Oxford Handbooks Online: Photo Essay: The Other Acropolises: Multi-Temporality and The Persistence of The Past

Photo Essay: The Other Acropolises: Multi-Temporality and the Persistence
of the Past
Oxford Handbooks Online

Photo Essay: The Other Acropolises: Multi-Temporality
and the Persistence of the Past
Yannis Hamilakis and Fotis Ifantidis
The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World
Edited by Paul Graves-Brown, Rodney Harrison, and Angela Piccini
Print Publication Date: Oct 2013 Subject: Archaeology, Contemporary and Public Archaeology
Online Publication Date: Dec 2013 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199602001.013.032
Abstract and Keywords
In this photoessay (based on the photo-blog, www.theotheracropolis.com) the reader/

viewer is invited to an alternative tour of the Athenian Acropolis. It moves beyond the
monumentalization and sacralization of the classical to expose neglected or suppressed
materialities (such as the medieval, the Ottoman, and the more recent social life of the
site), and it shows how these materialities, through their sensorial properties, have the
power to persist, enacting multiple times simultaneously. They thus offer us alternative
ways of conceptualizing temporality, beyond the modernist tropes of linearity and
succession. At the same time, this essay is a plea for archaeologists and other material
culture specialists to engage with the photographic medium in creative ways, beyond its
use as documentation. The photographic process is not deployed here as a
representational device but as an embodied, evocative practice which can enable a multi-
sensory and kinaesthetic engagement with materiality and temporality.
Keywords: archaeology, photography, Greece, memory, duration, materiality
Page 1 of 25
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Subscriber: National University of Singapore; date: 06 May 2018

of the Past
(p. 759)
IN THE BEGINNING, there is the ascend.
The uphill journey to get closer to it. To overcome its aura, to conquer ‘the unique
apparition of a distance’ (Benjamin 2008a: 23).
And along with it, the urge to capture it through your camera, to magically transform it
into a picture.
But what is it that you will photograph?
The marble blocks and the columns, some still in place, some taken apart and now tightly
arranged in rows (like well-behaved schoolchildren on a parade) ready for their
reassembly, and some conserved, reconstituted and restored, more clean and more white
and more ancient than before?
Or the national flag, reminding you that you are entering the most sacred national
monument of the country?
Or would you rather go for the information panel, which neatly tells you ‘the story’?
And would you frame out the cranes and the other restoration machinery, which has been
here for ever, now almost as much part of the Acropolis landscape as the Parthenon
itself?
You may have come to look at antiquities, but we will make sure that it is modernity’s
sights (our modernity or yours?) that you will encounter in every step.
It is going to start raining in a minute.
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of the Past
(p. 760)
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of the Past
And with the rain, this stony surface becomes even more slippery. It is not called ‘The
Sacred Rock’ for nothing.
Before the Parthenon, before even the Late Bronze Age citadel that stood here, before
even its first Neolithic inhabitants, this was geology, this was just a rocky outcrop. Not
that it was always so barren, devoid of any soil.
Take a look at any eighteenth-century engraving and you will see trees here. And then
look at those mid-nineteenth-century photographs taken from the Philopappou Hill
opposite, and you will understand: the huge spoil heaps, pilling up all the way from the
bottom of the hill to its top, evidence of the extensive clearing of the site. We had to get to
the bottom. We had to remove all post-classical layers, cleanse the sacred locale of all
remnants of post-classical ‘barbarity’ (Hamilakis 2007).
I told you to wear better shoes. It would be better to take them off: a history of the
Acropolis according to our bare feet (Ingold 2004).
(p. 761)
WHERE ARE YOU GOING?
Our tourist guide does not say that we should take a diversion! Instead of continuing our
ascend towards the centre of the hill and the Parthenon, you are taking a left turn; and
now going down a few steps.
Why would you want to do this?
Just to admire the lushness of the Ancient Agora, complete with its palm trees?
Or the churches, and the nineteenth-century buildings that survive the immense
archaeological cleansing of the site by the American School of Classical Studies in the
1930s (Hamilakis 2013)?
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of the Past
Whatever, you came here for, you did not expect to see amongst the rubble and the
broken marble fragments, the headstones of Muslim graves, did you?
(p. 762)
BUT THEN AGAIN, YOU DID NOT expect to see this either:
A bronze cannon, lying abandoned just inside the protective rope, not far from the foot of
the Parthenon.
Stare into the dark tunnel of history and count the casualties.
Recall Benjamin, again (from memory): every document of civilization is at the same time
a document of barbarity.
Page 5 of 25

