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Before moving away, it had never crossed my mind, that it was important, or that it was a part of me. An identity marker, self-evident and pervasive, is not apparent, or relevant, while language and place remain coherent. It is the act of a kind of a displacement that triggers and later cultivates the realization and confrontation with the identity, that not only shapes the self but projects collective memory and meaning. The question ‘where do you come from?’ emerges only when at least one, either language or place, is missing. I can easily answer the question each time, but gradually my identity marker that until recently was lying inactive, started to reflect on my situatedness regarding my origins and my present.

 I always had a strong distaste to any expression of nationhood, usually condemning it as a frayed ideal of the nostalgics or worse, the nationalists. The generations of my parents and grandparents, I have always justified, for still believing in the consistency of a national identity, and I usually explained it as a sentimental reaction after intense experiences, indicative of the unrest history of Greece in the 20th century. Nevertheless, the issue is a lot more complicated, and deeply convoluted within social processes and power regimes.

 For any given individual, at any given moment, certain territorial and demographic referents exist. These might change in time, but their existence in discrete slices of space-time remains and shapes an identity. In this regard, it seems impossible to opt out of nationhood. Given the fact that there are more than 200 distinct politically defined entities – usually referred to as ‘nation-states’ – it is highly unlikely to be born outside of the jurisdiction of one of them. However, a term that derives from nationhood, but entails a lot more complicated meanings and implications, is the one of ‘national identity’, which signifies one’s attachment to a nation; As social beings who thrive in the presence of others, ‘we invoke national identity as an anchor that provides emotional stability, historical durability and a strong sense of ontological security’[1]; but ‘often national identity is a residual concept utilised by social actors to make objective material order consistent with their subjective experience of that order’[2].

 How people then, come to assume and then inhabit national identities? Initially, the term sounds obsolete and irrelevant, considering the contemporary landscape - at least in the western wold – of globalization and open borders. One consequence of the increased mobility of people is the creation of hybrid identities that suggest the idea of belonging to multiple places at the same time. Yet, the understanding of the people who inhabit such identities, should take into consideration the fact that ‘the ability to deploy multiple, fluid identities in and of itself is a privilege of mobilization that has a specific relationship to power’[3], and certainly, the same narrative cannot account for the people who are forcibly and violently displaced. Could it be then merely a sense of belonging and sharing a common past? A sentiment, as Guibernau suggests? This can hardly be the case, since national identity, related unavoidably to nationalism, has the capacity to generate explosive consequences. What kind of influence does it have on our actions and our understanding about who we are?

 Quite often a neglected aspect or taboo and in other instances, a reason of exclusion, the notion of ‘national identity’ has dominated discourse in politics, ethnology, sociology, geography and other disciplines that have accentuated its significance as a central ontological and epistemological category of modern life.

[1] Siniša Maleševič, "The Chimera Of National Identity". Nations and Nationalism 17.2 (2011): 272-290. Web, p.287

[2] Ibid., p.273

[3] Miwon Kwon, "One Place After Another: Notes On Site Specificity", October 80 (1997): 85, doi:10.2307/778809.

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Cultural objects are historical resources for identity. A group of cultural objects that are available to me, and actually quite familiar, are located at the Duveen Gallery, in Room 18 of the British Museum; namely the gallery that accommodates the Parthenon Marbles. Despite being a cliché and saturated topic, the debate around the right to the sculptures of the Parthenon can provide insights to the complex processes that form identities.

 I think of my site as a ‘topos’, ‘τόπος κοινός’, which can be translated as ‘common place’, and refers to the reworking of standardized or traditional material in order to build an argument, in literary studies and in rhetoric. This explains largely why I hold no arguments in favour or against the repatriation. And I am very well aware that unintentionally, my views, but also hints of identity, are projected on the site as well as on this text; however, the point is not to write an objective history or provide answers to such a complicated issue, but to tell stories that lie besides it, which I believe are relevant and meaningful to where I/we am/are today. This is a story that I have brought with me, and it is not objective and fully representative of the opposing arguments, because it can’t be. Because I am not interested in postulating a critique, nor solving the debate. And because, when I was prompted to do a piece of site-writing, my physical presence was already inside the site and I could not help to build on this dynamic correlation and realize, that after all, I share a kind of displacement, like the objects that I was looking at. So, this is a story that I share.

 The repatriation claim of the Parthenon Sculptures or Parthenon Marbles is one of the most famous cases of return and restitution. The controversy begins, when the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Thomas Bruce, the Seventh Earl of Elgin, requested from the Turkish authorities to remove the sculptures from the Parthenon. At the time, Greek people were under Ottoman occupation. Elgin offered valuable assistance to the Ottoman empire in the French-Turkish war and after negotiations with the authorities, he managed to obtain a permit or ‘firman’, that allowed him to remove the sculptures from the Parthenon.

