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

Southern Albania and Epirus in Greece. While the state border did not present a real barrier in
their life before communism, it became practically impassable after 1945. To the people
living in the area a barb wire fence clearly defined its meaning.
Migrations of people, however, nevertheless continued. The movements on the road leading
across the border were replaced with the movements on the roads that connected
Dhërmi/Drimades with places in Central and Northern Albania. Movements thus continued;
only the directions have changed. While the movements before communism were free in their
nature and spread across the whole area of Southern Albania and Epirus, Hohxa’s policies
controlled their directions. In the name of unification of people of Albania, the relocation of
Greek speaking people to the places with Albanian majorities was stimulated.
The movements of people from Dhërmi/Drimades and Himarë/Himara area could according
to de Certeau (1984: 118) be interpreted as ongoing traversals from place to space and back
again. Individuals mapped the space with their movements from one place to another. This
phenomenon held together the space called the region of Epirus until 1945. The movements
towards particular destinations were then blocked and redirected to places in Northern and
Central Albania. After the fall of communism and subsequent massive migrations to Greece
and Italy, the spatial map changed its nature again and connected places in Albania with
places in Greece, Italy and elsewhere.
All these movements, which took place in different historical periods, constituted and defined
various locations of Dhërmi/Drimades in its wider geopolitical and social space. When the
local people, national and international policies, or local and national historiographers try to
“stabilize” and determine the “absolute and truthful” meanings of village’s location, they
come across oppositions, discontinuities and alterations. Many attempts to establish the
boundaries in order to secure the “whereness” of Dhërmi/Drimades and to locate it either in
Albania or Greece may be seen as attempts to establish a fixed location, bringing to a halt the
processes of its ongoing reconstruction and re-appropriation.
The processes of shifting the meanings of people and places involve the ambiguity in names.
Already the name of the village, Dhërmi/Drimades, discloses one of these ambiguities that
constitute the “whereness” of the village. On the one hand, from the perspective of the legal
policies and the mainstream public opinion in Greece, Dhërmi/Drimades and Himarë/Himara
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