ABSTRACT
The Greek Revival style in the United States was aesthetically modeled on Greek antiquities and ideologically motivated by the 1821 Greek Revolution. The Greek Revival became the first national style of the United States turning Greece’s material culture into a proxy for universal freedom, including the abolition of slavery at home. When 400,000 Greek immigrants crossed the Atlantic between 1880 and 1921, they encountered a familiar architecture, which they misconstrued along ethnic lines. Stripped of its original abolitionist connotations, the old Greek Revival style could be deployed to argue Greek racial superiority that was denied by the native Anglo-American population. In the United States, Greek communities experimented with diverse architectural options participating in sophisticated conversations of historicism and eclecticism. In contrast, religious architecture in Greece was codified by a state church. The laity could not shape its environment as they could in the diaspora. Greek immigrants conversed with other minorities who also manipulated architectural heritage to construct new public identities. When the Greek Orthodox Church of America endorsed an official Byzantine Revival style in 1959, it displaced the Greek Revival and its associated ideologies.
