Where to Be Buried: The Immigrant's Choice

During my last visit to Fernwood Cemetery in Philadelphia, I noticed a new memorial in the Greek-American section. My visits here are personal (upkeep of family grave) but also academic (analyzing diaspora material culture). See posting, Buried in Bottles (June 7, 2008). New monuments come with a dose of sadness as, in many cases, I know the deceased individuals, and I learn of their death at the cemetery. One recent burial that I noticed during my visit was Fotios Karalis, who died five months ago at the age of 86. The tomb's meticulous upkeep, the constant burning of the candle and the fresh flowers reflect the family's commitment to the upkeep of memory. The Karalis monument contains typical features found in Greek tombs, even when the options are constrained by the regulations of a historical Protestant cemetery. One source of tension seen frequently in Greek-American tombs is the Greek desire to fence off the human body to avoid stepping (a sign of desecration), which contradicts the idyllic park aesthetics that require the uniform coverage of grass. Any kind of enclosure is a nuisance to the cemetery authorities who must regularly mow the uniform lawn. The fence seen in the Karalis monument is a common compromise between cultural traditions, limiting enclosure to the concrete base of the future tombstone. The fence communicates the desire to protect the body without actually demarcating the body and violating cemetery rules.

Pictures on tombs tend to be portraits of the deceased. The Karalis monument is extraordinary in its visual images, namely two laminated photographs nailed on the cross. Both images show the deceased in his village in Greece. The lower photo (left) is framed by a vertical wooden post belonging to a porch in the village. The person who took the photo stands under the porch, shooting Karalis in the distance. Once nailed on the cross, the wooden post captured in the photograph runs parallel to the wooden post. The real wood (of the cross) and the wood from Greece (holding up the house) reverberate with each other. The pins that hold the image of Karalis on the cross also reverberate with the image of Christ on the cross represented in an icon. The photograph surface is plastic. They have been laminated to protect the image from the rain. A close up of the laminated surface shows specks of grass, thrown up on the image from the mechanical mowers cutting the cemetery's lawn. Grass from the ground has invaded the vertical image giving it, at the same, time a three dimensional texture and dimension of reality. Such art-historical readings were not certainly not intentional. The haphazard juxtapositions between real and unreal, present and past, here (Philadelphia) and there (Greece) animate the monument as a work of cultural production.

The inclusion of photos from the deceased individual's homeland is on its own interesting. The Greek American immigration narrative expressed in songs and attitudes inlcudes a yearning to be buried in Greece. Such a return of the body brings closure to the immigrant journey. Being buried away from the extended family also translates to a fear of not being remembered ritually. Burial in the "xenitia" (foreign land) means that the tomb will be forgotten among strangers. The extended family will not be able to perform the continuous rituals of commemoration, the trisagions, the continuous lighting of the candle and the visual upkeep. Most Greek immigrants of Karalis' generation faced a powerful dilemma. If they were buried in the U.S., their tomb could be visited by their immediate loved ones (spouses, children) but not by the extended kin. With geographical mobility in the U.S., the next generation might not even be anywhere close to the city that the deceased was buried. Burial back in the village of birth in Greece, nevertheless, guarantees a locus of visitation, a point of origin. After all, you would be buried next to your parents, grandparents, siblings and cousins. The photographs in the Karalis tomb resolve the dilemma in an interesting way. Although physically buried in the U.S., the photos on his tomb have transported him back to his village. The photos, in other words, facilitated that final journey home. Karalis is at both places.

My family is a good example of the geographical tensions of immigration. Like many immigrants, my father wished to be buried in Greece. Greek-American funeral homes, interestingly enough, do this frequently and have mastered all the bureaucratic steps along the way. It's not an easy matter to transport a corpse across international boundaries. For instance, the corpse has to be embalmed, a practice not common in Greece, and placed in a special metal coffin that is sealed and airtight. The special transport coffins are larger than the typical coffin used in Greece and, therefore, cannot fit in the pre-existing tombs. Commonly in Greece, the bones of the ancestors are interred and the new deceased is buried in the same location. When my father's coffin arrived, we had to excavate a new burial large enough to accomodate the high tech coffin. Having been embalmed, moreover, means that my father's body will probably never be interred because the body will take decades to decompose. But these are gorey details. The important conflict is that he is buried with his relatives (most importantly with his parents) but his immediate family can only visit him whenever they go to Greece, about once every two years.

My mother, on the other, hand was so patriotic towards her adopted country that she wanted to be buried in Philadelphia. Even though neither my sister or I live in Philadelphia, we still manage to visit her grave about once a month and perform the regular upkeep. My mother is the first member of our family to be buried in the U.S., so she has no family kin next to her. She's buried in the Greek-American section, but she is surrounded by strangers. My mother's family is from Athens and everyone has been buried in a family mausoleum. By choosing to be buried in the U.S., my mother is the first family member of many generations to be missing from the mausoleum in Athens.

This geographical choice of burial is not only complex but difficult to communicate. Consider the difference between my father and mother. Since we were little children, my father would take us to his village cemetery and involve us in the rituals of visiting the ancestors. After each annual visit, he would remind us that one day his bones would rest next to his parents, suggesting indirectly that one day, it will be us (my sister and I) visiting him. So when he died unexpectedly from a heart attack, there was no question about what his wishes regarding country of burial. My mother, on the other hand, had never expressed any choice to either her children or her siblings. When it was obvious that her cancer was terminal, we were placed in the rather sad position of having to ask her directly. Her choice to be buried in Philadelphia upset the rest of the family back in Greece. Not only had the immigration deprived them of their family member, but they couldn't even express their final farewell.

Architecture and the Civil Rights Movement

I've often wondered why architecture has played such a minor role in the Civil Rights movement. Traditionally, architecture has been a vehicle of hegemony, owned and controlled by dominant norms and organizations. Thomas Sugrue's Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (2008) takes us away from the South, where Civil Rights stories are often told, and examines the lesser known eruptions of resistance north of Jim Crow. Surgrue teaches American history at UPenn. His earlier Origins of the Urban Crisis (2005) focuses on Detroit's urban history and his co-edited New Suburban History (2006) introduces the complexities of American suburbanization.

Sweet Land of Liberty is a humongous encyclopedic work (543 pages of text) dealing with every aspect of the Civil Rights movement from Martin Luther King's student days at Chester, PA (when he was refused food at a dinner in Maple Shade, NJ), to the welfare rights activism of Roxanne Jones. The book was of great interest to me in discussing the spaces and architectural settings of resistance. Anyone interested in architecture's contribution to resistance movements has lots to learn. Sugre explores the spaces of restaurants (130-142), movie theaters (138-142), jazz clubs (264), public beaches (154-159), schools (163-199), and most importantly houses (200-250).

Chapter 7, "No Right More Elemental" deals with the central battle ground over housing. America's suburbanization in the model of Levittown (earliest one completed in 1958) created mechanisms to exclude African Americans from the suburbs, whether through private covenants or federal housing policies. This story is well known; in my history of housing class, I teach it through Gwendolyn Wright's Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (1981). What we learn from Sugrue is the organized resistance against Levittowns. Beginning in 1953, for instance, an American Friends Service Committee was formed and held secret meetings to crack Levittown's exclusionism. The ogranization had Quaker roots and included African-American and Jewish members. Sugrue also tells the story of William and Daisy Myers, the first black family to move into Levittown (220-228). Even more fascinating is Conccord Park, an interracial suburb developed by Morris Milgram in the white suburbs of Philadelphia (230-237). See Milgram obituary (NYT June 26, 2007). Milgram also developed Greenbelt Knoll, in Northeast Philadelphia, an experimental community of 19 houses designed by Robert Bishop and Margaret Duncan. Sugrue does not discuss the particulars of the architecture, but Harris Steinberg (dir. of Penn Praxis) and others have noted the involvement of Louis Kahn in the designs.

In 1953, African Americans from North Philadelphia started to migrate to the white affluent neighborhood of Mount Airy, where they met intense resistance from block-busting and real-estate agents. The historic West Mount Airy Neighbors association formed in 1959 to organize the battle that concluded with one of the most segregated neighborhoods in America. Thomas Sugrue is not just a teacher and scholar but a committed activist. In 1996, he took over the directorship of the West Mount Airy Neighbors and worked with the Fund for Open Society, created by Morris Milgram. Nathaniel Popkin's, "The Vital Thread of Tom Sugrue," Pennsylvania Gazette (June 2009), pp. 32-37, gives a full portrait of Sugrue's pursuits in both academia and the neighborhood.

Sweet Land of Liberty opens a door into urban history and the Civil Rights movement that can inspire other specialists of space, politics and architecture. In addition to documenting a unique historical period, Sugrue also gives inspiration for political engagement. I quote Sugrue's advice:

“One of the main issues we struggle with,” Sugrue explains, “is that often our vision is really small. We can’t solve the problems of the city by gussying up storefronts. I love and am a member of the grassroots, but ultimately they have the will but not the capacity. One take-away from [Sweet Land of Liberty] is that far-reaching gains in Civil Rights require people to organize locally but form a broader coalition, providing a longer reach. But we tend to think real small.” On the other hand, he says, “It’s the small things that matter” to people in city neighborhoods. He means that a meaningful understanding can only come from close observation. “One of the most interesting features of the urban landscape is going to places in the day and night. I don’t play golf or tennis, but I do go out and explore, ride the buses and subways. So, for example, at night the street changes. In some places it becomes marked. Women, especially, feel trapped. They’re made to feel they can’t go out.” (Pennsylvania Gazette interview)

Food Architecture before Agriculture

One of the most interesting chapters in Mesolithic archaeology is the Early Natufian period (ca. 12,500-10,800 BCE) when humans stopped being hunter gatherers and settled down for the first time. Human settlement is integrally connected to the domestication of cereals in the Neolithic period. The agricultural revolution is the single most important event in the history of mankind. Another agricultural revolution occurred in the 1970s, when we began to alter the genetic make-up of food itself. My favorite article on the latter is John Seabrook, "Sowing for Apocalypse," New Yorker (August 27, 2007).

David Mithen's book After the Ice Age: A Global Human History 20,000-5000 BC (2003) is my favorite introduction to prehistoric archaeology. Mithen writes the following about the domestication of grain: "Recall that the principal difference is the brittleness of the [grain's] ear -- the wild strains spontaneously fall apart when ripe, scattering their seed on the ground while the domestic strains remain intact, 'waiting for the harvester'." (p. 37) Although sedentary, the Natufians were eating wild grain. In his coverage of Early Natufian culture, Mithen discusses the site of Ain Mallaha excavated in 1954, where we have evidence for decorated sickles and stone mortars. In one tomb, a puppy was also buried affectionately embraced by an old woman.

What makes the Natufian people complicated is that they returned to nomadism during the Late Natufian period, possibly due to a climatic drought; this was at the end of the Ice Age when weather was highly unstable. It was not until the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A period (ca. 9000 BCE) that permanent settlement was tried again and the agricultural revolution took off the ground in the Fertile Crescent. This is of particular importance to architectural historians because agriculture is a prerequisite for fixed settlement. Agriculture, in other words, presupposes the formation of states and permanent dwellings.

An excavation by Ian Kuijt and Bill Finlayson has produced fascinating new evidence for the existence of granaries in an Early Natufian period before the actual domestication of cereal. The excavation at Dhra' (near the Dead Sea) was published last week,"Evidence for Food Storage and Predomestication: Granaries 11,000 Years Ago in the Jordan Valley," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Early Edition, June 22, 2009). It was considered ground-breaking enough to be announced in the Economist a few days later (June 27, 2009, p. 86). Kuijt and Finlayson have unearthed the earliest known granaries located between houses and areas of vegetable processing. The granaries are circular (3 m diameter, 3 m height) and they stored wild forms of grain. They had elevated floors (to protect the grain from rodents) and holes for air circulation.

I look forward to including Dhra' in my survey of architectural history next semester at Franklin and Marshall. The granary fits well with the discussion of Catal Huyuk,the Neolithic settlement (excavated by Ian Hodder) that I cover in the first week of class. Lancaster has a wonderful community of locavores and food activists. Members of F&M's art history department are leaders in community action and I'll be honored to join them this Fall. Lancaster County has some beautiful old silos, the descendents of the Natufian granaries. On the topic of food and architecture, I should briefly note a 2007 book, The Architect, the Cook and Good Taste published in Basel, Germany. Petra Hagen and Rolf Toyka have collected an eclectic set of essays. Although in English, the book is a German project and was not widely distributed in the U.S. It's worth requesting through Interlibrary Loan. I thank my student Katherine Chabla for recommending the book during our seminar on domestic architecture.

The abandonment of settlements and the return to nomadism during the Late Natufian period resonates with the recent phenomenon of eco-migration, the displacement of peoples as a result of global warming. The International Organization for Migration predicts that by 2050, some 200 million will become migrant in search of water. The United Nations University, CARE and Columbia University have produced a new study on eco-migration, "In Search of Shelter: Mapping the Effects of Climate Change on Displacement and Migration." In the same issue reporting the Dhra' excavations, the Economist also published an article discussing this grave global problem, "A New (Under) Class of Travellers" (June 27, 2009, pp. 67-68). Sadly, the Natufians are becoming relevant today.

Vanderpool House at Pikermi

I have been thinking about writing an essay called "The House that Archaeology Built" that reviews architectural patronage by foreign archaeologists in Greece. From Heinrich Schliemann's house in Athens to Fred Cooper's house in Neohori, archaeologist houses present a fascinating type of home-making. The architecture of foreign archaeologists illustrate a physical, spiritual and scholarly connection with their newly adopted home. Construction proceeds from the ground to the roof in reverse order from the process of excavation. Some of the most interesting archaeologist houses, therefore, address the paradoxical relationship between the past (the very reason to come to Greece), the present (the home that shelters research) and the future (the masonry that will outlive its occupant). The archaeologists of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA) have used different strategies to deal with the paradox of building-dwelling-thinking. One unique example is the house of Eugene Vanderpool at Pikermi, Attica, 12 miles outside of Athens.

Antiquated Vagaries (April 3, May 14, May 22, 2009) has posted a great oral history project, the interview of Pierre MacKay on the ASCSA of 1959-60. Discussing Eugene Vanderpool, MacKay echoes a comment that I have heard repeated by other Vanderpool students: "The Vanderpools had a place at Pikermi. They kept themselves to themselves, very much outside the world of the school. I've never seen the place out in Pikermi, one or two special students of Vanderpool have, but basically he and she [Mr. and Mrs. Vanderpool] wanted to have two separate lives and this was respected." I have asked dozens of ASCSA members of that generation about the Pikermi house but no one had seen it. A good source might be John Camp and, of course, Cathy Vanderpool. In an earlier posting, Art Deco Beauty (Dec. 2, 2007), I discussed the rich cultural life of Joan Bush Vanderpool, inspired by seeing her 1929 portrait by Tamara de Lempicka. Since then, I've been collecting more information about Joan Vanderpool's friendships with contemporary Greek intellectuals. I thank Artemis Leontis for sharing with me her research on the friendship between Mrs. Vanderpool and Eva Palmer Sikelianos. Letters from the 1930s also refer to a house in Xylokastro, Corinthia, where some of the ASCSA students met the Vanderpools (Alison Frantz correspondence).

But what about the house at Pikermi? As it turns out, the house was not a secret, but treated like a celebrity house in the Greek architectural press. I came across the first reference to the house in Demetris Philippides, Athens Suburbs and Countryside in the 1930s (Athens, 2006), p. 92. This is a great book documenting the development of suburbs like Psychiko and Philothei and their innovative architectural expressions. The Pikermi house is unique because it was built around an abandoned monastery. In 1956, the Vanderpools converted a 16th-century monastery into a house. I find this to be a fantastic proposition, especially in relationship to Rhys Carpenter's Folly at Ancient Corinth (see, Hesperia article). No other archaeologist house incorporates so fundamentally the sensibilities of living in ruins. The house at Pikermi also belongs to a distinctively American preoccupation regarding restoration, renovation, cloisters and the medieval past.

The Vanderpools were one of the most influential figures in the history of the ASCSA both in terms of the School's academic and extracurricular cultural life. Unlike many other faculty, they maintained a healthy separation between family and academic life. Although they guarded their private life in Pikermi, they were not guarded about the building itself. In 1958, Greece's leading architecture journal featured an article on the house, by Associated Press correspondant Vasos Mingos, "Ένα σπίτι 400 ετών υιοθετείται από Αμερικανική οικογένεια (A 400-Year Old House in Attika is Adopted by an American Family)" Αρχιτεκτονική 7 (1958), pp. 16-21. The article includes a sketch map drawn by Eugene Vanderpool himself, showing the exact location of the house, and an architectural plan (above). The original 16th-c building, the "cloister" is stippled and the additions are shaded in the plan (above). Some 18 photographs show interiors and exteriors, along with Mrs. Vanderpool and her young daughter Ann, "a Bryn Mawr student." The article summarizes the building's history, architectural features (including Mr. Vanderpool's research for comperanda) and Spanish furnishing. The visual juxtaposition of Spanish antiques within a medieval Greek space illustrates a dominant 30s aesthetic of a Mediterranean style. Objects such as a sculpture of Catherine of Aragon were acquired by Mrs. Vanderpool's father, through the American ambassador of Spain. The Spanish interior is also interesting considering the ASCSA's interests in Crusader Greece, including the Catalan and Aragonese towers of Attica.

I do not know what has happened to the Vanderpool house. It would be easy to learn about its state of ownership and preservation. In my mind, it is an architectural landmark. Its publication in Αρχιτεκτονική marks it as a celebrity house. Unlike Greek architecture journals today, the bilingual Αρχιτεκτονική (1957-67) was widely read internationally. Greek modernist were in the forefront of architectural debates (CIAM, Athens Charter, Doxiadis, etc.) Most good architecture libraries subscribed to it, including 70 libraries in the U.S. -- I first read the journal at Clemson University's Art and Architecture library, for example. The house in Pikermi was an internationally celebrated domestic space that marks a timely intersection between archaeology and design.

There are many houses connected to the lives of ASCSA luminaries, and each one offers unique notions. The list of great houses would include Schliemann's house in Athens (designed by Ernst Ziller, 1878), Villia Ilissia (designed by Kleanthes, 1838, for Philadelphia philhelene, now Byzantine Museum), the first American School Building (1878, by W. R. Ware) and Loring Hall (1929), the Duncan House at Kopanos (1903), a series of houses designed by Piet de Jong in Macedonia (1917, built 1930, I have oral histories for a specific home in Herakleia), the Rhys Carpenter folly in Corinth (1930), Oakley House in Corinth designed by Richard Stillwell (1920s), Hill House in Corinth designed by Charles Williams (1972, after original burned down, along with Mr. Williams' dissertation manuscript), the Shear House in Corinth, the Broneer House in Corinth (1950s, currently James Herbst and Ioulia Tzonou Herbst house), the Sanders house in Corinth (1990s, on-going restoration project), the Hill-Blegen House in Athens (Ploutarchou 8), the Alison Frantz/Lucy Tacott apartment in Athens, Hill House in Athens (1920s), James Merrill's House in Athens (donated to the ASCSA and now John Camp's house), Frederick Cooper's experimental house in Neohori (1960s), the Kalligas House in Monemvasia (1980s). I'm sure there are plenty more archaeologist houses of interest and I would love to hear about them. A collective study of all these works, would also need to consider the architecture of the foreign schools more broadly, from

A model for innovative domestic scholarship that combines architecture and social history is Alice Friedman's, Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History (New York, 1998).

