Introduction: Ruins in Contemporary Greek Literature, Art, Cinema, and Public Space

Panos Koutras's film Ξενία (Xenia, 2014) provokes a debate about the social value of ruins. In this travel and coming-of-age narrative, the title stands for the "hospitality" provided by a dilapidated hotel, in the ruins of which the Greek-Albanian characters Ody and his brother Dany find refuge. In an earlier scene on Ody's balcony overlooking the city of Athens, Dany points into the distance and asks, "Is that the Acropolis?" Ody listlessly acknowledges that it is, and they continue a heated discussion about their family's past. While the ancient ruin in the capital becomes a background against which the characters fight over their memories, the modern ruin on the periphery—the hotel—becomes the setting for reconciliation and for dreams of a possible future. In the middle of the film, the heroes reach the ruined hotel—the scene was shot in the Kozani Xenia hotel, one of the Xenia hotels built by the Greek National Tourism Organization and an epitome of the modernist architecture of the 1960s—where they finally bond, drink, and dance to an Italian song from the 1970s. The ruined hotel invites an alternative view of ruins: instead of representing a distant eternal uninhabited beauty, ruins here are an inhabited space that accommodates, and is re-made by, the so-called xenoi, the "foreigners." The former luxury hotel, in its peripheral and abandoned state, provides refuge from the xenophobic and homophobic attacks that have threatened the characters on their journey thus far.

Iakovos Panagopoulos argues that the name of the hotel, Xenia, is a reference to xenophobia rather than philoxenia (hospitality), "as the heroes are located in a hostile place, which is strongly illustrated in the abandonment of the hotel and the isolation of heroes in it" (2017, 59). The abandonment and isolation of this modernist architectural ruin, however, need not be seen as representing hostility, especially in light of the amount of relief, diversion, and ease the ruin provides both for the protagonists and for the narrative itself. For Dimitris Papanikolaou, the Xenia hotel is a space of "mending" for the characters and, more importantly, a "queer" space of hope that allows them to "make that space together, nominating it with their bodies. This is how the symbol of Greece's abandonment and noxious debt is turned into a queer refuge—with a possible future" (forthcoming [b]).¹ According to Papanikolaou, this ruined space becomes the setting for a new meaning of hospitality, and also of citizenship, to emerge. In the Xenia hotel, hospitality and citizenship are not defined and offered by the state, but by "what bodies make, when bodies orient towards one another" (ibid.). Reflecting on the function of the same ruined site in the film, Stathis Gourgouris notes that, in the characters' attempt to be liberated from the "debilitating dialectic of being xenoi (foreigners) at home without a home," the ruined hotel (and the film itself that bears that hotel's name) becomes a space to accommodate their "foreignness"—not only a space of hospitality but also one that calls for a new emancipatory identity, detached from "the binds of their inherited filiation" (2019, 534–535).

This special section aims to trace such alternative meanings and operations of ruins and ruined spaces in contemporary Greek culture, literature, film, memoirs, art, and public space. It thereby draws attention to cases that revise, complicate, thwart, or defamiliarize common valuations of (Greek) ruins as burdens of the past, signifiers of loss, failure, and nostalgia, or sources of national pride that are idealized, fetishized, or commodified. The contributing authors revisit ruins of the remote and recent past, as well as new, contemporary ruins in Greece, both in urban centers and on the periphery. They approach ruins as foreign objects with unsettled meanings that haunt and are haunted by the contemporary moment, opening up to debate our assumed familiarity with ruins as spaces of "inherited filiation" (Gourgouris 2019, 535). The contributions also inquire into how ruins can become productive materialities or contested spaces, partaking in unexpected encounters and critical debates...