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

 

RESTORATION RETICENCE

 

I suspect this will not be a universally popular view, particularly among those for whom every newly inserted block of Pentelic marble upon the Acropolis constitutes an act of national healing, but the recent images of the restored western pediment of the Parthenon have left many with a distinct sense of disquiet. The restoration itself is beyond criticism. Its workmanship is extraordinary, its scholarship meticulous and its engineering remarkable. Unease arises from something altogether more elusive, namely the relationship between restoration and memory, and the possibility that in seeking to preserve a monument we may simultaneously be altering the meaning centuries have attached to it. Such concerns are not unique to the Parthenon. Every restoration involves a choice, every choice privileges one version of the past over another and every intervention, however scrupulous, inevitably reveals as much about those undertaking it as it does about the object being restored.

No monument demonstrates this dilemma more acutely than the Parthenon. The image recognised throughout the world is not the brilliantly coloured temple that dominated the Acropolis in the fifth century BC but the ruin, the fractured silhouette familiar from schoolbooks, postcards, travel posters and countless representations of Greece itself. Broken pediments, absent sculptures and shattered columns have become so familiar that they are now inseparable from the monument's identity. For generations, visitors have encountered the Parthenon as a visible dialogue between creation and destruction, permanence and loss rather than as an intact edifice. Looking upon the restored pediment, one is thus justified in wondering not whether the work has been executed successfully but which Parthenon is now being preserved. Is it the monument erected under Pericles, the shattered structure left after Morosini's bombardment in 1687, the romantic ruin immortalised by generations of philhellenes, or the already heavily restored version familiar to us over the past century, itself containing modern interventions, relocated fragments and even sections incorporating concrete where suitable blocks of Pentelic marble could not be found? The question may appear academic, yet it lies at the heart of every discussion concerning the future of the monument.

Complicating matters further is the uncomfortable reality that the Parthenon has never possessed a single, fixed identity. Long before modern conservators arrived upon the Acropolis, successive generations had already appropriated, reinterpreted and transformed the building according to their own needs. The Athenians of Pericles understood it as a monument to the power of their city, although even this apparently straightforward proposition becomes less certain upon closer inspection. Contemporary presentations of the Parthenon routinely celebrate it as the supreme expression of democracy, civic virtue and enlightened government, yet the circumstances surrounding its construction suggest a considerably more ambiguous story. Established as a defensive alliance against Persia, the Delian League maintained a treasury funded by contributions from member states and housed upon the sacred island of Delos. Following the transfer of that treasury to Athens in 454 BC, resources contributed by allied cities for defence were misappropriated for Athenian purposes. Plutarch preserves the controversy generated by the subsequent building programme and records Pericles' defence of the expenditure. Whatever judgement one reaches regarding his justification, the conclusion remains difficult to avoid. Conceived at the moment Athens transformed leadership into domination and alliance into empire, the Parthenon stands today as perhaps the most beautiful monument ever financed through the appropriation of somebody else's money. Modern narratives seldom dwell upon this awkward detail. Schoolchildren encounter the structure as the embodiment of democratic ideals while the imperial realities that facilitated its construction recede discreetly into the background. Selective memory therefore begins not centuries after the monument's creation but at its very origin.

Any attempt to present the Parthenon as a straightforward symbol of classical antiquity encounters an even greater obstacle in the form of its Byzantine life. According to a remarkable tradition preserved in a sixth century inscription from the deme of Icaria and discussed by the scholar Paul Stevenson, Apollo was asked to reveal the future of his sanctuary and responded by proclaiming that the building would belong to the Virgin Mary. Whether authentic prophecy or pious invention matters less than the underlying assumption, namely that Christians did not perceive themselves as abolishing the sacredness of the Parthenon but rather inheriting it. Conversion into the Church of the Parthenos Maria followed during the sixth century and for almost a thousand years the building functioned as one of the most important churches in the Byzantine world. Pilgrims travelled there from across the empire, with even Emperor Basil II journeying to Athens following his final victory over the Bulgarians specifically to worship at the shrine. Byzantine frescoes adorned its interior and monks and travellers carved inscriptions upon its walls. The Panagia Atheniotissa became renowned throughout the Christian East. Measured simply in terms of duration, the Parthenon served as a Christian church for considerably longer than it functioned as a pagan temple. Throughout the overwhelming majority of the building's existence, those who approached it did so as worshippers rather than admirers of classical civilisation.