The Scottish fustanella

While researching America's relationship with Greece in the 1930s, it dawned on me that Greece occupied a parallel place in the American imagination as Ireland and Scotland. In other words, the American discovery of folk Greece happened at exactly the same time as the discovery of the Irish, Celtic and other less modernized regions of the United Kingdom. Similarities in constructing the Irish and Greek modern nation-states is well known. The revival of dead languages (Gaelic and Katharevousa) and scholarly exploitations of folk culture were common strategies in nation-building. Eric Hobsbawn has addressed modern Greece, Ireland and Israel in his classic, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (1990).

I have always wondered what thoughts may have gone through an American's mind when first seeing the Greek "national" costume, the white kilt known as fustanella. A 1934 American film promoting Mediterranean tourism makes the connection between Scottish kilts and the Greek fustanella quite direct. Narrator James A. Fitzpatrick claims direct descent. This circuitous genealogy, no doubt, reflects popular notions of the 1930s. The film, "Citadels of the Mediterranean" (click here or here), starts in Andalusia and ends in Athens. Segments 6:06-6:50 mins. shows Greek soldiers perform a dance in the Olympic Stadium. The narrator's voice explains:

"As a matter of individuality, no army has ever excelled that of Greece in costuming its soldiers. And no army or navy has yet developed a dance like the one that was staged for us by the president's bodyguard regiment of the Greek army. The origin of this unique costume goes back to the highlands of Albania and it is preserved in Athens today almost exclusively by the presidential guard. The early Roman soldiers copied it from the Greeks and during their conquest of the British Isles it was adopted and modified by the Scottish highlanders."

During the 1930s, British and American archaeologists occasionally put on fustanellas on special celebrations. American expats like George Cram Cook, co-founder of the Provincetown Players, gave up western fashions entirely and embraced the fustanella. Cook's photo above was published in a biography written by his widow, Susan Glaspell, The Road to the Temple (New York, 1927). Humfrey Payne, director of the British School in Athens (1929-1936), was another such figure "going native" for special occasions, the local festivals in Perachora. See photos in his biography, also written by his widow, Dilys Powell, The Traveller's Journey is Done (London, 1943). The American School's photographic archive contains many images of American archaeologists sporting Greek costumes. At first glance, such cross-dressing may be interpreted as a form of orientalism. But the story seems more complicated. By wearing a Greek fustannella, British or American archaeologists also evoked their own national traditions via Scotland. For some others, wearing folk costumes was an act of rebellion, sharing with the avant-garde (such as Isadora Duncan's dressing rebellion).

The Scottish relationship with Greece is also evident in the development of particularly Presbyterian attitudes. Peter Brown first pointed this out to me in a casual conversation. Presbyterians (Church of Scotland) had a different relationship with classical Greece than Anglicans (Church of England). Classicists from Presbyterian colleges, like Princeton, had specific denominational agendas.

Food: Avoiding the Acropolis Museum

While everyone else is obsessing over the opening of the Acropolis Museum, I turn my attention to another touristic matter, Greek food. Satellite TV, a staple of every immigrant home, has brought low-end pop culture inside every Greek American living room. The cast of characters includes Vefa Alexiadou (left), the culinary consultant in Antenna's morning show, Πρωινός Καφές (Morning Coffee). Back in 2005, Phaidon Press published an English translation of the classic 1950 Italian cookbook, Il cuchiaio d'argento. The marketing idea behind The Silver Spoon was to introduce English-speaking audiences to contemporary cookbooks used by native households. In May 2009, Phaidon hoped to make the same impact with Greek cuisine by publishing Alexiadou's Vefa's Kitchen. Friends that are expert in Italian cooking swear by the Silver Spoon; I have only tried the classic 1960s recipe for vodka-tuna pasta sauce. I hope that Vefa's Kitchen has the same impact as the Silver Spoon. See some earlier thoughts on Greek cookbooks, Mediterranean Cooking (Aug. 20, 2008)

While I'm a great supporter of culinary fusion and experimentation, I must air some complaints about a dessert variation I had in Greece. Loukoumades (fried dough balls soaked in honey and cinnamon) is a well known Turkish/Greek/Arabic dessert. Kamena Vourla, a summer resort town, is famous for its loukoumades. My sister, brother-in-law, nephew, niece and I stopped at Kamena Vourla this summer on our way back from visiting relatives in Lamia. Evoking our childhood memories, my sister and I insisted on having some loukoumades. On the menu, we noticed a variation of chocolate-covered loukoumades. My sweet-toothed 5-year-old niece was thrilled by the combination as was my Swedish brother-in-law, who argued that anything covered by chocolate must be an improvement to the original. My sister and I stuck to the traditional version. Once our order appeared, we realized that the chocolate lovers had a plate of loukoumades smeared with Nutella. They didn't complain. I had a try and found the combination deeply unacceptable. It was like shoving Vienna into Istanbul. The next weekend, I found myself on an archaeological project in Dilessi, where I was informed that the chocolate loukoumades had made an appearance there, too. The American students (who had never tried loukoumades before), moreover, were fond of the chocolated fare. As much as I support fusion and taste combinations (see Peasant Food Fusion posting), I must resist this innovation. My brother-in-law thinks that my sister and I are forever imprisoned inside our childhood memories of pure loukoumades. To a certain extent, he is right. Nevertheless, some combinations should be rejected despite their popularity. Although I would never endorse any kind of culinary essentialism mandated by a foodie police, I like to set a few firm limits: no chocolate should interfere with honey-dripped loukoumades.

"Behold the Greek Nacho," Mark Bittman's Minimalist column in today's New York Times, rekindled the militant state of mind I first noticed in Kamena Vourla. First, I do not abhor nachos the way that Bittman does (watch related video), and second, I find his recipe totally silly. Call it some ad hoc Californian concoction, and I might eat it. But call it "Greek" and I'll revolt. I have clipped the recipe and will certainly try it.

I cannot leave the topic of Greek food without pointing out two discoveries from my trip to Greece, a bookstore and a newspaper dedicated to culinary matters. The bookstore is called Chef in Love and is located on Em. Benaki 17, Athens; it holds the largest selection of Greek cook books I have ever seen. I was particularly intrigued by a selection of monastic cookbooks, including Τα μήλα του μάγειρα: Παράδοση της μονηστηριακής τράπεζας, 4th ed. (Indiktos, 2009). The new monthly culinary newspaper is called I Cook Greek. Free copies are available in major bookstores and on line. Last night, I tried out a stuffed tomatoes recipe, which turned out OK but was not as good as the recipe in my benchmark, Diane Kochilas' The Food and Wines of Greece (1990). Although not available in English, the newspaper has interesting and unexpected articles. My favorite is, "Τα γλυκά των 70ς" (May 2009, pp. 14-15), where Christina Tsamoura decodes the complex semiotics of Greek sweets in the 1970s. This was a golden decade of Greek desserts from a fusion perspective. Social events as simple as name days involved negotiating a whole mess of pressures, old and new, Greek and non-Greek, high and low, urban and suburban. American desserts were caught in a similar maelstrom of rapid modernization in the 70s, but Greece was under additional pressures springing from nearby European capitals. Although it embraced laxities of comfort, the Athenian middle class retained some formalities, such as always bringing sweets to house visits. These old bourgeois traditions, interestingly enough, were rather new for many new Athenians. Remember, the city's population boomed in the 70s, while "Paris of the Balkans" (as Athens was described in the 30s) became transformed into a concrete nightmare.

Perhaps, I write about food because I'm compulsively avoiding the hype over the New Acropolis Museum that opened its doors last Saturday. Christopher Hitchens, "A Home for the Marbles" (New York Times op-ed, June 19, 2009) and "The Lovely Stones," (Vanity Fair, July 2009, pp. 44-47) are typical in the media's obsession over the Elgin marbles. Bernard Tschumi's building needs to be considered in its own right. But more importantly, it needs to be related to Tschumi's architectural corpus and the fiasco surrounding the architectural competition(s) over the last 19 years. If nothing else, a Tschumi building in Greece should elevate theoretical discourse to the altitudes of Foucault and Deleuze. Tschumi is meaningless without the theoretical armature, see Architecture and Disjunction (New York, 1996). Shouldn't Deconstructivism annul the banalities of "patrimony"?

The museum competition(s) took many turns. Tracing the consecutive victories and annulments over the last two decades tells an interesting story about architecture and politics in Greece. Calatrava's Olympic stadium was an equally botched up job. On the occasion of the momentous opening, I've pulled out the journal Tefchos 5 (1991) that documents the results of the first competition in 1990. Articles such as "The 'Landscape' of an Architectural Competition" by Yorgos Simeforidis illustrate Greek architectural culture at its highest. Tschumi's museum is definitely an interesting building, but general readers might never know why. Hitchens certainly does not understand it. In all fairness, I have not been inside the building; I've only seen the exterior. For the time being, I should just stick to my area of LEAST expertise, cooking.

Bowie's Philadelphia Sound

Much of 1980s New Wave (ABC, Duran Duran, Thompson Twins, Spandau Ballet, Culture Club, etc.) has an orchestral soulful sound. These "New Romantics" reclaimed the grandeur of Swing from the syncopation of Disco. The city of Philadelphia played a minor role in New Wave with figures like Hall and Oates (who met at Temple) and the Hooters (who met at Penn). A local music scene thrived in the late 80s and 90s, although many bands, like the Johnsons, Scram and the Dead Milkmen, received limited national attention.

Philadelphia is responsible for the origins of New Wave's grand sound by means of an earlier and lesser known avenue, David Bowie's 1975 album Young Americans. On August 11, 1974, Bowie spent a week in Philadelphia, recording Young Americans at the Sigma Sound Studios on 212 N. 12th Street. It is here that Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff created what is known as Philadelphia soul or the Philadelphia sound (Bowie called it "plastic soul"). Gamble and Huff had started the Philadelphia International Records label only three years before Bowie's visit. Y0ung Americans was an important point of departure from Bowie's earlier rock persona in Ziggy Stardust (1972), or Diamond Dogs (1974). In Philadelphia, therefore, David Bowie pursued one of his many incarnations as a spiritually black artist. And it is here that he met Puerto Rican guitarist Carlos Alomar, who became an integral member of Bowie's band. Young Americans also features back up vocals by Luther Vandross and includes the song Fame, co-written with John Lennon, which became Bowie's first American hit.

I doubt that 1980s New Wave (or New Pop) was directly inspired by Philadelphia International Records. Its point of departure is David Bowie's 1975 album, which had already reconfigured the elements of the Philadelphia sound. A year after the release of Young Americans, David Bowie turned a new chapter in his musical career by moving to Berlin with Iggy Pop. The short relationship with Philadelphia was hence quickly overshadowed by a three-year residence in Berlin. The Berlin trilogy (Low, Heroes, Lodger) incorporated Brian Eno's electronic experimentation into the Philadelphia foundations.

Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008 and an excellent 4-CD box set was released on the occasion, Love Train: the Sound of Philadelphia (Sony Legacy). Terry Gross interviewed Gamble and Huff in "Riding Philly's 'Love Train' with Gamble and Huff" (NPR, Nov. 26, 2008, replayed May 22, 2009). On May 19, 2009, Gamble and Huff received BMI's Icon Award.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: A new book explores Bowie's creative three-years in Berlin, see Thomas Jerome Seabrook, Bowie in Berlin: A New Career in a New Town (London, 2008). For the Philadelphia episode, see also Christopher Sandford, Bowie: Loving the Alien (New York, 1996), p. 128. The story of the Philadelphia sound is chronicled in, John A. Jackson, A House on Fire: The Rise and Fall of Philadelphia Soul (New York, 2004).

My Philadelphia: Joyce, Kalfus, Saffron

I revel in the first few pages of Ulysses, tracing Stephen Dedalus's and stately, plump Buck Mulligan's ascents/descents in Martello Tower. The structure belongs to a series of defenses built to withstand a Napoleonic invasion, and it currently houses a Joyce museum. Last weekend, I surveyed a 15th century tower in Boeotia, so towers are on my mind. Mulligan wipes the sacramental shaving razor on Stephen's noserag and sees a snotgreen art color reflected in the snotgreen sea (the Homeric wine-dark). At one moment, Mulligan leaves the parapet and descends the stair; his song disappears in the bowels of the structure. Stephen, alone now, watches the sea, "Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from stairhead seaward where he gazed." The morning's slivers of light make the sea resonate with w's, "wavewhite, wedded words shimmering on the dim tide," and Stephen enters a reverie over his mother's recent deathbed. As we have already learned, Stephen refused to kneel at his mother's deathbed, declaring his rejection of Catholic rite and dishonoring his mother. In the guilt-induced reverie, Stephen sees the objects of his mother's youth, "her secrets: objects in the locked drawer," toys and projected memories--birdcage, pantomime, featherfans, dancecards powdered with musk, amber beads. The juxtaposition of architectural vantage (in-out, up-down Martello Tower), the landscape (the snotgreen sea) and objects (mother's secret toys) make Ulysses a most instructive exercise in archaeology, leaving aside the literary density (Hamlet, Odyssey, Yeats).

As Stephen leans over the parapet and sees "the mailboat clearing the harbourmouth," I hear my own mailwoman at the door. Examining the contents of my mailbox, I find the new issue of DWELL magazine, to which I subscribed last year but now read with disinterest. I practically jumped out of my seat when I saw this issues special feature on Philadelphia, an interview by Ken Kalfus (left). For most of the last six years, I had been living in Clemson, South Carolina, where I taught architectural history. Before that, Philadelphia was home, to which I returned to take care of a sickly mother (but unlike Stephen, I knelt). Inga Saffron's Skyline Online became my remote link to the Philadelphia skyline, my guide through architectural changes and controversies. Incidentally, I learned of Saffron only after seeing a reading of Ulysses at the Rosenbach Bloomsday celebrations a few years ago.

Last academic year, my college adviser gave a lecture at Clemson University and over dinner he noted the lack of Philadelphia literature. I had just started blogging and posted some thoughts. In Philadelphia Literature Question Mark, I projected a Philadelphia Ulysses on Kalfus and Saffron. Returning to DWELL's article "Ken Kalfus's Philadelphia" (July/August 2009, pp. 70-76), I marvel at Kalfus' brilliant suggestion, to post Ulysses on the PECO Building. The Philadelphia Electric Company Building is a 1970 Miesian skyscraper with a twist, a scrolling text at its top floors. For 35-some-years, the PECO Building was the only skyscraper towering over the Schuylkill River. It's an attractive black box with quotations of the celebrated PSFS Building (with its stationary text). I love its textual directives that change every night. It manifests a confidence in architectural minimalism and, no less, in the irrefutable power of words. The skyscraper announced facts. In 2005, the PECO Building lost its directive prominence when Cesar Pelli's Cira Centre rose on the other side of the River (a lovely building, the only Pelli project I admire). Unlike its modernist neighbor, this postmodernist signboard lacks prescriptive content. Every night it changes its skin by projecting different light compositions. The message is graphically vague and targeted, perhaps, to Richard Florida's creative class.

Kalfus' Ulyssean appreciation of Philadelphia runs through the DWELL interview; it includes an iconoclastic disregard for the PSFS landmark, a transient appreciation of 30th Street Station (Louis Kahn encouraged all his clients to come to Philadelphia only by train), and also a rare nod to Van Pelt Library (left). Very few people would admit this in public, but Van Pelt is a magical place. For me, it's the place where I discovered Ulysses. As Kalfus points out, it is open stacks and open to the public. Penn's library is one of the largest in the United States (ranking fourth, if I remember correctly). Known as "the book barn," Van Pelt has been criticized as generically modern. Designed in 1962 by the same firm of the PECO Building (Harbeson, Hough, Livingston & Larson), it provides an expansive open interior, a rational city of books. One of my favorite activities used to be losing myself, like a flaneur, in its pastel-colored metal shelves and discovering unexpected pieces of knowledge. I have friends who cultivated entire love affairs in the building. Back in the 1980s, when Van Pelt had a smoking section, the greatest cultural exchange between smoking Eurotrash (like myself) and American sophisticates (or wannabe's on both accounts) took place. As much as the university tries to keep up with Barnes & Noble, Marks' cafe will never replicate the ad hoc environment of the old smoking section.

I left Philadelphia in 2003, when I joined Clemson's faculty. Sporadic maternal visits, funerals, weddings and baptisms supplemented with the imaginative reflections of Kalfus/Saffron have turned my Dublin into a place more thought-provoking than when I had left it. The PECO Building could be Martello Tower. The very moment I received DWELL in the mail, Saffron commented on my blog posting. How more magical could blogging be? In September, I'll be returning to the Philadelphia area, starting a new academic position at Franklin and Marshall. The prodigal son is thrilled to return physically and intellectually. Joyce, Kalfus and Saffron have added to the city in innumerable ways. I cannot wait to discover Lancaster, rediscover Philadelphia and explore intersections between architecture, archaeology, literature and journalism. I have great hopes in Franklin and Marshall's Philadelphia Alumni Writers House, which I thoroughly enjoyed during my interview.

Ulysses Archaeology

June 16th is Bloomsday, a day in 1904 Dublin that forms the subject of Ulysses by James Joyce. Philadelphia's Rosenbach Library and Museum, home of a Ulysses manuscript, celebrates every year with a public reading. Nothing can be better than a Spring day in Center City listening to readers like Ken Kalfus and his wife Inga Saffron (architectural critic of the Philadelphia Inquirer and bloger Skyline Online) reading from Ulysses. Even at the risks of sounding pompous, Ulysses is one of my favorite books. In its last issue, the rock magazine SPIN placed derision on "People who get excited for Bloomsday. [They] Are asking to be beaten up" (June 2009, p. 34). Ironically, SPIN magazine's feature article is on Jack White's new band, the Dead Weather. I cannot think of a more Joycean figure in contemporary music than Jack White. But that's another story. The editors of SPIN need to re-read rock historian Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces (1989), where James Joyce is no stranger.

This year, I celebrate Bloomsday through archaeology. I follow the footsteps of Hugh Kenner, who first revealed how the archaeology of Greece deflated the fantasy that western culture had created from literary epics (The Pound Era, Berkeley, 1971, pp. 44-49). Archaeology turned attention to the quotidian banalities, trash, chaos, rubble walls. Both Ezra Pound and Joyce were followers of this discipline, which heavily contributed to their revolutionary vision. Ulysses is difficult to read because Joyce does not take for granted the subjective voice. Archaeology is similarly irrational because cultural authorship is not evident in material culture. Our data is the day-to-day, the stinking parts of life, the smell of liver cooked by Leopold Bloom.

This Bloomsday, I enjoyed Colum McCann's editorial describing his personal relationship to Ulysses, "But Always Meeting Ourselves," New York Times (June 16, 2009), p. A19. He quotes Vladimir Nabokov on the purpose of writing: "to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might pu on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade."

If good writing elevates the stinking day-to-day, good archaeology discovers its fragrance. Ulysses should be mandatory archaeological reading. I celebrate this Bloomsbury by reading 2 pages of Ulysses every day for the rest of the year, until Bloomsday 2010.