of the Past
(p. 763) OR
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of the Past
THIS: next to the classical Temple of the Erechtheion, a classical architectural marble block
but with an inscription in Arabic, struggling against gravel to remain visible, above
ground.
It was in 1805 when the fragment was inscribed with a text praising the Ottoman
governor of Athens, and then placed above a prominent entrance to the fortified citadel,
overlooking the small town of Athens.
Photographs, Roland Barthes (1993 [1980]: 96 and passim) contends, embody two times
simultaneously, the ‘that-has-been’ of when the photograph was taken, and the ‘here-and-
now’ of its viewing. But what happens when a photographic object captures another
material object which is itself multi-temporal? An object which embodies not only the
time of its first creation, but also subsequent times, when the very same object, because
of its temporal depth, its aesthetic-sensorial appeal, and its agency qualities, was invested
with new meaning and mnemonic weight? The Acropolis is full of multi-temporal objects
that defy the mono-chrony of the classical and resist its colonising effects. Their
photographic materialisation adds further to their multi-temporal character, and their
mnemonic impact.
(p. 764)
‘THE MOST ‘CLASSIC’ ANGLE of photographing the monument’, says the archaeologist Yannis
Stavridopoulos.
‘That’s me, in the mid- 1980s; I am photographed wearing Kitt’s jacket’, he notes,
referring to the 1980s American teenage TV hero, Knight Rider.
‘I should mention that on the chest there were small red lights; unfortunately, at the
photo you cannot see them blinking.’
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of the Past
(p. 765) WHY
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of the Past
To carve your presence, to make your mark? Ignore the ‘do not touch’ signs.
It is through your touch that you can read the scars upon the skin of the marble.
(p. 766)
HUMAN EMOTIONS and ancient civic and political statements, alongside the modern
archaeological grid.
Desires of permanence and duration, and desires of classification, containment and

control.
Page 9 of 25

of the Past
(p. 767) AND
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of the Past
‘In the night of the 30th of May 1941, the patriots Manolis Glezos and Apostolos Sandas
removed the flag of the Nazi conquerors from the Sacred Rock of the Acropolis. (Installed
by the “United National Resistance 1941–44” in 1982).’
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of the Past
(p. 768)
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of the Past
Should it not be at the entrance of the site?
And it looks too modern to have stood outside the small mosque which was once erected
inside the Parthenon, when the Acropolis was an Ottoman citadel.
The ‘unearthing’ of the optical unconscious, Walter Benjamin claims (2008b: 276–88), is a
key function of photography. By that he means the capturing of contingency, of the
instant, which goes unnoticed in daily encounters, a moment which can then be revealed
by the intense engagement with the photograph. In taking his insight further, it can be
claimed that the photograph, as a technique for the management of attention (Crary
1992: 18), enables a sustained and in-depth engagement with the micro-locales of the
world that go unnoticed in daily routines. Such reflection can also lead to unexpected
connections and associations.
Page 13 of 25

of the Past
(p. 769)
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of the Past
The Christian Acropolis (Kaldellis 2009) is another materiality that refuses to be erased
by the forces of archaeology.
(p. 770)
TIME TO GO.
This one we did not see on our way up. Shiny, new inscribed marble upon older, rusty and
wrinkly ones.
This one, installed in 2011 by none other than than the Queen of Spain, is perhaps the
most recent layer pilled on the top of this multi-layered landscape: the government of
Spain commemorating the medieval— fourteenth-century—Catalan and Aragonian
presence on the Acropolis.
A landscape of commemoration, a landscape continually in the making.
Page 15 of 25

