Paper short abstract:

This paper examines practices of commemoration in ruined settlements, focusing on one case from the Greek island of Chios, where a group of refugees commemorate a 19th century massacre that took place before their arrival on the island.

Paper long abstract:

In the landscape of war and forced displacement, ruins are the most eloquent testament to the effects of political violence on the social body: the desiccated and crumbling remains of human settlement bear testimony to the evident suffering of the dispersed and persecuted communities they once sheltered. The apparent self-evidence of ruins as testimony to violence is nonetheless necessarily an act of interpretation, and ruined settlements must first be constructed through social practices of commemoration. This paper examines the appropriation of the ruins of an abandoned village in the eastern Aegean island of Chios by an organisation of descendants of Asia Minor refugees who regularly commemorate a massacre that is said to have taken place there during the Greek war of independence - paradoxically before the refugees' arrival in the island. As the village still hosts a single surviving resident, the paper compares the memorial processes instituted by the group staging the commemorations with the memories of the last resident still living among its ruins.