ABSTRACT
Reaching the city of <;e~me in June 2008, during my fieldwork in the Aegean costal towns while following the traces of 'friendship' festivals, I entered the intercity coach station (otogar) to ask how I could get to the city's centre. The city had been one of the landmarks of the rapprochement initiatives, a place co-hosting - together with the Greek island of Chios - the 'Theodorakia festival', a festival devoted to Mikis Theodorakis and 'Greek-Turkish friendship'. Entering the relatively small main office to ask directions from the officer sitting behind an old-fashioned wooden desk, a large poster hanging on the wall behind him attracted my attention, depicting two images in fading colours. On the left side, in black and white, was a reproduction of an old photograph of a town in ruins. On the right was a similar frame, this time in colour and apparently more recent, maybe from the 1970s, depicting the same town from almost the same viewing angle, more modern, with the destroyed areas rebuilt. The accompanying message was in bold capitals:
OUR ENEMIES LEFT THAT ... WE TRANSFORMED IT INTO THIS
I once again realised that however many years had passed from the explosion and overflow of the 'friendship' discourse on the Aegean borderlands after the 1999 earthquakes, the sedimented memories of displacement and conflict could easily resurface - through a poster that was not taken off the peg, recalling that the pendulum between enmity and friendship was still swinging and that the utterance of the 'friendship' discourse had not been uncontested along the shores of the Aegean Sea.
