VENIZELOS' ANATHEMA

On the afternoon of 12 December 1916, a curious procession made its way towards the Field of Ares in Athens. Members of the Holy Synod, headed by Archbishop Theoklitos of Athens, emerged from their carriages and approached a vast crowd already assembled around a growing mound of stones. Gathered there were ministers, military officers, members of patriotic associations, reservists and ordinary Athenians, many of whom had come carrying stones in their pockets for a purpose that had been advertised in the royalist press for days beforehand. As the Archbishop lifted the first stone and pronounced the words «Ανάθεμα έστω», thousands responded in unison before adding their own contribution to the pile, an irony that would scarcely have been lost upon those familiar with Christ's injunction that he who is without sin should cast the first stone. By the conclusion of the ceremony, Eleftherios Venizelos, the former Prime Minister of Greece and head of the rival government established in Thessaloniki, had been publicly anathematised by the leadership of the Church of Greece in one of the most extraordinary episodes of the National Schism.

This medievalesque event did not arise suddenly. Rather, it represented the culmination of a political and constitutional crisis that had divided Greek society with an intensity unmatched until the Civil War. By the closing months of 1916, Greece effectively possessed two centres of authority. In Athens, King Constantine I and the royal government maintained control over the old kingdom. In Thessaloniki, Venizelos and his supporters had established the Provisional Government of National Defence, arguing that the King's insistence upon neutrality in the First World War endangered both the country's security and its territorial aspirations. The disagreement over foreign policy gradually evolved into a dispute concerning the nature of sovereignty itself, drawing into its orbit not only politicians and military officers, but also journalists, intellectuals and churchmen.

The origins of the crisis lay in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars. Constantine emerged from those campaigns at the height of his popularity. The liberation of Thessaloniki, Ioannina and vast tracts of Macedonia transformed him into a symbol of national success. His admirers spoke of him in language that often transcended ordinary politics. The coincidence of his name with that of the last Byzantine emperor encouraged comparisons with the legendary Marble King of popular tradition, while his military victories appeared to many as evidence of providential favour. Venizelos, whose diplomatic skill had contributed enormously to those same victories, enjoyed immense popularity of his own, yet the partnership between the two men proved incapable of surviving the challenges posed by the outbreak of the First World War.

The dispute centred upon Greece's response to the First World War. Venizelos regarded participation on the side of Britain, France and Russia as essential if Greece were to secure Allied support for its territorial aspirations in Asia Minor and Eastern Thrace. Constantine, brother in law of Kaiser Wilhelm II, favoured neutrality, maintaining that a country exhausted by two successive wars could not sustain another military adventure. Soon, the disagreement expanded beyond the sphere of foreign policy. At issue was the very nature of political authority within the Greek state. Venizelos insisted that the elected government possessed the right to determine national policy. Constantine maintained that, as constitutional monarch and commander of the armed forces, he bore an independent responsibility for the nation's welfare. A succession of ministerial resignations, parliamentary dissolutions and increasingly bitter confrontations gradually transformed constitutional disagreement into political warfare.

By 1916, the language employed by both sides reflected the extent of the division. Royalist newspapers portrayed Venizelos as a firebrand willing to sacrifice national unity to personal ambition. Venizelist publications described the King as an obstacle to national fulfilment and accused the court of leading Greece towards diplomatic isolation. Each side claimed exclusive possession of patriotism. Increasingly, compromise appeared impossible. The establishment of the Provisional Government in Thessaloniki formalised the division. Greece possessed two governments, two armies and, in effect, two competing narratives regarding the nation's future.

The events known as the Noemvriana intensified the atmosphere still further. In November 1916, Allied forces landed in Athens seeking the surrender of military matériel demanded by the Entente. Fighting broke out between Allied troops and Greek government forces. Casualties occurred on both sides, while sections of the capital experienced scenes of violence unprecedented in recent memory. The aftermath witnessed attacks upon Venizelist citizens and a wave of arrests, dismissals and reprisals. Royalist organisations, particularly the Reservists, emerged as powerful forces within public life, organising demonstrations and exerting influence far beyond their nominal role. Within this charged atmosphere, the idea of publicly anathematising Venizelos acquired increasing support among elements of the royalist movement.

