Continuity, Adaptation, and the Layered Life of Greek Ritual: Clearing the Air
A response to recurrent misunderstandings
You’re receiving this essay ahead of my usual Sunday schedule. Recent discussions have made it clear that the question of “continuity” in Greek ritual, language, and cultural practice remains both contentious and widely misunderstood—often misread through the lens of outside anxieties or polemic, rather than evidence and scholarship.
I’m publishing this now to set the record straight and provide a clear reference point—both for my own work and for anyone genuinely interested in the debate. This is not an argument for a static, unchanging tradition, nor a denial of historical transformation. It is a call for critical, precise engagement with what “continuity” actually means in the Greek context—and for refusing to let outdated anxieties dictate which questions can be asked.
I write deliberately from within the Greek tradition and for an audience that values both critical scholarship and lived experience. The urgency of the current debate requires clarity and advocacy as much as analysis.
Deeper analysis is necessary for a more formal position statement, but I say clearly that this is an interim piece responding to recent querying of my motivation and perspective. It should serve for the time being and I will refer readers back here if further questions warrant it. As always, I welcome good-faith critique, genuine questions, and further dialogue—provided the evidence is engaged on its own terms.
This essay is provided in two forms: a summary for those who want the essentials, and a full version for those interested in the details. I can’t win everyone’s approval for style or length—so take what serves you best.
I ask only that in future, I be called to respond to what I do say, and not projections.
Lay summary
For as long as anyone can remember, people have argued over whether Greek customs, rituals, and language truly “continue” from antiquity into the present, or whether modern practices are disconnected imitations—mere shadows of a lost world. This isn’t just academic hair-splitting: for Greeks themselves, it touches on living memory, local identity, and who gets to speak with authority about the culture.
The problem is, much of the debate has been shaped by outsiders—whether foreign scholars, collectors, or modern revivalists—each with their own preconceptions. Too often, this means that local perspectives are sidelined, and living traditions are either romanticised as museum pieces or dismissed as inauthentic.
Let me be clear about what I am—and am not—claiming in this essay. I am not arguing that modern Greek culture is perfectly preserved and unchanged from antiquity. Nor am I denying the immense changes, disruptions, and creative adaptations that have shaped Greek tradition over the centuries. What I am arguing is that “continuity” is not about simple survival or an unbroken chain. It’s about the ongoing, often messy process by which meaning, memory, and ritual are negotiated, adapted, and layered within living communities—even as names, images, or official stories change.
When I use the word “continuity,” I’m talking about the ways core patterns and social functions persist—sometimes openly, sometimes under new guises—not about secret pagan survivals or nationalist fantasies.
I use it the same way scholars talk about the survival of Irish storytelling in Gaelic communities, or the way African diasporic religions adapt and persist in new settings. When Irish speakers insist on the importance of the Gaelic language, or when Native American and Māori communities fight to keep their traditions and stories alive, it’s generally understood that their voices matter.
Outsiders may study, admire, or even participate, but few would argue that local perspectives are irrelevant, or that the right to interpret should pass only to foreign scholars or tourists. Those who live a tradition have a distinct and necessary perspective on its meaning and survival. In the same way, Greek voices should be part of the conversation about Greek tradition, not treated as curiosities, or told to “stay in their lane” by those with only a distant connection to the culture.
The same logic should apply to Greek tradition. The people who live with these rituals, stories, and objects—who still mark the fields at sowing, cast spells against the evil eye, whisper charms at the threshold, invoke the names of saints and old gods alike, light candles before icons, or recount stories that blur the line between folklore and liturgy—have something crucial to say about what those acts mean. As I’ve argued elsewhere, these practices are best understood not as strictly “religious” or “magical,” but as part of a deeply entangled, magicoreligious worldview and set of practices that cuts across boundaries set by outsiders or modern dogma.
