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Paper Trails: A Transimperial Legal Quest for the Franco Family’s Citizenship in the 19th Century

Antonis Nasis

The long-standing provincial dragoman dynasty of the Francos has served at the French consulate in Chania, the capital of the Ottoman vilayet (province) of Crete, since the mid-18th century. Their legacy seemed to be in jeopardy when Monsieur Latten emerged as a contender for the dragoman position at the consulate. In response to the French ministry’s intention to appoint Mr. Latten, the French consul, Bertrand, argued that the candidate’s “mediocre curriculum vitae” suggested he was considered primarily due to strong connections. This situation also had significant implications for the Franco family. On 15 July 1861, the French consulate in Chania initiated a procedure to register the family as French nationals. Despite any omissions regarding “certain formalities and bureaucratic acts”, as the consul himself acknowledged, the French authorities would ardently advocate for the Franco file, ensuring they could continue to maintain their centuries-old privileges under a specific legal framework. This framework was based on the Capitulations (῾ahdname), which conferred upon non-Ottoman subjects a set of privileges and obligations (Van den Boogert 2005).

Beyond Ottoman jurisprudence, the Franco family was required to consider amendments to the French Civil Code (1804, 1849) for individuals who were “not French nationals and who have made a substantial contribution to the French economy through the provision of services”. This entailed collating a substantial corpus of documentation attesting to their French origin. The collected documents were travelled in an envelope along the following routes: Chania, Bayonne (southwestern France), Paris, the port city of Smyrna (Ottoman Empire), and back to Chania. The collection of these documents, initially intended for individual use, will ultimately be used by the family as a set of seventeen pieces from various state and non-state entities, spanning over a century (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1 (left). List of the seventeen records in the Francos’ envelope (AMAE, Personnel, Moïse Franco, 23 August 1861); Fig. 2 (right). Copy of the birth certificate of Moïse Franco’s ancestor, Abraham Dacosta Franco, from Bayonne Municipality (AMAE, Personnel, Moïse Franco, 23 August 1861).

The Franco family, originally from the Iberian Peninsula, most likely Portugal, was compelled to follow migratory flows due to mass persecutions of Iberian Jews and eventually settled in the Jewish quarter of Saint-Esprit in Bayonne, a town in southwestern France. For this reason, in April 1861, Moïse Franco travelled to Bayonne to obtain a copy of his ancestors’ birth certificate to establish his lineage (Fig. 2).

Subsequently, additional documents were presented by the French consul in Chania, certifying the long-standing services of the Francos as dragomans and merchants who had served France’s interests across various periods (1823, 1837, 1843, 1848, 1853, 1858, and 1860). The Francos’ activities extended beyond the island of Crete and maintained a presence in the central Mediterranean port of Smyrna, as evidenced by archival records in the Ottoman archives. They acted as brokers (ṣarrāf), a function equivalent to that of moneylenders in the absence of bankers. They constituted a significant source of profit for the Ottoman state in the context of the capitulations (Fig. 3).

The document describes the appreciation and the long-standing contribution of the Franco family to Ottoman interests as brokers (BOA, İ.HR.239/14162)

Fig. 3. The document describes the appreciation and the long-standing contribution of the Franco family to Ottoman interests as brokers (BOA, İ.HR.239/14162).

However, the complex legal status of the Franco family required supplementary documentation. Consequently, the Francos requested the local Jewish millet (community) of Chania declare their religious affiliation. They declared that they had never “never renounced their French citizenship, nor their ancestry” (Fig. 4). Ultimately, the unique legal framework of the Capitulations allowed individuals from outside the Ottoman Empire to engage in commercial enterprises within its territory. However, this entailed formal ratification from the relevant Ottoman authorities. In this case, the vali (general governor) of Crete Muşir İsmail Paşa corroborated that Francos had always been part of the French delegation (Fig. 5).

Fig. 4 (left). Certificate of the Jewish community of Crete with signatures (Source: AMAE, Personnel, Moïse Franco, 23 August 1861); Fig. 5 (right). French translation of the Certificate issued from the Ottoman authority of Crete by the vali Muşir İsmail Paşa (AMAE, Personnel, Moïse Franco, 10-12 June 1861).

The case of the Franco family of Chania illustrates the legal pluralism that characterised the Ottoman Empire at the time, particularly for individuals under the protection of the French state who were not formal subjects of that state. The Francos served the French “colony” for a century without being subjects of the French state. Their case offers valuable insights into the evolving legal concept of citizenship in the Mediterranean and inter-imperial contexts, as exemplified by Crete. This aligns with Jessica Marglin’s concept of “legal belonging” in her microhistorical research, which examines the complexities of nationality and citizenship between imperial contexts and the personal positioning of actors (Marglin, 2022). The documents collected in the Franco case, while naming specific family members, would ultimately have a profound influence on all of the Francos’ professional and economic activities. Over time these records played a decisive role in their fate, leading to the loss of French citizenship and the subsequent extermination at the hands of the Germans in June 1944 – at least for the majority of them. The Franco family’s case demonstrates how legal and administrative documents, at different times and in various locations, were accorded disparate statuses and functions. However, these documents eventually constituted a unified cohesive whole an envelope – of legal and historical significance. This collection of records reflects the broader transformations occurring in the Eastern Mediterranean, where individuals and families sought to protect their interests and maintain continuity through inherited legal and economic strategies.

 

Sources

Archives du ministère des Affaires Étrangères [French Foreign Ministry Archives]

            Personnel, Moise Franco

Devlet Arşivleri Başkanlığı, Osmanlı Arşivi [Ottoman State Archives]

            BOA, İ.HR.239/14162

 

Bibliography

Julia Phillips Cohen, Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era, New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Jessica Marglin, The Shamama Case. Contesting Citizenship across the Modern Mediterranean, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022.

M’hamed Oualdi, “Une succession d’empires. Les historicités d’une société maghrébine (1860-1930)”, Annales HSS 72, no. 4, 2017, p. 1055-1083.

Marie-Carmen Smyrnelis, Traversées méditerranéennes. Jeux d’espace et mobilités au XIXe siècle, Paris : Classiques Garnier, 2023.

Maurits H. Van den Boogert, The Capitulations and the Ottoman Legal System: Qadis, Consuls and Beratlıs in the 18th Century, Leiden: Brill, 2005.

 

The Journey of a Hanukkah Lamp

Odette Varon-Vassard

The research on this Hanukkah Lamp began in 2024 for a presentation at a commemorative day at the Musée d’art et d’histoire du judaïsme in Paris, dedicated to “Shmonzes: Objects of Memory”. It was part of an effort to reconstruct family history during the dark years of the Shoah. Initially, no recollection existed that an object in the Rousso family had truly played the role of shmonzes, a yiddish word for an often trivial but memory-laden object. However, a silver Hanukkah lamp (a menorah with eight branches) unexpectantly came to light (Fig. 1). It had long held a place on the top shelf of the living room cabinet in the family house where the author of this note grew up in Athens, and it kept that same place when the piece of furniture was passed down to the next generation.

A Hanukkah lamp on top of a cabinet in a family house in Athens.

Fig. 1. A Hannukah lamp on top of a cabinet in a family house in Athens (author’s photograph).

At first glance, this Hanukkah lamp may not qualify as a shmonzes. It didn’t play a role in the transmission of memory; nothing was ever shared about it with its inheritors. Moreover, it was far from “a trivial object”; rather it was a precious item. To light the Hanukkah candles, one had to use another lamp, simple, modern, metal one, brought from Israel in the 1960s. This lamp was practical and easy to clean after the candles had melted – since tradition requires the candles to burn completely.

But another reason prevented its use. Upon close inspection, it becomes clear that the lamp is severely damaged on the left side, with the shamash (the servant lamp) detached from the main body. As a result, it had to be hung to the side. During the eight nights of Hanukkah, an additional candle is lit each night –always beginning with the shamash, without which the ritual would be incomplete. No longer functional, the lamp became a decorative object. But unlike the rest of the silverware, it stood as the only visible sign of the family’s Jewish origins. It was a bearer of identity and memory at the same time, an object from another place and time that had shared the family’s history inscribed in its body.

One might wonder if it is becoming a shmonzes simply through the act of research and writing on it. For the first time, it is being reflected upon and connected to a deeper layer of another part of the family’s pre-war history, to old Salonika. It may have been originated from Spain, given the Sephardic origins of the Rousso family which possessed it. The elder generation of the Roussos spoke Judeo-Spanish, but did not have the legendary iron key to a house in Spain, an emblem many families carried with them on the road to exile. The large key was the quintessential shmonzes of Sephardic memory, to which Jorge Luis Borges dedicated a beautiful poem (Una llave en Salónica).

By chance, in a showcase at the Jewish Museum of Greece (Εβραϊκό Μουσείο της Ελλάδος, thereafter JMG), there is a very similar Hanukkah. It was a surprise to learn from curator Anastassia Loudarou that this lamp originates from Vienna, a type very common in Mitteleuropa! The description of the lamp at the JMG (Battinou, 2013, p. 88-89), reads :

Silver repoussé lamp, common Austro-Hungarian type in a Rococo revival style, characteristically decorated with motif of two rampant lions and the crowned Tablets of the Covenant, edged by rocaille pattern, provided with jug-form oil containers, probably from Vienna, late 19th – early 20th century. Used by a Corfiote family in Corfu, 1930s.

The lamp’s refillable reservoirs are shaped like oil containers, echoing the legend of the Maccabees. According to tradition, when searching through the ruins of the Old Temple, they found only one container of oil, barely enough to light the wick for one night. Yet a miracle occurred: the oil lasted for eight nights. This miracle is celebrated during Hanukkah by lighting one more wick each night for eight nights, or a candle in modern Hanukkah lamps.

It thus turned out that the Hanukkah lamp did not connect the Rousso family to its Spanish roots but to the Ashkenazim world, an unknown world for such a family. In a long interview with an elder member of the family, Louisa Rousso, frequent trips to Vienna were often recalled and everything became clearer.