 From 1801 to 1804, Elgin shipped to Britain almost half of the surviving sculptures, that remained in his possession until 1816. That year, he sold the sculptures to the British government in order to be relieved from personal debts. The Select Committee of the House of Commons debated the issue and finally voted in favour of the acquisition of the sculptures. Since then, the sculptures are considered public property and are exhibited in the British Museum.

 In the 1980s, Greece initiated a campaign for the repatriation of the sculptures. Ever since, the issue has been a point of polarisation and a subject of diplomatic negotiations between Greece and the UK. The debate, despite frequently restricting itself in nationalist claims or colonial attitudes of superiority, still raises important and difficult issues concerning identity, cultural property, memory, patrimony and authority. And it is because of their physical location which is questioned and marked as a ‘displacement’, that puts forward the question of who has the right to preserve, exhibit and interpret cultural heritage.

 My background influences critically my relationship with the space, since the Parthenon constitutes an essential part of the national Greek narrative. In the Greek consciousness, it maintains a symbolic connection to a glorious past and constitutes an unchangeable part of the Athenian landscape. ‘The Parthenon Marbles evoke the idea of diachronic identity, the sense of permanence and continuity in time’[1], the displacement of the sculptures has disrupted the collective memory of identity and remains as a problematic and unresolved aspect of the Greek cultural history.

  For the modern Greeks, Parthenon, and by extension the Parthenon Marbles, ‘constitute not only the foundation of nationhood, but also have become the symbols of Greece’s hybrid architectural and cultural identity’. It is true that after the establishment of the modern Greek state, the cultural and national identity had to be redefined; not only due to the then-recent independence that came after 400 years of occupation, but also due to the country’s geographical position that had always placed ‘Greekness’ at the crossroads between East and West. Gaston Deschamp, an archaeologist of the French School in Athens, noted in 1892 the duality of the Greek identity: ‘the Greek wants to adapt to the European customs while simultaneously [keeping] the originality peculiar to his race. His pride urges him to imitate the Western manners and modes. At the same time however, he preserves an old fund of tenderness for the local traditions, from which he would part with difficulty[2]’.

For every community or nation, the common recollections of the past, reinforced by cultural objects or rituals, which their members recognize and identify with, create the idea of a collective identity and a shared historical consciousness, which in turn have the capacity to promote unity and interrelation, what Ernest Renan famously called ‘avoir fait de grandes choses ensemble, et vouloir en faire encore’[1]. In the case of Greece, the base for this construction was classical heritage that served as a confirmation of a continuous national narrative, with particular emphasis placed on architecture.

 Interestingly, the initiation of the public debate for the restitution of the Marbles by the Greek government, coincided with the accession of Greece to the European Economic Community, the precedent of the European Union. In 1981, Greece became the tenth member of the Community. Three years later, the Greek claim for restitution of the Marbles began, with Melina Merkouri, the then-Minister of Culture, who first opened the debate of legal ownership. Greece at the time was experiencing the first decade of democracy after the fall of the military dictatorship in 1974. The temporal interrelation of these two political actions, the first steps to be acknowledged as part of a post-national project on one hand, and a reinforcement of the collective memory based on historic consciousness on the other, seems paradoxical, however, it is indicative of the social and political actors that have formulated the foundations of the contemporary Greek national identity.

[1] Translation= having done great things together and wishing to do more

[1] Vassiliki Kynourgiopoulou, “National Identity Interrupted: The Mutilation of the Parthenon Marbles and the Greek Claim for Repatriation”, Louise Tythacott and Kostas Arvanitis, Museums And Restitution (London: Routledge, 2016), p.157

[2] ibid.,

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Indeed, already from the beginning of the 20th century, ‘Europeanization’ had been the overarching theme of the modernization processes in Greece, so that along with the growth of the modern Greek identity, a European one was being formed. The entry to the European Union, which still remains the principal force of European integration, has accelerated that process. The EU, a ‘Kantian illusion’ of cosmopolitanism and idealism, started as an economic project that responded to the emergent global capitalist economy with the aim to Europeanize the capital. At the same time, it was inextricably linked with an ideological project of the Europeanization of the nations. Emerging as a post-war project intended to establish peace and stability among nations that for centuries were entangled in local rivalries, the EU has embraced the Promethean role of promoting and overcoming constraints of national borders and interests. Along with the broadly common ideology of anti-nationalism, social democracy, and environmentalism, EU ideology demands a mutual limitation of sovereignty among member-states, but inevitably, this process is marked by the domination of particular visions and interpretations of ‘Europe’, overlooking the challenges that hegemonic politics can have in political, economic and social affairs that concern the whole.