The role of the Church of Greece in the affair remains among its more revealing aspects. Contrary to later assumptions, the Holy Synod did not immediately embrace the proposal. Contemporary accounts suggest a period of uncertainty during which the hierarchy weighed its options with considerable care. While the canonical difficulties associated with anathematising a politician rather than a heresiarch were evident enough, the Synod's hesitation appears to have owed at least as much to the fluid political situation as to ecclesiastical scruple. The outcome of the struggle between Athens and Thessaloniki was far from certain, and the Church, like many institutions of the period, seems initially to have been reluctant to identify itself too closely with either camp. As pressure from reservist organisations intensified, however, such caution became increasingly difficult to maintain. Delegations visited the Synod, appeals were made, positions were revised and reconsidered, and, after a period of conspicuous vacillation, Archbishop Theoklitos, a staunch royalist, and his fellow hierarchs ultimately resolved to participate in the ceremony.

The ceremony itself was carefully choreographed. According to contemporary newspaper reports, the Archbishop cast the first stone while declaring: “Upon Eleftherios Venizelos, who plotted against the King, brought suffering upon the people, occasioned sedition and bloodshed, and persecuted the Church, let anathema be pronounced.” Members of the Synod followed. Thereafter, representatives of various organisations approached the mound and cast their own stones while repeating the formula. By the end of the proceedings, the pile had grown into a substantial monument to political hostility. Photographs taken on the day reveal a crowd stretching across the surrounding area, bearing witness to the extent of popular engagement with the ritual.

One ecclesiastical figure whose name became associated with the episode through his absence was Metropolitan Nektarios of Pentapolis, the future Saint Nektarios. By 1916, Nektarios was already living at the Monastery of the Holy Trinity on Aegina, having endured years of marginalisation following his removal from ecclesiastical office in Alexandria decades earlier. Later accounts maintain that he declined invitations to associate himself with the anathema. While contemporary documentation concerning the precise circumstances remains limited, the tradition surrounding his refusal became firmly embedded within subsequent narratives of the event. In later retellings, the contrast between the participation of the Synod and the absence of Nektarios assumed a significance that exceeded the immediate political context, particularly following his canonisation in 1961.

The Holy Synod subsequently sought to reinforce the significance of the ceremony by communicating its actions beyond Greece. Correspondence was reportedly dispatched to the Ecumenical Patriarchate and other ecclesiastical authorities informing them of the decision. Yet the political circumstances that had produced the anathema were already changing. Allied pressure upon the royal government intensified. The blockade of Greece continued to undermine the position of Constantine and his supporters. Within months, developments overtook the ceremony itself.

In June 1917, Constantine departed Greece and Venizelos returned to Athens, confronting those who had organised and celebrated the anathema with a government headed by the very man they had publicly condemned. The ecclesiastical consequences followed swiftly. A special ecclesiastical tribunal was convened to examine the conduct of members of the hierarchy during the Schism, resulting in the removal of Archbishop Theoklitos from the Archiepiscopal throne and disciplinary measures against a number of bishops associated with the ceremony. If the events of December 1916 had demonstrated the willingness of sections of the hierarchy to employ the language of theology in the service of politics, the years that followed revealed the extent to which ecclesiastical fortunes had become tied to the shifting currents of political power. Following Venizelos' electoral defeat in 1920 and the restoration of Constantine, Theoklitos was reinstated, only to be removed once more after the Asia Minor Catastrophe and the Revolution of 1922. The repeated rehabilitation and deposition of prominent churchmen illustrated the degree to which the administration of the Church had become entangled in the rivalries of the National Schism, while questions concerning the legality and canonical validity of the anathema continued to be debated long after the political circumstances that had produced it had passed into history.

