Greeks plan new start for Games

Letter from Athens
Patrick Comerford

Metal hoarding still dominates the south side of Syntagma Square in the centre of Athens, and the signs of construction work for the new metro line can still be seen throughout the city. But in recent weeks, work on the metro has contributed a lot less to traffic chaos in the Greek capital that the protests by students and teachers or the intermittent strikes by trolley and bus drivers.

Driving through Athens demands great patience at the best of times. But Greeks are more tolerant of the chaos created by construction work on the metro than they are of protests and strikes - at least the metro promises to bring some relief to the traffic jams and bottlenecks. And they point out that the new metro, the planned new airport and a new highway all helped to secure the 2004 Olympics for Greece.

The failure to secure the centenary games in 1996 was a blow to Greek national pride and honour. In the early 1990s, there was a feeling throughout the country that Greece had some proprietary hold over the games, and the Atlanta games allowed many to sneer at the over-commercialisation of the Olympics. Now Greeks are determined to ensure that when the games come to Athens in 2004, the world will recall their Greek origins and the fact that the original Olympics were about more than sport.

Greeks believe the Olympic Games ought to be more than a staged athletic event of limited duration every four years. The original games had a cultural dimension too: during the ancient games all wars ceased between the Greek city-states, and the four-year period between each Olympic Games was counted as an Olympiad.

Now the Greek Minister of Culture, Prof Evangelos Venizelos, has seized the opportunity provided by the Athens games in 2004 to promote the concept of the Cultural Olympiad. Throughout the four-year period between successive games, Dr Venizelos wants to see the Cultural Olympiad as a fixed event consisting of a series of important cultural occasions of international importance.

He first presented the idea of the Cultural Olympiad to UNESCO in Paris last year, when it received unanimous acceptance. “Everyone understands that culture is an appropriate field for international co-operation,” he says. “On this basis, new institutions need to be established”, and he hopes his new enterprise will be established and working within the period 2000 to 2004.

The Cultural Olympiad will consist of a series of major cultural events of international interest, organised throughout the four-year period between successive games and in co-operation with the host cities.

But it is easy to assess participants in sporting Olympics – the fastest, the highest, the strongest, compete with each other. How could a Cultural Olympiad hope to standardise and numerically assess events and entrants? And the Greeks who have put forward the idea of a Cultural Olympiad are also aware that culture is not always an agent for the Olympian ideals of friendship, co-operation, understanding and co-existence: cultural differences have also caused political and military conflicts.

Mrs Sophia Hiniadou, the adviser to the Ministry of Culture with responsibility for the Cultural Olympiad, is aware of the danger of commercialisation, and at the same time wants to ensure the international dimension of the whole endeavour in a context of cultural pluralism and tolerance.

Four clear themes have emerged for the Cultural Olympiad: the culture of peace, co-existence and reconciliation; the culture of social cohesion and non-exclusion; the culture of the information society; and culture as a meeting place for tradition and innovation.

According to Mrs Hiniadou, the first Cultural Olympiad will open with the 2000 Sydney games and will end with 2004 Athens games. The plans for the opening include the “electronic kindling” of the Olympic Torch of Culture on the Internet, with a message of peace and social cohesion and of the Internet as a network of solidarity through knowledge and communication.

In Greece, the organisers plan to take advantage of the existing infrastructure provided by the country's cultural heritage, including ancient theatres, castles and large archaeological sites. The opening events will include an international conference on the state of culture at the dawn of third millennium, and will be staged in major symbolic venues such as the Lyceum of Aristotle and the Academy of Plato in Athens, Ancient Olympia, Delphi, Epidavros, Vergina, and Ancient Mieza.

The celebrations for 2000 coincide with the celebration of the sixth Greek Millennium, which is being marked with a multiple exhibition – “Axion Esti, the Millennia of Hellenism” – opening simultaneously in Athens, Rome, Egypt, China, New York, Japan, Sydney and Moscow. Later, events between 2001 and 2003 will include the simultaneous staging of anti-war works from the classic repertoire – tragedies such as The Trojan Women and The Suppliant Women, and comedies such as Aristophanes Lysistrata – in all the major Greek and Roman theatres throughout the Mediterranean basin.

To ensure that the Cultural Olympiad is not a once-only event to coincide with the Athens games, the Greek government has helped to establish the International Foundation for the Cultural Olympiad. The foundation has its secretariat in ancient Olympia and in Athens, and the international governing committee includes the director-general of UNESCO, Mr Federico Mayor, the president of the International Olympic Committee, and the Greek Minister of Culture.

Although the foundation recognises that the Cultural Olympiads will need a competitive element to ensure their success, Mrs Hiniadou is aware of the danger of their degenerating into some form of “beauty contest” similar to the Eurovision Song Contest, or of their being commercialised in the same way as the Atlanta games.

However, she is also keen to dismiss any idea that this is an effort from Athens to reclaim the Olympics as Greek cultural property. She points out that Greece first gave the world the concept of the Olympics. “It’s our duty to save what we gave in the beginning. Athens 2004 is a good opportunity to start anew,” she says.

