Having carried out doctoral research in the kingdom of Oku in Cameroon in the early 1990s, initially on the relationship between material culture and political systems, Nicolas Argenti later realized that it had shown him ‘an embodied past in the absence of discursive history’ (7). As a result, he decided to visit the Aegean island of Chios, his father's family's place of origin. Local people used the word ‘return’ for his visits – on a number of occasions between 2010 and 2015 – although he had never previously been there. Nicolas had grown up as a member of the Chiot diaspora with a jigsaw-like knowledge of the family's past. During his visits, he found the family surname everywhere he went on the island on plaques and monuments (his great-uncle, Philip Argenti, is well-known for writing about the history and folklore of the island). Indeed, Nicolas had the experience of seeing his very own name (because of Greek traditions of naming after relatives), and those of other living family members, represented in inscriptions recording the five-generations-earlier execution of these men following the events he had come to investigate – the ‘massacres’ of 1822.
These had occurred at the time of the Greek war of Independence, when Chios was reluctant to rise up against the island's Ottoman authorities. The Chiots thought of themselves not as ‘Greek’ but as ‘Romioi’ (citizens of the Eastern Roman Empire, Byzantines) and had established close ties with the Sublime Porte. Indeed, the mastic groves on the island (one of the sources of its great wealth) were a holding of the Sultan's mother. However, a flotilla from the island of Samos encouraged a rebellion. As a result, an Ottoman fleet engaged in a punitive expedition and 68 (some sources say more) heads of families, who had been imprisoned as hostages for the islanders’ good behaviour, were hanged. These included the author's four-times great-grandfather and other relatives. In the six months that followed, nine-tenths of the island's population of 120,000 were killed or sold into slavery, and many other Chiots left. Over the next one hundred and fifty years or so, the island experienced other forced departures resulting from natural disasters and from political events, and also forced arrivals (the Asia Minor refugees of 1922/23), the Occupation, and the consequent famine during the Second World War, when many of the 1922 refugees went by boat back to Turkey. The events of the Civil War, and the Colonels’ Junta, also impacted on islanders’ lives.
However, the initial research topic, focussing on memory, was overtaken by events, particularly the Greek sovereign debt crisis (although the research was over by the time of the refugee crossings into the Aegean), and Argenti soon became involved with theorizing the interconnections between memory, history, time and contemporary events deeply intermingled with a co-present past. The present, the sense of life on the island, began to be understood as an experience of the co-presence, the simultaneity, of all these instances of loss, change, deprivation, oppression, heroism and antagonism. The parallels here are not only with the Christian Orthodox doctrine that each occasion of the Liturgy is the same (not simply a re-enactment) as the original Last Supper which Jesus shared with his disciples, and as a reconstitution of the life of Christ, culminating in the Resurrection, existing together with all the other occasions on which the Liturgy has been performed. These parallels are also with, for example, Indigenous Australian views of the rituals of the Dreamtime as simultaneous with the original event which created features of the landscape. So, although Argenti uses the term ‘Aegean temporality’ for these ideas of events in so-called linear, historical, time, as pressing on, or rather fused with, contemporary life, as if on a folded piece of cloth (an image also used by Daniel Knight, History, Time, and Economic Crisis in Central Greece, Palgrave Macmillan: New York/ Basingstoke 2015), such experiences of the past blended and co-existing with the present have a ‘family resemblance’ (271) with those in other cultures. Earlier (page 35) he uses the term ‘post-Ottoman topology’ for ‘this destruction and reconstruction of chronological time itself – a form of historical simultaneity’.