of the Past
(p. 771)
WE HADN’T NOTICED THIS EITHER, it is not that prominently sign-posted, anyway.
Does the Acropolis need the seal of recognition from the UNESCO World Heritage
scheme?
After all, is it not the Parthenon itself that adorns UNESCO’s logo?
Yet its world is rather exclusive and limited, for it chooses to celebrate the classical alone,
and mostly that second-half of the 5th century bc, as if the Acropolis ceased to be
important after that.
(p. 772)
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of the Past
I TOLD YOU there was not much to see here, but you still wanted to take a stroll around the
hill.
Another small cement plinth, as inconspicuous as the one before. But this time, it sign-
posts an absence. An empty space in front of it; three lines, in Greek, in Turkish, and a
clandestine one, in Greek again.
Before it was demolished, the Little Mosque, now an evocative mnemonic void; but
according to the ones who added the third line, here stood Aphrodite’s Temple.
And someone else, or perhaps the same person, had tried to erase the Greek word for
mosque. But if you look carefully, there is another, smaller graffito, next to the Turkish
line, in Turkish again: ‘Evet dogru!’, ‘That’s right!’, it says, this was indeed the location of
a mosque.
The Acropolis landscape is nothing if not a landscape of contestation, a terrain of silent

memories; and counter-memories.
(p. 773)
AT LAST SOMETHING TO SEE DOWN HERE; and to photograph.
A happy coexistence of the classical, the Ottoman, the Christian, the neo-classical, and
the modern.
Or is it just the photographic framing of your multi-cultural fantasies?
Still, the area down here seems to have been spared of the cleansing frenzy at the
Acropolis.Yet everything is behind metal fences.
Pay for your entry or keep out: this is an archaeological site.
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of the Past
(p. 774) THE
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of the Past
Even hanging from the neck of this woman, walking passed us on Areopagitou Street.
Dispersed and mobile corpo-reality, on the streets of Athens, in the galleries of London, in
the global material and cyber-real ethno-scapes.
(p. 775)
THE NEW ACROPOLIS MUSEUM.
A site of national pride, a new locale of global pilgrimage.
A place to see the Acropolis from, a space to be seen at. Bodies of stone, bodies of flesh. A
play of reflections and shadows, a staged facade of mirrors, a liquid hyper-modernity.
Look carefully, and you will see the nineteenth century reflected on its glass surface.
Along with your own face.
No photos allowed.
Cappuccinos are cheap though.
Page 19 of 25

of the Past
(p. 776) YOU
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of the Past
Nothing here to see, save for the ‘ugly’ modern apartment blocks.
You must have tried hard to take this picture, extending your lens high up above the
screens which are here to guide your gaze towards the smiling archaic Kore, and towards
the Acropolis hill opposite.
The history that this museum tells comes into a standstill sometime in the Roman period
(if you search thoroughly enough, you may find one or two later objects). Here is another
museum of oblivion (Hamilakis 2011), on par with the British Museum.
Forgetting colonialism in Bloomsbury, forgetting the rich, multi-temporal and multi-

cultural life of the Acropolis in down town Athens.
(p. 777)
TIME FOR OUR DESCEND UNDERGROUND, let’s take the metro back.
No, these are just copies, the ‘real’ ones are in the British Museum; otherwise, would
they let you sit so close to them?
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of the Past
(p. 778)
THEY ARE FOLLOWING US.
And they are watching us.
Is this what panopticism means in the twenty-first century? Is it the moral authoritative
gaze of the classical from the top of the tower of Western culture, or the cameras and the
surveillance screens of the security company at the basement of the metro stations?
And where do the two meet?
(p. 779)
ALAS POOR WALTER, despite your hopes, technologies of reproduction have anything but
undermined bourgeois culture.
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of the Past
The mimetic machines of modernity keep enhancing that unique apparition of a distance.
The power of the Acropolis, as auratic as ever.
I told you that they are following us everywhere, even at home. But at least here you can
write back.
(p. 780) Further Reading

