Abstract
While Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) established a taste for terror in crumbling settings that became a real mania at the end of the eighteenth century, Gothic ruins left the page to become the actual setting of the phantasmagoria, a Gothic spectacle of optical illusions staged in a ruinous Capuchin convent in Paris in the late 1790s. Against this backdrop, this essay discusses the ruins of a Capuchin monastery in the heart of Athens, which was destroyed in 1821 during the Greek Revolution, having accommodated, amongst many other visitors, Lord Byron for eight months. The ruined convent of Athens is here reintroduced as the key site of the city’s Gothic phantasmagoria and cultural fusion of spectres from European history, literature and art.
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Notes
- 1.
The phrase appears in a letter written in 1353 by Petrarch during his stay in Vaucluse, where he claims to have established his utopian retreat (1966, 132).
- 2.
Laurent Mannoni proposes an alternative etymology to “agora,” that of “agoreuo,” which means “I make a public speech,” “an etymology which suggests a dialogue between the audience and the ghost called up by the magic lantern” (2000, 136). In fact, “agora” in ancient Greek denotes both “gathering” and “speaking in public,” among other meanings.
- 3.
Kampouroglou informs us that before the popularization of the name “lantern of Diogenes” the monument of Lysicrates was called “lantern of Demosthenes” (1890, 277). With Greece still under Ottoman occupation, the foreigners who referred to the monument in their publications used all of the above names, often interchangeably. For example, in a letter dated 9 August 1802 to Giovanni Battista Lusieri—the artist who helped Elgin remove the Parthenon Marbles—the notorious lord writes from Smyrna: “Continue your acquisitions, and add to my obligations − the lantern of Demosthenes!!! [The monument of Lysicrates]” (Smith 1916, 228). Fortunately, his plan was never realized.
- 4.
The monument owed its presence there to Count Choiseul-Gouffier, French Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in Constantinople, from 1784 to 1791, characterized by a profound interest for ancient Greek civilization (and a passion for looting and collecting antiquities) who, during a visit to Athens, made a cast of the whole Lysicrates monument and sent it to Paris (see Mauch 1910 [1845], n.p.).
- 5.
The Capuchin monks, who first settled in Ottoman Athens in 1658, belonged to the third family of the First Franciscan Order and got their name from the long, pointed hood of their robes, called “cappucio” in Italian (see Roussos-Milidonis 1996, 464). In 1669 the monks bought a house adjoining the Lysicrates monument, so as to expand it into a monastery, the ownership of which also included the monument (Dalezios 1964, 8). For information on the dispute over the monument’s ownership and its subsequent settlement, see Pagonis (1993, 17).
- 6.
Just before its destruction, in 1821, Walsh visited the convent and met the prior who narrated to him details about Byron’s stay there.
- 7.
See also Michael Hollington, Chapter 3, on Byron’s famous line.
- 8.
An account by an anonymous eyewitness testifies that in July 1821 “[e]ven the church of the Catholics in the hospice of the Capuchins was burnt down, and the beautiful monument of Lysicrates (called the Lantern) damaged by the fire” (“The Siege of the Acropolis of Athens, in the Years 1821–22 by an Eye-Witness” 1826, 197). Also, the American author Parker N. Willis, while visiting Athens during in his 1833 six-month Mediterranean cruise, observed the absence of the Capuchin convent and the existence of Byron’s name on the surviving Lysicrates monument: “The poet’s name is written with his own hand on a marble slab of the wall” (1853, 145).
- 9.
The exact date of the creation of the illustration is not given in the text, but an earlier similar watercolour painting by the same Swiss painter, J. J. Wolfenberger, dated 1834, can be found in Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. For its reproduction, see the Greek edition of Vladimir Davidov’s two-volume travelogue published in Russian in 1839–1840 (2004, 159).
- 10.
The collection’s full French title, inspired by Robertson’s phantasmagoria, is Fantasmagoriana; ou Recueil d’histoires d’apparitions, de spectres, de revenans, fantômes, etc. Traduit de l’allemand, par un Amateur (1812). The original German stories that compile the collection derive from many different sources (see Potter 2005, 77).
- 11.
The last traces of the convent disappeared in 1921 (Pagonis 1993, 36).
- 12.
For more information on the tower see Beckford’s Tower and Museum; “Beckford’s Tower with Attached Wall and Railings”; Gibbes (1835, 65).
- 13.
See The Valuable Library of Books in Fonthill Abbey (1823, 86, 356). Beckford’s library was also very up to date with new books on classical architecture, as revealed by the existence of a copy of An Examination of Grecian Architecture by J. Gwilt, published in 1825, which contains a drawing of the Lysicrates monument and cites Stuart and Revett’s book as a source. See Sotheby, Wilkinson, and Hodge, Hamilton Palace Libraries sale of Beckford Library.
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Vara, M. (2019). Amongst the Ruins of a European Gothic Phantasmagoria in Athens. In: Mitsi, E., Despotopoulou, A., Dimakopoulou, S., Aretoulakis, E. (eds) Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26905-0_2
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