• 1 Yi-Fu Tuan, 2012, p. 239.
• 2 The colloquial uses of the term homeland can easily be translated as memleket in Turkish, which als (...)

2Because many across the Valley, my research site to the east of Trabzon, had migrated to cities for economic reasons since the 1950s, I inquired why and how Hasan chose to stay in the Valley – especially given the affluence of his family. Explaining that he did not want to live anywhere else but in the Valley, Hasan recounted the hard times and the longing he endured when he left his village for university and how he rushed back whenever he could. He was determined not to leave ever again. Leaving the village, for Hasan, meant “abandon[ing] an important part of” himself.1 Although I had often heard the older men complain about the life in cities, Hasan, I must underline, had economic, social, and cultural means to easily adjust to urban life like many of his friends and family did. After all, most of the rural population across the Valley consisted of people who were fifty or older. And yet, Hasan was adamant in his desire to stay in his ancestral village, following his father’s path. As a highly regarded businessman of the village, Hasan’s father had ventured into Germany in the 1960s as a worker but eventually returned to the Valley in 1974 to start a business and has since then followed a rather reclusive life in this mountainous and geographically secluded village. Why had his father, like Hasan, come back? Hasan casually explained: “dreams.” During his years in Germany, I was told, Hasan’s father had never stopped yearning for and had incessant dreams about the same village we were in. Eventually giving in to the overbearing appeal of his ancestral homeland [memleket],2 he had decided to leave Germany for good, resettled the family in this elevated and green village, squeezed between steep mountain walls, and never left again.

• 3 Yi-Fu Tuan, 2012, p. 234.

3Longing for (one’s) homeland [memleket özlemi] is no doubt a common theme permeating migration experiences across Turkey. And yet, Hasan and his father’s seemingly boundless desire to be in their ancestral village in Trabzon may help us reflect upon a rather intriguing relationality to the landscapes across the Valley: “Can one also fall in love with a geographical place – be swept off one’s feet by a view, a landscape?”3 How does home/land exert such an influence? How is one’s relation to the landscapes affected by the socio-historical trajectories of the community dwelling in there? In the case of Hasan and his father, I particularly ask, which roles these relatively unknown socio-cultural practices (e.g., preservation of an archaic Greek variety) played in configurations of landscapes as homeland?

• 4 Departing from how “place is so much with us, and we with it” and is conventionally conceived to be (...)
• 5 This naming of the Valley as belde-i mübareke, which seems to have been conjured up using a quasi-A (...)
• 6 Yi-Fu Tuan, 2012, distinguishes “rootedness” in a place from having a “sense of place” and defines (...)

4Throughout my ethnographic research, I have been asked by my interlocutors, time and again, the same question: “You love it here, don’t you?” with many presuming that I must have already fallen in love with the green and misty Valley so much that, sooner or later, I was to leave my urban life (in the UK and Turkey) and settle in the Valley. Not loving the place4 they dearly called home/land was unimaginable for my interlocutors, regardless whether they physically remained in the Valley year-around or came back intermittently from wherever they lived and worked. A fascination, I came to notice, permeated their relationship to their ancestral home/land with many travelling for days and hours regularly to simply sit at their terraces to take in the often-foggy scenery. Where outsiders saw somewhat hostile, inhospitable, and infertile land squeezed between steep mountains with incessant rain, local men and women saw a beloved home/land they called half-jokingly belde-i mübareke (sacred district).5 The Valley was a source of fascination, care, and love for my interlocutors, luring them back from wherever they were scattered both in Turkey and abroad. How was I to understand this strong affection towards the landscapes, moving subjects both physically and affectively? Intrigued by this seemingly prevalent fascination with the local landscapes, I ask a number of questions to understand the effects landscapes exert upon social relations of the communities inhabiting this remote space: How does cultural heritage, whether in discreet or explicit forms, inform communal identity and the “senses of place”6 in the Valley? How is intimacy generated and sutured to spaces and to the relations taking place in such spaces, configuring them as home/land?

• 7 For a discussion of the term discreet, please see, L. Mahmud, 2012.
• 8 See, E. Saglam, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2021, and I. Sitaridou, 2014.