Isac and Louisa Rousso, both natives of Bitola (Monastiri in Greek), a city in Serbia at the time and now in North Macedonia, married in 1925 and settled in Salonika, where they lived until 1940 (there was a wave of emigration of Jews from Monastir – the Monastirlis – to Salonika at that time). The railway connecting Salonika to Vienna since the late 19th century played a crucial role in opening the city to Central Europe. In the 1930s, Isac Rousso frequently traveled to import fabrics from Central Europe while his mother (or mother in law?) systematically went to Vienna for medical treatments, often accompanied by her children. It was likely during one of these trips that the Hanukkah lamp was brought back to Salonika. An identical model, originating from Berlin, and dated around 1890, can be found online (Fig. 2). This is what the lamp must have looked like when it proudly stood, unbroken, in the Rousso family’s salon in Salonika, an elegant marker of both cultural connection and personal history.

A German WMF silver plated Hanukkah Lamp Menorah circa 1890 the backplate embossed with two lions

Fig. 2. A German silver plated Hanukkah Lamp Menorah circa 1890, the backplate embossed with two lions (Dawsons Auctioneers).

When Italy declared war on Greece on October 28, 1940, the Rousso family fled in haste to Athens taking the first available train. They settled there with their two children, and after the occupation, they lived in Athens with false papers until Italy’s capitulation on September 8, 1943. It is supposedly during one of his later trips, that Isac must have brought more items. Perhaps in December 1940, as Hanukkah approached, he brought the Hanukkah lamp. Isac’s decision to leave Salonika was the reason for the family’s survival, as they avoided the deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau that 96% of Salonika’s Jews (47,000 people) suffered. However, when the Germans became the sole occupying forces in Athens after Italy’s surrender, they decided to leave again. From September 1943 to October 1944, the Rousso family survived an incredible odyssey across the Peloponnese, thanks to the solidarity of many. It is unlikely they took the Hanukkah lamp with them on this perilous journey. More plausibly, they entrusted it, along with other valuables, to neighbors for safekeeping. In 1945, after the war’s end, the family settled permanently in Athens and recovered the items entrusted to these honest neighbors, as recounted by Louisa Rousso in her oral testimony. Another era, another life began in Athens—the city that had saved them—leaving behind what historian Mark Mazower has called “the city of ghosts.” The Hanukkah lamp, therefore, bears the scars of the traumatic period, a time when it had to be hidden, like the family itself, packed away among other items, in neighbors’ storage (Fig. 3).

The surviving Hanukkah lamp in a lving room in Athens.

Fig. 3.  A closer look at the surviving Hanukkah lamp in an Athens’ living room (author’s photo).

Mutilated, it is not just a damaged object but a relic of an era from which neither people nor possessions emerged unscathed. It testifies to an entire past, being in a way a survivor of the Holocaust.

Bibliography

Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts. Christians, Muslims and Jews 1439-1950, London, New York, Toronto, and Sydney: Harper Perennial, 2005.

Catherine Pinguet, Salonique 1870-1920, Photographies de la Collection Pierre de Gigord, préface by Paul Salmona, Paris : CNRS Éditions, 2023.

Odette Varon-Vassard, Des Sépharades aux Juifs grecs. Histoire, mémoire et identité, new augmented edition, Paris : éditions Le Manuscrit, 2021.

Zanet Battinou et al., Guide book of the Jewish Museum of Greece, Athens: The Jewish Museum of Greece, 2013.

The Circulation of Pasta Machines Across the Early 20th Century Mediterranean

Abel Solans

On November 18, 1911, the Italian embassy in Cairo informed the Ministry of Interior that Giuseppe Serracchioli had arrived in Alexandria from Marseille with a machine for making pasta. Serracchioli, a sailor born near Bologna in 1872, had settled in Egypt in 1902. He was known and monitored for his anarchist and revolutionary ideas. The Egyptian police were interested in this pasta machine and alerted the Italian consulate because, according to their information, it concealed a machine gun. Serracchioli was likely aware that transporting such a machine would not arouse suspicion. Indeed, there was a significant Italian community in Egypt, which as evidenced by numerous advertisements in Italian-language newspapers (Fig. 1), consumed both imported from Italy and locally produced pasta.

Nachson Pasta in Cairo

Capecchi. pasta

 

 

 

 

Fig. 1 Advertisements for imported and local pasta in Egypt, L’Imparziale, July 18th 1892.

The circulation of pasta machines to the southern Mediterranean did not only concern Egypt; it was probably even more significant in Tunisia, where, at the beginning of the 20th century, more than 80,000 Italian nationals resided (Finzi 2003). In Tunis, pasta was among the most consumed products by the Italian community. In 1908, an average of 15,000 kilograms was produced daily. That same year, there were 44 pasta manufacturers in Tunis employing more than 80 workers. These establishments were equipped with various machines necessary for production, including kneaders, and, especially, presses that shaped spaghetti, macaroni, and other forms. In Tunisia, all the owners of these establishments, as well as the workers, were Italian men. These businesses operated as small, family-owned workshops, each employing only a few workers (Fig. 2). The lower-paid workers, earning 2.75 francs in 1908, carried out the most physically demanding tasks. They started work at 5pm and for 15 hours prepared and kneaded dough made from durum wheat semolina and water. More skilled workers then pressed the dough into various shapes, after which it was cut and dried.

Fig. 2 Usine de pâtes alimentaires, Tunis (Camera di Commercio italiana di Tunisi, Gli Italiani nella Tunisia, Tunis, 1906, p. 36).

Fig. 2. Usine de pâtes alimentaires, Tunis  (Camera di Commercio italiana di Tunisi, Gli Italiani nella Tunisia, Tunis, 1906, p. 36).

Pasta quickly became a symbol of Italian identity. As in most Italian migration centers, its production and consumption were closely associated with members of the Italian community, regardless of their regional and social origins. While in Italy, pasta consumption was mostly limited to urban populations, particularly in the South, in Tunisia, it became the staple food of the Italian working class. For some Italians, pasta consumption only became a habit after settling in Tunisia, where they also developed a stronger sense of national identity. The presence of pasta machines in the southern Mediterranean helped make this food a marker of national identity, thus fostering a form of “everyday nationhood” (Fox & Miller-Idriss 2008).

Unlike in the United States, where pasta imports were more significant than local production until the end of World War I, this was not the case in the southern Mediterranean. The presence of workshops equipped with pasta-making machines and the volume of production in Tunisia suggest that imported pasta constituted only a minor portion of local consumption. While Italy exported food products to migrant communities as a source of foreign currency, this was probably not the case for pasta in Tunisia. Indeed, the trade in Italian-made food products played a key role in maintaining ties between migrants and their homeland, while reinforcing the Italian government’s influence over its emigrants. The significant Italian emigration and the expectation that migrants would defend Italian interests abroad formed the foundation of Italian particular colonialism in Tunisia and Egypt (Viscomi 2024). In Tunisia, the proximity and supervision of the Italian community likely reduced the need for commercial ties to sustain migrants’ attachment to their homeland (Montalbano 2023). Another reason pasta was not only imported from Italy is that, unlike the United States and France, which grew soft wheat for flour production, Tunisia had the necessary raw material for making dry pasta: durum wheat semolina, the same used for couscous.

The link between pasta production and Italian identity became clear in 1911 during the Italian invasion of Tripolitania. A campaign to boycott Italian products led to a 30% drop in pasta sales highlighting the extent to which Arabic-speaking populations regularly consumed this food. Indeed, newspapers like Al-Mouchīr expressed concern over the fact that pasta was the only sector in which native Tunisians could not replace Italian labor.

Pasta machines also played a role in the early struggles of the trade union movement in Tunisia. In 1908, pasta workers in Tunis went on strike, demanding either a wage increase or a reduction in the price of a kilogram of pasta, which had risen from 0.45 to 0.50 francs. Machines, likely presses such as the one shown in the photo (Fig. 2), proved to be an important element in negotiations between workers and employers. The cost of rental of these machines was one of the main arguments put forward by employers to justify the price increase. Giuseppe Natoli, an anarchist leader of the Italian labor movement in Tunisia, encouraged workers to form a cooperative that would allow them to resume work and sell pasta at 0.45 francs per kilogram. This cooperative was created a few days later as soon as workers managed to rent the necessary equipment.

Pasta machines most likely originated from Italy, though the example of Serracchioli shows that they could also be bought in France (Fig. 3). As in the United States, pasta producers in France sought to expand their market beyond the Italian community. To do so, they emphasized more mechanized and hygienic production, distancing themselves from the image of Italian producers who dried their pasta outdoors, with little regard for sanitary concerns (Cinotto 2013). It is unclear whether this trend extended to the southern Mediterranean. However, if it did, the fact that the machine Serracchioli brought came from France may have served as a selling point.

Advertisement for the pasta manufacturer Scapini, 1900.

Fig. 3. Advertisement for the pasta manufacturer Scapini, 1900. (Musée national de l’histoire et des cultures de l’immigration).

However, did Giuseppe Serracchioli really intend to produce pasta? Probably not. Despite carrying a weapon, he was not arrested in Egypt, as he immediately left for Muhammarah, an emirate at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates. According to informants from the Italian consulate, Sheikh Khaz’al, the Emir of Muhammarah, had tasked Serracchioli with bringing machines from Europe for making explosives and bombs. Yet, no mention of such machines is made in the surveillance reports. Could the pasta machine have been repurposed for producing explosives?

One could speculate that a kneader might have been used to mix explosive dough or that a press could have shaped them into cartridges. But it is also possible that the device was not a pasta machine at all, and the Egyptian surveillance authorities inferred its function from the nationality of the person transporting it. In any case, the arms smuggling was successful. By 1915, French intelligence reported that, Serracchioli continued trafficking arms in the Bassora region and the Persian Gulf. His connection to typically Italian machinery did not end there: in the 1920s, he was in Paris and became the general representative of the “Percolateur Express” coffee machine brand. Through this business and his employees, he gathered information on the anti-fascist movement, which he passed on to the Italian authorities.

Following Tunisia’s independence, many Italians emigrated, leading to the disappearance of several pasta workshops. Those that remained became associated, in the memory of Tunisians, with artisanal pasta production (Fig. 4).

Gandolfo pasta in Tunisia

Fig. 4. Poster from the 1960s. Gandolfo pasta was produced in Tunisia until the late 1990s. There have been two Italian pasta manufacturers named Gandolfo since 1886.

