Paper short abstract:

The paper deals with the uncertain memories provoked through the construction of a memorial in Messogia region in Attica; memories of the civil war during the 1940s, which produce disquieting politics at the present time and lead to the construction of unstable identities.

Paper long abstract:

The recent construction of a memorial commemorating the community's 'Resistance' against Nazi occupation during the Second World War and the ensuing Greek Civil War, as well as the burning-down of the village, has brought to the surface enduring political conflicts and tensions within the community. In a period of apparently conciliatory politics and a flourishing civic ethos, the memorial has provoked contradictory memories and discourses about the events which took place during that period, offering voice to conflicting versions of 'history' that surround different orders of political power at different levels of abstraction.

Drawing on a number of life histories of informants, both right- and left-wing (survivors of exile), whose lives have been affected by the events of that time, the paper attempts to discuss the ways in which an inability to deal with traumatic events of the past at the level of consciousness leads to novel conceptualisations of evil at a symbolic/imaginary level, which themselves belong to individual, family as well as collective institutional mythologies. Furthermore, the paper inquires into the manners in which retrospective construction of mnemonic loci, narratives, texts, representations or even 'practices of remembering' and disquieting politics ethnographically transform such conceptualisations of evil in idiomatic languages. It also attempts to uncover muted, inchoate, or latent and painful memories, which challenge the national hegemonic discourse, and the politics of institutionally-organised forms of forgetting.