Philippe Jockey

 

This 25-minute documentary, produced by UNESCO in 1977, was made just four years after the fall of colonels’ regime in Greece. This dictatorship had taken the reins of power in 1967 after a coup d’état. It shows the anxious concern of an international institution over the very symbol of Western civilization, the Athena Acropolis, and its first monument, the Parthenon. The UNESCO logo, shown at the beginning of the movie, is a stylized Greek temple façade and is a clear allusion to the Parthenon. It has been at the heart of European concern since travelers wandering through Greece in the quest to glimpse its glorious past rediscovered it in the eighteenth century. Pollution of all kinds, due to the demographic boom that has characterized Greece since the 1960’s and that has drawn more than one fifth of the population to live in Athens threatens the integrity of the monument. It attacks the outer layer of Pentelic marble, altering its aspect and blackening it, which constitutes the ultimate assault against the very symbol of the white Greece, this Greek Miracle lauded by Renan in his famous Prayer on the Acropolis (1865-1876-1883). Indeed, this general theme with the slogan “Save the Acropolis” is far from new. In fact, it’s been at the core of European nations’ talks since the end of the eighteenth centuries, justifying the mutilation of its sculpted decors, displayed in the largest European museums (The Louvre and the British Museum), bolstered by the exaltation of classic Greek civilization, melded here within Pericles’s Athena (circa 5^th century BC) and his literary, artistic and philosophic works. This focus on Athena, spoken by Athenian statesmen themselves in a famous speech reported by the Greek historian Thucydides and given at the beginning of the Peloponnese war between Greece and Sparta (431-404 BC) constitutes the main part of this documentary. It expresses, through the celebration of Athenian productions, this Western fascination that some have called “Greek mirage”. The presentation of active policies to protect the sculpted remains of the Acropolis by the Greek themselves, as shown in the case of the Erechtheion Caryatids is a decisive stage in the contemporary history of the restoration of ancient monuments, Greek in particular. It particularly underlines the new position given to artists, sculptors and moulders who are shown in the movie. In this short film, we can hear the metaphor of a wish spoken by an undisputed international organism: to see the Greeks take the reins of their own destinies, the destiny of their heritage, formerly political, just four years after toppling the colonels’ regime. This theme is still current today and the restoration works on the Acropolis are busier than ever.

 

Bibliography :

 

Sophie Basch, Le Mirage grec. La Grèce moderne devant l'opinion française.
(1846-1946), Paris, Paris, 1995.

Sophie Basch (dir.), La métamorphose des ruines, École française d'Athènes (coll. Champs helléniques modernes), Athènes, 2004.

Philippe Jockey, Le mythe de la Grèce blanche, Paris, Belin, 2013.