This isn’t just a matter of lighting candles in church; it’s also about those who still bake honey cakes for Hekate at the crossroads, bless their animals with the rite of St. Mamas, or recite ancient hymns in living Greek, not as nostalgia, but as acts of presence and power so ingrained that it is unthinkable not to do so as part of everyday life.
In all of these, what matters is not just the words or gestures, but the unbroken thread of intention, memory, and negotiation with the forces—divine, ancestral, chthonic—that shape the living landscape.
Ignoring or dismissing that perspective, or acting as though Greeks are mere guests in their own house, isn’t just unethical, it’s a form of silencing that no one would accept in any other context.
If you find yourself suspicious of the word “continuity,” I ask you to consider whether those suspicions come from genuine evidence, or from old anxieties and polemics - many of them projecting Western cultural biases onto a discussion where they are unwarranted. Dismissing the whole conversation - and individual - because it makes us uncomfortable only silences real questions and the people who live these traditions.
So, when I use “continuity,” it’s not code for “nothing ever changes.” It’s a lens for looking at how the past and present are in constant dialogue—how living culture works, and why it still matters who gets to interpret it.
To support independent scholarship, please consider subscribing.
Scholarly version
Author’s Note
What follows is a work in progress—an interim position statement, written in response to the recent surge of questions and misreadings I’ve received on the subject of continuity in Greek ritual and cultural practice. This is not a definitive or exhaustive account, but a reference point until a more formal version is ready. For now, it outlines my perspective and serves as the response I will offer to queries in the meantime. I welcome further discussion, but ask readers to recognise this is a provisional statement, not a final word. Not all inline citations are complete; a provisional reference list is found below and across the articles in this journal.
Defining Continuity in Greek Culture
What does it mean to claim “continuity” in Greek religious practice? Why is the word so contentious, and what are we actually talking about? In this essay, I lay out my position for the record, clarify common misunderstandings, and explain why this debate still matters.
Why “Continuity” Is Controversial
Academic discomfort with the language of continuity is not new. For well over half a century, scholars of Greek religion and folk tradition have debated whether Orthodox Christian practices and beliefs in Greece can be meaningfully traced back to ancient cults and mythic structures—or whether such claims are overstatements, wishful thinking, or even “nationalist invention.”
The arguments here are not purely technical or historical. The debate reflects deeper anxieties about religious “purity” and the dangers of “syncretism”; a term that, in Anglophone scholarship especially, has often implied dilution, contamination, or the loss of cultural authenticity (Stewart, Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece, 2017; “Syncretism and Its Synonyms,” 1999). Suspicion of “continuity” is reinforced by a long history of post-Reformation concerns with pure origins and boundaries—concerns that rarely match the lived realities of the Greek (or wider Mediterranean) world. (Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy, 1996).
These works, among others, make it clear that ritual forms and functions persist through processes of adaptation—not by accident, but as a conscious negotiation of meaning in changing historical circumstances.
As Margaret Alexiou (2018) has argued, it is time to move beyond static or idealised models of “Greece”:
I wish to challenge the appropriation of ‘Greek’ as defining only the ancient part of the tradition, to the exclusion of its medieval and modern inheritors; to question the validity of universalist, archetypalist, or reductionist theories; and to replace one-way Hellenist perspectives on continuity with a dynamic understanding of interaction… In other words, we must look forward, backward, and sideways.” (After Antiquity, p. 3)
What I Am and Am Not Saying
First, let me be explicit about what I do not mean by “continuity”:
What I Am Not Saying
I do not claim that Modern Greece is a fossil or direct continuation of pagan antiquity.
I do not propose a simple, unbroken chain of rites, beliefs, or identities, untouched by time, context, or history.
I do not endorse nationalist or romantic narratives that use “continuity” to erase rupture, conflict, or transformation.
