Athens serves as a concrete example of how a national identity can take shape through an external gaze. In 1800 it was a provincial village of 10,000 inhabitants, yet pressure from Western powers helped establish it as the capital of independent Greece and connect modern Greek identity to the image of ancient Greece cherished by Westerners.

Setting and Status

The account emphasizes the distance between Athens’s later symbolic prominence and its circumstances around 1800: it was a provincial peasant village with 10,000 inhabitants. Nor was it the first capital of independent Greece. Its eventual centrality was therefore not presented as the simple continuation of an ancient status, but as the result of a modern political and cultural process.

Capital and Architecture

Under pressure from Western powers, especially Germany and England, the capital was moved to Athens. Western architects then designed a series of neoclassical government buildings there. The city’s official architecture thus made visible the influence of those who helped select it as the national capital: Athens became a seat of government in a form shaped by Western ideas of classical heritage.

The Western Gaze and Greek Identity

Western fascination with antiquity helped instill in Greeks a sense of continuity with ancient Greece. The account uses Athens to show that a culture’s identity is not always formed independently and then distorted by outsiders; it may also develop through identification with the outsider’s image of it. Modern Greece is described as having arisen, in this sense, as the materialization of the Other’s fantasy. Athens’s political elevation and neoclassical appearance exemplify how that external image could become part of the country’s own national self-understanding.