1821 tweets. Networks and ideological discourse around the Greek revolution bicentenary
The year 2021 marked the 200th anniversary of the 1821 Revolution against the Ottomans, which eventually led to the formation of the modern Greek state. In order to celebrate the momentous occasion, a special committee called Greece 2021 was formed to organize the national festivities of the bicentenary commemoration in March 2021. Greek businesswoman Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki, best known as the president of the bidding and organizing committees for the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, served as the head of Greece 2021. Many prominent business people, mainstream academics, cultural figures, and historians participated in the committee. For the right-wing government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis that organized the celebration, as well as for the economic elite connected to it, this was a great opportunity to stage a series of events that would boost its popularity and occupy the news agenda. But things didn't go as expected because of the Covid-19 pandemic and the social, economic and political tensions that it triggered. The majority of the planned events were cancelled, leaving plenty of room for the dissemination of controversies around the 1821 bicentenary in social media that largely countered the official agenda. In this paper we propose an original method combining large scale network and lexicometric analysis in order to link identifiable communities of Twitter users with the main discursive themes they used around the 1821 revolution bicentenary. This in order to distinguish the political and cultural issues and cleavages within Greek society that were made visible on Twitter on the occasion of this event.