Taryn Simon collaborated with Russia’s State Atomic Energy Corporation (ROSATOM) to prepare a work of art made from nuclear material. In the year 3015, approximately one thousand years after its creation, a black square made from vitrified nuclear waste will be permanently displayed at Garage in a custom designed void that has been integrated into the new museum building.
Yeah, just forget about Byzantine Greece, Venice owning Greece, the Ottomans owning Greece, Nazis invading and conquering Greece, the Civil War, a dictatorship, and finally the current Greek government. Other than that, just one unbroken line of greekdom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Greece
Feel free to correct me if I’ve misunderstood your point, but are you saying that “Greece” in a historical context is not a unitary entity? But how can that be so when the very thing that creates this “unbroken line of Greekdom” you refer to is the the entire concept of a “History of Greece” that reaches back thousands of years in the first place?
If there is no unitary Greek identity that reaches back from the present to the Greeks of the past, then a history of Greece that includes the Roman conquest, the Ottomans, Byzantium, would be absurd (and shame on the Wikizens for including it in one conceptual lump as well, I guess).
You could say the same of Britain after 1066, or France after Henry VI. Or of Egypt after the merging of the kingdoms, or after the Ptolomys, etc; and yet most Egyptians would push back at the suggestion that there is no direct line from the age of pharaohs to the present day.
Being a nation with the same name, occupying at least a portion of its original geography, populated by many of the decedents of the same people – well, that grants a country some pretty big ontological leeway. Who gets to decide whether the Greeks of today share the history and are of a piece with their ancient predecessors? Well the Greeks do, presumably. I mean, that’s just the way I see it, I might be off on a wild tangent for all I know.
A history of domination by foreigners doesn’t mean we’re not the same people. Assyrians, Jews, Kurds, Roma, and more people groups have stayed the same despite millenia of oppression