ABSTRACT
Crisis and recovery are embedded from generation to generation in the form of collective memory, inherited family stories and state-endorsed historiography. Hope at a time of crisis points to the tension between personal expectations, the capacity to project life into the future and the ability to fulfil those plans. This chapter demonstrates how some past events that are prominent in collective memory are evoked in order for people to better understand their experience of twenty-first-century suffering. Hope and pride are prevalent in collective memory and are mainstays of how accounts of the past help inform the imaginings of the future. The past is not simply recalled but it is enacted, embodied and projected into visualisations of the future. Ioanna concludes that two aspects are particularly prevalent in Greek nationalism: the foreigner committing atrocities that leave the nation in ruin, and the determined Greek, relentless in his quest for recovery.
