From national panegyrics to stage scandal: Athanasios Diakos in history

Abstract

On 26 March 1894 a panegyric titled ‘Athanasios Diakos in history’ was delivered at the Society of the Friends of the People. At the dusk of the nineteenth century, this speech summarized the literary programme of a nationalizing attachment to the heroes of 1821 and their romantic monumentalization. More than a century later, the theatrical scandal of Lena Kitsopoulou’s Athanasios Diakos: The Return (Greek Festival, Athens, 2012) was a typical response to the breach inflicted on the canonical meanings and the established interpretations of the myth of Diakos. Amid a national crisis, the transformation of Diakos into a modern-day kebabhouse owner who harasses his wife and his immigrant employee performed a critical transposition of the hero into a toxic unheroic present. After reviewing the histories and mythologies of Athanasios Diakos, this article discusses Kitsopoulou’s production and its reception in order to argue that the playwright called upon a dramaturgy of suspicion that threatened the credibility of a heroic past, destabilizing thereby national expectations and assumptions.