It is the silence that I recall most from that day in early October 2020, when I visited the ruins of Moria. The uncanny and strange silence of the place that I remembered so alive and so full of buzz. January 2020 it was, when I was here last. The soundscape then was very different. I recall the winter sun; I still hear the sound of an ax falling on olive trees. It was a rare sunny interval in the midst of the winter, and people were out chopping firewood. Children were out, too, playing, their voices still in my ears. I recall how stunned I was then, when I realized the extent of the Moria settlement (Hamilakis 2022). It had covered not only the “Olive Grove” or “Jungle” areas to the east of the walled compound but all the hills around it, to its north and west, extending way back from the main road and entrance, and high up the hill. It had even nearly reached the area where asylum seekers from central Africa, Christians, used to find refuge, their own Mount of Olives, to perform their ceremonies, to send to the skies their chanting. It was a peaceful place up there, back in 2017. Not so in late 2019 and 2020.
Now, instead of chopped firewood and children’s voices, mostly silence. Silence that was, however, punctuated by strange noises: dog noises, cat noises. I then remembered that the settlement of 20,000 people had attracted many stray cats and dogs, and I recalled that they were fed by the inhabitants, shared in some of the food their human neighbors struggled to prepare every day. They also often enjoyed the lion’s share from the camp food prepared by the subcontracted catering company, food that was mostly rejected by humans, as they found it inedible. The millions of euros that centralized food provision contract, ill-spent, the mountain of wasted food, the animals that it attracted from nearby: the migration industry and its multispecies entanglements. I know for a fact that, of those cats and dogs, some had been adopted by asylum seekers themselves; strong bonds must have been created, echoing Manus Island and its dogs in the stories narrated by Behrouz Boochani (2021). Some of these animals must have left with the Moria inhabitants, in those terrible nights and days of September, when they gathered what they could and abandoned the burning camp. But most animals stayed behind. They belonged to the place. They have been here, hungry for almost a month now. And they were wandering around. The barking was penetrating, sad, terrible. I hear that some asylum seekers and people from the town were touched by their plight and have come here to feed them. But it’s not enough, and it has been almost a month. Suddenly, as we were walking the cement road up the hill on the eastern side, we heard loud noises and saw inside the fenced compound a pack of angry dogs ferociously chasing a frightened cat in and out of the burnt and ravaged containers. “They are going to kill her, they are gonna eat her,” G. said, agitated, and rushed to chase them away. . . . And what happened to the bird that was kept in this burnt cage?
But there were some human noises, too. Occasionally, a group of young people, most likely volunteers for migrant support NGOs, would wander, like us, among the ruins and stop and comment at specific spots. A heritage space already? No, more likely a landscape of ruination, suspended between two temporal states, a landscape going through the time of agony (Gonzalez-Ruibal 2014), not a living site, nor a mummified heritage locale. What is to happen to this place? If the government authorities have their way, it will become a park (a park?), so the urbanite conservative prime minister said, or it will be planted again with olive trees, so another politician said. Erasure by nature seems to be the site’s fate, desired by people in high places, oblivious perhaps to the persistence and resilience of material memory.
There were other human voices, too, more animated, from people indifferent to our presence, hard at work, eager to get going: a large group of men, women, and children, many possibly from the Roma community, but not only, coming to take things away, to scavenge for scrap metal and other usable and recyclable things. They were working primarily inside the walled compound where most metal could be found; the meager materials of the encampment around it, mostly wood, stone, plastic sheets and tarp, and water bottles, were of less interest to them.
D. wanted to show me the new location of the school and the art studio operated by the Wave of Hope for the Future, the self-help mutual-aid initiative started by Afghani people and with whom I collaborated in the staging of the Transient Matter exhibition (Hamilakis 2021; see contribution by Farzad). I recalled my last visit to the school, the community library, and the studio, crammed in the “Jungle,” between closely spaced habitation tents and a mosque. Later in 2020, I saw in their Facebook posts that they were building a new, larger one in the area behind the walled compound. D. tells me that it was because the large NGO that was in charge of the “Olive Grove” and “Jungle” areas, wanted them out. As we reached the spot, the traces were unmistakable: a large pile of white ash where the library was, many burnt acrylic paint tubes and metal cases containing paintbrushes where the art studio once stood, and the large, rectangular empty space where the schoolrooms were.
