Page 57 - Studia Universitatis Hereditati, vol 11(2) (2023)

those commemorating the victims of violence I told them “You’re wrong, it’s been in my
perpetrated by Chams are much more recent. family for several generations, my father’s
Some even bear dates of construction in the and my grandfathers before him. The village
1990s or 2000s. This characteristic raises fur- above is yours, but not this field.”
ther questions about the function of such mon- He continued:
uments, since the period in which they were
built is marked by the strength of the migrato- It all points to a certain state of mind ... they
ry flow described above. Alongside the Albani- think everything here is theirs! Is that a big
an workers crossing the border in Thesprotia, problem or a small one? I don’t know ... I
there are also reports of the arrival of descend- think it’s a big problem. And it’s true that
ants of the Chams who were curious to find they had a lot more property here than we
out about their family’s places of origin. Vis- did. But why did they have them? How did
its to ghost villages even seem to have become they get it? It wasn’t the result of their work. 57
They didn’t have them because they had
a recurring motif for the inhabitants of this re-
ti gion over the last few decades. They have no dif- worked hard like us. We’ve been here for so
many years, what are we going to say to them?
ficulty in recounting the visits of Albanians in
search of their ancestors’ homes, and even the Come and take everything! Take the fields!
Even though they were a minority here, they
ta new inhabitants of the border village of Kot- had the best fields. It’s not right. They say we
exchanges they have had with them. One of the
chased them away, but it’s also because they
sikas explains, “In the village, some old Albani-
were afraid of what they’d done to us. It’s cer-
ans came and cried when they saw their house. I
di took them in and they stayed for 10 days. It was tain that they couldn’t have stayed because tales from the greek-albanian borderland ...
our relations had seriously deteriorated dur-
easy to talk to them because they knew Greek.
ing the war.
They had come from Fier in central Albania to
see their old homes!” He also met an Albanian
What better way to affirm the Hellenic
from Kotsikas who lives in Italy and comes to character of the grounds to visitors from Alba-
here turns go so smoothly. An Albanian from Kon- pictured above is right on the border, between
Greece for all his vacations “because he feels at
nia than to remind them of the antagonism be-
home here” (interview 13). But not all these re-
tween Greeks and Albanians? One of the steles
ispol recounts how one day, while visiting the
the two customs posts (figure 4). It welcomes
village where his father was born in Greece, he
migrants as they enter Greece, reminding them
was told: “This is your home, but we’re going to
of the sacrifices made by the Greeks to protect
get you out of here.” (interview 14)
It is true that sometimes these visitors can
the other steles in Thesprotia, they all point to-
studiauniversitatis
cause the Greek inhabitants a deep anxiety, as themselves from Albanian irredentism. As for
wards Albania, where the alleged murderers
Christos, an inhabitant of Sagiada, expressed fled ... but where the migrants now come from,
to me (interview 5). His parents and grandpar- too.
ents were born there, as were previous gener- But there is another hypothesis to consider,
ations. They even owned fields there, whereas one that can be constructed in the light of the
people like him (Orthodox) often worked for social and identity dynamics of the 2000s: that
Muslim landowners until the region was an- such monuments are also addressed to the local
nexed to Greece in 1913 and, more importantly, inhabitants themselves, to remind them of the
the Second World War and the eviction of the contours of their common belonging. It is true
latter. However, in the early 1990s, two “Turko- that the history of these regions is at the root
Chams” from Albania came across him in his of the very heterogeneous nature of the popu-
field and told him: “this field is ours.” lations that have settled there since the Second