Particularly significant was a letter sent by Archbishop Chrysostomos Papadopoulos to Venizelos in 1930. In that correspondence, the Archbishop effectively argued that the anathema lacked proper canonical standing, noting the absence of the procedures ordinarily required before the imposition of such a sanction. The issue resurfaced periodically throughout the twentieth century as historians, theologians and political commentators revisited the events of 1916. In 2000, Archbishop Christodoulos publicly referred to the anathema as a mistake, reflecting the extent to which attitudes towards the episode had changed within the Church itself.

More than a century after the mound of stones rose in the Field of Ares, the anathema remains among the most revealing episodes of the National Schism. Above all, it offers a glimpse into a period when political divisions penetrated every institution of Greek society, drawing into their orbit not only governments and armies, but also bishops, monasteries and the Church itself. Ecclesiastes observed that there is a time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones together. In December 1916, thousands of Greeks gathered stones only to cast them at another Greek. The pile they created serves as a reminder that the deepest divisions in modern Greek history have often been those Greeks fashioned for themselves.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 20 June 2026

ONE RACIST NATION

 

“Hey Kalimniou,” one of the school bigots shouted. “How big is your mum’s mo?” English being my second language, it took me a while to understand that mo here signified a moustache and not a moment, the implication being that, because I was Greek, my mother must also be Greek and therefore possessed of more facial hair than average for the global species. “Vastly bigger than certain parts of your anatomy,” I responded. Seeing him hesitate, I added by way of explanation: “Anatomy is a Greek word. Look it up.”

Given that this exchange took place three decades ago, there is something revealing about a politician who, confronted with the complexities of economic reform, reaches for a similar stereotype in the present day. In describing the government's capital gains tax reforms as having “more hairs than a Greek cook,” Federal One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce offered far more than a laboured metaphor. He reached into a cupboard of inherited ethnic clichés and pulled one out for public consumption.

Predictably, some will insist that this was merely a joke. I would argue, however, that humour does not emerge from a vacuum. Every joke depends upon a shared set of assumptions between speaker and audience. Joyce's remark functions only because listeners already recognise the stereotype being invoked and regard it as sufficiently familiar to be amusing. Consequently, the Greek, divorced of his Australian attributes, ceases to be a citizen engaged in the national conversation and becomes a stock character whose purpose is to provide comic relief.

The image itself is revealing. The figure of the “Greek cook” is assembled from a bundle of assumptions about ethnicity, appearance and culture. A gendered dimension is also present. Either the cook is imagined as a man, despite cooking so often being coded as women's work within domestic life, or the joke sidesteps the more obvious reference to Greek women because that would awaken another longstanding stereotype about female body hair. The humour relies upon ethnic and gendered caricatures treated as self evident and therefore available for public use. Greeks are hairy. Apes are hairy. Complete the equation.

The stereotype Joyce invoked did not emerge yesterday. It belongs to a long catalogue of assumptions that have accompanied Greeks throughout their Australian experience. Earlier generations were caricatured as café owners, fish and chip shop proprietors, garlic eaters, knife wielders, queue jumpers and foreigners who spoke too loudly while refusing to abandon customs deemed incompatible with Australian life. Throughout much of the twentieth century, sections of the media portrayed southern European migrants as culturally deficient, excessively emotional and incapable of assimilation. Individual stereotypes may have changed with the decades, yet the underlying logic endured. Greeks could contribute to Australia, enrich Australia and even become celebrated examples of multicultural success, to the extent that they were held up as model ethnics by members of the dominant culture, while continuing to occupy a distinct category within the national imagination.

What is perhaps most striking about Joyce's remark is its complete irrelevance to the subject under discussion. Capital gains tax reform concerns investment behaviour, housing affordability, government revenue and economic policy. None of these matters bears the slightest connection to Greek cooks. The comparison reveals a politician unwilling to inhabit the complexity of his own argument. Economic reform is difficult, technical and often resistant to simplification. Rather than confronting that difficulty, Joyce abandons the subject altogether and retreats into a cultural cliché. The stereotype functions as a substitute for intellectual labour. It spares both speaker and audience the inconvenience of analysis, offering recognition in place of understanding and familiarity in place of thought. One need not be offended in order to be disappointed. The standards appropriate to a federal parliamentarian are necessarily higher than those governing casual conversation. Citizens are entitled to expect from their elected representatives a degree of intellectual seriousness commensurate with the office they hold.

