The Goulianos (Ioulianos) family, though largely neglected in modern scholarship, appears prominently in seventeenth-century sources as part of the Greek Orthodox aristocracy of Ottoman Constantinople. Closely connected to the Ecumenical Patriarchate, influentialPhanariotfamilies, and the rulers of the Danubian Principalities, they held key administrative offices and exercised considerable influence in both secular and ecclesiastical spheres. Constantine Goulianos, Grand Logothete of the Patriarchate, was a central figure in the intellectual circle of Theophilos Korydalleus and a close associate of Ioannes Karyophylles and Eugenios Giannoules. His residence in the Phanar served as a venue for Korydalleus's lectures, linking the family to the dissemination of Neo-Aristotelian thought and the reformist program of Cyril Loukaris. Manuscript evidence, letters, and biographical annotations preserved by Nikolaos Kritias and Nikolaos Karatzas document the family's educational, theological, and political interests and activities. This single Phanariot household came to embody the shifting contours of Orthodox elite identity in seventeenth-century Constantinople through its sustained involvement in ecclesiastical politics, the exercise of key administrative functions, and the transmission of Neo-Aristotelian philosophy. Tracing the intellectual, political, and social networks of the Goulianos family highlights the formation, consolidation, and transformation of Orthodox elites duringa pivotal moment in early modern Ottoman history.
The cultural heritage space of Athens was shaped and then reshaped to depict two distinct historiographical narratives. First was the narrative of Revival, which internalized Western Hellenism and Philhellenism; later, the narrative of Continuity emerged, addressing discrepancies that challenged a coherent and lasting national identity. The reconsideration of Athens' cultural heritage space to represent the latter narrative began in the early twentieth century following the expansion of the Greek kingdom and incorporated Byzantine heritage as a common feature of both the Old and the New Lands, as well as the territories claimed by Greek irredentism. Within this context, the depiction of Continuity became a heritage management priority, eventually shaping Athens' cultural heritage landscape in its present form.
In Ottoman Heraklion, Crete, a Roman statue made of white marble and embedded in a Venetian fountain was painted black and became the object of veneration by the trans-Saharan African community of the city. Criticized as "superstitious" by both bewildered foreign antiquarians and Christian Cretans of the time, and overlooked by historians and archaeologists until recently, the blackwashing of the statue and the associated African religiosity are indicative of alternative engagements with monuments of classical antiquity. The engagement in this case was not shaped by the dogmatic antiquarianism of white elite Europeans; instead, it was developed by Black people who were typically marginalized and often remain invisible and silenced in the textual record of previous centuries. This case highlights the politicized dynamics of whitewashing and blackwashing in constructions of the Greek past and classical antiquity; it also underscores the role of trans-Saharan African communities within the broader context of the Black Mediterranean.
During the First World War, Greek society became sharply polarized around the figures ofLiberal Party leader Eleftherios Venizelos, who supported intervention on the Allied side, and King Constantine, who favored neutrality. This rift, known as the National Schism, eventually resulted in the country's split in 1916-1917 with the formation of the pro-Allied "National Defense" regime in Thessaloniki while the official government in Athens remained neutral. The limited historiography on the National Defense putsch has generally prioritized high politics and diplomacy, disregarding the political dynamics on the ground in Thessaloniki and Greek Macedonia. A perspective "from below"shows that the coup enjoyed only modest popular support. The National Defense regime's unpopularity helps illuminate the later evolution of the National Schism.
The framing of nuclear science and space achievements in Cold War Greece reveals the strategies of US cultural diplomacy and the pivotal role of the United States Information Agency (USIA) in these strategies. American scientific and technological accomplishments formed a vital component of the American image promoted by USIA, with the "Atoms for Peace" campaign (1953) serving as a particularly decisive propaganda move. Nevertheless, the launch of Sputnik in 1957 challenged American cultural diplomacy by reshaping global public perceptions of the Soviet Union as an advanced technological power. USIA functioned as an agent of science communication within the ideological clash of the Cold War, as evidenced by USIA and State Department archival materials documenting the design and evaluation of cultural diplomacy projects in Greece. USIA opinion poll data from that era serves to illuminate Greek public perceptions. Situating US cultural diplomacy initiatives within Greek public debates on nuclear physics and space exploration reveals both the strategic significance of US efforts to advance American foreign policy objectives within the US-Soviet rivalry and the complexity of Greek public opinion.
