Introduction

The Introduction presents the major theoretical questions and debates that inform the empirical study presented in the main chapters: the relationship between history and memory; cultural and communicative memory; the links between memory and identity; nationalism studies and the “performative turn”; national identity, “invented traditions” and realms of memory; public history and historical culture; commemorations and bodily social memory; visual history and images as historical agents; “spectacular” historical consciousness and the modern regime of “seeing” the past. Including a summary of the chapters, the Introduction discusses how a social and cultural history of collective memory in modern Greece during the first century of state independence can be written.