A tale of two cities: Athens, Thessaloniki and the incorporation of Byzantium in the Greek national imagination

The nation-building project in nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury Greece was accompanied by dramatic changes in urban spaces. The refurbishing of existing cities and the making of new settlements, characterized by regularized, Hippodamian plans and rebuilt along classical lines, was meant to create a rupture with the Ottoman past and signal the country’s Westernization. This programme finds its clearest expression in the building of New Athens, adorned with neoclassical buildings and purified from what was considered as extraneous to Greek identity. Hence, Byzantine and later buildings were condemned to demolition to recreate a homogeneous classical and neoclassical urban landscape meant to provide a sense of continuity between the new-born Greek state and the glory of Ancient Greece. Only from the moment that Byzantium was accepted as a legitimate component of national history were Byzantine monuments protected as national monuments. The incorporation of imperial narratives in modern Greek ideology and political discourse as well as the military engagement of the nation in Crete, Epirus Macedonia, Thrace and Asia Minor were decisive factors in the rehabilitation of the Byzantine past and heritage, which were exploited to substantiate ethnic and territorial claims. The annexation of Macedonia in the Balkan Wars and the rebuilding of Thessaloniki after the Great Fire of 1917 offered the chance for the creation of a new, monumental landscape, in which the presence of Byzantine monuments materialized this new synthesis, bridging the gaps in national historical time.