In 1950s-1960s Greece, crucial actors of the Civil War's victorious national-minded side-namely the state, the Christian brotherhood Zoe, and the royal couple Queen Frederica and King Paul-took charge of shaping the country's postwar welfare policy, founding institutions across the country. Within these institutions, a new psychological discourse took shape that, while genuinely aiming to care for and protect those in need, was deeply infused with the dominant national-minded ideology, often taking the form of aggressive anticommunism as embodied in the infamous slogan "Fatherland-Religion-Family."In the public sphere-including the press, scientific publications, and public speeches-the achievements of the psy-sciences (psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis) and welfare institutions were framed and celebrated as national victories against the "communist disease," while care and protection were, in the discourse of psy-scientists, welfare professionals, and political figures, inextricably linked to discipline and conformity to national-minded values. The psy-sciences were thus both shaped by and instrumental in the ideological project of national-mindedness, playing a significant role in the psychological warfare strategies of post-Civil War Greece.
The complex relationship between religious institutions and free expression in Greece is deeply rooted in a legacy where the Greek Orthodox Church has significantly influenced public discourse, institutions, and legal frameworks. to restrict artistic and intellectual expression, reflecting broader tensions related to politics, national identity, and the boundaries of speech. While historical ties between state and church allowed these provisions to persist. Informal censorship remains influential, particularly with the rise of far-right and religious fundamentalist groups, often supported by elements within the Greek deep state, including the church and police. These groups have restricted free expression under the banner of preserving religious and national values. Prominent censorship cases involving cultural figures and controversial works reveal how conservative forces, especially within the church, continue to resist progressive change, leveraging censorship to maintain ideological control and challenging democratic freedoms and open discourse in Greek society.
In February 1962, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin-fresh from his historic journey into space-arrived in Athens, generating widespread public enthusiasm and extensive media coverage across Greece. His visit, part ofa broader Soviet campaign to showcase its space achievements, underscores how scientific milestones were strategically leveraged as powerful diplomatic tools, shaping political narratives and influencing public perception. For Greece, a nation firmly aligned with the West, Gagarin's visit posed a diplomatic dilemma. Although initially hesitant, the conservative Greekgovernmentulti-mately extended official honors to the Soviet icon, using the occasion to project an image of cultural openness and political balance amid domestic criticism accusing it of authoritarian tendencies. Both Greece and the USSR seized the opportunity to elevate national prestige and advance broader strategic objectives. This episode exemplifies how, during the Cold War, technological achievements such as space exploration became deeply intertwined with Cold War ideological competition, power projection, and global power dynamics.
Nostalgia podcasts are an emerging medium and a growing resource for historical research. Contemporary Greece provides a productive terrain on which to examine their potential. To fully harness nostalgia podcasts as historical sources, it is essential to investigate theirfeatures and audiences, to assess their possible uses by researchers, and to reflect on the methodological implications of these uses. Since nostalgia podcasts share certain similarities with qualitative interviews, oral history offers researchers useful tools for engaging with them. At the same time, it is crucial to recognize the particularities of storytelling within a commercial media context shaped by "quantified nostalgia," and to remain aware of the limits of these similarities. Only then can researchers approach this novel source with the necessary sensitivity.
A small but growing body of scholarship and creative work brings to the forefront the unacknowledged cultural, emotional, physical, social, and care labor performed by Greek American women, giving visibility to their agency and capabilities. Identifying this material as a distinct corpus and outlining its primary themes of critical exploration creates a foundation for nuanced, in-depth discussion of Greek America that places women's work and lives at the center of debates. This multidisciplinary collection of essays examines Greek American women's labor, reconsidering their supposedly natural roles and often neglected spaces of activity and producing a complex portrait of Greek immigration to the United States-one that resists ready-made notions of success and assimilation and instead presents women's labor as central to theformation of Greek America. Ultimately, these essays lay the groundwork for a new appreciation and richer discussion of Greek American women's work and their vital roles within the broader narrative of Greek America.
