ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the experiences of U.S.-based Armenians who travel as self-described pilgrims to their ancestral homeland of ‘historic Armenia’, now in Turkish Anatolia, in search of family houses and villages lost during the genocide of 1915. In a once shared culture, they encounter familiar foods that become problematic in a land often thought of as that of the enemy. Using an extensive archive of pilgrims’ experiences that spans over 40 years, the chapter draws on Bachelard’s seminal The Poetics of Space to suggest how an encounter with familiar foods in this fraught setting induces a home-centred reverie that serves to ‘protect’ against a variety of negative memories and emotions. Importantly, for the majority of pilgrims who are second or third generation, and have no autobiographical memories of ancestral villages, familiar foods generate reverie-images of a home not in Anatolia, but in the diaspora where these foods are essential components of their deepest ‘sense of being’. Food-inspired reveries provide these pilgrims with a persistent and protective spiritual strength that connects memory to place as an integration of the values of a lost past with gratitude for the present and confidence in the future.