This feature was published in The Irish Times on 8 December 1998

Time for the Parthenon Marbles to be sent home

Letter from Athens
By Patrick Comerford

A brush fire broke out recently in the ancient Agora at the foot of the Acropolis in Athens, briefly threatening 2,500-year old monuments before being brought under control.

Tourists watched as fire fighters battled burning trees and bushes inside the site that was the ancient market and meeting place of Athens, and smoke billowed up towards the Acropolis and the Parthenon.

Temperatures and winds have caused hundreds of forest fires throughout Greece this summer, and the fire at the foot of the Acropolis came only weeks after the long dispute over the Parthenon Marbles grew more heated. In a new book, the British historian William St Clair claims cleaners at the British Museum irreparably damaged them 60 years ago by scrubbing them with metal scrapers.

As St Clair’s book was being published, the British government once again rejected renewed demands from the Greek Culture Minister, Mr Evangelos Venizelos, for an international commission to decide the fate of the Parthenon Marbles, known in the museum as the Elgin Marbles.

Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, was British ambassador to the Ottoman Court in Istanbul when he stripped much of the surviving inner frieze and most of the pediment sculptures from the Parthenon, shipped them off to England in 1802, and sold them to the British Museum in 1816.

Elgin had stretched the powers of an Ottoman permit allowing him to collect inscriptions and slabs from the Acropolis, and in their rushed efforts his crews greatly damaged the temple.

“Instead of removing things slowly and safely they hacked away and mutilated,” says Dr Manolis Korres, the architect in charge of a major restoration project at the Acropolis. “They pushed three-tonne ledges from 15 metres high, shattering them and damaging the base of the temple.”

St Clair alleges the damage caused to the marbles 60 years ago was covered up by the trustees of the British Museum. Over a period of 15 months from 1938 to 1939, the marbles were cleaned by workers who used copper tools to remove what they believed was dirt but was in reality the honey-coloured patina of the surface.

The museum standing committee found that “through improper efforts to improve the colour of the Parthenon sculpture … some important pieces had been greatly damaged”, and disciplinary action was taken against two officials. Frederick Pryce, then keeper of Greek and Roman antiquities, was given leave to retire because of ill-health, and his assistant, Roger Hinks, who later resigned, was formally reprimanded for neglect of duty.

It is generally believed the cleaning was ordered by Sir John Soames, then director of the British Museum, at the request of Lord Duveen, who had commissioned a new gallery to house the sculptures.

However, in public the museum denied using a blunt copper tool. In a letter to the Times in 1939, George Hill claimed the cleaning method involved only soap and water and any resulting damage was imperceptible to the untrained eye. But Arthur Holcombe, the museum's chief cleaner, later admitted that when a solution of soap and water and ammonia had failed “to get some of the dirtier spots, I rubbed the marbles with a blunt copper tool.”

A new controversy over the cleaning of the marbles surfaced in 1983, when the museum was accused of speeding up the process of decay by coating the caryatid with a supposedly protective plastic. That year, the then Greek Minister of Culture, Melina Mercouri, began a vigorous campaign for the return of the marbles, saying: “I believe the time has come for these marbles to come home to the blue skies of Attica.”

Her successor, Mr Venizelos, says: “The request for the restitution of the Parthenon Marbles is not made by the Greek government in the name of the Greek nation or of Greek history. It is made in the name of the cultural heritage of the world and with the voice of the mutilated monument itself, that cries out for its marbles to be returned.”

In Britain, the campaign to have the marbles restored to Greece has received the support of writers such as Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens, Tariq Ali and John Fowles.

However, the British Museum and government insist the marbles will stay in London, although previous Labour leaders, including Neil Kinnock and Michael Foot, supported their return.

Earlier this year, the Mail on Sunday claimed the British Culture Secretary, Chris Smith, had said in private he was sympathetic to calls for the return of the marbles. Former arts minister, Mark Fisher, is a known supporter of the demand to return the marbles. A long-awaited Acropolis Museum is being built near the Parthenon to house the marbles, and Mr Fisher believes Greece has now met many of the British objections to their return.

In recent years Greece has demonstrated a commitment to preserving its archaeological heritage. Alarmed by the rapid crumbling of the Minoan palace at Knossos, archaeologists in Crete are trying to rescue the 5,000-year-old site from further damage by the millions of tourists who visit it each year in search of a unique glimpse of Europe's oldest civilisation. A 700 million drachma (£1.6 million) restoration project is expected to be completed by the end of the century.

Last month it was announced that the five marble lions on the island of Delos, prized as beacons of Greek antiquity, are to be moved indoors to save them from salt erosion and pollution. The lions, dating from 700 BC, will be replaced by copies next year.

But the most ambitious restoration programme in Greece is currently under way on the Acropolis.

