Abstract
While travelling in Greece in 1892, a British tourist wryly commented on a group of tourists arriving in Athens who were travelling with nothing but a Baedeker guidebook and a pair of opera glasses (Armstrong, 1892). By 1892 tourist images were beginning to determine the benchmark for authentic vistas of Greece. This argument analyses an early technology for generating three dimensional images of Greece and the technological, ideological and discursive features that distinguish a particular iteration of the early tourist gaze. The study seeks to bring research from the humanities on tourism in Greece to a broader audience as a means of investigating the potential for more productive cross-flows in research covering tourism and the arts and humanities. HIGHLIGHTS: • Research in tourism to Greece in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is predominantly conducted in the arts and humanities. • Tourist guidebooks to Greece in the nineteenth century shift from a focus on oriental to classical stereotypes. • Stereoscopic guides through Greece in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reproduced, and contradicted, guidebook stereotypes. KEYWORDS: Greece, interdisciplinary, stereoscope, visual, guidebook