What I Am Claiming
What I am arguing, in line with a qualified functional (i.e. the function it fulfils in context, sidestepping teleologies) and palimpsestic perspective, is that the core ritual patterns, cosmological roles, and symbolic structures of ancient Greek religion often continued, adapted and integrated, within Christian practice and folk tradition. In this sense, many Christian rituals in Greece are not coded survivals in the sense of secret or underground “paganism,” but the direct, public evolution of old forms serving enduring social and existential needs, under new theological justifications. The theology developed to justify these practices; changing names and rationales. The old rituals continued.
Thus, what we see is neither simple rupture nor static survival, but ongoing adaptation—a palimpsest in which old and new are layered, sometimes consciously, sometimes by force of habit or collective memory.
Palimpsestic Continuity: A Method for Cultural History
The palimpsest, as theorised in material culture studies, offers a rigorous methodological framework for thinking about these dynamics (Colwell, 2021). It is not merely a metaphor for overlay or concealment, but a methodological tool for reading the traces—both visible and erased—left by the continual negotiation, adaptation, and re-inscription of meaning across time (Duara 1988; Colwell 2021).
Every historical source—whether a monument, ritual, altered landscape, or artefact—is a trace of lived reality, carrying with it both what is preserved and what has been lost or overwritten (Ricoeur 1988). The task is not to identify pure origins, but to interpret the entangled layers: the accumulated marks, erasures, and reinscriptions by which each generation makes sense of its own needs in dialogue with the past.
This is particularly relevant to Greek ritual, where both external appropriation and internal negotiation have generated “layered lives” for objects and practices through radically different processes. The palimpsest is a political as well as an analytical concept: it mediates between local communities and external authorities, enabling both agreement and the camouflage of profound divergences beneath the surface of shared icons or rituals (Duara 1988; Colwell 2021).
Following Colwell’s (2021) model, I use ‘palimpsestic continuity’ not as a vague metaphor, but as a methodological lens for tracing the processes of how meaning, authority, and function are layered, erased, and reinscribed across generations—not just in the object, but in the lived relationships between people, objects, and texts.
Continuity is established not by unbroken surface resemblance, but by the ongoing, context-dependent negotiation of meaning within communities themselves. This approach allows us to systematically track both physical and narrative traces, and to interrogate how erasures, re-inscriptions, and contextual shifts generate new social realities (Colwell 2021).
Embodied, Material, and Sensory Layers
A full account of continuity requires more than reading textual or iconographic traces; it must also attend to the deeply personal, sensory, and biographical attachments that individuals and communities form with ritual objects (Hoskins 1998; Kreps 2021). Objects such as icons, amulets, embroidered cloths, and statues are not just vessels for inherited meaning. They act as pivots for life stories, migrations, confessions, and everyday negotiations. The “biographical object” approach foregrounds how meaning is always entangled with memory, affect, and relationship, and is continually renewed through ritual activation, narrative, and personal investment.
From this perspective, the analysis of Greek ritual continuity must include not only visible material traces, but also the lived, affective, and relational layers that constitute the true “life” of objects and traditions (Colwell 2021; Hoskins 1998).
Functional Continuity and the Critique of Rupture
On this basis, I argue for a model of functional and palimpsestic continuity that resists both static replication and artificial compartmentalisation. Continuity here is not about the mere survival of forms, but about the persistent function and social role of ritual—even as names, symbols, and justifications change.
To paraphrase Alexiou once more:
The major question to be addressed concerns the kind of ‘continuity’ we are talking about, and this is where politics come into play… The painstaking work of [earlier] scholars does not have to be brushed aside for us now to develop more sophisticated models for cultural transmission…” (After Antiquity, p. 13)
The question is never whether some trace “survived,” but how its function and significance were adapted, re-signified, or contested over time.
As recent scholarship in material culture clarifies, meaning is always a process of mediation, translation, and negotiation—never a mere accretion (Preucel & Bauer 2001; Peirce 1998). My concern is with highlighting those signifieds and traces in the Greek lived experience, because this is a deeply misunderstood, neglected, and contested area. I draw on a range of interdisciplinary resources to do so, since the toolbox must fit the task regardless of artificial disciplinary boundaries (Chaitow 2014; 2022).
