A (Hi) story of Illyria Jennifer Wallace

1. A (Hi) story of Illyria
   Jennifer Wallace
   
   Greece & Rome, Second Series, Vol. 45, No. 2 (Oct., 1998), pp. 213-225
   
   By Jennifer Wallace - Oxford University
   
   In his recent book The Illyrians, John Wilkes attempts to reverse this ignorance by stripping away the accumulated legends, or `illusion', about the Illyrian people and unearthing, in their stead, painstaking detail about the reality of their civilization. But this strategy seems to reduce the overall picture of the identity of Illyria.
   
   For Illyria has always been a place where fact and fiction meet, where myth is substituted in the absence of knowledge and later becomes a geographical or historical reality, mapped onto the physical landscape or the territory's political borders.
   
   Illyria has also always been a threshold between the known and the unknown world, a threshold internalized by the Illyrian peoples themselves, sometimes considered `Western' -- and even Greek -- but at other times thought to be barbarian and different. It is a liminal space which dramatizes the problems of our conventional polarizations of ethnic identity.
   
   In many ways, the study of Illyria, its myth and history, serves as an analogy for the study of Greece. Greece, too, comes with almost as much mythical baggage as historical facts. In the lesser known, and lesser loved, example of Illyria, we have a parallel land combining a powerful mixture of ancient stories and dimly remembered historical details to forge its independence in the nineteenth century.
   
   But Illyria is interesting because throughout history it has served, not: only as a parallel for Greece, but also as a counterpoint to it. From Herodotus to Byron, Illyria has been cited as the opposite of Greece, used to illuminate, by contrast, the particular qualities of Greece.
   
   This contrast: has by no means been straightforward, since it has not always been obvious where Greece stops and Illyria begins. Indeed Illyria serves to highlight the fact that the conventional polarization between Greek and barbarian/other, which persisted through ancient Greek history and has been revived since independence in 1830, created as much anxiety and lack of distinction as it did clarity. Thus the history of Illyria and its literary appropriation raises the issue of Greek ethnicity -- both ancient and modern -- and sheds light upon the uneasy relationship between national myth, politics, and geography which still troubles the Balkan area today.

 

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