Materialities and Traumatic Memories of a Twentieth-Century Greek Exile Island

Abstract

In the twentieth century, over one hundred locations in Greece served as places of political exile and imprisonment for men, women and children. A distinctive example of these painful places is the island of Ai Stratis in the North Aegean Sea. The island was used for political banishment from the 1920s through to the 1960s. This paper will provide a historical and material biography of Ai Stratis before discussing the materiality of this traumatic heritage, and will finish by exploring the potential for an archaeology of exile in Greece.