Identity, memory and belonging: heritage 'work' in a rural Cypriot village

Erin Gibson presents ongoing research from her Marie Skłodowska-Curie project, "Pathways to Heritage: Community Heritage and the Archaeology of Movement in the Adelphi Forest, Cyprus," focusing on the village of Nikitari and the Asinou valley in the northern Troodos foothills. Building on her earlier work with the Troodos Archaeological and Environmental Survey Project and her doctoral research on Roman to British colonial communication routes at the University of Glasgow under Bernard Knapp and Michael Given, Gibson examines heritage as an active social process rather than a static set of monuments.

Gibson explains how her perspective shifted during postdoctoral work with the St'át'imc First Nation in British Columbia, where participating in graveyard cleaning showed her how tending to ancestral places links past and present. Returning to Cyprus, she began asking residents of Nikitari what places, objects, and practices held meaning for them. She contrasts the official UNESCO listed status of the church of Panagia Forviotissa at Asinou with everyday negotiations of the past, such as the display of old bread baskets, horse and donkey tack, and unshaped leather boots in the nearby Forviotissa restaurant.

The lecture walks through several community activities carried out around Nikitari. Working with the Asinou Regional Primary School, which draws pupils from Nikitari, Potami, and neighboring villages after the closure of local village schools, Gibson organized a postcard exercise and a field trip to the abandoned settlement of Asinou. There, local elder Panayiotis Loupas guided the children through the ruined mudbrick houses where he grew up and told stories of daily life. Gibson also describes filming the village women's group making and sharing traditional pastries (pittes), and accompanying a villager, Eleni, to tend olive trees planted by her father and grandfather.

Finally, Gibson discusses a photovoice project in which residents photographed meaningful places, such as a village telephone booth and ancestral homes in Asinou, wrote descriptions for the prints, and held a community exhibition. In the discussion that follows, the community president of Nikitari, Kyriakos Alexandrou Roupas, thanks Gibson, and audience members ask about the transmission of memory to younger generations and how British colonial forest demarcation severed the villagers' traditional pastoral relationship with the Adelphi Forest.