“Whatever these gentlemen [a trio of foreign scholars] says is true,” [Dimitrakis] said at last, looking squarely at Aristodemus. “They are wise and they are foreign—two things that give them the right to see things much differently than we do. But if tomorrow Khan should return, or someone else to take our land and our house, what do these men have to lose?”
“Our books!”
“Our books! Why? They’re just as much theirs as they are ours. They belong to the entire world.”
“But they were written by our forefathers.”
“So you think that, whatever drivel Tom, Dick, and Harry write today, tomorrow their descendants will have to be responsible for it?...Don’t curse them like that, for God’s sake.”
“Are you making some kind of joke?” asked Perachoras [i.e., “Foreigner”, one of the scholars].
“I’m not joking at all, I’m telling you how things are. If that terrible thing I’m speaking of should ever happen to us—and I assure you, we will do everything in our power to prevent it—just what, pray tell, will you do then? You’ll shed a few tears over the tombs of the Eumorphopouloses and be on your merry way.”
“Ingrate!” shouted Aristodemus in anger, clenching his teeth. “How can you say all these things to people who love us so much?”
“You poor sap! How naïve you are!” Dimitrakis said sadly. “They do love us. You’re right. But you’re not asking which of us they love. Me and you? No. Don’t believe it. Underneath both of us they see some chlamys-wearing Eumorphopoulos. And all their love and charming conversation is really for them. Not for us. But I don’t want that kind of love, I don’t!” He added loudly: “It’s of no use to me; it embarrasses me. I’m me and I want to be me!”
The Archeologist and Selected Sea Stories collects the turn-of-the-century Greek writer Andreas Karkavitsas’s short allegorical novel The Archeologist (1904) and four short stories from Karkavitsas’s 1899 collection Λόγια της πλώρης, translated by classicist Johanna Hanink.
I have been interested in Hanink’s work for almost a decade, now, since reading her extremely good essay “On Not Knowing (Modern) Greek” in 2016, which radically reshaped the way I think about Classics as a discipline. I highly recommend her nonfiction book The Classical Debt, which, while at times falling into some liberal idealism at the expense of a more materialist critique, is nonetheless an important and accessible intervention into the history of the idea that “the West” is “indebted” to Greece and the complex and often deeply fucked up ways that this “debt” has been mobilized in rhetoric, scholarship, and policy. at stake in the idea of Greece as the “origin” of “the West”, Hanink argues, is the claim that — as Dimitrakis puts it in the passage I quoted from The Archeologist above — Greece really belongs to everyone (in “the West”). this is to say, at minimum, that Greece belongs to everyone equally, with no-one (including the Greeks who actually live there) having any special claim to it; very often, however, it has led to a stronger claim: that Greece belongs more to people outside Greece — German, French, British, USAmerican — than it does to the people who, through an accident of history, happen to live in Greece now.
I am interested in the various ways these claims have been mobilized — often destructively, as in the clearing of the village of Kastri by the French School at Athens in 1892 in order to open the site of ancient Delphi for excavation/extraction — and contested, not least because some aspects of the contested relationship between modern Greece, modern Greeks, and their past resonates with aspects of the appropriation (or expropriation) of Celtic-language cultures by dominant-language writers as “common aesthetic property” (as I have put it elsewhere). there are, of course, substantial differences between Greece and any contemporary Celtic-language-speaking region, not least modern Greece’s history of irredenist ambitions under the auspices of the Μεγάλη Ιδέα and the devastating history of mutually agreed ethnic cleansing that was the 1923 “population exchange” between Greece and Turkey. still, there are significant commonalities of experience, and I was struck in the above passage, early in The Archeologist, by how closely the situation Dimitrakis (accurately) outlines parallels attitudes towards “the Celts”: outsiders love the bagpipe-playing Highlander™ in fèileadh-beag, sgian-dubh at his side and claidheamh-mòr at his back; they love the idea of the wise druid (or his D&D-ified sexy shape-shifting counterpart), the harp-playing bard singing ancient laments. they do not love the Gaels who live their culture in 2026 along with cell phones, internet access, and all-too-familiar concerns about affording rent. foreigners love the idea of Greece, the stark white of marble statuary that has lost its ancient colors; they do not love the reality of a country that has grown out of millennia of cultural contact and exchange, that has been ravaged by centuries of colonial (and postcolonial) exploitation — including by the archaeologists digging up those marble statues — and that is now enthusiastically complicit in the violence of the European Union’s brutal border regime. this cannot be the true Greece, and by extension its people cannot be the true Greeks.