This essay is based on the photo-blog, The Other Acropolis (www.theotheracropolis.com),
where more photographic material and other resources can be found; visitors are also
encouraged to leave comments and feedback. On the relationship between the
photographic and the archaeological, see Hamilakis 2001, 2008, 2009; Shanks 1997;
Hamilakis et al. 2009; Bohrer 2011; amongst others. On the recent and contemporary
lives of the Acropolis, in addition to the literature cited above, see Tournikiotis 1994;
Hurwit 2000; Caft antzoglou 2001; Yalouri 2001. On multi-temporality, memory and
duration, see Hamilakis and Labanyi 2008; Olivier, this volume; and of course, Bergson
1991.
Acknowledgements
The image on page 762 is based on a photograph by Yannis Stavridopoulos, reproduced
here with his permission. The photo on page 771 was taken by Yannis Hamilakis. The rest
of the images were produced by Fotis Ifantidis. In addition to the authors, Vasko Démou is
also a member of The Other Acropolis Collective.
References
Barthes, Roland. 1993 [1980]. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, tr. Richard
Howard. London: Vintage.
Benjamin, Walter. 2008a [1935–6]. The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological
Reproducibility (second version). In Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its
Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, pp. 19–55. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
——— 2008b [1931]. Little History of Photography. In Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in
the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, pp. 274–98.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bergson, Henri. 1991. Matter and Memory. New York: Zone Books.
Page 23 of 25

of the Past
Bohrer, Fredrick. 2011. Photography and Archaeology. London: Reaktion Books.
Caftantzoglou, Roxane. 2001. The Shadow of the Sacred Rock: Contrasting Discourses of
Place under the Acropolis. In Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place, ed.
Barbara Bender and Margot Winer, pp. 21–36. Oxford: Berg.
Crary, Jonathan. 1992. Techniques of the Observer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hamilakis, Yannis. 2001. Monumental Visions: Bonfils, Classical Antiquity and 19th
Century Athenian Society. History of Photography 25(1): 5–12 and 23–43.
——— 2007. The Nation and its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology and National Imagination in
Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
——— 2008. Monumentalising Place: Archaeologists, Photographers, and the Athenian

Acropolis from the Eighteenth Century to the Present. In Monuments in the Landscape:
Papers in Honour of Andrew Fleming, ed. Paul Rainbird, pp. 190–8. Stroud: Tempus.
——— 2009. Transformare in monumento: archeologi, fotografi e l’Acropoli di Atene dal

Settecento a oggi. In Relitti Riletti: Metamorfosi delle Rovine e Identita Culturale, ed.
Marcello Barbanera, pp. 179–94. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri.
(p. 781) ——— 2011. Museums of Oblivion. Antiquity 85: 625–9.
——— 2013. Double Colonization: The Story of the Excavations at the Athenian Agora
(1924–1931). Hesperia 82: 153–77.
Hamilakis, Yannis and Labanyi, J. 2008. Time, Materiality, and the Work of Memory.
History and Memory 20(2): 5–17.
Hamilakis, Yannis, Anagnostopoulos, Aris and Ifantidis, Fotis. 2009. Postcards from the
Edge of Time: Archaeology, Photography, Archaeological Ethnography (a photo-essay). In
Archeological Ethnographies, eds. Yannis Hamilakis and Aris Anagnostopoulos, pp. 283–
309. Leeds: Manney (special double issue of Public Archaeology 8: 2/3).
Hurwit, Jeffrey M. 2000. The Athenian Acropolis: History, Mythology, and Archaeology
from the Neolithic Era to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ingold, Tim. 2004. Culture on the Ground: The World Perceived Through the Feet. Journal
of Material Culture 9(3): 315–40.
Kaldellis, Anthony. 2009. The Christian Parthenon: Classicism and Pilgrimage in

