Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This article examines the domestication of the Greek past in autonomous Finland (1809–1917). It explores the relationship between ancient Greek inheritance and nation-construction and seeks to show how the scholars and other builders of the Finnish-speaking educated public imprinted Hellas on the nation’s memory. Taking a long-term view of the wide-ranging Finnish revivalist movement, I wish to demonstrate why the Neohellenic ideas, texts, and images constituted a prominent feature of nationalistic imagination in these years. Philhellenism (the love of Hellas) is a word and a concept which many associate with the classicist admiration of the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean, or the nineteenth-century political movement to liberate Greece. Here, my aim is to focus on the ways in which revivalist writers made Hellas a part of the national culture stock in the northernmost corner of Europe and to shed new light on archaic imaginary and its importance for communal memory.
Author: Johannes Huhtinen
Institution: Åbo Akademi University
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4410530564