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ABSTRACT
In 1961, a “Museum of the Struggle” was created to remember and glorify the heroes of the Greek Cypriot anticolonial war (1955–1959). The museum functions, this article argues, as an apparatus of hagiographical mediation, rendering for local and international publics an aura of sanctification around the war’s fallen fighters. Such an impression is generated by the museum’s spatial mise-en-scène, its progressive orientation of visitors who move through its halls, its ways of curating belongings and images of the dead, its narrative construction of the life and conduct of the fighters, and its subtle evocation of traditional saintly patronage associated with the island’s communities. Drawing on original fieldwork in Cyprus between 2012 and 2018, the article treats the musealization of the Greek-Cypriot national struggle as a tight lens through which to consider the diversity of processes by which modern Orthodox Christians in (post)colonial situations construe, commemorate, and maintain relationships with holiness. In particular, it finds that the celebration of the dead anticolonial fighters as “heromartyrs” (ērōomartyres) serves to constitute a distinctive category of Christian martyrdom that infuses a post-Byzantine martyriological identity with the imagination of ancient Greek heroic virtue and epic violence.
Acknowledgements
I thank the staff of the Struggle Museum, especially Andreas Karyos, whose identity is reproduced in this article with permission. All images (except where otherwise noted) are my own photography; permission for reproduction has been granted by the Council for the Historical Memory of the EOKA Struggle (SIMAE).
Notes
1 This attribution (from Leontios Machairas’ fifteenth-century Chronicle) was widely promoted in the 1960s by Archbishop Makarios III, in his book Cyprus the Holy Island.
2 There is a second Struggle Museum in what is now north Nicosia, presenting the Turkish experience on Cyprus as its own “national struggle” [milli mücadele] to be commemorated and celebrated. For parallels and contrasts between the two museums, see Papadakis Citation1994 and Stylianou-Lambert and Bounia Citation2016.
3 See McLuhan Citation1964, 56–61, on media as “active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms” (57); Mitchell Citation2015, 125–133, on media as a “mixture of sensory, perceptual, and semiotic elements” (129); Williams Citation1977, 158–162, on media as “form[s] of social organization” (159).
4 On how national museums must cultivate collective memories of others in order to stabilize constructions and justifications of the self (or vice versa), see Karp Citation1991, 15; Marstine Citation2006, 14; and Arnold-De Simine Citation2013, 1-2.
5 The foregoing historical summary relies on Orr Citation1918, 35–45, 160–171; Kyrris Citation1985, 314–318, 335–337; Kitromilides Citation1990, 4–10; Holland and Markides Citation2006, 162–167; Varnava Citation2009, 53; and Morgan Citation2010, 2–4.
6 Struggle Museum, “Κύπρος.” Where I cite exhibits with English names, I am quoting English text displayed in the museum; where I cite exhibits with Greek names, I am providing my own translation of Greek text displayed in the museum.
7 This is the phrase used by the museum’s founding director, Christodoulos Papachrysostomou, appealing to the families of the fighters to donate their effects: “We are absolutely certain that the Cypriot people in the same manner that contributed to our holy struggle will help us sustain through the museum the spirit of that struggle” (Papachrysostomou, translated in Koureas Citation2015, 5; emphasis mine). Cf. Papachrysostomou Citation1977, 7–11, and Citation1999, iv.429.
8 Papachrysostomou, translated in Koureas Citation2015, 4. It may be coincidental, but it is certainly an indication of the director’s family values and a fact resonant with his explicit claims as to the religious significance of the national struggle, that Papachrysostomou’s father, grandfather, and brother were all Greek Orthodox priests.
9 From a conversation on February 15, 2016.
10 Struggle Museum, “Cyprus.”
11 As Clive Gray suggests of differing analytic approaches to the political meanings of museums (Citation2015, 67), I am primarily interested here in the “implicit [hagiographical] meanings as conveyed through the ideological content of museum displays,” yet recognize no less the need to consider “overt versions of the [hagiographical use] of museums and their contents by particular sets of actors.”
12 Struggle Museum, “Ο Όρκος της Ε.Ο.Κ.Α.” The apostolic symbolism of the twelve signatories, the museum staff insist, was quite deliberate.
13 See Arnold-De Simine Citation2013, 80–83, on the use of shoes in particular as “icons of trauma” (although in this context, it seems more likely that the shoes of these leaders, neither of whom was killed in action, are more akin to contact relics than to visceral evocations of absence and haunting); cf. Williams Citation2007, 28–31.