5Drawing on ethnographic data, this article strives to attend to these questions arising out of the “discreet”7 preservation of Greek among Turkish-nationalist communities and explores the changing meanings of home/land in relation to this discreet cultural heritage. The arguments presented in the following sections are based on an ethnographic field research conducted in 2015 with rural communities in an elevated valley (henceforth, the Valley) east of Trabzon. The Valley is composed of a number of villages where a local variety of Greek – called Romeyka – with archaic linguistic characteristics are still spoken, albeit discreetly, by communities who identify as Turkish and practice Sunni Islam.8

• 9 S. Feld and K. H. Basso, 1996, p. 6.
• 10 Y. Navaro-Yashin, 2009, p. 8. See also, M. Otis, 2018.

6This article departs from this intriguing presence of Greek to primarily examine the community’s intimate relationships to the landscapes qua their ancestral home/land in the present. The discussion is to help us understand changing dynamics, modalities, and configurations of home/land in contemporary Turkey as well as providing us insights into how landscapes are implicated in the way communities make sense of the past and fashion their identities in the present. Directly engaging with conventional articulations of home/land, especially in the diaspora-migration studies, the findings demonstrate how homeland as a category is incessantly stretched and transfigured in relation to the diverse modalities of imagining, relating, sensing, remembering, and inhabiting places. Attending to these particular social reverberations of localized senses of places – however elusive and spectral they may be – would help us further the discussions around the “landscape as cultural process”9 and how “‘non-human entities’ too may be interpreted as effecting ‘agency’”.10

• 11 E. Casey, 1998, p. x.

8My take on landscapes, it should be noted, covers not only the materiality of the places my interlocutors live on but underlines the social forgings of identity and memory through the mediation of these topographies. Rather than denoting places as “an a priori of our existence on earth”,11 following the footsteps of Casey, I pay particular attention to the very re-configuration of place/space and try to demonstrate how various social, political, mnemonic, affective, and psychic processes are involved in the way we conceive it. Here, place goes well beyond its material/physical characteristics and bounds and is taken to be an integral element of the way socialities are organized, instantiated, and fashioned. Attending to how Greek heritage is accommodated in the present in Trabzon, is an attempt to demonstrate how the landscapes communities dwell in are an integral element of the fashioning of one’s identity as well as an occasion and milieu of remembrance. Landscapes, as this article will demonstrate, exert such socio-mnemonic effects.

• 12 R. I. Cohen, 2018, p. viii.
• 13 Lenhard and Samanani, 2020, p. 1. In the case of the Roma, for instance, Humphris underlines that “ (...)
• 14 Duden states that heimelig and heimlich were etymologically used interchangeably in the pre-modern (...)
• 15 Lenhard and Samanani, 2020, p. 2.

9Defining home/land is not easy. Conventionally home may have material, spatial, relational, or emotional/affective dimensions which are at once both prevalent and elusive.12 “It may evoke warm feelings of belonging,” as Lenhard and Samanani indicate, as well as alienation, oppression, inequality, and exploitation.13 Reflecting the significant differences in etymologically related German words Heim [home, n.], heimelig [homely, adj.], heimlich [secret, hidden, discreet; adj.], and unheimlich [uncanny, adj.],14 home/land both invokes familiarity, belonging, and proximity as well as disfiguring and unmaking intimacies, relations, and memories. Because of “fundamental diversity of what home might entail”,15 homeland comes to ascribe a sense of historicity and belonging to particular localities where intimate relations reign supreme to generate a feeling of community “dwelling” in a place as well as experiences of alienation, oppression, and anxiety.

• 16 Yi-Fu Tuan, 2012, p. 231; P. Blickle, 2002, p. 4.
• 17 C. Applegate, 1990, p. 9; P. Blickle, 2002, p. 7.
• 18 A. Biemann, 2018, p. 123.
• 19 F. Eigler and J. Kugele, 2012, p. 5; C. Applegate, 1990, p. 4. Also see, P. Blickle, 2002.