Byzantine Athens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shanks, Michael. 1997. Photography and Archaeology. In The Cultural Life of Images:
Visual Representation in Archaeology, ed. Brian L. Molyneaux, pp. 73–107. London:
Routledge.
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of the Past
Tournikiotis, Panayotis (ed.). 1994. The Parthenon and its Impact in Modern Times.
Athens: Melissa.
Yalouri, Eleana. 2001. The Acropolis: Global Claim, Local Fame. Oxford: Berg. (p. 782)
Yannis Hamilakis
Yannis Hamilakis, Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton.
Fotis Ifantidis
Fotis Ifantidis, Department of History & Archaeology, Aristotle University of

Thessaloniki.
Page 25 of 25

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Abstract and Keywords

In this photoessay (based on the photo-blog, www.theotheracropolis.com) the reader/

Keywords: archaeology, photography, Greece, memory, duration, materiality

Subscriber: National University of Singapore; date: 06 May 2018

IN THE BEGINNING, there is the ascend.

But what is it that you will photograph?

It is going to start raining in a minute.

Subscriber: National University of Singapore; date: 06 May 2018

Subscriber: National University of Singapore; date: 06 May 2018

WHERE ARE YOU GOING?

Why would you want to do this?

Subscriber: National University of Singapore; date: 06 May 2018

Subscriber: National University of Singapore; date: 06 May 2018

Subscriber: National University of Singapore; date: 06 May 2018

Subscriber: National University of Singapore; date: 06 May 2018

(p. 765) WHY

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Desires of permanence and duration, and desires of classification, containment and

Subscriber: National University of Singapore; date: 06 May 2018

(p. 767) AND

Subscriber: National University of Singapore; date: 06 May 2018

Subscriber: National University of Singapore; date: 06 May 2018

Subscriber: National University of Singapore; date: 06 May 2018

Subscriber: National University of Singapore; date: 06 May 2018

Subscriber: National University of Singapore; date: 06 May 2018

A landscape of commemoration, a landscape continually in the making.

Subscriber: National University of Singapore; date: 06 May 2018

WE HADN’T NOTICED THIS EITHER, it is not that prominently sign-posted, anyway.

Subscriber: National University of Singapore; date: 06 May 2018

The Acropolis landscape is nothing if not a landscape of contestation, a terrain of silent

AT LAST SOMETHING TO SEE DOWN HERE; and to photograph.

Or is it just the photographic framing of your multi-cultural fantasies?

Pay for your entry or keep out: this is an archaeological site.

Subscriber: National University of Singapore; date: 06 May 2018

(p. 774) THE

Subscriber: National University of Singapore; date: 06 May 2018

THE NEW ACROPOLIS MUSEUM.

A site of national pride, a new locale of global pilgrimage.

Cappuccinos are cheap though.

Subscriber: National University of Singapore; date: 06 May 2018

(p. 776) YOU

Subscriber: National University of Singapore; date: 06 May 2018

Forgetting colonialism in Bloomsbury, forgetting the rich, multi-temporal and multi-

Subscriber: National University of Singapore; date: 06 May 2018

THEY ARE FOLLOWING US.

And they are watching us.

And where do the two meet?

Subscriber: National University of Singapore; date: 06 May 2018

(p. 780) Further Reading

Subscriber: National University of Singapore; date: 06 May 2018

——— 2008. Monumentalising Place: Archaeologists, Photographers, and the Athenian

——— 2009. Transformare in monumento: archeologi, fotografi e l’Acropoli di Atene dal

(p. 781) ——— 2011. Museums of Oblivion. Antiquity 85: 625–9.

Kaldellis, Anthony. 2009. The Christian Parthenon: Classicism and Pilgrimage in

Subscriber: National University of Singapore; date: 06 May 2018

Yannis Hamilakis, Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton.

Fotis Ifantidis, Department of History & Archaeology, Aristotle University of

Subscriber: National University of Singapore; date: 06 May 2018

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