ABSTRACT
A hundred years ago Virginia Woolf visited Greece for the fi rst time. She strolled around Athens, where “all people seem poor” and sit “about on classic marble, chatting and knitting” (Woolf 1993: 212). Her Greek travel diary depicts a time and era when Greek culture was still trying to overcome the trauma of Turkish rule. Four centuries under Ottoman rule, which ended in the 1820s, was enough time to derail the illusion of racial purity for the descendants of Aristotle and Pericles. Most likely Woolf had read Percy Shelley’s Hellas, whose preface claimed that “the modern Greek is the descendant of those glorious beings whom the imagination almost refuses to fi gure to itself as belonging to our kind.” What Woolf saw in Athens, instead, was a new fused Greek being born in the ruins of history. “Like a shifting layer of sand these loosely composed tribes of many different peoples lie across Greece,” she notes in her diary,
calling themselves Greek indeed . . . but the language they talk is divided from the language that some of them can write as widely as that again is divided from the speech of Plato . . . You must look upon Modern Greece as the impure nation of peasants, just as you must look upon the modern Greeks as a nation of mongrel element and a rustic beside the classic speech of pure bred races.