Case Study: Medusa, Demeter, Despoina, Panagia
To illustrate, consider the transformation and survival of female divine figures—specifically, the thread linking Medusa, Demeter, Despoina, and Panagia. While the conceptual and ritual affinities between these figures are well-established, my aim here is not to assert a direct genealogical line, but to illustrate how patterns of functional adaptation and layered significance manifest in Greek tradition.
In ancient Arcadia (Pausanias, Description of Greece 8.36–8.54), Demeter is venerated as “Despoina” (“the Mistress”), a goddess whose name is never fully revealed, associated with chthonic mysteries and mother-child symbolism. The myth of Demeter’s union with Poseidon, producing both a horse (Areion) and Despoina, echoes other hybrid birth myths (cf. Medusa–Poseidon and Pegasus/Chrysaor); each involving both deities and chthonic figures. The figure of the Gorgon (Medusa), whose apotropaic face appears on temples and shields, is later redeployed as a protective motif on Christian churches—a sign not of secret paganism, but of continuity in the ritual function of protection. The name Despoina becomes an epithet of Panagia. Both layers remain active, and intelligible to participants in the sociocultural matrix.
In Christian iconography and folk practice, many attributes and rituals once associated with these goddesses—fertility, protection, the power to avert the evil eye, annual rites for crops and communal well-being—are reattributed to the Panagia (the Virgin Mary), especially under local epithets such as Mesosporitissa (“of the mid-seeding”), Panagia Pantanassa (“Queen of All”), and Panagia Platytera (Broader than the Heavens). These are not static survivals nor evidence of clandestine paganism, but layered adaptations in which ritual forms and social functions persist, even as names, images, and theologies shift. The process is neither total erasure nor perfect preservation—it is a palimpsest, a living negotiation.
Compare this with an example from Peircean semiotics:
Consider wedding rings. In a marriage ceremony, the rings exchanged and the vows given are performative acts that together constitute the marriage contract and bring a new relationship into being. Moreover, as each new sign is completed, it feeds back into a new cycle of interpretation, a process Peirce called semiosis. Once “wedding ring” is conceptualised, it becomes a new object for an interpretant to translate. That new object then becomes another new object and so on. In this way, semiosis is infinitely negotiated….Put another way, community, social value, and authority underpin the process of semiotic mediation (Keane 2005:190; Preucel 2016). This negotiation leads to a semiotic ideology, which is “people’s underlying assumptions about what signs are, what functions signs serve, and what consequences they might produce” (Keane 2018:66, in Colwell 2021).
The wedding ring is just a ring until it is used in the marriage ceremony. From that point on, it cannot be seen as something else. Someone from a culture unfamiliar with wedding rings, however, might perceive it as a simple ornament, with no conception of the multiple layers of significance, nor its function. They may ask to borrow it, in naive ignorance of its importance.
Similarly, to even a modern Orthodox Greek, Demeter and Panagia Mesosporitissa are intimately linked, as are ritual acts at threshing or sowing, the blessing of the fields, and the apotropaic gestures and invocations made for protection and fertility—regardless of the surface theological frame. The layers are not lost; they are rendered intelligible within the community through the performative act and the interpretive tradition that continually reanimates them. Yet to an outsider, these same practices might appear as mere superstition, borrowed symbolism, or quaint relics stripped of their deep local meaning and history of negotiation. Just as with the wedding ring, the power and significance of these ritual objects and acts reside in their context, their history, and their shared, evolving understanding within the community itself—not in any essential property or fixed surface meaning.
Lest I be misread: the wedding ring example serves as an analogy to illuminate how objects accrue meaning through social use and recognition, rather than as a direct historical parallel to Greek ritual. Its purpose is to clarify the semiotic processes at play, not to suggest equivalence between marriage rites and ancient goddess cults.
This persistent outsider tendency to see only the “fixed surface meaning” or to search for some essential property within the ritual or object is precisely what leads to misreading, distortion, and ultimately appropriation.
