cspdf, Job 181 - University of Kent

international community, not to celebrate them, but to uncover the political
and moral implications of their ritualistic repetition. The Olympiad should be
regarded as a survival of this nineteenth-century narrative that made Hellenic
civilisation the core of European modernity. ‘Olympism’ is, in other words, the
collective celebration of a metanarrative on European ancestral origins. The
circulation of the Games in the community of nations impregnates them with
meaning and transforms them into a relational value. It is precisely this
relational dimension that Greek state representatives mobilised in their
Olympic rhetoric.
Identity in Antiquity/Antiquity as Modernity
From the outset the Olympics and so-called ‘Olympism’, the philosophy of the
event, were permeated by nationalist ideology. Although the origin of the
modern Games is usually attributed to a Frenchman, Pierre Fredy, Baron de
Coubertin (1863-1937), a similar proto-movement existed in Greece long
before de Coubertin’s initiative.
It began with a suggestion by a
Constantinopolitan Greek poet, Panagiotis Soutsos (1806-1868), to Ioannis
Kolettis, the Greek Minister of the Interior (Young, 1996: 17-18). The
suggestion was focused around the establishment of a national day on which
Greeks would celebrate the War of Independence (24 March), the ritualistic
reverence of the Greek ‘spirit’ par excellence that has not lost its importance
ever since. Although the national day was immediately established, it took the
state over a decade to revive the Olympiad. In 1859, Zappas, a Greek
merchant undertook the organisation of the first commercially based Olympic