The experience of the research on Chios has obviously had a profound impact on Argenti, particularly evidenced by the poetic language of some his descriptions and of his theorizing on multiple and non-linear chronologies. On the occasion of the enthronement of a Chios-born bishop, the official investiture was slightly delayed by an event that Argenti and his research assistant (Catherine Paidoussi) were lucky enough to witness. The bishop went to the dungeon where the heads of the leading families had been imprisoned, and were hanged after the 1822 rebellion. After a short ceremony in the cell, the bishop waited to have a moment by himself, walked over and kissed the wall and crossed himself. As Argenti says, with that kiss, he felt as if a part of himself that had been missing ‘had suddenly been returned’ (10). ‘Returned’ is crucially significant to the argument of the book, the very final section of which has the sub-heading ‘The Eternal Return’ (269), calling to mind Eliade's pronouncements on the fusing of the present with ‘mythical time’.
Argenti's argument is developed in a series of chapters (3–8) which give accounts of interviews and conversations with local people.
Eleftheria (Chapter 3) was interviewed twice, focussing on her personal memories of the Occupation and famine on Chios and on her current experiences. In both interviews, her narratives on these particular topics were woven together with references to the 1822 massacres, the plight of the refugees from Smyrna in 1922, and the current sovereign debt crisis. She also recounted her female relatives’ prophetic dreams (of family deaths) which lead Argenti to speculate about dreams, song, symbolism, and the role of trauma, long-term collective memories of violence, as ‘active forms of social and political engagement in contemporary society’ (88).
Fotis (spelt ‘Photis’ on page 270), the builder – and now destroyer (because of EU directives against over-fishing) – of wooden boats (Chapter 4), talked of the living conditions in the old fortress, the Kastro (where Argenti had seen the bishop kiss the cell wall) where he had grown up, the child of Asia Minor refugees of 1922. Empty paraffin tins and pots of marigolds reminded them of their ‘homeland’ (Asia Minor). Talking with Fotis about his training as a boat-builder, Argenti then recounts Fotis's experience of ‘slaughtering’ the wooden fishing boats and hearing them cry out and groan as he sawed through them. Fotis described the EU's directive as ‘a crime against memory’, the memory of the communal life and the collective memory of the Asia Minor community. The two then went on to talk to an official in the fisheries department about the rationale for destroying the boats. As it turned out, the official talked at them, prevented any conversation or discussion, and provided a classic example of ‘the social production of indifference’ (114).
In Chapter 5, the focus is on the ruined village of Anavatos, a medieval fortress on a five-hundred metre cliff. Aristea is the sole inhabitant of the ‘new’ village, built when the old village was declared a national monument, and ‘the archaeologists’ turned ‘a living village’ into a ‘dead monument’ (142). In this place, one of the last pupils of the Orthodox seminary at Halki (closed in 1971), Andreas Axiotakis, founder of ‘Pharos’ (‘Lighthouse’) the society of Asia Minor refugees in Chios, had instituted a commemorative occasion. This centred on an event which may or may not have actually taken place in 1822. Aristea had never heard her parents, grandparents or any of the villagers mention it, and Axiotakis did not talk to residents but only to the village priest in researching his book about Anavatos (published in 1976). Rather than submit to the Ottoman forces laying siege to the village, the story goes that women and children jumped off the cliff in a collective suicide, and are regarded as martyrs. But what the commemoration centres on is not this, argues Argenti, but the loss of the places in Asia Minor that the refugees and their descendants mourn and which the ruins embody. Young women in the traditional dress of those villages of origin walk around the ruins of Anavatos, scattering flower petals in memory of the martyrs, and both religious and political ceremonials take place. Axiotakis was pressuring for the event to become a national political ceremony but died before this aim could be achieved. However, Aristea's memory is not of Asia Minor, but of this village itself, when it was full of life (until a Junta decree closing schools with fewer than fifty pupils brought about its abandonment). She is pleased that Axiotakis has brought the commemoration, and so many people, to the village; her antagonism is with the archaeologists who want to turn the village into a monument. Her presence there (‘an embodied testament’) ensures that the village cannot be seen as an abandoned ruin, a monument, but as still a living village.
