Atelier anti-tour inside/outside the walls of Thessaloniki:

pilgrimage/tour in the neighborhoods of the absent, the invisible and the subaltern bodies

Abstract

Within the framework of a Summer School, organized in collaboration with foreign universities and
the French School of Athens on “Religion and Politics: Between res publica and Private Practices”
(September 2023), participation by the Culture-Borders-Gender/Lab (BSOS-PAMAK) included,
among other activities, an anti-tour workshop inside and outside the Eastern Walls of the city. In the
anti-tour atelier, a group of researchers from the perspective of Anthropology, while attempting to
open decolonial methodologies of research, narrative, writing, and interaction with/in the
neighborhoods of the city. This effort also brought to light a reflexive view of anti-tour as a form of
collaboration within the group. This anti-tour atelier that started from the neighborhoods of Ano
Poli and culminated at the Jewish monument of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, bore the
characteristics of a pilgrim procession in the neighborhoods of the excluded, the absent, and the
forgotten from the dominant national narratives of the sovereign Greek state in the northern Greek
public space since 1912. We followed the modality of the Epitaph that even today wanders around
these neighbourhoods, making stops, narrating stories, and offering performative testimonies in
churches, mausoleums, baths, cemeteries, peculiar and marginal buildings. These sacred places, often
driven into collective oblivion, were brought into visibility/life through narratives and performances
about charismatic saints and dervishes, everyday women and subaltern bodies, blessed materialities,
and other beings, from the world of the dead and the uncanny, inside/outside the walls. By
employing decolonial methodologies that trace materialities, humble bodies and popular imagination
on occasion, form a critical public anthropology perspective, we attempted to subvert linear
chronological narratives in the history of the city. As we explored religiosity beyond the boundaries
of orthopraxy (transreligious testimonies), we insisted on the co-articulation of materialities and
subaltern bodies. We engaged with the palimpsest of spatio-representational narratives across
different spatio-temporal contexts through performative practices that highlighted aspects of
pilgrimage at the pilgrimage sites/monuments. Using a multi-sensory approach, we tried to produce knowledge through different experiences of corporeality and performances such as dramaturgical
recitations, soundscapes, tactilities, and smells that recalled “what has been,” and tastes that gained
new meaning in past occasions and spaces. Through this collage of experimental ethnography
(assemblage/rasanblaj) of narrative practices, performed ritually, we sought not only a
counter-narrative of the history of the city’s neighborhoods but also, by conversing with other beings
and worlds, we tried to fortuitously bring back enchantment to the everyday life of the neighborhood.