Athens – City of Wisdom
Author, Journalist and Lecturer, Bruce Clark discusses his latest book with Prof. Bettany Hughes (Historian, Author and Broadcaster) and Dr John Kittmer (Former British Ambassador to Greece).
In the words of the publisher, “[Athens: City of Wisdom is] a sweeping history of Athens, telling the three-thousand-year story of the birthplace of Western civilization, from Runciman Award winner Bruce Clark. Each of the book’s twenty-one chapters focuses on a critical ‘moment’ in the city’s long history, from the reforms of the lawmaker Solon in the sixth century BCE to the travails of early twenty-first-century Athens, as a rapidly expanding city struggles with the legacy of a global economic crisis. Bruce Clark has a rich and revealing sequence of stories to tell – not only of the familiar golden age of Classical Athens, of the removal from the Acropolis of the Parthenon marbles by agents of the 7th Earl of Elgin in the early nineteenth century, or of the holding of the first modern Olympic Games in 1896; but also of the less fêted later years of antiquity, when St Paul preached on the Areopagus and neo Platonists refounded the Academy that Sulla’s legions had desecrated. He also delves into Athens’ forgotten medieval centuries, unearthing jewels gleaming in the Byzantine twilight, and tales of Christian fortitude and erratic Turkish governance from the four centuries of Ottoman rule that followed.”
From the Parthenon to Pentapotamia. Reflections on Greece, India and Syncretism. Clark Bruce, Arvanitopoulos Stavros
On Friday, January 17, 2025, the name day of the founder of the Benaki Museum, the Friends of the Benaki Museum organized for the second year the lecture in memory of Antonis Benakis.
Lecture topic: “From the Parthenon to Pentapotamia. Thoughts on Greece, India and Syncretism”
Invisible Capital: How the Refugees of 1923 Transformed the Social, Cultural and Religious Life of Athens
It has often been observed that from 1923 onwards, the arrival in Greece of at least 1.2m newcomers from Anatolia and eastern Thrace changed, enriched and in certain ways, divided Greek society, both urban and rural. Both the demography and the economics of northern Greece were transformed by an intensive programme of land distribution and resettlement. By 1928, the population of the Athens basin had nearly doubled, since the start of the decade, to 802,000. Through a mixture of state provision and spontaneous building activity, the capital saw the emergence of new neighbourhoods where refugees were concentrated. In more “respectable” parts of this urban area, these new districts were considered dangerous and subversive. This sharp differentiation came to a head during the Nazi occupation and civil war, when the refugee quarters became strongholds of the political left. But there is another side to this story. Despite the pronounced inequality and stratification of greater Athens as it emerged after the refugees’ arrival, there was also a gradual process of social convergence, ensuring that the world of the refugees would decisively affect both the high and popular culture of the Greek mainstream over the remainder of the 20th century.
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