Diaspora Grief and the Hellenic Double Standard
originally published to my blog The Liminal Compass on Substack
How growing up in the West shaped my understanding of Greek culture, and why I’m reclaiming it from my own perspective
Author’s note:
I write about Greek history and myth as someone who lives inside this culture. I am not an outside observer. I am a Greek diaspora woman who holds a BA in Classical Literature and an MA in Linguistics. I have spent over a decade teaching language and culture across contexts. I read texts in the original Greek, Ancient and Modern. I have spent the last six years living on Greek soil, reconnecting to a heritage that was always mine though not always accessible to me.
I invite you to consider the ideas of a Greek woman. I invite you to listen to a Modern Greek engaging in English speaking contexts about Greek culture. I invite you, especially those who interact with Greek culture in your personal or professional practice, to engage in the conversation with Modern Greeks.
It’s not just ancient wisdom. It is a living legacy. I am part of it.
— Maria
The Only Greek Girl in School
Being a member of the Greek diaspora and growing up in southern California placed me in a strange space of in-betweenness. With a name like Maria Stenos, I wasn’t white enough to go under the radar. Mostly, people assumed I was Latina. When I was out with my parents, our Mediterranean features and their heavy accents were things that gave us away as immigrants. Oftentimes people defaulted to speaking Spanish without asking. This gesture was an act of consideration, and also a symbol of the conditional whiteness we inhabited as Greeks.
I was happy when people assumed we spoke Spanish, because it made me feel like part of a larger sociocultural group, one that had a claim to the land I was on. But I wasn’t from the Americas. I spent my life split between two continents, never feeling fully at home in either, but always longing for both.
I went to school in a majority white environment, and my Spanish-speaking friends and I, the only Greek girl in school—we were the outliers. So we formed our own little group. We were the ones who didn’t fit. And we learned about their histories, and mine, in English, together. Already detached from our land and language, our culture and our families, a further detachment appeared as I was being taught my own Western-washed history. I was proud when we learned about Greek history in school, but the history lessons taught only the ancient heritage. The last 2000 years were largely missing.
As a literature major, my university didn’t offer modern Greek studies. If I was going to take on this debt, I wanted to study something meaningful. So, I decided to focus on Classics. I had small classes, hands-on professors, and real conversations about a history that was my own. I got to learn how Hellenic heritage influenced Western art and philosophy, religion, sciences, and mathematics. I got to analyse mythology in ways I had only ever dreamed of. I was in an environment which helped me reconnect to my culture, and gave me tools to go deeper into that practice as I have gotten older. But through all of this, something felt off. This version of my heritage was filtered through lenses that weren’t mine: beautiful, but translated and decontextualised. It was fun for professors to defer to me for specific questions, or for classmates to be interested and curious about my Greekness. At the same time, I felt fetishised; I was culture made spectacle.
So I have to ask: am I supposed to be grateful?
I spent years feeling unsettled around the idea of Greekness, and not understanding why I felt this way. As I have started to understand the machinery behind it, the discomfort is now making sense. I spent years quietly trying to understand Greece’s history before I recognised what that unsettled feeling really meant. So I’m going to share some of what happened, and why Hellenic culture has been absorbed into the idea of Western whiteness. I do this for my own sake, to channel the anger at the loss, and also to invite those who understand the harm that appropriation causes to consider how they might become more ethically engaged with a heritage that has been called part of white hegemony for far too many centuries.
When was it decided that Greek history simply belongs to the West? A (somewhat) quick and dirty summary of the last 2000 years
When the Eastern Roman (aka Byzantine) Empire fell in the 15th century, many Greek scholars fled westward, carrying manuscripts and knowledge into Renaissance courts who were hungry for them. Ancient Greece was being rediscovered and celebrated by Western elites as the cradle of civilisation, even as living Greeks fell under Ottoman occupation. As Stathis Gourgouris argues in Dream Nation, this admiration was never innocent: it was the construction of a mythologised Greece that served Enlightenment Europe’s need for an origin story. That story required ancient Greeks to be powerful, heroic, admirable. Modern Greeks, living at the end of an empire, falling to invasions from an expanding power to the East, were no heroes of myth. We were set aside, and our heritage became clay, moulded to serve someone else’s narrative.