11This seemingly geographical quality of the term, however, should not lead us to assume homeland as simply an attribute of geographical – albeit in changing scales – origin since, in close connection to the idea of home, it involves senses of belonging, familiarity, intimacy, and memory.16 In his discussion of the term in the German context, Peter Blickle underlines how homeland is “both a spiritualized province (a mental state turned inside out) and a provincial spirituality (a spatially perceived small world turned outside in).”17 Homeland’s spatial qualities, hence, are not limited to this idea of origin for the self/community but go well beyond spatiality to instigate sociocultural, political, affective, and institutional reconfigurations in gendered ways. Homelands within the scope of this article, hence, denotes social “imaginations” of origin,18 as widely discussed in the diaspora literature, encompassing not solely the topographical elements but also collective memory, senses of belonging, enactments upon that particular space as well as socio-political strategies emanating from these enactments and relationalities.19

• 20 See also S. Chan, 2018.
• 21 M. Serres and B. Latour, 1990, p. 60.
• 22 D. Knight, 2017, p. 28.
• 23 M. Serres and B. Latour, 1990, p. 60-61. See also N. Argenti, 2017.
• 24 See Y. Navaro-Yashin, 2009 and 2012.
• 25 C. Stewart, 2003, p. 481.

12In a similar vein, it should be underlined that our senses of temporality are also affected by articulations of and relations to the landscapes we dwell in, and vice versa, as imaginations of homeland do not simply invoke an idea of space binding individuals dispersed across different geographies together. The very idea of a homeland, especially of more local scales, also issues forth alternative modalities of time and remembrance through which the past is sensed, preserved, and engaged in the present.20 Negating its conventional conceptualisations as a homogeneous and standardized flow within which events occur through a linear sequence, time emerges as an “object, a circumstance, is thus polychromic, multitemporal, and […] is gathered together, with multiple pleats”.21 “Time is,” Knight argued in relation to contemporary Greek experience, “fluctuating, folded, with currents and counter-currents that create a ‘scrambled’ experience of the past in the present”.22 It is not apart from the space and does not follow what we conventionally assume to be a linear direction, but rather embodies a “topography” within which multiple temporalities are intermingled with dynamic proximities.23 Yael Navaro’s research on Turkish-Cypriot communities, for instance, highlights how objects and places emerge as bearers of the past and affect the present profoundly.24 Through a cross-reading of psychoanalysis and phenomenology, Charles Stewart explores treasure hunts as “by-products of […] intense historical consciousness in Greece”, underlining how different temporalities are condensed and implicated across landscapes and materialities in the present.25 Going well beyond the limits of archival-historiographic accounts and their coherent linear narratives, memories and how we make sense of the past may hence take many forms in relation to local particularities: magicalities, and dreams, hauntings, affects, materialities, places, and corporeal movements.

• 26 D. Aksel, 2019, p. 30-31; C. Applegate, 1990, p. 9; F. Eigler and J. Kugele, 2012, p. 3; R. Humphri (...)
• 27 A. Appadurai, 1996, p. 188. Also see P. Blickle, 2012, pp. 58-61.
• 28 C. Applegate, 1990, p. 3. Applegate further explores how the term took its contemporary form alongs (...)
• 29 P. Blickle, 2012, pp. 63 and 61, respectively.
• 30 P. Blickle, 2012, p. 63.

13In scholarly analyses, articulations of homeland have long been accompanied by discussions on diasporas. As underlined by various research on transnational networks and diasporic identities across contexts, conventional conceptualizations of diaspora presumed (a desire to return to) an (imagined) homeland, implying that homeland’s symbolic significance is dependent on this spatial/temporal separation between one’s current dwelling and their origin.26 And yet, new meanings ascribed to the term homeland, as Appadurai writes, underlines diverse modalities in which communities engage with and relate to the places they hail from, move across, and dwell in (often fragmentally).27 In his exploration of the idea of Heimat in the German context, Blicke traces the transformation of the term in the post-1990 period and notes that Heimat, the German counterpart of the idea of home/land,28 is no longer “a gendered space with clear boundaries” as it was in the past (as in the “motherland”) and has ceased being “a place of shared identity and shelteredness”.29 Yearning for this, what was long thought to be a spatial quality, has been transformed to a relatively recent feeling within which “one tries at once to reach this longed for space and to escape it.”30

• 31 Due to ethical concerns around the privacy and well-being of my interlocutors, I will not specify t (...)
• 32 Of District [ilçe] has traditionally covered the whole valley but Çaykara was established as a sepa (...)

