identity search European Capitals of Culture are huge projects, they ask the big questions. But what does this mean for small industrial towns following the crisis? A visit to Elefsina
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Edition 07/2023
Tricky question: what actually counts as culture?
On the Saturday evening when the small port town of Elefsina officially became the European Capital of Culture, the central promenade was packed with people. It was quiet beyond the main streets. Here are one-storey bungalows with neoclassical-looking architraves and unadorned two- to three-storey apartment buildings. Orange trees with inedible fruit line the streets, sometimes stray cats chase through the lantern light. The small town was chosen as this year’s Capital of Culture alongside Timișoara in Romania and Veszprém in Hungary.
At the grand opening in the temporary amphitheater at the port, Greece’s President complained
President Katerina Sakellaropoulou the spiritual emptiness of modernity. She reads the myth of Hades and Persephone, set in Elefsina, as a tale of the exploitation of nature. Valdis Dombrovskis, Vice-President of the European Commission, says that the European Capitals of Culture are no longer regarding finding homo Europaeus, but regarding strengthening common values. Lina Mendoni, Greece’s Minister of Culture, explains that we all came to Elefsina to be reinitiated. The more one thinks regarding what actually is European, the more unclear everything becomes. Elefsina, the city once called Eleusis where Aeschylus was born, is built around a mystery. The tragic poet was sentenced to death because he was accused of betraying the mystery in one of his plays, but nothing might be proven once morest him. At the heart of the ritual was Persephone’s return, and it took place at night by torchlight, at the spot where Demeter is said to have been waiting for her daughter, kidnapped by the underworld god Hades. If you go over the desert plan of the excavation site, you pass a first entrance gate, then another, the ceremony was embedded in stairs and rocks. Such an environment would today be called immersive. The perennial fire395 AD the Visigoths destroyed the city and its temples. Much, much later Greece lovers came to the city from England. The romantic young men were drawn to the ruins that have collapsed around the mystery. Lord Byron visited the city, Friedrich Nietzsche, later Virginia Woolf. From 1922, refugees from Asia Minor came to the region, fleeing the persecution of the Greek population at the end of the Ottoman Empire, when there were no external EU borders. A famous photo from the post-war period shows headless statues of the holy site. There are a few fragments of columns lying around, the chimneys of the cement factory are smoking in the background. The town became an industrial center during the 20th century and a long harbor stretches along the coast, bounded by the Titan cement factory on the northwest and the Kronos liquor factory on the southeast end. The giant and the god of time replace Demeter and Persephone. The dusty, half-ruined cement factory looks oddly like a close relative of the temple, and from across the bay the never-ending fire of the Hellenic Petroleum Refinery greets at night, as if there were a metropolis with hundreds of lights but no people selected since 1985 on the recommendation of the European Commission. The applications are regarding being European, or regarding becoming European. But doubtful questions regarding identity were not always part of the initiative. The first Capital of Culture was Athens, followed by Florence, Amsterdam and later Paris: more confirmation than question. In 1990, Glasgow was the first post-industrial city to be named, and tourists flocked to Scotland. The initiative changed, Capitals of Culture were increasingly found on the geographical fringes of the international community and they became smaller. Socio-economic goals and change for cities and regions were discussed well beyond a celebratory year. Culture as a catalyst for creative cities and the establishment of institutional structures became a location factor for post-industrial service societies. If you ask Michail Marmarinos, actor, director and artistic director of 2023 Eleusis what the city’s heritage is, he says there is a tangible and an intangible . There are gaps and free spaces that you won’t find in Athens, and yes, just the mystery, as if Marmarinos wanted to give the city back its myths. On the other hand, the Academy of Choreography, for example, is tangible, intended as a permanent institution, which is currently a guest in an old bowling center. Or the subsequent use of old industrial buildings for cultural production. Three thematic areas of the Mysteries of Transition, as the program is officially titled, are intended to connect Elefsina with the rest of Europe: society, environment and work. “A small town has to be more visible, otherwise it gets lost,” says Marmarinos. The events, exhibitions and projects are numbered consecutively: Mystery 79 is an annual conference for exchange between international actors and the urban community, for Mystery 111 active and retired factory workers portrayed in terracotta. Mystery 45 aims to give aspiring festival makers a workshop. Much of it is still under construction and will only open in the course of the year. In the evening, people in embroidered traditional costumes dance complicated steps in a circle, others sing from their balconies on the harbor promenade. The artist and composer Heiner Goebbels scurries between the visitors of his 7 Columns, an installation in the old oil mill at the harbour. With a pool of water in the center and projections on the walls, the room is transformed into a telesterion like it stood at the ancient sanctuary a few hundred yards away. Performers in videos carry columns back and forth like relics of European history. Greek folk music, which was collected by the ethnomusicologist Samuel Baud-Body around the middle of the century, plays to this. In general, music. In a car workshop further down the port, a song by Stelios Kazantzidis is played so loudly that the car bodies, like marble under a milky veil of plastic foil, rattle as if of their own accord. Kazantzidis’ wistful songs deal with the pride of the working class and migration: “My songs are not for the living room,” he sang. All of this is part of the program item If Only My Life Were A Saturday Night. Even later, following the official opening ceremony, six souped-up small cars with huge loudspeakers are parked at the end of the beach promenade, like on every Saturday evening. I try to ask one of the young men if he is from Elefsina and what he thinks of the European Capitals of Culture initiative. But the bass is too loud. He just nods: yes, yes. It doesn’t matter to him how fascinated the surrounding city dwellers from Athens, Berlin and elsewhere find the cars and the music. Another person speaks to me from the side. He wears a yellow knitted hat and is from Athens. He asks whether the car men are part of the 2023 Eleusis program, but he really doesn’t want to know. He thinks it has more to do with noise pollution than cultural heritage. The years following the economic crisis haven’t been so kind to the city. Greece was among the EU nations that repeatedly failed to meet the deficit criterion. People reacted to the strict budget consolidation measures with protests. Those who are young today in Elefsina are more likely to look for their future in the capital or elsewhere. At the same time, once morest the background of new nationalist movements, Europe’s self-image began to falter. But perhaps it also became particularly obvious that European identity is an elusive thing that does not do justice to the diversity of the continent, whose cultural borders are fluid – and whose borders are hard if you want to be part of it. Perhaps this is precisely where the great mystery of this Capital of Culture lies, because this is where the tricky question crystallizes as to what actually counts as culture. And how we will think regarding the center and periphery of Europe in the future.
