The Benaki Museum in Interwar Greece: Constructing Greek Art & the Greek Nation After the Fall of the Ottoman Empire

Abstract

In this dissertation, I investigate the formation of the Benaki Museum, founded in Athens, Greece in 1931, which exhibited a wide variety of Ottoman art and material culture. The museum, which continues to be a pre-eminent institution in Greece today, was largely the work of the Greek collector and founder Antonis Benakis (1873 – 1954) and its first director and curator Theodore Macridy Bey (1872 – 1940). By analyzing the museum’s early acquisition policy, its curatorial strategies, and its publications, I argue that it contributed to the formulation of Greek national narratives at a pivotal moment in Greek history: the museum opened to the public in the years after the crushing Greek defeat in the Greco-Turkish War of 1919 – 1922, which signaled the failure of Greece’s expansionist vision, the final dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of the Turkish Republic. The consequent Exchange of Populations between Greece and Turkey (1923), also contributed to the country’s ethnic homogenization and brought over a million Ottoman-Christian refugees from Asia Minor into Greece.

I argue that the Benaki Museum constructed a highly ideological image of Ottoman art and of the recent Ottoman past. It portrayed Ottoman art as an integral and venerable part of Greek culture, and, in doing so, overtly rejected some of the Orientalist narratives inherent in earlier and more dominant constructions of Greek nationalism. These saw the classical period as the pinnacle of Greek cultural and aesthetic achievement and rejected the Ottoman period as one of cultural decline.

At the same time, I also argue that the museum forged a Greek national history of the Ottoman past. Benakis and Macridy portrayed the material culture of Greeks of the Ottoman Empire – which were products of a multiethnic society – as distinctly “national,” culturally pure and largely free of Turkish influence.

Moreover, the museum, which was built following a period of major territorial and demographic changes, made telling statements about who constituted the Greek nation and what constituted Greek culture. Importantly, the museum insisted on the notion that the art of Asia Minor, from regions only recently forfeited to the newly founded Turkish Republic, was an integral part of Greek culture.

Finally, I underline Benakis’ and Macridy’s reliance on Ottoman bodies of knowledge, as well as exchanges with intellectuals in Republican Turkey who were also promoting the aesthetic appreciation of their shared Ottoman past. I thus highlight intellectual continuities and connections that are largely ignored in scholarship on modern Greece, in large part due to the very success of national narratives created by institutions like the Benaki Museum.

I elaborate on these arguments over the course of three chapters, each of which is dedicated to one of the Ottoman-period collections in the Benaki Museum. I first engage with the museum’s large collection of Islamic ceramic and textiles produced in Ottoman Asia Minor. I then turn to the collection of late-Ottoman ecclesiastical objects, brought to Greece by the refugees of the Exchange of Populations. Finally, I turn to museum’s collection of Ottoman- period Greek folk costumes.