Welcome to Greece in Context

Greece in Context is a conversation series that explores Greek identity, citizenship, and culture through encounters between people, ideas, and objects. Grounded in the belief that material culture can open powerful pathways to understanding the present, the series brings together Greece-focused thinkers and practitioners from diverse backgrounds to engage directly with the collections of the Benaki Museum.

Each participant—artists, writers, scholars, curators, activists, and cultural practitioners—visits the museum and selects an object that resonates with their work or concerns. Through this encounter, objects become starting points for reflection on contemporary Greece: its social transformations, cultural continuities and ruptures, and its place within a broader global landscape.

Michael Herzfeld / Μάικλ Χέρτσφελντ

In this episode, Michael Herzfeld, who held a professorial chair in the social sciences at Harvard University and is an honorary Greek citizen, reflects on Greece as a lifelong intellectual and emotional focus shaped by his own cosmopolitan background. He introduces the concept of “crypto-colonialism” to describe countries like Greece and Thailand that were never formally colonized yet internalized Western pressures and ideals, especially through an internal class hierarchy, nationalism, and a rigid model of the nation-state.

Γιάννης Χαμηλάκης / Yannis Hamilakis

In this episode, Yannis Hamilakis, archaeologist and professor of Archaeology and Modern Greek Studies at Brown University, sees archaeology as the study of how material things and time relate—whether in prehistory or the present. Besides the excavation of Koutroulou Magoula in Thessaly which he co-directs, he researches the “archaeology of the present,” including migration and border crossings on Lesvos.

One of his current major projects focuses on the Athenian Acropolis from the 1830s to the present. He shows how the site was “cleansed” to appear almost exclusively classical, erasing Ottoman, Muslim, African and other histories, such as the large Muslim cemetery on its western slope. Hamilakis links this to global histories of race, colonialism, and ideas of whiteness, highlighting figures like Leo von Klenze, who helped transform the Acropolis while theorising Aryan ties between Greeks and Germans.