18 The research site that I call the Valley is situated to the east of Trabzon, a province stretching from west to east along the Black Sea littoral in the north and the steep mountain range to the south.31 Rising immediately at the shore, the mountain range leaves little space for agricultural activity or settlement. Cross cutting the province, rivers run from the elevated southern mountain rises to the shore in the north, forming successive valleys that run parallel to one another. Social and economic life in Trabzon has historically been centred around coastal market towns, which have developed where rivers reach out to the sea and create relatively plainer space for settlement, agriculture, trade, and transportation. Hinterland valleys of these port towns, with elevation increasing as one moves from the northern coasts to the pastures to the south, are dotted with villages scattered across mountain slopes toward inland. Within this socio-geographical configuration, the Valley is located to the south of the socio-politically significant town of Of, one of the most important social and economic centres of Trabzon. Of Valley constitutes the easternmost valley system of the province and has historically encompassed all settlements from the littoral to the pastures on top of the mountain range till the administrative re-organizations in 1948 and 1990.32 This research pertains to the communities scattered across this southernmost section of the Of Valley, stretching around 40 km to the south toward the pastures on top of the mountain range.

• 33 See M. Meeker 2002 and 2004.

19Although tea and hazelnut are widely cultivated across the Eastern Black Sea region, the area that I focus in the article is not climatically and geographically suitable for the cultivation of either of these products. Considering the fact that even subsistence farming is severely hindered by local conditions, it has been customary for men to venture outside their village to work as imams and muftis, scholars, merchants, craftsmen, and bureaucrats.33 This strong track record of participation in socio-political and juridico-economic structures of both the Empire and the Republic is still observable as men and women from the Valley continue to put great social emphasis on education and fill a considerable proportion of high-level bureaucratic posts, including the top cadres of the military and government.

• 34 H. Bostan, 2005, pp. 18-20.
• 35 See H. Lowry, 2009.
• 36 It should, however, be indicated that the littoral has two other communities with comparable histor (...)
• 37 For a linguistic analysis, see I. Sitaridou, 2014 and H. Özkan, 2013.

20Historical records indicate that the settlements in this section of the Of Valley emerged in the second half of the 15^th century, as Christian Orthodox communities, in the immediate aftermath of the Ottoman takeover of the city of Trabzon in 1461.34 In the following period, these settlements across the Valley were gradually Islamised with a Muslim majority emerging by the late 17^th century.35 Intriguingly though, the communities have kept on using the local variety of Greek, unlike others across Anatolia, which, upon conversion to Islam, have dropped their pre-Islamic languages (mostly Armenian or Greek) and gradually switched to Turkish (in some cases, the shift to Turkish has occurred without even an accompanying conversion to Islam, as in the case of Karamanlis).36 With religion as the defining criterion of the Exchange of Populations Agreement between Greece and Turkey [Mübadele] in 1923, Greek-speaking Christians of the Trabzon region in general – settled mostly toward the coastal sections in the case of the Valley – were forced to leave for Greece, while Greek-speaking communities of the Valley professing Islam were able to remain in their homeland, explaining how this archaic Greek variety is still present in the region. Local communities have retained their pre-Islamic language, called Romeyka (Rumca in Turkish), and continue using it up to this day. The fluency in Greek among communities across the Valley has been fading consistently, especially in the last decades, due to education policies (solely in Turkish), absence of socio-cultural and institutional support, social stigma around Greek heritage, and migration of speakers to urban centres. Although the continued presence of Greek is overall known by neighbouring communities, the language has not enjoyed the popular attention or revival attempts that other minority heritages experienced (e.g., Armenian, Laz, or Kurdish) in the early 2000s and it still remains difficult, for the wider public, to pinpoint Romeyka to a particular community or site in the Black Sea. Although a few scholars initiated preliminary linguistic analysis, so far, no socio-cultural analysis has been conducted on how these (Turkish) nationalist communities continue to speak Romeyka, other than this ethnographic study.37

• 38 Also see G. Bakırezer and Y. Demirer, 2009; U. Biryol, 2012.