Industrial production, meanwhile, was carried out by Tunisian companies. To our knowledge, the first workshop founded by a Tunisian, Habib Mellouli, in partnership with an Italian, was in 1943 in Sousse. The Mellouli Pasta Company, which later became Épi d’Or, mechanized its operations and, by 1990, produced 100 tons of pasta per day. Traditional machines, therefore, remain strongly linked in the collective imagination to Italian craftsmanship, symbolizing both Italian colonization and a broader cultural exchange.

References

Simone Cinotto, The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City. Champaign, United States : University of Illinois Press. 2013.

Silvia Finzi, Mestieri e professioni degli Italiani di Tunisia. Tunis : Ambasciata Italiana di Tunisi. 2003.

J. E. Fox & C. Miller-Idriss, “Everyday nationhood,” Ethnicities 8, no. 4, 2008, p. 536–563.

Gabriele Montalbano, Les Italiens de Tunisie : La construction d’une communauté entre migrations, colonisations et colonialismes (1896-1918). Rome : Publications de l’École française de Rome. 2023.

Joseph John Viscomi, Migration at the End of Empire: Time and the Politics of Departure between Italy and Egypt. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press. 2024.

 

 

 

Of Cycladic Figurines and the Landscape: Tales from the Aegean Sea

Stelios Lekakis

The bibliography on looting in Greece has grown significantly over the last two decades (Chippindale and Gill 2000; Brodie 2014). The exposure of the international criminal network trading in looted antiquities, following the accidental death of Christos Michailidis in 1999 and the prosecution of his partner, Robin Symes, led to a more systematic understanding of this complex phenomenon. This has shed light on the convoluted processes of illicit smuggling, storing, selling, buying, and collecting ancient materials (Apostolides 2006; Watson and Todeschini 2007).

Despite these developments offering insights into international trafficking and the role of auction houses and museums, they have done little to uncover the local dynamics of looting or its impact on communities in the Aegean. Even the term “looting” (αρχαιοκαπηλία in Greek) frames the issue from a legal perspective, overlooking the rich cultural values tied to the discovery, excavation, sale, mediation, or even forgery of antiquities (Lekakis 2006; Antoniadou 2014; Tsirogiannis 2022).

Postcard sent by Foteini Zapheiropoulou, while excavating in Naxos in the 1960s.

Fig. 1. Postcard sent by Foteini Zapheiropoulou, while excavating in Naxos in the 1960s. In a remarkable shift in meaning, she notes how locals referred to “archaeologists” as “looters,” while calling actual looters the “state archaeologists” (Lekakis 2013, p. 267–69).

This post focuses on these often overlooked aspects of the looting phenomenon, particularly the role of finders and local mediators of Cycladic figurines. These prehistoric curiosities feature since long in a number of European museums, but were initially excluded from the canon of Western Hellenicity, because they were seen as ‘ugly’ and ‘barbaric,’ until primitivism elevated them to the status of masterpieces after WWII. The newfound appreciation fueled a collecting boom and created a substantial commercial market in the 1960s, leading to the looting of an estimated 12,000 Early Cycladic graves. Significant loss of data ensued, making it challenging to understand the figurines’ chronology, significance, or use, as well as the sites from which they originated. (Gill & Chippindale 1993, p. 602).

Cycladic figurines on a Greek passport

Fig. 2. Cycladic figurines on a Greek passport—an ironic symbol for one of the most ‘well-traveled’ antiquities from Greece.

On the Cycladic islands, the discovery of marble figurines, known locally as koukloi (κούκλοι) or kouklakia (κουκλάκια)(dolls), has been documented since at least the 18th century (Lekakis 2013, p. 267). Initially, finders, unaware of their economic value, gave the figurines to children as toys or sold them to interested travelers. By the 1960s, however, this casual exchange gave way to more systematic looting, particularly on Naxos and other Cycladic islands, driven by their newfound appeal to modern art. The figurines were hailed for their minimalistic lines and clear forms – especially since artists could only distinguish the elegance of form and not the exuberant painted details commonly washed off after been buried for centuries (Doumas 2002).

Christos Doumas, then the deputy Ephor for Naxos, recounted the sophisticated looting practices centered around Early Cycladic antiquities (Doumas 2013). The village of Apeiranthos, in particular, became notorious for organized looting and trading of Protocycladic marble artifacts, from Naxos and the surrounding islands, especially Paros, Keros, Koufonissia, Amorgos, Schoinoussa, Irakleia, Ios, Sikinos and Folegandros. The –at least two– gangs of looters operated in full moon, conducting illicit excavations primarily after autumn rains, when the soil was easier to dig. Sometimes the dig would reach the depth of one meter, making the field appear well tended and ready to be planted. For that reason, Doumas mentions that such illicit excavations were funded by agricultural loans, provided to favourites by officials. The only proof would be the broken cover of the Early Cycladic graves that were afterwards build on the drystone walls of the fields. If caught, looters would turn to their governmental affiliations for pardon.

However, apart from the organised gangs, other locals occasionally recovered antiquities and Cycladic figurines during agricultural work. In such cases, ‘findings’ qualified as ‘vresimata’ (βρεσιμάτα), a word equivalent to treasure – without always the monetary aspects of it. Findings are commonly understood as the product of one’s interaction with the natural landscape, a comparable but more valuable fruit of labour to a sack of potatoes. They can be randomly encountered or even emerge from the landscape on their own volition. In all cases, the landscape is animated, enchanted and has a potent agency (Stewart 2001). It reveals and it conceals, and it can also be evoked through intricate processes of what can be described as ‘occult archaeology’ –involving dreaming, story-telling and rituals– an uncanny, pre-modern archaeology that can grant access to the resources. These processes feature heavily in oral history and folk tales in the Aegean, involving multiple ways of dealing with landscape creatures associated with ‘vresimata’ to tame, trick or give back to and finally manage to keep the ‘vresimo’ for oneself.

Once the antiquity would have been secured, i.e. retrieved from the landscape domain, by an individual or sometimes the contribution of various people or the whole of the village, the ‘crop’ notion settled. The antiquity was owned, as a crop would be, and could be used. In some cases, figurines retained their magic force, as elements from another time and space and had otherworldly or more than human power to protect against things that could not be rationalised. They would be placed above the house entrance, as apotropaic symbols, to avert the evil eye, as in a case from the settlement of Grotta, Naxos (Gill & Chippindale 1993, p. 647).

In other more practical cases, they would be used to complement the house income by selling it to a gang associate or to a local mediator. In a case near Agiassos Bay, this was the local baker known to collect, transport inside loafs of bread, and then distribute profits ‘by the centimetre’ of the find (‘με τον πόντο’).

Display of Cycladic objects at Badisches Landesmuseum, Karlsruhe (2007)

Fig. 3. Display of Cycladic objects at Badisches Landesmuseum, Karlsruhe (2007) (author’s photograph).

As mentioned, crop mentality was prevalent in Cyclades, so material found their ways to various museums of Europe. Instead of hiring more archaeologists or embark on a public awareness campaign for the material and intellectual consequences of illicit digging, the Greek state urged affluent shipowners to buy so to prevent antiquities bleeding abroad. People of Naxos still remember the yacht of Goulandris to Spedos Bay buying looted figurines from the locals, ‘by the centimetre’.

Display of cycladic objects at Altes Museum, Berlin (2007)

Fig. 4. Display of Cycladic objects at Altes Museum, Berlin (2007) (author’s photograph)

Even though, ineffective state policies for culture and the public could be the theme for another (rather long) piece, one cannot fail to mention the recent, contested legitimisation of the Stern collection by the Greek Ministry of Culture. In an act considered as a policy backslide in the expressed target to fight the illicit trade, the ministry accepted the return of 161 Cycladic antiquities from the American collector Leonard Stern (Homecoming was the name of the related exhibition organised in 2023 by the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens), comprised of numerous figurines of unregistered origin but also numerous fakes, tacitly legitimizing their illicit provenance. By recognizing Stern as a ‘donor’ rather than reclaiming the artifacts as looted heritage, the Ministry weakened Greece’s stance against antiquities trafficking, setting a problematic precedent for future restitutions (YPPO 2024).

Funerary items, fertility goddesses, symbols of modernity but also crops and apotropaic symbols to avert otherworldly forces, Early Cycladic figurines still enchant and remind us how meaning can be lost if communities are not involved in its production.

 

References

Ioanna Antoniadou, “Looting deconstructed: a study of non-professional engagements with the material past in Kozani, Greece.” PhD diss., University of Southampton, 2014.

Andreas Apostolides, Αρχαιοκαπηλία και εμπόριο αρχαιοτήτων: μουσεία, έμποροι τέχνης, οίκοι δημοπρασιών, ιδιωτικές συλλογές [Looting and the antiquities market: museums, art dealers, auction houses, private collections]. Εκδόσεις Άγρα, 2006.

Neil Brodie, “The antiquities market: It’s all in a price.” Heritage & Society 7, no. 1, 2014, p. 32-46.

Christopher Chippindale and David W J Gill. “Material consequences of contemporary classical collecting.” American journal of archaeology 104, no. 3, 2000, p. 463-511.

Christos Doumas,  Joan R. Mertens, and S. Alexander. Silent witnesses: early Cycladic art of the third millennium BC, New York : Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation, 2002.

Christos Doumas, “Πρόσωπα, πράγματα και συμπεριφορές στη Νάξο των αρχών της δεκαετίας του 1960 [People, things, and behaviors in Naxos in the early 1960s]”. Αληθινά Παραμύθια της Νάξου, 2013, p. 9-22.

David WJ Gill and Christopher Chippindale. “Material and intellectual consequences of esteem for Cycladic figures.” American journal of archaeology 97, no. 4, 1993, p. 601-659.

Stelios Lekakis, “Αρχαιοκαπηλία και τοπικές κοινωνίες. Η περίπτωση των Κυκλάδων το 18ο και 19ο αιώνα.[ Looting and local communities. The case of Cyclades in the 18th and 19th centuries],” Ναξιακά 20, no. 58, 2006, p. 7-19.

Stelios Lekakis, “Κοινωνικές και οικονομικές οπτικές της πολιτιστικής κληρονομιάς: η διαχείριση σε τοπικό επίπεδο: η περίπτωση του Αιγαίου και της νήσου Νάξου. [Social and economic perspectives on cultural heritage: locallevel management the case of the Aegean and the island of Naxos]” PhD diss., Εθνικό και Καποδιστριακό Πανεπιστήμιο Αθηνών (ΕΚΠΑ). Σχολή Φιλοσοφική. Τμήμα Ιστορίας και Αρχαιολογίας, 2013.

