to stay alive and keep dreaming,” Gottero proposes the opposite: that escape, seductive though it may seem, is not a solution, but a postponement. The work of transformation is not external but internal, and it requires, above all, vulnerability, the courage to live through fragile days.

 

This ethos is encapsulated in the epigraph Gottero borrows from Ovid: Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt: “They change their sky, not their soul, who cross the sea.” The entire novel unfolds as a meditation on this ancient truth. Marco's journey to Greece, and especially to Corfu, functions not as a physical voyage but as a psychospiritual crucible. Like the lobster of Panaghiotis' myth, revealed at the humble taverna “O Astakos,” Marco must shed his shell, retreat into silence and softness, and allow the painful process of regrowth to occur. Corfu, then, is not a utopia—it is The Great Rock, the metaphorical refuge where one undergoes inner recalibration before emerging again into the world.

 

Gottero draws upon a symbolic economy rich with classical and Christian resonance. In Marco’s journey, there are subtle echoes of the monastic retreat, of the desert fathers who fled not to abandon the world but to wrestle with the self in the crucible of solitude. Greece, and particularly its Ionian manifestation in Corfu, is not exoticised; it is contemplative, quiet, and unyielding. It does not offer Marco comfort but reflection, not solutions but space. In this, Gottero constructs an ethical geography: the Aegean is not a tourist fantasy but a landscape of reckoning.

 

The characters who populate Marco's journey are not dramatis personae in the usual sense, but interlocutors—bearers of insight who reveal, by contrast or compassion, the shape of the protagonist’s internal landscape. The Tuscan widower, who has forged his own form of resilience after the death of his wife, offers Marco a model of sorrow dignified by acceptance. The restaurateur, with his broken English and rich metaphors about shedding one’s shell, serves as a rustic philosopher whose hard-earned wisdom contains more theology than the pages of any manual. Then there is young Dimitri, “The Sponge,” whose gift is his quiet attentiveness, a child who sees the world through others’ eyes, representing the uncorrupted potential that Marco once had and perhaps might recover.

 

These characters contribute to what Mikhail Bakhtin would call a “polyphonic” narrative space. The novel does not impose a singular ideological voice; instead, it allows voices, experiences, and philosophies to co-exist, contributing to the slow sedimentation of Marco’s self-understanding. The novel is dialogical in its very structure, echoing also the classical model of the katabasis, the descent into an inner underworld from which the hero does not emerge unscathed, but reborn.

 

Gottero’s prose is spare yet saturated with affect, at times almost liturgical in cadence. He constructs a rhythmic movement between stillness and speech, inner thought and outward observation. There are no grand plot twists; the drama is internal, psychological, spiritual. It unfolds in silence, in encounters, in the flicker of thought at twilight. This restraint serves the story's deeper themes. Fragility, as the title makes clear, is not a defect but a crucible. Days that are “fragile” are those when the protective casing of routine is cracked open and the raw matter of the self is exposed. It is in these days, Gottero suggests, that transformation is possible, rather than in strength, in the willingness to be undone.

 

This is nowhere more powerfully articulated than in the novel’s final passages, when Marco reflects:

 

“I think you can only truly experience that sense of absolute freedom—that feeling that makes you feel completely alive—at two points in life: in the unbridled recklessness of youth, or in the wise awareness of maturity… The more you’ve experienced that freedom in your youth, the more you’ll do anything to find it again as an adult. It’s a natural calling, a primal need, something you feel in your bones and in your skin. But precisely for that reason, it’s not for everyone. It takes courage.”

 

Here, Gottero traces the contours of what Viktor Frankl might call “the search for meaning,” a yearning that cannot be satisfied by distraction or escape, but only through the courage to live consciously. Between the impetuosity of youth and the serenity of maturity, lies the middle terrain of suffering, failure, repetition, and reflection. Marco’s return from this middle terrain, this inward desert, is the quiet arc of the novel. He is not triumphant but tempered. And that is the whole point.

 

The novel’s philosophical undertow also draws from the existential tradition. One senses the influence of Albert Camus, not in tone but in tension. Like Camus’ The Fall or A Happy Death, The Strength of Fragile Days confronts the paradox of human longing: the desire to remake one’s life entirely, yet being bound to the self that one cannot outrun. And yet, unlike Camus, Gottero does not leave the reader in absurdism. His novel is suffused with a redemptive humanism, a belief, quiet but firm, that it is possible to become whole again, but only by descending into brokenness.

 

What is particularly striking is Gottero’s refusal to romanticise either place or person. Greece is not idealised; its role is that of a catalyst, not a cure. As the author notes in his own reflection, “Greece—and especially Corfu—is not a paradise to be reached; that paradise can only be found within ourselves.” In this sense, Corfu becomes a “topos” of metanoia, the Greek word for repentance, which literally means to change one’s mind, or more deeply, to reverse one’s gaze. It is in Corfu that Marco turns inward, sees himself not as a failed escapee, but as a man learning how to inhabit his own life with sincerity.