Paired with the previous chapter is Chapter 6, about celebrations in the ruins of Kidianta, a shepherds’ hillside hamlet. Here, in February every year, the left-wing resistance fighters of the island are commemorated. Because of the left-right conflict following WWII, which would have created enormous problems in celebrating the end of a war which then turned into a Civil War, Greece commemorates the outbreak of the war – 28 October, 1941, Okhi (‘No’) Day – when German and Italian troops were denied free entry to Greece, and then invaded. So, on Chios, in an almost deserted village, the island's left-wing organizations commemorate those who were killed on the island during the Civil War. Police came to the village in January 1948, on the day of a wedding, to arrest three brothers known to be in the resistance; a policeman was shot, one of the brothers was killed, the other two were captured, and after a trial, allowed to choose which of them would be punished for the policeman's death. The elder, unmarried, brother was executed, the other was exiled to the prison island of Makronisos. The schoolmaster left soon after and was not replaced, and gradually the village depopulated.
Argenti's informants in this chapter are Nikos (spelt ‘Nicos’ on page 159), who came with his parents to Chios in 1922 when two months old, and Giorgos, who grew up in the hamlet. Nikos's story is of escaping to the Turkish coast from Chios when the Germans occupied the island, and of eventually serving with the Allied forces, and then being interned, eventually returning to Chios after five years. Because of his association with left-wing resistance fighters, Nikos was blacklisted and suffered discrimination for the next three decades. For him, current conditions replicate those prior to the Civil War. Giorgos, who had lived in the village as a boy, and witnessed the events of the shootings, walks there every day, and without a priest willing to conduct services, has instituted the custom whereby the former villagers decorate the epitafios (the bier of Christ) with flowers, as is customary, and process around the church, holding the Good Friday service without a priest. Tending to their olive trees in this area, and thus keeping it ‘alive’, they also process around the church on the saint's day of the church. Here, popular and informal collective memory, ‘atemporal recursions of lived remembrance’ (176), survive and are reinforced, uninvolved in official state history and commemoration.
Chapter 7 gives a more-or-less verbatim transcript of an interview with Mariam, the 91 year old Abbess of Nea Moni, an ‘exemplar…of Aegean temporality’, which Argenti defines as a ‘collective sense emergent across time and space’… an ‘achronological, extratemporal time’…‘outside the dominant discourse of linear historical progression’ (179). In elucidating this phrase (‘Aegean temporality’), Argenti provides an insight for the reader, whom he directly addresses, into the wording of the book's subtitle: ‘the sense of life…’. To summarise: Aegean temporality is a collective sense, the sense of time, and time, as Paul Claudel stated, is the sense of life: sense denoting meaning, direction, sensation and all the bodily senses (179).
To return to Abbess Mariam; the monastery, now a convent, has precious icons and beautiful mosaics and is said to have been ‘second only to the Aghia Sophia’ in this respect. Abbess Mariam, originally from Lesvos, joined the convent at Nea Moni in 1959, aged 37. At the age of 80 she began to experience and to interpret divine visions, with saints and angels appearing to her, and people started coming to see her for healing or divine intervention. She also saw visions of the victims of the massacres of 1822. Argenti discusses what might be termed a ‘rationalist’ explanation for these visions, or visual hallucinations, of figures in baroque and oriental clothes seen to be glowing and brilliant. This ‘medical’ explanation, which reduces the visions of hermits and anchorites and those subject to sensory deprivation to ‘mere hallucinations’ (201), is now known as Charles Bonnet Syndrome, usually affecting elderly people suffering from macular degeneration. The Abbess connects her visions to the life of Christ, to events on Chios, and to events in Greece and questions why these visions came to her in these particular circumstances, especially the sovereign debt crisis. Her answer appears to be that her visions provide a critique of the crisis from the perspective of ecstatic religious experience (191).