Greek American women have been celebrated in their communities as mothers, wives, teachers, and caretakers. This historiographic focus on home, church, and school endorses a patriarchal confinement in which female agency has been permitted to operate and ignores the extraordinary contribution that Greek American women have made in shaping the public sphere of art throughout the twentieth century. New research on a selection of pioneering artists who have not received proper attention places their work and lives in the context of their respective diaspora communities and their complex interactions with multiple colliding worlds. Cleo Damianakes flourished in the 1920s, and her classical figurative designs were popularized through her book covers. Ethel and Jenne Magafan came of age as social realists in the murals of the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. During the emergence of the feminist movement in the 1960s, sculptor Lynda Benglis and painter Mary Grigoriadis pioneered two radically different strategies of critique. Finally, performance artist Diamanda Gal & aacute;s brought her voice to the conceptual breakdown of genres in the 1980s and 1990s. Situating these Greek American women artists in the context of their Anglo Greek sisters who preceded them and of expatriate Greek artists who joined them during the Cold War prompts a reexamination of the Greek American experience. Rather than submitting to roles defined by tradition and patriarchy, the six women considered here used their Greek American voices to critique, revolutionize, and ultimately reshape the visual arts in the twentieth century.
The life of Garifalia Mohalby (1817-1830) adds to existing literature on the generation of "orphans" of the Greek Revolution (1821-1832) who arrived in the United States. The story of her purchase from slavery and adoption by a family in the United States, together with that story's afterlife, are critical to gaining insight into early perceptions of Greek females in America. The life of Mohalby, one of the earliest examples of an adopted foreigner in the nascent United States of America, was widely appropriated. It became the basis of wider sociocultural discussions and attempts at self-identification in the American literary and artistic tradition of the nineteenth century, especially with regard to race, the institution of slavery, gender roles, andAmericanness as seen from an outside perspective.
The author's experience as a Greek American parochial school student is used auto-ethnographically to contextualize six interviews of Greek American women educators. Reflecting on what the interviewees shared, the author realizes how much in her own life is owed to the unrecognized labor of the women who taught her Greek. In the interviews, women rangingin age from their thirties to their seventies discuss their hopes and disappointments, as well as the challenges they have faced. For women with children, the greatest challenge was the labor of caring for children, both their own children and their children's children. By incrementally taking on greater authority and agency within the school environment, a space of labor that conforms to female gender expectations, women educators have contributed to a more expansive construction of women's roles.
Since the mid-1970s, Greek American women in the western United States have produced thousands of traditional Greek folk costumes for their children and grandchildren. Worn at community events and judged at the annual Greek folk dance competition known as the Greek Orthodox Folk Dance and Choral Festival (FDF), these costumes are a highly visible aspect of Greek American culture, yet the histories of their creation remain largely undocumented. The research, budgeting, and organization required to produce costumes in large quantities is a testament to the skilled labor and creative talents of Greek American women. Their commitment to preserving this important aspect of Greek material culture is an entry point to explore larger themes of the Greek diaspora, including how Greek culture is imagined and transcribed in the American context, how gendered labor and social roles manifest themselves, and how Greek American womanhood is defined and practiced.
At the heart of the burgeoning phenomenon of competitive Greek American folk dance festivals in the last several decades are a number of women dancers, instructors, administrators, and judges. The author, relying on his extensive participation in these festivals as a musician, his observation of performances, rehearsals, and planning meetings, and his interviews with dozens of dancers, uses the approach of narrative ethnography to foreground the diverse perspectives of five particularly talented and influential women in the dance revival movement, simultaneously offering his own analysis informed by contemporary critiques of neoliberalism and the Euroamerican culture industry. Interpretive agency is given to the women as their conversation grapples with the gendered aspects of authority, self-worth, and the perpetuation of expressive culture in the context of neoliberal marketization of the self, moving through subjects such as folk dance festivals considered as intercultural zones, assimilation, identity, belonging, the complexities of multiple ethnic consciousness, and the tension between competition and collaboration.