Of the 97 surviving blocks of Parthenon frieze, 56 are in Britain and 40 in Athens; of the 64 surviving metopes, 18 are in Athens and 15 in the British Museum; in many cases, half a sculpture is in Athens and the other half in the British Museum.

Mr Venizelos says: “The most important monument of Western civilisation is mutilated. The Parthenon itself demands its marbles back.”

Roger Casement once wrote:

Give back the Elgin marbles, let them lie
Unsullied, pure beneath the Attic sky.
The smoky fingers of our northern clime
More ruin work than all ancient time …
Give back the marbles, let them vigil keep
Where art still lies, over Pheidias’ tomb

The marbles form an inseparable part of the Parthenon and their restitution would restore the unity of the decoration and the architectural cohesion of the monument. The 2004 Olympics in Athens would provide an ideal opportunity to return the Parthenon Marbles to Greece.

This ‘Letter from Athens’ was first published in ‘The Irish Times’ on 4 August 1998

Dictionary lifts the lid on Greeks

Letter from
Greece
Patrick Comerford

While Greeks got caught up in recent weeks in strikes and protests over the planned privatisation of the Ionian Bank and the sell-off of Olympic Airways, the government was more concerned with Cyprus and with its slide in the opinion polls.

But for the chattering classes, the most important topic of social conversation has been a new Greek dictionary which has committed the cardinal error of giving outsiders an insight into how Greeks speak about each other.

The primate of the Greek Orthodox Church, Archbishop Christdoulos of Athens and All Greece recently used a disparaging word – “Greekling” – to describe 53 deputies who would prefer not to take their parliamentary oath in the name of God. An unrepentant Archbishop Christdoulos insisted: “I will not keep my keep my mouth shut because I believe that what I have to say is what the people want and need to hear.”

The people would have been far happier not to have heard what Prof George Babiniotis had to say in his New Dictionary of Greek Language. Most Greeks were angered that Prof Babiniotis had provided a secondary definition of “Bulgarian”, revealing it is “a derogatory slang used in ball games by southerners to describe northerners”, particularly for supporters of teams from Greece’s second city, Thessaloniki. The dictionary also revealed that Pontians, Greeks originally from the Black Sea region, are often the butt of jokes.

But the outrage was not caused by sensitivity to Greece’s northern neighbours or Pontic immigrants who might be insulted by their names being used as insults implying racial inferiority. “Instead,” according to Nikos Konstandaras, columnist with the leading daily Kathimerini, “the fuss concerns the act of writing down, of codifying, something which everybody accepts readily.”

Every major team in Greece is pilloried by its opponents for its racial or social inferiority. AEK’s supporters are referred to as “Turks”, the supporters of Olympiakos as “cheap fish”, and those of Panathinaikos as “vaseline boys” – a term full of dubious sexual connotations.

Football transcends the social and class barriers in Greece. But, while these insults and nicknames are generally accepted and known, even in polite Greek society, Prof Babiniotis has broken a long-accepted taboo by committing these terms to the printed reference book where they can be read by outsiders.

The Culture Minister, Mr Evangelos Venizelos – who hails from Thessaloniki – said Prof Babiniotis had made “an error”, and Pasok’s candidate for mayor of the city, Mr Thrasyvoulos Lazaridis, a Greek of Pontic origin, made political capital of the controversy. A court in Thessaloniki banned the dictionary following an action by a former deputy mayor who is leader of Thessaloniki’s Pontic Greek association.

But Greeks have always spoken of one another in such terms since classical times. In the Dodecanese, the island of Leros suffers from the double indemnity of being host to the most notorious psychiatric institutions and the fact that its name has a close mental association with the Greek word for dirt or filth, lera. The ancient Greek poet, Phokylides, in one of his few epigrams surviving from the 6th century BC, wrote:

And this is by Phokylides.
The Lerians are evil.
Not one [evil], another not; but all, except Prokles;
and Prokles too is a Lerian.

There are less polite renderings of the original Lerioi kokkoi, but these are best left to imaginative readers to translate. The poet’s sentiments were echoed over 50 years ago by Lawrence Durrell when he visited the island and wrote: “God help those born here … The water is brackish – like the wit of its inhabitants. As far as I am concerned I am wholeheartedly on the side of the poet Phocylides who used the name of Leros to throw mud … An early example of literary mud-slinging!”

Durrell’s contemporary, the half-Irish Patrick Leigh Fermor, was privy to how Greeks talk about each other. Greece and Greek are not words in the Greek language – today they refer to themselves and their state as Hellenes and the Hellenic Democracy. But for 1,000 years Greeks knew themselves as Romaioi, the subjects of the Roman Emperor at Constantinople.

Under the Turks, all Greeks used the word romios to refer to themselves, and Leigh Fermor tried to contrast two appellations: he identified the Romios with the Dome of Saint Sophia, Demotic Greek, and home-sickness for the Byzantine Empire; the Hellene stood for the columns of the Parthenon, katharevousa, the formal Greek language, and nostalgia for the age of Pericles.

