Remembering Absence

Nicolas Argenti, himself a descendant of the Chiot diaspora, spent time on Chios while Greece was caught in the sovereign debt crisis of 2010. He centres his study on several islanders whose lives mirror the upheavals reshaping the Aegean island. When these people describe their present worries and frustrations, they keep returning to earlier catastrophes: the German occupation and famine of the Second World War, the 1922-23 exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey, and the 1822 massacres that devastated the island as the Greek War of Independence began.

Argenti shows how this layered sense of time is rooted in local life, in commemorative rites, visionary experiences, an annual rocket battle, and other bodily practices. Together these create ways of remembering that challenge the assumptions of trauma studies and present Chiots as people actively shaping their own place in history. The book deliberately mixes historical writing, recollection, faith, and myth. Argenti draws on unpublished letters from survivors of 1822 and their heirs, as well as family stories passed down orally and the things families leave unsaid, where the island appears as a presence that is hard to grasp yet impossible to ignore.

Focusing on how memory and a shared experience of time were uprooted and passed between two peoples, Argenti also reflects on his own return to Chios. In that encounter the usual division between the outside researcher and the community being studied breaks down, and the two roles blur together.