The EU membership in 1981 rekindled debates about the country’s position between East and West. Religion, art and history, the core areas of “active cultural memory” according to A. Assmann, became the spearhead of the tensions between Greekness and the others, and a defensive mechanism since the late 2000, when the profound economic crisis shook the Greek society.
Since the 1980s, the landscape of Athens turned into a powerful, orchestrated mnemonic device. Due to the already existing intensive collective affect, the imagery of the Acropolis and iconic 19th century neoclassic buildings in the urban space became the backdrop for symbolic enactments of national and cultural identities during major cultural events. They became the “figures of memory” that sustained the “dominant narrator” rhetoric, and produced a sense of cultural superiority within the Greek society.
The paper will refer to the concepts of ‘heroism’ and ‘distinction’, used by the hegemonic political elites since the 1970s, as salient mechanisms for collective behavioral regulation. It will argue that the potent emotional impact of belonging nourished the division with – and the exclusion of – the other and impeded Greek society from reacting beyond the soothing myths that ‘safeguard’ the cultural and national integrity.