14 These were the terms used by museum staff in conversation. Cf. Papadakis Citation1994, 401–409, on the “syntax” of the museum.
15 The sacrificial logic of the “holocaust” is derived from Leviticus and filtered through such classic hagiographies as the Martyrdom of Polycarp. For the relations between biblical sacrificial models, the theology of sacrifice in Christ, and the martyrs’ own Christomimetic sacrifice, see Young Citation1975; Castelli Citation2004; Moss Citation2010; and Salisbury Citation2004.
16 These terms and their rejection function as a crucial point of resonance with the narratives of the Ottoman-era neomartyrs, such as can be found in Nikodemos Hagiorites’ Νέον μαρτυρολόγιον. For specifics of the three “holocaust” events (the Battle of Machairas, the Battle of Liopetri, and the Battle of Dikomo), see Varnavas Citation2002, 198–201, 311–315, 325–328.
17 Only nine of the 108 EOKA dead lost their lives on the gallows, but the instrument of execution functions nonetheless as an integrating symbol of the martyriological nature of the whole Struggle.
18 Stylianou-Lambert and Bounia Citation2016 makes no overt reference to the category but does include a section (“Heroes and Martyrs,” 144–147) discussing the ways that the “national struggle” is curated in such a way as to evoke “religious experience.” Toumazis Citation2017 uses the terminology of “heroes and martyrs” (and on occasion “heroes-martyrs”), but does not theorize the category. The Greek-language texts that do make regular use of the term “ηρωoμάρτυρες” (Psillita-Iοannou 1996; Sabbidou-Theodoulou Citation2004; Stylianou and Christodoulou Citation2004; and Demetriou Citation2008) do not interrogate the category, but rather use it uncritically in the manner that it is deployed in postcolonial Cypriot society more generally: as a signal that the ethos and conduct of those who gave their lives for Cypriot “freedom” (ελευθερία) or “liberation” (απελευθερώση) are worthy of glorification and martyriological appropriation by subsequent generations. The term “heromartyrs” itself, in other words, is deployed in a recognizably hagiographical way for recognizably hagiographical purposes (for instance, “to stimulate the ethical sensibility [το εθνικό φρόνημα] of our people” [Psillita-Ioannou 1996, 8]), yet it has not been theorized as such.
19 See also Papadakis Citation1998, 154–156 (on Hellenism as synchronic, diachronic, and religious); Kitromilides Citation2010 (on the tension between appeals to ancient Greece and to medieval Byzantium in the pre-national Greek intellectual debates); Kalaitzidis Citation2012, 65–71 (for a more pointed reading of the fusion of Orthodox identity with national identity as an evacuation of the former to make room for the latter); and Grigoriadis Citation2013, 25–33 (on the intra-nationalist debates over this synthesis).
20 Struggle Museum, “Ο Όρκος της Ε.Ο.Κ.Α.” Cf. Papachrysostomou Citation1999, IV.446-48.
21 See again Hollander Citation2018, 434–446 (and 234–240 for a specifically Cypriot example), on the hagiographical “transposed seeing” that apprehends situations of earthly failure through the imagination of spiritual victory. Cf. Papadakis Citation1994, 407, on the museum’s negotiation of the EOKA struggle’s lack of closure.
22 The rhetorical contrast between “listeners” and “imitators” of the saints was commonplace in early Christian hagiographical homiletics. The Struggle Museum participates in the cultivation of this binary by promoting its narrative (and having its narrative promoted by the Greek-Cypriot secondary school system) as a heritage to which each generation is bound by duty to cultivate in itself. See Papadakis Citation1994, 414–415; Koureas Citation2015, 8–9; Stylianou-Lambert and Bounia Citation2016, 47–49, 60–67; and Farmaki and Antoniou Citation2017, 179–183.
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Aaron T. Hollander
Aaron Hollander is a scholar of interreligious relations and contextual theologies, with a center of gravity in Orthodox Christianity and emphases on lived religion and the entanglements of material and intellectual culture. His current research concerns the mediation of holiness and the relations between hagiography and politics. He holds a PhD from the University of Chicago, an MPhil from Trinity College Dublin, and a BA from Swarthmore College. Formerly an instructor of classics and religious studies at DePaul University (Chicago), he is now Associate Director of the Graymoor Ecumenical & Interreligious Institute (New York) and Affiliated Faculty at the Centro Pro Unione (Rome). [email protected]