Flying Greece: Olympic Airways as infrastructure of representation, 1957–2006

The article examines how Olympic Airways (OA) helped produce Greece as both a tourist destination and a national image between 1957 and 2006. Drawing on a corpus of 585 domestic and international advertisements and on sustained coverage in the Greek, British, American, and French press, it argues that the flag carrier functioned as an infrastructure of representation: a linked system of routes, aircraft, employees, services, and images through which particular versions of Greece were made visible and materially accessible. OA’s claims carried unusual credibility because they could be purchased as tickets and tested through travel. Across private ownership under Aristotle Onassis, dictatorship, nationalisation, and European integration, the constituencies entitled to hold the airline to account multiplied while the authority to judge its national mission shifted from advertisement to audit. When such an infrastructure breaks down, the article concludes, it does not cease to represent: its breakdown itself becomes a representation of the nation.