 

The novel’s structure mirrors the process it describes. It begins with distance: Athens, disorientation, the impulse to abandon everything. It moves through encounters, memories, digressions. And it ends not with arrival but with return—not to a former place, but to a deeper self. In this, Gottero’s work shares spiritual affinities with the Orthodox understanding of the prodigal son, not as a morality tale, but as a movement from estrangement to homecoming.

 

Ultimately, The Strength of Fragile Days is a profoundly humane and quietly radical book. In a culture that idolises productivity, novelty, and hardened identity, Gottero offers us a counter-narrative: that the soul’s most important work often takes place in stillness, in smallness, in the fragile in-between. That identity is not discovered through conquest but shaped through encounters. That Greece—ancient, luminous, and unresolved—can function not as a romantic elsewhere but as a place that invites interiority, reverence, and silence.

 

This is a novel for those who have grown weary of movement without meaning. For those who suspect that selfhood is something not constructed but uncovered. For those who understand that sometimes, the only way forward is the courage to stop and sit with oneself beneath the olive tree, to listen to the sea, and to wait until a new shell grows.

 

In The Strength of Fragile Days, Gottero offers not escape, but encounter, not solution, but surrender. And in so doing, he reminds us that the truest strength often lies precisely in our willingness to be fragile.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 12 July 2024

WAIT FOR ME: ORIENTALISM AND THE HOLLOWING OF HELLENISM IN HADES

 

Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown, lauded for its musical ingenuity and socially conscious storytelling, has captivated audiences with its reimagining of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth in a postapocalyptic, Depression era setting. Yet beneath the acclaim lies a set of aesthetic and ideological concerns that merit further examination: specifically, the production’s orientalist and tokenistic engagement with Greek culture. This is not a question of bad faith or deliberate misrepresentation, but rather of how cultural frameworks are repurposed in ways that, however unintentionally, risk flattening the traditions from which they originate.

Edward Said’s foundational framework in Orientalism, describes the tendency of Western discourse to appropriate, stylise, and commodify non-Western cultures in ways that reinforce dominant cultural hierarchies. While his focus was primarily the Middle East, his framework also serves to illuminate how ancient Mediterranean cultures, Greek in particular, are often exoticised and selectively appropriated in modern Western media. Paradoxically, though Greece is credited as a cornerstone of Western thought, it is also depicted as an archaic or mystical Other, a kind of lost world used to lend timelessness and gravitas to contemporary narratives.

In Hadestown, this process of exoticisation manifests in two significant ways: abstraction and deracination. Importantly, these dynamics appear to be largely subconscious. There is no overt intention to misrepresent or diminish Greek culture. Rather, Hadestown exemplifies a recurring tendency in Western artistic production to treat classical antiquity as a symbolic archive from which motifs can be drawn and repurposed, often without sustained engagement with the philosophical or metaphysical structures that gave those motifs their original significance. In this sense, the orientalism at play is not a deliberate caricature, but a habitual narrative pattern.

The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, for instance, is transposed from its religious and philosophical roots into a stylised American context. Gone are the Orphic rituals, the eschatological themes, the metaphysical resonances of descent and return. Instead, we encounter a Depression era industrial dystopia in which Hades is a tyrannical capitalist, Eurydice is a woman driven by hunger, and Orpheus is an idealistic singer songwriter. These transformations are not inherently flawed; creative adaptation is essential to myth’s survival, but they raise questions about what is lost in the process. When the myth is lifted wholesale into a modern idiom, how much of its original symbolic architecture is retained?

The answer, it seems, is possibly relatively little. Hadestown makes extensive use of mythological names and themes, but rarely delves into the cultural and cosmological systems from which they arise. In this, it echoes what bell hooks describes in Black Looks: Race and Representation as “eating the Other,” an aesthetic consumption of cultural difference that enriches the dominant culture without engaging the worldview of the marginalised one. Greece, within Hadestown, is less a place or history than a poetic atmosphere. The mythological figures operate largely within a Western narrative logic, detached from the ritual, linguistic, and ethical frameworks that once sustained them.

This tendency is reinforced by the musical language of the production. While the score’s fusion of folk, blues, jazz, and gospel is musically innovative and thematically resonant within an American context, it makes no reference to the musical traditions of Greece, whether ancient modes, Byzantine chant, or regional folk idioms. The choice to anchor the sonic world entirely in Americana underscores the show’s recontextualisation of the myth as a story of modern hardship and hope. Again, this is not a failure of artistry, but it does mark an identifiable shift away from any engagement with Hellenic musical or spiritual expression.

