To make a land Hellenic: toward a national(ist) landscape in southern Macedonia, 1896–1932

ABSTRACT

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Greek state engaged in a campaign that opted to present southern Macedonia as a genuinely Hellenic space. The goal was to inhibit rival national discourses that emphasized the primordial presence of non-Greek ethnic groups in the province which legitimized expansionist claims by other states. To achieve this, many Greek governments at the time employed agents and institutions who used three devices to spatialize the Hellenic past of the province: Travelogues, monuments, and excavations. This paper explores and assesses their impact on defining southern Macedonia as a Greek land.

KEYWORDS:

• Macedonia
• nationalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

George L. Vlachos

George L. Vlachos is a post-doc researcher, currently cooperating with the National Hellenic Research Foundation. His Bachelor was on Political Science. Deciding to continue on a different academic track, Vlachos went on to earn his Master of Arts in History, from Leiden University in 2014. In 2015 he was admitted to the European University Institute, more specifically in the ‘Department of History and Civilization’. For the next four years and under the supervision of Prof. Pieter M. Judson, Vlachos worked on a socio-environmental history of modern southern Macedonia that aspired to establish a link between the transformation of the environment and the rise of nationalism in Greece. His Thesis is titled ‘Where the Nation would Dwell: The Hellenization of southern Macedonia 1913–1940’ and was defended successfully in 2019.