scholarly journals Records and Transformations of Memories in the Cultural Landscape of Idomeni (Kilkis, Northern Greece)

Open Archaeology ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 563-585
Author(s):  
Stamatis Chatzitoulousis ◽  
Vlasis Vlasidis ◽  
Apostolos Sarris ◽  
Kalliopi Efkleidou ◽  
Eleni Kotjabopoulou ◽  
...  

AbstractFollowing recent excavations and geophysical prospection at Idomeni in the Kilkis prefecture of Northern Greece, this paper attempts to reconstruct through digital means, the tangible and intangible vestiges of historical episodes that come together to form multiple narratives of a diachronically terra incognita site, gradually unlocking its hidden secrets. The digital documentation and processing, with the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS), of the spatial remains associated with historical episodes demonstrate the ways in which space at Idomeni was used within a multifaceted, diachronic framework. It is a place that is constantly being transformed over the past 7000 years from a seemingly “peaceful” agricultural community during the Neolithic period to a burial ground for a still invisible Middle Byzantine settlement, and finally, as a place of violence having been one of the battlefields of the First World War. The story of Idomeni has only recently been concluded as the theatre of a dramatic influx of modern refugees. Thus, the “multilayered” identity of a mnemonic place with various representations of the past unfolds: on one hand the distant eras, such as the still unknown Neolithic and Middle Byzantine period, and on the other, the relatively recent “traumatic” (war-related) past. Within the specific historical context of the First World War, this paper discusses the management of memories of locals and non-locals, e.g. the disappearance of entire settlements, or the emergence of new toponyms related to the protagonists and their actions during the war in the area of Idomeni remaining in the memory of locals today.

2020 ◽  
pp. 65-80
Author(s):  
Magdalena Strąk

The work aims to show a peculiar perspective of looking at photographs taken on the eve of the broadly understood disaster, which is specified in a slightly different way in each of the literary texts (Stefan Chwin’s autobiographical novel Krótka historia pewnego żartu [The brief history of a certain joke], a poem by Ryszard Kapuściński Na wystawie „Fotografia chłopów polskich do 1944 r.” [At an exhibition “The Polish peasants in photographs to 1944”] and Wisława Szymborska’s Fotografia z 11 września [Photograph from September 11]) – as death in a concentration camp, a general concept of the First World War or a terrorist attack. Upcoming tragic events – of which the photographed people are not yet aware – become for the subsequent recipient an inseparable element of reality contained in the frame. For the later observers, privileged with time perspective, the characters captured in the photograph are already victims of the catastrophe, which in reality was not yet recorded by the camera. It is a work about coexistence of the past and future in the field of photography.


Modernist Cultures ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-194
Author(s):  
Marjorie Perloff

This essay offers a critical re-assessment of Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era. It argues that Kenner's magisterial survey remains important to our understanding of Modernism, despite its frankly partisan viewpoint. Kenner's is an insider's account of the Anglo-American Modernist writing that he takes to have been significant because it sought to invent a new language consonant with the ethos of the twentieth century. The essay suggests that Kenner's impeccable attention to the Modernist renovation of language goes beyond formalism, since, for him, its ‘patterned energies’ (a term derived from Buckminster Fuller's theory of knots) relate Modernism to the larger complex of artefacts within which it functions and, beyond these, to what he takes to be the great works of the past and to the scientific-technological inventions of the present. But the essay also points out that Kenner's is an eccentric canon, which makes no room for Forster, Frost, Lawrence, or Stevens. Furthermore, Kenner's emphasis on the First World War as a great cultural rupture, while plausible, works less well for Joyce and Williams than it does for Pound and Eliot.


10.7202/1015794ar ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 212-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Fantauzzo
Keyword(s):  
Home Front ◽  
World War ◽  
The Road ◽  
The Past ◽  
War Narrative ◽  
War Machine ◽  

Over 450,000 British soldiers fought as part of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force during the First World War. Between 1915-1918, they fought their way across the Sinai Peninsula, into southern Palestine, captured Jerusalem, and overran the Turkish Army, leading to the surrender of the Ottoman Empire in October 1918. Despite being the war’s most successful sideshow, the Egypt and Palestine campaign struggled to gain popular attention and has largely been excluded from First World War scholarship. This article argues that returning soldiers used war books to rehabilitate the campaign’s public profile and to renegotiate the meaning of wartime service in interwar Britain. The result of sporadic press attention and censorship during the war, the British public’s understanding of the campaign was poor. Periodic access to home front news meant that most soldiers likely learnt of their absence from Britain’s war narrative during the war years. Confronting the belief that the campaign, prior to the capture of Jerusalem, was an inactive theatre of war, British soldiers refashioned themselves as military labourers, paving the road to Jerusalem and building the British war machine. As offensive action intensified, soldiers could look to the past to provide meaning to the present. Allusions to the campaign as a crusade were frequently made and used to compete with the moral righteousness of the liberation of Belgium.


