Page 10 - Studia Universitatis Hereditati, vol 11(2) (2023)

The project included the organisation of and heritageisation of the temporary presence
several symposia (Prague, June 2021; Paris, (or passage, or crossing) of Greek refugees in
March 2022; Koper/Capodistria, October 2022, Czechoslovakia in the 1950s and 1960s. After the
etc.) and two webinars. One webinar was ded- Greek Civil War, alliances within the commu-
icated to memory, heritage and the built envi- nist parties enabled the refugees from Greece to
ronment, entitled “Walking through spaces/ find refuge in different countries of the Eastern
traces of the past(s)” (guests included the sociol- Bloc and other Soviet-influenced countries. In
ogist Olga Sezneva and the architect Gruia Ba- some countries, this temporary presence is now
descu), and the other was dedicated to the issue acknowledged and heritageised, while in others
of the Roma holocaust in the Czech republic, it is not. This is the case of the present-day Czech
entitled “Space(s) and politics of memory: the Republic and the town of Těchonín, a site of for-
Roma holocaust in the Czech Republic” (with mer barracks transformed into a temporary con-
guests Yasar Abu Ghosh, Alenka Janko Spreiz- valescent home for 600 Greek refugees. A par-
10 er and Nina Ludlová). The webinars were organ- ticularity of this research lies in the fact that it
ised by the junior researchers in the project team. was conducted in 2021, during the COVID pan-
studia universitatis hereditati, letnik 11 (2023), številka 2 / volume 11 (2023), number 2
It was the work of this group of emerging profes- demic. The fact that only one interlocutor was ti
sionals that led to this thematic issue being pro- found indicates that memorial discourse about
posed. There was the wish to record some of the this historical phenomenon is absent. As a result,
research that had been carried out related to the the interlocutor’s personal photographs turn out
project and that had not yet been published, as to be the only monuments that serve as a re- ta
well as to promote established research beyond minder of this past presence.
solely national frameworks. Greece, its contested northern border with
The first article, by the anthropologist Albania and the related memorialisation and
Michèle Baussant, is the result of an autoethno- heritageisation processes, are the focus of the pa- di
graphic reflection of several years of research on per by the geographer Pierre Sintès. The paper
the absent and/or silenced memory of displaced presents the region called Thesprotia in Greece
people, namely the French-speaking inhabitants and Chameria in Albania, marked by histori-
expelled from Algeria after the independence cal turmoil, population change, and the con-
war in 1959, and especially of their descendants. sequent polarisation of national discourses.
The article unveils personal and family attach- Particular attention is paid to the different tra-
ments to lost places in the “hometown” of Al- jectories of these discourses within the border here
giers in Algeria, through the use of “broken lan- society and its many groups, namely that of the
guage” and inherited attachment and perception Chams, the large Albanian-speaking communi-
of toponymy and sense of place. The imaginary ty, which disappeared from the western section
presences, as felt by the second generation, are of the Greek-Albanian border after WWII, but
investigated mainly through the combination has been reactivated as a central memory poli-
of French and Arabic, as well as through the use tics topic since the fall of the communist regime
of local denominations of places from Algeria, in Albania and the daily migration of Albani-
transposed to France. By revisiting the linguis- an workers to Greece. A particular theme that
tic, spatial and temporal cartography of attach- emerges from the analysis is the role of past vio-
ments and detachments among displaced peo- lence and its impact on the structuring of mem-
ple, the article illustrates the role of rupture and ory narratives. The paper derives from years-long
reinvented continuity. research and fieldwork since the early 2010s, pre-
The anthropologist Maria Kokkinou pre- sented here in an ex-post outlook. studiauniversitatis
sents a forgotten chapter from Europe’s history, Catherine Perron, an expert in political
as she deals with the memory, memorialisation sciences, presents a complex reflection on the