Stelios Lekakis and Mina Dragouni, “Heritage in the making: Rural heritage and its mnemeiosis at Naxos island, Greece.” Journal of Rural Studies 77, 2020, p. 84-92.

Marisa Marthari, “Altering information from the past: illegal excavations in Greece and the case of the Early Bronze Age Cyclades,” In Neil Brodie et al., Trade in illicit antiquities: the destruction of the world’s archaeological heritage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 161-172.

Charles Stewart, Demons and the devil: moral imagination in modern Greek culture. Vol. 8. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.

YPPO ,“ΥΠΠΟ: Η συλλογή Στέρν εκτίθεται ως δάνειο της Ελλάδας στο Μητροπολιτικό Μουσείο της Νέας Υόρκης” [Ministry of Culture : the Stern collection exhibited as loan of Greece to the MET in New York], 2024

Peter Watson and Cecilia Todeschini, The Medici Conspiracy: The Illicit Journey of Looted Antiquities-From Italy’s Tomb Raiders to the World’s Greatest Museum. New York: Public Affairs, 2007.

The American Trunk and the Return Journey of Greek Migrants in the Early 20th Century

Giota Tourgeli

The travel trunk emerged as a powerful symbol of transatlantic migration at the turn of the twentieth century. Among the more than 400,000 Greeks who immigrated to the United States by the 1920s – many intending only temporary sojourn – the trunk became a preeminent material object associated to their eventual return to the homeland. Notably, approximately 40% of these migrants returned to Greece, often carrying trunks that symbolized the material benefits accrued through their mobility. Unlike suitcases, which primarily facilitated the transport of their essential belongings (Fig. 1), the trunk served as a protective container for a diverse range of objects accumulated over time. These items addressed personal needs and were often intended as gifts for family members, functioning as a kind of remittance. The ritual of packing and unpacking these trunks reaffirmed enduring familial and communal bonds, offering symbolic compensation for prolonged physical absence.

Fig. 1. Anonymous, Ready to return for Balkan War, c. 1912. (The Library of Congress, Bain News Service). About 40,000 Greek migrants returned to Greece during the Balkan Wars. They travelled “light”, planning to defend their country and then come back to the United States.

Undoubtedly, the American trunk represented more than a mere travel item; it was a material marker of the migrant’s metamorphosis. The transformation was first signaled by the migrant’s return as a second-class – if not first-class – passenger on an ocean liner. Secondly, it was reflected in the quality and quantity of his baggage and, by extension, in the nature of the goods he carried. Greek peasants, who initially departed as steerage passengers, transported their modest possessions in baskets, betel bags, cloth bundles or, at best, in inexpensive cardboard suitcases purchased in port markets. The objects included their first “European” costume, a blanket, a migrant guide and some dry food for the trip.

In contrast, upon their return, migrants often arrived with multiple elegant suitcases and steamer trunks, filled with carefully selected items chosen for their utility, emotional value or the prestige they provided. Some of these were everyday objects –often second-hand, acquired in the workplace– that nonetheless seemed fabulous within the context of rural Greek communities. These included fashionable clothing, textiles and linens, agricultural tools, kitchen utensils, and popular books from Greek-American publishers. Particularly impressive were Western industrial goods and technological innovations –many purchased with installment plans– such as toys, clocks, firearms and musical instruments, gramophones and records. The contents of these overloaded trunks testified to the migrants’ economic power, and the material lifestyle fostered by their mobility. They also skillfully concealed the frugality and hardships they had endured to acquire such items. The presentation of these goods served to craft a narrative of success, masking the difficult realities of migrant life abroad.

Long-distance travel across borders imbued trunks with significant symbolic value, marking them as special objects. The colorful travel stickers – bearing the logos of the railroad and steamship companies – not only charted the long journey but also attested that they had come from elsewhere. These stickers narrated aspects of the complex bureaucratic process encountered while travelling. The carriage of the baggage to the port of New York, its disinfection and loading onto liners, customs clearance at the ports of Patras and Piraeus, transshipment via domestic steamers, transportation to mountain villages, and final delivery to migrants’ families depended upon a dense transnational logistical network consisting of travel agents, boatmen, porters, carters and muleteers. However, this transnational journey was shaped not only by the organized services and economic interests of transport entrepreneurs but also by the opportunistic activities of petty crooks and bandit gangs. The large, heavy trunks – emblems of distance and perceived wealth – contributed to the reputation of returning migrants as affluent men. Consequently, these migrants and their families often became targets of attacks in port zone, along transit zones, and even in their own homes.

The migrant trunk, as a container of exotic commodities, promoted the “American Dream” itself and contributed to the emergence of a migration culture. It served as a condensed representation of the “American world” and provided tangible evidence of the economic disparity between life “abroad” and “at home.” The baggage, often transported on mules, sent messages of conspicuous consumption, making the migrant’s homecoming triumphant. The size, weight, sturdiness and decorative elements of the trunk impressed all those gathered in the communities of origin to welcome the migrant, whereas the metallic lock further ignited curiosity and speculation about its valuable contents. The ritualized opening of the trunk and the distribution of its objects to family and friends had a profound impact on the mental mobility of young people in particular. Objects enclosed within disseminated images of wealth, fashion and Western modernity, shaping local perceptions of life in the United States. These objects inspired aspirations and reinforced the desire among many to pursue their fortunes abroad, thereby contributing to the perpetuation of migration flows.

Upon delivery, the American trunk was transformed from a travel object and personal possession into a valued family asset. Although its physical journey had ended, its symbolic biography continued to evolve. Like many other migration objects travelling to the Greek provinces, the trunk’s afterlife acquired new layers of meaning. Imbued with the glamour of the golden land, it was regarded as an extraordinary object and prominently displayed in the main room of houses built with the American earnings. It stood alongside other prized possessions brought from America – such as the gramophone and the Singer sewing machine. Much more than a decorative element, it attested to the family’s migration history and rising social status. The inscriptions it bore, with the owner’s name and the American manufacturing company, alluded to an exclusivity, enhancing the symbolic capital of its owners. As an object of distinction, the trunk served to connect the migrant family’s past to its envisioned future, reinforcing its elevated status within the local community.

However, in the materially impoverished setting of the Greek countryside, the trunk’s functional role persisted. As one of the few substantial furnishings in a peasant household, it was repurposed for the storage of dowry clothing or to conceal valuable family possessions. Even the sturdy ropes that had bound it during its transatlantic journey found new utility in agricultural work. These practical adaptations contributed to the trunk’s preservation, safeguarding it from decay. Over time, many trunks underwent further transformations (Fig. 2).

American trunk

Fig. 2. American trunks exhibited at the local folklore museum in Stefani in eastern Corinthia (Peloponnese, Greece). Curated by the Educational and Cultural Association of Stefani. Photographs by the author.

 

 

Retrieved from attics and cellars – if not ending up in antique stores – they were reappropriated as mnemonic objects by later generations and local heritage associations. Regaining a prominent place in the home as family heirlooms, or featured as central exhibits in local heritage museums, these trunks became tangible links to the past. Alongside migrants’ photographs and records from the Ellis Island passenger database, they document the “American past” of the Greek countryside  serving as enduring witnesses to a complex history of migration and cultural memory.

Further reading

Paul Basu and Simon Coleman, “Introduction: migrant worlds, material cultures,” Mobilities 3, no. 3, 2008, p. 313-330.

Hans Peter Hahn and Hadas Weis, “Introduction: biographies, travels and itineraries of things,” in Hans Peter Hahn and Hadas Weis (eds.), Mobility, meaning and transformations of things: Shifting contexts of material culture through time and space, Oxford and Oakville: Oxbow Books, 2013, p.1-14.

Igor Kopytoff, “The cultural biography of things: Commoditization as process,” in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 64-92.

Giota Tourgeli, Οι Μπρούκληδες. Έλληνες Μετανάστες στην Αμερική και Μετασχηματισμοί στις Κοινότητες Καταγωγής 1890-1940 [The Brooklidhes: Greek immigrants in the United States and the transformations of origin communities, 1890-1940], Athens: National Centre for Social Research (EKKE), 2020 (e-book).

A Modern Ethiopian Artwork in Contemporary Greece

Maria-Mirka Palioura

In 2003, the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens received a significant donation from Aikaterini Exarchou-Gensonnet (1921-2005), an expatriate from Ethiopia. The collection included antiquities, jewelry and church paraphernalia from Ethiopia, alongside a small but notable collection of twenty paintings by Ethiopian artists. These paintings –tempera on parchment and processed textile– are probably dated to the second half of the 20th century. The artworks were incorporated into the Modern and Contemporary Art Collection of the University Museum and showcased in a 2005 exhibition at the Kostis Palamas University building in central Athens. The exhibition, titled “Ethiopian Folk Art: Painting – Handicraft, Donation of Aikaterini Exarchou” was curated by the late Art History professor, Nikos Zias (1939-2020), who also edited the accompanying Greek language catalogue (Λαϊκή Αιθιοπική Τέχνη: Ζωγραφική, 2005).

The collection’s artworks depict themes related to Christian faith and worship, historical memory and everyday life. Among these is a notable piece by Qengeta Jembere Hailu (Andabiet, 1913-Addis Ababa 1994), which portrays the First Italo-Ethiopian War of 1896, specifically Τhe Battle of Adwa (March 1, 1896) (Jonas, 2011) (Fig. 1). This decisive victory secured Ethiopia’s independence for several decades, lasting until 1935, when the second Italo-Ethiopian war began. The Battle of Adwa remains a significant historical reference point in the broader context of anti-colonial resistance, not only in Ethiopia but across Africa (The Adwa Victory Memorial, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia).

Qangeta Jembere Hailu, The Battle of Adwa

Fig. 1. Qangeta Jembere Hailu, The Battle of Adwa, 2nd half of 20th c., tempera on cloth, 76Χ129 cm. (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, University Museum, Modern and Contemporary Art Collection)

In this context, Hailu’s work is of particular interest due to its multi-layered narratives. It reflects an event from the history of Ethiopia while also engaging with its reception within collective memory. At the same time, as an artwork that was sold and transported beyond Africa, ending up in the museum of an educational institution in a European country which does not have a colonial past, it embodies the complexities of cultural circulation. Its inclusion in the museum’s collections marks a new chapter in its biography – where official history and individual stories intersect – creating a canvas of fragmented memories, connotations and fluid interpretations.

