The Heromartyrs of Cyprus
National Museums as Greek Orthodox Hagiographical Media
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4318127 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Aaron T Hollander (0000-0002-8555-9334, InterScience (United States), corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 131-161 |
| Publication date | 2020-03-14 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Material Religion (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1743-2200 • E-ISSN: 1751-8342 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/17432200.2020.1722902 |
| OpenAlex | W3007473788 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 38 |
In 1961, a “Museum of the Struggle” was created to remember and glorify the heroes of the Greek Cypriot anticolonial war (1955–1959). The museum functions, this article argues, as an apparatus of hagiographical mediation, rendering for local and international publics an aura of sanctification around the war’s fallen fighters. Such an impression is generated by the museum’s spatial mise-en-scène, its progressive orientation of visitors who move through its halls, its ways of curating belongings and images of the dead, its narrative construction of the life and conduct of the fighters, and its subtle evocation of traditional saintly patronage associated with the island’s communities. Drawing on original fieldwork in Cyprus between 2012 and 2018, the article treats the musealization of the Greek-Cypriot national struggle as a tight lens through which to consider the diversity of processes by which modern Orthodox Christians in (post)colonial situations construe, commemorate, and maintain relationships with holiness. In particular, it finds that the celebration of the dead anticolonial fighters as “heromartyrs” (ērōomartyres) serves to constitute a distinctive category of Christian martyrdom that infuses a post-Byzantine martyriological identity with the imagination of ancient Greek heroic virtue and epic violence
Ancient history · Art · Byzantine architecture · Consciousness · Evocation · Literature · Narrative · National consciousness · National identity · Politics · Theology · Virtue · Balkans: History, Politics, Society · Cyprus History, Politics, Society · History · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philosophy
Museums and the making of ourselves
Marxism and literature
Images at Work
Writing History, Writing Trauma
Image Science
Mediating Memory in the Museum
Exhibiting cultures
Museum Materialities
The British and the Hellenes
Sweet and Bitter Island
Instilling Religion in Greek and Turkish Nationalism
Re-conceptualizing Museum Audiences
Greek irredentism in Asia minor and Cyprus
Writing history, writing trauma
Understanding media
The birth of the museum
Cultural imagining among museum visitors
Museum space and the experience of the sacred
Cyprus under British Rule
Rhetoric of Motives
Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
Greek Cypriot Narratives of History and Collective Identity
Piercing transfigurations
The National Struggle Museums of a divided city
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.17 |
| Citation span | 2020 - 2020 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |