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Prosthesis Helen in (Modern) Greece Modern Greek Nationhood: Altneuland In ‘‘The Virgin of Sparta,’’ a sonnet by the modern Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos (1884–1951), Mary, or Helen, is implicitly invoked as the patron saint of graft: ‘‘Not of Pentelic marble nor of brass / shall I erect Thy deathless idol [τὸ ἀθάνατο εἴδωλό Σου], but / from a tall column made of cypress wood / that my work may be fragrant throughout the ages. / And on that hill which wears like a tall crown / an old Venetian castle, I shall build / a massive church, and in it shall lock Thee fast [καὶμέσαθὰΣέκλείσω] / with mightyadamantine gates of iron!’’ (ll. 1–8; Sikelianos 1951:82, trans. Friar 1982). In fact, Sikelianos’s addressee would seem to be both Mary and Helen.1 The title alone is more than enough to suggest a synthesis of the Christian and the Pagan. Other elements in the poem, however, point to the theme of synthesis, or graft. The Venetian castle, for example, reminds us that Greece has long been a culture occupied by the foreign. The ‘‘massive church’’ is also a temple, and a prison. The idol inside is at once a work of art and a work of nature, tree and column, made of neither marble nor brass, but of the wood of the indigenous cypress, emblem of perpetuity . Grafting Helen is the story of countless such idols (εἴδωλα), imitation Helens or Helen substitutes, all fashioned out of the latest vernacular. Poetically, but also politically, culturally, and linguistically, the modern Greek nation-state is built upon the rhetoric of graft.2 During its struggle against the Ottoman Empire in the beginning of the nineteenth century (culminating in the War of Independence of 1821), the question of Greece’s political and ethnic status generated a considerable amount of debate in Western Europe.3 As Michael Herzfeld argues in Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the 239 240 Prosthesis Making of Modern Greece: ‘‘To be a European was, in ideological terms, to be a Hellene’’ (1982:15). Many Europeans of the time, however, believed the contemporary Greeks to be an adulterated version of the classical Greeks— ‘‘Byzantinized Slavs’’ (Bernal 1987:292), a people debased by foreign grafts.4 Others took for granted the existence of an unbroken connection between the Greeks of antiquity and today. That premise was central to the folk movement developing in Europe at this time. Claude Fauriel in his Folk Songs of Modern Greece, for example, appeared to assume that Homer’s creativity lived on in the spontaneous and naïve poetry of the Greek peasant. ‘‘Europeanness,’’ for the Greek patriot Dora d’Istria, was a quality allotted to different ethnicities in hierarchical degrees: ‘‘the Serbs—even when Moslem by religion—are more European than the Turks, but the Greeks are the most European of all’’ (Herzfeld 1982:57).Whether the Greeks were embraced or excluded, what was never rejected was the standard of purity by which they were evaluated.5 But revolutionary Greece needed Europe just as much as Europe needed Greece. Freedom from the Ottoman Turks was impossible without European intervention, something dictated by both realpolitik (a balance of powers must be maintained on the continent) and ideology (the designated cradle of European identity must be protected from the infidel).6 Turkey recognized the Greek state in 1829, but only in 1832 was Greece granted independence by the European powers. Europe’s goal, according to Herzfeld, ‘‘was to form an entity made in their own image and upon their own terms’’ (1982:15). The new state’s first monarch was a Bavarian prince, Otto I. The confusion of identity suggested by this graft of a German ruler upon a Greek people is emblematic of the whole struggle for coherence faced by the incipient Hellenic nation. Although Greece had relatively little say in its own political self-creation, cultural identity is another matter. Above all it was crucial that Greece equate itself with antiquity. Herzfeld has compared this gesture of affiliation to Theodore Herzl’s theoretical conception of a Zionist state as an Altneuland: ‘‘Political Hellenism shared with political Zionism a preoccupation with the physical site of the nation’s history and cultural evolution, and both faced the paradox . . . which Herzl’s phrase so concisely suggests’’ (1982:158n6). Greece also straddles a border, at once geographical and historical, between East and West.7 Herzfeld suggests (19) that the Greek struggle to fashion itself anew can be viewed along two perpendicular axes: temporal, from ancient to modern, and...

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