By the 18th and 19th centuries appropriation became ideological infrastructure. The French Enlightenment drew on Greek rationalism to position European civilisation as the pinnacle of development. The British framed their empire as a continuation of Athens’ civilising mission, a framing Johanna Hanink traces in detail in The Classical Debt. The logic was circular and convenient: we (Western Europe) are the heirs of Greece, therefore our dominion represents progress, therefore our subjects should be grateful. The problem was, they weren’t the inheritors—we were. At the very moment Hellenic democratic ideals were being invoked to justify colonial rule across Asia and Africa, Greeks continued to live under Ottoman occupation, invisible to the empires invoking our ancestors’ names.
Across the Atlantic the same pattern repeated, translated into racial terms. The American founding fathers built neoclassical monuments in their capitals and invoked Athens to legitimise their republic. They raised temples to an idea of Greece while the actual Greeks, arriving as immigrants to this new democracy, were told they did not quite belong to it. As Yiorgos Anagnostou traces in Contours of White Ethnicity, Greeks in 20th century America occupied a position of conditional whiteness: Mediterranean and racially ambiguous. The monuments were modelled after our culture, but we were not accepted in their halls as equals.
After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, this sequence extended into politics and geography. Rather than determining our own governance—which might have seemed natural, given how loudly the West had been praising Greek democracy—the same countries that claimed themselves Philhellenes installed foreign monarchs to govern the new Hellenic nation-state. The consequences were not merely symbolic. Cities burned. Pogroms, population exchanges, and death marches tore apart multicultural communities who had lived alongside each other for centuries. All these actions were justified in the name of clean national borders that served foreign political interests, while simultaneously tearing apart local populations from the Eastern Mediterranean. As Artemis Leontis documents in Topographies of Hellenism, the mapping of Greece was itself an act of appropriation. The homeland was reimagined to fit a Western ideal rather than to reflect us, the people living it.
The same exclusion eventually shaped the academic institutions I studied in. As Gregory Jusdanis has argued, Modern Greek Studies face significant barriers to recognition. Greeks became marginalised within a Western academic landscape that preferred sanitised versions of Ancient Greek history over living Hellenic scholarship. The classics had been deemed shared inheritance, homogenised under the monolith of Western culture; modern Greeks were simply an inconvenience to that story.
Can you see the pattern? The heritage was welcome. The people were not.
This is the machine that makes me uncomfortable, that’s always made this adoration of Ancient Greece feel so off—it’s lopsided. Our ancient past was dressed up in a frilly dress and called Western. Meanwhile the modern Greek still stands as a background character in a holiday maker’s selfie, visible but not centred; just out of reach. Coloniality is not just about land, it is also about knowledge. This is about whose culture gets to be living and whose gets frozen into an origin myth. It is about who speaks, who is spoken for, and who is spoken about without being consulted.
So I have to ask again: am I supposed to be grateful?
The history of this land and its heritage has always lived in my body, and it hurts. I can feel the intergenerational pull of my ancestors, but I cannot access them fully. So I’m no longer grateful in the simple way I once was. The grief points me toward what was lost and what I can still reclaim. Now, gratitude and grief sit together in this liminal space within me. What does it mean to be Greek diaspora? Part of it is learning about my own culture in translation. Another part is constantly holding the tension of belonging to many places at once, yet feeling inadequate in each of them.
This brings me back to a younger me, the only Greek girl in school. We learned Ancient Greek culture and it was lauded by the teachers as the cradle of civilisation, but those same teachers and classmates didn’t see me as their equal. How could they claim my culture and reject me? Yet they did, too easily, do just that. I see it happening again; it happened in my university, and it happens daily in online spaces. This time, I’m speaking up. Appropriation of Hellenic heritage has been happening in the Western context for far too long. I do not accept the Western version of my own culture. τέλος.
