This paper considers the historical processes by which one particular ancient Greek site has been constituted and characterized, especially by non-Greek travellers who made it a point of pilgrimage beginning in the late 18th century. The narratives inscribed by these wayfarers created an historically evolving discourse, which operated somewhat independently of what was happening in the area, but which also came to influence how local residents, 20th century archaeologists, present-day tourists and myself, an anthropologist, presented and pursued our activities there. They also tell us much about the meaning of ancient sites in Greece.
The Heyday of Travel to Nemea
The site of Nemea is located in a small, upland valley in the northeastern Peloponnesos. This valley was home to several Neolithic and Bronze Age occupations, one of four major sacred athletic games of the classical period, and several small, early Christian and Byzantine farming settlements, interspersed with phases of abandonment.
Foreign travellers began visiting the valley in the late 18th century, drawn by three columns which still stood from the temple of Zeus built for the ancient games. At that time, there were several small settlements on the western hillside close to the town, today officially designated Nea Nemea but then known as Ayios Yeorgos. The total settled population was around 140, with transhumant shepherds also residing in the area in the winter. Fields and vineyards were clustered around the western hillside, and the valley floor was open land used for grazing.
The first one hundred years of travel to Nemea witnessed the development of a much repeated, even canonical representation of the site there. While Nemea was not the most important stop for travellers during this period, virtually all major wayfarers to the Argolid-Corinthia region visited it. The earliest visitors were among the few to spend the night, and their accounts ranged over more subjects than later ones. As time went on, however, descriptions of Nemea became more uniform, creating an image still operative today.
The one constant, central to all accounts, was the temple. The travellers often cited Pausanias' statement that the temple was the thing worth seeing in the valley. They curiously omitted, however, other aspects of the ancient conception of the valley, given by Pausanias, Strabo, and Pindar alike. Only one fifth, for example, connected the temple to the games for which it was built, and only two spoke of the sacred nature of the valley in antiquity, an issue of central importance to ancient authors. The travellers may have replicated ancient routes but they removed the temple from the context by which it was understood by ancient writers. These were not studies of the Nemean past, but use of remains of that past for contact with an imagined world as much 18th century in origin as 5th century B.C.
The meaning the travellers gave these ruins emerges from the narrative structure of their accounts. Most travellers approached Nemea from the East. They crossed from the Dervenakia pass, over an upland plateau to the hills rimming the valley. Their accounts generally began with a description of the panorama afforded from this vantage point. Remarkably, the travellers left only verbal portraits of what they saw, and invariably these portraits centered on the three columns of the temple. The only other elements mentioned at this point were the surrounding hills and the open land on the valley floor. These depictions of the valley as a whole presented the columns as the only things noticable in an otherwise empty enclosure.
Most travellers then descended into the valley, moving directly to the temple where they spent a few hours before continuing their journey. While no accounts offered illustrations of the panorama from the hillside, many presented drawings taken near the columns, views they must have felt more appropriately captured the site's meaning. Such illustrations were remarkably consistent, beholding the valley through the columns which thus loomed larger than the surrounding mountains that would have dwarfed them from other angles and points of observation. The columns literally soared above everything else.
The only two exceptions to these illustrations are revealing. Both Stackelberg and Lear presented one drawing done near the columns and one from further away. In these latter, anomalous views, the columns faded into the landscape, as indeed they must also visually have done in the vista from the eastern hillside which the travellers avoided sketching. Other than these two illustrations, however, we are left visual and verbal accounts of the columns as absolutely dominant, while the rest of the valley was reduced to a setting for the temple.
This scene was characterized in ways increasingly consistent as the 19th century progressed. The temple, and with it the valley, was repeatedly identified with three traits: isolation, melancholy, and silence. Nemea became a place unconnected to anywhere else, empty of almost anything and anyone except the temple and the traveller, alone with his or her thoughts. Fewer than half the travellers mentioned seeing people, usually either guards at Dervenakia with tales of brigands in the area, or a single shepherd wandering with a flock in the valley itself, a device Tsigakou (1981:70) feels was used for picturesque effect. While a few early travellers mention the village on the western hillside, and census records indicate the valley's population grew to 216 by 1879, there was literally no mention by any traveller of this village between 1840 and 1880.
