Reinventing Paradise: the Greek Crisis and contemporary British travel narratives

Abstract

In the second half of the twentieth century Greece became a subject for travel writers in search of a European ‘Paradise’. But ‘Hell’ was also to be found in Greece, often in the form of frustrations over allegedly ‘non-European’ standards of living, facilities, and attitudes. A sample of travel narratives published between 2006 and 2014 suggests the extent to which, in the light of the ‘Greek Crisis’, twenty-first-century writers are abandoning these formerly conventional themes. There is now the potential for the realignment of narratives, with Greece becoming the Hell, rather than the Heaven, of Europe.

Notes

1 D. Wills, The Mirror of Antiquity: 20^th Century British Travellers in Greece (Newcastle 2007) 82ff.

2 P. Anderson, Dolphin Days: A Writer's Notebook on Mediterranean Pleasures (London 1963) 95, 154.

3 Á. Quintana, ‘Travelling through discourse, discoursing on travel: recent writing on travel literature and British travellers in Mexico’, Studies in Travel Writing 5 (2001) 172‒88, here 173.

4 W. Russell, Shirley Valentine and One for the Road (London 1988) 30.

5 P. Lloyd (director), Mamma Mia! The Movie (2008).

6 L. Durrell, Prospero's Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corcyra (London 1945) 11.

7 E. Keeley, Inventing Paradise: The Greek Journey 1937–47 (New York 1999).

8 Quoted in Keeley, Inventing Paradise, 146, 26.

9 Wills, The Mirror of Antiquity, 27‒8.

10 D. Wills, ‘British accounts of residency in Greece 1945–2004’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 23 (2005) 177‒97.

11 Keeley, Inventing Paradise, 114.

12 D. MacCannell, The Tourist: A New History of the Leisure Class (London 1976); J. Urry, Consuming Places (London 1995) 144‒5.

13 E. John, Time after Earthquake: An Adventure among Greek Islands in August, 1953 (London 1954) 127.

14 R. Payne, The Isles of Greece (London 1965) 1.

15 V. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 4, 1931–1935, ed. A. Olivier Bell (Harmondsworth 1983) 94.

16 Durrell, Prospero's Cell, 18.

17 R. Bray and V. Raitz, Flight to the Sun: The Story of the Holiday Revolution (London 2001) 196.

18 S. Wheeler, Evia: Travels on an Undiscovered Island (London 2007, first published 1992) 1.

19 A Place in the Sun (June 2006) 170.

20 K. O'Reilly, The British on the Costa del Sol (London 2000) 135.

21 D. Wills, ‘Ancient sites, modern eyesores? The transformation of the city of Athens in English-language accounts (1945–2005)’, Kambos: Cambridge Papers in Modern Greek 14 (2006) 103‒27.

22 T. Stone, The Summer of my Greek Tavérna (New York 2002) 121.

23 N. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, French Images from the Greek War of Independence, 1821–1830 (New Haven and London 1989) 28.

24 Wills, The Mirror of Antiquity, 100‒4.

25 B. Church, Always on a Sunday: An Englishman in Greece (Athens 2002) 5.

26 C. Brechneff, with T. Lovejoy, The Greek House: The Story of a Painter's Love Affair with the Island of Sifnos (New York 2013) 9.

27 P. Levi, The Hill of Kronos (London 1983) 149.

28 Brechneff, The Greek House, 101.

29 D. Roessel, In Byron's Shadow: Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination (Oxford 2003) 275.

30 C. M. Woodhouse, The Rise and Fall of the Greek Colonels (London 1985) 59.

31 Levi, The Hill of Kronos, 189.

32 J. Skinner, ‘Introduction: writings on the dark side of travel’, Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing 11.1 (2010) 1‒28, here 3‒4.

33 Joanna Lumley's Greek Odyssey (ITV1, 2011), episode 1.

34 P. J. O'Rourke, Holidays in Hell (New York 1988) 1, 10.

35 K. Daskala, ‘Victoria Hislop's “The Island” (2005): the reception and impact of a publishing phenomenon in Greece’, paper given at conference ‘Greece and Britain in Women's Literary Imagination’, Selwyn College, Cambridge, 12 April 2013.