Memory Studies ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerie Rosoux ◽  
Laurence van Ypersele
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
The One ◽  
Second World ◽  

This article examines the gradual deconstruction of the Belgian national identity. Is it possible to speak of a de facto differentiation or even ‘federalization’ of the so-called ‘national past’ in Belgium? How do Belgians choose to remember and forget this past? To contribute to an understanding of these issues, the article considers two very different episodes of Belgian history, namely the First World War and the colonization of the Congo. On the one hand, the memory of the First World War appears to provide the template for memory conflicts in Belgium, and thus informs the memories of other tragedies such as the Second World War. On the other hand, the memory of the colonial past remains much more consensual – providing a more nuanced picture of competing views on the past. Beyond the differences between the ways in which these episodes are officially portrayed, the same fundamental trend may be observed: the gradual fragmentation of a supposedly smooth and reliable national version of history.


Author(s):  
George (Gedaliah) Silverstone

This chapter studies an early example of a sermon which focuses more on the toll taken by the First World War on the masses of Jewish civilians living on the contested territories of the Eastern Front rather than on the implications of the war for the general values of culture and civilization. Here the sermon of George (Gedaliah) Silverstone does not underline the patriotism of Jews towards all the countries where they lived, but rather emphasizes the underlying unity of the Jewish people, and the sometimes painful tension between that unity and such patriotism. The preacher introduces it by speaking of the reaction of his listeners to the story they have read ‘in the newspapers’, apparently within the past few days. In addition to narratives drawn from the contemporary newspapers, there are two other major components of the sermon's message, drawn from traditional Jewish literature. The source provides hope for a providential, redemptive dénouement to the bloodshed, in the traditional homiletical style.


Author(s):  
David Fisher

Churchill’s expression was glorious Rodomontade, but in the end it is still nothing but rodomontade. Understanding the causes of the First World War did not help us to understand the different factors that were operating in 1939, and understanding the results of our isolationism when Hitler began strutting around did not help us avoid the opposite mistakes we made by waging “preventive” war in Vietnam and Iraq. “The past is a different country; they do things differently there,” and we learn nothing from them except that we cannot predict the future. This is true even more with science than with politics. At the end of every century, there is a spate of experts predicting what the new century will bring. But in 1900 no one predicted radio, much less television, or antibiotics or computers or MRI or CAT scans, or cyclotrons or trips to the moon, or even that man might fly. So I cannot pretend that the history written here will tell us what breakthroughs are in store for those working with the noble gases. That’s why they call it research; if you knew what the result of your experiment was going to be, there’d be no point in doing it. I thought I knew what the result of Ray Davis’s neutrino experiment was going to be, and so I thought there was no point in doing it. I was wrong, and glad to be, for it’s the surprises that drive us forward: Rutherford’s helium particles bouncing backwards, the xenon-129 peak poking up beyond where it ought to be, the argon-39 peak appearing where it oughtn’t to be at all, the electrical currents suddenly running wild through the heliumcooled mercury, et cetera and so forth and so on. What’s coming next? I have no idea and, no matter what they tell you, neither does anyone else. Which is what makes it all so exciting. Exactly fifty years after I first met the noble gases at Brookhaven in the summer of 1958, I turned off the mass spectrometer and retired.


Tempo ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 71 (282) ◽  
pp. 80-81
Author(s):  
Stephanie Jones

In response to Paul Valéry's words after the First World War in La Crise de l'esprit – ‘We later civilisations … we too now know that we are mortal’ – the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler remarks, in his own chapter entitled ‘Apocalypse Without God’ in his What Makes Life Worth Living, We too, earthlings of the twenty-first century know that we are capable of self-destruction. And if in the past the possibility of such an extinction of our kind was inconceivable other than as the consequence of God's anger – of original sin – today there is no longer any religious reference at the origin of this extreme global pessimism’ (p. 9).


Maska ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (200) ◽  
pp. 146-155
Author(s):  
Miha Turk

With an influx of refugees from the Middle East and Syria in particular it is important to understand their recent history so as to familiarize our audience with historical context that helped shape the contemporary conflict. The article is composed of an accessible and non-formalized narrative of the so called ‘Arab revolt’ where Arab rebels sided with the Entente forces in a bid to gain independence from the Ottomans on the side of the Central powers. Their bid was ultimately betrayed as the war ended with colonization from the their former allies - the French and the British. This betrayal is still very much alive and fueling the modern conflict and general distrust of the West. The Great War fundamentally changed the Middle East much more than the second war though its effect and aftermath are for the greater part unfamiliar to the general public. The article aims at adding the ‘Middle East’ piece to the general imaginarium pertaining the First World War.


2009 ◽  
Vol 3 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 143-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Gregory ◽  
Robert M. Schwartz

One of the early drivers of historical GIS was the development of national historical GISs. These systems usually hold all of a country's census and related statistics from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As such they have represent an extremely valuable resource, but at the same time they were and remain extremely expensive and time consuming to build. Was the investment worthwhile? This paper takes one of these systems, the Great Britain Historical GIS, and explores how it was built, what methodologies were developed to exploit the data that it contains, and provides an example to demonstrate how it made possible a unique analysis of railroads in Wales before the First World War.


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