Qangeta Jembere Hailu, a priest and renowned painter of traditional art, trained under his uncle, who specialized in religious themes subjects for Ethiopian temples. Hailu adhered to the so-called “traditional” style of Ethiopian painting, characterized by religious iconography and historical narratives. His life was marked by resistance; he fought in the second Italo-Ethiopian war (1935-1936) and later during the Italian occupation (1936-1941). After settling in Addis Ababa in 1948, He took up the paintbrush and resumed his artistic practice sustaining himself through his artwork until his death in 1994. His career, however, was notably affected by the political shift in 1974 with the rise of the Derg junta. The regime’s establishment curtailed the interest of foreign tourists, who were looking for something local and exotic (Silverman and Fisseha 1999, 156-179). Through his depiction of The battle of Antowa, according to the contemporary pictorial language in Ethiopia, very different from the European naturalistic perception, Hailu contributed to the glorification of Ethiopia’s victorious past, particularly the reign of Emperor Menelik II (Atse Menilik) (r. 1889 -1913) (Fig. 2).

The Battle of Antowa: The Last Rally of General Dabormida,

Fig. 2. The Battle of Antowa: The Last Rally of General Dabormida, The Graphic, 11 April 1896 (Wikimedia Commons)

The abundance of pictorial parallel representations of the battle of Adwa testifies to the existence of a visual template established in the late 19th century. This template not only shaped artistic conventions but also resonated strongly with the buying public—a trend that persists to this day. The recurrence of almost identically painted renderings of the battle constitutes an intriguing subject for further scholarly investigation, offering insights into the dynamics of visual tradition, collective memory, and the commodification of historical narratives (Fig. 3 and 4).

Unknown, The Battle of Adwa, first half of 20th c.

Fig. 3. Unknown, The Battle of Adwa, first half of 20th c. (National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C.)

Marcos Jembere (Qangeta Jembere’s son), Battle of Adwa

Fig. 4. Marcos Jembere (Qangeta Jembere’s son), Battle of Adwa, 1993, 293,91 by 150 cm (Michigan State University Museum)

Several versions of the subject preserved in different museums are available online: The Battle of Adwa, 1896 (Horniman Museum and Gardens, UK); three versions of The Battle of Adwa, first half of 20th c., Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of African Art; The Battle of Adwa, 1940-1949 (The British Museum)  ; The Battle of Adwa, 1975, by Shibru Nuru (Library of Congress, African and Middle Eastern Division, Ethiopian Collection) ; The Battle of Adwa, (Wereldmuseum, Amsterdam).

The Battle of Adwa is part of the secular themes that, as early as the 19th century, appeared in ecclesiastical murals depicting battles and portraits of local lords (Biasio 2009, 14-25). The composition is structured vertically and in overlapping zones, forming two distinct solid parts where the opposing camps are aligned with their respective flags symbolizing national identity. The Ethiopian tricolor flag, depicted twice, presents a visual anachronism as it was officially established by Emperor Menelik II in October 1897, a year after the battle.

Historical elements are evident in the composition (Fig. 1), such as the numerical superiority of the Ethiopian army with the suggestive presence of countless heads, and the obvious organized military formation of the Italian army behind low fortifications. The figures of Emperor Menelik II, his court dignitaries and the Ethiopian church, Empress Taitu, and Commander-in-chief Tafari (second zone left) embody the intersection of secular and religious authority in the struggle. The central placement of the onrushing Ethiopians in the center –amongst them the prominent hero general (Fitaurari) Gebeyehu– defines the battlefield and reinforces the heroic element. The depiction of fallen dead Ethiopians at the lower zone reinforces the connotations of heroic sacrifice for the country’s independence. Saint George, Ethiopia’s patron saint, is illustrated in the upper central part, haloed with the colors of the Ethiopian flag, symbolically assisting the Ethiopians by menacingly brandishing his spear toward the Italian army.

The austere design, absence of perspective, flatness, isocephaly, vivid colors, honesty, and balanced composition reflect the iconographic tradition of Ethiopia as well as of Coptic art. The intense narrativity is further enriched by explanatory inscriptions in the official Amharic script. The top left identifies the painter and his origin (Kegn Geta Jenbere Hailu from Gondar), the flags of the two enemies (Ethiopia, Italy) and Saint George. Below, an inscription records the defeat of the Italians (The Battle of Adwa, the victory of the Ethiopian army and the defeat of the Italian army). Notably, Ethiopian protagonists of the battle are distinctly highlighted, while the Italian side is noted once (left, among the Italian soldiers). Emperor Menelik (Atse Menilik) is depicted with a crown of feathers (top left), and Chief general (Fitaurari) Gebeyehu, dressed in green costume and wielding a bloody sword, is discernible at top center of the painting.

The Battle of Adwa aligns with the 20th-century Ethiopian artistic production, conventionally categorized as “traditional” art. Alternatively, it may be considered “non-Western art” (Davies 2000, 199-216), a term that better encapsulates works produced post-1930s for foreign markets. Stanislaw Chojnacki labeled such art as “degenerate” (Silverman and Fisseha 1999, 158) considering that “modernization” or “Europeanization” severed its ties with Ethiopian Christian painting traditions. This perspective reflects Western biases regarding “authenticity”, often overlooking the evolving dynamics of this artistic language.

Hailu’s painting related to traditional forms, categorized as “antika” or “airport art”, addresses the need to construct a “great tradition of a powerful state”; appealing to foreign visitors of the country seeking “authentic” Ethiopian artifacts (Rubinkowska-Anioł 2017, 114). The acquisition of The Battle of Adwa, by Aikaterini Exarchou, fits into this context. The painting idealizes historical and cultural values, expressing an objective truth through iconography.

Upon transfer to Greece and donation to the Museum of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, the painting assumed a new semantic context. Approximately twenty years earlier, in the first exhibition held in 2005, the museum engaged with the Ethiopian community in Athens. Today, within the context of this collection’s imminent re-exhibition, the museum is facing the challenge of adopting new policies distinguishing this collection of paintings from Ethiopian antiquities, amassed through colonial-type practices. Amidst global discourse on decolonizing academic collections, the University Museum has an opportunity to reassess its approach, considering the historical Greek presence in Ethiopia.

The value of The Battle of Adwa extends beyond aesthetics to encompass Ethiopia’s collective memory. It also testifies to the personal aesthetic of A. Exarchou, who was an artist herself and acquired the painting, during her long stay in the country with her husband –an engineer– in the 1960s. The painting, a memorabilia of her life, holds multifaceted significance. Detailed documentation of this work and the rest of the paintings acquired by Exarchou ensures their proper future exhibition (Sfyroera 2013, 92) aligned with her intent to share her collection with the public, especially students and pupils. In Spring 2024, the University Museum took a preliminary step by exhibiting works from the collection alternately at the entrance of the library building of the Faculty of Philosophy (Fig. 5).

Qangeta Jembere Hailu, The Fest [in Gondar]

Fig. 5. Qangeta Jembere Hailu, The Fest [in Gondar], 2nd half of 20th c., tempera on cloth, 77 by 108 cm (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, University Museum, Modern and Contemporary Art Collection)

In addition, the museum can explore and incorporate connections between the Ethiopian community in Greece with their national past and culture. In this framework, The Battle of Adwa can serve as an idiosyncratic site of collective memory (lieu de mémoire), for Ethiopian immigrants in Greece, a cultural artifact fostering collective identity across generations. At the same time, the painting bridges past and present and future, by engaging with long-lasting issues regarding European perceptions of diverse historical and cultural experiences.

Many thanks to Assera Debele, the director of the Ethiopian Socio-Cultural Center “Aithiops” based in Athens, for his valuable assistance in translation, as well as to Prof. P. Petrides and Dr. M. Leontari.

References

Elisabeth Biasio, “Contemporary Ethiopian Painting in Traditional Style. From Church based to Tourist Art”, African Arts 42, no. 1, Spring 2009, p. 14-25.

Stephen Davies, “Non-Western Art and Art’s Definition” in Noël Carroll (ed.), Theories of Art Today, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000, p. 199-216.

Raymond Jonas, The Battle of Adwa, African Victory in the Age of Empire, Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 2011.

Λαϊκή Αιθιοπική Τέχνη: Ζωγραφική – Χειροτεχνία. Δωρεά Αικατερίνης Εξάρχου [Ethiopian Folk Art: PaintingHandicraft, Aikaterini Exarchou Donation], Exhibition Catalogue, Athens: National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, 2005.

Alexandra S. Sfyroera, “Aikaterina Exarchou-Gensonnet and the Museum of Archaeology and History of Art. The chronicle of a ‘reciprocal relationship’ through the pages of her personal archive, Volume of Abstracts (Greek – English), Νinth Scientific Symposium, Excavation and research, IX: From the Research Work of the Archaeology Department and Art History, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, 2013.

Raymond A. Silverman and Girma Fisseha, “Jembere and his son Marcos, Traditional Painting at the End of Twentieth Century” in Raymond A. Silverman (ed.), Ethiopia, Traditions of Creativity, East Lansing: Michigan State University Museum/Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999, p. 156-181.

Hanna Rubinkowska-Anioł, “Antika – Ethiopian Airport Art as a Construction of Tradition”, in A. Pawłowska, A. Drozdowski and A. Kuczyńska (eds), The Artistic Traditions of Non-European Cultures, University of Warsaw, Polish Institute of World Art Studies, Vol. 5, 2017, p. 113-128.

A Rusty Key Out of Place. Archives, Materiality and the Holocaust in the Dodecanese

Alexis Rappas

Tedium, seldom disrupted by the excitement procured by the rare promising document, is what one can associate archival research with. Nothing prepares for the conflicting emotions that can overwhelm the historian, when sifting for example through the records of the German-Italian administration of the Dodecanese, in this instance on one day in July 2013. These papers were admittedly somber in themselves. They mostly consisted of lists of the items belonging to the Jewish community of Rhodes –the main island of the Dodecanese–, which members had been dispossessed, with characteristic Nazi thoroughness, prior to being shipped to the death camps. But it was one small pink envelope that affected the present author in ways one thought impossible in the comfortably dull environment of the archive. In it was a large, rusty key, with a tag mentioning its owner, Rosa Alhadeff and her address, Via Malatesta, No. 30. Four Rosa Alhadeff are singled out in the inventory identifying all Rhodian Jews exterminated by the Nazis, all of whom perished in the death camps between July and September 1944, three of whom at a comparable age (47, 48 et 56 years old) (Fondazione Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea).

