From this perspective, this postcard captures some of the discursive processes implicated in any attempt to convey, interpret, and naturalize the otherness of foreign, past or present, cultures. This rendering entails a discursive transference of the multilayered-but here inevitably fragmented-local culture into a hegemonizing artistic crystallization intended for consumption by European admirers of (ancient, medieval, and contemporary) Greece’s perplexing, albeit often idealized, alterity. Characteristically, the French caption at the bottom of the picture ( Une rue de Mételin) undertakes to rewrite the snapshot of the photographed indigenous life in the lingua franca of European cultural colonialism at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Rather than a historical “document” of the life and sociocultural economies of Mytilene at a specific historical period, this image may be viewed as an aestheticized “monument”-a metonymic, anthropologically intriguing illustration of the discursive mechanisms involved in the rewriting and circulation of foreign societies among privileged consumers of cultural capitals. Therapon, most prominent in Mytilene until today, dominates the left background of the picture, the right front of which is occupied by an eclectic mixture of random local passersby. One of the major Greek Orthodox monuments of the city, the elaborate church of St. The postcard on the cover of the book depicts a privileged view of a central street of Mytilene at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Searching for sappho