The prominence of the Parthenon within the Christian imagination subsequently created difficulties for the architects of the modern Greek state, whose understandable desire to establish an unmediated connection between contemporary Greece and classical antiquity sat uneasily beside a monument that had served as one of the most important churches of the Byzantine world. Accordingly, Byzantine frescoes that survived well into the nineteenth century disappeared beneath the enthusiasm of archaeologists intent upon revealing an exclusively classical structure, while Byzantine, Frankish and Ottoman additions were progressively removed in order to produce a monument more closely aligned with contemporary national aspirations and European expectations. The great Frankish tower that had dominated the Acropolis for centuries was demolished. The Ottoman mosque disappeared, its minaret was dismantled. Layer after layer of accumulated history was removed in order to reveal a monument that conformed more closely to a particular idea of Greece. Standing behind this transformation was an assumption that continues to shape perceptions of the monument today, namely that classical antiquity constitutes Greece's most legitimate inheritance and that subsequent centuries are meaningful primarily insofar as they lead back towards it. Such an interpretation proved immensely attractive to Western philhellenism. It also required a remarkable degree of historical editing.

The difficulty is that the Parthenon stubbornly refuses to conform to any single narrative. A structure financed through the appropriation of the Delian League treasury became one of the holiest churches of the Byzantine world, a Catholic church and a mosque. One occasion, it was even repurposed for purposes profane. According to Plutarch, when Demetrius Poliorcetes regained control of Athens in 304 BC, he took up residence within the Opisthodomos and installed his mistresses there, provoking the comic poet Philippides to complain that he had transformed the Acropolis into an inn and brought courtesans to the virgin goddess. Far from possessing a singular identity waiting patiently to be rediscovered, the Parthenon accumulated meanings, absorbed contradictions and survived every attempt to define it permanently.

The latest restoration therefore cannot be viewed in isolation from the longer history of the monument's modern reinvention. Long before fresh marble found its place upon the western pediment, the Parthenon had already been subjected to a far more radical process of reconstruction. Presented as acts of recovery, the interventions of the nineteenth century were equally acts of selection, privileging one period of the monument's existence while relegating others to the margins. Looking at the restored pediment today, one cannot help also to observe that the same assumptions continue to exert their influence. Rather than bringing the observer closer to the monument that inhabits the collective memory, the restoration may occasionally create a sense of distance from it. The eye drifts unexpectedly towards Nashville, Tennessee, where a full scale replica has stood for more than a century, or towards the reproductions that continue to appear in places far removed from Attica such as Lanzhou, China. The comparison is of course absurd and yet strangely difficult to avoid. Recover enough of the original form and the monument begins to resemble its copies. Pursue completeness too vigorously and familiarity can, for some observers, give way to estrangement.

Lost in this pursuit of classical purity there is a possibility that the awkward reality of the Parthenon's many lives may receive less attention. The Parthenon became significant precisely because it never remained what anyone wished it to be. Its scars, absences and contradictions constitute a visible record of conquest, devotion, adaptation, destruction and survival. The ruin itself has become part of the monument. Every missing sculpture, every shattered column and every visible wound reminds the observer that history is cumulative rather than selective and that identity is forged through accretion rather than recovery. Having spent two centuries stripping away those elements deemed inconsistent with an idealised vision of Classical Greece, today's restoration provides an opportunity to reflect upon how future interventions might continue to balance careful conservation with the preservation of the monument's layered historical memory. The workmanship deserves admiration and the scholarship commands respect. At the same time, awareness of this broader historical context ensures that each new restoration is understood as another chapter in the Parthenon's long and evolving story rather than the recovery of a single definitive past. In that sense, the monument invites us to remain attentive to the ways in which every generation, however well intentioned, inevitably leaves its own imprint upon history.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 11 July 2026