Description
Book SynopsisBy 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.
Trade ReviewThis is a lively account of a formidable personality, scholar and archaeologist in the making. –
Sir Michael Llewellyn Smith (2020), British Ambassodor to Greece 1996 – 1999'This first of three volumes based on {Bagnani's] personal letters and news’ reports covers the momentous years from 1921-1924... We are treated to highly-entertaining sketches of leading archaeologists in Greece, and the way fieldwork was conducted, as well as the social life of the political class and wealthy elite of Athens. Informative, excellently-edited and a delight to read.' – Professor John Bintliff (2020), Edinburgh University
'This book stands as a major contribution—and an accessible one—to our understanding of the history of Greece in the years 1921-1924. In bringing Gilbert Bagnani back to life through his subject’s letters and through his own careful delving into primary sources, Ian Begg joins a group of scholars (among them Natalia Vogeikoff-Brogan, Jack L. Davis, Susan Heuck Allen, Kostis Kourelis, Artemis Leontis, Despina Lalaki) who have examined the personal lives, attitudes and idiosyncrasies of archaeologists, artists and performers, anthropologists, and historians as entryways into the discoveries they made, using their personalities as lenses for their scholarly or artistic methods. Such approaches by later generations of scholars shed fresh light on the work of their predecessors and enlarge our understanding of the histories they wrote or performances they created.' – Robert Pounder (2021): Bryn Mawr Classical Review
'The titles of some books act like magnets. They pull you towards them and command attention... It is not about the lost worlds of Ancient Greece alone but also about the lost worlds of Modern Greece... Who is Gilbert Bagnani and what adventures is he having in Greece before and after the Asia Minor Catastrophe? Any hesitation you may have had vanishes into thin air when you start reading this absorbing, literate, informative and simply wonderful book.' – James Karas (2022): Greek Press, Toronto, March 4, 2022
‘In 2022 Greece will be commemorating the one-hundredth anniversary of the Asia Minor Catastrophe. There are only a few books in English accessible to a broad audience that consider the events of 1922. These include, for example, Michael Llewellyn Smith’s Ionian Vision (1973), Lou Ureneck’s The Great Fire (2015), and Philip Mansel’s Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean (2010). To these we should now add Begg’s Lost Worlds. Lost Worlds of Ancient and Modern Greece is also the first part of a projected trilogy that will follow Bagnani and his future wife Stewart (Mary Augusta Stewart Huston) throughout the 1920s and 1930s before they finally left Europe for a new life in Canada. We should all very much look forward to learning about the next stops in this journey...’ – Natalia Vogeikoff-Brogan (2022): Journal of Modern Greek Studies
‘A serious and punctilious archaeologist, culturally open to the investigation of other historical periods, an able journalistic correspondent, an incurable salon-lover and admirer of luxury, gifted with an intelligent sense of irony,12 even a secret agent. Gilbert Bagnani’s multifaceted personality emerges very well from the pages of Ian Begg’s book, which takes us not only through the history of Greece in the 1920s but also through that of the Archaeological Schools and of the Italian one in particular.’ -
Stefano Struffolino (2022), Journal of Greek ArchaeologyTable of ContentsForeword –
Prof. T. H. B. Symons ;
Preface ;
Acknowledgements ;
Introduction ;
Timeline ;
Maps ;
Prologue: Odysseus vs. Achilles ;
Chapter 1. Vengeance ;
Chapter 2. Back in Time ;
Chapter 3. Imposing Ruins ;
Chapter 4. Marble Sepulchres ;
Chapter 5. The Arms Merchant and the Secret Agent ;
Chapter 6. Foreign Correspondent ;
Chapter 7. The Oracle of Apollo and St Paul ;
Chapter 8. The Renaissance at a Byzantine Outpost ;
Chapter 9. Exposed ;
Chapter 10. The Knights of Rhodes ;
Chapter 11. The King of Kos ;
Chapter 12. Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea ;
Chapter 13. Monasteries in the Air ;
Chapter 14. In the Minotaur’s Labyrinth on Crete ;
Chapter 15. Inferno ;
Chapter 16. Executions ;
Chapter 17. The Pharaoh’s Curse ;
Chapter 18. The Castles of the Giant Cyclopes ;
Chapter 19. A Surviving Byzantine Republic ;
Chapter 20. Karpathos: The Island of Poseidon ;
Chapter 21. Paradise Lost ;
Chapter 22. Mission to the Underworld: Spying for Mussolini ;
Chapter 23. Lost Greek Empires ;
Chapter 24. The Land of the Golden Fleece ;
Epilogue ;
Figures ;
Bibliography ;
Index
