The Nation and its Ruins...
"The very mention of the word 'Greece' evokes for most people, especially in the western world, classical antiquity, temples and marbles, ancient battles, and the origins of democracy. Yet my focus here is not classical antiquity itself, nor Hellenism as understood by most western scholars (the idealization of classical antiquity in western Europe from the eighteenth century onwards; cf. Morris 1994), but a different set of Hellenisms: the neo-Hellenism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, imported into Greece, and mostly what I called Indigenous Hellenism--the appropriation of western Hellenism by local societies in Greece in the mid to late nineteenth century and its recasting as a novel, syncretic, and quasi-religious form of imagining time and place, past and present, of producing and reproducing national identities."
