ABSTRACT
Avery Gordon's words urge us to look at the margins of history, the margins of memory, in order to locate traces, which - even if forgotten or suppressed - can still affect our ways of doing things, affect our socio-political experiences. It is for this reason that I will now turn to the case of a Greek-Turkish initiative, forgotten and excluded by the existing literature, which emerged in the early 1980s in Greece, in the aftermath of the Turkish coup d'etat and the subsequent flow of self-exiled Turkish political activists seeking asylum in European soil. An initiative which, on the one hand, can be paradigmatic of the discursive articulation and mutual haunting between 'the Left', 'Democracy' and 'Friendship', and at the same time, shows how such an articulation created and diffused its own spectres. The exploration of its recently 'unearthed' archive! is useful here to discern this emerging new discourse nurtured within the Left in the 1980s and early 1990s promoting Turkish-Greek rapprochement. This focus will unravel not only the potential but also the limits and challenges posed by the spectral links between democratisation demands, the Left and friendship.