Clé de Rosa Alhadeff, à Rhodes

Fig. 1. Rosa Alhadeff’s key (Γενικά Αρχεία του Κράτους–Δωδεκάνησος 1944/195: Verbali dei denuncianti).

The Nazis, who occupied the Dodecanese in 1943, retained the Italian civil servants already in place, so the records under their administration were written in Italian. Hence the file in which the envelope was found bore the ominous title Verbali dei denuncianti– Records of the informers.

Historians more or less regularly encounter emotionally challenging documents; a death sentence, a petition from a distraught family, even an order to commit mass murder. Yet the manner in which these are expressed, formally and in writing, and the immediate textual environment in which they are submerged, a corpus of dry official correspondence, are often designed to create an emotional distance between the events being reported and the person reporting them. As Michael Herzfeld noted (Herzfeld 1992), the very purpose of bureaucracy is the production of indifference, best suited for dispassionate, supposedly rational, administrative action. The archive –from the Greek arkhè/αρχή, authority– is intended to bring, however arbitrarily, order to the chaos of life. It operates what Ranajit Guha terms a clinical separation between the author of the document and “the site and subject of diagnosis.” (Guha 1988, p. 52). Chronologically distant from the events they are studying, historians are thus further alienated from them by the very nature and purpose of their sources. The work they do to interpret the past is therefore more often cognitive rather than affective, even when their very interest in the topic under scrutiny may have initially been motivated by more than just intellectual curiosity.

The incongruous presence of an object among written –even handwritten–documents shatters that distance and conjures the past in a radical way, shifting the attention from a search of meaning to one of experience. What was held in the hands of the historian, that July, was not just a key to a building; it was the gateway to the intimacy of a family. Profound sadness was felt at the knowledge that the reason this key made it to the archive was because its owners had been spoliated and murdered; but also the uneasiness of the potential intruder, another trespasser about to break into a home to which they had not been invited. As Rebecca Bryant reminds historians in her study of Cyprus refugee homes, that which is intimate to a family is supposed to remain secret for outsiders (Bryant 2010, p. 53); such is the duality of meaning of the Freudian concept of Heimlich. As a consequence of this uneasiness, the present author has never, until now, returned to that envelope and that key, even when evoking, in research, the deportation and annihilation of the Jewish community of Rhodes.

What brought him back to it was the suspicion that an emotional reaction, perhaps tainted with some self-righteousness, might be clouding, if not stunting, the understanding of this specific key. When processing these ideas, a famous Sephardic song called “La yave [llave]/Suenyos d’Espanya [Sueños de España] taught in high school by a Spanish language teacher came to mind:

Ónde està la yave ke estava en el kaxun?

Mis nonus la truxeron kon grande amor

La dixero a luz fijus, estu ez il korason

De muestra kaza d’Espanya

Suenyos d’Espanya”

“Where is the key that was in the drawer?

My forefathers brought it with great love

They entrusted it to their sons, this is the heart,

Of our house in Spain,

Dreams of Spain”

As Levy, Olazabal and Varon-Vassard showed, many Ladino songs and poems evoke the keys that the Sephardim supposedly took with them on their road to exile in 1492 as a reminder of the homes they left in Toledo (Lévy and Ozabal, 2015; Varon-Vassard, 2021). Whether the legend is true or not is less important than the function played by the key as a means to reassert Sephardic identity. It is a link to the lost homeland, the collective recollection of which bolsters the sense of communal belonging. Others, most famously Palestinians, have also used housekeys as, in Dima Saad’s words, “metonymic fragments of home and of the self, as vessels of identification and belonging” (Saad 2019, p. 58). Could it be that the key found in the envelope was precisely such a relic?

It is premature to risk an answer at this stage. But considering this object, its trajectory, real or imagined, and its ultimate fate, opens new vistas on the notions of belonging, identity, and community, one that far exceeds the narrow confines of an understanding of a key as the emblem of property ownership. “The minuscule,” once wrote Gaston Bachelard, “is one of the refuges of greatness” (Bachelard 2012, p. 154). In that sense, the experience of its unexpected discovery, out of place –unheimlich/uncanny–, as it were, in an administrative file, is perhaps even more harrowing.

Sources

Milan, Fondazione Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea (CDEC), https://ebreidirodi1944.cdec.it/en/advanced-search/ 

Rhodes, Γενικά Αρχεία του Κράτους-Δωδεκάνησος (records of the German-Italian administration of the Dodecanese 1944/195: Verbali dei denuncianti)

References

Gaston Bachelard, La poétique de l’espace, Paris : PUF « Quadrige », 2012 [1957].

Rebecca Bryant, The Past in Pieces. Belonging in the New Cyprus, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.

Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” in Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (eds.), Selected Subaltern Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 45-86.

Michael Herzfeld, The Social Production of Indifference. Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Joseph Josy Lévy and Inaki Olazabal, “Chapter 6. The Key From (To) Sefarad. Nostalgia for a Lost Country,” in Olivia Angé and David Berliner (eds.), Anthropology and Nostalgia, New York: Berghahn Books, 2015, p. 139-154.

Dima Saad, “Materializing Palestinian Memory: Objects of Home and the Everyday Eternities of Exile,” Jerusalem Quarterly 80, 2019, p. 57-71.

Odette Varon-Vassard, Des Sépharades aux Juifs grecs. Histoire, mémoire et identité, Paris : Éditions Le Manuscrit, 2021.

Houses Left Behind, Pictures Taken: Memories and Legacies of the 1923 Lausanne Treaty

Eleni Kyramargiou

On October 2, 1924, in compliance with the terms of the Lausanne Treaty, the residents of Sinasos/Mustafapaşa in Central Anatolia (in the Ürgüp District of Nevşehir Province today) left their homes for Greece. As refugees displaced by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, they were fully aware that neither they nor their families would be allowed to return. Their exodus was not an abrupt, but rather a long, coordinated farewell. The residents of Sinasos had known they would have to leave since the signing of the population exchange treaty; what remained was to learn the details and the date of their departure.

Although their overall story is typical of the population exchange process, one detail sets Sinasos apart. Before their departure, the residents of Sinasos, supported by their local council, photographed their houses and community. Τhese photographs travelled with them, or even ahead of them, first to Istanbul and then, finally, to Athens where the photo album Η Σινασός: το διαμάντι της Ανατολής, 1924 [Sinasos: the diamond of Anatolia, 1924] was published at the end of 1924 (Fig. 1). This album was a conscious attempt to preserve the past, namely the history, the traditions, and the collective memory of a community which no longer exists. The photographs from ‘there’ and the short texts written by the refugees in their new ‘here’ constitute an endeavour to reconstruct their old communal life, from its history and architecture to the local dialect and the songs they used to sing (Fig. 2).

The cover of the photo album Η Σινασός: το διαμάντι της Ανατολής, 1924

Fig. 1. Christos Panagos, The cover of the photo album Η Σινασός: το διαμάντι της Ανατολής, 1924 [Sinasos: the diamond of Anatolia, 1924]  (private collection)

The first page of the photo album Η Σινασός: το διαμάντι της Ανατολής, 1924

Fig. 2. Christos Panagos, The first page of the photo album Η Σινασός: το διαμάντι της Ανατολής, 1924 [Sinasos: the diamond of Anatolia, 1924] displaying a general view of Sinasos (private collection)

This album is more than just a book. For the people of Sinasos who experienced the exodus, it is a living piece of home, while for their descendants it serves as a way to learn about their past and place of origin. For historians, the album is valuable historical evidence, not only for the information it provides, but also for the insight it offers into the historical perception and perspective of its creators, who sought to document the history of a place and community that would soon cease to exist in its original form. It is a precious object despite the fact that it did not actually come from the native land of Sinassos, but was instead made ‘here’ in order to preserve the history of a ‘there’ that had to be left behind, highlighting the multiple dimensions an object can acquire over the course of its life.

One page of the photo album Η Σινασός: το διαμάντι της Ανατολής, 1924

Fig. 3. Christos Panagos, One page of the photo album Η Σινασός: το διαμάντι της Ανατολής, 1924 [Sinasos: the diamond of Anatolia, 1924]  with photographs on the right hand and texts on the left.

The album created by the first generation of refugees from Sinassos, was one of the objects encountered during a research on the material dimensions of the population exchange experience. The initial questions were simple: what does one take in a moment of expulsion? What objects were considered valuable, useful, or symbolically important? What became of them over time? And if one can still identify these objects, what meaning do they hold for their current owners?

For the research team, the album initiated a broader investigation into the objects that Christian refugees chose to take with them at the moment of flight. More specifically: What objects did the non-exchangeable refugees who arrived in Greece after August 1922 bring with them? Did they choose objects objectively valuable, subjectively precious, or useful and practical? How many of these objects have survived to this day? When the project started, the research team believed these objects would help reconstruct the process of refugee integration into the novel setting in Greece. Eventually, it was realized that these objects have a second life: they acquire multiple meanings and generate diverse sentiments in the hands of their current owners (Kopytoff 1986, p. 64).

Clothes and personal items, jewellery and valuables, trade tools and religious icons, property deeds, documents, and letters were among the most common things that the displaced chose carry. In hastly packed bundles, they combined practical items for daily use with objects of material and emotional significance; the precious and the quotidian, side by side. To encapsulate and disseminate the findings of the research project Objects in Motion, it was decided that a digital exhibition would be the ideal medium. These objects along with the stories of both their original and current owners, highlight the intersection mobility history and material culture. As Renée Hirschon noted, these objects and the memories they carry, as well as the use of memory itself over the past 100 years, have built ‘memory bridges’ for the owners’ descendants. These bridges constructed across three generations, represent an effort to maintain continuity through time, especially when the place of origin has been irrevocably lost and memory has become ‘their most valuable property’ (Hirschon 1989, p. 15).

