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

to Entela the elderly woman sees herself in local terms or in terms of ethnicity 7 , placing her
identification in Northern Epirus. In this short example the individual identity is, along with
other determinants such as language, religion and kinship, defined territorially. The identity is
a mobile and unstable relation to difference which always includes the construction of space
(Gupta in Ferguson 2001: 13). Therefore I will be mainly preoccupied with identification (a
living process) rather than with identity as such (a fixed, often politically defined concept).
“Exactly where Northern Epirus begins and ends is another one of those contested issues
involving drawing lines on the map” (Green 2005: 15). While for some the Northern Epirus
straddles the Greek-Albanian border, for others it also includes a part of the Southern Albania,
where predominantly the Greek-speaking population of Christian Orthodox religion lives; and
there are also others, especially the Albanian people, for whom Northern Epirus does not exist
at all. The widest geographical and historical region of Epirus is considered to consist of
Southern Albania and Epirus in Greece, regardless of the Greek-Albanian border (ibid.). After
the foundation of the independent Republic of Albania in 1913, Epirus was divided between
Southern Albania and Epirus in Greece. According to the mainstream public opinion in
Greece the Greek speaking people of Orthodox religion living in Southern Albania are called
Northern Epirots (Vorioepirotes) (see Triandafyllidou and Veikou 2002: 191). According to
the public opinion in Albania they are often referred to by Greeks or Greku or pejoratively
Kaure (non-believers) or Kaur i derit (non-believer-pigs, i.e. Greek pigs).
Throughout the centuries people living in Northern Epirus have travelled to and from the area
mainly because of trading, seasonal work, shepherding or due to their service in different
armies (Winnifrith 2002, Vullnetari 2007). In the early 19 th century the area of today’s
Southern Albania and Epirus in Greece was part of the vilayet with a centre in Ioannina. For
purposes of a tax collecting system Ottoman administration divided all non-Muslim people in
special administrative and organizational units, millets, which incorporated people according
to their religious affiliation, regardless of where they lived, what language(s) they spoke, or
what was the colour of their skin (Glenny 1999: 71, 91-93, 112, 115, Mazower 2000: 59-60,
7 In modern Greek language the term ethnicity derives from the word ethnos which virtually incorporate the
entire range of terminology for nationhood and nationalism (Herzfeld 2005: 113, see also Green 2005: 266 fn.
12). Similar meanings the word ethnicicy has among the people of Dhërmi/Drimades who predominantly use
local Greek dialect and Albanian southern dialect in their day-to-day conversation. In order to avoid this
semantic conflation that do not fully reflect the meanig of ethnicity as defined by Barth (1970 [1969], 1994),
Eriksen (1993), Coen A. P. (1994), Knežević Hočevar (1999), Šumi (2000) et.al. in the continuing part of my
thesis I do not use this term.
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