The British Major Derek Dodson left a unique record of the Allies' entry into Thessaloniki at the time of the German withdrawal from the city in October 1944. The record is preserved among Dodson's papers, which are held at the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King's College London. Dodson's report reveals a widening gap dividing the various Greek resistance groups and also a perceived need on the part of the British to act decisively. The race was on to recapture Thessaloniki and to retake primacy, and this race was symptomatic of the unresolved power struggle that fueled the ensuing Civil War. Here, PartB ofDodson's "Final Report on Third Visit to Greece" appears in print for the first time, along with an introduction to the author and his role, notes to the text, a map of the relevant area, and an image of the first page of the unpublished typescript manuscript.
How did Ottoman Greek immigrant women negotiate their identity againsta dominant Greek immigrant identity paradigm in the early twentieth-century United States? A micro-, meso-, and macro-level model is used to answer this question by exploring experiences of Ottoman Greek migrant women whose identity negotiation was withgender, Greek immigrants, andAmerican Whiteness. Based on the model as applied to excerpts from thirty-six interviews with descendants of Ottoman Greek immigrant women, the women's use of local, racial, and pan-ethnic appellations served as a means to claim American Whiteness. Ottoman Greek immigrant women's identity negotiation provides information about the construction of GreekAmerican identity.
Iphigenia Copadis (1889-1985), a teacher, poet, writer and journalist from Greece who relocated to the East Coast of the United States in 1924, became well known among her peers for her intellectual, educational, and public work. Six issues of Copadis's monthly women's magazine Epsilon lambda lambda eta nu iota delta alpha/Hellenida (1949-1955) are extant in the Tsakopoulos Hellenic Collection at California State University in Sacramento. Placed in their sociocultural context along with other immigrant publications, the issues offer clues to the magazine's readership, content, scope, and impact; they also give insights into the work of Copadis as an editor and writer and the role of the periodical in the formation of Greek American female subjectivity.
Abraham Benaroya (1887-1979), one of the founders of the Socialist Workers' Federation (Ladino, La Federaci & oacute;n Socialista Laboradera) in Salonica, lived a long life that straddled empire and nation, socialism and the Jewish Question. Later described by the historian Paul Dumont as "the most important socialist organization in the Ottoman Empire," the Federation sought to unite the city's multiethnic population of Jews, Greeks, Bulgarians, Turks, and others under the common banner of socialism. Nevertheless, most of its members Yitzhak Ben Zvi, the second president of Israel, to describe the Federation as the "only socialist organization among the Sephardim," one with significant parallels to, but also differences from, the Bund, the better-known socialist organization founded by Yiddish-speaking Jews in Eastern Europe. Following the incorporation of Salonica into Greece, Benaroya played an important role in the development of socialist politics in the country before being purged by the Communist Party of Greece. He later survived incarceration in Nazi camps and eventually emigrated to the newly established state of Israel, where he came to terms with Zionism. Benaroya's complex life and politics serve as a powerful synecdoche for the broader experiences of many Sephardic Jews from the Balkans during a long century of imperial collapse, state formation, and socialist and nationalist politics.
Representations of the Greek immigrant experience in the Hellenic Cultural Museum (HCM), a vernacular Greek American museum in Salt Lake City, Utah, commemorate the everyday life, labor struggles, and folk culture of early twentieth-century working-class Greek immigrants. As a repository of working-class memories, the museum challenges a set of dominant US immigration narratives around class and race, including the white ethnic bootstraps success model. At the same time, the museum's exhibition draws from popular narratives of Hellenism in the United States and Greece to distinguish local Greeks as a prominent community of the Intermountain West. The HCM thus oscillates between regional and nationally dominant understandings of the Greek American experience, proposing hybrid identity narratives that enrich the public narrativization of Greek America. The vernacular background of the exhibition, on the other hand, poses a set of museological challenges in terms of accessibility and inclusivity, which affect the understanding of Greek America vis-& agrave;-vis its museum representations.
