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INVISIBLE CITIES: INDEX

Diomira
Isidora
Dorothea
Zaira
Anastasia
Tamara
Zora
Despina
Zirna
Isaura
Maurilia
Fedora
Zoe
Zenobia
Euphemia
Zobeide
Hypatia
Armilla
Cloe
Valdrada
Olivia
Sophronia
Eutropia
Zemrude
Aglaura
Octavia
Ersilia
Baucis
Leandra
Melania
Esmaralda
Phyllis
Pyrrha
Adelma
Eudoxia
Moriana
Clarice
Eusapia
Beersheba
Leonia
Irene
Argia
Thekla
Trude
Olinda
Laudomia
Perinthia
Procopia
Raissa
Andria
Cecilia
Marozia
Penthesilea
Theodora
Berenice

REMEMBERING SOME; FORGETTING OTHERS

To one side of the area of flat ground in front of the Anafi village church is a war memorial, erected by a migrant islander who became a successful businessman in Athens and President of the island’s Migrant Association. The memorial lists the names of island men who died in the Balkan and subsequent wars, and in the opposition to British rule in Cyprus (1952).

The Anafi memorial is in one sense a secular monument, as there are no religious symbols or wordings inscribed on it, only a laurel wreath heading the list of names. In another sense it is a cenotaph, a tomb containing no remains, commemorating those whose bodies are buried elsewhere.  For the families of most of these men, there were no bodies to bury or bones to exhume, but presumably memorial services were carried out. 

There is also, for those who know the twentieth century history of the island, a missing monument. If it existed, it would commemorate the political exiles on the island over a period of twenty-five years up to the end of the Greek Civil War. From the 1920s onwards the island was used as a place of exile for people deemed social undesirables. Many of these were convicted animal thieves, bandits, drug-dealers or addicts, for whom exile was in addition to a prison sentence. But there were also men, and a few women, who were in earlier years convicted in court, and in later years administratively deported (i.e. without a trial). They were considered dangerous to the public because of their left-wing views, trades-unionism, and anti-government orientation. A few of them died while on the island: one from food poisoning, and others, during the Occupation, of illnesses brought on by malnourishment and lack of food. The funerals of two of them were photographed, and although the funerals were held in the village church, it is clear from those images that their initials, but no cross, were on the coffin lid.  Photographs were also taken of the coffin about to be lowered into a grave-site in the village cemetery. An account by one of the exiles reports that after three years the bones were secretly exhumed by a sympathetic island family, whose daughter, who presumably carried this out, he described as “the Antigone of Anafi.” What happened to the bones is not known, and it may be that the island family took them to a family chapel.  These extraordinary events are forgotten to all intents and purposes on the island, because they are not relevant to any local concerns, and they do not form any part of whatever history is recounted orally, in print, or on island websites. Young women of some village families married a few of the exile men (both the “criminals” and the “politicals”), and it is among their descendants that these forgotten histories and memories are still transmitted. (Margaret E Kenna, “Rituals of Forgiveness and Structures of Remembrance: Memorial Services and Bone Depositories on the Island of Anafi, Greece.” History of Religions, Vol. 54, No. 3 (February 2015), p. 225-259.)

April 2015