Greek society in the making, 1863-1913 : realities, symbols, and visions

First published in 1997, Carabott creates a volume exploring the struggle between the forces of modernity and those who resisted and denied it, providing the underlying theme of this volume. Using a wide array of sources, and drawing parallels with processes elsewhere in Europe, the contributors focus on such topics as secularization and the church, education and irredentism, shifts in the language of political contention, the feminist awareness in prose. Historical writing on Greece in this era has tended to concentrate on facts and on the roles of individuals and foreign powers. The papers here, which derive from research presented to a conference at King’s College London in 1995, aim rather to look at the potency of social forces and groupings, and offer a critical and often revisionist account of the fundamental changes in society that marked the period from the 1860s to the start of the present century. Contents 6 Editor’s Preface 8 A Note on References Cited 10 Acknowledgements 11 About the Contributors 12 Part I: Social groupings and latent class antagonism 16 1. Class structure and class antagonism in late nineteenth-century Greece • Christos Hadziiossif 18 2. Social solidarity on the periphery of the Greek kingdom: the case of the Workers’ Fraternity of Corfu • Grigoris Psallidas 34 3. ‘All for one and one for all’: anarchists, socialists and demoticists in the Labour Centre of Volos (1908–1911) • Lito Apostolakou 50 4. Ioannis A. Valaoritis: the life of a typical Greek nineteenth-century bourgeois? • Helen Gardikas Katsiadakis 70 Part II: Images and symbols 86 5. The excavations at Olympia, 1868–1881: an episode in Greco-German cultural relations • Suzanne Marchand 88 6. The nation and the individual: social aspects of life and death in Greece (1896–1911) • George Margaritis 102 7. Social gatherings and Macedonian lobbying: symbols of irredentism and living legends in early twentieth-century Athens • Basil C. Gounaris 114 Part III: Facets of modernization 128 8. Literacy and unredeemed peasants: late nineteenth-century rural Crete faces education • Kalita Kalliataki Merticopoulou 130 9. Illusions and realities at the end of the nineteenth century: an attempt to construct a railway line on the island of Syros • Christos Loukos 146 10. Voluntary associations and new forms of sociability: Greek sports clubs at the turn of the nineteenth century • Christina Koulouri 160 11. Feminist awareness and Greek women writers at the turn of the century: the case of Kallirroe Parren and Alexandra Papadopoulou • Maria Anastasopoulou 176 Part IV: Undercurrents of change 192 12. Secularization and the Greek Orthodox Church in the reign of King George I • Vasilios N. Makrides 194 13. The changing language of political contention in the era of King George I • Katerina Gardtkas Alexander 212 14. Regularization and resistance: urban transformations in late nineteenth-century Greece • Eleni Bastea 224 Index 246