Consider, for instance, the ritual function of music in Orphic tradition. In ancient Greece, Orpheus was not merely a poetic figure but a hierophant, a mediator between worlds, whose music was a form of divine utterance. His lyre had cosmological resonance, not simply emotional appeal. His myth’s potency lay not in personal sentiment, but in its evocation of a sacred cosmology, an ordered vision of life, death, and the soul’s journey. In Hadestown, music is powerful, but it is largely metaphorical. It uplifts, consoles, and persuades, but it no longer speaks across ontological thresholds. The audience is moved, but not transformed.

Treated thus, Greek mythology becomes a set of suggestive signs, familiar names, archetypes, and tropes, that decorate rather than define the work. Roland Barthes notes in Mythologies, that myth can function as “a type of speech” that naturalises cultural constructions. In Hadestown, the myth of Orpheus becomes a vessel for universalised messages about love, loss, and resistance, valuable themes, certainly, but ones that are unmoored from their specific historical and cultural contexts.

This aesthetic approach extends into the show’s visual and performative language. While the characters bear Greek names, they are costumed and staged in idioms that owe little to Greek tradition. The Fates echo vocal trios of a past era, Hermes appears as a narrator in the blues tradition, and Hades’s domain is imagined as a factory town. These inspired choices successfully serve the narrative’s political themes, however they also may subconsciously contribute to a broader tokenism in which cultural symbols are retained primarily for their exotic appeal.  In “The Spectacle of the ‘Other’,” Stuart Hall indicates how gestures of this nature may often reduce cultural difference to aesthetic surface, stylised, decontextualised, and comfortably assimilated into dominant narratives.

This is the paradox at the heart of Hadestown: it seeks to critique capitalist systems while borrowing a mythic framework in ways that risk reinforcing the very patterns of cultural dominance it critiques. In reframing Greek myth through a Western industrial lens, ingenious as that undertaking may be, the production inadvertently may be reproducing a colonial logic in which non-Western cultural forms are adapted to suit Western moral and aesthetic frameworks. The myth becomes a vehicle for broadly humanist themes, but its Hellenic specificity fades.

Postcolonial theory further serves to illumines\ this phenomenon. Homi Bhabha, in The Location of Culture, describes colonial discourse as producing subjects who are “almost the same, but not quite.” Hadestown echoes this dynamic by rendering Greek myth recognisable enough to be accessible, but not so specific as to challenge dominant cultural assumptions. The result is a kind of cultural palatability: the myth becomes familiar, marketable, and while undeniably emotionally potent, distanced from its origins.

Moreover, one might consider how this dynamic parallels similar trends in the representation of other cultures within the canon of musical theatre. From the orientalist spectacle of The King and I to the appropriation of African diasporic spirituality in The Lion King, Broadway has long relied on the incorporation of non-Western mythologies and aesthetics to enrich its narratives. What distinguishes Hadestown is its presentation as politically progressive, which may obscure the structural conservatism embedded in its approach to myth. In this context, its artistic achievements undoubtedly deserve celebration, but also critique.

In this regard, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s concept of “epistemic violence,” articulated in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and referring to the erasure of marginalised forms of knowledge through processes of representation that impose dominant frameworks, also assumes relevance. Hadestown, by translating Greek myth into a largely Western idiom, enacts a soft form of this violence, not by silencing outright, but by rearticulating cultural material in ways that obscure its indigenous logic. It does not provide Greek myth with an opportunity to speak on its own terms, but rather within paradigms that are already familiar to a Western audience.

None of this is to suggest that adaptation is inappropriate or undesirable or that the work itself is not remarkable. On the contrary, reimagining myths is one of the ways cultures remain alive. But adaptation carries responsibilities. When a myth is lifted from one context and placed into another, the process should ideally involve an awareness of what is being displaced, and a sensitivity to the symbolic systems at play.

One might ask: what would a more dialogic approach to adaptation look like? It might begin with a deeper engagement with the source culture’s own articulations of myth. It could include collaborations with scholars, artists, and musicians from within that tradition. It would involve not only borrowing, but listening. And it would acknowledge the specificity of the mythic voice, resisting the impulse to universalise what is, at its core, culturally rooted. Assuming of course, that there is a particularly Hellenic way of viewing such myths…

Hadestown succeeds in many of its ambitions. It is musically rich, emotionally compelling, and thematically urgent. Nonetheless, its use of Greek mythology deserves critical reflection. It demonstrates how even the most progressive art can carry within it unexamined habits of cultural appropriation, and how easily cultural depth can be replaced by aesthetic resonance. Perhaps it is not enough to speak the names of gods; we must also ask what worlds those names once sustained.

In this sense, Hadestown offers an opportunity to reflect on the ways myth, while powerful and resonant across cultures, carries meanings that are intimately tied to place, tradition, and cosmology. Its reimagining of Orpheus and Eurydice illustrates how ancient narratives continue to inspire new expressions, even as they change shape. In tracing these metamorphoses, we are reminded of the importance of cultural specificity, not as a constraint, but as a source of richness that deepens our engagement with the stories we retell.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 5 July 2025