Imagining the ‘True Vow’: Urban Planners, Dictatorial Ghosts, and the Making of Public History

On September 30, 1969 the Greek military regime launched an architectural contest to at last build The Nation’s Vow (Táma tou Éthnous), a church that the participants of the Fourth National Assembly of 1829 had pledged to construct in return for Greek liberation from the Ottoman Empire. For the colonels, building the church would signify the country’s new glories, the dictatorship’s capacity to rebrand urban space, and the triumphant merger of nationalism, the classical past, and Orthodoxy. Despite the Junta’s efforts, the Táma would remain unrealized. In this paper I offer an ethnographic study of a controversial site of fantasy and its long history. In particular, I explore how the urban planer Konstantinos Doxiadis imagined the Táma tou Éthnous. Taking his monograph The True Vow as a conceptual point of departure, I consider the dictatorial legacy and the place of silence, resistance, and complicity in Greece today.

Speaker: Dimitrios Antoniou, Hannah Seeger Davis Fellow, Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, Princeton University