Lost Worlds of Ancient and Modern Greece: Gilbert Bagnani: The Adventures of a Young Italo-Canadian Archaeologist in Greece, 1921-1924

This book relates three years (1921-1924) in the life of Gilbert Bagnani, a young Italian archaeologist in Greece, based on his letters to his mother in Rome, at first as a non-partisan observer of, and later as an active participant in, some of the most tumultuous events in modern Greek history.

''The titles of some books act like magnets. They pull you towards them and command attention... It is not about the lost worlds of Ancient Greece alone but also about the lost worlds of Modern Greece... Who is Gilbert Bagnani and what adventures is he having in Greece before and after the Asia Minor Catastrophe? Any hesitation you may have had vanishes into thin air when you start reading this absorbing, literate, informative and simply wonderful book.'' – James Karas (2022): Greek Press, Toronto, March 4, 2022

''This book stands as a major contribution – and an accessible one – to our understanding of the history of Greece in the years 1921-1924. In bringing Gilbert Bagnani back to life through his subject’s letters and through his own careful delving into primary sources, Ian Begg joins a group of scholars [who] have examined the personal lives, attitudes and idiosyncrasies of archaeologists, artists and performers, anthropologists, and historians as entryways into the discoveries they made, using their personalities as lenses for their scholarly or artistic methods.'' – Robert Pounder (2021): Bryn Mawr Classical Review

‘In 2022 Greece will be commemorating the one-hundredth anniversary of the Asia Minor Catastrophe. There are only a few books in English accessible to a broad audience that consider the events of 1922... To these we should now add Begg’s Lost Worlds.’ – Natalia Vogeikoff-Brogan (2022): Journal of Modern Greek Studies

‘A serious and punctilious archaeologist, culturally open to the investigation of other historical periods, an able journalistic correspondent, an incurable salon-lover and admirer of luxury, gifted with an intelligent sense of irony, even a secret agent. Gilbert Bagnani’s multifaceted personality emerges very well from the pages of Ian Begg’s book, which takes us not only through the history of Greece in the 1920s but also through that of the Archaeological Schools and of the Italian one in particular.’ - Stefano Struffolino (2022), Journal of Greek Archaeology

By day, young Gilbert Bagnani studied archaeology in Greece, but by night he socialised with the elite of Athenian society. Secretly writing for the Morning Post in London, he witnessed both antebellum Athens in 1921 and the catastrophic collapse of Christian civilisation in western Anatolia in 1922. While there have been many accounts by refugees of the disastrous flight from Smyrna, few have been written from the perspective of the west side of the Aegean. The flood of a million refugees to Greece brought in its wake a military coup in Athens, the exile of the Greek royal family and the execution or imprisonment of politicians, whom Gilbert knew.

Gilbert’s weekly letters to his mother in Rome reveal his Odyssey-like adventures on a voyage of discovery through the origins of western civilisation. As an archaeologist in Greece, he travelled through time seeing history repeat itself: Minoan Knossos, Byzantine Constantinople and Ottoman Smyrna were all violently destroyed, but the survivors escaped to the new worlds of Mycenaean Greece, Renaissance Venice and modern Greece.

At Smyrna in the twentieth century, history was written not only by the victors but was also recorded by the victims. At the same time, however, the twentieth century itself was so filled with reports of ethnic cleansings on such a scale that the reports brutalized the humanity of the supposedly civilized people reading about them, and the tragedy of Smyrna disappeared from public awareness between the cataclysmic upheavals of the First and Second World Wars.

• | Author: D. J. Ian Begg
• | Publisher: Archaeopress
• | Publication Date: Oct 29, 2020
• | Number of Pages:
• | Language:
• | Binding: Hardback
• | ISBN-13: 9781789694529
• | ISBN-10: 1789694523