I would like to leave this with an invitation of awareness: living Greeks carry the legacy. Those who engage with our culture, whether through academia, art, or spiritual practice, ought to be engaging with it as a whole, ancient and modern. Recognise that contemporary Greek voices exist. Writers and researchers, creators and artists, philosophers and ritualists engage with our legacy as a living, breathing thing.
We are here.
We are speaking.
We are that legacy.
Leave a comment below and let me know your thoughts. Were you shocked, angry, confused, or even inspired? Did you learn something new or relate to something? Let’s talk about it!
READING LIST
For those ready to engage with Hellenic heritage from a more ethical perspective:
Below are some books and pieces written primarily Greeks and Greek Diaspora writers that I encourage you to read. They are good entry points into learning more about Greek history and the modern Greek experience. This list is by no means comprehensive; they are a few publications related to this essay, and a good starting point for anyone wanting to engage ethically with Hellenic culture.
- Anagnostou, Yiorgos. Contours of White Ethnicity: Popular Ethnography and the Making of Usable Pasts in Greek America. Ohio University Press, 2009. (On conditional whiteness and the racial ambiguity of Greek diaspora identity in the United States)
- Chaitow, Sasha. “A Life Shaped by Greek Magic and its Absence, Part 1: The Lens That Blinds Us and the Price of Becoming ‘Western.’” Thyrathen: The Lost Bibliothēkē, Substack, December 29, 2025. https://thyrathen.substack.com/p/a-life-shaped-by-greek-magic-and (On how Western interpretive frames become embedded in Greek and diaspora lives, and how they distort Greek vernacular and Orthodox material)
- Cosgrove, Katerina. “Who Owns the Greek Myths?” Island Magazine (reprint), 2021. https://islandmag.com/read/who-owns-the-greek-myths-by-katerina-cosgrove (On retellings of Greek myth without modern Greek context)
- Gourgouris, Stathis. Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece. Stanford University Press, 1996. (On sanitisation of Greek heritage for Western use)
- Hanink, Johanna. The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in an Era of Austerity. Harvard University Press, 2017. (On Western debt to Greece & modern implications; Hanink isn’t Greek but is fluent in the modern and ancient language; her perspective as an expert in the study of Greek heritage and linguistics is needed and welcomed)
- Jusdanis, Gregory. “The Importance of Being Minor.” Journal of Modern Greek Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, May 1990, pp. 5-18. (On the peripheral and “minor” status of Modern Greek Studies in Western academia, and how classical Greece was celebrated while modern Greece was marginalised)
- Leontis, Artemis. Topographies of Hellenism: Mapping the Homeland. Cornell University Press, 1995. (On the transformation of Hellenism from an idea to a nation state)
- Manusos, Lyndsie. “In a Wave of Greek Mythology Retellings, Where Are the Greek Writers?” Book Riot, July 24, 2023. https://bookriot.com/greek-writers-of-greek-mythology-retellings/ (On the systematic absence of Greek writers from Greek mythology retelling spaces in contemporary publishing)
- Nasios, Angelo. “Byzantium and the Specter of Europe with Dr. Anthony Kaldellis.” Hearth of Hellenism, Substack, February 18, 2024. https://angelonasios.substack.com/p/06-byzantium-and-the-specter-of-europe (Podcast conversation unpacking the “idea of Europe” and anti-Greek sentiments in the West, tracing origins through the complex relationship between western Europe and the eastern Roman empire)
And two books on my reading list:
Kaldellis, Anthony. Phantom Byzantium: Europe, Empire, and Identity from Late Antiquity to World War II. University of Chicago Press, 2026. (On how western Europe constructed “Byzantium” as its inferior eastern doppelgänger; ideological foundations of Byzantine studies and their implications for contemporary European identity)
Mathews, Sean. The New Byzantines: The Rise of Greece and Return of the Near East. Hurst Publishers, 2025. (On Greece’s forgotten Near Eastern identity and the reforming of old cultural, political, and economic ties with the eastern Mediterranean)
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