To some extent, this oversight of population and farming in the valley reflected the fact that all but six travellers approached Nemea from the East. Their interests lay in the ancient sites of Corinth, Mycenae and Argos, and since Pausanias discussed little to the west of this line in antiquity, they conceived little beyond it in the present, certainly not a world of market towns and transportation routes more important to the interior residents of the Corinthia than the road used by the travellers. Most travellers therefore missed Ayios Yeorgos, which served as transit point between surrounding villages and the larger town of Argos to which it was connected by a major road running southeast.
This circumstance, however, only partially accounts for the sense of isolation found in these narratives. I have sat on the eastern hillside at the place where most travellers entered the valley staring at the point where the hillside village used to be, and cannot but think that it and its vineyards must have been visible even if unremarked.
Indeed, even those few accounts mentioning the village or farming in the valley fell prey to the dominant view once they turned toward the temple. Thus, although Dodwell wrote of the village, wine, grain, and olives, when he contemplated the temple he nevertheless stated, "Nemea is more characterized by gloom than most of the places I have seen. The splendor of the religious pomp, and the busy animation of gymnastic and equestrian exercises, have been succeeded by the dreary vacancy of a death-like solitude" (1819:209-210). Even travellers who normally noted local commerce and administrative organization ceased doing so when they reached Nemea.
Others have remarked the absence of contemporary Greeks from travellers' accounts in general, except during the two or three decades in which Philhellenic interests dominated. Angelomatis-Tsougarakis (1990) has detailed the neglect and miscomprehension of modern Greek life found in these accounts, which Augustinos (1994:227) sees as a form of intellectual appropriation enabling travellers to dominate the scene before them.
What the Nemea case adds to these discussions is clear demonstration that this process involved erasing what must have been visible concerning modern Greek life, and that, at least in some instances, the characterization of the antiquities became a characterization of the contemporary situation as well. The intense focus on the temple came to define everything around it. The temple stood for the entire valley, and its description as lonely, isolated, and steeped in silence came also to be a description of contemporary human activity in the area.
The temple at Nemea, like similar monuments in other parts of Greece, gained its dominating importance for travellers because it was seen as a portal to reverie, a doorway through which the visitor could see and enter an imagined world. 18th and 19th century travellers often experienced their contact with such ruins as moments in which they felt removed from the present and able to reflect on loss, decay, and the imperfect nature of the world in which they lived.
Specific places provoked what Spencer (1954:50) calls the "topographical sentiments" involved in such meditations. The best of these contained certain features: ruins, stillness, solitude, solemnity, and wildness. The travellers most moved to reverie by their visit to Nemea found it worthy on all counts. In one of several journeys to Nemea, Ross (1851 (I):137) was moved to say that "...nowhere do the ruins of antiquity appear more powerful, as where they stand far from modern surroundings, alone in their simple greatness."
By 1880, the successive travelogues had built a tradition of discourse on Nemea. The valley as a whole, its inhabitants, and even other knowledge of the past were reduced to the three columns of the temple whose perceived greatness stemmed from its perceived isolation, melancholy and silence. This view remained remarkably consistent even though motivations for travel varied. It was an image of great power although different meaning for Philhellenes, Romantics, those interested in the picturesque, postwar philanthropists, the high classicists of Germany, Greek Revival architects and others. A site for contacting the past was created at Nemea, and the conventions of representing this site came to organize experience for subsequent travellers.
Travel to Nemea Since 1880
Transformative changes in Greek travel emerged after 1880, changes which engendered fuller discussions of the Greek countryside. As I now turn to the last 100 years of travel to Nemea, however, it will become apparent that this did not mean the columns lost their dominance, or that the rest of the valley ceased being background to the temple, despite the new ways in which it was portrayed.
By the late 19th century, greater numbers of foreign visitors annually came to Greece, staying less time and seeing fewer places. They retained an interest in ancient sites, not so much as social commentary on the present, but as standards of beauty, evidence of the glories of western civilization, and markers of an appropriate journey for those of education and class (Eisner 1991:244). Greek villages began to play more prominent roles in travelogues. Their new importance was only partially driven by interest in cultural continuity. Equally important was the perception that the Greek countryside and seacoast were landscapes where the worries of urban life could be temporarily suspended, a perception as strongly held by many urban Greeks as foreigners.