An Old Friend Leica

Although a practical science at heart, surveying is also a poetic enterprise. In the 1980s, archaeologists began to use EDMs, or electronic distance measuring theodolites. Traditional surveyors were horrified to see a new generation of computer users clicking points away without understanding the trigonometric fundamental of surveying. I learned my surveying in the summer of '92 on a 19th century transit up on the top of a Peloponnesean mountain. A year later, I learned how to use an EDM Total Station as an intern at the Corinth Computer Project. Surveying architectural ruins and archaeological landscapes has given me a fantastic education across the Mediterranean. The Leica theodolite has been a loyal friend through the years.

Last weekend, the Eastern Boeotia Archaeological Project (EBAP) asked me to assist in setting up their surveying instrument. EBAP is an intensive regional survey going into its third season. Looking ahead into geophysical studies and excavation, the project directors recently acquired a new theodolite, a Leica TCR 407. Bryan Burns (above), Camilla MacKay and I put our heads together and explored the tool's potential. After figuring out the command procedures (each machine has its idiosyncrasies), we set up pins and surveyed parts of the ancient and medieval acropolis of Elaion. My personal interests lie in Elaion's two medieval towers, one of which sits on the acropolis. MacKay, who has analyzed the site's medieval pottery, found no evidence for occupation before the 15th century. Once assumed to be a Frankish tower, the evidence at Elaion points to an Ottoman date instead. See EBAP's 2007 field report here. Camilla and I surveyed the tower's foundations and experimented with some digital photogrammetry (using ArcGIS's georeferencing tool).

Using EBAP's Leica felt like reconnecting with an old friend. The instrument's distinctive beeps, its pale green color, the frustrating DOS command system, the bright red hard case, and even the yellow raincoat transported me to the mid-1980s, when the machine was first designed. Although intended to produce hard facts--x, y, z coordinates--the Leica theodolite elicits an entire aesthetic universe reminiscent of its contemporary New Wave music--Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, Heaven 17, etc. As a machine, it has visually dominated archaeology throughout the world (see example from Iron Age excavation in Sweden here). The Leica transit has added technological flair to an 18th-century practice. EDMs emit a laser beam which is reflected back through a prism. The Total Station calculates the time of the laser's flight and deduces distance. The laser technology has removed surveying from the domain of trigonometric functions. Strangely enough, it has also absolved the surveyor from some burdens of responsibility. The archaeological user is not asked to provide a margin of error or close the angles. The Total Station's precision, in other words, is often confused with accuracy. As a result, it is a lighthearted instrument once you understand how it works. In its daily operations, EDMs demand a choreography of buttons and commands. When the reflector is sighted and the laser is sent, the instrument emits a beautifully cerebral sound like the clicking of SLR camera mirrors.

For a detailed history of the Leitz company and its transition into Leica, see Leica Heerburgg im Wandel der Zeit (1996). The TC series tachymeter was developed in 1988. I cannot help but feel sentimenatl about the Leica EDM. Using it once again on the acropolis of a Boeotian town transported me into the universe of synthesizers and drum machines, the musical aesthetics of the '80s. The Leica's sleekness, the lack of userfriendly interface (pre-Windows) and the beauty of its primary elements invokes the world of Brian Eno. Bill Caraher wrote about similar experiences and DIY punk aesthetics while trying to crack a new GPS surveying instrument this summer in Cyprus, see Archaeology, Technology, and Who is the Punk Archaeologist Now? I am struck by the minimalist technological eclecticism of the '80s Leica. I think archaeology and its surveying instruments have profoun aesthetic manifestations. I will never forget a comment that my surveying mentor made one evening in the Peloponnese. His reason for branching out into digital surveying had to do with listening to John Cage's computer-generated music. The world of Cage, Merce Cunningham, Pop Art and Black Mountain College fed the imagination of an archaeological pioneer and the generation before me. In turn, my surveying world is inspired by New Wave and No Wave, the Cure and Sonic Youth. After all, '80s music was playing on the Walkman while clicking the Leica.

One more reason to be sentimenatl about the Leica has to do with its slow phasing out. GPS surveying (especially differential GPS) is displacing Total Stations. The Leica served an interesting role of connecting the 1920s (Weimar Republic, Bertrold Brecht, New Objectivity) with the 1980s, just as David Bowie, Bauhaus, Joy Division, Nick Cave and Tom Waits connected musical traditions. In the 1990s, Leica overlapped with GPS, but GPS embodied an entirely different world: smart bombs, selective availability, Persian Gulf, Desert Storm, video games, Al Gore and corporate navigation. As GPS is winning the battle over EDM, it also eclipses the Leica's aesthetics that made the 1980s a romantic reflection of the 1920s. Surveying truly connects archaeologists with minimalist avant gardes.

Modern Greek Art Auction

To the surprise of many, the Modern Greek art market shows no signs of economic depression. On May 19, Bonhams auction house in London completed its Greek sale with stunning results, a $6.2 million sale. The sale took place in Athens and the buyers were predominantly Greek. "There is a real passion by Greeks for collecting Greek Art today," said Bonhams' agent. The clientele, however, also indicates the lack of interest by non-Greeks. Unlike its Classical or Byzantine correlate, Modern Greek art remains a closed national market, which is surprising given the international reaches of Greeks themselves as entrepreneurs or as diaspora communities.

Bonhams' auction broke many sale records. The highlights included, Nikos Lytras' Landscape ($175,800), Konstantinos Parthenis' Dawn ($566,700) above, Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika's Studio with Easel ($513,220), Yannis Tsarouchis' Pasalimani ($315,160) and Georgios Bouzianis' Asian Princess ($238,800)

The lack of interest on Modern Greek art by an international audience is a product of many forces. For most, interest in Greece (tourism included) stops with the Classical and for a few with the Byzantine period. The importance of Ancient Greek in early American religious education has translated into the monopoly of Classical Studies in all Greek curricula. At the same time, Modern Greece has been so obsessively literary since its foundation, that it has ignored art history. Most national battles have been fought through language rather than the visual arts. Art history as an academic discipline hardly exists in Greek universities. In many ways, Greeks are textually over-literate but visually illiterate. The county boasts many writers of international acclaim and a couple of Nobe prizes. Cavafy, Elytis, Seferis, Kazantzakis, Ritsos are household names to literary historians. Yet no Modern Greek artist has caught the same international attention. The contrast with Modern Italy is telling. Visual literacy and cultural investment on the arts (thanks to the Renaissance tradition) trumps Greece. Roman Catholicism's Counter-Reformation visual exuberance, moreover, has made visual rhetoric quite sophisticated in Italy, Spain, Portugal and France.

While teaching an independent study on Modern Greek Art in 2003, I realized how unsual it was to offer such a class in the United States. This is too bad considering how fertile the academic terrain is for "other," "lesser" modernisms (trying hard not to use the word "provincial.") Especially in the 1990s, the pages of the Art Bulletin were filled with reappraisals of Czech, Rumanian and Bulgarian modernism. After 9/11 the focus on minor Europe shifted outside of Europe altogether. What makes Modern Greek art interesting to a globalized context is not simply the cadres of national artists but also the Greeks of the diaspora whose international acclaim overshadows that of their peers living in Greece (e.g. Lucas Samaras, Yannis Kounelis, William Baziotes).

An appraisal of Greek-American artists alone is greatly needed. It is missing because the Greek American community has not been interested in the visual arts. The Greek-American identity has been dominated by Classical Greece, a phenomenon most brilliantly explored by anthropologist Yorgos Anagnostou. While teaching a History of Medieval Architecture class, one of my students approached me for an independent study on Modern Greek art. Fotini Xydas was a Greek-American senior majoring in Art History. The previous summer, she had interned with Christie's and was involved with the Modern Greek auction. And that's how the independent study began. Coming up with a syllabus was not difficult at all. Although there was no single textbook, the secondary literature in English was ample. After graduation, Fotini received a Master's in Museum Studies and began working for galleries in New York. She is currently Senior Research Associate at Citi Art Advisory Service and also pursuing a PhD. Although I knew that Fotini was unique, I appreciate how unusual her professional choices may have actually been in a Greek-American context. I have taken an informal survey among friends and colleagues in both universities and museums looking for young Greek American talent. Many Greek nationals in are taking Art History classes in American universities. They tend to be daughters of wealthy enterpreneurs, themselves art collectors, patrons and players in the Greek cultural arena. Those undergraduates typically return to Greece and oversee the family or the family company's cultural investments. The socio-economic profile is not different from American students in that respect. Given the lack of financial aid, undergraduates directly from Greece tend to be above-average in the socio-economic scale.

More surprising is the shortage of Greek-Americans, a much larger demographic pool than the foreign students. Greek-American students flock to Classical Studies instead. Looking at my own contemporaries, I note a few Greek-American academics specializing on Byzantium. This make sense; the Greek Orthodox Church of North America plays a central role in the education of the Greek community. I remember fondly Angela Volan telling me about her childhood inspirations in Merrillville, Indiana, looking up at the Byzantine mosaics of her parish.

Admitedly, Modern Greek art is a funny animal, missing the appropriate institutions for its study. The National Gallery in Athens and Melissa Publishing House have made huge contributions to the discipline in the last couple of decades. The flourishing Greek market must reflect this academic impetus. But time has come for Modern Greek art to break outside the national borders and receive greater exposure.

Dumbarton Oaks and Surface Surveys

During the Q&A following my paper at the Dumbarton Oaks Spring symposium, I showed a map of the Peloponnese outlining the location of 16 archaeological surveys that have taken place between the pioneering 1968 Minnesota Messenia Expedition and the present. I also made a comment that, interestingly enough, Dumbarton Oaks had not financially supported any of these projects. As I might have anticipated, my comment solicited some further discussion at the conference and over email. Below, I have compiled some of my thoughts and clarifications on the subject, namely the lack of Dumbarton Oaks' interest in archaeological surface surveys in the late 20th century. I hope these observation will not be seen as confrontational but as the opening up of a larger discussion. The map comes from my dissertation, "Monuments of Rural Archaeology: Medieval Settlements in the Northwestern Peloponnese" (2003), p. 467, fig. 69.

In the last few years, I have been researching the history of Byzantine archaeology, exploring the wonderful personal friendships and motivations that bring scholars to the discipline. The research began with studies of Gabriel Millet, the American School of Classical Studies and Anastasios Orlandos (in the DO paper) . With historiography in mind, I've been especially vigilant over the role that collections of individuals and corporate bodies have made in shaping the direction of the field. Dumbarton Oaks has of course been a major supporter of archaeological projects. But an institution's identity, I believe, can also be gauged by the kinds of projects it does not support just as much as by the projects it does support. And in this respect, Dumbarton Oaks has had a specific identity that ultimately reflects the intellectual horizons of its senior fellows. During the 1960s, archaeology experienced a theoretical revolution known as New Archaeology or Processual Archaeology, placing the discipline on its own methodological foundations and away from its traditional role as a "handmaiden" to text-based or art-based histories. This movement developed new principles, methods and field practices particularly in studying settlements and the landscape; these methods had began to be developed in North American archaeology during the 1930s. The discipline flourished in the Peloponnese with the pioneering Minnesota Messenia Expedition, known today as the grandfather of field surveys. My comment about DO's patronage referred to a map showing the location of the 16 regional surveys that have taken place in the Peloponnese since 1968. These were all "intensive" rather than "extensive" surveys, meaning that they started with an experimental hypothesis and collected data indiscriminately rather than seeking out known sites, monuments, or works of art. My comment, that Dumbarton Oaks had not financially supported any of them, is true.

DO's lack of interest for this kind of field project as opposed to all the other kinds of projects it has sponsored is historically interesting. The one way I can explain the omission has to do with the senior fellows who make the granting decisions. Most of them and especially the archaeologists, I believe, were never part of this tradition. The archaeologists had been trained in historical or art-historical traditions and, therefore, would have not been trained in archaeological theory post-1968 especially in North America. In my limited exposure to Dumbarton Oaks, I believe that some senior fellows were even explicitly hostile to this tradition and went out of their way to block it. I remember conversations with Angeliki Laiou, for example, giving me this distinct impression. In all her brilliance, Dr. Laiou had some archaeological blinders. My experience as co-director of the Morea Project has also been negative. The repeated rejection of DO support over the course of a decade seemed too consistent to be accidental; I never saw this as personal, but rather as disciplinary. Another important situation to consider is national scholarships. New Archaeology was an Anglo-American development. If you belong in a French, German, or Greek intellectual tradition, you might have missed surveys altogether. To this day, survey archaeology is an Anglo-American specialty, rarely practiced by continental archaeologists unless connected to Anglo-American mentors (e.g. medieval archaeology in Italy, Holland, etc). I remember being amused in the 2005 DO symposium, where Johannes Koder applied central-place theory, a concept so foundational in survey archaeology. David Clarke's 1968 "Analytical Archaeology" made central-place theory part of every American undergraduate textbook. But unless you were an American undergraduate in archaeology or anthropology (not in art history), you might have not even heard of it. Exposure to archaeological discourse varies even in the United States. None of my friends with PhDs from the NYU's Institute of Fine Arts, for example, have had the slightest exposure to it (despite grand projects like Aphrodisias); same goes for Princeton or Harvard, in contrast to UPenn, Brown (as of recently), Michigan, UT Austin, Ohio State, or Stanford.

I have great respect for all the projects that Dumbarton Oaks has financed and even greater respect for its directors and personnel. As the surface surveys of the 1970s-1990s are now finally getting published, however, it has become impossible to ignore this tradition. Hence it is unacceptable to do settlement archaeology, rural archaeology, or landscape archaeology without it. And I've been critical of projects and publications on settlement archaeology that ignore it. Producing architectural drawings for buildings may also be called survey, but it's an 18th-century method quite different from what we mean by archaeological survey today.

Thank you for enduring through this long elaboration explaining my comment on DO's lack of support for the great surveys of the Peloponnesian countryside through the 60s-90s. The state of archaeology is something very dear to me and a topic that I discuss at every opportunity. I feel passionate about promoting medieval and post-medieval archaeology because it has finally reached a moment of maturity, even self-sufficiency. Every year, during the Archaeological Institute of America's annual meetings, a Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeology group meets and discusses the state of the field. Our goal is to create an intellectual forum, share data, sponsor colloquia and generally promote the field. The meetings are well attended (about 20 people every year) and the discussion often takes stock of where the discipline stands. We have always respected DO's contribution to archaeological research, but the consensus among American archaeologists working in Greece right now seems uniform: DO seems to be tied down by a very art-historical definition of archaeology and has missed the excitement of New Archaeology over the last half century. In that sense, I felt that my reading of DO's relationship to surface surveys is not entirely idiosyncratic but reflects a more general opinion. This of course is already a backward looking observation. The situation at DO at this moment might be entirely different. The inclusion of three survey archaeologists in last week's symposium painted a completely different picture, different even from the 2005 symposium on Anatolian settlement archaeology (that was organized by text historians). I am very optimistic about the future.

Actually, this is an interesting time for survey archaeology in general because the age of large regional projects has almost eclipsed. The grand surface surveys that boomed in the 1980s and 1990s are simply not possible anymore. The generation of pioneers, like Tim Gregory (in the Korinthia), John Bintliff (in Boeotia), Jack Davis (in Messenia; now dir. of the American School in Athens) and others, are now close to retirement age. Their projects required large groups of student personnel; field walking is labor intensive and requires large data sets (in order for the analysis to be statistically meaningful). Both the financial resources and the student interest are waning. The younger, or second, generation also lacks the heroic fervor of the first generation, who invented the discipline out of scratch. As products of the 1960s, the first generation was very utopian about the power of their methodology. Many were attacking 19th-century traditions entrenched in classical archaeology and they brought a little bit of the renegade flair. Processualism, moroever, has waned under the critics of Post-Processualism.

Most of the large survey projects in Greece are now finished. Smaller projects are trying to carry on the tradition with more limited goals. Another interesting issue has to do with the material (mostly pottery) that was collected in the first generation of surveys. It survives in bags, in basements of archaeological services; the material has now accumulated its own age, some of it has been moved, the plastic bags have began to deteriorate, tags are starting to disappear, etc. Since much of the material may need to be reconsidered (or published for the first time), there is the difficult question of reconstructing its meaning. I know Archie Dunn is dealing with this issue in Thisvi -- and thanks for pointing out that Archie has indeed received support from DO. Tim Gregory had surveyed the territory in the 1970s (I believe) but the material was not published. So it's being revisited and revamped. The new method has become old.

This is probably more than anyone wanted to know about surface surveys. I should have pointed out an additional reason why surveys may have escaped DO's immediate radar. Given their undiscriminating collection principles, surface surveys are diachronic. By covering prehistoric to modern periods, the projects were not explicitly conceived under the umbrella of Byzantine Studies. For a quick taste of the diachronic scope, I recommend "Beyond the Acropolis: A Rural Greek Past" by Van Andel and Runnels (1996), a very accessible book by the Stanford Argolid Survey. And as publications move into the 2000s, the Byzantine/Frankish/Ottoman material becomes ever more focused. Ioanita Vroom's dissertation on the pottery from the Boeotia Survey is as good as it gets ("After Antiquity," Leiden, 2003). One interesting side-effect of the diachronic focus is that prehistorians and Byzantinists got to know each other and discovered that they were equally marginalized by antiquity in the middle. So they teamed up and ganged up against the classicists.

In making a comment about the 16 Peloponnesian surveys, I did not seek to express any personal animosity towards Dumbarton Oaks, or perpetuate any battles from the previous generation. I felt it was a matter of fact that needed to be ever-so-slightly underscored. Dumbarton Oaks has single-handedly created a discipline of rural studies and a focus on every day life. We would be nowhere without it. This great accomplishment has been carried out through the careful study of primary texts, works of art and monumental architecture. Somehow, the discipline of survey archaeology, however, has slipped through the cracks. Perhaps the fault lies on us, its practitioners, for not making the data more accessible to scholars in other disciplines. Perhaps DO's art collection has aligned the institution philosophical closer to museums like the Getty or the Metropolitan and further away from contemporary archaeological theory and ethics. DO must come to terms, for example, with holdings of problematic provencance (such as the Sion Treasure from Turkey and other controversial Meso-American artifacts). I don't really know. And by no means can I claim any familiarity with the institution; I'm only an outside viewer looking in and mostly someone who enjoys trying to make sense of the recent past and scholarly
traditions.

Mount Menoikeion: The Sacred Grip

My blog postings for the month of May have slowed down considerably because of the Dumbarton Oaks symposium last weekend and a presentation last night at Princeton University. I summarize the latter here. The Mount Menoikeion project is directed by Nikolas Bakirtzis and involves a multidisciplinary workshop at the monastery of Saint John Prodromos in Macedonia, Greece. In 2005 and 2007, I supervised the investigation of the monastery's surrounding landscape, its immediate and distant territory. The last time I was at Princeton was exactly two years ago as a Seeger Fellow. It was great to return and visit old friends but also to meet this year's fellows. The program in Hellenic Studies at Princeton is probably the closest thing to a Greek think-tank in North America (and quite different from Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington). It's an extraordinary place for generating and sharing ideas. Princeton, for me, offers another treat. Although not affiliated with the university, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens has its U.S. headquarter in the town. So I got a chance to visit the busy bees of ASCSA's publication office and to share some of my recent detective work on Georg von Peschke (a very important but unknown painter who worked in the Corinth excavations during the 1930s).