36 Personal communication with Victoria Hislop, 17 May 2014.

37 Leaflet Political Tours, 2014.

38 http://www.politicaltours.com/tours/tour-greece-the-euro/, accessed 11 May 2014.

39 Skinner, ‘Introduction: writings on the dark side of travel’, 5.

40 Skinner, ‘Introduction: writings on the dark side of travel’, 4.

41 G. Tzogopoulos, ‘Interpreting the Greek Crisis from a British media perspective’, in D. Wills (ed.), Greece and Britain Since 1945, 2^nd edn (Newcastle 2014) 191‒201.

42 J. Shaw, Talking to Zeus: My Year in a Greek Garden (London 2010) 9, 25.

43 Ibid., 21.

44 Ibid., 117, 44.

45 Ibid., 89, 121.

46 Ibid., 248, 157.

47 Ibid., 320‒1.

48 Ibid., 327.

49 Ibid., 145, 341.

50 Ibid., 342, 354.

51 E. Goldsworthy, A Flat-Pack in Greece (Ceredigion 2006) 7.

52 Ibid., 30.

53 Ibid., 10

54 Ibid., 23.

55 Ibid., 70.

56 Ibid., 31.

57 Ibid., 94.

58 Ibid., 40.

59 Ibid., 9.

60 Ibid., 20.

61 Ibid., 143

62 Ibid., 34.

63 Ibid., 141.

64 Ibid., 98.

65 Ibid., 140.

66 Ibid., 139‒40.

67 H. Bucknall, In the Dolphin's Wake: Cocktails, Calamities and Caiques in the Greek Islands (London 2011) 17.

68 E. Enfield, Greece on my Wheels (Chichester 2003); C. Somerville, The Golden Step: A Walk Through the Heart of Crete (London 2007).

69 Bucknall, In the Dolphin's Wake, 296, 83.

70 Ibid., 296, 195.

71 Ibid., 69.

72 Ibid., 148.

73 Ibid., 83.

74 Ibid., 64.

75 Ibid., 53.

76 Ibid., 75, 88.

77 Ibid., 99, 71.

78 Ibid., 15.

79 Ibid., 86, 37.

80 Ibid., 37‒8.

81 Ibid., 25.

82 J. Barclay, Falling in Honey: Life and Love on a Greek Island (Chichester 2013) 281.

83 Ibid., 82.

84 Ibid., 128.

85 Ibid., 13.

86 Ibid., 22.

87 Ibid., 35.

88 Ibid., 48.

89 Ibid., 229.

90 Ibid., 231.

91 Ibid., 75.

92 Ibid., 25, 67.

93 Ibid., 27.

94 Ibid., 57.

95 Ibid., 192.

96 Ibid., 26.

97 Ibid., 49.

98 Ibid., 91, 112.

99 Ibid., 258.

100 Ibid., 16, 17.

101 Ibid., 245.

102 M. McGinn, Things Can Only Get Feta: Two Journalists and their Crazy Dog Living Through the Greek Crisis (London 2013) 67.

103 Ibid., 12.

104 Ibid., 13.

105 Ibid., 15.

106 Ibid., 12.

107 Ibid., 91.

108 Ibid., 306.

109 Ibid., 305‒6.

110 Ibid., 123.

111 Ibid., 59.

112 Ibid., 229.

113 Ibid., 306.

114 Ibid., 126, 229. McGinn has written a sequel which was published too late (April 2015) to be fully considered here. Homer's Where the Heart Is: Two Journalists, One Crazy Dog and a Love Affair with Greece (ebook 2015) reveals the consequences of austerity measures in 2011 and 2012 for the residents of the Mani, and explicitly finds parallels with the oppression and protest the author witnessed during the period of the Colonels.

115 For example, P. Markaris, Che Committed Suicide, translated by D. Connolly (London 2009).

116 P. Johnston, The White Sea (Sutton 2014) 70, 44.

117 Johnston, The White Sea, 238.

118 Personal communication with Peter Mackridge, 28 June 2014.

119 L. Kanaris, Codename Xenophon (Sawtry 2014) 10.

120 Ibid., 240.

121 M. Leigh, The Wrong Shade of Yellow (2014) 83.

122 Barclay, Falling in Honey, 241.

123 M. Lowen, ‘Tourists return as austerity-hit Greece emerges from crisis', BBC News, 25 June 2014, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-27989995.