The Real and the Ideal: The Field of the Asia Minor Expedition as Memoryscape and the Politics of Collective Memory

Abstract:

In the summer of 1921, the Greek armies had succeeded in occupying part of Greece's claimed territories in Asia Minor. Although the outcome of the Greco-Turkish war had yet to be decided, the Greek minister of military affairs proposed that a public war memorial park be constructed in Athens, a park-monument where the Asia Minor locations under Greek control would be presented metonymically. The project, visualized on a detailed map, foresaw the transport of ancient Greek antiquities from Asia Minor and their selective positioning in the park so as to create a spatio-temporal miscellany. In the proposed memorial park, space, time, and Greek antiquity were to produce a new locus, a memoryscape, that went beyond existing frontiers and outside experienced time. The plan to create a cultural mnemonic marker monumentalizing the Asia Minor Campaign sought not only to shape the national identity but also to proclaim and promote Greece's demand for annexation of the Asia Minor territories.