The poet Kostis Palamas liked to quote the dying words of a Greek hero before his throat was slit by Ali Pasha:

Romios ego gennithika,
Romios the na pethano.
“I was born a Greek, I shall die a Greek.”

Romiosini, the great epic poem by Yannis Ritsos celebrating Greek identity, has been set to music by Mikis Theodorakis. But when Leigh Fermor used Romios instead of Hellene in casual conversation to describe a Greek, he found Romios is strictly for internal use and not for foreigners, however fluent and seasoned. He “got a black look … I was an outsider usurping a secret family password.”

Prof Babiniotis, who has committed the sin of allowing outsiders to know about secret family passwords and about how Greek speaks about Greek, has offered to delete the controversial entries from the second edition, although he said the initial court order amounted to “a muzzle” on the academic community.

But Prof Babiniotis’ dictionary is likely to continue causing controversy. More indignant citizens are are now upset at a further entry: “Vlachs”, the name of a Balkan people ethnically and linguistically linked to Romanians is used in slang to describe a backward villager.

If Prof Babiniotis is to draw any comfort from the controversy, the first edition is almost sold out.

The Athens daily Ta Nea reported his book had sold 14,500 copies in less than a week – “a figure more suited to a racy novel rather than a reference book,” according to the Athens News.

This feature was first published in ‘The Irish Times’ on 30 June 1998.

All that delirium of the brave

Patrick Comerford

One of the most moving events for me of the 1798 commemorations this summer was being asked to unveil a memorial stone on the mass grave in Old Ross of more than 100 people who were left without a gravestone or memorial for 200 years.

The 100 women, men and children buried in St Mary’s churchyard were burned to death in a barn at Scullabogue shortly after the United Irish rebels were defeated at New Ross. But for two centuries they were neglected, often branded as loyalist prisoners of war, and a source of embarrassment to many. This year, the victims of Scullabogue have been remembered with equal dignity along with those who died fighting with the United Irishmen.

But it would have been impossible to imagine a public tribute like that during previous commemorations. As Professor Kevin Whelan writes in one of the many new books published to coincide with the bicentenary, “The 1798 rebellion remains buried under an oppressive weight of misrepresentation … The Catholic Nationalist version which dominated the centenary, 1938 and 1948 commemorations created the 1798 which people think they know.”

Historians such as Whelan, Daire Keogh and Nicholas Furlong have done much in recent years to challenge the way in which the myths and ballads of the late 19th century have shaped and formed our ideas of what happened in 1798. Kevin Whelan’s comments come in a new book edited by Mary Cullen, 1798: 200 years of Resonance (Irish Reporter Publications, no price given). The generosity of spirit he encourages is reflected in the essays by Norman Porter and Martin Mansergh.

Porter tries to reclaim some of the values of 1798 for unionists, or, in his own words, “to capture and sustain the anti-sectarian legacy of 1798”. In our post-referendum days, his view of unionism offers hope not only to southern nationalists but a gripping challenge to Northern nationalists and unionists alike.

In an equally generous approach, Dr Mansergh pays tribute to Unionists such as Councillor Harvey Bicker, who chairs the Co Down 1798 Commemoration Committee, and rightly says: “Our task today, like that which the United Irishmen set themselves, is to transcend the conflicts of the past.”

And so it is sad to see the Rising being used for narrow, marginal political purposes and to read in the same collection Sean O Bradaigh’s essay which could have been written in 1948 or even in 1898. He displays no knowledge of recent historical studies which show that the founding and leading United Irishmen included not only Presbyterians and Catholics, but members of the Church of Ireland, too, and that the turning point for the Wexford Rising was the Battle of New Ross, not the defeat at Vinegar Hill.

Unfortunately, the worst of the myths and ballads are still being perpetuated and recycled with fervour and with glee. The best and the worst of those ballads have been put together by Danny Doyle and Terence Dolan in The Gold Sun of Irish Freedom: 1798 in Song and Story (Mercier Press, £6.99). The book comes complete with musical notation and simple guitar chords, and combines a linking narrative with the history, songs, poetry and fables of the Rising.

But while tales such as that of Biddy Dolan and the conman who collected money to finance Father Murphy’s escape are engaging, the narrative is racy and questionable, recycling many of the old myths. And, in parts, it is plainly and simply inaccurate: Henry Munroe was neither Scottish nor Presbyterian, but a member of the Church of Ireland from Co Down. Perhaps the authors’ sympathies are exposed when they say the French fleet at Bantry was defeated by “the Protestant Wind”.

The critical approach to understanding the events of 1798 was pioneered as long ago as 1955 by Dr Charles Dickson, with his The Wexford Rising in 1798. Using previously unpublished letters, documents and archive sources, he set the standard for his successors, and his work remained the definitive account of events in Co Wexford until Dr Daniel Gahan’s seminal The People’s Rising. Now Dickson’s account has been republished (Constable, £9.99 in UK). The book remains valuable for its methodology, its succinct biographies, and its critique of the early bibliography of the Rising.

