Resisting clearance and reclaiming place in Cyprus’ state forests through the work of heritage

Abstract

The British took over administrative control of Cyprus in 1878 and three years later all uncultivated land was converted into State Forest. The removal of people from the forest over the following 60 years had long term social impacts. Today clearance is manifest in the absence of a connection and knowledge of the forest and its past inhabitants. This paper explores how clearance is resisted in ruralCyprus through the practice and performance of heritage. It is derived from the community-engaged Pathways to Heritage Project that sought to understand the places and practices of significance to the village of Nikitari located on the outskirts of the Adelphi State Forest, Cyprus. I focus on two stories of resistance. Elder Panayiotis Alexandrou Loppas grew up in the forest and spent his life resisting clearance through visiting his places of significance and performing memory. He reworks the past in order that he and his ancestors are remembered into the future.Teachers and pupils of the Asinou Regional Primary School chose the abandoned village of Asinou as the anchor for a new school identity. Their research transformed this forgotten place into a heritage site while setting the foundations for a new regional identity.

Traditional Wine Landscape as a Rural Heritage:

“…The historical and traditional structures and processes of landscape transformation that maintain a traditional design are more sustainable, multifunctional, biodiverse, and resilient (Calabrò & Vieri, 2018). As Gibson (2020) refers, culture and heritage make a link with the past that could create value, reinforcing economic, cultural, social and sustainable growth.…”

Chasing Future Feelings: A Practice-led Experiment with Emergent Digital Materialities of Heritage

“…As a historical archaeologist, my brief was to record and analyze the built traces of the recent past -defined as the Ottoman (1571-1878) and British colonial periods (1878-1960) -particularly abandoned and still occupied rural villages, water mills, water management systems and other agricultural remnants such as threshing floors. These were the traces of daily rural life from the past 400 years -the distinctive evidence of intensive agricultural production from the Ottoman period, and of the economic, environmental and social changes wrought by British colonial policies, as well as by local resistance and responses to those events (Given 2002;Gibson 2020).…”

“…TAESP's oral histories and the project's close attention to the densely networked social landscape led to a focus on the mobilities of both the recent and distant past in this rural region (Given et al 2013;Gibson 2020). In part it was the evidence of constant movement, flux and flexibility, changing environmental, economic and political circumstances, that took the study team away from traditional phenomenological approaches and towards a focus on 'conviviality' (Given 2013), movement and becoming, reinforcing the appropriateness of the practice-led, ethnographic (finding ways to follow) methods we adopted for our new digital engagement with place.…”