Our Mount Menoikeion presentation last night anticipates a paper that Bakirtzis, Milliner and I will give in October, 2009, at the Modern Greek Studies Association conference in Vancouver. Last night also marks the first time I've used Franklin and Marshall College as my new academic affiliation. I carried the name with great pride. For more information on the Mount Menoikeion workshop explore the website here.

The Sacred Grip
Landscape and Art in Mount Menoikeion (18th-20th Centuries)

Kostis Kourelis (Franklin and Marshall College)
Matthew J. Milliner (Princeton University

Tuesday, May 12, 2009, 6:00 p.m.
Princeton University, Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

Mount Menoikeion near Serres, Greece, preserves a rich tradition shaped around the thirteenth-century monastery of Saint John Prodromos. The monastery evolved into a major monastic center, surviving through volatile chapters of Balkan history. It is a spectacular monument of Byzantine art and architecture surrounded by an equally spectacular natural environment. In 1986, the deteriorating architectural shell was taken over by a female community of nuns whose spiritual guide, the Athonite monk Elder Ephraim, resides in Arizona. The Program in Hellenic Studies at Princeton University established an annual field seminar to investigate the site's complexities in its modern and contemporary Greek context. Since 2005, the Mount Menoikeion Workshop has brought together a diverse group of scholars and students from anthropology, archaeology, history, classics, religion, music and art history. In preparation for the 2009 summer research season at Mount Menoikeion, this presentation will focus on two aspects of the monastery's history: landscape and wall paintings. The early modern landscape of Menoikeion reveals an inherent tension between the ideal of monastic wilderness and its aggressive human exploitation; the monastery's eighteenth and nineteenth century frescoes illuminate the post-Byzantine aesthetic trajectory of mainland Greece.

Kopanos: A Blog Challenge Fulfilled

This entire last weekend, I was physically in Washington, D.C. but mentally in the Peloponnesos. Dumbarton Oaks' annual symposium on Byzantine Studies was devoted to "Morea: The Land and Its People in the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade." This was by far the most intellectually fulfilling symposium I have ever attended, brilliantly crafted by Sharon Gerstel (but more about that later). The session was attended by many colleagues associated with the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (Maria Georgopoulou, Diana Wright, Pierre MacKay, Timothy Gregory, Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory, Glenn Bugh, Sharon Gerstel, Mary Lee Coulson, etc.), all friends who transported me to Greece. In the meantime, another member of the American School was searching the city of Athens for a blog challenge, the search for Isadora Duncan's house at Kopanos.

In my posting, Jogging Empowerment: Kopanos (Apr. 25, 2009), I challenged Antiquated Vagaries to find the house that Isadora Duncan built in 1903. The house is an amazing document of bohemian domesticity, a work of art in its own right, based on the house of Agamemnon. The challenge was met over the weekend. This is incredible. We can all now travel through space and time and share Katie's discovery. The narrative of discovery is just as interesting as the object of discovery. Don't waste your time with my words and immediately go to Success (Antiquated Vagaries, May 3, 2009).

I apologize in advance for the lull in my blog production. Between now and mid-May, I am overwhelmed with lectures, workshops, travel, exams, grading and most importantly planning for my new job, architectural historian at the College of Franklin and Marshall.

Metal Machine Music

In 1975, Lou Reed released one of the most radical albums in rock history. Metal Machine Music consists of looping guitar feedback, orchestrated dissonance, 65 minutes of noise. Released a year after the pop-oriented Sally Can't Dance, the album has puzzled historians. Was it a joke? was it a redemptive avant-garde gesture? did it fulfill an earlier record contract? However skeptical some critics may have been, this monumental double album had a huge influence. Not only did it invent New York's Post-Punk "No Wave" movement but also a new rock genre known today as Industrial. It also aligned Punk with contemporary classical music, the rarefied mechanical universe of Xenakis, Stockhausen and Cage. In an interview with Lester Bangs, Reed points out that he originally sought to release the album in RCA's classical division.

In 2007, the German ensemble Zeitkratzer performed the piece with Lou Reed and released it on CD. See Pitchfork interview (Sept.17, 2007). Last Thursday, Reed performed Metal Machine Music once again at the Blender Theater in New York, with Sarth Calhoun and Ulrich Krieger (who first transcribed the work for Zeitkratzer). See review in New York Times (Apr. 25, 2009, p. C1)

It's amazing to think that 34 years have passed since the album's original release. Excluding Sonic Youth's success, the dissonant New York scene of No Wave is completely unknown to the general public. The situation might be changing, however, through a bibliographic explosion. In 2008, Thurston Moore (of Sonic Youth) and Byron Coley have published a documentary visual history, No Wave: Post-Punk Underground. New York. 1976-1980 (New York). Two other books were released in 2007,: Mark Masters, No Wave (London); Paula Court and Stuart Baker, New York Noise (London). A biography of Sonic Youth has also just been published: David Browne, Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth (New York, 2008). In so many words, the New York punk scene has found some solid scholarly footing in the last couple of years.

There have also been some serious attempts to document the visual tradition of punk rock. While attending the Archaeological Institute of America's annual meetings in Chicago (January 2008), I got a chance to see, Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll since 1967, an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art that tried to present rock's visual tradition after 1967. I must admit that the exhibit was disappointing (for a variety of reasons that I won't get into here) but at least it made one contemplate the difficulties of pulling threads between art and music. At least, it inspired me to design a class on Punk Aesthetics (which I doubt anyone would ever let me teach). For those that missed the show, the catalog is just as good, see Dominic Molon and Diedrich Diederichsen (Chicago, 2007).

Although not explicitly connected to Punk, a relevant show just opened in New York, believe it or not, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Pictures Generation 1974-1984 reflects on artists like Cindy Sherman that flourished at the hey day of Punk. Some of the artists were also part of the music scene. Robert Longo is a good example. He designed The Replacements' album cover Tim (1985) and shot music videos for New Order and R.E.M. Robert Longo's Men in Cities painting series (1979) stands out as the greatest visual statement of Post-Punk aesthetics that I grew up with (left). The Met show includes another work by Longo, a three-dimensional leaping man, American Soldier (1977). Holland Cotter uses Longo's leaping metaphor in his review, "At the Met Baby Boomers Leap on Stage" (New York Times, Apr. 23, 2009). It's unusual that this shows takes place at the Met, "a fusty backwater for contemporary art and an object of scorn in the art world" (Cotter). But the change is very much welcome. The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney and the Guggenheim have become so annoying with their "contemporaneity" and steep admissions. The Met for me has become a default in the good old world of public service.

Pictures Generation runs parallel to a "Generational" show at the New Museum. The Generational: Younger than Jesus surveys a new crop of artists born after 1976 (hence younger than 33-yr-old Christ). The title is pretty annoying. Harold Cotter's review it in "Young Artists Caught in the Act" (New York Times, Apr. 9, 2009). The Generational series at the New Museum is trying to out-do the Whitney Biennial.

The object of my posting here was simply to overview some recent phenomena in the historization of Punk. The scholarly armature is growing. Biographies, photographic archives, new performances and museum exhibits entrench Punk deeper into a hole, the halls of academic legitimacy. Still, however, there is little on Punk Archaeology. If the reader had the slightest doubt that Punk has accumulated an aged patina of cultural value, consider the following. Christie's held its first Punk Rock Fine Art auction on November 24, 2008. You can see preview all 236 lots (and respective prices) on Christie's website here.

Finally, congratulations to Holland Cotter, who has won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. His reviews in the New York Times have been a guiding light.

Istanbul (Not Constantinople)

Today, I chanced on the original version of the song "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" recorded by the Four Lads on August 12, 1953. The song hit #10 in the Billboard chart. I had only known the 1980 version by They Might Be Giants. The Four Lads, as it turns out, was a Canadian group from Toronto. Connie Codarini, Bernie Toorish, Jimmy Arnold and Frank Busseri met at Saint Michael's Choir School. They performed under various names including (my favorite) The Otnorots--Toronto spelled backwards. They were discovered by American band leader Mitch Miller and moved to New York City, also known as Old Amsterdam (according to the song lyrics). "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" made the Four Lads famous. I wish I had known this trivia when I was in Toronto with fellow Byzantinist Vasilis Marinis, getting a Licentiate at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Saint Michael's College. Saint Michael's Choir School belongs to the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music in Rome and the Toronto Catholic District School Board. I'm tickled by Toronto's Catholic influence on American pop culture.

Jogging Empowerment: Kopanos

This posting is a test in transnational academic connectivity. It is the kind of challenge one might encounter in an episode of the Amazing Race, the popular CBS reality show going on its 14th season. I set the challenge for Antiquated Vagaries, a terrific blog documenting the experiences of Katie, an American graduate fellow at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA). Antiquated Vagaries has been posting on ASCSA history from research trips to the basement of the Archives, Loring Hall and from oral histories, see Dudes: Stay Out! (Feb. 2), Dinner Table Art (Feb. 20), School Art 2: Edward Lear (Mar. 12), and Happy Anniversary (Apr. 3).

Antiquated Vagaries has also been posting on jogging, see Jogging in Athens #1: The Olympic Stadium (Apr 22). Athens is a rough city for joggers, let alone pedestrians (who are killed by cars and motorcycles on a daily basis). Posting on jogging routes is, thus, extremely helpful to other joggers (I speak from personal experience, having been attacked by dogs on Lykavittos). But from an intellectual point of view, it extends a venerable tradition of Athenian topography. Direct engagement with the modern city has been central to ASCSA's curriculum since the 19th century. Ask any 60-something American archaeologist about Athens, and they will immediately bring up Eugene Vanderpool, the peripatetic master who discovered countless sites through his hikes with students. Moreover, there is a tradition of women archaeologists whose liberation took the form of walking through Greece--without chaperons or native guides, relying solely on their physical endurance, and on their linguistic and cartographic skills. The diaries of Lucy Shoe, Agnes Newhall, Virginia Grace, Allison Frantz, or Eugene Bush Vanderpool are testament to this peripatetic empowerment from the 1920s.

Antiquated Vagaries is the 21st century version of such diaries. Although Athens is a safe city, women are still confronted by patriarchical obstacles, quite literally ... the exposed phallus. Katie describes an empowering incident by fellow Fellows: "... a few weeks ago a teenager chased after two Associate Members with his junx hanging out. To his dismay, one of those girls turned around, chased him down the hill, grabbed him by the hair, and beat the shit out of him until he cried ... a story with a happy ending! All in all, though, jogging in Greece is a pretty safe endeavor, so don't let the creepo's get you down." Truth be told, that unlike the 1920s, it's only a minority of ASCSA fellows that have enough curiosity about the modern city to venture out of the ASCSA buble today. Kudos to Katie and others for confronting Greek realities face to face and striking a post-colonial victory.

Here is my challenge for Antiquated Vagaries. It's an experiment that hopes to bridge past and present, the U.S. and Greece. In Jogging in Athens #2: The University Run (Apr 23), Katie shows a photograph from the top of Mount Hymmetos. As soon as I saw the photo, I realized that Katie wasn't standing far from Kopanos Hill, where Isadora Duncan, the famous American dancer (above), built a house in 1903. In My Life (New York, 1995, pp. 93), Duncan writes, "The barren hillock, on the same level as the Acropolis, known since ancient times as Kopanos, now belonged to the Clan Duncan. The next step was to secure paper and architectural instruments and make the plans for a house. Raymond found the exact model desired in the plan of the Palace of Agamemnon. He scorned the help of architects, and himself engaged the workmen and the stone carriers." Find My Life on Google books here

So, my challenge for Antiquated Vagaries is to find the house through jogging. I am not sure if the house survives. Athenian topographer Leta Costakis has told me that the house still exists. The only clues I have for Katie are a few published photographs below. Mind you, I am writing this challenge from Middletown, Connecticut, so I cannot join the search. But perhaps this is the beginning of a new game, an ASCSA version of Geocaching. If you have never heard of the game, here is a clue: "Geocaching is a high-tech treasure hunting game played throughout the world by adventure seekers equipped with GPS devices. The basic idea is to locate hidden containers, called geocaches, outdoors and then share your experiences online. Geocaching is enjoyed by people from all age groups, with a strong sense of community and support for the environment."

Spring has arrived, and the human body reclaims the city through exercise. The human mind also reclaims the past. The Kopanos clues below are images from, D. Duncan, C. Pratl and C. Splatt eds., Life into Art: Isadora Duncan and Her World (New York, 1993), pp. 53, 54, 110.

Truck Stop Chapels

Why would a medieval architectural historian post on airport chapels or truck stop chapels? Good question. Although most medieval architectural historians focus on churches and mosques, I prefer vernacular forms, secular buildings, productive installations, houses and landscapes. My archaeological method defines me, but it also encourages me to think diachronically. Although I have never excavated in the "New World," I am a devout follower of Dell Upton and the study of material culture as defined by Henry Glassie, James Deetz and others. Whenever possible, I use Upton's unorthodox textbook Architecture in the United States (Oxford, 1998) in conjunction with Deetz's In Small Things Forgotten (1st ed., New York, 1977).

Teaching in South Carolina (where I also lived as a kid) has sensitized me to the region's unique history and the occasional stupidity by which some "Yankees" dismiss the South as hick, racist, or backwards. After the Civil War, the victorious North administered the South as a colony-- exploiting its natural resources and managing its bureaucracies. Creating a subhuman caricature of the Southerner hick is classic colonialist strategy. So I'm amused to hear enlightened post-colonialist specialists from the obvious colonies (India, Congo, etc.) forget about the American South. Liberals in general have grown hostile to the South because of its conservative dominance. A new anxiety with the South has grown in the last few decades because Southern culture has dominated American culture for the first time since the Civil War. See Richard King," The Regions and Regionalism," in The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Culture ed. C. Bigsby (Cambridge, pp. 53-72).

One of my favorite books on Southern history is Jack Temple Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost: The American South 1920-1960 (Baton Rouge, 1987). Kirby documents the southern modernization especially in the transition from agrarian to industrial modes of production. As Deetz reminds us, even bluegrass is a modern musical form (In Small Things, 2nd ed., pp. 180-182).

A couple of years ago I got a chance to meet Shane Hamilton, an American historian of technology who now teaches at the University of Georgia in Athens. We met, thanks to our commuter wives, who both happened to be teaching at Vassar College the same year. Hamilton takes the lessons of agrarian modernization and applies it to a rich case study, the abandonment of farming for trucking. Hamilton's dissertation has just been published, Trucking Country: The Roads to America's Wal-mart Economy (Princeton, 2008). The book answers a lot of questions and explores the southern agrarian origins of trucking culture.

And today, I just learned that there is a graduate student at Yale who studies Truck Stop Chapels. Dana Byrd is a PhD candidate in Art History at Yale University. I have not yet contacted her, but I am truly excited that someone is documenting such vernacular forms of devotion and architectural space. In 2005, Byrd gave a paper at the Center for Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware, entitled "Way Finding: Work, Space and Evangelism at a Truck Stop Chapel." I look forward to its publication.

I learned of Dana Byrd through the power of blogging. One of my students in the House History course at Wesleyan read my Airport Chapels blog. Katherine Chabla is an American Decorative Arts specialist at the Yale University Art Gallery and a constant source of information. Katherine also wrote one of the most amazing House Stories, see From 100 to 99. Once I learn more about Dana Byrd's project, I will post some details. Keep on truckin'.

Stand by Me

Bruce Sperling, a founder of the cyberpunk literary genre, shocked the South by Southwest Interactive tech conference in Austin by raising issues of class in the jolly optimism of web networking. Sperling argued that Facebook, Twitter, Skype, text-messaging and other such forms of connectivity are registers of poverty. Poor folk, are essentially the greatest users of these technologies. Lacking resources to connect with other human beings, web connectivity fills in for class deprivation. The implications of Sperling's argument are profound, placing a buffer on the financial optimism that such services have depended on. Virginia Heffernan takes Sperling's reading further in "Let Them East Tweets: Why Twitter is a Trap," New York Times Magazine (Apr. 19, 2009), pp. 22, 24. And for an amusing take on Sterling's speech by Sterling himself, see his blog, Beyond the Beyond.

I personally agree. My ventures into web connectivity--this very blog, for instance--arise from desperation. Absolutely, if I had other venues of communication, I would choose them over the amorphous and undependable readership of a blog. If I could publish each one of my musings in a peer-reviewed journal, or even if I had a syndicated newspaper column, I would shut down this blog immediately. But such platforms require a different financial infrastructure, where I would ultimately also benefit financially (either directly through royalties or indirectly through tenure). At a moment of early optimism, I contacted my local newspaper offering to contribute a weekly column on architectural criticism, news in historic preservation and urbanism. But there was no interest. The cultural pages of the Greenville News, in this case, simply regurgitated articles circulated from USA Today, owned by the same conglomerate, the Gannett Co. I'm also fully aware that using the Blogger platform is dependent on mammoth economic players. Founded in 1999, Blogger was bought by Google in 2003. Indirectly, my medium of expression is a $23 billion dollar corporation.

Academic blogging is an interesting sub-genre. In discussions with colleagues, it still seems relatively counter-cultural and even dangerous. The medium of poverty remains more democratic than other options and is worth the risk. A few days ago I have even started experimenting with Twitter. Little did I know that on the same day, Oprah Winfried publicly joined, too, ushering Twitter into the mainstream, see Jenna Wortham, "With Oprah on Board, Twitter Grows" (NYT, Apr. 17, 2009). Thanks to the laborious commentary by Bill Caraher (Archaeology of the Mediterranean World) and others, we are beginning to understand the repercussions that blogging is having on the archaeological discipline and on pedagogy (much less so with Twitter). The effects (for me at least) have been astounding. And in discussions with Caraher, I still feel that academic blogging is a form of resistance. It is democratic and transparent in ways that run against the grain of academic institutions--even though a small number of academics have eagerly embraced the medium. This has been the first year, for example, that I've been on the academic job market with a blog visible to all future employers. The results have been interesting, and I will ponder on them later in the year (when the dust settles). I think it's undeniable that tools of connectivity have changed the rules of the academic market. Imagine doing a job search without Google's search engine, or without a Wiki. But enough about that.

I want to return to the issue of "Connectivity is Poverty" through a video that made me jump, clap, sing outloud and dance along. The video is a version of the 1961 hit "Stand By Me" rendered collectively by 16 dislocated performers throughout the world. Watch the video here. Stand by Me was produced by the Playing for Change Foundation and filmed by Mark Johnson and Jonathan Walls. "No matter how much money you got, you are gonna need somebody to stand by you," starts off Roger Ridley, a street performer in Santa Monica, California. Suddenly, Grandpa Elliott joins in, except that he is performing from another street in New Orleans, 1800 miles away (according to Mapquest). As the song further unfolds, we are joined by an array of musicians performing in the streets of New Orleans (Washboard Chaz, Roberto Luti), Amsterdam, Holland (Clarence Bekker), Zuni, New Mexico (Twin Eagle Drum Group), Toulouse, France (Francoise Viguie), Rio, Brazil (Cesar Pupe), Moscow, Russia (Dimitri Dolganov), Caracas, Venezuela (Geraldo and Dionisio), Mbouta, Congo (Junior Kissangwa), Guguletu, Umlazi and Mamelozi, South Africa (Pokei Klaas, Sinamuva Umlazi and Vusi Mahlasela), Barcelona, Spain (Djano Degen) and Pisa, Italy (Stefano Tomaselli). All the performers are street musicians and represent poverty; some bear the visible signs of poverty and even homelessness. They are all alone in their corners but collectively connected through the recording. They have never met each other, but the new media has brought them together. This may not be the best example of new connective technologies, but it gives a glimmer of hope towards new means of connectivity even if those connected are poor folk. I thank Brenda Gray for sending me the video. It is truly inspiring and has brought "tears of joy" to many bloggers throughout the world.