Greek villages thus entered narratives of the late 19th and 20th centuries as ahistorical settings bringing the traveller rest, relaxation, and miracle cures for mid-life crises. They retained their peace and remoteness, but were now populated. The idea that Greece provided places away from present time continued, but the nature of these places changed. For those seeking 20th century escapes, the ruins of antiquity suggested beauty, origins and great thoughts, but they were now accompanied by the wisdom of simple villagers and peasant philosophers.
Such changes coincided with canonization of the standard tourist itinerary following 1880. Archaeological excavations, steamer routes, railway lines, group tours and general guidebooks increasingly channelled Greek travel. What remains the boilerplate tour through the Argolid-Corinthia region was set by the late 19th century, with construction of the Corinth-Nafplio rail line and initiation of excavations at Corinth, Mycenae, Tiryns, and Epidavros. While these four sites became essential ancient elements of a trip to the region, a stop at Nemea became optional. As early as 1886, some travellers were content simply to note they had passed close to Nemea as they sat on the train from Corinth to Mycenae.
Travelogues which included Nemea thus dwindled after 1880. The few which exist are revealing. For while some continued the tale of lonely columns in an isolated valley even into the 20th century, the majority spoke of a different place. The gloom lifted and farmers appeared. Previous accounts were openly challenged by visitors such as Hutton (1928:204-5), who wondered why earlier travellers had found the place so gloomy when, for him, "... the whole valley is open to the sun, ... exquisite in its smiling beauty, full of light and refreshment."
This shift in imagery is only partially explained by the foundation of two new villages on the valley floor or by the vineyards and olive groves spreading across the plain as the valley's population grew. Certainly the dispersal of fields and houses was more gradual than their abrupt appearance in travel accounts. The changing depictions also reflected the search for light and beauty rather than melancholy, and the new regard for Greek villagers held by travellers in general after 1880.
A closer look at the new image of the valley, however, suggests that while people appeared in these narratives, they were not the entrepreneurial farmers actually living there. Only a few travelogues and guidebooks in the late 19th century mentioned the recent foundation of a village near the temple, and this completely drops from discussion after 1910. The valley was quickly peopled with farmers who appeared to have been there from time immemorial. One gets no sense that the valley was a commercial agricultural center. While the wine sold at roadside stands has increasingly gained notice, it seems to signify enduring peasant life and the pleasures of travel rather than an expanding cash crop.
Even more telling is the fact that both travel accounts and guidebooks continue to privilege the temple. The valley may have changed from gloomy and empty to sunny and peopled, but it fundamentally remained background for the temple. The farmers were picturesque but mute; the valley still a place for silent reverie. The columns thus remained the validation of an appropriate Nemean experience and the medium through which the rest of the valley was understood by outsiders.
The general guides to Greek travel which have become increasingly numerous in the last 30 years sum up these representational shifts and also consitute the most common way tourists are now directed to approach Nemea. They focus on the columns as the primary point of interest. Some expand their conception of the site to recent archaeological work in the sanctuary around the temple, the stadium and the museum. Only a few, however, mention other remains in the valley, despite excavations of a Christian basilica and Bronze Age site. Remarkably, only two guides in the last 25 years mention the village which stands a few hundred yards from the temple, and several imply the nearest settlement is Nea Nemea. Local life is commonly represented by the local wine, but not the wine industry that produces it.
Travellers, Scholars and Farmers in Nemea
Such has been the image of Nemea for travellers for 200 years: a site pinpointed to three columns, once portrayed as isolated in an empty valley, now standing amidst wine-drinking peasants who still speak less than the columns. In composing this image, the literature on Nemea has avoided direct reference to relationships between the nations of the travellers and Greece. The site created there enabled visitors to leave their own world and make visual, experiential contact with an imagined Greece, both past and present. The surrounding valley presented abundant evidence to those willing to see it of the increasing commercial connections between western Europe and Greece. Yet few mention anything connected to this. Ancient sites in Greece serve other purposes.
The force of this representation has not been confined to travel and tourism. In ways both subtle and direct, it forms the backdrop for archaeological and other scholarly work in the valley as well as local perceptions of the temple. It plays into discussions even of those who would describe the area differently. Archaeological initiatives and employment have interacted with commercial agriculture in shaping class, land use, and self-definitions in the area for some time. The conception of the site as a separate world has nevertheless directed attention away from these issues and toward two parallel but separate lines of discourse about the valley: one for its ancient condition, and another for its modern state.
