Greece appears as a place whose modern national identity cannot be separated from the Western gaze that helped shape it. The book traces this formation through Athens’s elevation as capital, the construction of neoclassical public buildings, and the Western ideal of continuity with ancient Greece, showing how a culture’s image of itself may take form through an external fantasy it comes to inhabit.

Athens and the Making of a Capital

In 1800, Athens was a provincial peasant village of 10,000 inhabitants, and it was not even the first capital of independent Greece. The capital was moved there under pressure from Western powers, chiefly Germany and England. The change made Athens central to the modern Greek state, but the account emphasizes that this political geography was not simply the expression of an already settled national identity: it was also shaped by outside influence.

Architecture and Historical Continuity

After the move, Western architects designed a series of neoclassical government buildings for Athens. Western fascination with antiquity also helped instill in Greeks a sense of continuity with ancient Greece. The resulting national image thus joined a modern capital and its civic architecture to an admired classical past, with Western taste and authority participating in the construction of that connection.

The Western Gaze and Cultural Identity

The account rejects a simple opposition between a culture’s authentic identity and its distortion by foreign observers. A culture’s self-image, it argues, may itself develop through identification with an outside gaze that serves as an ideal. Modern Greece is presented as an especially sharp instance: it arose, in the book’s formulation, as the materialization of the Other’s fantasy. This does not mean that Greek identity is merely false or that Greece has no agency; rather, the example unsettles the idea that national identity begins as a self-contained essence untouched by external representations.

The argument culminates in a deliberately provocative claim about ancient monuments. Because Western ideological fantasy gives those monuments their particular value, the passage suggests that Greece might even offer to Germany and England the ancient works still in its possession, rather than demand the return of pieces displayed in the Pergamon Museum and the British Museum. The proposal is framed as a consequence of the argument about fantasy, not as a neutral account of ownership: it exposes the tension between Western power over cultural objects and Western influence over the meanings through which Greece is imagined.