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Chania
The Making of "Home" away from Home:
The Multicultural Festival in Chania Greece, as a case study.
Dr. Elia A. Vardaki

Abstract:
This presentation is about "de-territorialisation" of locales and the role played by transnational communities to this end. I am interested in the way migrants use objects, foods and places to establish themselves in a place that it is more an imaginative "home" than a real one. Migration is not only about moving to places, but it is a cognitive experience with people engaged in physical and metaphorical movement in place and time. So far, the literature on migration has stressed the division between those who are "emplaced" and those who are "out-of-place". As Dawson and Johnson recently suggested "place and identity are rarely made or inhabited in a singular manner but are most often constructed and experienced as a variety of both literal and metaphorical roots and routes" (2001:320).

Such metaphorical "roots and routes" (ibid) is the Multicultural Festival which was organised by the municipality of Chania in Crete, Greece from 1997-2002. This Festival gave the opportunity to a number of ethnic minorities which were living and working in Chania to create for a week their own space of activity and a sense of "home" away from home as well as to accustom locals to the cultural history of each participant country. The Festival created a common ground of interrelation between migrants and locals, expanding the local and national borders to include exotic smells, sounds, dances and people from afar. A place becomes meaningful once connected with human experiences, with senses, emotions and animated by memories, creating thus a sense of rootedness. The Festival created such informed spaces and shared memories for both migrants and locals, providing thus an opportunity, at local level, to incorporate different ethnic minorities. The aim of the presentation is to challenge the notion of fixity and rootedness that it is often raised in the local and national discourse and to call into question propositions that connect people with a locale by using shared history and tradition as connection link. In this presentation I will demonstrate the way people "on the move" find the opportunity to create their own "roots" in a unfamiliar territory challenging the sense of locality which the people of the small provincial town of Chania in Greece experience.

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