The Anavysos (Kroisos) Kouros As a Locus of Intersecting Refugee Displacements (15 min)

Presenters

Leticia R. Rodriguez, University of California, Berkeley; and Jason R. Vivrette, University of California, Berkeley

Abstract

This paper reconsiders the place of the archaic sculpture known as the Anavysos (Kroisos) Kouros (National Archaeological Museum of Athens, inv. no. 3851) in a series of intersecting narratives of displacement both ancient and modern. By tracing the history of its art-historical interpretation and literary adaptation, the paper explores how the kouros has been oriented in ways that both reflect and reduce the identities and experiences of displaced peoples in the eastern Mediterranean.

The kouros was famously returned to Greece in 1937, after having been illegally unearthed and smuggled abroad. Together with this modern repatriation narrative, the statue also bears ancient histories of displacement; possibly named after the eponymous Lydian king, the youth commemorated in this grave marker may well have been “a refugee from Ionia” based on his unusually fleshy “eastern” features, as noted by Richter (Oxford, 1942). As such, the marble sculpture is a rich symbol of the displacement of people and objects alike. It is not surprising then that the kouros served as inspiration for Elias Venezis’s 1939 novel, Serenity, one of the earliest and most prominent works of fiction to thematize the experiences of those displaced by the 1922 Asia Minor catastrophe.

Bridging the disciplines of archaeology and literature, this paper argues that formative framings of the kouros allowed the sculpture to embody a plethora of seemingly competing ancient identities (e.g., Attic, Ionian, Lydian), and in ways symbiotic with the equally plural, transnational identities of the refugees that Venezis—himself a refugee of Asia Minor—attempted to capture in his novel through the vehicle of archaic sculpture. Through close literary and art-historical analysis, the paper explores how multivalent formulations of refugee identity available in the description of the original kouros and its novelistic analogues have gradually undergone various processes of assimilation and erasure.

  AIA-1E