Archives end up on the street as the State reneges on obligations
The archives of historical and intellectual associations stored for years in the Culture Ministry’s House of Arts and Letters on Mitropoleos Street were literally being thrown out onto the street when Christina Dounia happened to pass by. A lecturer at the University of Crete, Dounia managed to save some of them and made the issue public. This is by no means an isolated incident. Here the question is one of responsibility – whether the State or the associations concerned should have been looking after the files. «The State has an obligation to supervise state and private archives according to law 1946/91,» Professor Nikos Karapidakis told Kathimerini. A professor of Medieval History at the Ionian University and former director of the State General Archives (GAK), Karapidakis explained that «supervision» means announcing when buildings are sold and informing the National Archive Directory, while GAK should be in continuous contact with all services that maintain archives. «Either GAK should send people to the ministries to monitor archives or else each ministry should appoint people to be in charge of the archives and to inform GAK of the administrative usefulness of their particular files,» he said. Arrangements such as these began to be introduced in 1991 but were discontinued after 1994. Karapidakis referred to what he described as a «non-existent memory in the civil services.» «When a service is abolished, so is its history,» he said. «The archives of defunct state or private organisations should be moved to GAK, which falls under the jurisdiction of the Education Ministry.» Karapidakis headed GAK between 1989-1994 and during that time gained a distinct impression of how civil services treated their archives. «The Culture Ministry never cooperated with GAK; it never appointed staff to liaise with us and never returned our questionnaires. It was the most indifferent of all ministries,» he said. GAK’s problems go back a long way, to the years soon after 1914, when Yiannis Vlachoyiannis set it up. It never had its own buildings, for example, and depended on the good will of the private sector that did the most to help. «That was both a good and a bad thing, given the limited interests of the private sector, even though in Greece we have very good archives, both private and state,» he said. Karapidakis believes the only way to solve the problem is to formulate a clear policy, a White Paper on archives. Decisions have to be made, such as which state archives are of permanent historic value, which should be destroyed and how private archives are to be dealt with. Another problem is that of access. In Greece, the law provides for access to all archives after 30 years (some are immediately available) and is actually quite progressive. However, it is not implemented, since archives are never available to researchers when they need them. Premises are also a problem. GAK is currently housed in Theatrou Street, cheek-by-jowl with the immigration bureau. The president of the Greek Archive Association, Amalia Pappa, says that the problem is to make the State more aware and to make GAK’s role more widely known. «GAK’s role has to be upgraded and its reputation and credibility has to be restored,» she said.