Three recent studies of the rising in neighbouring Co Wicklow and in Co Kildare show how that critical approach has been developed. Two accounts of the Rising are provided by Mario Corrigan’s popular All That Delirium of the Brave – Kildare in 1798 (Kildare County Council, no price given), and Liam Chambers’ scholarly Rebellion in Kildare (Four Courts Press, £9.95). Corrigan’s book benefits from local photographs and takes a look at the 1898 commemorations, too. Chambers’ book is based on his MA thesis at Maynooth, and effectively points out that the Rising was not a sectarian rebellion forced on the peasantry by a draconian military government.

That view comes through too in the memoirs of one of the forgotten Protestant heroes of the Rising, Joseph Holt, edited by Peter O’Shaughnessy. Rebellion in Wicklow, General Joseph Holt’s Personal Account of 1798 (Four Courts Press, no price given) is the first full and accurate transcript of the Irish part of the memoirs of Michael Dwyer’s friend. The book benefits from the annotations and footnotes, and appendices provide a variety of opinions on Holt as well as his obituary from the Dublin and London Magazine

But perhaps one of the finest and most original books this year has been edited by Daire Keogh and Nicholas Furlong. The Women of 1798 (Four Courts Press, £9.95) has its gaps – there is no biography of Betsy Gray or of Lady Pamela FitzGerald – but that is a small quibble given how women have been neglected by most historians of the Rising and, as Anna Kinsella points out, by the ballad writers, too. Robert Dwyer Joyce’s The Boys of Wexford opens in praise of “the captain’s daughter” but she remains unnamed – it was a double indemnity to be both a Protestant and a woman when tales of the Rising were being rewritten for the 1898 commemorations.

In his essay, John Beatty examines seven contrasting accounts of the Rising by Protestant women in Co Wexford, and points out that it is difficult to classify loyalist women of the day in neat liberal or conservative categories. Nancy Curtin provides a much-needed study of Matilda Wolfe Tone, and Anna Kinsella tells the contrasting tales of Mad Madge Dickson of Castlebridge and Mary Doyle, the oft-neglected heroine of New Ross.

Many of the dead of 1798 will remain neglected if heroes and heroines are selectively chosen in way the Richard Roche has approached his book, Here’s to their Memory (National Graves Association, no price given), which tries to list the gravestones and burial places in Co Wexford of supporters of the United Irishmen. Apart from an unfortunate number of inaccuracies (John Henry Colclough, for example, was a Catholic, not a Protestant), Roche also appears to have paid little attention to Brian Cantwell’s monumental work, which has shown why many of the 1798 graves are misdated.

And if it had been published any later, this book would have found no place for the new memorial in Old Ross to the victims of Scullabogue. If the story of 1798 is to be told, then it must be told without a partisan approach, for the aim of the United Irishmen was to unite Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter in the common name of Irishmen, not to perpetuate old separations and divisions.

Patrick Comerford is an Irish Times journalist; his study of the Church of Ireland clergy in Co Wexford in 1798 appears in Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter: The Clergy and 1798

This feature was published in The Irish Times on Saturday 13 June 1998

Islanders remember waves of invaders

World View

Patrick Comerford

Kremasti and the small villages of Rhodes, with their tavernas, white-washed domed churches and neoclassical public buildings, appear for all the world like picture-postcard Greece. It is hard to imagine that Rhodes and its neighbouring islands in the Dodecanese have been part of the modern Greek state for only 50 years.

Looking across the narrow strait that separates the western coast of Rhodes from the thin, finger-like peninsulas that jut out from Anatolian Turkey, it is easy to understand why local people talk in terms of “when the Turks come,” and rarely “if …”

The shore line is pock-marked with gun positions which, despite their wilting camouflage, are always ready for use. Turkey and Greece have gone to war twice this century, and both states have yet to find a way to implement an agreement reached 10 years on reducing tensions in the Aegean.

The signs of invasions that came wave after wave are to be seen throughout the island. Rhodes has been attacked or conquered by each and every civilisation that has sought to impose its might on the Mediterranean, including the Minoans, the Dorians, the Romans, the Arabs, the Byzantines, Genoese pirates, and the Crusading Knights of Rhodes, who were forced by the Turks to abandon the island for Malta in 1522.

In the old town of Rhodes, the Turks have left a monumental legacy, with their terracotta pink mosques and minarets, Ottoman libraries and harems, fountains, baths and bazaars providing an oriental atmosphere in the narrow streets with their hanging balconies. There is still a small minority of 4,000 Muslims of Turkish origin on the island, and their integration into island life is typified by Mustafa, the taxi driver, who insists on being called Taki by his colleagues.

But while the Turks left their mark mainly in the old town, the Italians were the last invading force to leave their mark everywhere in Rhodes and throughout the Dodecanese. Despite their name, there are more than 12 islands in the Dodecanese: over 1,000 islands – only 26 are inhabited – fell to Italians after they defeated the Turks in 1912.

