The paper explores how the local people and emigrants who live in Greece and keep returning almost every year to their natal village constitute their area as an 'independent' region and strive to place it in 'Europe', represented by the European Union and thought of as a cluster of ‘Western’ European countries. The ethnographic focus is on the pilgrimage to Stavridi on the evening before the Dormition of the Theotokos, one of the most important Christian Orthodox religious feasts. The emigrants’ continuing returns to Himarë/Himara and their pilgrimage to Stavridi are a constitutive and constituting processes through which they negotiate their social boundaries and constitute the porosity of the Albanian-Greek border. By narrating past and present movements they reconstruct themselves and ‘their’ area and constitute it as part of Europe. The pilgrimage could be interpreted as a trope of a route, with its temporal and spatial dimensions related to the processes of place and identity formation.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 32324653