Who Owns Athens? Urban Planning and the Struggle for Identity in Neo–Classical Athens (1832-1843)

Abstract

Planning and building of Neo-Classical Athens under the Bavarian administration does not fit easily in a typical program of European nation-building. Scholars have understood this common European process using the concepts such as “invented traditions” and “imagined communities” arguing that it was the Greeks who invented Modern Greece. Here I argue that the power relations between the powerful European rulers and the impoverished Greek natives were far more influential than previously believed. The Greeks, even though physically in Europe and for centuries the focus of European Enlightened imagination, were treated more like colonial subjects. It was actually the subaltern Greeks who had to live their everyday lives in the European “imagined community” and they resisted the European Neo- Classical dream.