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countries that some Italians deem culturally inferior, notably the Maghrebian couscous
that is now a staple of, especially, southern Italian cooking.
Even where nationalistic imperatives continue to insist on overwhelming linguistic
and religious uniformity, however, as in Greece, regional specialties—or, in the case
of Israel, specialties derived from different countries of origin as well as those of the
Arab minority (hummus, for example)—are enjoyed as a permissible form of internal
exoticism, and provide an important terrain for ranking districts (or, again, countries
and cultures of origin) in a hierarchy that both models and confirms that larger rank-
ing of world cultures to which these countries are attempting to calibrate themselves.
As Hirsch (2011) points out, hummus can serve as a signifier of both proximity and
distance, of Israeli as well as of Arab identity, in Israeli eyes.^4 I have similarly been
struck by the frequency with which Greeks acknowledge the superiority of Turkish
food to their own, as well as to the latter’s Turkish origins. Such admissions are not
unambiguously complimentary; much as Hirsch (2011: 620–622) notes that hum-
mus was appropriated as a biblical food and still has an aura of antiquity and simplicity,
so the attribution of Greek cuisine to Turkish origins—especially in the context of
repeated attempts to “westernize” Greek food by reducing the oil content and organ-
izing the table into sequential courses—may represent relegation to another and more
primitive time, what Fabian (1983) calls “allochronism,” rather than a straightfor-
ward appreciation of culinary excellence.
Architecture, yet another modality of collective but contested representation,
offers a superficial appearance of unity because the Byzantine, Venetian, and
Ottoman traditions—among which there is also considerable borrowing in terms of
style and function—established common patterns around the region, so that sites
can at one and the same time commemorate national events and Mediterranean
traditions. Nationalistic proponents of cultural diffusion could still nevertheless try
to claim historical priority for their respective countries, so claims of Mediterranean
commonality were not necessarily inimical to nationalist parochialism and could,
with a skilled management of the archaeological evidence, be used to reinforce it.
Moreover, historic conservation efforts (for example Dines, 2012; Fernández
de Rota y Monter and Irimia Fernández, 2000; Herzfeld, 1991, 2009; Palumbo,
2003; Schneider and Schneider, 2003: 5–19) rarely seek to create a specifically
“Mediterranean” ambience. To the contrary, in this arena in particular, national and
local identities usually trump the idea of a common regional culture, because con-
servation seeks to create irrefutably material justifications of nationalist narratives of
origin, conquest, and moral entitlement. The most famous example of an island
architecture invading urban space, Anafiotika in Athens, evokes “Greek island archi-
tecture” rather than something more generically Mediterranean. Anafiotika has
been gentrified and commodified in a manner that, by treating it as specifically
Greek, implicitly ties it to the neo-classical heritage with which it had earlier been
treated as incompatible, alienating it in the process from the descendants of
those who originally defied the authorities to create and maintain the settle-
ment with its distinctively “island” aesthetic (see Caftanzoglou, 2001). But the
“Mediterraneanness” of Anafiotika was not really an issue. Anafiotika’s place among
competing images of Greekness, on the other hand, and its location at the foot of
the most important ancient site in the national capital, most certainly played an
important role in its vicissitudes.