Essentialism, whether in the form of seeking the “real” original meaning, or insisting that an object or practice can be reduced to a single, unchanging core, flattens the layered, negotiated reality of living tradition into a caricature. It presumes that meaning inheres in the object itself, rather than in its enacted, evolving relationship with the community and the matrix of practices that sustain it.
This mistake is not simply academic. The drive to essentialise is what allows collectors, curators, and even well-meaning admirers to treat Greek ritual objects and practices as timeless relics, ripe for extraction, reinterpretation, or display. It is what enables the narrative that Greek tradition is best understood through universal archetypes, detached from the specific histories and communal acts that give them life. And it is precisely this logic, explicit or implicit, that underpins much of the damage: the silencing of living communities, the erasure of their right to interpret and adapt their own heritage, and the legitimisation of cultural appropriation under the guise of preservation, scholarly authority, or revivalism.
To mistake a palimpsest for a fossil, or to claim the authority to fix meaning in place on the basis of scholarship steeped in the colonial gaze, is far more than an intellectual error; it is a political and ethical one. It renders invisible the very processes of adaptation, negotiation, and survival that constitute the heart of Greek culture. In so doing, it perpetuates the colonial logic that has long worked to dispossess communities of their own living traditions.
Appropriation, Dispossession, and the Politics of Meaning
The palimpsest approach compels us to confront the politics of appropriation and meaning-making—not only in antiquity but in the present. The layered life of objects and rituals is never innocent: when communities are prevented from interpreting, using, or remaking their own heritage, this is not only a symbolic violence but a material act of dispossession (Colwell 2021).
Consider the case of the Mijikenda vigango statues in Kenya, wrenched from their context and displayed as “primitive art” in Western museums, stripped of their function, voice, and communal agency (Nevadomsky 2018; Udvardy et al. 2003; Colwell 2017). The same flattening occurs when Greek statues, icons, or ritual objects(once agents in living practice) are uprooted for foreign collectors or museum display, their layered histories collapsed into dead “artworks” or tokens of a supposed universal civilisation.
Just as Colwell (2021) argues for respecting the agency and interpretive rights of descendant African communities regarding vigango statues, I insist on the same standard for Greek ritual heritage. The principle is not ethnonational exclusivity, but the decolonial imperative to restore interpretive agency to communities whose traditions have historically been subject to external appropriation, silencing, or misrepresentation.
This dynamic is not limited to museums. In contemporary neopaganism or well-meaning Western revivals, statues of the gods are “reclaimed” or reinterpreted to suit imported ideas of devotion, often severed from the palimpsest of ritual, anxiety, and negotiation that kept these figures alive in Greek memory, Orthodox ritual, and folk practice. To insist on a single “true” meaning or to demand a fixed definition of Greek sacred art is to repeat, however unwittingly, the violence of the colonial collector: confiscating the right to interpret, use, and reanimate heritage on its own terms.
License to destroy
I recently posted about my great-grandmother’s dowry chest: for Greek women, such a chest is not merely a decorative artifact, but a vessel of lineage, memory, and social meaning, laden with ritual and personal significance. Yet in modern Greece, these chests routinely fetch high prices in antique shops, where foreign buyers value them as “folk art” or decorative curiosities. In purchasing them as static objects, however well-intentioned, they often unwittingly sever the object from its living context, reducing it to surface ornament and silencing the intricate histories it carries.
But this is not a call for indiscriminate preservation either. In times of crisis, such as wartime famine, my own family once burned an even more elaborate dowry chest for firewood, choosing survival over sentiment. Nor is ritual destruction unknown in Greek tradition: when sacred or meaningful objects outlive their purpose, they may be ceremonially burned or buried, with the act itself imbued with significance and closure.
The difference is agency and context. When objects are repurposed or destroyed within the community, it is part of an ongoing negotiation of value and memory. When meaning is flattened for external consumption, what is lost is not the object, but the right to determine its significance.