 The symptoms of this conflicted nature of the European identity have lately magnified. Many EU countries have seen a rise in support of populist and to some extent euroskeptic parties, that largely appeared in response to Europe’s economic stagnation, austerity measures and the socio-economic crisis. The European project experiences a turning point that will define its future viability, with the major destabilizing forces being Greece and the UK; the former because of the economic crisis that posits the country on the verge of exiting, the latter because of the recent decision to leave the EU.

 Ironically, Britain’s vote to leave has sparked again the discussions about the return of the Parthenon sculptures with the prospect of putting their restitution in the negotiating table of the Brexit deal. The EU Treaty postulates that the Union ‘shall ensure that Europe’s cultural heritage is safeguarded and enhanced’ and that actions under other provisions, such as article 50, should be aimed among others, towards the ‘conservation and safeguarding of cultural heritage of European significance’. This implies, that since the Parthenon is commonly recognized as a unique representation of the origins of democracy and an indispensable part of Europe’s cultural history, the EU has the duty to make sure that the Parthenon sculptures will remain part of the continent’s cultural heritage.

 So far, there had been no imperative for action, since their location was part of a ‘shared territory’. The prospect of this changing, reveals the underlying tensions between the parties that claim the right to the cultural heritage that constitutes their identity. And whether this identity is largely invented or not, it still has a symbolic function within society which depends upon it, because it has the capacity ‘to invoke a categorical fixture, unchangeable and permanent through time’[1]. This interpretation of natural and cultural identity, is closer to the view of Sinisa Malesevic, who suggests that the term that should be used in the place of ‘identity’ in order to describe ‘why individuals reify their group membership and perceive other groups and categories as homogeneous things with single wills[2]’ is ideology, namely ideas towards action. Let us not forget that the ‘historical experiences are only candidates for self-conscious appropriation’[3] because without a self-conscious act, namely a decision about what we appropriate and what we refuse, ‘they cannot attain the power to shape our identity’[4].

 The spatial experience of the site is informed by this multiplicity of references that eventually, promote an understanding, not of a self-contained meaning, but one that is positioned in relation to other material or ideological entities. Indeed, it is not a binary story. It is true, that several artworks from the Acropolis, where dispersed before and after Elgin’s time. Besides this, from the original total of the Parthenon sculptures, only half survived. These remains are shared between museums in London, Athens, Copenhagen, Würzburg, Rome, Vienna, Munich and Paris.

 The Parthenon becomes then, ‘a dismembered entity’.

 I am fond of this term because it encompasses the contradiction of completeness and fragmentation that have determined my work. The physical location of the fragments –within Europe, and indeed, within the European Union – is significant, because it is precisely this idea of the shared identity and of ‘a common heritage’, that constitutes and maintains the dispersal. In a sense, the Parthenon sculptures cannot be considered displaced, because they belong to a commonly acknowledged cultural and ideological whole. The dissipation of the fragments among a heterogeneous landscape indicates an ontological transformation about the state of the cultural object, which does not imply ‘culture’ as a ‘self-contained, bounded and unified construct’, but as a hybrid one. Accordingly, we cannot define culture anymore as something fixed, ‘heritage’ or ‘tradition’, but ‘as the fluid constantly shifting result of boundless and flexible construction processes’[5].

 This conception of culture is a consequence of a shifting world that I am part of. Confronting the site, that is charged with these complicated issues of identity and belonging has provoked a process of self-awareness about the terms that constitute my physical and ideological relation to it. In order to structure my response, I rely on the site as a ‘topos’ that can help me delineate relationships between diverse ideas. Camouflaged as an account of cultural objects, I am telling a story about people and their situatedness in terms of the cultural processes that stem from an identity that they share. Borrowing a term from the Russian philosopher and literary critic, Michail Bakhtin, namely the notion of ‘heteroglossia’, I attempt to create a situated response, that understands this complicated identity of the subjects, as a ‘heteroglot consciousness’.

[1] Vassiliki Kynourgiopoulou, “National Identity Interrupted: The Mutilation of the Parthenon Marbles and the Greek Claim for Repatriation”, p.156

[2] Péter Niedermüller, “Nationality, and the Myth of Cultural Heritage: A European View”, Journal of Folklore Research, Vol. 36, No. 2/3, Special Double Issue: CulturalBrokerage: Forms of Intellectual Practice in Society (May - Dec., 1999), p.251

[3] Jürgen Habermaas and Jacques Derrida, “February 15 or what binds the European together: A Plea for a Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in the Core of Europe”, Constellations 10, no. 3 (2003): 291-297, doi:10.1111/1467-8675.00333, p.295

[4] ibid.,

[5] Péter Niedermüller, “Nationality, and the Myth of Cultural Heritage: A European View”, p.251