J. C. Leyendecker

The New Britain Museum of American Art displays a drawing of a male fashion model by illustrator J. C. Leyendecker for Kuppenheimer's Men's Clothing Co., intended possibly for Country Gentleman Magazine, ca. 1920. The drawing illustrates the mastery of Leyendecker's craftsmanship, his regulating lines (hinted in the geometry of the socks), the care of the folded hands, the dreamy tilt of the head, the contrasting aquatic background, etc. Unlike other illustrators (like Norman Rockwell), Leyendecker has received little scholarly attention with only one book published since his death, Michael Schau, J. C. Leyendecker (New York, 1974). A new study by Laurence and Judy Cutler seeks to rectify this neglect, J. C. Leyendecker: American Imagist (New York, 2009), reviewed in Steven Heller, "Signs and Portents," New York Times Book Review (April 5, 2009), pp. 12-13.

The German-born Joseph Christian Leyendecer (1874-1951) produced hundreds of illustrations appearing continuously from the 1900s to the 1940s in The Saturday Evening Post, The Century, McClure's, Vanity Fair and other popular magazines. One of my favorite series is New Year Babies running on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post between 1908 and 1943. Leyendecker is also best known for his Arrow shirt ads and the beautiful Ivy League athletes embraced by gay visual history. The Atwater Kent Museum in Philadelphia, the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, and the National Museum of American Illustration in Newport (founded by the authors) have made important contributions in ushering low-brow graphic works into the canon of American art. For example, see my earlier posting, Norman Rockwell and Conn College and Cousin Reginald Spells Peloponnesus. The medium's popularity in the American public is best seen at antique stores or even at the listings of eBay, where original magazines are highly desirable and inexpensive. I have begun a small collection of Collier's and Saturday Evening Post's from the 1930s. Seeing the illustrations next to contemporary prose, fiction, ads and related graphics is my favorite way of understanding the genre and the decade. The prose--of mostly forgotten writers--matches the visual language; the rhetorical and interdisciplinary coherence is great. After a bit of research, it also becomes evident that artists of some repute contributed images, this being the subject of Double Lives: American Painters as Illustrators, 1850-1950 at the New Britain Museum of American Art. As was the intention in the original publications, I appreciate possessing the art intended for my class, poor man's masterpieces.

Unlike Rockwell, who in 2001 was ushered into the halls of high art (by a Guggenheim exhibition), Leyendecker has not received his due acclaim. Part of the problem is Leyendecker's homosexuality. As Cutler & Cutler point out, Leyendecker stayed away from the public eye to protect his homosexual private life at a time when it would have caused him professional and social persecution. He also purged any reference to homosexuality from his archive, making it doubly difficult for the historian to reconstruct the artist's intentions. In the 1980s, the homoerotic subtext in his work was recognized by gay subculture and he was immediately embraced as an artistic forefather. However, the homosexual branding has kept Leyendecker in a private drawer as a transitional but not conclusive figure in gay America's coming of age.

Regardless of sexual orientation, Leyendecker is profusely erotic. According to the new study, he painted in a dark room illuminated by a single candle to capture a transgressive erotic quality. His visual language, more than any of his contemporaries, encapsulates the sexual tensions of the 1920s, flapper liberties tamed by censorship. Sometimes, I feel that Leyendecker is forgotten because he was so successful in his primary objective, "creating images easily reproduced, immediately recognized and broadly distributed for audiences by the millions to appreciate." We have internalized Leyendecker's Jazz Age to such a degree, that we claim it as our own. This familiarity has thrown the true author into obscurity. The same can be said about our internalized vision of homey America in the work of Rockwell. But we have scratched deeper under the Rockwell surface because we know it won't be sexually uncomfortable. A broader study of Leyendecker would trace the trickling down effect of Leyendecker's qualities in all aspects of visual culture. Even in archaeology, my expertise, I see traces of Leyendecker in the handling of scaled figures (typically placed in elevation drawings).

I write my ponderings on American culture, homosexuality and aesthetics, while learning of the death of Eve Sedgwick, the literary historian who helped create the discipline of queer studies, see Claire Potter, "All About Eve," Tenured Radical and New York Times obituary. I can't say that I have been influenced by Sedgwick's research directly, but in the hope of refining my critical vocabulary, I hasten to her classic Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, 1990).

Church Logos

Back in December, I began a blog theme called Airport Chapels. Since then, I've been trying to visit as many of them as my journeys have made possible. The Charlotte Douglas International Airport (CLT) is a place I used to know very well from a commuter marriage from Clemson. But only during a recent connecting flight did I note the airport's multiple chapels . In addition to a permanent room and an ephemeral Sunday space, I found the first graphic sign for chapel. The icon depicts an abstract figure in a kneeling pose. I took a picture of the illuminated airport directory (above), but you can also see it on the official airport website. Charlotte's airport chapel is located just outside the terminal. At the risk of missing my connecting flight, I exited the terminal and visited the sacred space.

The chapel door bears a circular stained glass window depicting an appropriately jet-setting icon, the globe (left). Longitudes and latitudes divide the earth into green, blue, yellow and clear zones, while the logo kneels opaquely in front, genuflecting on Antarctica with its head rising from the equator. The image is too rich for words, crossing multiple planes of signification, from the Platonic immateriality of logos and the visual immateriality of glass to the capitalist abstraction of the logo and its legalistic immediacy. Was this logo copyright-ed?

Chapel logos are not limited to the heterotopia (Foucault) of airports . My good friend Kat (aka Little Ethiopia[n]) is all about church shops and church logos, and I thank her for introducing me to the genre. Kat's and the Esquire's infinite hospitality in Los Angeles included driving me to all the architectural monuments my heart desired.

At the top of my list was Rafael Moneo's celebrated Catholic Cathedral (of our Lady of the Angels) completed in 2002. We marveled at the structure's monumental ingenuity, the historical materiality unique to Moneo, the new Catholic art, the speaker funnels, the tapestry, Moses the Ethiopian (of course), and then we visited the church shop. We swung open a glass door (left) with the shop's hours and an iconic distillation of the building, literally mirroring the solid volumes across the open space.

Another Los Angeles church with its own shop and logo is the Greek Orthodox Cathedral, Saint Sophia completed in 1952. I've been studying this building in its own right as a pious donation of Charles and Spyros Skouras, the founders of Fox Studios in Hollywood. Spyros Skouras, moreover, was a trustee of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and the producer of a 1947 documentary for the School. In the collection of essays I have just edited, The Archaeology of Xenitia, Natalia Vogeikoff-Brogan has written on the relationship between the Greek-American community (the omogeneia) and the School. The 1947 documentary, Triumph over Time, that Vogeikoff-Brogan discovered has been remastered as a DVD and published along with Vogeikoff-Brogan's insightful commentary.

My own contribution to The Archaeology of Xenitia was an essay on the Orthodox Cathedral of Philadelphia (a church without a logo). The research on Saint George has morphed into another project, a survey of Greek-American architecture, a collaboration with Vasilis Marinis at Queens College. LA's Saint Sophia is a hybrid of Hispanic and Orthodox motifs, appropriate for its locale. The commemorated craftsmen for the building seem to have been Latin American, but according to oral history, they were all brought from Greece. But that could be the subject of another posting altogether.

Documenting chapel logos throughout the U.S. illustrates a well-studied phenomenon, the intrusion of corporate culture into religious space. Most research, however, has focused on the phenomena of televangelism and megachurches. The more modest evidence from Charlotte's chapel, from the Cathedral of our Lady of the Angels and from Saint Sophia point attention to different processes of image-making and meaning.

Sheeler's Classic Landscape

When John Updike died, I decided that it was time for a self-guided tutorial on postwar American authors. An old copy of The Harper American Literature, vol. 2 (1987) is my guide. The aesthetics of this edition bring me back to my college years. Remember those literature surveys with 300-page weekly assignments? Remember the textbooks, and the thousands of tightly bound, fragile, onion skin pages?

The mammoth that sits on my reading table has Classic Landscape (1931) by Charles Sheeler on the cover. Sheeler is one of my favorite American painters, and I fully understand why the editors chose this image to visually represent American literary modernity from Walt Whitman to Toni Morrison.

After indulging in Nabokov's "Terra Incognita" (1963), James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1960), and Eudora Welty's "Why I Live at the P.O." (1941), I close the book and take a break from the written word. It's time to judge the book by the cover. With Karen Lucic as my guide (Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine, 1991), I explore the problems behind this industrial landscape.

Sheeler painted Classic Landscape in 1931 at the height of the Great Depression. The scene depicts the Ford Motor Company's industrial complex on the Rouge River. Henry Ford moved his factory from Highlands Park to Dearborn in 1927, as he also introduced the Model A. The advertising agency of Ayer & Sons managed the company's new image and commissioned Sheeler to photograph the site. Sheeler's 32 official photos appeared on popular magazines like Vanity Fair and celebrated the factories as cathedrals of industry. American images of silos and industrial architecture inspired the new generation of European architects, evident in treatises like Le Corbusier's Vers un architecture (Paris, 1923).

Three years after the Ford commission, Sheeler used his photos to model a series of paintings, including American Landscape (1930) and Classic Landscape (1931). Their execution during the Depression begs the question on Sheeler's persistence on industrial heroics even at a time of pessimism. The absence of humans in the paintings, moreover, could be construed as total disregard for human labor and lack of compassion for the miseries of unemployment. In contrast, muralist Diego Rivera used images of the Ford plant to condemn capitalism in his Detroit Industry (1932-33), which is crowded with figures. Similarly, architects like Le Corbusier abandoned the precisionist heroics for a brutal, curvilinear, expressionist alternative. Scholars have wondered why Sheeler refused to abandon the deification of American industry that he had helped create, why he ignored the human suffering of the Depression, or whether he had no regard for the labor movement.

The best way to explain the absence of humanity and the resilience of the machine in Classic Landscape is to recognize the poetic beauty of the work as a form of humanist triumph. Our guide in redeeming Sheeler's poetics should be no other than his contemporary, the poet William Carlos Williams. In a 1939 essay, Williams explains the artist's overwhelmingly humanless industrial landscape as follows: "Sheeler was devoted himself mainly to ... landscapes with little direct reference to humanity. This does not in the least make him inhuman, since when man becomes insignificant in his attributes and swollen to fill the horizon the representation of the human face is not enlightening." (Lucic 1991, p. 105) And even more potent is Williams' own industrial passivity expressed in his 1937 poem "Classic Scene" (Lucic 1991, pp. 106-107):

A power-house
in the shape of
a red brick chair
90 feet high

on the seat of which
sit the figures
of two metal
stacks-aluminum

commanding an area
of squalid shacks
side by side -
from one of which

buff smoke streams while under
a grey sky
the other remains

passive today -

It's a shame that the editors of Harper American Literature lacked the art-historical insight to include this poem in their anthology and have Sheeler's and Williams' classic landscapes reverberate. In the postwar period (the literature of which I'm reading), Sheeler was heavily criticized as an apologist for capitalist exploitation. But his paintings seem to move beyond political activism in order to express a deeper existential ambivalence. They engage industry with an American pastoral tradition. Lucic most eloquently describes the dialectical tensions inherent in Sheeler's Ford landscapes: "They speak to us in ways that are not easily analyzed--touching our needs to idealize as well as our fears of being annihilated by the object of our regard. Bringing conflicting hopes and anxieties to the surface, albeit subtly, they not only express ideology but also enact is own virtual unmasking and self-criticism. While such works relate to the hyperbolic rhetoric about industry during this era, they also turn the rhetoric in on itself to reveal its hollow core." (Lucic 1991, p. 117)

From Bones to Flesh: Parthenon and the Hudson School

John Ruskin had been raised on the bread and butter of classical antiquity and Winckelmann's ideal nudes. Like many Victorians, his introduction to the human body was through classical statues. Although male statues often contain suggestions of pubic hair, female statues do not. When Ruskin first laid eyes on his wife (according to his biographer) he was shocked to see pubic hair on the real female form. He was so repulsed by this physicality that he never consummated his marriage, leading to an annulment. For most of the 19th century, classical art and architecture presented an ideal of structural purity. From about 1820 to 1850, the Greek Revival style celebrated this great purity of classical forms. Nicholas Biddle was only the second documented American to divert the Italian Grand Tour towards Greece. His first impressions survive in his 1806 journals edited by R. A. McNeal (University Park, 1993). The revelatory character of pure tectonic form lead to the Second Bank of the United States (1816). As bank president, Biddle commissioned William Strickland to design this Philadelphian Parthenon, based strictly on Stuart & Revett's drawings in The Antiquities of Athens (London, 1762). The classical purity of the commission rejects the Roman impurity of the First Bank building (1791) located around the corner. In my mind, the Second Bank best illustrates America's early love affair with a pure, white, pristine national prototype. Like Ruskin's ideal beauty, the 1816 building lacks pubic hair.

This weekend, I realized that this is only the first half of the American relationship with the Parthenon. During the second half of the 19th century, the Parthenon becomes fleshy.

The New Britain Museum of American Art is currently hosting seven "Hudson River Paintings from the Metropolitan Museum of Art" (through Sept. 2010). And here, I got a chance to marvel Frederic Edwin Church's grand painting, The Parthenon. Church had traveled to Greece in 1869. He called the Parthenon "... certainly the culmination of genius of man in architecture," and in 1871 started to paint it. The Parthenon was widely celebrated and included in many shows, including the 1878 Paris Exposition Universelle. Church was a native of Hartford, making it especially enjoyable to see his work in Connecticut. Included in the show is also his West Rock, New Haven, of 1849.

What shocked me about Church's Parthenon is a monumental change in America's relationship to the classical original. Upon close inspection, Church's Parthenon is not clean and idealized but red hot and bothered. The tonality of the painting animates the tectonic bones with a pink luscious flesh. Church's Parthenon wears a luminous skin. The inclusion of human figures and human sculpture, plus the staging of slits and openings turns all attention to the surface of flesh. The painting also reminds me of two Acropolis paintings of contemporary date by Vikentios Lanza (1860) and Raffaello Ceccoli (c. 1845-1850), both in the National Gallery of Greece (cf., National Gallery, Alexandros Soutzos Museum: Four Centuries of Greek Painting, Athens, 2000, pp. 74-77)

So, I sat down with the painting and wrote down some thoughts on my notebook. Without trying to polish them up, or do any further readings on the luminosity of the Hudson River School, I share my first impressions below. One can zoom through the painting on the Metropolitan Museum's web site here. I have included some of my own details.

Two erect Doric columns (one blending into the frame) introduce the viewer into the dialectics of the Doric forms. The columns belong to the Propylaia through which the visitor must pass. Between the two columns, the statue of a kore stands in the distance; we notice her drapery. The only figure populating the sacred stone is a Greek man wearing the traditional foustanela skirt. The foustanela replicates the folds of the kore's clothes and the folds of the columns' fluting. Strange perspective: our horizon seems to be aligned with the temple's stylobate, also in line with the kore, but perched about 3/4 up the height of the Propylaia. One of the two Propylaia capitals catches the light (as does the kore), a key to the Parthenon's brightly illuminated facade in the distance--the temple rises above a diagonal line of shade. The mustached male figure, however, is seen from above. He shrinks both by our elevated perspective and in contrast to the colossal architectural blocks on which he leans. Although diminished in size and by his location in the shade, he captures our attention through his bright red vest, hat (fez), girdle and shoes. The tiny human pops into space. His orientally clothed red figure provides a signature for the red wash that bleeds vertically over the Parthenon columns. Church's tonality turns the monument from architectural bones to architectural flesh. It's a vibrant animated body, the color of blood-infused red cheeks. At the lower left, a third erect fluted column completes the foreground composition. Paradoxically, this fragment stands on a brick wall (hence post-classical), suggesting some stratigraphic inversion. Like the columns on the right, this, too, is located in the dark. Right behind it, half hidden, an architectural relief pops out, depicting a billowing fabric pinned by a central pin. The other fleshy elements are, of course, the highlighted pink metopes and the single surviving pedimental sculpture. The joined bodies of Kekrops and his daughter balance a patch of infill at center right (more evidence of post-classical restorations). Finally, a sleeping dark voluminous mass, the mountain behind, completes our fleshy journey. The painter's identity is inscribed on a fallen block at the bottom left, "F.E. CHURCH 1871." Figuratively, the painter could also be impersonated by the male figure in red. James Stuart, after all, had inserted himself in The Antiquities of Athens, dressed up as an oriental man. We cannot fail to see two additional (non-fleshy) colors that balance the overwhelming red. The bright blue sky hovers above and through the mass of the temple. Then, there are bright green patches of grass, which situate the painting to verdant spring (and not the scorching heat of summer)

Intersection: Sidewalks and Public Life

On April 2, the Philadelphia Alumni Writer's House at Franklin and Marshall College held a panel on the publication of Intersection: Sidewalks and Public Life, edited by F&M professor Marci Nelligan. Intersection collects six essays on the political contestation of public space, inspired by Jane Jacobs' classic book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). Nelligan and Nicole Mauro have assembled a collection of vibrant essays that reanimate Jane Jacobs' urban criticism. The panel included performance artist William Pope L., sociologist and historian Claire Potter (the celebrated blogger Tenured Radical), and sociologist Jerome Hodos. The room was packed with faculty and students.

The event was magical for someone like me, raised on Jane Jacobs. Most incredible was to see a liberal arts college conducting a workshop at such a level of critical engagement. Having passed through many small colleges (Swarthmore, Vassar, Conn College, Wesleyan), I've become sensitized to the role that they can play in American intellectual life. As Claire Potter pointed out (from her experiences at Wesleyan), elite liberal arts colleges have changed dramatically. Competition for admission has become so fierce, that the student body is now dominated by successful test-takers. Colleges with radical traditions have a new problem. Their students have been admitted because they have done everything right (and hence taken no risks); they are the cream of the crop of no-child-left-behind policies. Liberal arts colleges have become conventional places of higher education. Paradoxically, the administrations heavily market the liberal arts brand as a places of experimentation, diversity, individualism and overall funkiness. Potter's essay "Chalking the Borders" discusses this very confrontation between critical student practices and the administration, when Wesleyan banned chalking on its campus in 2003-2003. In this case, Jane Jacobs' sidewalk (private? public?) was contested through ephemeral graffiti written overnight by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer voices.

My copy of Intersection just arrived and its contents look great. I will post comments about each individual essay, as I read them one by one. I encourage EVERY reader of this blog to order the book. It's published by Chain Links, an independent venue, and it's worth every penny of the $16.