Now, in recounting this story that my own mother told me about the burning of the other dowry chest, the act itself, and the retelling, acquires new layers of meaning.
The object may be gone, but its story becomes a living thread in the fabric of family and cultural memory, woven anew each time it is recalled or reinterpreted.
In telling it here, I am not preserving the chest, but activating its meaning: transforming private memory into a public reflection on continuity, loss, agency; the nature of war, survival, and grief. This kind of renegotiation and reanimation of meaning is precisely what is lost when such objects are simply displayed as exotic decor in a wealthy expatriate’s living room, their living resonance muted in favour of surface appreciation.
Ritual objects accrue new meanings through ritual activation, gifting, and contextual change, while sometimes deliberately erasing or overwriting prior histories (Palmer et al., 2019). Commodities, by contrast, seek to erase all prior meaning in pursuit of a pristine “newness.” Ritual and heritage objects do the opposite: they are the very sites where layers of memory, relationship, and contestation are kept alive, even when uncomfortable or disproportionate - as with the burned chest.
The reality is that meaning, power, and cultural agency do not reside in the object (or text, or hymn) alone, but in the evolving relationships and practices that surround them. Their force—whether as protector, mediator, or relic—depends on context, not the gaze of an outsider. To ignore this, or to assert a singular interpretation, is a subtle form of dispossession.
The same principles apply to texts as to ritual objects: their meaning is not inherent or frozen in time, but continually made and remade through the practices and intentions of those who use them. Written sources—like objects—are “traces” whose significance depends on their layered interpretation and reanimation in changing social contexts (Colwell 2021).
When ancient hymns, prayers, or epics are revived outside their living tradition—detached from the networks of memory, belief, and usage that gave them their depth—they become surface relics for aesthetic or ideological consumption.
The problem is not that outsiders engage with Greek texts or rituals, but that they often do so by imposing and disseminating fixed, essential meanings, or by claiming unmediated access to a heritage still entangled in the ongoing self-understanding of Greek communities.
True engagement would require recognising the embedded, negotiated life of these forms, involving those for whom the layers still matter, rather than stripping them for parts or treating them as abandoned cultural property. Anything less perpetuates dispossession, however well-intentioned.
My argument is not to deny outsiders the possibility of meaningful engagement, but to insist that such engagement be dialogic, self-aware, and situated—recognising the layered, contested history of Greek tradition and the ongoing claims of those for whom it remains a living inheritance. Legitimate engagement must be based on respect for local agency and an openness to collaboration, rather than on claims of unmediated access or proprietary interpretation.
Ritual, Community, and Authority
Rituals themselves surrounding statues, icons, or sacred spaces, are not fixed performances but living negotiations. Gestures, prayers, offerings, and processions evolve and layer in response to new needs, historical pressures, and communal anxieties. What persists is not the pristine repetition of some “original” act, but the community’s ongoing power to make meaning, mediate life itself, and invoke protection.
To claim, as some do, that such continuity is “tainted” or “invalid” because it operates under a new religious dispensation—or, worse, to insist that it must be validated by external (often Western) criteria of authenticity—is itself an act of appropriation. This echoes the same colonial logic that uproots artefacts for museum display: the assumption that meaning can be frozen, and that the right to interpret belongs not to the living community, but to the outsider, scholar, or collector.
This is especially evident in debates over “survivals” and “syncretism.” Outsider anxieties often treat the visible presence of Christian elements layered over older forms as evidence of contamination, impurity, or rupture. The persistence of ritual forms, reworked within a new theological frame, is thus viewed as a sign of something “tainted” or “inauthentic.” From within the tradition, however, this very process of adaptation and layering is not a source of embarrassment or evidence of loss, but a hallmark of cultural vitality and resilience.
