At the dawn of the 21st century, insurgency irrefutably constitutes the most prevalent type of war throughout the world. The Greek Civil War (1946-1949) stands out as one of the rarest occasions of a clear-cut and permanent victory of a government over an insurgent movement during the Cold War. In fact, the Greek Monarchist regime conclusively defeated the foreign-backed Communist insurgency in less than four years - a truly notable feat compared to the humiliating failures of the Great Powers at the hands of insurgent movements during the Cold War. And yet, this - relatively understudied - episode of the Cold War has not been studied thoroughly from the point of view of the strategy of the counter-insurgent. In reality, the vast majority of the works on the Greek Civil War have studied the interventionist policies of the British and Americans and, above all, the strategy of the Greek Communists. What did cause ultimately the defeat of a Communist insurgency which at some point in 1947 seemed in fact undefeatable? Did the Communist guerrilla movement fall victim to the feud between Stalin and Tito and the vainglory of its leadership as several scholars maintain? Or did the massive British and, above all, American aid rescue the Greek Monarchist regime - notorious for its incompetence - from collapse? Or could the Monarchist regime simply take advantage of the massive support from the Anglo American allies and the catastrophic errors of its enemies to score a hard-won, yet inevitable, victory? Ergo, this thesis will attempt to explain how the Greek Monarchist regime decided to counter the Communist insurgency, how external and internal actors influenced these policies and when, how and why these policies were crowned with success. For the very first time, this thesis will study completely and systematically the strategy of the Monarchist regime.

This thesis examines the views of Ion Dragoumis and their transformations concerning the Greek foreign policy and the nationalist mobilisation of the Greeks in the Ottoman Empire during the historical developments and political reversals that took place there from 1903 until the Balkan wars. Most of the writings concerning Dragoumis are biased and idealised narratives motivated by nationalist aims and values. Moreover, the determinative influence that the specific historical conditions (social, diplomatic, political and ethnographic) exerted on the particular contents and development of Dragoumis' nationalism is understudied. The thesis aims, through a critical examination of Dragoumis' published material and unpublished archives, to uncover the political functions and objectives that Dragoumis' nationalist ideas fulfilled, alongside the specific historical circumstances which allowed their appearance and conditioned their attainability. During the decade 1903-1913 Dragoumis' nationalism crystallised into incompatible political plans, passing through all the main types of Greek nationalism from the establishment of the Greek Kingdom until his time. Therefore, the examination of the historical and political development of Dragoumis' nationalism constitutes a case study of the historicity and plasticity of nationalist ideas and of the alternative political forms and contradictions of Greek nationalism in the turbulent years of the early twentieth Century.

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In this thesis, I focus on the experiences of the Greeks of Istanbul and Imbros/Gökçeada, who were exempted from the compulsory population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923. Particularly in the years c.1950-1980, members of these communities were faced with persecution in Turkey, and overwhelmingly left their places of birth to resettle in Greece, their purported ‘national homeland’. Drawing on oral history testimonies, written documentation, and participant observation, I explore how the expatriated Greeks of Turkey appealed to and reworked the past as they attempted to establish belonging in their new place of residence, make sense of their recent historical experiences, and communicate these understandings to others. Part I sets out the conceptual, methodological, and historical background of the thesis. In part II, I consider the representation of self and others by the Greeks of Turkey, arguing that they sought to assert both belonging and distinctiveness within the Greek national community by emphasising the specificities of their own local heritages. Part III investigates the ways in which activists and writers from the expatriated community, in their efforts to raise awareness of their experiences of persecution, adopted and adapted archetypes both from Greek nationalist history and the mnemonic repertoires of other communities, and I discuss these discourses in relation to the recent ‘transcultural turn’ in memory studies. In part IV, I turn my attention to the seasonal, semi-permanent, and permanent return of the Greeks to Imbros after 1988, documenting how these more recent developments have impacted upon the community’s relationship to the Greek state, and the transmission of memory and identity to the younger Greek-born generation. I conclude by suggesting that anthropologists and historians can make significant contributions to current scholarly debates concerning national identity and social memory by examining the internal heterogeneity and malleability of ethnicity and nationhood, and how the transcultural circulation of memories makes its presence felt on particular local communities in particular historical contexts.

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This project explores the multiplicity of contemporary invocations of the 1973 Athens Polytechnic uprising as remembrance practices of political myth-making (Bottici, 2007), focusing on the annual commemoration of the uprising in 2012 and 2013. Contextualised within the contemporary ‘crisis,’ this thesis poses the following questions: how and why are images of the Polytechnic uprising invoked and made transmissible in the present through remembrance practices? How are such practices meaningful for people involved in everyday political action? Using mixed ethnographic methods - audio-visual artefacts, pamphlets, interviews, and participant observation - I propose that urban sociologists concerned with political action should be attentive to political myths. I argue that the different spaces and temporalities created through myth-making are tied to different imaginations of political action. I situate these practices in Exarcheia, and explore how this area is produced as an exceptional space of contentious politics. While most scholarship focuses on myths of the nation-state, I disentangle competing dominant and counteractive political myths. I analyse how dominant political myths create a linear homogenous concept of time, and fabricate the Polytechnic as a space of mourning and, sometimes, extremism. I explore the heterogeneous counteractive political myths through the production of counterspaces, examining how participants make artefacts using dialectical images to create distinct temporalities of a ‘contemporary Junta’ and a discontinuous history of tenacious resistance. I show how creating, sharing, and interpreting myths is meaningful for people in terms of political subjectivity and generating affective agency. I argue that these practices can be considered forms of indirect resistance, with the annual commemoration a ‘coming together’ serving as a resource that fortifies people’s capacity to resist. This project hopes to build on the rich interdisciplinary contemporary scholarship on Greek urban political action by taking into account the importance of remembrance practices of political myth-making.