And here are a few additional notes on Jane Jacobs. Debates over the fate of the American city, walkable environments, creative classes, etc., have brought fresh attention to Jane Jacobs, see earlier posting, When a Place Gets Boring, Even the Rich People Leave (July 23, 2008). Jacobs is newly relevant in issues of civility in the virtual community of the internet. By reading this blog, you are participating in democratic space. Wikipedia is another key example of this space. This month, the first book on Wikipedia was published, where we read the following, "Ms. Jacobs argued that sidewalks provided three important things: safety, contact and the assimilation of children.” She may as well have been talking about wikis: “A wiki has all its activities happening in the open for inspection, as on Jacobs’ sidewalk. Trust is built by observing the actions of others in the community and discovering people with like or complementary interests.” These words could have come straight out of Intersection. They are from Andrew Lih's, The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia (2009), just reviewed in Noam Cohen, "Wikipedia: Exploring Fact City," New York Times (March 29, 2009).

Finally, back to urbanism. Peter Laurence, my colleague at Clemson University, is perhaps the single greatest force in Jane Jacobs studies today. Once published, Laurence's dissertation will be the authoritative intellectual biography; for the time being, see "Jane Jacobs (1915-2006): Before Death and Life," JSAH 66 (2007) pp. 5-15. Last November, Laurence organized a conference, Re-Imagining Cities: Urban Design after the Age of Oil. The event marked the 50th anniversary of another conference held at the University of Pennsylvania, The Conference on Urban Design Criticism, where Jane Jacobs, Louis Kahn, Kevin Lynch, Ian McHarg, Lewis Mumford, and I.M. Pei first introduced their new urban visions. Both 1958 and 2008 conferences were sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, see Laurence, "The Death and Life of Urban Design: Jane Jacobs, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the New Research in Urbanism, 1955-65," Journal of Urban Design 11 (2006), pp. 147-172.

Colleagues like Laurence made Clemson a place of intellectual debate (making my decision to leave even harder). For instance, I had the great pleasure to participate in Critical Practice for the Next Generation, a workshop on contemporary theory and practice organized by Laurence. It is there that I first learned the new term "post-critical," describing the architectural sell-out we are experiencing today (e.g. Rem Koolhaas, The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping). Intersection generates exactly the same intensity that I had last experienced in the Critical Practice seminars. And it reassures us that post-criticism has thankfully not won the day.

Iraq, Sikyon, Orlandos

Hate crimes targeting Iraq's gay population have been rampant during the last couple of months with some 25 dead bodies discovered in Sadr City. Newly acquired social freedoms have allowed a gay subculture to emerge from secrecy. This very freedom, unfortunately, has made homosexuality a public target. Both Shiites and Sunnis condemn gays and some clerics have authorized cold-blooded executions, see Timothy Williams and Tareq Maher, "Iraq's Newly Open Gays Face Scorn and Murder," New York Times (Apr. 7, 2009), pp. A1, A10.

I read about these anti-gay hate crimes while working through Anastasios Orlandos' scholarship on the Frankish/Byzantine site of Mystras. Orlandos populates his reconstruction drawings of this medieval city with images of courtly love. A knight rides up the cobbled street while a lady looks down from her tower balcony. Here, Orlandos provides a visual correlate to the romantic imagination that Modern Greek literature invested on the texts and monuments of the Frankish Peloponnese. Such blatant heterosexual images of love, coupled by the stories of Iraqi intolerance, make me think of Orlandos' own personal life, particularly the murder of his lover at Sikyon. In the 1930s, Orlandos was the principal excavator of ancient Sikyon, where he also designed a fascinating museum, rising on the foundations of a Roman bath. But suddenly, Orlandos' archaeological activities stopped in 1953. The excavation terminated and, according to oral history, Orlandos never stepped foot on the site again. When working in the Sikyon Survey Project, I heard an interesting story about Orlandos' life in Sikyon. Apparently, Orlandos had a boyfriend in Sikyon, who was murdered by the locals for his homosexual leanings. After that incident, Orlandos vowed never to return to the site.

Stories such as these and any reference to Orlandos' homosexuality can only be heard in conversation. To this day, I have never encountered any published acknowledgment of Orlandos' sexual politics. In the celebratory volume Αναστάσιος Ορλάνδος, ο άνθρωπος και το έργον του (Athens, 1978), we find evocations for every aspect of Orlandos' extracurricular life, from his art collection to his literary style, but we encounter a deafening silence on issues of his homosexuality. So much so, that sometimes I wonder whether it was true at all. But when I doubt the veracity of oral histories, I encounter yet another archaeologist who reaffirms, "of course Orlandos was gay, everybody knows that." In Greek scholarship, Orlandos is the closest to a national hero. He was the head of the national monuments service, a teacher, architect and restorer. So, it's no surprise that a certain amount of censorship may have been imposed by him and his students.

In contrast to Greek academia, America has opened up the discussion on homosexuality, and its unique contribution to archaeological scholarship, even though Orlandos' American peers were no less persecuted. The closet was a choice of survival. A. Kingsley Porter's story is telling, as told by Douglas Shand-Tucci in Crimson Letters: Harvard Homosexuality and the Shaping of American Culture (New York, 2003), pp. 125-129. Porter was a leading expert on Romanesque art, influential professor of art history at Harvard and founder of the Medieval Academy of America. Although an influential member of the Harvard gay scene, Porter's homosexuality was not public. Speculation has it that Porter's homosexuality leaked and Harvard president Abbot Lawrence Lowell fired him. This ultimately led to his suicide in 1933, which was kept secret for many years. Ironically, Lowell's own sister, the poet Amy Lowell cohabited with her partner, actress Ada Dwyer Russell, in a "Boston marriage."

During the early 20th century, art history and archaeology were havens for a gay academic subculture. Greece was a desirable destination because homosexuality was not criminalized. When things got particularly repressive at home, British and American gay intellectuals found safe haven in Greece, where lovers were also readily available. Unable to be an expat in his own country, Orlandos and Greek intellectuals could not so readily enjoy the liberties shared by the internationals. In the absence of any formal acknowledgment, archival sources or private testimonies, it becomes difficult to explore Orlandos' sense of homosexuality or his relationship with openly gay expats. Future biographers and social historians will hopefully address the complexities of Orlandos' personal life and elevate his lover's murder in Sikyon above gossip. But even without such solid historical groundwork, I cannot help but read into Orlandos' medieval domestic fantasies an element of desire. The murder in Sikyon flavors my readings of Mystras.

Douglas Shand-Tucci has been most vocal in exploring America's "gay gothic," a closeted form of rebellion. An equivalent Greek version has not been formally written. We are left with many questions. For instance, how did Fotis Kontoglou's Byzantine aesthetics influence Yannis Tsarouchis open homosexuality? Did Tsarouchis break away from his master because Kontoglou disapproved of his sexual preference? Even though the personal has become political in Greece, too, there is a reticence in committing it to print. Everybody is in-the-know, but few risk the public uttering. Perhaps this is the very recipe that has kept homosexuality safer in Greece.

For an introduction to the Greek problems of queer theory, see James Faubion's, "Men Are Not Always What They Seem: From Sexual Modernization toward Sexual Modernity," in Modern Greek Lessons: A Primer in Historical Constuctivism (Princeton, 1993) pp. 213-241. For more information on Sikyon, see Yannis Lolos' much anticipated book, Land of Sikyon: The Archaeology and History of a Greek City State (Princeton, 2009)--kudos to Yannis and to the American School Publications office.

Ouranis' Frangissa: Greek Occidentalism

The scholarly history of Frankish Greece has been tainted by colonialism and nationalism. After the Fourth Crusade, the Latins controlled parts of the Peloponnese for almost two centuries (1206-1430). European historians of the 19th and early 20th centuries explored this period as precedent for French, German and British colonialism in Greece. In retaliation, their Greek peers explored the Byzantine counter-offensive as precedent for Greece's continuous resistance to colonialism from the West. Imperialism, on the one hand, and nationalism, on the other, have produced a polarized picture of the relationship between the Latin (Catholic) and Greek (Orthodox) populations of Frankish Greece. Today's scholar has inherited an exaggerated ideological mindset, hoping to dissolve the national/imperial agendas under a new paradigm of post-national multiculturalism. There are many reasons to endorse this strategy, most notably in order to highlight the Mediterranean as a medieval ecology where cultural interaction flourished. Reading through the Greek scholarship and literature of the polarizing 1930s, however, I have come to realize that we might have exaggerated the ideological certainty of our predecessors.

Without a doubt, the Frankish period served Greek national agendas, but only on the levels of official history (taught in the classroom, etc.). At the cultural arena, the texts and monuments of the "Frangokratia" served quite a different role. They liberated the Greek imagination from the national chains of history. The Frankish Middle Ages introduced a breath of fantasy, romance and love into a historical consciousness dominated by the weight of the Classical tradition. By the late 19th century, Greeks replaced their subservience to the classics with a new ambivalence (to use Paschalis Kitromilides' terminology, see, "From Subservience to Ambivalence: The Modern Greek Attitudes towards the Classics," in The Impact of Classical Greece on European and National Mentalities [Amsterdam, 2003], pp. 47-54). I would argue that the Frankish discovery reinforced this very ambivalence and encouraged a new romantic relationship with the past. Romanticism gave liberties that Neoclassicism was unable to offer.

Among other considerations, we must give the Greeks of the 1930s some international leeway, since many of them were, in fact, a lot more multicultural than our enlightened postmodern scholar. After all, Constantine Cavafy is the paradigm of multiculturalism. Unlike Cavafy, the poet Kostas Ouranis (1890-1953) is less known (and untranslated) in English-speaking circles. Ouranis lived much of his life in transit and his work reflects the early modernist theme of homelessness. Ouranis lived during the political upheavals of the Balkan Wars, the "Great Idea" and the Asia Minor Catastrophe. Like many of his contemporaries, he turned his attention away from the national crises and explored a deeper inner life. Like his contemporary Kostas Karyotakis, he was inspired by French Symbolism and the introspective side of Kostis Palamas. For a short overview of such interwar tendencies, see R. Beaton, Introduction to Modern Greek Literature (Oxford, 1999), p. 124.

In 1920, Ouranis published "Frangissa" (the Latin Lady) in his collection of poems Nostalgies. It reveals some of the poetic and cultural ramifications of the Crusader period in the modern Greek psyche. Instead of nationalism, we find compassion. The female overlord becomes identified with the itinerant poet. The Latin Lady discovers loneliness in Athens, the same way that the poet discovers loneliness in Paris. At the end of the poem, Ouranis takes us to the material culture of the Franks, the lady's tombstone (with its feudal crest) standing out of place in the Greek landscape. The literary character of the western woman becomes prevalent in Greek literature. Her various manifestations illustrate the interpretive complexities at the moment that gender, desire, emotion and sexuality enter in the relationship between Greek and non-Greek. I quote the whole poem from Ouranis' collection, Poiemata (Athens, 1953), p. 70. My translation follows.

Η Φράγκισσα (1920)

Ξενητεμένη στην ξερή τη γη της Αττικής,
σ' 'ενα του θέρου καυτερό κ' ήσυχο μεσημέρι,
η Φράγκισσα η Αυθέντισσα κοιτάει απ' τον εξώστη
του πύργου της τα ξενικά για την ψυχή της μέρη.
Όλα στο φως ακίνητάν: ελιές, βουνά, μνημεία,
σαν μες' σ' αιωνιότητα να είταν βυθισμένα
- κι ούτ' ένας ίσκιος να σταθεί ν' αναπαυτεί η ψυχή της,
μήτε και ταξιδιάρικο περνάει σύγνεφο ένα...
Και η ξανθή πριγκίπισσα, μονάχη στον εξώστη,
της εξορίας της μακρυνής νιώθει όλη την πικρία
κ' έτσι λευκή κι αμόλυντη και δίχως ιστορία,
μαραίνεται εγκατερτικά σαν κρίνος μεσ' στο κάμα.
Και μιάν ημέρα ο τάφος της ο οικοσημασμένος
μέσα στη γη της Αττικής θά 'ναι κι εκείνος ξένος.

The Latin Woman

Uprooted in the dry land of Attica
in the hot and quiet noon of summer
the Latin woman, an overlord, looks out from her tower's
balcony and sees a place completely foreign to her heart.
Not even a traveling cloud passes above ...
The blond princess, alone on the balcony,
feels the bitterness of distant exile.
Standing all white, pure and without history,
she withers like a lily in the burning heat.
And one day, her tomb decorated with her baronial crest
will also be foreign in the land of Attica.

Ouranis is not the only Greek writer to focus on the Latin female. The first piece of Greek literature to dramatize a love affair during the Frankish period is Alexandros Rakaves' The Lord of the Morea (1851) about which I've written earlier, see Postmodern Morea. And we must not forget that Mystras offers a backdrop for an even more celebrated romance, the marriage of Faust and Helena in Goethe's Faust. Angelos Terzakis' novel Princess Izampo (1935-1947) is another example, contemporary with Ouranis. The events dramatized in Terzakis take place ca. 1210-1297 and focus on the love between a Byzantine orphan Sgouros and a Latin princess Izampo. The Frankish Peloponnese had no shortage of interesting women. Especially at the end of the Latin reign, much of the Morea's rulership had fallen onto the hands of women. In typical antifeminine fashion, historians like William Miller blamed the rule of women for the ultimate collapse of the Latin state in Greece, see, The Latins in the Levant (1908). Thus the national question (Greek vs. Latin) is complicated by gender. Unlike the Western Middle Ages, Byzantium had been ruled by women. Historian Angeliki Laiou has also shown that Byzantine law favored women over men in the management of property, the passing of dowries, etc. In reclaiming a multicultural history for the Morea, it is easy to ignore the issue of gender and intermarriage.

In the fictive expression of Frankish Greece, love is central. This should not surprise us from the perspective of European literature. What would Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831), or Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (1819) be without romance? Greek poets and novelists were fully aware of this tradition. Latin subjects could easily establish the same motifs on Greek soil.

The image at the beginning is the famous tombstone of princess Agnes from Andravida.

Morea: The Land and Its People

The Dumbarton Oaks' annual spring symposium focuses on the medieval Peloponnese. "Morea: The Land and Its People in the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade," was organized by Sharon Gerstel and will take place in Washington, D.C., on May 1-3, 2009. In my opinion, this is one of the most interesting symposia organized at Dumbarton Oaks, which tends to be a fairly stodgy institution (administered by Harvard). Of course, I'm biased because I'll be delivering a paper. As the month of April unfolds, I now turn my undivided attention to this paper, and I suspect the postings on Objects-Building-Situations will reflect this reality. My apologies to the non-medievalists. It is a great honor to be included in the panel of speakers, a veritable who-is-who of Morea studies. See the full lot of abstracts here. I'll be speaking about the medieval town of Mystra, founded by the Latins in 1205 and passed on to the Greeks in 1261. From 1261 to 1460, Mystra became the seat of the Despotate of the Morea and a center of cultural revival. I'll be focusing on the domestic architecture of the site. I'll be arguing that the houses of Mystra, published in 1937, played such a great ideological role in modern intellectual history that they are practically useless as archaeological evidence. My abstract follows:

DEFLATING MYSTRA
GROUNDING HOUSE & SETTLEMENT

Kostis Kourelis

Mystra has played a unique role in the history of medieval architecture as the paradigmatic survivor of Byzantine urbanism and domestic form. Since the 17th century, this picturesque ruin has fed the creative imagination of artists, poets, statesmen and scholars. Rather than providing the foundations for the archaeological study of Byzantine and Frankish settlements, however, Mystra became a mythological benchmark, a much needed heterotopia for homeless heroes like Faust, Villehardouin, Palaiologos, Phrangopoulos and Laskaris. The first part of this paper excavates the fictional stratigraphy layered upon the city's domestic fabric. As with the castles of Western Europe, fact and fiction created a provocative house of cards, an experiential version of history that deflected cultural anxieties over national identity, ethnicity, gender and social change. The historic preservation of Mystra (from the 19th to the 21st centuries) obfuscated the archaeological record of the medieval city. For the second part of the paper, we must hence turn elsewhere for comparative data, looking at sites whose presumed worthlessness saved them from imperial and imperialist inflation. Surveying recent fieldwork from across the Peloponnesian countryside will ground the houses and settlement of Mystra within an ecological and productive setting. Some see Mystra as the Paris of the Mediterranean, but we will consider it as a modest village.

Architecture as Tattoo: Meghan Marchie Interview

Architect and theorist Adolf Loos equated ornament with crime. In his 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime” (translated into English in 1913) Loos singled out tattoos (from New Guinea) as the prime example of degeneracy. Since Loos, much architectural theory has placed tattoos and building in diametrical opposition. A generation before Loos, the skin of a building took on fundamental significance. Gottfried Semper’s “The Four Elements of Architecture” (1851) outlined four primordial motives commensurate with four crafts: building a base (masonry), building a hearth (ceramics), building wall enclosure and roofing (carpentry), and walling (weaving). Semper, too, used anthropological examples, namely a Caribbean hut he saw at the London World’s Fair (the Crystal Palace). Unlike Loos, Semper saw the ornate membrane in a positive light and awakened the appreciation of weaving, which had been demoted as a craft since Vasari. More recently, topics of architectural surface have figured prominently in theoretical discussions. Cladding, weathering, skins and decorated sheds have resurfaced in the debates of Postmodernism.

Thinking of skins and architectural theory is what turned my attention to the tattoo worn by one of my students. Meghan Marchie is an Architectural Studies major at Connecticut College. Last summer, Meghan got a tattoo of a Frank Lloyd Wright window design. Architectural tattoos are a rarity, and Meghan was fully aware of those tensions. So, I decided to interview Meghan and document her aesthetic and intellectual choices. The interview is the second of a larger pedagogical project of collecting and presenting student narratives regarding art, architecture and modern life. The first interview, by Spencer Sutton, focused on the connections between art history and underground music.

Meghan discusses the tensions of a linear architectural design, “a cage,” against the curvature of the body, and how difficult it was to find a tattoo artist to even draw it. She speaks of her early inspirations in domestic architecture that stirred her towards Frank Lloyd Wright and architectural studies, as well as her curriculum at Connecticut College. Meghan’s architectural tattoo, moreover, highlights the communicative intricacies of the medium. Tattooing culture has witnessed a tremendous resurgence in the American mainstream. According to the Times Tattoo Topic, “It’s hard to look authentically rebellious or menacing these days, when even well-behaved businessmen wear earrings and ponytails and college students destined for quiet suburban lives have body piercings and tattoos." See also “Tattoos Gain even More Visibility,” New York Times (Sept. 24, 2008). Having emerged out of subculture, the tattoo phenomenon has become more interesting in its current prevalence. Meghan’s story enlightens us on the relationship between architecture, architectural education, lines and bodily expressions. What follows is a complete, unedited transcript of the interview. I thank Meghan for giving me permission to post it.

MEGHAN MARCHIE INTERVIEW

December 4, 2008, 4:30-5 pm.

Cummings 207, Connecticut College

New London, Conn.

KK This interview doesn’t have to be limited to your tattoo. Give me the context, your relationship to Frank Lloyd Wright. We can start with even how you discovered Frank Lloyd Wright.

