Delusion street: Commemoration and monumentality in post-Ottoman Iraklio, Crete

ABSTRACT

The complex memorial practices that have developed along the street named in commemoration of a massacre of the Christians of the city by Muslim irregulars in 1898 demonstrate an ambivalence towards the transition to the post-ottoman nation-state, one aspect of which is the dialectic that develops between absence and presence of material traces of the Ottoman past. A second aspect is the non-linear temporality within which historical events are remembered. Official commemoration practices have shaped plural memories and often conflicting accounts of the events into a single narrative of modernization, to justify the rebuilding of the city according to western precepts. Reactions to this process did not take the shape of political resistance, but emerged as acts of refusal that create telling absences in the archive and ironic statements that form a genealogy of the ambivalence contemporary Irakliots feel towards the official state and its account of progress to modernity.

KEYWORDS:

• Monumentalization
• commemoration
• refusal
• absence
• Ottoman
• massacres
• Crete

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Aris Anagnostopoulos http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0358-991X

Notes

1. Iraklio has been declared a ‘traditional’ space in its entirety by state law in the 1980s (FEK 58Δ/28/1/1982). The neoclassical buildings on this particular street are listed as heritage monuments and protected by strict building regulations.

2. The political reasons behind this, which had to do with the financing of a new ‘shadow’ government in favour of Christians, are presented in Holland and Markides (2006, 102).

3. For a detailed account of the events, based mainly on British diplomatic sources and newspapers, see Phillips (2001).

4. A ‘worker’ amounted roughly to the area of a vineyard that one worker could dig during a single day.

5. Eleftheria Newspaper, 2 October 1899.

6. FO 78/4935, Biliotti to Constantinople Embassy, 13 September 1898.

7. SALT archives Istanbul, ACIEVC00009, 28 March 1903.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Economic and Social Research Council [grant number PTA-030-2002- 00408].