The Archeologist is a biting allegory of this situation, presenting the Balkans in microcosm in the form of a village inhabited by the Morphopoulos — or Eumorphopoulos, their ancient and now re-embraced for romantic reasons name — family and their neighbors: the poor but attractive young woman Elpida (“Hope”), the wealthy landowning Khan family (representing the Ottomans), the uncouth and greedy but hardworking Theomisitos (literally “hated-by-God”, representing Bulgaria), and others. the (Eu)morphopouloses are represented by the brothers Aristodemus and Dimitrakis. the former is the titular archaeologist, obsessed with his family’s and his people’s ancient history at the expense of the world around him, digging up his fields to search for artifacts to please the trio of foreign scholars who are studying the Eumorphopouloses (think of Seferis: “Ἄλλοτε μᾶς εἴταν εὔκολο ν᾽ ἀντλήσουμε εἴδωλα καὶ στολίδια / γιὰ νὰ χαροῦν οἱ φίλοι τοὺ μᾶς ἔμεναν ἀκόμη πιστοί” // “It used to be easy for us to draw up idols and ornaments / to please those friends who still remained loyal to us” (tr. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard)). Dimitrakis, meanwhile, eschews antiquity, preferring the living culture of modern Greece, its people, and its own post-Byzantine traditions. the novel leaves little doubt as to which position Karkavitsas — a modernizer and pioneer of realism who wrote in the (spoken language-based) Demotic form of literary modern Greek as opposed to the state-backed, archaizing Katharevousa — favors: in the end Aristodemus is literally crushed to death by an ancient marble statue of Glory and the weight of his notebooks filled with the ancient past. Dimitrakis, in contrast, though there are still challenges ahead of him, prospers by literally and figuratively embracing Elpida/Hope: “And they all lived happily ever after.”
Karkavitsas’s satire is well-executed, engaging and sharp, though it also highlights the other side of Greece’s complex relationship to its past and to the region around it: it is a national novel, invested in the idea that everywhere that Greeks live now and, perhaps, everywhere that Greeks once lived in the past (certainly everywhere Greeks lived in the heyday of the Eastern Roman Empire) rightly belongs to Greece, the nation-state. this is evident in both Aristodemus and Dimitrakis’s disdain towards the representatives of neighboring Bulgaria, Romania, and Serbia, as well as the stereotyped moneylender “Kurdocephalus”, who draws both on nineteenth-century race science ideas about “Armenoid” physiognomy and on Western European loans to Greece in the aftermath of the 1897 Greco-Turkish war. if the novel is pointed in its critique of Western European archaeologists and of antiquarianism in Greek nationalism, it adopts this position first and foremost in the interest of an expansionist Greek nationalism. archaeologists and antiquarians are too enamored of the past to see the possibilities offered by the present — possibilities that are, as Karkavitsas frames them, basically about acquiring more territory in the interest of securing The Greek Nation.
the sea stories are a marked change of pace, and based on Hanink’s introduction it sounds like they are more representative of Karkavitsas’s work, in that they are rooted in a social realism — though several of them, most notably “The Gorgon”, incorporate folk fantasy elements. these stories draw on Karkavitsas’s own experience with maritime labor and on his interactions with sailors and other maritime workers, notably sponge-divers, who are the focus of two of the four stories included here (“The Sponge Divers” and “The Antipatharian”). I was particularly struck by one of Hanink’s comments in her introduction, discussing the impact of the scaphander (early diving suits) on the sponge industry in relation to “The Antipatharian”:
The plot of “The Antipatharian” also relies on the physical and literary device of the scaphander, for it is the innovation of the diving suit that enables the narrator to spend enough time on the sea bottom to cut the antipatharian, whereas generations before him had failed. Those earlier divers, the narrator tells his dubious captain, “went down with a stone. One dive and back up. What could they accomplish in one dive?” (171) These comments also function as a metaliterary acknowledgement of the new possibilities that the grim apparatus had opened for maritime fiction, which now had the option of setting plausible plots under the sea.
though Hanink notes that in the end “The Antipatharian” concludes that “no matter the human technology, in the end it will always be Nature that triumphs and abides” (her summary), I think it’s worth situating the story not only in relation to other turn-of-the-century realistic maritime fiction but also to the trajectory of science fiction: “The Antipatharian” represents an intermediate point between the speculation of Verne’s Vingt mille lieues sous les mers and the speculation of something like SeaQuest DSV, a moment when it seemed possible that the underwater world might genuinely, rather than merely science-fictionally, open up to human exploitation — even if the titular sponge ultimately escapes, in a moment of liminal fantasy. (it also should be borne in mind that both “The Antipatharian” and “The Sponge Divers” are fundamentally stories about resource extraction. I am once again asking: who is writing oil rig fiction based on their experience working on an oil rig?)
if the sea stories are less openly nationalistic than The Archeologist, they are still marked by national and racial politics, which I think Hanink has navigated more or less effectively in translation and in her extensive notes (I’m inclined to say the notes are a bit excessive, but for readers unfamiliar with ancient Greek literature or the history of southeastern Europe they’re probably more useful, though the identifications of all of the allegorical references in The Archeologist felt unnecessary to me after a while). the translations throughout the book skew at times towards (what feels like) the literal, but it didn’t bother me overmuch.
I would place this book alongside texts like Mathias Storch’s Singnagtugaq or Augo Lynge’s Ukkiut 300-nngornerat — a problematic text, but also a fascinating, weird, and in some ways still all too relevant “bad” aesthetic object. definitely worth a read if any of this has sounded interesting to you.
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