In search of Neo-Hellenic culture: Confronting the ambiguities of modernity in an ancient land

<jats:p>This article critically examines the construction of the official ideology of the Modern Greek state in its attempt to create and disseminate a historicist perception of the past. It analyses its origins and certain central symbolic discourses, and focuses on the specific pre-urban elites that took over the intellectual hegemony of the state after the urbanization and industrialization of the country without, however, modernizing the function of state apparatuses. Furthermore, it explores the various attempts to create counter-cultural discourses from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present, through the critical assessment of the historical continuity between Ancient Greece, Byzantium and Modern Greece. Special attention is given to the critical discourse of the Greek diaspora, especially of expatriates Cornelius Castoriadis, Kostas Axelos, Gerasimos Kaklamanes and Panayiotis Kondyles. The article also examines specific works of art in cinema, literature and philosophy, which in moments of crisis renegotiated the relationship between past and present, power and society, memory and ideology. Finally, it puts forward the suggestion that Greek culture in its long duration needs a different conceptual metaphor, which is the ‘polydialectical palimpsest’, based on an idea proposed by Nikos Kazantzakis. Only through an understanding of the past as both complex and intelligible, full of paradoxes and ambiguities, can Modern Greek culture abandon its monophonic and uncritical official historicism and confront the central questions of contemporary postmodernity.</jats:p>