When Memory Fails: Things Did Not Happen The Way We Remember Them
When Memory Fails: Things Did Not Happen The Way We Remember Them

Summary/Abstract: This study examines historical memory and how it developed in early Balkan state formation. In the process a collective memory emerged which influenced people’s understanding of the past and shaped their present and future. Using the example of a bona fide Greek nationalist and actor in the so-called Struggle for Macedonia, Athanasios Souliotis-Nikolaidis, this study will illustrate how nationalist attitudes evolved over the years and how they changed from seeking confrontation and domination to searching for cooperation and coexistence. This was the case which led this individual to seek cooperation with other Balkan people and the creation not of a Greater Greece but a federal state where Greeks, Slavs, and Turks, Christians and Muslims, could live and prosper in harmony. The picture that emerges then is not of a one-dimensional individual but a sophisticatedthinker who through his experience understood the need for a better path to the future of the Balkans and the Near East; one who fought his enemy but in the process came to see that his enemy was in many was just like him. While such ideas existed before, they were dismissed as coming from special interests and the “other”. But Souliotis-Nikolaidis, with his impeccable nationalist credential, cannot be so easily dismissed. In short maybe the past is not how we remember it; maybe it is time to realize that even some of the historical players did not view their actions and conditions the way we have been told they did. This might serve as a call to reexamine our knowledge and attitudes about our own histories.

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