Local Performance in the Construction of National Identity

Abstract

In this article, the author studies the local response to the nation-building process that constructs society, its space, and history, by focusing on the particular case of Greece in the nineteenth century. How local inhabitants actively participated in this process is discussed in the example of the Plaka district on the northern slope of the Athenian Acropolis. The author argues that mutual relations among modernization, Hellenization, and living tradition constructed modern Greece as a new nation in the nineteenth century. The official efforts toward Hellenization and modernization with the emphasis on classical antiquity gave rise to the emergence of alternative tendencies that were shaped by the local inhabitants according to the way they perceived society and experienced space. The author’s focus in this article, then, turns to nineteenth-century houses in Plaka as a folk expression of the official neoclassical style to discuss the local performance in the construction of a national identity.