Equally revealing is the choice of target. Contemporary Australia has developed an elaborate etiquette governing public discussion of identity. Politicians are expected to exercise caution when speaking about race, religion, gender and sexuality. Entire industries of advisers, consultants and media trainers exist to prevent public figures from straying into offensive territory. Yet certain ethnic stereotypes continue to enjoy a curious exemption. Greeks, evidently remain fair game, for Joyce is not the first Australian politician to engage with such stereotypes. We would do well to recall former Australian PM Julia Gillard’s 2012 comments about renovations to her Abbotsford property:  “In order to try and make it look less hideous, part of the work that Con was to do was to mortar it and put pickets on it ... to try and stop it looking quite as Greek, dare one say... He's just a big Greek bullshit artist.” Familiarity appears to have granted these caricatures a peculiar immunity from scrutiny. What would provoke outrage if directed towards some communities is often dismissed as harmless folklore when aimed at ours.

Part of the explanation may lie in the peculiar place Greeks have occupied within the Anglo Australian imagination. Unlike some migrant communities, Greeks have rarely been cast as passive or compliant. From the goldfields and the labour movement to trade union activism, anti dictatorship campaigns and the noisy politics of the diaspora, Greeks have often been imagined as argumentative, unruly and resistant to authority. Even popular culture has tended to portray them as loud, emotional, entrepreneurial and forever negotiating the rules rather than simply accepting them. Beneath the apparently benign stereotype of the hard working migrant lurks another figure: the Greek as perpetual outsider, troublemaker and sceptic. He may be welcomed, even admired, yet he remains faintly suspect, a character whose difference is presumed to persist regardless of how completely he participates in Australian life.

The peculiar way multiculturalism operates in Australia also requires examination.  The official narrative celebrates diversity, yet diversity is frequently reduced to a collection of recognisable cultural symbols. Communities become associated with food, festivals, dancing, accents and inherited quirks. The complexity of lived experience gradually gives way to folklore. Greeks become tavernas, plate smashing and body hair. Italians become espresso, pizza and hand gestures. The individual disappears behind a catalogue of cultural shorthand. Stereotypes survive, and are tolerated by the target communities because they are often mistaken for affection.

There is an irony in this. Greek Australians have become victims of their own success. The community is sufficiently established to avoid being perceived as threatening, yet sufficiently distinctive to remain available as comic material. Earlier generations fought battles over employment, housing and social acceptance. Their grandchildren encounter a different phenomenon. Open hostility has largely disappeared, while caricature continues to circulate beneath the surface, even as increasingly, those latter generations are culturally indistinguishable from their Anglo counterparts. Acceptance has rendered the stereotype more comfortable, not less persistent.

This perhaps explains why remarks of this kind continue to resonate. They offer a fleeting glimpse into the deeper structures of perception through which Australian society continues to understand itself. The vocabulary of citizenship may be universal, yet the imagination often remains stubbornly tribal, arranging communities into recognisable and enduring types. Most of the time this process operates silently, beneath the threshold of conscious reflection. Then a joke, a casual aside or a political metaphor momentarily lifts the veil. The surprise lies neither in the existence of the stereotype nor in its expression, but in the discovery that it has survived so comfortably within a society convinced of its own inclusiveness.

The endurance of these images owes something to another, less frequently acknowledged dynamic. Many Greek Australians will insist that they are entirely untroubled by such remarks. Some actively repeat the same jokes, invoking hairy Greeks, overbearing mothers and chaotic family gatherings with evident affection. This is often interpreted as confidence, resilience or a healthy sense of humour. It may also reflect a more complicated reality. Communities that spend generations seeking acceptance within a dominant culture frequently learn to accommodate the images through which they are viewed. Over time, caricature acquires the familiarity of folklore. The stereotype ceases to feel imposed from without and begins to appear as an authentic expression of identity. To laugh along signals ease, belonging and social confidence, while to object risks appearing humourless, insecure or incapable of taking a joke. Gradually, the terms upon which a community is recognised can become the terms through which it recognises itself. In this way, stereotypes acquire a remarkable durability. They are sustained not only by those who create them but also, on occasion, by those who inherit them.