21It should be underlined that the Turkish nationalist sentiments are remarkably strong among communities of the Valley, who overwhelmingly vote for right-wing nationalist-conservative political parties.38 Locals characterise themselves first and foremost as patriots and nationalists. Currently, most men and women in the Valley identify as Turkish with direct lineages from the Turkic tribes from Central Asia, as I mentioned above, and passionately disassociate with Greek heritage and the (Christian) Greeks [Rumlar] who had lived in the area till 1923.

• 39 The legal code regulating the property regime in pastures has recently changed, rendering the pastu (...)

24Settlements in the Valley consist generally of three layers that are inhabited in different periods of the year. Villages, mostly below the forests, act as the primary residential spaces communities live in. Due to their proximity to the town centre, most villages are well connected to the road network throughout the year. Situated in or right above the forest, kom, or mezire, on the other hand, refers to rather rudimentary settlements, often accessible solely by trails across forests. Traditionally, communities used to move their cattle up to the koms in April/May prior to their move to pastures in early June to spend the summer there as a refuge from the humidity of the season. Covered in meters-deep snow throughout the winter months, pastures [yayla in Turkish and parxara in Romeyka] become accessible in late spring months for communities to make use of meadows on top of the mountain range. Every village across the Valley has a historically designated pasture assigned to their collective use.39 Housing in pastures generally consist of a two-storey structure with the upstairs spared for the family while the ground floor is used as a barn and storage. Moving up to pastures [yaylaya çıkmak] in late spring (or early summer) is a significant communal occasion many locals eagerly wait for. In the past, and to a certain extent in the present, the journey to pastures is recounted to have been an event-in-itself for local communities as families – often led by the cattle back in the day – moved across the forest trails for a day or two. As construction in pastures has legally been restricted – which now changed due to the emerging touristic potential, settlements used to have rather simple structures scattered across meadows with spectacular views over the Valley and the mountains, augmenting the feeling of being in pristine nature.

• 40 Communities have been resettled in Van, Antakya, Gökçeada/Tenedos of Çanakkale, and Cyprus due to t (...)

25Local communities’ care toward the landscape, however, is not limited to their enjoyment of the scenic views the geography offers. Their almost envious preservation of the forests stands in clear contrast to widespread destruction thereof in the Turkish countryside. Local communities consciously refrain from overusing resources across the woods and do their best to ensure the health of the local ecosystem. Echoing their care for and preservation of forests, they labour insistently to preserve tracts of land by their houses. Local women and men insistently cultivate these relatively small fields to grow vegetables even though both the climate (especially incessant rain and flash floods) and the wild animals (especially bears and boars) wreak havoc on their workings. Furthermore, these fields are eroded fast since the valley walls are steep and the rain is almost incessant, causing occasional floods and landslides. The Valley had many significant episodes of such natural disasters – the landslides in the early 20^th century being the most violent ones with many having resulted in fatalities and the destruction of neighbourhoods.40 To reverse the adverse effects of erosion and to preserve their precious plot, local men and women engage in a biennial process of toprak kaldırma [trans., lifting the soil] through which neighbours help each other to carry the eroded soil from the bottom of the hill back up to the plot on their backs every second year. This ceaseless labouring to keep the plots intact is remarkable given their relative infertility – only a narrow range of vegetation (as in kara lahana [kale], maize, squash, or beans) can be cultivated in small quantities and they do not always ripen because of the chronic lack of sunlight.

• 41 See K. Öktem, 2008.

26Supplementing this care of local men and women for the landscapes they dwell in or hail from, it should be underlined that places and topographical features across the Valley are all conjured in Romeyka. Villages (e.g., Ğorğoras, Zelaka, or Oxena/Ogene), pastures (e.g., Mavreyas and Ma’akambos), koms, species of trees and other plants (e.g., ifteri [fern], likarba [berries], tsifin [a type of flower], animals (such as gogli/kohli/kohlidi [snail], kunkuna [weasel?]), paths, estates/patronymics (such as Gargar, Kalençsi, Kunkuna, Similo, or Rizi), slopes, rocks, neighbourhoods, crossings, clearings, spots, hills, caves, woods, and streams have Romeyka names that only locals know of and navigate across. Although villages and neighbourhoods have also Turkish names that have been generated since the 1970s as part of Turkification policy of the state,41 locals rarely use them (except in their official dealings) and still overwhelmingly use Romeyka names in their everyday life.