This thesis deals with the parallel threads of colonial politics, nationalism and archaeology in the Cretan State (1898 – 1913), a semi-autonomous, semicolonial regime, established on the island of Crete by some of the “Great Powers” of the time (Great Britain, France, Russia and Italy). This polity ended 250 years of direct Ottoman rule, in a region inhabited by both Christians – the majority – and Muslims. Some of the most significant archaeological projects began during that period, mainly directed by western archaeological missions. Amidst this setting, a local elite of intermediaries supported Greek irredentism and demanded a nationally “pure” present, heir to an equally “pure” past. At the same time, an obedient stance towards the occupying forces and their archaeological demands secured their individual and collective interests. Both stances lead them to clash with Western archaeologists, Greek archaeologists, and especially the local peasantry, whose behaviour towards antiquities they considered ignorant and non-patriotic. How did the colonial foundations of Cretan archaeology affect its relationship with Greek nationalism? How was modern archaeology received and “consumed” by the Cretans of the time? In order to answer these questions, I organise my chapters by focusing upon different “groups” of people related to my subject (the Western archaeologists, the local archaeological elites, the Cretan peasants etc.) and studying how their intermingling evolved regarding the management of the material past. Most of my resources are of an archival nature, some of them never published before. They come from personal collections, memoirs, correspondence between key figures, press articles and administrative records. My findings clearly highlight how the Westerners managed to incorporate successfully the Cretan archaeological production within their identity-building, focused on the origins of the European civilisation. This material bond subsidised their collective, “civilised” identity, allowing them the privilege to colonise the world beyond their perception. At the same time, Crete was occupied by the Greek national imagination. The new archaeological narrative was used by the local elites in order to remodel the Cretan society, particularly the most “unruly” parts of it, the rural population, into obedient national subjects. The Cretan peasants reacted to these practices with a remarkable flexibility and resistance, which was evident in both their narrative and activity related to the material remains of the past. The outcomes of my research have wider relevance, especially for studies that may include, among others, topics such as the social history of Crete, archaeology and the politics of identity, ethnocratic applications of archaeology, memory destruction and reconstruction, conflict archaeology and archaeology “from below”.

Existing studies of urban riots, violent protest and other instances of contentious politics in urban settings have largely tended to be either event- or time-specific in their scope. The present thesis offers a spatial reading of such politics of contention in the city of Athens, Greece. Tracing the pattern of the occurrence of these instances through time, the research scope of the thesis spans across Greece’s post-dictatorial era (i.e. post-1974, the Greek Metapolitefsi), concluding shortly after the first loan agreement between the country’s national government and the so-called ‘troika’ of lenders (IMF/ECB/EU). The thesis includes a critical overview of literature on riots in a historical and geographical context; questions on methodology and ethics in researching urban riots; a discourse analysis of violence concentration in Exarcheia; ethnographic accounts on everyday life in the neighbourhood and a ‘rhythmanalysis’ of the Exarcheia contention concentration during the period of research. Seeking to explain this concentration the thesis introduces the notion of the 'spatial contract': rather than signalling a type of discord, the concentration of mass violence in Exarcheia through time is hereby conceived as the spatial articulation of a certain form of consensus between Greek authorities and their subjects. In this way, the thesis places the concentration of urban violence in Exarcheia solidly within the social and political context of the country’s postdictatorial era. The thesis suggests that it would be beneficial for future human geographical research to trace such concentration patterns of urban riots. By exercising a crossscale reading, it would then possible to place these and other forms of contentious politics within a social equilibrium that is far more complex and often much more consensual than it might appear to be.

This thesis builds on, and contributes to recent scholarship on the history of nineteenth‐century liberalism by exploring Greek legal thought and its political implications during the first decades after independence from the Ottomans (ca.1830‐1880). Protagonists of this work of intellectual history are the Greek jurists—a small group of very influential legal scholars—most of whom flocked to the Greek kingdom right after its establishment. By focusing on their theoretical contributions and public action, the thesis has two major contentions. First, it shows that the legal, political and economic thought of the jurists was not only conversant with Continental liberal currents of the Restoration, but, due to the particular local context, made original contributions to liberalism. Indeed, Greek liberals shared a lot with their counterparts in France, Italy and Germany, not least the belief that liberty originated in law and the state and not against them. Another shared feature was the distinction between the elitist liberal variant of the ‘Romanist’ civil lawyers such as Pavlos Kalligas, and the more ‘radical moderate’ version of Ioannis Soutsos and Nikolaos Saripolos. At the same time, the Greek liberals, seeking not to terminate but to institutionalize the Greek revolution, tuned to the radical language of natural rights (of persons and states) and national sovereignty. This language, which sought to control the rulers, put more contestation in power and expand political participation gained wide currency during the crisis of the 1850s, which exposed also the precarious place of Greece in the geography of European civilization. The second contention of the thesis is that this ‘transformation of thought’, informed the ‘long revolution’ of the 1860s and the new system of power this latter established. By so doing, it shows that liberal jurisprudence provided the intellectual foundations upon which the modern Greek state was build.

