“Your long-standing research on modern Greece has brought forth the particular condition which the Greek state seems to be under since its creation in the 19th century: a sense of cultural ambiguity, along with an ostentatious adherence to western ideological precepts. To what extent do you consider this ambivalence relevant today?
I think the best way to answer is by means of language. Nowadays virtually no one speaks katharevousa or uses it consistently in writing, but it is always present, an ever-present and often ironic echo that can be used to claim authority, signal pomposity in an interlocutor, or simply to satisfy some criterion of elegance and balance in a sentence. It’s also more evident in formal situations – legal or bureaucratic documentation, for example. So while we can say that this artificial neo-classical language is no longer either the official language of the country or a regular mode of communication, it’s also true that it constantly reappears to tease our historical sensibilities and our sense of linguistic propriety. You can say much the same about the dual modalities of Greekness that emerged with Independence and formed the basis of most debates on the subject at least up to the fall of the military junta in 1974 – the tension between the Hellenic and Romeic models. To be sure, the latter term is heard less and less, but the sense of Greekness that most people seem to assume, more or less unconsciously most of the time, is the Romeic one, although the Western-inspired understanding of Greece’s classical roots remains to some extent in tension with this “culturally intimate” version of Greekness as well as with elements that have genuinely and undeniably persisted from ancient times though perhaps with forms, meanings, and geographical relevance very different from what the pre-1974 ultra-conservatives, for example, would ever have realized or admitted. As Greece today settles to its new role as a shining example (in a world showing signs of increasing authoritarianism) of a truly workable democracy, despite the flaws that many Greeks themselves admit, Greeks seem increasingly comfortable with a history that isn’t all helmets and heroism – that even embraces values and practices of which some Western Europeans would disapprove. Greeks today are asserting collective and individual dignity through new forms of inclusiveness and solidarity that also allow them to recognize cultural traces of the non-Western “other” in themselves. I think that this more relaxed understanding of their identity goes hand-in-hand with the strengthening of democratic institutions – especially the all-important alternation of parties of honestly differing ideological stripe, something that many Western countries are failing to achieve a comparable degree – and with the withering of the strident nationalism that in the past has so greatly embarrassed the country and made it vulnerable to geo-political pressures exerted by its so-called allies and protectors.”