The above notwithstanding, ethnic communities are resilient and require no paternalistic rescue from politicians or commentators. Greeks have survived far worse than an ill-considered quip from a parliamentarian unable to engage in constructive debate. Our concern lies elsewhere. The remark exposes a striking intellectual laziness. Public life depends upon the capacity to engage with complexity. Democratic debate requires argument, evidence and persuasion. Whenever politicians abandon those tools in favour of caricature, the quality of public discourse is diminished.

Such moments matter because populism rarely arrives draped in banners announcing its intentions. More often it enters public life through the gradual coarsening of discourse, through the transformation of prejudice into common sense and through the recycling of inherited stereotypes under the guise of humour. A society that repeatedly excuses such habits eventually becomes accustomed to them.

The endurance of the stereotype tells us something unsettling. Three generations after mass Greek migration to Australia, many Greek Australians have become almost indistinguishable from their Anglo counterparts in language, education, profession and outlook. Yet a joke about "Greekness" remains immediately intelligible to a national audience. The stereotype survives even as the people it purports to describe have largely disappeared. Perhaps that is its real function. It no longer explains Greeks. It reassures the majority that cultural categories inherited from an earlier Australia remain available whenever they are needed.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 13 June 2026

ODIOUS ODYSSEYS

 

For centuries, the West has returned obsessively to Homer in moments of civilisational uncertainty. Renaissance princes, Victorian imperialists, German romantics, American filmmakers, and modern strategists have repeatedly ransacked the Homeric world in search of reflections of their own anxieties, ambitions, and ideals. It seems that every age has remade Greece in its own image.

Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming Odyssey appears poised to continue this long tradition through a translation of Homer into the emotional grammar of contemporary Anglo-American culture: spectacle, trauma, masculine isolation, endurance, and the solitary individual wandering through a fractured world in search of home. No civilisation encounters antiquity innocently or recovers it in some pure historical form. Epics survive precisely because successive civilisations conscript them into their own moral and psychological dramas.

Yet before the film has even appeared, sections of the Greek diasporic press have already erupted in indignation. The complaints are familiar: too few Greeks in the cast, American accents issuing from Homeric mouths, Hollywood once more exploiting Greek civilisation while excluding Greeks themselves from meaningful participation. Beneath the irritation lies something more revealing: the discomfort of watching one of the foundational narratives of world literature transformed into a global cultural spectacle in which modern Greeks themselves appear by their absence.

Some critics have attempted to frame the matter through the language of modern representation politics. Hollywood, they argue, has spent years moralising about diversity, authenticity, inclusion, and cultural sensitivity, only to abandon those principles when confronted with Greek civilisation. If representation matters elsewhere, why does it suddenly become optional for Greeks? Why may other cultures demand symbolic participation in stories connected to their heritage while Greeks are expected simply to applaud from the margins?

At first glance, the accusation appears compelling. Yet the more closely one examines it, the more unstable the entire framework becomes.

The deeper difficulty lies in the assumption that Homer may be straightforwardly mapped onto modern ethnic categories at all. Emerging from a world that predates nationalism by millennia, the epics inhabit a civilisation whose identities were tribal, aristocratic, regional, and fluid in ways fundamentally alien to the modern nation state. Within the Achaean imagination there existed no conception of “Greekness” in the contemporary political or ethnic sense. To demand strict modern ethnic correspondence between ancient epic and contemporary casting categories therefore risks imposing nineteenth century nationalist logic upon a civilisation that existed long before such categories emerged.

Indeed, parts of the diasporic reaction increasingly drift beyond cultural criticism into something far less defensible: racial anxiety thinly disguised as concern for authenticity. One rarely encountered comparable outrage during decades in which Hollywood routinely populated antiquity with conspicuously northern European or Anglo-Saxon actors whose appearance bore little resemblance to the Mediterranean world itself. Blond, blue eyed, Nordic looking performers passed largely without protest when they embodied Achilles, Helen, Alexander, or countless Romans and Greeks across twentieth century cinema. The fury appears to intensify selectively when the departure from expectation involves black actors rather than northern Europeans, revealing that the issue for some critics is not historical precision consistently applied, but discomfort with particular forms of racial reinterpretation.

