cspdf, Job 181 - University of Kent

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event. In his proto-Olympic movement we note the co-existent promotion of Greek products and individuals with a revival of what were considered as ancient Olympic rituals. The event was institutionalised and a number of similar festivals took place over the next three decades (1870, 1875, 1888 and 1889). I have already noted that the relationship between nationalism and the Olympics existed long before their universal appeal. The involvement of a man of letters in the Olympic revival is not coincidental, if we consider Soutsos’ literary work in its historical and linguistic context. The institution of modern Greece did not necessarily solve the problem of a polyglot and polyidiomatic would-be nation that had spent centuries under the Ottoman ‘yoke’. It was not just that Greek citizens were bilingual and trilingual, but also that not all those populations who considered themselves Greek were recognised as such by the Greek state or lived within it. The Babelic outcome of Greek liberation was further worsened by philhellenic dissatisfaction and fear that the Great Powers of Europe had given birth rights to a degenerate non- European ‘race’. To the straightforward Orientalist discourse of ‘Ottoman Greekness’, we can add another that denied modern Greeks any association with their Hellenic forefathers, even one based upon cultural ‘degeneration’. This was expressed by Jacob Philipp Falmerayer, a Tyrolean historian who assumed the status of Satan in Greek culture when in the 1830s he claimed that the modern Greeks comprised a bastard Slav nation that had nothing to do with ancient Hellas (Skopetea, 1999). In an age in which culture was confused with ‘race’ and ‘blood’, this accusation by a Hellenist scholar was
unbearable. In fact, the Falmerayer trauma was never overcome, and even today Greek academics assume the same old defensive attitude towards the Tyrolian classicist. In Soutsos’ period, the question of the unity and historical continuity of the Greek nation was manifested mainly in the domain of language. Greek academics and literati were split into three groups, each defending a different version of Greek (and therefore ‘Greekness’): the demoticists supported the ‘live’ language of the folk, adumbrating a fullyfledged romantic movement; the Hellenists advocated the ancient Greek version, identifying modern with ancient Greek identity; and the katharevousianoi (the ‘purified’), claimed that a mixture of the two should represent modern Greekness. It is interesting that Soutsos began as a demoticist, but eventually became an advocate of katharevousa, an artificial Greek language that would dominate the Greek bureaucratic regime till 1974. The merging of nationalist demoticism and ketharevousa statism determined the content of Greek national ideology and gave shape to the modern Greek nation-state. Soutsos’ interest in the Olympics should not be separated from his conviction that by resurrecting things ancient Greek he would recover this long-lost Hellenic modernity for his homeland. Soutsos’ Olympic ideal was shared by later generations of literati. Most prominent was Angelos Sikelianos, a demoticist, who sought to revive a version of the Olympics in Delphi in 1927. Interestingly, Sikelianos’ project had as an end the ‘alleviation of humanity from pain’ (Vitti, 1989: 339). Context binds Soutsos and Sikelianos: the first half of the nineteenth century is the period in which the Greeks discover their ‘Great Idea’, a nationalistic
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Page 37 and 38: Cultural Olympiad, http://www.cultu
Page 39 and 40: Herzfeld, M. (2002b) The Absent Pre
Page 41: Young, D.C. (1996) The Modern Olymp

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