• 42 E. Saglam, 2019 and 2020 (b).
• 43 N. Abraham and M. Torok, 1994, p. 127; N. Rand 1994, p. 16.

27Hence, settlements across the Valley have two socio-symbolic dimensions: a Turkish one that has arrived in the area relatively recently and is accessible by the public but remains rather distant, undetailed and generic; while the Romeyka one is embedded in the collective memory and emerges as intimate, mnemonic, local, and timeless. Only if one knows the Romeyka name, can one see the Valley as locals do, undergirding senses of familiarity and homeliness. The ability to name things in Romeyka as an exclusive capacity of the communities dwelling in the Valley, as I argue elsewhere,42 both reiteratively “incorporates”43 the language into the topography in its seemingly dead and silent presence as well as enchanting the landscape as the depository of this un-signified and un-public heritage.

• 44 There are a number of reasons for the relative public invisibility of Romeyka in contemporary Turke (...)
• 45 See E. Saglam, 2020 (a) and (b).
• 46 See B. Anderson, 1991 [1983].
• 47 H. Özkan, 2013, p. 138. In his preliminary work, linguist Özkan reproduces these nationalist assump (...)

29I shall start with an exploration of how the discreet preservation of Romeyka renders the Valley as an intimate and (communally) private space for the communities. As Romeyka has been banished from the public,44 the Valley as a rather secluded and communal space emerges as the only possible site to preserve the remnants of Greek heritage in contemporary Trabzon. Above, I indicated how Romeyka provides an intimate mapping of the Valley that only locals know of. This communally private status of Romeyka allows locals to accommodate the abjected fragments of the past within the present without having to radically re-position themselves as well as without contravening the nationalist ideology and how they identify themselves as (nationalist) Turkish subjects (considering that nationalist matrix imagines mutually exclusive categories, Turkish vs. Greek, and renders Greek heritage incompatible with Turkish identity). Many of my respondents indicated how they felt uncomfortable, at a certain point in their lives, with the fact that they natively spoke a Greek variety.45 Individuals recounted stories of refusing to speak Romeyka for a period of time during their youth; for instance, a number of villages, I was told, banned the use of Romeyka in the 1960s and 1970s in order to “leave this Greek residue behind.” Their individual and collective discomfort, I noted, stemmed from conventional articulations of national identity as an “innate” and “perennial” quality of selves and communities, that was crystallized best by one’s mother tongue (“If one speaks Greek natively, s/he must be Greek” this convention presumed). Although such primordialist assumptions have long been dismissed by scholarly analyses which emphasise the socially-constructed “imagination” of a clearly bounded national body,46 popular nationalist rhetoric continues exerting a great degree of influence and expects “a Greek (T Rum) identity lying beneath their Turkish national identity”47 if one’s mother tongue is Greek, explaining why most of my respondents secluded this language to the privacy of intracommunal encounters.

• 48 In Freud’s original text (2003 [1919], pp. 12-13), unheimlich denotes the estrangement of “somethin (...)
• 49 A. Gordon, 2008, p xvi. See, S. Frosh, 2013.

30Landscapes across the Valley, hence, emerge as depositories for fragments that are deemed “inappropriate” within the existing socio-political structure, which posits Greek identity/heritage as antagonistic to Turkish identity/heritage. As a cultural practice that blends (presumably) irreconcilable Turkish and Greek identities, Romeyka could, hence, exist only in discreet and communally private forms so as not to hinder the smooth “integration” of local communities into the Turkish identity. “Incorporated” into the landscapes, Romeyka has been turned into a silenced and un-representable element of local culture that nevertheless permeates social relations and mediates collective memory. What is shrouded in the Valley or what cannot be integrated into the “appropriate” scheme of Turkishness, in this sense, seems to be buried (alive) across intimate places, hosted in the “natural” features of the space that are familiar and proximate, yet simultaneously alien and distant. Romeyka, hence, is a mark simultaneously both of intimacy and alienation, of familiarity and distance, of feelings of being-at-home and unheimlichkeit,48 and of remembering and forgetting. It both instantiates the Valley as an intimate space and yet incessantly reminds why it had to be secluded to the (communally) private encounters – its popular associations with Greek culture/identity at the expense of locals’ ardent Turkish nationalism. It both marks and guards the borders of the family and community – since knowing Romeyka would automatically mean that you are from the area – while it also requires one to distance himself/herself from the heritage and the landscape in order to enshrine his/her Turkishness. It simultaneously generates intimate “senses of place” through issuing forth affective links to the very places one dwells in and also renders it “haunted” as it hosts spectres of the past that are no longer welcome.49

