Memory Walking and Nostalgia

Just returned from Crete, visiting a friend who grew up in the capital Heraklion. We were given an amazing tour of the city centre that was based on her memory of what was there when she lived in the city during a variety of different ages. Seeing past the numerous cafes and bars a new city began emerging. Hidden under the parasols and flat screen tv's of the multiple venues, were beautiful facades of stately homes that housed a variety of characters who came to life among the cobbled lanes. The white noise of chatting people and buzzing phones, became the ghost sound of a child's bicycle racing down the slanted alleys, or the old woman chasing them with a pot of boiling water.

A new city emerged, like Raban's Soft City, one of histories and stories, one which seemed much more local as a social network. Raban tell us 'the city, our great modern form, is soft, amenable to a dazzling and libidinous variety of lives, dreams and interpretations'. It was this soft amenable city that came alive with the bench behind the square where lovers once met now empty, the popular hair dressers studio where the scraping of chairs being pulled out for customers was heard around the corner but is now turned residential, the childhood home transformed into a health spa yet retaining the original tiles and doors, allowing the phantoms of nostalgia to continue to inhabit the hard city. The hard city that retains its shape while the soft city lives and dies within it. 

Going on this walk around Heraklion opened up a past, re-awoke a memory, like Lazarus it brought to life a narrative that once was but had died. The deep nostalgia that punctuated the derive was palpable and I felt a strange sense of both belonging to the place and envying the memory. Somehow wanting to be a part of that which was never mine. It reminded me of Boym's The Future of Nostalgia and her rich analyses of the workings on memory on society and city. She tells us 'the past of the city... is not entirely legible; it is irreducible to any anachronistic language; it suggests other dimensions of the lived experience and haunts the city like a ghost.'

This was an alternate ghost tour of a city, a rich and vibrant walk down memory lane that made me really truly appreciate Heraklion and see it for what it was and had once been.