MM Well, I knew I’d always been interested in architecture because, even as a child, I used to move all my furniture around in my room just, you know, on a whim. Really, a little kid, I’d move around this huge four poster iron bed and my mom would come upstairs next day and be like “who moved all this stuff?” And even from then I would be interested in drawing little floor plans and seeing the best way my room would look. And this was back in elementary school before I even really knew what that was. And then, they actually offered architecture courses in high school, which was really nice because a lot of high schools don’t really have that. So, the second I got into that I really really liked it. I had my teacher introduce me to Frank Lloyd Wright. We studied some of his homes and talked about Fallingwater, that kind of thing. So, I guess, this was the beginning of high school, but I just thought he was really cool. I thought his architecture was not just any old architecture, I thought it was actually hip, hip and cool.

KK Let me just ask you out of curiosity, what kind of architectural studies classes did you take in high school? Studio? History?

MM We used computers and did vector works, and drafting, and using CAD machines, and stuff like that, which is awesome because not many people have that opportunity. And it definitely made me completely interested. And I took it for three years, and basically by my third year I knew more about the program than my teacher did because he would come to me and ask me questions. I was young and using it more, and it got to the point where I was the local authority on how to do 3D drafting of a kitchen, or something. So, it got to a point where I was actually teaching my teacher and thought I really want to go somewhere with this. My mother works in the school system and keeps in touch with my old teachers and he, Mr. Bruss was his name, he was really excited that I decided to major in architecture, like “I knew, I knew that was going to happen.”

KK I’m curious also about the kind of place where you grew up. Was it a city, were you in an architectural environment that fed your interest, or was it always through books and reading?

MM I was lucky enough to move my Freshman year into a really, really, really nice suburb of New Jersey, and it’s a lot of old money [Summit, N.J.]. And so they had these beautiful old homes that were just humongous. Even today, my friend and I would do what we call real estate tours, literally, just drive around and look at the houses that we liked and point out why we liked them, or our friend lives there, that’s great. So I was really into residential architecture from the get go because I was surrounded by beautiful homes. Really, it’s an upper class neighborhood so everybody can afford to keep their houses in tip top shape.

KK Where those houses of historical value, of the 19th or early 20th century?

MM Some of them are. There’s some old historical houses in my town. There is this really really old club called Fortnightly Club, where, actually this summer, I worked with an interior designer and we did a wine cellar in there. So there is a bunch of historical houses in my town. I kept being drawn towards the more modern side. Even in architectural studies now, if I have a choice between doing something traditional and doing something modern, I like to do something that’s just as crazy as you can go.

KK In your mind, at what point in your life did that direction get formulated? I mean, why do you think you are attracted to the modern style? Is it because it’s more exciting, more creative?

MM I feel like you can do more with it. I definitely appreciate the beauty in an old building. Of course, that’s not going to be lost on me. But, I guess, upon reaching college, that is when I started getting into classes and reading books about modern architecture. And then I realized what a movement it was. Originally, I thought it was a hip thing to study. Then I actually got really into it, started getting really into Mies van der Rohe and that whole movement there, and I was in Gender and Architecture class at Connecticut College, and we were funded to go to Chicago. So our whole class went and stayed in a hostel on the Loop, and we got to see Mies van der Rohe houses, Richardson and Frank Lloyd Wright. Upon actually being in that space, just completely changed my mind. Seeing it in a picture and then just walking up to the Farnsworth House, this beautiful glass thing, the expanse of glass and the structure of modern architecture, I find, it’s just, it moves me a little bit more.

KK So for you, it’s very much an aesthetic experience. I’m curious about your term “hip.” That you knew even in high school that there was something hip about this kind of thing. I’m curious to see whether you had other friends. Was there a circle of people that were kind of architecture-heads, architecture fanatics? Or were you on your own?

MM What is kind of funny is that my close friend in high school, he was in all the architecture classes with me, and we both ended up going to architecture school. Out of, literally, the entire class, it was just us two. I think we are the only ones that are pursuing architecture actually in my high school class. And even today, when we come back from breaks, we’ll talk about architecture because that’s what we’ve been doing together the entire time. So I definitely have. He is the one that comes on real estate drives with me. I mean, we have the interest and we feed each other. So I do have a friend to talk about it with. And, yeah, it’s really nice.

KK So, you’re pretty sure you’re going to architecture graduate school.

MM Yeah, I really want to go to architecture grad school, but I think I’m actually going to try to apply to the Peace Corps before that. Because, apparently, if you have a BA in architecture, you can do an urban development program for two years. And upon coming out of that, you can pretty much go wherever you want with that. I mean, you can really get into really good schools, so I kind of want to have that experience even though it’s really tough.

KK But it sounds like you already have international experiences. You had mentioned in class that you went to Vietnam. So it won’t be such a shock to you.

MM Yeah, I feel I’d be able to handle rats and cockroaches. I mean, I already did that for a couple of months and it got to a point where I didn’t care anymore. So, I figure that I can be OK with that kind of stuff.

KK Were those international journeys also motivated by architecture?

MM Yes, but I was there more doing sociological work. We were doing research on how the new economy is affecting migrant street vendors from the villages. But upon that, we traveled all over Vietnam and Cambodia and Singapore. So, I was able to see, because Vietnam is in this really interesting place where their economy is recently becoming this global thing so there is just a lot of growth. And you’re seeing these amazing amazing modern buildings going up and then when we go to the village, you just see people are still living in dirt huts. But even that architecture was really amazing. I saw some really cool tribal huts that are built like 20 feet off the ground to protect them from animals and stuff. I got to experience a really really different type of architecture. And I think a lot of people take the opportunity to go to Rome, go to Europe and see the sites you are supposed to see. But, I figure, I can do that at any point in my life, and being somewhere, and living in a third world country, and actually experiencing that type of architecture was completely mind changing.

KK So it sounds like you have an interest not only in high architecture but also in vernacular forms and social things.

MM My minor is psychology and, right now, I’m getting an independent study prepared that’s going to measure how people with certain personality types respond to certain spaces, so we’ll see how that goes.

KK Is it like a thesis?

MM Yeah, it’s a final integrative senior project, so it is integrating my two cores.

KK So, for you, the Peace Corps sound great. It’s something that people used to do all the time. I guess it’s a generational thing, but less and less …

MM Even now with the economy today, it’s getting really really hard to get in. Yeah, it used to be something like you would sign up and they’d send you anywhere. I think over 12,000 apply and under 3,000 get accepted. So, it’s really like applying to a really special school again.

KK You are a senior, right? Are you in the process of applying?

MM I’m going to start, I think, in January. It’s like a six month process, it’s pretty long. So, yeah, I’m putting that off until I have to.

KK Good. That gives me a sense of how you’ve built that interest. Let me just go back to Frank Lloyd Wright so that we can get to your tattoo also. Do you still feel that you have a special relationship with Frank Lloyd Wright, as a kind of formative person?

MM I like what his buildings stand for. He really was a genius in putting things together and the experience of space. He really was first of his kind to build democratic buildings and that type of thing. I don’t think him as a character was the greatest guy ever. I mean, he definitely didn’t respect women. I’ve had conversations with other architecture majors about why I want to put something on my back from this guy who was a total misogynist and had a bunch of wives and would leave his family, but it’s more that I just like what he does.

KK Tell me how you decided a) to get a tattoo, b) to choose a Frank Lloyd Wright tattoo, and c) how you chose that particular design for a tattoo.

MM I actually knew I was going to get a tattoo at some point maybe because my mom was like “never get one.” And plus, I think the tattoo culture is great. And nowadays for so many people it’s a way to express your individuality.

KK Tell me what you like about the tattoo culture. Is it another form of design? It links the vernacular and design.

MM It’s interesting now, I wasn’t aware of it before. But now, if I have my tattoo out, you get in conversations with people who have tattoos, so they’ve been through the same experience and process. And it kind of makes you more keen to how people are expressing themselves on their body. I have some friends with some really weird things on their bodies that, at first, people looked at it and were like, “that’s gross,” but once someone explains it to you and how it has to do with their life and stuff, it is just really interesting because putting something on your body is really kind of a statement rather than just drawing something on a piece of paper. And it’s something you want to people to see, you want to be affiliated with it. I almost feel sometimes, now that it is winter and I can’t have my tattoo out, I almost kind of feel sort of naked that I don’t have it on. I feel like people don’t know I have this thing on my back that’s so important to me. So even though it’s winter, I try to make an effort to have a strap or something, so that I can have my tattoo out. I mean, I’ve got into really interesting conversations with people because it’s a really unique tattoo in that architecture is all about us, straight lines and structures and everything being precise and the second it’s put on skin, if I move my arm, the whole thing becomes organic and the shape changes. That’s what I love about it, that it goes from being something completely structured to just with the move of my arm it turns into something else. I was originally going to get a tattoo in Vietnam and what’s funny is that I was actually going to get a different architecture relief. I had been to a bunch of…, at Angkor and stuff, and they had these really cool etchings and I wanted to get an Angkor Wat etching on my back, but then I kind of thought about it and I was kind of torn whether I wanted to do something Frank Lloyd Wright-ish or something really old and a little more floral and fantastical. So I started doing a search for my favorite Frank Lloyd Wright images and, by the time I narrowed it down, I just felt there was so much more beauty in something that, I mean, it really does look like a square cage on my back--that’s what my mother says. But I think it’s so great that I can have these straight lines on my back that are really not that straight at all, at the same time.

KK You said some of your friends have tattoos. What is the repertoire of your friends’ tattoos? What kind of iconography have they chosen? Is it all over the place?

MM My tattoo, I had to ask a bunch of different tattoo artists to do it. Nobody wanted to do it because it’s all straight lines and it’s precise. Literally, if you don’t have it precise, the entire geometry of the thing is thrown off. So the guy who did my tattoo, after he finished, he was like “I’m never doing anything like this again,” and he was like “this is a really weird tattoo. You’re going to have people come up to you in the street and asking you about it because most tattoos aren’t straight lines.” And of course, I was “really? whatever,” and it’s totally true. I have a bunch of people with tattoos always come to me and ask me. “Wow! Who did your tattoo? It’s amazing that you have straight lines on your back.” And I just think it’s really awesome because I do have people come up to me and go “is that Frank Lloyd Wright on your back?” and there I get into these great intellectual conversations about architecture with people. It’s kind of a whole new way to express what I’m interested in ‘cause, I mean, some people have music lyrics on their arm and you can say, “hey, I know that song,” and talk about that or something like that. But it’s just kind of in your face, like a Frank Lloyd Wright image on your back and I've met some really, really cool people just because I have it on my back. I mean, people, strangers, have come up to me and been like, “I know that’s Frank Lloyd Wright, I love his Prairie Houses,” and, you know, we go on from there. It’s a whole different level of intellectual conversation really.

KK And how did you find the artist who would actually do your tattoo? Was it through word of mouth?

MM I actually went to San Diego because I had a friend living there, and that’s one of the better places to get tattoos done, apparently. I’m not much in the tattoo culture; I have one, and I’m not getting another one because I can’t beat the one that’s on my back, ever. Nothing can be better than what’s on my back right now. I’m not going to get another one. I basically had my image, which I had printed out and was just taking it around and everyone was just like, “no, I’m not going to that, I’d much rather do a flaming skull, and actually the tattoo artist that I ended up with, he was like, “hey, is that Frank Lloyd Wright?” and I was just like “Yes! Please do it. You know exactly who I am talking about.” So that made me a lot more comfortable, that he knew where I was coming from and, yeah, he took a picture of my tattoo and hung it up ‘cause it was one of the most original things he’s done.

KK How did you choose to put it on your back? Was that something you had to think through? Did you choose the piece first and then realize that the back was the best place for it to go, or did you choose the part of the body first and then choose the image?

MM I knew I wanted something on my back.

KK Why? So that you can hide it?

MM Well, I mean that of course, if I wanted to be .. I don’t want something on my arm or something you can see when I shake your hand. I mean, this is easily covered up and easily shown, if I want. I guess, hmmm. How did I decide? I originally wanted it really small, and right now it’s gigantic pretty much. The thing is that the detail is so intense that the tattoo artist was like, “All right. This is the smallest I can make it,” and then he showed me the size, and I was like “just do it. OK. Just do it, like, I’m not even going to think about it.”

KK Interesting, so there was a scale factor.

MM It was going to be really a lot smaller, but then, I mean, I’m really completely 100%, 110% happy with it. The fact that it’s big, I think, just makes it even more like a statement, and I knew I wanted a stained glass window pane by Frank Lloyd Wright because I think that is some of his most recognizable and dynamic work and so, I mean, I basically just went online and was googling images and looking at the houses that I liked the most and ended up finding this image that actually is supposed to represent a version of a modern city. So if you look at the tattoo from pretty far away, it actually looks like skyscrapers and I thought that was really cool.

KK So, have you make a pilgrimage to the original? Have you seen the original?

MM No, I haven’t seen the original.

KK Does it still exist?

MM I’m actually not sure if it exists anymore.

KK It might have been torn down.

MM Yeah, I probably should know that.

KK No, no, no, it’s not that important, but I thought it might be the kind of thing that you …

MM Yeah, that would be really cool, to like have a picture next to it or something, but, yeah, I’m not really sure if it exists anymore, but it’s on my back.

KK It’s not important, right?

MM Yeah.

KK And how big is it? Maybe you could send me a photo of it.

MM Yeah, I have a photo. I would say it’s like this big, maybe 6 x 10 roughly, maybe a little bigger than that. It’s pretty much my entire shoulder blade. Yeah, it’s a statement for sure. My mother was furious.

KK Now that you have the tattoo and we know how you made your decision, tell me about the response. You’ve told me about the positive response by people that come up and talk to you.

MM The only negative response I’ve gotten is from my mother.

KK Whom you told, right?

MM Yeah.

KK Did you consider hiding it from her?

MM I didn’t even consider it ‘cause it’s ... I was, like, “Look what I got! Hoo hooo.” I mean, she says it’s just like too big, it’s going be there forever, and I was, like, “that’s what I wanted.” I even actually came, and when I got back to school, my initial thing was to find all my architecture professors and show them my back and that’s exactly what I did and my advisor, van Slyck, who is right next door, was just like, “Wait! That is awesome. Wait, come here.” And calls over another professor. I have all these teachers looking at my back. Yeah, I mean, I got such a great response because I think it is really really original and nobody has that type of thing. Even people who don’t know what it is still think that it’s “stunning,” “beautiful” quote unquote. I get amazing compliments about it and it’s just my mother is the only one that doesn’t like it.

KK Well, is she more traditional?

MM She says that it’s going to affect my ability to get a job, that’s why. It’s like motherly concern.

KK Pragmatism.

MM Yeah, I understand where she’s coming from, but I was, like, “I can can hide it,” you know, “I didn’t get it on my face,” so.

KK Plus, it might actually get you an architecture job.

MM Yeah, it really could. I’ve had a lot of great conversations with architects, with students, with so many people.

KK I find it fascinating because of the two worlds you were describing earlier, you are interested in vernacular stuff and architecture. I think of tattoos as something that is more vernacular culture, popular culture. You know. I guess anthropologists study it in non-western civilizations that use tattoos extensively. I mean, to tattoo yourself is part of that anthropological interest in transforming your own body as a work of art, which is very different from the Modernist architectural ideas of pure form, purity, abstract beauty which is perfect. In that sense it is kind of amazing and very unique. I haven’t heard of anyone that has an architectural tattoo.

MM That has straight lines as a tattoo.

KK It’s not the obvious thing you think of. It’s not generic.

MM Right, I want, like, a heart on my back or something. I know that it definitely is more popular culture now because thinking back to even when I was back in high school, in older kids, like, it was something really bizarre when someone came back with a tattoo and now, when I think of my groups of friends and people that I know, I would confidently say that 75%-85% have a tattoo now.

KK It’s a huge revival.

MM It really is and it’s just a new way to express who you are.

KK Especially in some places. My direct experience is in Philadelphia, especially in certain neighborhoods like Northern Liberties or West Philadelphia, everybody has one. It’s an interesting phenomenon in its own right as a way of making underground connections and creating a visual culture that’s not academic.

MM There definitely is a tattoo culture. I felt very different about it, and then, when I got my tattoo, I actually felt I was part of this special group, and it’s, like, a whole new world has been opened up with this tattoo, with this one tattoo on my back,

KK If you think of the tattoo historically, it’s something that sailors got, Vietnam veterans got, it totally doesn’t have the hip associations that it has now. There is a theory of subculture (Dick Hebdige) that argues that you choose something that is perhaps of your parents’ generation, you appropriate it, and then you use it in a context that is so different, that you make it your own, and it doesn’t carry the connotations of the previous generation. As a result, your mother probably had the associations of the earlier generation.

MM Oh, definitely.

KK Of being kind of … opium den and sailors, getting drunk and getting a tattoo that you don’t remember.

MM I feel that it’s definitely a cultural thing. When I was talking to my friends in Vietnam about getting a tattoo…

KK Oh, yeah. Do the Vietnamese do a lot of bodily ornamentation?

MM No, no. Hair, I think is pretty much the most manipulated thing. But very very few people have tattoos and then if people have tattoos, it’s a big deal. One kid in my group had a tattoo in his arm and I remember my Vietnamese friends were just like “Wow! That’s crazy. I can’t believe you would do that to your own skin,” like it was just like a really miraculous thing to have. And a bunch of them, especially because I was a girl, thought that I was being crazy for trying to do that on my skin. It’s definitely cultural.

KK There is the trend of the Chinese character tattoos. It’s a kind of Orientalism that you see in tattoo culture.

MM But the thing is that in that culture they would never, they would never do that, so it’s totally different.

KK I’ll ask you one final question. Do you have an opinion about people that have tattoos in other parts of their bodies? Do you think it’s intentional to put tattoos on their necks? You said that you didn’t want your to be always visible. Do you look at other people that have tattoos and look at them as manipulating you, but placing them in particular places?

MM I don’t know because sometimes I actually wish that it was in a place that was visible, I mean, as I’d said before, I’m sometimes mad that I have to cover it up. I almost wish I could just get the same exact thing on my arm so I can have it out all the time. But I have a bunch of friends that have some really really obvious tattoos, like on their collar bone, on the back of the neck, and a lot of people do it on the bottom of the forearm, that’s a really really visible area and I don’t think there is anything wrong with it. I just think it’s their choice to put it wherever they want, it’s their body, I mean all power to you.

KK OK. I was just curious about how you situate yourself within tattoo culture in general. Or even if you care about organizations like the Suicide Girls. Have you heard of the Suicide Girls?

MM Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, that's just over the top

KK So, you wouldn’t go that far.

MM Oh, my gosh. They, like, pierce their faces. I mean, I have a nose piercing, I’m OK with piercing, but I’d definitely draw a line and I do think that people who have sleeves, that their entire arm is covered, my uncle is like that, and I remember, when I was little, I always thought that was really cool.

KK Oh, tell me about your uncle.

MM He’s a very crazy man. He, like, plays guitar. He was the fun uncle. I think he got his nipples pierced, I think when he turned 40, or something. But he was the uncle with the tattoo and I always remember telling my mom that that was great, and she was always, “No, don’t copy uncle Danny, that’s not a good thing, you don’t want to do that.”

