university of nova gorica graduate school contested spaces and ...

A long time ago, about 300 B.C., the first inhabitants lived by the sea. The area was
called Meghalihora (big space) and its inhabitants were known as the Chaonians. They
were wild people who ate raw fish. Sometime later these people moved to the hills
because they were constantly threatened by pirates who came from the sea. The pirates
were stealing women and material possessions. Therefore the first inhabitants were
forced to move to the hills where they built houses from the stones collected in the
mountains. This was around 12th or 13th Century A.D[…].
A similar story was recalled by a widower Nikola, who was born in 1921 in
Dhërmi/Drimades. Nikola married within the village, where he lived for all his life. During
the times of communism he worked as a shepherd in the village cooperative. Nowadays he
lives alone in the house of his father that was rebuilt with the financial help of his three sons
(one of them died a few years ago) in 2000. Nikola has seven children, among whom one
lives in Dhërmi/Drimades and the rest in Greece. One August afternoon I met Nikola in front
of his house. He was on his way to the village kafeneio, where he is a regular guest every
morning and evening. Soon our chat evolved into a debate about the village and its people in
the past. Nikola told me the following:
In 600 B.C. people used to live down by the sea. They were autochthones who called
their settlement Meghalihora. They had problems with pirates, therefore they moved
to the hills, to somewhere where the small village of Ilias begins. Through generations
they multiplied and moved to other places where they founded the villages that are a
part of the Himara. At that time there were 56 villages, but because of the Turks only
seven remained till the present time […].
The above mentioned accounts are just two of many which I had the opportunity to listen to
and record during my stay in the village. Regardless of different biographical backgrounds of
Spiros and Nikola, the main points of their stories are practically the same. Both describe the
origin or the ethnogenesis of the people of Dhërmi/Drimades which they locate in the Big
Space or Meghalihora where the life of people was supposedly harmonious. Spiros said that
Meghalihora (today called Dhraleo) used to be settled by the Chaonians, one of the Epirote
tribes whose origin represents an important part in debates and polemics of contemporary
scholars.
The contents of both stories put forth the ideas of primacy, autochthonism and homogeneity
of the village people and describes their linear and continuous development throughout the
centuries. While recounting the story of origin, Spiros and Nikola construct the place of their
origin which they describe as big and spacious and as place of their belonging. After the
resettlement of the “autochthonous” people from the coastal plains up to the hills the unity
and spaciousness of the place diminished and gradually dispersed into many smaller places on
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