ABSTRACT
The return to the past through an authentic and almost bodily experience was a dominant trend throughout the 19th century. People had the desire to “re-live” the lives of their ancestors, reconstituting a tangible past in their present. Chapter 6 focuses on the performance of a past “golden age”, the experience of the past by participants and spectators as an “authentic” expression of tradition, as well as the position of revivals in molding cultural memory. Various cultural practices and spectacles such as reenactments, wax displays and tableaux vivants, a European fashion that reached Greece in the late 19th century, are studied as examples of “living history”. The concept of regeneration on which the historical memory of the period from 1821 to 1930 was constructed – the Greek Revolution was commemorated as national regeneration – also included the related concepts of rebirth and revival. Reenactments and replications of antiquity, such as performances of ancient drama, the revival of the Olympic Games and the Delphic Festivals, were designed and executed not only as a means of regenerating contemporary Greece but also as proof of historical continuity. In parallel, they were conceived as modern Greece’s “memory duty”, a mnemonic act of recalling the past in the present.