Under the command of the Italian Governor, Mario de Vecchi, Italian architects rebuilt the Palace of the Grand Masters, destroyed in an explosion in 1856, as a summer residence for King Victor Emmanuel III and Mussolini. They were given free rein to their fantasies and proved indiscriminate in their mixture of architectural styles, features and furnishings, plundering early Christian mosaics from Kos and misplacing them in the upper floors. The overall kitsch effect was later ridiculed by Lawrence Durrell as “a design for a Neapolitan ice”. Ironically, the rebuilding was completed in 1939, and neither the king nor Il Duce ever stayed in the palace.

A project that was a disaster – although on a lesser scale – was the building work at Kalithea, where Hippocrates had advised his patients to take the spa waters for kidney and arthritic complaints. The Italians tried to restore the thermal baths, laid out terraced tropical gardens, and built domed pavilions with pink marbled pillars, arcades and walks in pseudo-Moorish style. The project failed to attract Italian visitors, and today the site is only of passing interest to tourists on their way south to the popular resorts of Faliraki and Lindos.

Further north in the Dodecanese lies Leros, once famous as the island of Artemis, but now infamous as the home of Greece's most notorious psychiatric institutions, and as the island to which the colonels exiled their opponents. After Mussolini came to power, Italian architects and town planners started working on Mussolini’s vision of a fascist dream town in Lakki, building wide boulevards, a saucer-shaped market building with a clock tower, a cylindrical town hall and fascist centre, and the vast art deco Albergo Romana, later the Leros Palace Hotel, with a cinema and theatre complex.

To defy the Italians, the people of Leros abandoned Lakki and made the village of Platanos their own capital. Today, Mussolini’s summer residence houses the State Therapeutical Hospital, and Lakki is a ghost town by day, resembling a disused film set.

***

BUT, despite Durrell's criticisms of the rebuilding of the old town of Rhodes, the pleasant shape of the new town is a credit to Italian architects. They built the Nea Agora (new market) in the style of an oriental bazaar a Moorish inner courtyard and heptagonal domed fish market; they built the imposing and stately Post Office and the Bank of Greece; and they rebuilt the Evangelismos Church, a faithful reconstruction of the Crusaders’ Church of St John. The Governor's Palace - now home to the Greek Orthodox archbishop - mixes elements of Arab, neo-Gothic and Venetian styles, and has been compared by some with Doge’s Palace in Venice.

To view the authentic architectural styles of the islands, one must travel to Symi – squashed between Rhodes and the Marmares peninsula of Turkey – with its pastel-coloured neo-classical houses rising in tiers above the the semi-circle of the harbour they embrace. On the harbour-front at Symi, a small plaque commemorates the surrender of the Germans on May 8th, 1945, and the end of the second World War.

Durrell arrived soon after in Rhodes to edit to re-establish local newspapers and as part of the British administration. The British continued to administer the Dodecanese and in the old Governor’s Palace in the new town, the Italians formally handed over the Dodecanese in 1947.

This year, Rhodes and the other islands have been marking the 50th anniversary of their incorporation into the Greek state on March 7th, 1948. If Mussolini and Victor Emmanuel never managed to take up residence in the Grand Masters’ Palace, the Italians’ lasting legacy may well be the introduction of tourism to Rhodes. Close to the Villa Kleoboulos, where Durrell once made his home, they built the now-abandoned Hotel des Roses in Moorish style as the island’s first holiday hotel. And while other Greek islands have suffered from depopulation over recent decades, tourism has allowed Rhodes to see its population almost double from 66,000 in 1971 to the present 110,000.

The Italians are welcome and popular tourists today. No longer a threat, they are praised for the efforts to enhance the island’s beauty. But the islanders still look across the straits to Anatolia, and worry about the Turks who first and invaded and conquered them in 1522.

This ‘World View’ column was first published in ‘The Irish Times’ on Saturday 13 June 1998

1798: The Lost Leaders

Patrick Comerford

Co Wexford has started marking the 200th anniversary of the 1798 Rising, with concerts and flag-raising ceremonies, although the Rising did not begin in Wexford until May 27th, and was effectively brought to an end with the execution of Grogan and Harvey on Wexford Bridge on June 21st.

The organisers have ensured the commemorations command broad support throughout the community. Next week sees a ’98 Commemorative Concert in the National Concert Hall and events running through the year include exhibitions, lectures, seminars, the opening of the National 1798 Visitors’ Centre in Enniscorthy, a National Service of Commemoration in St Patrick’s Cathedral, and the unveiling of a plaque to commemorate the 113 people burned to death in Scullabogue Barn in one of the worst excesses by supporters of the Rising.

The programme includes the staging of Mozart’s Requiem in Belfast, Dublin and Wexford on three successive nights in the week before Easter, academic conferences in Belfast and Dublin in May, and the reconvening of the Wexford Senate at the end of May. Father John Murphy's house has been rebuilt in Boolavogue, the Tour de France will visit Enniscorthy and New Ross in July, and even the Orange Order has plans to commemorate the Battle of Ballynahinch in Co Down.

