The Modern Gaze of Foreign Architects Travelling to Interwar Greece: Urban Planning, Archaeology, Aegean Culture, and Tourism

This paper reflects on the embrace of the Ancient world in modernity and the journey to Greece as a vehicle for their reciprocal reshaping. In the interwar period, new visual narratives emerged in Western accounts, proposing alternative contexts for Greek cultural heritage and associating regional culture with the emergence of modernism. The article investigates the mobility of modern travellers in Greece as an essential factor for the new contextualization of the country’s dominant cultural paradigm -Antiquity- as well as for the emergence of parallel narrations of the Mediterranean genius loci that examine the spatial imprint of heritage and tourism on the Greek urban, archaeological and natural environment. Western intellectuals, engineers, architects and urban planners, supported by a highly mobile network of editors, travel agencies, tourist cruises, architectural or archaeological conferences and congresses, contributed to the promotion of modern architecture and urban infrastructure in Greece. Their yet to become tourist gaze embraced the Aegean tradition, the Greek landscape and the ancient ruins as equal collocutors, initiating at the same time Greece itself into modernity. This paper traces the encounters between foreign travellers and the divergent manifestations of the country’s cultural identity in the pages of printed articles, books, travel accounts, photographic material and films. Following these documentations, the paper argues that tourism mobility gave rise to an alternative, southern modernism, whose emergence and development deviates significantly from mainstream narratives propounded by the continental historiography of modernity. Vice versa, the modern mobility networks of the South promoted the development of urban infrastructure and welfare facilities in Greece, as well as the establishment of early tourism policies, thus articulating the new national narrative of interwar Greece, based equally on classical heritage, regional culture and modern progress. The present paper is part of the research program Voyage to Greece: Mobility and modern architecture in the interwar period, where E. Athanassiou, V. Dima, V.; Karali, K. contribute as post-doctoral researchers, with P. Tournikiotis, Professor NTUA as scientific supervisor. The research is co-financed by the Greek State and the European Union.