Provincial Anthropology, Circumlocution, and the Copious Use of Everything

Provincial towns are not miniature replicas of national metropolises but centers with their own trajectories of aesthetic and civic development. They operate in a regional context in relation both to the rural villages within their spheres of influence and to international cultural circuits. Inhabitants of peripheral towns in Greece negotiate the challenges of pluralism, modernization, and the hegemony of the nation state in their own social, political, and cultural idioms of accommodation and distancing. A close analysis of the modern history, city planning, and architecture of Florina in Western Greek Macedonia, particularly in the period between WWI and WWII, shows the development of an eclectic stylistic lingua franca in the aftermath of the appropriation of Muslim property and the demolition and suppression of the Muslim architectural presence. Provincial border towns manage their changing modes of heterogeneity in the context of an intimate space-in-common that generates an ambiguous pluralist semiotics in architecture as in dance.