One of the great historical ironies is that Greek civilisation itself rarely treated Homer as ethnically enclosed property. Byzantium preserved the pagan classics while simultaneously Christianising and transforming them. Alexandrian scholarship universalised Greek learning across the eastern Mediterranean. Renaissance Europe inherited Homer through centuries of Greek transmission. Modern Greek intellectuals themselves proudly present antiquity as a contribution to universal civilisation rather than as restricted tribal inheritance. Greek civilisation expanded historically through dissemination, adaptation, and reinterpretation rather than cultural quarantine. The attempt to convert Homer into protected ethnic property therefore sits uneasily beside the actual historical trajectory of Hellenism itself.

Meanwhile, the outrage surrounding American accents misses the deeper point entirely. No Homeric adaptation can ever be “authentic” in any meaningful sense. The language of the epics is gone. Their religious cosmology has vanished. Their heroic morality is profoundly alien to liberal modernity, while their aristocratic codes of honour, slavery, warfare, kinship, sacrifice, and divine intervention no longer constitute living psychological realities. Every adaptation necessarily translates Homer into contemporary emotional vocabulary. Nolan’s Odyssey will no more resemble archaic Greece psychologically than Joyce’s Ulysses, the Cohen Brothers’ O Brother Where Art Thou?, or Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy resembled the Bronze Age world they reimagined. And after all, this is mythology, not history.

This does not mean that all criticism of Hollywood is invalid. Hollywood unquestionably treats some cultures with reverence while reducing others to infinitely recyclable symbolic material. Nor does the contemporary industry apply its own ideological principles consistently. American studios frequently instrumentalise antiquity in order to perform modern moral or political gestures palatable to contemporary Western audiences. A production may happily deploy black actors within classical settings as a visible statement about inclusivity and racial progress, yet one notices far less enthusiasm for extending comparable symbolic centrality to Asian actors within the same mythological universes. Diversity itself often follows recognisable American ideological patterns rather than any coherent philosophy of global representation.

Nonetheless, the present controversy also exposes another contradiction. Many critics simultaneously condemn Anglo appropriation of Greek civilisation while seeking greater inclusion within that same machinery of appropriation. Hollywood’s ownership of Homer is denounced even as participation in Hollywood’s Homer is demanded. If Hollywood is regularly condemned as superficial, commercialised, historically illiterate, ideologically fashionable, and opportunistically moralistic, why should inclusion within it suddenly function as proof of civilisational recognition? Why should symbolic participation in an American entertainment industry become the criterion through which Greeks assess the legitimacy of their own inheritance?

Within Anglo societies especially, antiquity has long functioned for diaspora Greeks as symbolic legitimacy. References to Socrates, democracy, philosophy, and Homer became ways of negotiating dignity within cultures where migrants historically occupied ambiguous positions. Throughout much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Greeks themselves were not uniformly regarded within northern European and Anglo societies as fully “white” in the contemporary sense, but instead occupied an uncertain place at the margins of Europe’s imagined civilisational hierarchy. Under such conditions, classical antiquity acquired enormous symbolic significance. Ancient Greece became one of the principal mechanisms through which diaspora Greeks secured cultural admission into the architecture of the West.

Consequently, contemporary disputes over antiquity often conceal anxieties extending well beyond cinema itself. Many of the same voices condemning the West’s appropriation of Greek civilisation frequently defend conceptions of antiquity themselves heavily shaped by nineteenth century European racial classicism. The imagined “authentic ancient Greek” often owes as much to neoclassical aesthetics, Victorian painting, colonialism, and modern racial imagination as to the historical Mediterranean world itself.

The ancient Mediterranean cannot be reduced meaningfully to contemporary racial categories. It was a world of movement, conquest, colonisation, migration, intermarriage, and cultural exchange extending continuously across Africa, Asia, and Europe. Greeks interacted ceaselessly with Egyptians, Phoenicians, Persians, Anatolians, Syrians, and innumerable other peoples within a fluid maritime civilisation fundamentally unlike the rigid racial taxonomies later imposed upon it by modernity.