French archaeological investigations at the columns in 1884 were followed by American excavations at the temple and a nearby Bronze Age settlement in the 1920s, and then a comprehensive exploration of the classical sanctuary and a surface survey of the entire valley in the last two decades. My own research, focused on recent migration and settlement in the valley, was done in tandem with the last of these.
In all cases, the image of the site as a place away from time and context has played around the edges of these efforts to probe more deeply into the area's history. The ancient site and modern world are often distinct in our accounts. In aligning with the local residents whom I wished to understand, I thus found myself looking away from the site, leaving it out of my accounts of the modern landscape as if it were not connected (e.g., Sutton 1994). Archaeological statements have sometimes operated in the reverse direction, even as they presented the first detailed written discussions of the new village. The recent guide to the newly excavated stadium, for example, attempts to direct visitors to see the ancient world more deeply. In so doing, however, the rest of the valley is consigned to silence.
"And it is here - especially along the rim of the stadium - where one sits quietly, that a gentle wind sometimes blows through the trees. Puffs of dust swirl down the track while the peaceful tranquility of the Nemean valley echoes with the whisper of running footsteps from beyond the centuries" (Miller 1994:2).
Archaeologists have struggled with the notion of the site for several decades, both within and beyond Greece. Uncritical use of the concept privileges certain periods and centers over others, reduces the past to a few spots rather than systemic connections, and overlooks processes by which sites are conceptually constructed. To this must certainly be added Fotiadis' (1992) belief that unspoken and long-standing images of what sites are supposed to be also can make themselves felt. There is a history to the way sites have been understood in Greece that cannot easily be put aside.
The division of the Nemea valley into ancient and modern zones, both literally and conceptually, has also played into local understandings of the site. The relationship is complex in ways beyond the scope of this paper. In contrast to more popular sites, tourism plays only a very minor role in the local economy. Many villagers have nevertheless participated in the excavations, and there is general pride in the presence of a major archaeological site in the valley.
There is also, however, considerable tension and disinterest. The site is seen as a world apart, controlled by outsiders whose methods and findings are only partially understood. It does not figure in local histories, except in stories of land negotiations and working on the excavations. I find considerable meaning in the local joke that the columns are the children of archaeologists who have worked in the valley. The long-standing representation of the site as a separate realm has been one more piece in the alienation of local residents from this place in their midst.
Susan Buck Sutton is an Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianopolis.
Works Cited:
Angelomatis-Tsougarakis, Helen 1990 The Eve of the Greek Revival; British Travellers' Perceptions of Early Nineteenth-Century Greece. London: Routledge.
Augustinos, Olga. 1990 French Odysseys: Greece in French Travel Literature from the Renaissance to the Romantic Era. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Dodwell, Edward 1819 A Classical and topographical Tour Through Greece During the Years 1801, 1805, and 1806. London: Rodwell and Martin.
Eisner, Robert 1991 Travelers to an Antique Land: The History and Literature of Travel to Greece. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Fotiadis, Mihalis. 1992 Units of Data as Deployment of Disciplinary Codes. IN Jean-Claude Gardin and Christopher S. Peebles, eds. Representations in Archaeology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. pp. 132-148.
Hutton, Edward. 1928 A Glimpse of Greece. London: The Medici Society.
Miller, Stephen G. [1994] The Ancient Stadium of Nemea: A Self-Guided Tour. Privately published.
Ross, Ludwig. 1851 Wanderungen in Griechenland. Halle: Schwetschke.
Spencer , Terence. 1954 Fair Greece, Sad Relic: Literary Philhellenism from Shakespeare to Byron. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Sutton, Susan Buck. 1994 Settlement Patterns, Settlement Perceptions:Rethinking the Greek Village. IN Nick Kardulias, ed., Beyond the Site:Regional Studies in the Aegean. Lanham MD: University Press of America. pp.313-336.
Tsigakou , Fani-Maria 1981 The Rediscovery of Greece: Travellers and Painters of the Romantic Era. New Rochelle NY: Caratzas Bros.