Bernard Browne, who has been co-ordinating Comoradh’s commemoration efforts from his office in Enniscorthy, is proud of the tone the commemorations are taking this time round, and finds a sharp contrast with the commemorative events in 1898, 1938 and 1948.

Those previous major commemorations of the 1798 Rising were emotional celebrations of the ideals of a Catholic and Gaelic Ireland. Monuments to Pikemen and Fighting Priests were unveiled throughout the southeast, and grand tableaux and parades were staged, often led by folksy representations of Father Murphy on horseback. But there was little effort to undertake new historical research into the causes, nature and course of the Rising, few tributes were paid to the real leaders, and there wasn’t even a hint of assent to the United Irishmen’s ideal of uniting “Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter”.

In the immediate aftermath of 1798, few people were brave enough to admit that family members had taken an active role in the Rising. Bernard Browne points out that the graves of many of the leaders remain unmarked, and many families erected gravestones throughout Co Wexford with dates such as 1788, 1797 or 1799 to avoid giving a hint that someone had died in 1798 during the Rising.

It was a wise precaution. In the immediate aftermath of the Rising, Catholic chapels were burned across north Wexford, and for years afterwards liberty trees were burned in triumph by loyalists in Enniscorthy, New Ross and other towns. Although Miles Byrne, Thomas Cloney, Edward Hay and others published their own accounts of the Rising, history and memories for most people in the 19th century were shaped instead by Sir Richard Musgrave’s history, first published in 1803. Musgrave saw the hands of Catholic priests in every aspect of the Rising, and later editions of his history tried to link the cause and inspiration of ’98 with accounts of the slaughter of Protestants in 1641.

For decades, families who had supported the Rising sought safety in suppressing their memories; confidence would come only in the years after the Famine. Anna Kinsella points out that the earliest known 1798 memorial in Co Wexford was erected as late as 1875 in Bunclody, and the first commemoration of the Rising was attended by fewer than 500 people on May 20th, 1877, in the village of Oulart. To this day, there is no public memorial to the Rebel Governor of Wexford, Matthew Keugh, or the president of the Wexford Council, Beauchamp Bagenal Harvey.

So how did Father Murphy become the hero of the Rising, and how did history come to distort the memories of men such as Bagenal Harvey or Keugh? According to three Wexford historians, Kevin Whelan, Daniel Gahan and Anna Kinsella, the Rising received a distinctly Catholic character and a blatantly religious dimension in the run-up to the 1898 commemorations due mainly to the writings of a Wexford Franciscan, Father Patrick Kavanagh.

Kavanagh’s Popular History Of The Insurrection Of 1798 was first published in the aftermath of the failed Fenian rising of 1867, and quickly became the popularly accepted account of 1798.

For the firebrand friar, the Rising was a struggle for “Faith and Fatherland”, the response of a Catholic people to a reign of terror by Orange oppressors. Kavanagh claimed his work was based on the recollections of survivors of the Rising, and his family connections ensured his credibility: Father Michael Murphy was a grand-uncle on his mother’s side, and his paternal grandfather, Jeremiah Kavanagh, owned the pub in Ballinamonabeg where the Wexford leaders of the United Irishmen met the night before the Rising began.

But Kavanagh ignored the evidence of Miles Byrne that thousands of Wexford people had taken the oath of the United Irishmen in the year before the Rising, and Luke Cullen’s evidence that John Murphy had no exceptional role in the Rising. He consciously distanced events in Wexford from the revolutionary plans of the United Irishmen, and blamed them for creating a climate of political intrigue which exposed innocent people to the excesses of violent Orange behaviour.

Although Kavanagh was dismissive of the leadership role played by Protestant United Irishmen in Co Wexford, both Harvey and Keugh were members of the Church of Ireland, as were four of the eight members of the government of Wexford town and all three colonels for the Baronies of Forth and Bargy. Two instincts dictated Kavanagh's approach – fear of the Fenians, and sectarian distrust of Protestants involved in the campaign for Home Rule.

In the aftermath of the failure of the Fenian Rising and Cardinal Cullen's condemnation of the Fenians as a secret society of “men without principle or religion”, Kavanagh attacked the United Irishmen as a secret, oathbound society. Thomas Cloney, William Barker and John Kelly were praised faintly as brave men, while Bagenal Harvey was dismissed in negative terms; he failed to mention that any of these were United Irishmen, moved by the wave of democracy sweeping across Europe and North America.

Kavanagh’s attitude can also be explained by his sectarian suspicion of the motives of Isaac Butt, Parnell, and other Protestant politicians - the second edition of his Popular History was published in 1874, the year 59 Home Rulers led by Butt were elected as MPs.

By down-playing the role of Protestants in the Rising, Kavanagh as a Catholic priest had managed to complete Musgrave's intentions: he changed popular history, cast the priests in an heroic mould, and placed them at the centre of the Rising.