As anthropological theory has long insisted, meanings are never simply accumulated; they are struggled over, reworked, and renegotiated by interested human actors, each with their own agendas, biases, and histories (Murphy 2015). Continuity is thus not a passive inheritance, but a dynamic and sometimes agonistic process that preserves traces of violence and exclusion, as well as of creativity and renewal.
Neo-Pagan and Scholarly Anxieties: Agency and Adaptation
Neo-pagan critics often object that any absorption of old ritual forms by Christianity represents “betrayal,” “erasure,” or “appropriation.” But such judgements presume a static model of tradition and ignore the agency of the community doing the adapting.
Scholarly resistance, meanwhile, is understandable given the excesses of nationalist and romantic narratives. But the corrective is not to banish the language of continuity, but to clarify its meaning, specify its limits, and demonstrate it rigorously (Stewart, “Syncretism and Its Synonyms,” 1999; Alexiou, After Antiquity).
Conclusion: Towards an Ethics of Interpretation
To claim “functional and palimpsestic continuity” is not to erase history, but to recover the agency and creativity of Greek communities past and present in making meaning out of their ritual lives. This approach does not collapse difference; it asks instead how meaning and practice are negotiated across time, and how communities make sense of change while holding onto what still matters. Identifying “what still matters” is what gives us the notion of continuity.
The palimpsest model offers a way toward decolonising scholarship, refusing closure and hierarchy in meaning-making, and envisioning a future in which the right to interpret and remake tradition belongs first to those who live it (Colwell 2021). It requires, above all, an ethical and dialogic practice that recognises the layered, sometimes painful, sometimes creative, palimpsests of the past.
The case of Medusa–Demeter–Despoina–Panagia is only one thread. There are dozens more: the integration of local daemons, the adaptation of folk healing rituals, the persistence of protective icons and agricultural festivals. These trajectories demand careful textual, ethnographic, and material excavation, and it is my intention to bring more of them to light in future essays. The work I publish here is aimed at the middle ground and represents research in progress. The footnotes are solid, and I refer you to those until the formal work emerges.
The debate on “continuity” deserves to move beyond polemic and anxiety toward grounded, critical research that begins with clear definitions and a willingness to listen to lived realities. Pre-emptive eye-rolling at the mere mention of “continuity” is not just unhelpful; it shuts down legitimate inquiry and silences those best placed to interpret their own tradition. Like my colleague- an associate professor in philosophy - who told me about an erroneous correction to her Greek by a non-Greek reviewer who was unaware of the word’s polysemy. Or the Classics Professor tweeting his visit to Athens while mocking - erroneously - the modern usages of words that do retain all layers of meaning, suggesting to his followers how brutish Modern Greeks have become.
This is especially acute when Greeks themselves are discouraged from engaging with their cultural inheritance on their own terms, and are blocked or silenced when speaking up.
To move forward, the question should not be whether continuity exists, but what kind of continuity is at work, and how it functions—ritually, socially, linguistically, and imaginatively. Rejecting the question out of hand is not critical scholarship; it is intellectual gatekeeping.
In short, following Alexiou, my aim is not to “prove” that nothing changed, or to conflate past and present, but to track the specific processes by which Greek ritual, language, and symbolism adapt and persist. The debate on continuity must move toward intellectual honesty and scholarly integrity.
Misuse of the term in the past is no reason to forswear it in the present. Let’s clarify, document, and—above all—keep asking the right questions.
To support independent scholarship, please consider subscribing.
This reference list and the inline citations are provisional and incomplete. Many of the additional relevant references are spread across the in-depth feature articles in this journal, which represents a research project in progress. I am happy to provide them on request and will revise this piece as time allows to more properly reflect the literature.
Alexiou, Margaret. After Antiquity: Greek Language, Myth, and Metaphor. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002.
Alexiou, Margaret. The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974.
Appadurai, Arjun. Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule: A South Indian Case. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Appadurai, Arjun, guest ed. “Place and Voice in Anthropological Theory.” Cultural Anthropology 3, no. 1 (1988).