In Chapter 8, Argenti's informants are a number of men involved in the ‘rocket wars’ of Vrontados. In this place, groups of men and boys attached respectively to churches on the northern and southern sides of the town, separated by a ravine, bombard the ‘opposing’ church with a continuous hail of rockets on the evening of Easter (Holy Saturday). Teams of close friends and their sons spend months making hundreds, if not thousands, of rockets. An estimate of the number used one Easter is 170,000 (218). Both the making of the rockets, using gunpowder, and their launching, is fraught with danger and there have been severe injuries and deaths. Although the event is officially illegal, the local police ‘co-operate’ by closing roads to traffic, and firemen stand ready because of the danger of brush fires. This chapter has many resonances with, and refers to, Sutton's work on the dynamite throwing at Easter on the island of Kalymnos. The parallels between the Chiots’ rocket wars and the Kalymnians’ dynamiting refer to the feelings of intense and passionate involvement (kapsoura) in the event, and the close association between Resurrection (Anastasi) and the Greek Revolution (Epanastasi) are very striking. Argenti's argument is that the two sides are not ‘warring’ against each other, but that both are united in opposing the former Ottoman overlords (and also the current Greek state), in a profoundly Christian Orthodox celebration. The chapter contains not only Argenti's account of the occasions on which he witnessed the ‘rocket war’ but also passages from his fieldnotes of the event in 2012 and 2014. His descriptions are vivid (there are also photographs) and many of the threads and themes of previous chapters begin to reinforce each other.
It is not until the final chapter (Chapter 9) of the book that the source of its main title is revealed (the sub-title was elucidated in Chapter 7) and the argument brought to a conclusion. However, in the first part, Argenti describes a blind fisherman (whose name is not given) who continues to sail his small boat from one of the little harbour villages on the eastern coast of Chios so as to fish near the western tip of the Anatolian coast, repeating each day the trips of his boyhood before the occasion when a mine, left by the retreating Germans, took his sight. For him on these fishing trips there was no light, no time, and he found his way back to harbour by recognising smells and sounds and the feel of the waves and the current – remembered from his boyhood. For him there is ‘remembrance within and aging without’ (Benjamin writing about Proust, quoted 252), that is, for the blind fisherman there are different times. The final section of the chapter continues the discussion of the combining of objectivist models of chronological time and non-linear, subjective formulations, of ‘multitemporality’, lived experience which highlights ‘the transformations and juxtapositions that collective memory fashions out of chronologically different periods’ (259).
In his 1899 poem ‘Candles’, Cavafy describes days which have passed and those still to come, as a line of candles, some already burnt out, some still lit. These are days in chronological time, and yet the poem can be read in another way: Argenti, drawing on Mackridge, and other Cavafy poems, aligns it with his discussion of ‘Aegean temporality’. The lost past, and memories of those we have loved, link us to them, they are not ‘absent’ but have a ‘ghostly presence’. All of the candles, extinguished and still shining, are there together: ‘all of the narrator's days, and ultimately all of time’ is brought ‘into co-presence’ (261). Thus, ‘remembered absence may not be absence after all, but a kind of presence’ (260). The poem contains different times: chronological time and non-chronological time, the multi-temporality with which the whole book has been dealing, and which its main title encapsulates.
I have learned a great deal from this book, not least about the history of Chios. I particularly enjoyed the accounts of interviews and conversations with informants and others, and the vivid passages from fieldnotes and diary entries. Argenti seems to be writing in some places for a reader, and in others is working out his own thoughts for himself in his own highly allusive language, on the issues of types of time, drawing on the work of other researchers (particularly Knight), and on the insights of philosophers and theoreticians. He has not been well served by proof-readers and copy-editors, who have failed to notice a number of ‘typos’ (for example ‘canon’ for ‘cannon’, page 215) and of very obscure wordings (‘Macondo’ ‘Trapalanda’, ‘aporetic silence’, ‘veridical hallucinations’, ‘a succedaneum of the preceding period’, ‘the aorism of the poem’) and passages which may distract a reader. One example, early on, compares his relatives of the Chiot diaspora, baffled by the passage of time since their leaving the island, with ‘a moribund cetacean, having reached the nadir of its doomed antediluvian lineage ….. [dimly perceiving] the passing sheets of rain on the noisy surface of the tenebrous Cimmerian void’ (6). Such stylistic features should not be allowed to detract from the contribution of this book.
