Overview
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.
Full Product Details
Author: D. J. Ian Begg
Publisher: Archaeopress
Imprint: Archaeopress
Weight: 0.759kg
ISBN: 9781789694529
ISBN 10: 1789694523
Pages: 380
Publication Date: 29 October 2020
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
Gilbert Bagnani, the subject of Ian Begg's book, was unknown to me, and I am glad to have made his acquaintance. The book covers the period 1921-1924. Gilbert comes across as a fascinating character, who encountered the Levant at a critical time for both the Greece of Eleftherios Venizelos and the Turkey of Mustapha Kemal Ataturk. He was bilingual in Italian (from his father) and English (from his mother): an archaeologist but always more than that. He knew and was helped by the excellent William Miller, which led to his contributing incisive articles about the politics of Greece and the Levant to the Morning Post in London. As a member of the Italian School of Archaeology in Athens he travelled around Greece and the islands and found himself in Asia Minor at a critical phase of the Greek occupation and Kemal's war of independence. All this and much more is described in Gilbert's letters to his mother. His grasp of local and international politics was impressive. He and Begg paint sparkling pen pictures of personalities such as Bosdari, the Italian ambassador during the Great War, and later Governor of the Dodecanese, Prince Demidoff the Russian ambassador, Harold Lamb the British Consul at Smyrna and family, Greek personalities such as Stratos, Kalapothakis, Karapanos, and colleagues at the Italian School. Gilbert emerges as clever, sometimes arrogant, fascinated by people especially from high society, and with a weakness for royalty. Begg does him justice in a well sourced book. This is a lively account of a formidable personality, scholar and archaeologist in the making. The black and white photographs by Gilbert himself are excellent. - Sir Michael Llewellyn Smith, British Ambassodor to Greece 1996 - 1999 ; Gilbert Bagnani, of Italian and Canadian extraction, arrived in Greece at the age of 21, already well-connected through his parents' social and professional circles. He was ostensibly studying Greek Archaeology and participating in fieldwork, research and assisting with educational trips for the Italian and other Western archaeological institutes in Athens. However, secretly, he was sending well-informed reports on the dynamic political situation in Greece and between Greece and Turkey to a London newspaper, while later spying for Mussolini. This first of three volumes based on his personal letters and news' reports covers the momentous years from 1921-1924, which witnessed the disastrous failure of the Greek invasion of Western Turkey, the sack of Smyrna, a military coup and executions in Greece. We are also treated to highly-entertaining sketches of leading archaeologists in Greece, and the way fieldwork was conducted, as well as the social life of the political class and wealthy elite of Athens - into which, despite his youth, he quickly found a niche, thanks to his family connections and obvious social graces. Informative, excellently-edited and a delight to read. - Professor John Bintliff, Edinburgh University
'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 '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 ‘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
This is a lively account of a formidable personality, scholar and archaeologist in the making. - Sir Michael Llewellyn Smith (2020), British Ambassodor to Greece 1996 - 1999 This first of three volumes based on {Bagnani's] personal letters and news' reports covers the momentous years from 1921-1924... We are treated to highly-entertaining sketches of leading archaeologists in Greece, and the way fieldwork was conducted, as well as the social life of the political class and wealthy elite of Athens. Informative, excellently-edited and a delight to read. - Professor John Bintliff (2020), Edinburgh University 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 (among them Natalia Vogeikoff-Brogan, Jack L. Davis, Susan Heuck Allen, Kostis Kourelis, Artemis Leontis, Despina Lalaki) 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. Such approaches by later generations of scholars shed fresh light on the work of their predecessors and enlarge our understanding of the histories they wrote or performances they created. - Robert Pounder (2021): Bryn Mawr Classical Review 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
Author Information
Ian Begg studied archaeology in Greece at the America School of Classical Studies in Athens. For this book, the author retraced Gilbert Bagnani's footsteps around Greece, the Aegean, Turkey and Libya. He has not only participated in excavations in Sicily, Greece, Crete and Egypt but also initiated a survey on the island of Karpathos especially for the chapter in this volume.
