Anna Coopey

From 1940 to 1947, Greece was physically occupied by three foreign, “western” powers: Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Britain. Yet ever since its foundation as a modern state in 1821, Greece has been culturally occupied by “The West”, its culture adopted as the origin of “Western civilisation” and canonised in a narrative as solidified (and sanitised) as the “ideal” archaeological ruins that have been passed down to us. During their Occupation in the 1940s, Greek writers sought to radically fight – and write – back against this cultural and physical appropriation through that culture itself, adopting antiquity to counter fascist ideology and suppression, and create an identity for the Greek people to emerge with from their subjection when that time came. My research uses the frames of post-colonial literature (Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin 2002) and resistance literature (Harlow 1987) to examine how the Greek authors Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957), Angelos Sikelianos (1884-1951), and Yannis Ritsos (1909-1990), used Greco-Roman antiquity to decanonise, decolonise, and reenergise in the face of its adoption by “Western”, fascist regimes, working against a double layer of occupation (both mental and physical) to create an identity for themselves and their fellow countrymen.