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Lost worlds of ancient and modern Greece : Gilbert Bagnani : the adventures of a young Italo-Canadian archaeologist in Greece, 1921-1924 / D.J. Ian Begg.

By: Begg, Ian (Donald James Ian) [author.]
Contributor(s): Bagnani, Gilbert, 1900-1985 [author.]
Series: Publisher: Oxford : Archaeopress Publishing Ltd, [2020]Copyright date: ©2020Description: xxxviii, 309 pages : illustrations (some color), maps, portraits ; 22 cm.Content type: text | cartographic image Media type: unmediated Carrier type: volumeISBN: 9781789694529; 1789694523Subject(s): Bagnani, Gilbert, 1900-1985 | Archaeologists -- Italy -- Biography | Archaeologists -- Canada -- Biography | Archaeology -- History -- 20th century | Greece -- History -- 1917-1944
Contents:
Odysseus vs. Achilles -- Vengeance -- Back in Time -- Imposing Ruins -- Marble Sepulchres -- The Arms Merchant and the Secret Agent -- Foreign Correspondent -- The Oracle of Apollo and St. Paul -- The Renaissance at a Byzantine Outpost -- Exposed -- In the Land of the Knights of Rhodes -- The King of Kos -- Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea -- Monasteries in the Air -- 14. In the Minotaur's Labyrinth on Crete -- Inferno -- Executions -- The Pharaoh's Curse -- The Castles of the Giant Cyclopes -- A Surviving Byzantine Republic -- Karpathos: The Island of Poseidon -- Paradise Lost -- Mission to the Underworld: Spying for Mussolini -- Lost Greek Empires -- Land of the Golden Fleece --
Summary: By day, young Gilbert Bagnani studied archaeology in Greece, but by night he socialised with the elite of Athenian society. Secretly writing for the Morning Post in London, he witnessed both antebellum Athens in 1921 and the catastrophic collapse of Christian civilisation in western Anatolia in 1922. While there have been many accounts by refugees of the disastrous flight from Smyrna, few have been written from the perspective of the west side of the Aegean. The flood of a million refugees to Greece brought in its wake a military coup in Athens, the exile of the Greek royal family and the execution or imprisonment of politicians, whom Gilbert knew. Gilbert's weekly letters to his mother in Rome reveal his Odyssey-like adventures on a voyage of discovery through the origins of western civilisation. As an archaeologist in Greece, he travelled through time seeing history repeat itself: Minoan Knossos, Byzantine Constantinople and Ottoman Smyrna were all violently destroyed, but the survivors escaped to the new worlds of Mycenaean Greece, Renaissance Venice and modern Greece. At Smyrna in the twentieth century, history was written not only by the victors but was also recorded by the victims. At the same time, however, the twentieth century itself was so filled with reports of ethnic cleansings on such a scale that the reports brutalized the humanity of the supposedly civilized people reading about them, and the tragedy of Smyrna disappeared from public awareness between the cataclysmic upheavals of the First and Second World Wars.
Holdings
Item type Home library Collection Shelving location Call number Copy number Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Book Book British Museum Greece and Rome Open Shelves Biography: Individuals: BAG (Browse shelf(Opens below)) 1 Available 00027280
Total holds: 0

Includes bibliographical references (pages 296-303) and index.

(from table of contents) Foreword -- Preface -- Introduction -- Timeline -- Maps -- Prologue -- Odysseus vs. Achilles -- Vengeance -- Back in Time -- Imposing Ruins -- Marble Sepulchres -- The Arms Merchant and the Secret Agent -- Foreign Correspondent -- The Oracle of Apollo and St. Paul -- The Renaissance at a Byzantine Outpost -- Exposed -- In the Land of the Knights of Rhodes -- The King of Kos -- Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea -- Monasteries in the Air -- 14. In the Minotaur's Labyrinth on Crete -- Inferno -- Executions -- The Pharaoh's Curse -- The Castles of the Giant Cyclopes -- A Surviving Byzantine Republic -- Karpathos: The Island of Poseidon -- Paradise Lost -- Mission to the Underworld: Spying for Mussolini -- Lost Greek Empires -- Land of the Golden Fleece -- Epilogue.

By day, young Gilbert Bagnani studied archaeology in Greece, but by night he socialised with the elite of Athenian society. Secretly writing for the Morning Post in London, he witnessed both antebellum Athens in 1921 and the catastrophic collapse of Christian civilisation in western Anatolia in 1922. While there have been many accounts by refugees of the disastrous flight from Smyrna, few have been written from the perspective of the west side of the Aegean. The flood of a million refugees to Greece brought in its wake a military coup in Athens, the exile of the Greek royal family and the execution or imprisonment of politicians, whom Gilbert knew. Gilbert's weekly letters to his mother in Rome reveal his Odyssey-like adventures on a voyage of discovery through the origins of western civilisation. As an archaeologist in Greece, he travelled through time seeing history repeat itself: Minoan Knossos, Byzantine Constantinople and Ottoman Smyrna were all violently destroyed, but the survivors escaped to the new worlds of Mycenaean Greece, Renaissance Venice and modern Greece. At Smyrna in the twentieth century, history was written not only by the victors but was also recorded by the victims. At the same time, however, the twentieth century itself was so filled with reports of ethnic cleansings on such a scale that the reports brutalized the humanity of the supposedly civilized people reading about them, and the tragedy of Smyrna disappeared from public awareness between the cataclysmic upheavals of the First and Second World Wars.