Perhaps the deeper anxiety lies elsewhere. Modern Greece encountered antiquity under profoundly unusual historical conditions. Independent Greece emerged during an age in which European philhellenism had already transformed classical civilisation into the legitimising ancestor of the West itself. Yet the Greece admired by Europe was largely imaginary: a civilisation of marble clarity, democratic rationality, sculptural perfection, and secular elegance. The living Greeks encountered by travellers proved far less convenient to this fantasy. They were Orthodox, Balkan, Ottoman shaped, village based, and profoundly Byzantine in temperament. Consequently, modern Greece inherited a classical past whose dominant interpretation had already been fashioned abroad, converting antiquity from living continuum into national obligation.

The estrangement deepened after the fall of Byzantium, which ruptured the last Greek civilisation still inhabiting the ancient world as part of an internally continuous intellectual universe. Under Ottoman rule, survival understandably displaced classical creativity, while the emotional foundations of Greek life came to be shaped by Orthodoxy, communal endurance, migration, and historical survival. Antiquity persisted increasingly as education, prestige, and symbolic ancestry refracted back through Western philhellenism rather than as an organic Hellenic perspective with its own lineage.

Thus, if Greeks resent foreign reinterpretations of Homer, the unavoidable question follows: where are the Greek reinterpretations themselves? Civilisations retain ownership of myths through continual artistic recreation. If modern Greece wishes to challenge Hollywood’s Homer, it must ultimately produce its own Homer.

Yet contemporary Greek cinema often appears trapped within remarkably narrow ideological and emotional horizons. It repeatedly circles political trauma, social realism, domestic suffocation, economic anxiety, and historical melancholy while displaying striking hesitation toward epic imagination, metaphysical ambition, speculative mythology, or engagement with wider civilisational narratives beyond its own immediate historical obsessions. Greek cinema not only rarely revisits Homer. Beyond Cacoyannis, it rarely ventures seriously into broader mythological or symbolic universes at all.

Perhaps this helps explain why modern Greek artistic culture so rarely reclaimed antiquity with imaginative boldness upon its own terms. Post war and post junta Greek cinema cultivated ambiguity, silence, exile, memory, melancholy, and political fracture rather than epic monumentalism. Theo Angelopoulos explored historical dislocation rather than Homeric spectacle. The suspicion toward grand mythmaking arose from an entirely different artistic temperament, one formed through twentieth century catastrophe, fracture, and disillusionment rather than through any cultural deficiency.

Meanwhile, the Anglo American world approached antiquity with extraordinary imaginative freedom, each successive age reshaping Greece according to its own emotional, political, and cultural needs. Renaissance Europe aestheticised it. Victorian Britain imperialised it. Modern America spectacularises it. Shakespeare rewrote Plutarch without anxiety, Joyce transformed Odysseus into a wandering Dubliner, and Hollywood converted Sparta into mythic spectacle for mass consumption. Through this continual process of reinterpretation, antiquity entered Western consciousness as endlessly reusable symbolic material rather than inviolable national inheritance. It is perhaps precisely through such reinvention that Homer endured beyond the confines of any single civilisation, surviving because he gradually ceased belonging exclusively to Greeks alone.

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey therefore exposes the unresolved tensions governing the modern relationship between Greece, the West, and antiquity itself far more clearly than it illuminates questions of historical fidelity.

None of this renders diaspora criticism entirely unreasonable. There is nothing absurd in wishing for greater Greek participation in narratives emerging from Greek civilisation. Nor is Hollywood free from inconsistency, opportunism, or fashionable moral posturing. Yet the larger question persists beyond the immediate politics of casting.

For cultural ownership belongs ultimately not only to those who inherit a civilisation historically, but to those who continue recreating it imaginatively before the world. And if Greeks themselves increasingly approach antiquity primarily as custodians rather than creators, Homer will continue to be reinvented elsewhere.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 6 June 2026