Στόχος της εργασίας μας ήταν η μελέτη, μέσα από πρωτογενείς κυρίως πηγές, της περιόδου κατοχής στην Αχαΐα. Ειδικότερα θελήσαμε να δείξουμε πως επηρεάστηκαν η ζωή του άμαχου πληθυσμού και η εκπαιδευτική διαδικασία από την κατάκτηση, την Κατοχή και την Αντίσταση. Υπό το πρίσμα αυτό διερευνήσαμε τις σχέσεις του άμαχου πληθυσμού με τους κατακτητές και την Αντίσταση και τη θέση του σχολείου,εκπαιδευτικών και μαθητών/φοιτητών στις νέες συνθήκες. Όπου κρίθηκε απαραίτητο αναφερθήκαμε σε άλλες περιοχές της Ελλάδας με στόχο την συγκριτική ανάγνωση των τεκταινομενων στην Αχαΐα. Η έρευνά μας περιστράφηκε γύρω από τρία βασικά ερωτήματα: τις επιπτώσεις της Κατοχής και της Αντίστασης στην καθημερινότητα των ανθρώπων, τις αντιδράσεις των Αχαιών στην προπαγάνδα και τα αντίποινα των κατακτητών και, τέλος, τα προβλήματα της εκπαίδευσης και τις πρακτικές του εκπαιδευτικού κόσμου. Από την έρευνά μας καταλήξαμε στα εξής συμπεράσματα: Α) Η αντίσταση στην Αχαΐα υπήρξε σχεδόν καθολική. Ήταν ηπιότερη απέναντι στους Ιταλούς, περισσότερο οργανωμένη και καλυμμένη απέναντι στους Γερμανούς. Αναλύονται διεξοδικά οι λόγοι της γενικευμένης αντίστασης και αναφορέρονται οι επιπτώσεις των αντιποίνων. Β)Στην αντίσταση κατά των κατακτητών, επισημαίνεται ο ιδιαίτερος ρόλος του ΕΑΜ, το οποίο κατάφερε να πλησιάσει τους πολίτες κάθε κοινωνικής ομάδας, μέσα από ένα πλήθος οργανώσεων οι οποίες κάλυπταν κάθε πτυχή του κοινωνικού βίουκαι απαντούσαν σε σύγχρονες και χρόνιες ανάγκες του πολίτη,ανάγκες στις οποίες το επίσημο κράτος δεν μπόρεσε ποτέ να ανταποκριθεί. Γ) Η κατάκτηση άλλαξε τα δεδομένα του σχολείου. Απάντηση στα τρέχοντα και τα χρόνια προβλήματα της εκπαίδευσης προσπάθησαν να δώσουν οι αντιστασιακές οργανώσεις ΕΔΕΣ και ΕΑΜ, κυρίως η δεύτερη. Το ΕΑΜ πρωτοστάτησε, επιπλέον, στην αντίσταση στον εκπαιδευτικό χώρο. Η συμμετοχή των φορέων της εκπαίδευσης στην Αντίσταση ήταν σχεδόν καθολική. / The goal of our research is the investigation (through unpublished sources mainly) of the period of the Italian - German occupation in Achaia. In particular, we tried to show how people's everyday life and the educational process was affected by the occupation and the Resistance. In this light we investigated people's relation with the conquerors and the Resistance and the school's, teachers' and pupils'/students' situation under these circumstances. When it was needed, we was mentioned to the other regions of Greece, focusing on a comparative look of what happened in Achaia. Our investigation ran on three basic questions: the impact of the Italian-German occupation and the Resistance on people's everyday life, their reactions to the conquerors' propaganda and reprisals and, finally, the educationl problems and the acts of educational world. The conclusions of this study are: A) The resistance in Achaia was widespread. The struggle against Germans was orginized and clandestine. The resistance to the Italians was less intense. The reasons of this general resistance are analyzed in detail in this study and also the impacts of the reprisals. B) The exeptional role of EAM in the resistance to conquerors is pointed out. Eam managed to embrace people from every social class through a large number of organizations that covered every aspect of social life and addressed the current and chronic needs of the citizens, needs to which the official government could never respond. C) The conquest changed the school in many ways. EDES and EAM, mainly the second, tried to address the problems in education. In particular, EAM played a leading role in the organization of the resistance of teachers and other education authorities and achieved their board participation.