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

These multiple voices are revealed through people’s stories presented in Chapter One. They
tell us about how the size of Himarë/Himara area has changed through centuries; how names
of the villages and people have always been ambiguous and changeable; how people’s selfdeclaration
can change; which languages were present and how they were intertwined; how
numerous the chapels and religious practices are; how population can be counted and
categorized in opposing ways; and how understanding of kinship, its inclusion or exclusion,
can also change. All these stories are similar to the remembrances of older villagers: they map
different kinds of village locatedness. The stories are caught in a continuous process of
(be)coming. Therefore, they escape fixed and closed categories, which different political and
economical administrations or even people themselves, are trying to impose.
Chapter Two tries to uncover the history in order to relate this unpredictable changeability to
its historical context. The history is today, in post-communist Albania, redefined through a
process of re-writing the past. All of the ambiguities regarding people’s names and place
names, minority issues, belonging and locatedness of the village become in this way a part of
single-mindedness, a subject of unifying view of the past, which serves to reach the goals of
the present time. An overview of historiographers’ works (especially those published during
last seven years), which either represent a pro-Albanian, pro-Greek or pro-local points of
view, shows us how these historiographers try to situate the village on a historical and
geopolitical map of nation-states. Their discourse shows that they conceptualize nation-states
as solid entities, which divide people according to their language, territory, and national
belonging since ever.
Changeable numbers, self-declaration and village names find their unity and singularity in
national categories, which were enforced upon people’s lives during the times of communism.
The three-meter high, high-voltage fence has at that time clearly marked the state border, not
only on the political map of Europe, but also in everyday life of the people, who were
exclusively defined as either Albanian or Greek. When the state border cut the road in half the
movements and travels between both parts of the area were firstly obstructed in 1913 and then
completely stopped after 1945. Although peoples’ movements continued, they changed their
direction towards the interior of the country.
I have shown throughout my thesis that the construction of space is continuous and
irreversible process. People of Dhërmi/Drimades themselves participate in this construction
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