Fifteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

On several occasions throughout the twentieth century, a cluster of more than thirty islands in the Aegean Archipelago served as political banishment destinations. They were flooded with male and female political exiles, sometimes exceeding the local population in number. Their presence left an imprint upon the physical as well as the social and political landscape of these islands. Consecutive governments’ efforts to silence the past of political oppression and erase its material remains, though, has led to the subsequent suppression and marginalisation of personal and collective memories of political exile, until recently. By mapping the official and unofficial processes of monumentalisation and commemoration of this contested past, this paper seeks to examine the degree to which material testimonies and memorial practices related to the political exile qualify as cultural heritage, and for whom. Moreover, the historical context within which tangible and intangible signifiers of exile were claimed as heritage will be studied, taking into consideration the politics of memory. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach using current theories and analytical tools of contemporary archaeology, history and social anthropology, this paper analyses the cases of three Aegean islands, Makronisos, Ai Stratis and Ikaria.