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Lawrence Osborne's Beautiful Animals (2017) thematizes the arrival of refugees on Europe's shores and the division of Europe into core and peripheral regions. The psychological thriller tells the story of two young wealthy white women whose daily routines of swimming and sunbathing are interrupted when they meet a Syrian refugee on a secluded beach. In this article, I argue that the novel overlays geographies of forced migration with those of Greek national history, myth, travel, crime, and violence. The murder committed on a Greek island compels readers to examine what might be considered the larger 'crimes' of Europe – exclusionary refugee policies, the meddling in Greek affairs, and the legacies of colonialism and imperialism. In doing so, the novel asks us to rethink the multiple meanings of the Mediterranean as holiday destination, deadly outer border, and Southern Other, both intra- and extra-European at the same time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a well-established literature on monuments as sites of memory (lieux de mémoire), their ability to strengthen national ideology, to shape collective memory as well as to mobilize conflicting memories; and although it seems contradictory, their potential to get consigned to oblivion through their multiple and pliable meanings. In this study, via the narrative of a monument erected in the interwar era, particularly turbulent years in modern Greek history, the memory regimes and the role of the "Asia Minor Catastrophe" and the "refugee issue" in those regimes are investigated. For this purpose, this article focuses on the multifaceted memory of Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Smyrna, who unifies the purportedly incompatible religious and secular strands of Greek nationalism through his "martyrdom" in 1922, his monument in Athens as the embodiment of this memory and its "adventures" from the 1920s to contemporary times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of Hellenism featured extensively in modern Greek political and cultural life in the period from the turn of the twentieth century to the early 1930s. These four decades mark the transition from the national-imperial expansion of the modern Greek state to the management of the failure of the Greater Greece project. A systematic analysis of the writings of influential public intellectuals reconstructs the overlapping and contested political, cultural, and aesthetic languages of Hellenism that were mobilized to imagine Greece's place in Europe and the world. The study of the permutations of Hellenism reveals the complexity of its meanings and highlights its multiple legacies throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]