Antiquities, Diplomacy, and the Construction of Soft Power in Greek–US Political Relationships at the Beginning of the Cold War Era. A Perspective from Archival Research in Greece and the USA

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Already before World War II, the Greek government or its delegates presented antiquities as diplomatic gifts encoding explicit or implicit messages from givers to receivers and vice versa. This practice witnessed a new impetus after World War II. This essay focuses on the inaugural presentation of a set of symbolically charged antiquities presented to President Truman by a formal delegation from Greece on 28 March 1949. The analysis comments on the nature of archival resources in Greece and the United States while problematizing the qualitative and quantitative nature of the existing archival records of Greece and the United States. The comparison between these records illuminates an interesting phenomenon that has largely to do with the power differential between the global superpower of the USA and the ‘crypto-colonial’ state of Greece in a liminal geostrategic location of Europe. One could expect that, as a source country, Greece would have a firmly simple but clear archival record of this formal exportation of antiquities. This record, however, is very scarce, and this has to do, at least in part, with the intentional elimination of the archival habit in the troubled political life of Greece after World War II. On the other hand, archives in the US are rich in information, mainly because the archival habit has to do with construction, maintenance, and imposition of power, both internally and externally.