ABSTRACT
This chapter develops and expands upon the book’s broader theme of the relationship between the locality and the nation through a specific case study: the return of the Greeks to Imbros. During the 1970s and 1980s, the expatriated Greeks of Imbros focused on commemorating their locality as part of the national pantheon of ‘lost patrídes’ (lost homelands), and attempting (ultimately unsuccessfully) to establish a ‘New Imbros’ on Greek soil, where they could return to a rural style of life. After 1988, however, changing circumstances on Imbros permitted seasonal, semi-permanent, and even permanent return, and precipitated a communal struggle not only to tackle the practical obstacles involved in the re-establishment of a Greek community on the island, but also to confront a multitude of daily challenges to the returnees’ sense of belonging in a locality greatly transformed by changes to its demographics, its built environment, and its touristic status. The possibility of return has had a noticeable impact upon the Imvriótes’ relationship to Greece as well as the identities of the second generation born away from the island. For first-generation Imvrian activists, the realisation that Imbros might not be a ‘lost homeland’ provoked an increasing sense of dissatisfaction with the diplomacy of the Greek state. This led not so much to the abandonment of the rhetoric of ‘lost patrídes’, but rather its redeployment as a discursive device for criticising a perceived inactivity or fatalism on the part of Greek politicians and diplomats. For the younger second generation, meanwhile, experiences of visiting Imbros alongside their parents and grandparents have fostered a greater emotional identification with the island as a contemporary physical place as opposed to a bygone cultural or historical inheritance. This has not necessarily prompted them to supplant a national Hellenic sense of self with a local Imvrian one, but rather inclined them to reimagine their Hellenic identity in terms of a different locality (i.e. Imbros rather than Athens or Thessaloniki). This demonstrates that, even for those born inside Greece, national identity and statehood are not inextricably bound together, and the relationship between the locality and the nation is not invariably a zero-sum conflict between competing and incompatible claims on individual belonging and selfhood.