• 50 E. Çaylı, 2016, p. 7.
• 51 K. H. Basso, 1996, p. 54.
• 52 E. S. Casey, 1996, p. 25.
• 53 E. W. Said, 2002, p. 247.
• 54 J. Fontein, 2011, p. 713.
• 55 J. Fontein, 2011, p. 715.
• 56 Y. Navaro-Yashin, 2009, p. 8.
• 57 Y. Navaro-Yashin, 2009, p. 16. Rebecca Bryant’s research in Cyprus also produces similar insights. (...)

32How locals relate to the places they dwell in highlight what role materialities play in this configuration. Places emerge not solely as “passive backdrops”50 of human encounters but as active agents that are implicated in these interactions as well. They are always social51 and closely related to collective and individual memories through which subjects are incessantly re-configured.52 “Places stimulate not only memory but dreams and fantasies,”53 as Said says, and this intriguing and productive quality, especially with regards to how it is implicated in socialities, constitutes the gist of my understanding of how locals in the Valley engage with the place. In his analysis of graves and ruins in post-colonial African encounters, Joost Fontein, for instance, argues that these “materialities of belonging,”54 as crystallised in the case of graves and ruins, help us to comprehend the role played by the landscape in the processes of subjectivation and how they “continue to be ‘active’ in the way that they enable, constrain, and structure contests of belonging”.55 Especially relevant with regards to both remembrance and subjectivation, Yael Navaro-Yashin touches upon how materialities and the way they are related give rise to a specific subjectivity through her ethnographic analysis of Turkish-Cypriot post-conflict space. Following Latour’s articulations around how “‘non-human entities’ too may be interpreted as effecting ‘agency,’”56 she highlights the way uncanny materiality and the landscapes induce memory to produce affects, as the geography is imbued with memories of conflict and violence.57 Thus, subjects’ relationship to the landscape also tells us a lot about how the past is engaged with and how collective memories are accounted for in the present.

• 58 M. Otis, 2018, p. 30.
• 59 C. Applegate (1990, p. 14) explores similar social tensions and anxieties in the German case.

33Landscapes, then, can be considered as depositories of collective memory, which is banished from the domain of (national) history, generating another modality of remembrance of the past in topographical, material forms. The tension and incommensurability between what local memories and knowledge bring forward and what nationalist historiography and ideology preach for, in this sense, might be interlinked to the very animation of the places people dwell in through which unaccounted memories are retained and engaged in different forms, as in the case of the discreet preservation of Greek heritage in the Valley. The privacy and discretion of Romeyka is possibly related to these endeavours through which we observe how places are implicated in the way the past is engaged, inscribing their effects on subjectivities and socialities. Home and homeland, as the most intimate configurations of places we inhabit, may have an even more augmented impact on the way individuals and communities relate to one another, mark their social boundaries, and remember the past. The senses of the place, as an aggregate of affective encounters and social relations emanating from one’s relations to and within a particular space, then, not only render home/land intimate and familiar but also unleash a range of other individual and collective stipulations that both enhance and undo this conventional sense of being-at-home.58 Nationalism in the Turkish context required communities to forego their pre-nationalistic identifications and imaginations altogether in public but, these very same communities have also employed various strategies to retain their socio-cultural distinctions and have often found imaginative ways to accommodate them in rather discreet and privatized forms. The conundrum in the Valley has mostly been around the balance within which communities could both embrace the homogenizing ideals of the modernist nationalism while retaining their rather local differences through their re-articulations of the very idea of home/land.59