‘Building a new world in the shell of the old’

This chapter extends the argument of heritage as commons looking into the case of a squatted historic building in the tourist centre of the old city of Chania and the community organised around to protect it and use it in unauthorised ways. The chapter challenges the tourist-ready destination of heritage as a by-product of the national enclosure of the past, examining the plural affordances of the “squatted monument” in the realm of the commons and its social repercussions in the contemporary local and national context.