Greece Writes Back: Anti-Fascist Receptions of Antiquity in the Literature of Occupied Greece, 1941-1945

When we think of the weaponisation of cultural heritage, far-right nationalist regimes come to mind, from Mussolini's Italy to Ceaucescu's Romania - yet the axe swings both ways. Throughout history, cultural heritage has also been used in resistance against domination from outside and in fights for social justice. It can play a crucial therapeutic role in coping with the social trauma of oppression.

Greece Writes Back explores the literary reception of antiquity as a form of resistance and therapy during the Nazi occupation of Greece, when Greek writers, including Nikos Kazantzakis and Angelos Sikelianos, reclaimed their ancient historical and mythological narratives.

Nazi Germany's appropriation of ancient cultural heritage is well-known. Emphasising a dubious "Western" lineage, Hitler's regime displayed the cultural remains of ancient Greece and Rome as its own. Fascist appropriation of antiquity ranged widely from classicising architecture to the 1936 Olympics and even medical theory.

While there has been sustained scholarly examination of the gradual co-option of Greek cultural history by fascists in 20th-century Europe (e.g. Mazower 2001 and Roche & Demetriou eds. 2018), including the Greek fascist classicism of Ioannis Metaxas (e.g. Hamilakis 2007), the anti-fascist Greek reaction against has been neglected.

During the Nazi occupation of Greece (1941-1945), several Greek authors sought to fight (or write) back, reclaiming their cultural past from their oppressors. My project seeks to close the gap in the scholarship and establish an interdisciplinary model for future work on classical reception as a mode of resistance, combining political science, literary studies, and cultural history.

My thesis will be organised into three sections, focusing on the works of three pivotal modern Greek authors written during Nazi Occupation - 1) Nikos Kazantzakis' Prometheus trilogy, 2) Angelos Sikelianos' tragedies (Sibylla, Daedalus in Crete, and Asclepius), and 3) Yannis Ritsos' poetry. In order to contextualise these discrete case studies, I will use the poetry of national great, Kostis Palamas, whose funeral in 1943 became an important locus of protest against the Nazi regime, to frame discussion.

Through analysis of the works chosen and their classical sources, I will investigate how each author attempted to wrest Greek antiquity from fascist appropriators. Key research questions include: What does "resistant reception" look like? How well do existing postcolonial and classical reception theories apply to the classicising literature of occupied Greece?

How did these socialist-adjacent internationalist writers negotiate the nationalism inherent in the act of claiming cultural inheritance? What relationship did their anti-fascist struggle for national history have with the cultural politics of the Comintern's Popular Front? How did the way they responded to cultural appropriation by fascists relate to the longer and deeper appropriation by Western democracies, who had for centuries adopted ancient Greek figures as their own cultural predecessors?

What might their examples contribute to present-day discussions of ownership of cultural heritage? And how can engagement with a common cultural past help heal the traumas of a nation in extremis?

Throughout my research I will employ the skills of close reading and comparative literary analysis. I will build on the work of Hamilakis (2007), Beaton and Ricks (2008), and Plantzos (2023), who have all examined (in diverse academic disciplines, from Comparative Literature to Archaeology) modern Greek identity formation through a relationship with the distant past.

My title draws on Ashcroft et al.'s Empire Writes Back (1989) because I intend to adopt and adapt such postcolonial theory. The works of Homi Bhabha and Ernest Renan, who have developed pioneering concepts of the formation of national identity and cultural self-definition through heritage, are crucial to my study. By fo