Local Performance in the Construction of National Identity: Plaka District of Athens during the Nineteenth Century

Date

2012-01-01

Author

Gur, Berin F.

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

58
views

0
downloads

In this article, the author studies the local response to the nation-building process that constructs society, its space, and history, by focusing on the particular case of Greece in the nineteenth century. How local inhabitants actively participated in this process is discussed in the example of the Plaka district on the northern slope of the Athenian Acropolis. The author argues that mutual relations among modernization, Hellenization, and living tradition constructed modern Greece as a new nation in the nineteenth century. The official efforts toward Hellenization and modernization with the emphasis on classical antiquity gave rise to the emergence of alternative tendencies that were shaped by the local inhabitants according to the way they perceived society and experienced space. The author's focus in this article, then, turns to nineteenth-century houses in Plaka as a folk expression of the official neoclassical style to discuss the local performance in the construction of a national identity.

Subject Keywords

Urbanism and architecture in Greece, National identity, Neoclassicism, Nineteenth-century nation building in Greece, Nineteenth-century houses in Plaka, Athens

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/63969

Journal

JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144211420639

Collections

Department of Architecture, Article

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Architecture and public dialogue : an evaluation of the role of architecture centers Demirel, Buket; Erkılıç, Mualla; Department of Architecture (2005) This thesis points out the transformation in the visions of architectural institutions about architecture-public dialogue, the interrelations of architect-client to architecture-the public, in a historical perspective. It states that architecture center as a phenomenon has been emerged with the transformation of the consideration of the functions of architectural institutions from merely guaranteeing competence and integrity to stimulating awareness, accessibility, participation and collaboration of both pr...
Tourism Architecture in Alanya-Turkey in the Second Half of the 20th Century Döngül, Bengüsu; Altan, Tomris Elvan; Department of History of Architecture (2022-6-15) This research focuses on the relation between tourism and architecture in the case of Alanya-Turkey during the second half of the 20th century. The town of Alanya was an important center for coastal tourism in the so-called “Turkish Riviera” from the mid-20th century onwards. By surveying particular tourism facilities that were built in the period from the 1950s to the 1990s from pensions and hotels in the city center to motels and mocamps along the motorway, and holiday villages and summer houses in the pe...
An analysis of the conservation of the twentieth century architectural heritage in Turkey : the case of Ankara Elmas, Nimet; Altan, Tomris Elvan; Department of History of Architecture (2005) This thesis examines the twentieth century architecture from the perspective of conservation. The criteria of conservation have changed as the idea of conserving a single monument has progressed into the acceptance of the need to conserve different cultural properties and the field has been enriched with new notions, such as the twentieth century architectural heritage. The main concern in this thesis is to present these current debates about and developments in the conservation of the twentieth century arc...
Environmental aesthetics of the rural architectural tradition in the Mediterranean highlander settlement: the case study of Ürünlü Kavas, Kemal Reha; Erzen, Jale Adile; Department of History of Architecture (2009) This thesis formulates a conceptual framework to account for the rural architectural traditions. The proposal is presented by referring to Ürünlü, a Mediterranean highland settlement in Southwestern Turkey. The thesis' basic assumption is the environmental coherence of the traditional rural culture. Environmental aesthetics provides the conceptual basis through which architectural elements of the environmental coherence are investigated. Environmental aesthetics enhances the inclusive conceptions of "enviro...
Architecture, revolution and temporality: the Soviet avant-garde and the politics of modernism Demirok, Görkem; Sargın, Güven Arif; Department of Architecture (2017) This study aims to present a political re-reading of modernism and the Soviet Avant-garde through their conceptualizations of temporality. To that end, affirmative and negative characteristics of modernism and the avant-garde in their relation to modernity and the capitalist mode of production are examined, and their over-identification with capitalism is questioned. Thereafter, the Soviet context of modernism and the avant-garde are analyzed through the temporal conception of Bolshevism. The study claims t...

Citation Formats

B. F. Gur, “Local Performance in the Construction of National Identity: Plaka District of Athens during the Nineteenth Century,” JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY, pp. 39–70, 2012, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/63969.