Abstract

In the consciousness of the educated, bourgeois classes of nineteenth-century Europe, Greece was the eternal motherland of Europe and thus Greekness was synonymous with ancestral heritage. The idea(l) of Greece as ‘a spiritual landscape’ that embodied both ‘wild beauty and antique wisdom’ was a pole of attraction for those bohemian Philhellenes who sought to discover in Greece’s ‘uncivilized’ nature ‘a further range of experience beyond the classroom clichés’ of the academic classical world. The picturesque physiognomy of Greece proposed by popular travel books and illustrated ‘This is Greece’ tourist guides in the late nineteenth and twentieth was visualized through images of mount Olympus, the temple at Delphi, Epidaurus and the Acropolis, churches and monasteries in Meteora and Mount Athos, farmers threshing, fishermen on their caiques, and village women working al fresco. Locally identified as the ‘Western gaze’, this narrative would not only feed western tourist imagination but would become the visual epitome of Greekness at home as well. This paper examines visualisations of Greekness in modern Greek photography with specific emphasis on the work of Nelly’s and Voula Papaioannou, two photographers whose work, circulated through tourist publications and the National Tourism Organisation became synonymous with the national image of Greece at home and abroad.