Europe	Greece: The echoes here are even more complex and further off.  [Some of it (the Byzantine) because it is "off the beaten track" of European cultural development and therefore very foreign; in part also because its center (Constantinople) no longer exists at all; some of it (ancient Greek) because it's just plain very far back and has been layered over with so many strata of foreign domination etc.]  The echoes here are like a shadow, intangible.  Very brittle and easily hurt by modernization or tourism.
	"Echo" of "High Culture"	Norway: Echo of heathen beliefs [which were strong in the countryside very long].  Echo of the Vikings.
France: High culture is close in time - a present, living memory - receding, but not fast or far as yet.		India: Vast continuity... (but something (in form) very like Italy..)
Italy: High culture is distant (Renaissance).  It is present, but fallen off.  It "echoes" but in modern national culture it is less explicit; a kind of revitalization takes place, but a lot of this is on the basis of more modern, peasant [variants of the old] culture.  This results in a strange mix of "high" and "peasant" components in present-day consciousness.  Leonardo echoes in the plastic madonnas.  [Italians are "freed" from their culture when they come to America.]  Venice is a city, but in a sense more like a fraflytningsområde(*) [note that a specific kind of urban area here has that quality - where else today does one find this?] (Venice is not a museum, but a shrine.)  Further behind, and more complex and far more indirect and inscrutable, is the echo of Rome: The villages are like cities.  Even the most peasant-like culture is somehow sophisticated.
(*) Pardon my Norwegian: The word means an area (in Norway), from which people have moved away to larger centers, leaving their old farms to decay.