Delusion street: Commemoration and monumentality in post-Ottoman Iraklio, Crete

The complex memorial practices that have developed along the street named in commemoration of a massacre of the Christians of the city by Muslim irregulars in 1898 demonstrate an ambivalence towards the transition to the post-ottoman nation-state, one aspect of which is the dialectic that develops between absence and presence of material traces of the Ottoman past. A second aspect is the non-linear temporality within which historical events are remembered. Official commemoration practices have shaped plural memories and often conflicting accounts of the events into a single narrative of modernization, to justify the rebuilding of the city according to western precepts. Reactions to this process did not take the shape of political resistance, but emerged as acts of refusal that create telling absences in the archive and ironic statements that form a genealogy of the ambivalence contemporary Irakliots feel towards the official state and its account of progress to modernity.