Contested Territories from Ancient Narratives and Modern Contexts

Antonis Kourkoulakos works as Individual Grant Officer at Tilburg University, The Netherlands. His research focuses at the cultural interactions in Late Bronze and the reception of Greek antiquity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the author of Getting Rid of the Interface: East Aegean/Western Anatolia and the Role of Seha River Land and Arzawa/Mira in Late Bronze Age Cultural Interaction (2023).Vasileios Balaskas is Assistant Professor of Modern Greek Studies at the University of Malaga, Spain. His research centres on how sociocultural and literary expressions in the twentieth century appropriated Graeco-Roman antiquity. He is the author of Revivals of Classical Drama in Greece and Spain (1860s-1970s): Theatre in the Realm of Ideology (2025).

• List of IllustrationsNotes on ContributorsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Land Claims and Collective Identities in Ancient and Modern Contexts, Antonis Kourkoulakos & Vasileios Balaskas (University of Tilburg, the Netherlands & Universidad de Málaga, Spain)PART I: New Grounds: Land and the Making of SelfhoodChapter 1. ‘You Ask me for Arcadia? You Ask Too Much’: The Spartans and the Beautiful Plain of Tegea, Giovanni Ingarao (Università degli Studi di Cagliari, Italy)Chapter 2. Exiled Poet to Lonely King? ‘Claiming’ the Land in Ov. Pont. 2.9, Laura Loporcaro (Ghent University, Belgium)Chapter 3.The Sanctuaries of Athena Areia and Demeter Eleusinia: The Plataeans and the Memory of the Persian Wars, Alice Solazzo (Università degli Studi di Palermo, Italy)Chapter 4. Creating Histories in Past and Present: The Case of Ancient Ionia, Rik Vaessen (RAAP Archaeological Consultancy, the Netherlands)PART II: Contested Grounds: Appropriation and the Struggle for LandChapter 5. Coastal Sanctuaries and LBA Eastern Mediterranean Networks: A Seafarer’s Perspective, Andreas Ladas & Dimitris Papageorgiou (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece)Chapter 6. Bridges as Symbols of Domination over Nature in Roman Times, Anna Klara Falke (University of Münster, Germany)Chapter 7. How to Claim a Land: Use, Abuse and Contrast of Classical Models in Early Modern Spanish Historiography, Pamina Fernández Camacho (Universidad de Cádiz, Spain)Chapter 8. Cross-temporal Land Claims and the Physical Concept of History: The Case of Ancient Rome and Contemporary Zimbabwe, Obert Bernard Mlambo (Rhodes University, South Africa)PART III: Land as an Institution: Politics and Collective MemoryChapter 9.Collective Memory and Ethnic Identity Formation in Amuq Valley during EIA: A Theory of Practice Approach, Dimitris Papageorgiou (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece)Chapter 10. Ploughing for a New Jerusalem: Claiming and Abandoning Lands in Montanist Phrygia, Romeo Gessaga (University of Oxford, UK)Chapter 11. A Claim to the Land? Rural Slaves and the(ir) land in Ancient Greece, Marios Anastasiadis (New York University, USA) & Jason Porter (University of Edinburgh, UK)Chapter 12. Claiming the Hellenicity of Asia Minor (1919-1922): Archaeological Activities in the Context of Megali Idea, Vasileios Balaskas & Antonis Kourkoulakos (Universidad de Málaga, Spain & University of Tilburg, the Netherlands)Index