I begin the thesis with these two examples not because I am trying to compare the treatment of communists in the 20th century and migrants today, although there are similarities in their fates on Greek soil, including mass detention in poor conditions and the use of physical and psychological violence against them. The imprisonment of those deemed unworthy of the polis has been a longstanding strategy of successive Greek governments. Nor am I trying to enter the debate about how the antiquities have been used as symbolic and cultural capital to construct national mythologies. This has already been skillfully done by archeologists and anthropologists (see Hamilakis and Yalouri, 1996; Hamilakis, 2007). It is, however, in the context of the ‘ancient glorious past’ that this thesis traces the Greek nation’s rich reserves of racism, which have been the foundation upon which the detention system in the country has been built. Racism is historical. Drawing on Hortense Spillers (2003), Imogen Tyler (2020, p. 125) argues in her work on the stigma machine of the border, that racism “draws its ‘narrative energies’ from existing grids of associations, from ‘semantic and iconic folds’ that are deeply etched in the collective memories of people and places’’. In this case, the Acropolis, a monument 2400 years old, provides a sense of continuity, permanence, historicity, and authenticity. In Greek consciousness, the ‘ancient glorious past’ is incorporated into the conception of the nation as its genealogical and cultural cradle; with Acropolis being its sacred rock. In the same way, therefore, that building Acropolis was seen as an important symbolic resource to rehabilitate communists, the polluted Greek citizens, the provision of a shelter for immigrants with a view of the Acropolis, is considered by the authorities as a marker of a civilised state in which Greeks (us) were pitted against uncivilised masses (them) (Bosworth et al., 2018). The history of immigration detention in Greece is largely untold. The amount of national and European resources, sustained media attention and political emphasis on building border-enforcement strategies in Greece remain curiously detached from an exploration into how and why the immigration detention system in the country has ballooned and taken such a violent turn. The work of Jenna Loyd and Alison Mountz (2018) in unveiling the racialised history of migration detention in the United States is critical in understanding this sharp contrast. As they explain in their context, ‘political crises over migration and the nation-state repeatedly invoke “the border’s” porosity, absence, or lawlessness to rationalize further fortification. Thus, there exists a strategic relationship between knowing 12