For the research team, Objects in Motion raised many intriguing questions on an array of issues: How do individuals construct multiple identities? How are personal recollections and, in the end, personal history shaped through second hand accounts?, More generally, how are personal narratives formed and how do they influence the big picture and the broader narrative? What symbolic meanings are attached to the ancestral house, and which memories endure across generations? Conversely, what traumas emerge from forced displacement and resettlement in unfamiliar homes? Many informants have reconstructed their ‘refugee identity’ repositioning themselves and their families within historical narratives, spanning the past, present and, possibly, the future. Kristina Gedgaudaitė describes this process as ‘viewing memory as a portable toolkit’ aptly characterizing it as ‘portable memory’ (Gedgaudaité 2021, p. 219).

These objects, alongside the stories and memories they carry, are fragments from a long and arduous population movement. This movement concluded a decade of military conflict in the Balkans, defined the national borders of Greece and Turkey, and shaped the societies of both countries. Simultaneously, thousands of people and objects crossed the Aegean in the opposite direction, as Muslim populations left Greece under the Lausanne Treaty. Monumental as it was, this was neither the first nor the last time refugees crossed the Aegean Sea. Objects do not speak for themselves. Yet they stand as resilient markers of historical moments, reminding us that even in times of crisis people make choices: they chose what is valuable, what they believe will help them face the unknown, and what they hope will carry their memories into the future.

References

Kristina Gedgaudaitė, Memories of Asia Minor in Contemporary Greek Culture. An Itinerary, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.

Renée Hirschon, Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Igor Kopytoff, “The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process,” in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The social life of things. Commodities in cultural perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

A Diary Across Time and Space: Elpida Castanaki, Cairo-Paris-Athens-Antibes, 1933-1963

Vivi Hatzigeorgiou

For more than thirty years, Elpida Castanaki kept a diary in French comprising 130 notebooks. A resident of Paris, she also spent a few years in Athens. Moving between Paris and Athens but also Antibes and Cairo, Elpida always carried some volumes of her diary with her, even in extreme circumstances. This multivolume diary is now part of the Castanakis archive at the Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive (ELIA) (Fig. 1 and 2).

A pile of notebooks forming part of the diary of Elpida Castanaki

Journaux Elpida Castanakis

Fig. 1 and 2. Notebooks forming part of the diary of Elpida Catanaki in pile and box at ELIA (Source: ELIA/MIET)

Elpida Castanaki was born in Cairo, on March 17, 1912, as the second of the five daughters of businessman Michalis Mavroeidis and Sappho Kanaki. In 1929, she moved to Paris to pursue literature studies at the Sorbonne. There, she met and fell in love with Thrassos Castanakis, a writer and professor at the School of Oriental Languages. A Greek from Istanbul, Thrassos was married to philologist Angela Valiadi. Despite her family’s objections, the 18-year-old Elpida, decided to commit herself to Thrassos. In the summer of 1931, they settled together in Paris.

From his years in Istanbul, Castanakis maintained a close friendship with the Prassinos family, a relationship that continued in Paris where the family had settled after fleeing what is known in Greece as “the Asia Minor Catastrophe”. The Prassinos children – poet Gisèle and painter Mario – were frequent visitors to the Castanakis home on rue Littré in Montparnasse (Fig. 3 and 4). Elpida and Thrassos affectionally referred to them as “our children.” In their will, they named Gisèle and her husband Petros Frydas, as their literary heirs. These details are drawn from the pages of Elpidas’s diary. What she could not have foreseen, however, was the fate of her diary after her death in 1963 at the age of 51. Thrassos, devastated and struggling with long-term alcoholism, passed away in 1967.

Elpida Castanaki at her desk in Paris

Elpida Kastanaki standing in her home in Paris

Fig. 3 and 4.  Elpida Castanaki at her home in Paris, c. 1935 (ELIA/MIET)

At that point, Gisèle’s husband, Frydas, gathered and organized the papers he found in the Castanakis couple’s residencies in Paris and Antibes. In 1975, he sent them to ELIA, along with a detailed catalogue. But why did Frydas choose ELIA? The extensive Castanakis archive constitutes a significant contribution to the study of Greek literature from the first half of the 20th century. ELIA remains to this date a foundation dedicated to the preservation and study of modern Greek literary and historical archives. Frydas believed that the Castanakis papers should be made available to the research in what seemed – then as now – to be their natural repository. Another factor that may influence archival donations decisions is personal connections. Frydas, an Alexandrian intellectual, was a friend and supporter of Manos Haritatos, also an Alexandrian and the founder of ELIA. The transfer of the Castanakis archive from Paris to Athens was facilitated by a bond of trust forged in Alexandria. The diary was not included in the first donation. It was only in 2017 that Catherine Prassinos, daughter of Mario Prassinos, entrusted it to ELIA. This is how Elpida’s personal journal intime was ultimately transformed into archival material, an object for study and exhibition.

Although the diary’s first entry is dated Cairo, 16 February 1929, it seems that Elpida started writing systematically after her wedding in 1933, notably at Thrassos suggestion. She recalls:

Antibes, Tuesday 21 June 1938. I stretch to re-read my diary for the years 1931 to 1933. The first two years do not exist, only a few dates and from these not all the important ones. In any case, at the time Thrassos had not suggested to me the idea and it was not from me that it would come. The year 1933 begins to turn into a real diary…. All that would have been lost and not only the events but also the words and the very ideas of Thrassos.

A typical teenage diary, marked by gaps and irregular entries, turns into a chronicle of shared life with Thrassos. Elpida assumes the role of guardian of his thoughts and expressions. Nevertheless, the diary’s importance would be greatly diminished if Thrassos were its only focus.

The Castanakis couple moved within the circles of left-wing intellectuals during pivotal moments in European history. Elpida noted the activities of each day. We observe how the French intelligentsia expressed solidarity with the Spanish Civil War, how their friends were exiled in the Greek islands under the Metaxas regime, how the Castanakis fled Paris during the June 1940 exodus. Their journey took them to the village of Monestiés near the Franco Spanish border, where they stayed for three months before undertaking a perilous route via Portugal to Greece where they finally arrived on 20 October 1940 and remained there throughout the war (Fig. 5). Elpida’s entries document not only the escalating destitution during the German occupation but also a remarkable surge in literary production, as expressed through the publication of new periodicals, books and theatrical plays. Petros Haris wrote: “if someone asked me what it is that our country produces during these difficult times I would answer, without hesitation, theatrical troupes and philological periodicals.” (Haris, 1943).

A first page listing places to which the couple and the diary travelled in 1940

Fig. 5. A first page listing places to which the couple and the diary travelled in 1940 (ELIA/MIET)

Thrassos, Elpida and a group of literary friends gathered daily at the Athenian publishing house, Pyrsos, later renamed Aetos. Among them were Varnalis, Kavvadias, Terzakis, Karagatsis, Venezis, Iakovidi, Theotokas, Evelpidis, who met to discuss collaborations, new periodicals and the course of the war.

By 1942, however, signs of exhaustion emerged. Instead of running to the nearby shelter during air raids, Elpida and Thrassos chose to stay in bed, reading War and Peace. Thrassos writes incessantly: short stories, novels, articles; he keeps the theatrical review column in Philological Sunday. Elpida translates plays and short stories from English and French. At the same time, they work hard in their farm at Helliniko, growing vegetables and raising animals that helped them survive during the famine – and friends and poor neighbours, as well.

After the war, they spend their summers in Antibes hosting friends. Thrassos, famous for his culinary skills, prepares special dishes for their guests. Yet new conflicts loomed. The Korean war, although distant, creates an upheaval in Europe. The brother of Thrassos, Loukas, is exiled in Makronisos and Ai-Stratis, along with Ritsos, Dimitris Fotiades and other friends.

The transformation of Elpida’s diary, from a private record of the domestic sphere to public archival source, available to research, raises questions about how objects can acquire a new meaning never anticipated by their creator. Furthermore, the successive transfer of the diary and archive – from Castanakis to Frydas and finally to ELIA – through relationships built on trust, highlights the essential role of interpersonal connections for the circulation and re-signification of objects.

References

Σπύρος Καράογλου, “Από την αλληλογραφία Γιώργου Θεοτοκά-Θράσου Καστανάκη. Το χρονικό μιας φιλικής σχέσης [From the correspondence of Giorgos Theotokas-Thrassos Kastanakis. The record of a friendship]”, Κονδυλοφόρος, no. 1, 2002, p. 118-173.

Αλεξάνδρα Μπουφέα, Τα λογοτεχνικά περιοδικά της Κατοχής [Literary magazines during the Occupation], Αθήνα : Σοκόλη, , 2006.

Δημήτρης Φωτιάδης, Ενθυμήματα [Memoirs],  Αθήνα : Β έκδοση, Κέδρος, 1983.

Petros Haris, «Πρωινός Τύπος» (Proinos Typos), 1st October 1943.

Jean Pierre Joshua, « Le journal comme forme littéraire et comme itinéraire de vie », Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 87, no. 4, 2003, p. 703-714.

La xhubleta : un vêtement albanais venu de la Crète minoenne ?

Gilles de Rapper

En novembre 2022, l’Unesco a inscrit sur la liste du patrimoine immatériel nécessitant une sauvegarde urgente les « savoir-faire, artisanat et formes d’utilisation » de la xhubleta, un vêtement féminin originaire du nord de l’Albanie (fig. 1). Si le dossier préparé par le ministère albanais de la Culture insiste, conformément aux attendus d’une telle candidature, sur la participation des femmes au processus de fabrication et aux usages de la xhubleta ainsi que sur son importance pour la survie des communautés locales, le même vêtement est l’objet d’un autre discours largement diffusé en Albanie, mais moins visible à l’étranger, qui fait remonter son origine jusqu’à une antique civilisation méditerranéenne dont les Albanais seraient les derniers héritiers. Ce billet, tout en retraçant l’histoire récente de la xhubleta, s’intéresse précisément au discours qui fait de ce vêtement une preuve de l’ancienneté plurimillénaire des Albanais.

site de l’Unesco consacré à la xhubleta

Fig. 1. Capture d’écran du site de l’Unesco consacré à la xhubleta. Le site précise : « Portée par les femmes et les filles qui vivent dans les régions montagneuses du nord de l’Albanie, la xhubleta est un vêtement fait à la main qui se caractérise par sa forme de cloche ondulée. Elle est majoritairement noire avec des motifs brodés colorés. »

On désigne par xhubleta un vêtement féminin en usage dans la Grande Montagne (Malësia e Madhe), au nord de l’Albanie. Son élément principal est une jupe ondulée, en forme de cloche (la xhubleta proprement dite) réalisée en bure (shajak) de couleur noire (fig. 2). Le vêtement se compose aussi d’un gilet, d’un tablier, de chausses et d’une capote. Outre la forme caractéristique et le poids de la jupe, le vêtement se distingue par les motifs brodés sur ses différents éléments. Il était produit par les femmes elles-mêmes en plusieurs exemplaires et constituait leur trousseau. Plusieurs variantes sont attestées selon les localités.

