ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the encounter and interaction of contrasting representations and uses of place in an area beneath the Acropolis of Athens, articulated by unequally empowered discourses produced on one side by the managers of the archaeological site and on the other by a small community that has been living under the Acropolis since the 1860s. The management and landscapings of monumental sites provide striking instances of interventions by the apparatuses of modernity that work on the multiple layers of meaning inscribed onto landscapes through time, striving to rearrange these living palimpsests in ways that are deemed appropriate to the national project. In 1883, the secretary of the Greek archaeological society Stephanos Koumanoudis petitioned the government asking for the evacuation of the settlement and the removal of the ‘unhappy residents’ in the interest of ‘their security and health and the aims of archaeology’.