“This heroic ideal found permanent expression in the bronze 1798 memorial erected in the Market Square in Enniscorthy,” says Anna Kinsella. The monument consists of two figures: the larger one, with rosary beads dripping from his pocket, represents Father John Murphy; the smaller figure is a young rebel or croppy boy with a pike and unfurled flag in one hand and a sword in the other. The priests were seen as leading poor Catholics in revolt against Orange oppressors.

Kavanagh ignored the embarrassing conflict between John Murphy and Bishop James Caulfield of Ferns. The reality, of course, is that the Catholic clergy of Co Wexford were no different than their Church of Ireland contemporaries. Dr Whelan points out that of the 85 Catholic priests in Co Wexford in 1798, only 11 played an active role in the Rising, while the other 74 “were either active loyalists or kept a very low profile”.

Among the 57 Church of Ireland clergy in Co Wexford in 1798, at least one – the Rev Henry Wilson of Mulrankin – took the United Irish oath. The Rector of Wexford, the Rev John Elgee, showed his sympathy for the rebels by accompanying Cornelius Grogan and Bagenal Harvey onto Wexford Bridge and praying with them before their execution; and, ironically, the Rector of Kilmuckridge, the Rev Robert Burrowes, who was murdered at Kyle Glebe on the opening morning of the Rebellion, was sympathetic to the United Irishmen if not a member.

Despite Kavanagh’s history, the majority of Catholic clergy of Co Wexford – like their predecessors of the previous century - wanted little to do with the Rising in the 19th century. At the first commemoration in May 1877, the parish priests of Boolavogue and Ferns refused to allow a 24-foot high cross to be erected to the men of ’98 in the churchyard at Boolavogue. When thousands arrived for its unveiling in Ballytracy in September, they found the ceremony had been spoiled: a local priest had paid a small boy two shillings to remove the covering of cloth and garlands the night before.

The centenary edition of Kavanagh's Popular History once again isolated events in Wexford from the rest of the country, overemphasised the role of John Murphy and other priests and refused to accommodate the role of the United Irishmen in the leadership of the Rising.

The commemorations of 1898 came late that year, and the initial preparations were marked by the divisions between the Redmond and Dillon wings of the divided Parliamentary Party, with two competing centenary committees vying to organise national events. The politics and the divisions delayed the organisation of the 1898 commemorations. The main Wexford rally did not take place until July 31st, while the main event in Dublin took place on August 15th, perhaps because of its importance as a date in the calendar of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, of which Kavanagh was vice-president. Organisation was so poor, that Oliver Sheppard’s pikeman in the Bull Ring, Wexford, was not erected until 1905.

Commemorations were staged once again on the 110th anniversary, when the statue in Enniscorthy was unveiled by Father Kavanagh on May 31st, 1908.

Kavanagh died in 1918, but Dr Whelan points out that his legendary and emotional approach continued to dominate the commemorations in 1938 and 1948. By then, Prof Louis Cullen of TCD points out, a “synthetic and suspect” version of the Rising had replaced real memories, and were popularised and consecrated in the words of popular ballads such as Patrick McCall’s misleading Boolavogue.

It is ironic that these false images of the Rising, paying no tribute to Bagenal Harvey or the United Irishmen, were in tune with Lecky's assumption that the Wexford Rising was agrarian, or Musgrave’s view that it was essentially a conspiracy master-minded by Catholic priests.

But Kavanagh’s approach to history was challenged in the wake of local anger and resentment in Co Wexford following the publication of Thomas Pakenham’s The Year Of Liberty in 1969. Nicholas Furlong of Wexford, Michael Kehoe of Glynn and others expressed strong anger at the launch of the book in White’s Hotel. “I remember being angry all right,” says Furlong, “for I recall Tom Pakenham confessing in strange innocence that never once during his research on 1798 had he entered Co Wexford.”

Pakenham confessed to relying on “spy reports … folksongs and hearsay” for his picture of the revolution in Wexford. But in recent decades a major reassessment of the Wexford rebellion – mainly by historians such as Prof Tom Bartlett, Prof Louis Cullen, Dr Kevin Whelan, Dr Daniel Gahan, Dr Daire Keogh, Dr Marianne Elliott, Anna Kinsella, Nicky Furlong and Brian Cleary – has transformed our understanding of its economic, social, and political contexts.

Their careful research, and the seminars and publications of recent years, have laid the foundations that guarantee the events organised by Comoradh this year will not be dominated by the sectarian and narrowminded folklore popularised and even invented by men like Patrick Kavanagh. His ghost has been laid to rest, the real atrocities at Scullabogue and on Wexford Bridge are being admitted, and new life has been given to the real leaders, such as Harvey, Colclough, Keugh, the Grogans and the Hattons.

Patrick Comerford is an Irish Times journalist; his study of the Church of Ireland clergy in Co Wexford in 1798 appears in the newly-published Protestant, Catholic And Dissenter (ed Liam Swords, Columba Press)

This feature was first published in ‘The Irish Times’ on Saturday 10 January 1998