KK Is he her brother?

MM Yeah, her brother.

KK That’s interesting. So, you had some kind of early-on exposure.

MM So, like, I definitely knew that my uncle was a big tattoo guy. And when I got my tattoo, I called him up and was like “Yeah, I got my first tattoo.” He was really excited for me. “Yeah, c’mon over, I must see it. It’s really great.” So, actually, my uncle’s son all of a sudden got his first tattoo. It’s kind of like tattoo culture in uncle’s house. It’s really funny because the second my grandmother comes, everybody covers it up. My grandmother doesn’t even know about her son’s numerous tattoos. He’s kept them hidden probably for 30 years, which is pretty impressive. But he still hides them, which shows something about fear of my grandmother.

KK Well, that’s great. This is all really interesting, the various lines of connection between architecture and design.

MM I hope that was helpful.

House Stories: Flipping the Grandparents' House

House Stories is a collection of personal narratives, a teaching experiment in History of Domestic Architecture (Wesleyan ARTS 637). See Introduction, and Table of Contents.

FLIPPING THE GRANDPARENTS' HOUSE

By Matt Strekel

Growing up, there was nothing remarkable about my grandparent’s house in Colchester, CT. They had moved there in 1981 just before I was born from South Windsor, CT. It was a simple house. A raised ranch, built in the late 1970’s, with plans and materials from a Sears store. Mint green vinyl siding clad the house, white vinyl faux-shutters on either side of each window. Nothing, I promise, remarkable about it. The house sits on a little less than four acres, set back far from route 16. My grandmother was passionate about birds and other wildlife. Heading down the driveway always meant seeing deer, fox, and many birds. There were purple martin birdhouses in the front yard, a bat house, and around the back, more birdfeeders and suet cages than you could count.

The inside of the house was certainly remarkable, but not in a good way. My grandparents had owned a travel agency in Colchester after their retirement, and they had traveled all over the world. As part of their travels, my grandmother would bring home wallpaper from Japan and Egypt, and fabric from Panama and Chile. Each wall in the entire house was covered in a different pattern, but brought together through a common color. My grandfather laid the carpet by himself, which means that the floors creaked, and little padding was left between the thin carpet and plywood floor.
My grandmother passed away on April 4, 2004 at 4:04 a.m. (should would have really gotten a thrill about passing away at a date and time that was all 4’s). My grandfather lived for a few years without her, but despite his tough exterior, was very sad and alone without her. Nearly seventy years of marriage is hard to just forget about, and it was hard for him to begin living on his own.

On a Sunday in August 2007, my brother, uncle, and I went to take my grandfather to lunch. It had become a ritual to take him to, what for him, was an early dinner once a month. When my brother and I arrived, my uncle was in the garden, picking through cucumbers and tomatoes that were ripe. The door to the house was locked, which we assumed meant that gramps was in the shower. Not unusual for him to lock the front door until he was ready to go. After about half an hour in the garden, and no sign of my grandfather, we entered the house through the garage and up through the basement. My brother walked up the stairs first, and upon reaching the top, found my grandfather dead on the kitchen floor. He had passed away while washing the dishes, sponge still in hand. I tell you this story not because of my grandparents or to relive fond memories, but about what role that house played for me after his death.

At the same time that we were dealing with his death, I was going through my own tribulation. I was divorcing from my ex-wife, and the opportunity presented itself to move in to my grandparent’s home to “flip it” before we sold it as part of his estate. I had extensive experience flipping entire homes in the Boston area, and it seemed to be a great time to do it. My grandfather was a tough and hard man, and there were few times when his true emotions for both his sons and his grandsons would show through. But we knew that he loved us. Flipping this home was my way of honoring his memory and doing the best that I could to make him proud. One last tribute I suppose.

About twenty-five years in the same house meant that they had accumulated lots of possessions. I was responsible for going through everything that had belonged to them. It should also be noted that I was not yet working at Wesleyan, and flipping this house was my full-time job. I spent a month, full time, going through their life. Slowly but surely things went in to boxes, off with relatives, or in to the basement to be sold at an estate sale. After moving their life in to boxes and selling it off, it was time to start on the house. Peeling wallpaper that had traveled halfway around the world and then painting the walls. For me, it was a job. For them, it was a memory whenever they looked at those God-awful patterns. As I spent nearly 16 hours a day, 6 days a week working on this house, there was lots of time for me to think about them. About growing up with them, spending nights in that house when my parents were away, dinners, Christmas Eve’s, and more. I have always believed that there is little use in associating a person or a memory with a physical object, and that the memory of that person is inside you, not the thing. For me, it was my way of saying goodbye, saying I loved them, and saying that they were wonderful people by fixing up this house. Room by room, I tore off wallpaper, painted, pulled up carpet, laid new carpet, replaced light fixtures and electrical outlets, installed tile and new plumbing, hung new cabinets, and brought in new appliances.

This house was more than a piece of real estate. It was part of my family, held many memories, and was my quiet way of honoring my grandparents. Shortly after finishing my work in the house, I started working at Wesleyan. I lived there for a while after I started working at Wes, while the house was on the market. We sold the house in an awful market; for $80,000 more than had we not flipped the house. I have no doubt that my grandparents were with me the entire time, checking in on my work, encouraging me, and making sure that I was safe and that we got the best price for their home. It was not always easy, but for me now and always, there will be something remarkable about that house.

PaK and Sol: Greek Hip Hop Revolution

From a young age, my godson Patroklos showed proclivities towards rap and hip hop. But nothing has prepared me for the release of a masterful full-length CD released a few days ago with his partner in hip hop Solmeister. The LP is called Απ' την καλή και απ' την ανάποδη (From the Good Side and the Bad Side) and was produced by DJALX at 396 μοίρες/Rainlab Studios in Athens. It can be downloaded here. This is a tremendous accomplishment from a 14-year old.

Half of the songs are written by Sol, and have a romantic bend. The other half, written by PaK, present a sobering portrait of contemporary Greek life, full of honesty, nostalgia and anger. Hip hop truly has no national boundaries. Although influenced by American sources, the songs are written in Greek, present distinctive Greek realities, but they also represent the pains of migration. PaK has recently moved to Germany experiencing the contradictions of personal geography and history at an early age. His relationship to the Greek hip hop scene are mitigated by a new distance.

I have only started to listen to the album and I'll refrain from individual comments. In future postings, I hope to provide some aid (esp. for the non-Greek speakers) on a song-by-song basis. For earlier work, see Sol's and Pak's ΑΠΑΧΑ ΓΙΑΟΥΡΤΙΑ (Nonfat Yogurts) here.

From Town to Country: The Archaeology of Modern Greek Landscapes

There are two colloquia that I have been working on this year. Since I have already posted the details of the first one, First Out: Late Levels at Early Sites, I should also post details for the second, co-organized with Effie Athanassopoulos. The Modern Greek Studies Association (MGSA) conference, which takes places every two years, will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia. I have never attended the MGSA meetings, and this is the first time the Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeology in Greece AIA Interest Group has submitted a panel. On March 21, we learned that our panel was accepted. Congratulations to all the wonderful contributors and their papers.

Modern Greek Studies Association Annual Symposium 2009

October 15-17, Vancouver, Canada

From Town to Country: The Archaeology of Modern Greek Landscapes

Organizers: Kostis Kourelis (Connecticut College) & Effie Athanassopoulos (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)

Respondent: Susan Buck Sutton (Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis)

Since the birth of the nation-state, the identity of Modern Greece has been defined by its relationship to antiquity. The discipline of archaeology has, thus, played a central role in the construction of Greece, but only in so far as it concerns ancient periods (archaia). For Greece, the archaeology of the recent past is an etymological contradiction. Material culture dating to after 1850 is considered non-archaeological; it can be exported and traded freely. Archaeological studies on 19th- and 20th-century Greece are greatly lacking, leaving a huge disciplinary gap with Historical Archaeology, a discipline that flourishes in the United States.

This panel brings together recent work applying archaeological perspectives to the material culture of Modern Greece spanning a spectrum of ecological milieus from the metropolis, to the small town, the village, the monastery and the rural landscape. The theme that connects the individual papers is that of “landscape” approached through the lens of archaeology. Landscape as a concept refers to the external world mediated through subjective human experience. In archaeology, approaches to landscape have changed drastically over time, from economic and ecological perspectives of the 1960s to more recent post-modern views that focus on the social and symbolic construction of landscapes. In Greece, the field of landscape archaeology has grown out of the tradition of archaeological regional surveys, introduced by American scholars during the 1950s.

The individual papers offer diverse perspectives and examine a wide variety of landscapes in the 19th and 20th century. The settings range from the urban space of 19th century Athens to the town of Corinth, to rural space in the upland basins of Corinthia, to monastic space in Mount Menoikeion in northern Greece, and to landscape features such as Mt. Pentadaktylos in Cyprus. Each paper applies a different methodological tactic. Some revisit older historical records, others collect new data or re-conceptualize physical relationships. Collectively, they represent the richness of a growing field. Susan Buck Sutton, who pioneered the study of the Modern Greek countryside and single-handedly developed the discipline of ethno-archaeology, has agreed to serve as the panel’s respondent.

The panel is sponsored by the Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeology in Greece Interest Group of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA). The Group consists of AIA members with an interest in the archaeology of post-classical Greece, and in promoting its understanding through various programs and publications.

Athens in the 19th Century: Archaeological Landscapes and Competing Pasts

Effie Athanassopoulos (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)

This paper examines the changing archaeological landscape of Athens in the post-liberation phase, in the decades following the establishment of the Modern Greek state in the 1830s. During the Othonian period (1833-1862) large scale demolition of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine buildings took place in the new capital. These actions were an attempt to eradicate the physical evidence of an “inferior” past, which interfered with the efforts of the decision makers to establish an unbroken continuity between classical antiquity and the re-born state.

The government officials of the 1830s and 1840s were all proponents of a purist classical perspective. Their goal was to enhance the classical buildings by freeing them from additions of later and ‘lesser’ eras. The ‘purification’ of Athens was carried out by archaeologists who shared these views and felt little sympathy for the material remains of the Byzantine and Post-Byzantine eras. Thus, churches, mosques and other structures were demolished on the Athenian Acropolis and in the lower town. Some churches were destroyed because they stood near ancient monuments. Others were viewed as obstacles in the opening of new roads and the beautification of the capital. According to one estimate, approximately seventy-five churches met that fate; they were noted on maps of the early 1830s but disappeared in the next few decades. The ‘cleansing’ of the Acropolis is well documented, the destruction of churches in the lower town less so. Here, I will document several examples through plans and drawings of European visitors as well as archival research.

Another goal of this paper is to examine the relation of the discipline of archaeology to evolving national ideals. The initial hostility towards Byzantium shared by the educated elite gradually waned. In the 1850s the work of an influential historian, Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, led to the inclusion of the Byzantine past into the national narrative. In turn, Byzantium’s new role influenced the direction of Greek archaeology, which gradually began to lose its exclusive classical emphasis. Still, the purist classical ideals prevalent in the Othonian period have left their indelible mark; they guided the physical reorganization of the archaeological and urban landscape of Athens in the course of the 19th century.

Ancient Corinth from the Ottoman Empire to the Archaeologists

Amelia R. Brown (American School of Classical Studies at Athens)

Most modern visitors to Ancient Corinth come to see the ruins, the fenced-off ancient city at the center of a town whose houses, shops and churches were largely built since the 1950s. Only a few roadside shrines and now-crumbling structures still hint at the 19th-century town, a far-different Corinth which once occupied the same basic landscape. The written accounts of Corinthians, European travelers and American archaeologists add depth and color to these physical traces, as do archival photographs and the archaeological excavation of 19th-century remains recently undertaken by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. All this evidence is worth studying for several reasons. First, few if any towns in the Peloponnese boast such rich sources for the 19th century, the era in which Greece emerged as a nation-state, began industrial development and became a mass-market European tourist destination. At Corinth, these external shifts meant the destruction or abandonment of the urban and social fabric of the Ottoman town, the founding of a “modern” city on the coast, and a revolution in agriculture on the plain in between the two. The Grand Tour, Greek nationalism and the growth of classical archaeology also spurred interest in the traces of antiquity, once completely integrated into the Ottoman urban fabric. This interest culminated in the establishment of the large-scale excavations which continue to this day, but which have only sporadically taken account of the town which continues to thrive around them. Though these excavations initially sought only “Ancient” Corinth, today their archives and recent finds alike form a unique testament to the dramatic changes in and since the 19th-century. In this paper, I integrate this disparate source material to reconstruct the cityscape of 19th-century Corinth, both to better understand Corinthian and Peloponnesian history in that era, and to tease out what kinds of continuities do, in fact, exist in every city ever established on the shores of the Corinthian Isthmus.

Between Sea and Mountain: The Archaeology of a 20th-Century “Small World” in he Upland Basins of the Southeastern Korinthia

William R. Caraher (University of North Dakota)

David K. Pettegrew (Messiah College)

Timothy E. Gregory (Ohio State University Excavations at Isthmia)

Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory (Ohio State University Excavations at Isthmia)

Between the villages of Sophiko and Korphos in the southeastern Korinthia are a number of geographically well-defined and fertile upland basins or poljes, each one accompanied into modern times by a cluster of farmsteads and used for agriculture and pastoral activities. The heavily forested slopes adjacent to these basins were systematically exploited for resin production, a flourishing industry in the wider region especially after World War II, which is now in serious decline. Although physically isolated from major urban centers, these microecologies played a vital role in the subsistence of its local population, which originated primarily in the nearby mountainous village of Sophiko. Placing these isolated, yet deeply interconnected places into their regional context provides another key case-study for the contingent character of the Greek countryside in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Between 2001 and 2009, the authors investigated these basins, with a primary focus on the largest, known locally as Lakka Skoutara, through two archaeological projects: the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey (2001-2003) and the Saronic Harbors Archaeological Research Project (2008-09). The former studied Lakka Skoutara as part of its emphasis on the archaeology of the modern period (19th-20th centuries), while the latter conducted archaeological investigations in several of these basins as part of a larger regional survey of the Saronic coastline.

Typical of the other basins, Lakka Skoutara presents a remarkably robust assemblage of material including domestic and religious architecture, agricultural installations, and ceramics scatters. This material reflects the dynamism of changing land use patterns in the Greek rural landscape as well as the formation processes and life cycles of use, reuse, and abandonment connected to domestic residence. By combining archaeological survey with oral information obtained from local residents, we were able to reconstruct part of the landscape history of this small, low-density rural settlement and its relationship to the wider world. This micro-level analysis of the site complements the broader perspectives offered by regional level data collection, oral history, and comparative studies from elsewhere in Greece. Lakka Skoutara and its neighboring poljes offer both snap shots of historical processes affecting the countryside over the last two centuries as well as the dynamic archaeological environments of semi-abandoned settlements recorded over the much narrower horizon of a decade of field work.

The Sacred Grip: Landscape, Art and Architecture in Mount Menoikeion (19th-20th Centuries)

Nikolas Bakirtzis (The Cyprus Institute)

Kostis Kourelis (Connecticut College)

Matthew Milliner (Princeton University)

Mount Menoikeion near Serres preserves a rich tradition shaped around the 13th-century monastery of Saint John Prodromos. The monastery evolved into one of the major monastic centers, surviving through volatile chapters of Balkan history. It is a spectacular monument of Byzantine art and architecture surrounded by an equally spectacular natural environment. In 1986, the deteriorating architectural shell was taken over by a female community of nuns whose spiritual guide, the Athonite monk Elder Ephraim, resides in Arizona. Although reviving older Orthodox traditions, Prodromos presents intersections between Byzantine and modern realities, between monastic life and local communities, ecclesiastical authorities, productive resources and the landscape. The Program in Hellenic Studies at Princeton University established an annual field seminar to investigate the site’s complexities as exemplary of the Modern Greek condition. Since 2005, the Mount Menoikeion Workshop has brought together a diverse group of scholars and students from anthropology, archaeology, history, classical studies, religious studies and art history. Our paper concentrates on the archaeology of 19th- and 20th-century life, represented in the cultural landscape, the architecture and the artistic treasures of Mount Menoikeion.

Landscapes are the product of ecological and human processes. What to the romantic eye seems idyllic and “natural” is, in fact, the product of continuous inhabitation and exploitation. In order to read the chronological development of the monastic landscape, we have mapped all evidence of cultural activity--caves, chapels, roads, paths, fields, orchards, farm buildings, sheep pens, trash heaps, industrial installations, water channels, memorials, inscriptions, markers and quarries. The early modern landscape reveals an inherent tension between the ideal of monastic wilderness and its aggressive human exploitation. Architecturally, Mount Menoikeion contains an intricate complex of buildings emanating from the Katholikon. Additions, towers and chapels tell a story not only of Byzantine tradition, but of modern Orthodox responses to more recent challenges, including Ottoman patronage, the ravages of the Balkan Wars and the effects of World War II, which in Menoikeion took the form of a Bulgarian occupation. Of special interest are the monastery’s 19th- and 20th-century art. Byzantine art historians have traditionally ignored this period as inferior and entirely derivative. The artistic culture of Prodromos demonstrates not only a flexible multilingual visual language but also deeper insights into the Orthodox community’s negotiation on multiple fronts, from its benevolent Ottoman patrons, to its western European markets and to an independent Greek nation-state further south.

The Body of the Land and the Land as Body in Greece and Cyprus

Nassos Papalexandrou (The University of Texas at Austin)

This paper explores conceptualizations of the land as body in the Hellenic Mediterranean. The evidence for the culturally ingrained tendency of thinking the landscape in terms of somatic metaphors is variegated and richly documented from antiquity to today. It may be attributed to a cultural poetics that enabled the extravagant vision of turning Mt. Athos into a colossal image of Alexander the Great or the perennial association of landscape features with important figures of myth and legend. Somatic metaphors also are deeply embedded in everyday vocabulary as toponymical or substantive terms (e.g. Greek “rachi,” “ophrys,” “neromana” etc.). This phenomenon may derive from the perennial need of humans to create intimate bonds between themselves and their (home)lands. The projection of human categories to the surrounding inanimate world may also register a relationship of mutual respect and interdependence—values, that is, currently in crisis in an increasingly urbanized world.

However this may be, this peculiar connectedness to the land is a universal cultural phenomenon. In this paper I propose that its Hellenic inflection should be studied as such. A good case for this study is the island of Cyprus, the geomorphology of which is rich in toponyms and oral traditions. This is especially evident in the case of Mt. Pentadaktylos (or Keryneia Mountains, in the occupied territory of northern Cyprus), a special geomorphologic feature of which still embodies the memory of the epic hero Digenis Akritas—a gigantic somatic “relic” of a heroic age in the Greek history of the island. The somatic nature of this feature may have motivated a recent Turkish-Cypriot monument that takes the form of a gigantic flag on the north slope of the mountain. This gigantic sign, I argue, “brands” the land/body of Pentadaktylos as an inalienable possession even as it cries out, in image and text, an altogether new but ambivalent identity. This “branding” of the landscape is literal and metaphorical. It derives its referential capacity from the actual branding of possessions, like cattle or enslaved human beings in the past.

Nassos Papalexandrou had to withdrew his submission because of a timing conflicting, but I include the abstract because it's a fascinating paper.