Appadurai, Arjun. “The Globalization of Archaeology and Heritage: A Discussion with Arjun Appadurai.” Journal of Social Archaeology 1, no. 1 (2001): 35–49.
Burkert, Walter. Greek Religion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.
Colwell, Chip. “The Palimpsest Theory of Objects.” Current Anthropology 62, no. 2 (2021): 223–250.
Duara, Prasenjit. “Superscribing Symbols: The Myth of Guandi, Chinese God of War.” Journal of Asian Studies 47, no. 4 (1988): 778–795.
Hall, Jonathan M. Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Hall, Jonathan M. Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
Hall, Jonathan M. Reclaiming the Past: Argos and Its Archaeological Heritage in the Modern World. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.
Herzfeld, Michael. Anthropology: Theoretical Practice in Culture and Society. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.
Herzfeld, Michael. Anthropology Through the Looking-Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Herzfeld, Michael. A Place in History: Monumental and Social Time in a Cretan Town. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Herzfeld, Michael. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Hirschon, Renée. Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.
Hirschon, Renée. “Cyclical Time and Recursive Ritual in the Greek Orthodox Calendar.” In The Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate, edited by Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter D. Mignolo, 205–218. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013.
Hirschon, Renée. “Dismantling the Millet: Religion and National Identity in Contemporary Greece.” In Nationalism in the Troubled Triangle: Cyprus, Greece, Turkey, edited by Ayhan Aktar, Niyazi Kızılyürek, and Umut Özkırımlı, 115–134. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Hirschon, Renée. “Essential Objects and the Sacred: Interior and Exterior Space in an Urban Greek Locality.” In Women and Space: Ground Rules and Social Maps, edited by Shirley Ardener, 72–88. London: Croom Helm, 1981.
Hirschon, Renée. “Identity and the Greek State: Some Conceptual Issues and Paradoxes.” In The Greek Diaspora in the Twentieth Century, edited by Richard Clogg, 158–180. London: Macmillan, 1999.
Hirschon, Renée. “Imported Individuals, Indigenous Persons: Changing Celebrations of Personal Identity in Contemporary Greece.” In Eastern Christians in Anthropological Perspective, edited by Chris Hann and Hermann Goltz, 191–209. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.
Hoskins, Janet Alison. Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People’s Lives. London: Routledge, 1998.
Kaldellis, Anthony. Ethnography after Antiquity: Foreign Lands and Peoples in Byzantine Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.
Kaldellis, Anthony. Hellenism in Byzantium: The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Kaldellis, Anthony. The Christian Parthenon: Classicism and Pilgrimage in Byzantine Athens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Kaldellis, Anthony, and Dimiter Angelov. Byzantine Readings of Ancient Historians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Kreps, Christina. Commentary in Colwell, “The Palimpsest Theory of Objects,” 2021.
Mackridge, Peter. Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766–1976. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Mazower, Mark, ed. Ideologies and National Identities: The Case of Twentieth-Century Southeastern Europe. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2003.
Mazower, Mark. Networks of Power in Modern Greece. London: Hurst & Co, 2008.
Mazower, Mark. Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430–1950. London: HarperCollins, 2004.
Parker, Robert. Polytheism and Society at Athens. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Pausanias. Description of Greece. Translated by W.H.S. Jones and H.A. Ormerod. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918–1935.
Preucel, Robert W. Commentary in Colwell, “The Palimpsest Theory of Objects,” 2021.
Stewart, Charles. Demons and the Devil: Moral Imagination in Modern Greek Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Stewart, Charles. Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Stewart, Charles. “Syncretism and Its Synonyms: Reflections on Cultural Mixture.” In Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis, edited by Charles Stewart and Rosalind Shaw, 1–26. London: Routledge, 1999.
Udvardy, Monica L., Linda L. Giles, and John Athanasios Mitsanze. “Repatriation of Vigango.” African Arts 36, no. 4 (2003): 52–69.
I wish this was written years ago - I could have avoided so much drama with the pagans. 😭