RuncimanAward

The Runciman Award, named in honour of the late Sir Steven Runciman and generously sponsored by the National Bank of Greece, is awarded by the Anglo-Hellenic League to a book on Greece or some aspect of the Hellenic scene. Books published in English anywhere in the world are eligible for the Award.

An interview with Kevin Featherstone and Dimitris Papadimitriou, authors of Prime Ministers in Greece: the Paradox of Power

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Many thanks to Kevin Featherstone and Dimitris Papadimitriou, authors of shortlisted book Prime Ministers in Greece: the Paradox of Power, who kindly agreed to this interview.

It was difficult not to get carried away with all the questions I wanted to ask them. In fact, some of my questions were impossible to answer in just one paragraph, and would have required… a whole book!

You were both involved in an ad hoc advisory committee to George Papandreou some years ago. Can you tell us more about it? What impact did the advisory committee have? Were any changes made as a result?

We interviewed George Papandreou, before he became PM, about his father, Andreas.  It was a good and wide-ranging discussion.  Kevin had written in ‘Kathimerini’ about the contrast between the formal powers of the Greek PM and the practical reality of a constrained and under-resourced position.  Later, after George’s election victory he invited Kevin to join an ad hoc advisory committee on how to ‘modernise’ the government structure and operation.  The Committee was to be composed of foreigners; Dimitris made his own bilateral input.  George announced in 2010 that he would be adopting the Committee’s Report and he started to implement some of its action-points.  But, of course, wider political events took over and George resigned as PM.  Yet, the impact continued: the governments that followed took action to reform the government at the centre and the Troika itself pressed this same agenda.  So, a focus had been defined and an agenda set.

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An excerpt from Kevin Featherstone and Dimitris Papadimitriou’s book, Prime Ministers in Greece: the Paradox of Power

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Prime Ministers in Greece: The Paradox of Power (OUP, 2015)

Kevin Featherstone and Dimitris Papadimitriou

 

The debt crisis that enveloped Greece after 2009 – shaking the international financial markets and raising doubts about the viability of the ‘euro-zone’ – drew attention to how the Greek political system was governed and its capacity to deliver reform. In that sense, the crisis served the purpose of highlighting issues that had been long-ignored, to Greece’s detriment.

The genesis of this book predates the crisis and grew out of a recognition that Greek politics exhibits a paradox: legal scholarship and much public debate assumes that the Prime Minister exercises great authority, often unchecked by others; yet, the practical reality of the PM’s post – reflected in repeated ‘under-performance’ in delivering promised reforms – is of operational weakness, sustaining a lack of control and coordination across the government machine.

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An interview with Sharon Gerstel, author of Rural Lives and Landscapes in Late Byzantium

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Sharon Gerstel, author of Rural Lives and Landscapes in Late Byzantium, kindly agreed to answer a few questions. The answers are so interesting and so evocative of village life in Greece that even a second interview wouldn’t do justice to everything there is to say.

Sharon, you have made a very comprehensive study of life in villages in the Late Byzantine period. You distinguish your approach from that of some earlier studies. How would you characterise your own approach?

As a specialist in art history, archaeology, and ritual studies, my interest was to look across traditional disciplinary boundaries at Byzantine villages. Having lived for many years in Greece and having spent twenty years walking the landscape and discussing life stories with the older residents of small villages, it was also important for me to layer their stories onto the histories of their villages. While I’m very aware of the scholarly hazards of crossing between the medieval and modern periods, the fact that the villages and buildings have been in continuous habitation and use from the Late Byzantine to the modern period argued in favor of including personal testimonies within my research. Here, I was inspired by the work of a number of ethnographers, including that of Juliet du Boulay, who was a Runciman Award winner in 2010!

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An excerpt from Sharon Gerstel’s entry, Rural Lives and Landscapes in Late Byzantium

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In 1998, Mrs. Kanella Georgopoulou guided me over stone fences and through fields of donkey thistles to a dilapidated chapel below a small village in the Mani. Bleeding from scratches and parched by the heat of the high sun, we contemplated the face of the Virgin. Once found in the apse of the church, a section of the painting now lay shattered on the ground below. Gazing at the pieces of her village’s history, Mrs. Georgopoulou asked why no one was interested in the past. “When we are gone,” mused the octogenarian, “there will be no one left to tell the tale.” Mrs. Georgopoulou was one of the numerous elderly villagers in the Mani, Boeotia, and Crete who expressed to me the same concern — village life would soon disappear.

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This week’s focus: Rural Lives and Landscapes in Late Byzantium, by Sharon Gerstel

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This week we focus on Sharon Gerstel’s book, shortlisted for this year’s award. From the book jacket: “This is the first book to examine the Late Byzantine peasantry through written, archaeological, ethnographic, and painted sources. […] The village is a micro-society, with its own social and economic hierarchies. This text reveals lesser-known individuals – such … Read more