The saddest words of tongue or pen,

are these, my dear, "Southeast European historiography"

Sorry to destroy one of the most beautiful quotes of all time there, but I can't help myself. Just got back from Greece (a day or so later than planned...who would've guessed that the weekend between Kurban Bayram and Christmas is a bad weekend to travel?) and I'm more than a bit excited to be back in Turkey. I practically kissed the Ataturk poster(s) at the Istanbul airport.

It wasn't as if there was a One Thing that made me lose it...though it might have been the middle-aged man in a miniskirt walking down our hotel's street. Or the drunk and bruised Irish sailor pontificating on the American education sailor. But it wasn't about the people, who were generally incredibly friendly (and spoke a whole lot more English than I do Greek). More just the way that all of those beloved ruins are represented in Thessaloniki and Athens (I can't speak for the rest of Greece, which I realize is really petty and it isn't fair to say "I've been to Greece" when I've been to two cities and a port...but oh well).

Basically, wrap your head around this concept. History is not always fact. Fact can be twisted into any which way you want. And in a country like Greece that was founded on the premise of having an Ancient and Illustrious past, the present conflicts seem to be a bit more confusing. "Who are we?" is never as strongly represent as "Who were we?" I don't think, so when the country is trying to fit its way into the contemporary world order, things can get nasty.

And also, the past can be explained away using anything. Ethnicity is fluid, of course. Are Modern Greeks related to Ancient Greeks? This is debatable (this article has one of my more favorite wikipedia quotes, "The star of Vergina applies to the 3rd century BC northern Greece - a very different situation, not related to the 21st century AD. I think it's modern politics, and we're witnessing the use of an archaeological symbol for history that it's really not related to.") And hey, the Ancient Greeks even somehow got claimed by the Nazi Party...at least they were more acceptable than Slavs or Jews, as a whole lot of the latter found out in 1942.

By the way, don't try and swing that last bit into "Greeks are Nazis", ok? Thanks.

So the Acropolis? Covered in concrete casts and scaffolding. It reminded me a lot of The City of Fallen Angels, about the burning down of a famous opera house in Venice. It was rebuilt in the name of "As it was, where it was," but HOW was it? Something like the Acropolis has been around for millenia...which version of it do you accept as the True version? Sure, "The Ancient Greek" version seems to make sense, but the Acropolis, like Rome, wasn't built in a day. And should millenia of Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Italian, and everyone else's history just be erased? Can one do that in good conscience? These are not questions to be glossed over, right? I mean, a lot of different folks happened to be in Greece at a lot of different times. What does it say about us, as a people, to ignore the contributions of our coinhabitants? Isn't this, like, bad?

Maybe this is just the American in me. Bigger, Faster Stronger and all. But embracing innovation has to be a good thing. Despite what Walter Sobchak might have you believe, it is not a good thing to be living in the past (Greeks may disagree, however, with the theory that at least National Socialism is an ethos). But in that book about the Venice Opera House, there's a pretty rad quote in it. Dino Vallatico (I don't know who he is either, don't worry) said that, "the city should have had the nerve to build a completely new theater; Venice betrayed its innovative past by ignoring it."

Anybody who has seen Athens would agree with this. The Greek Orthodox Cathedral is incredibly unattractive (since they couldn't fit it into the Classical Greece motif...and I can't find it on wiki, sorry) and the modern city is, well, smoggy, claustrophobic, and full of depressing poverty. Sometimes, I think, the best way to celebrate the past is by looking into the future. Think of it this way: Turks don't celebrate Sultanahmet, they celebrate Taksim square. English folks don't look at the Tower of London the same way they look at the London Eye. This is why the Freedom Tower is the center of so much debate; it represents the first Big Step Foward in American Symbolic Architecture...what are we going to do with it?

The past is gone. Embrace it, but move on. I realize this isn't the greatest thing a history major should say in order to gain better job prospects, but hey. I think of history as a reference to the future. As one of my best professors said, the past is studied in order to explain what the future should look like. This is true, and it explains one of the things I am most fascinated with; bad history. Using any combination of sources, analysis, and big words, any sort of current event or future desire can be explained as completely, 100%, logical. We all have seen this, whether or not we know it. It's why archaeology is so fraught with problems (and why, ostensibly, countries don't allow you to take stuff out from their borders).

We all have been lied to by history before. It's ok. We all tend to perpetuate these lies. We don't know any better. How we interpret the past isn't worth getting worked up about, unless you're going to do it for a living, I guess. But what we all do with it, I think, is really important. We can't afford to live in the past and not look at what the future will think of US. We really ought to be continually getting better, right? The one thing that caught me comparing Greece to Turkey is that Turkey is optimistic, Turks are looking foward to a better future for them and their kids. Greeks seem to be in more of a "woohoo! We're in the EU! now what?" sort of mode. Not that I'm at all accomplished or learned enough to make this sort of generalisation. But yeah, let's look towards the future, and learn from our history (or histories) to create a better future. That sounds nice, right?

I started with a quote, I might as well end with one. Even if it is Nietsche. I didn't spell his name right, and I don't care.
“I love the great despisers. Man is something that hath to be surpassed."