A girl dressed in Xhubleta costume during Logu i Bjeshkëve, Malësi e Madhe

Fig. 2. A girl dressed in Xhubleta costume during Logu i Bjeshkëve, Malësi e Madhe, photographie d’Anila Zajmi, 2018, disponible sur le site de l’Unesco. Logu i Bjeshkëve est un festival annuel qui met en scène les vêtements traditionnels du nord de l’Albanie. Dans sa version actuelle, inaugurée en 1998, il reproduit un rassemblement régional déjà attesté au début du xxe siècle dans lequel la xhubleta constituait un vêtement d’apparat.

La première mention de la xhubleta serait due à un savant hongrois qui l’avait observée à la fin du XVIIIe siècle chez des montagnards albanais de la tribu des Kelmend installés en Slavonie austro-hongroise à la suite de la guerre austro-ottomane de 1737-1738. C’est surtout au début du XXe siècle, cependant, que sont publiées les premières descriptions et études qui fondent aujourd’hui encore la connaissance de la xhubleta et de son histoire. Le principal auteur de cette première période est un autre savant hongrois, Franz Nopcsa (1877-1933), qui publie en 1925 un ouvrage rassemblant ses observations conduites en Albanie dans les premières années du XXe siècle. Nopcsa est un des premiers à rapprocher la jupe-cloche du XXe siècle de trouvailles archéologiques récentes en Espagne, en Crète, en Serbie et en Asie Mineure (figurines et céramiques peintes). Ces analogies lui firent énoncer l’hypothèse d’une grande ancienneté et d’une origine « méditerranéenne » de la xhubleta (fig. 3).

rapprochement entre une statuette néolithique découverte en Serbie et le costume féminin de la tribu Hoti

Fig. 3. Deux illustrations publiées dans Nopcsa 1925 suggérant le rapprochement entre une statuette néolithique découverte en Serbie et le costume féminin de la tribu Hoti (ici dans sa variante pour enfant). L’auteur précise (p. 215) que les « jupes-cloche » (Glockenröcke) « sont en tous points identiques à des jupes connues à travers une figurine en argile néolithique de Serbie et de nombreux bijoux de Mycènes, ainsi qu’à travers des pièces de Crète, et quelques pièces ‘mycéniennes’ de Chypre ».

Cette hypothèse a été largement reprise par les ethnologues albanais qui, à partir des années 1950, se sont intéressés aux « vêtements populaires » (veshje popullore) en voie de disparition, et en particulier à la xhubleta, à l’instar d’un pionnier de l’ethnologie albanaise, Rrok Zojzi (1910-1995). Le vêtement est ainsi devenu, pour reprendre le titre d’un article de 1968, un « témoin de l’ancienneté de notre peuple » (Jubani, 1968). Il faut signaler toutefois qu’aucun document archéologique ou textuel n’est venu corroborer les analogies formelles signalées par Nopcsa entre la xhubleta et les figurines de la Méditerranée et des Balkans préhistoriques. L’étymologie n’est pas d’un grand secours : le mot, parfois orthographié xhupleta jusque dans les années 1950, est sans doute, comme les mots xhup, « veste matelassée », et xhybe, « manteau féminin sans manches », emprunté à l’italien médiéval giubba, lui-même emprunté à l’arabe djubba désignant une « veste de dessous » (d’où provient aussi le français jupe qui désigne au XIIe siècle un pourpoint ajusté sur le buste avant de prendre au XVIIe le sens moderne de vêtement féminin descendant de la taille vers les pieds).

L’intérêt des ethnologues s’est accompagné de la constitution de collections de xhubleta, en particulier par l’Institut de culture populaire, à Tirana, qui en a rassemblé une quarantaine entre 1948 et 1965. À partir du milieu des années 1960, l’usage et les savoir-faire relatifs à la fabrication de la xhubleta ont graduellement disparu et les exemplaires en circulation se sont raréfiés. Conservée dans des collections ethnographiques publiques et mise en scène lors de festivals folkloriques dans les années 1970 et 1980, la xhubleta connaît cependant une nouvelle vie à partir des années 1990, dans le contexte de l’Albanie post-communiste. Des collections privées se constituent et un mouvement de revitalisation apparaît. Dès les années 2000, des projets de sauvegarde et d’inscription sur la liste de l’Unesco sont envisagés. Ils débouchent sur le succès de la candidature de 2022. Luljeta Dano, propriétaire d’une des plus grandes collections privées (60 pièces) et fondatrice en 2009 du Centre anthropologique Xhubleta, figure parmi les promoteurs de la candidature déposée en 2022. D’objet vernaculaire, la xhubleta devient ainsi, selon une trajectoire commune, un objet ethnographique puis un objet patrimonial et touristique.

Cette trajectoire est soutenue, de façon plus ou moins affirmée, par l’hypothèse de l’ancienneté de la xhubleta et de son origine méditerranéenne qui se trouve, elle aussi, revitalisée à partir des années 1990. À cette époque en effet se diffuse une nouvelle version du mythe d’origine des Albanais dans laquelle les Pélasges, population préhistorique des Balkans et de la Méditerranée orientale, sont reconnus comme étant les ancêtres nationaux des Albanais. Mentionnés par les auteurs antiques, les Pélasges n’ont cependant laissé aucun vestige archéologique ni aucune trace écrite. L’hypothèse « méditerranéenne » avancée par Nopcsa et adoptée en l’état par les ethnologues albanais de la période communiste est désormais reprise par les promoteurs du mythe pélasgiste et précisée : la xhubleta est un vêtement pélasgique, ce qui explique son attestation à des périodes anciennes en plusieurs lieux des Balkans et de la Méditerranée, zone d’expansion des Pélasges. Son occurrence aux époques historiques dans les montagnes du nord de l’Albanie est une preuve que les Albanais modernes qui en ont hérité et qui l’ont conservé sont les descendants directs des Pélasges ; elle établit aussi l’Albanie et ses montagnes comme un conservatoire de traits culturels remontant au Néolithique et aux origines de la civilisation en Europe et en Méditerranée. Le rapprochement visuel entre la xhubleta et des figurines de Kliševac (Serbie) ou de la Crète minoenne fait partie des arguments avancés par les auteurs pélasgistes et se retrouve dans plusieurs ouvrages récents (fig. 4).

Planche extraite de l’ouvrage Les Pélasges, fondateurs de la civilisation mondiale, publié à Tirana en 2009

Fig. 4. Planche extraite de l’ouvrage Les Pélasges, fondateurs de la civilisation mondiale, publié à Tirana en 2009 par Ali Eltari, qui attribue aux Pélasges des vestiges archéologiques de Mycènes et de la Crète. La légende de l’image de la « déesse aux serpents », en haut à gauche, précise que « le vêtement de l’ancienne déesse de Crète ressemble beaucoup au vêtement de Mirditë [région du nord de l’Albanie] ».

Dano, La déesse Athéna et autres symboles cosmogoniques, 2007

Fig. 5. Couverture de Dano, La déesse Athéna et autres symboles cosmogoniques, 2007 qui reproduit un motif brodé sur une ceinture de xhubleta dans laquelle l’auteur reconnaît la déesse Athéna telle qu’elle apparaît sur des représentations découvertes par H. Schliemann lors des fouilles de Troie : « visage en forme de chouette, grands yeux exorbités, sans jambes ni bras, buste (…) qui descend jusqu’au nombril »

Le problème reste néanmoins celui de l’absence de preuve archéologique ou historique d’un lien entre ces objets et la xhubleta. Certains auteurs ont proposé de contourner cette difficulté en faisant des motifs brodés sur les divers éléments du vêtement un « langage symbolique » transmis au fil du temps et témoignant de la grande ancienneté de la xhubleta. Il serait possible de lire alors les broderies de la xhubleta comme un exposé de conceptions cosmogoniques rapportées aux Pélasges (fig. 5). Une nouvelle difficulté surgit cependant puisque, comme l’a montré Dorina Arapi, les femmes qui fabriquent et portent ces broderies n’y voient pas du tout les mêmes choses. Les interprétations restent donc ouvertes, tandis que la xhubleta entame, avec la reconnaissance de l’Unesco, une nouvelle étape de son existence.

Source

Site Unesco du Patrimoine culturel immatériel : https://ich.unesco.org/fr/USL/la-xhubleta-savoir-faire-artisanat-et-formes-d-utilisation-01880 (consulté le 22 janvier 2025).

Références bibliographiques

Dorina Arapi, « Xhubleta: A heteroglossic visual space of narratives », Contemporary Southeastern Europe 11, n° 1, 2024, p. 38-60.  

Luljeta Dano, Perëndesha Athina dhe simbole të tjera kozmogonike [La déesse Athéna et autres symboles cosmogoniques], Tirana: Ideart. 2007.

Bep Jubani, « Xhubleta. Treguese e lashtësisë së popullit tonë [La xhubleta. Témoin de l’ancienneté de notre peuple] », Konferenca II e studimeve albanologjike [Deuxième congrès d’études albanaises], Tirana: Universiteti i Tiranës, p. 233-245.

Ferencz Nopcsa, Albanien : Bauten. Trachten und Geräte Nordalbaniens [Albanie : constructions, costumes et outils], Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1925.  

Afërdita Onuzi,  Xhubleta. Tirana: Akademia e studimeve albanologjike, 2021.

Rrok Zojzi, « Mbi veshjet tradicionale të popullit tonë [Sur les costumes traditionnels de notre peuple] », Studime historike 4, 1965, p. 143-148.