Straddling the National Divide: Appropriated Pasts, Inverted Archaeologies, and Byzantine Architecture in Europe, 1878-1939

Abstract

Although the “French Byzantine architecture” was methodically invented by nineteenth century historians, and revived by architects to distinguish the French from other European nations, it was the same nexus between the appropriation of the Byzantine Style and national exceptionalism that marked many other nations’ architectural representation of identity between late-nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century.The outrageous insularity of these Neo-Byzantine edifices, which were constructed as islands of apparent architectural archaism in their increasingly modernizing urban settings across Europe, testifies to the duality of national identity that Homi Bhabha has called the tension between the “pedagogical” and “performative”. It is this duality of nation as a historical object and subject of representation that can be traced in various architectural medievalisms—both built and written—across Europe in the critical moment of nation building between the Congress of Berlin and