Amyntaeo: Preservers of Memory

52 TEXTS AND 27 AUTHORS write about the small town of the north, Amyntaeo. A small, insignificant and incoherent province in the north-west of Greece, "north and equally west", as the neighbor Mimis Souliotis wrote, to "ensure you in all critical circumstances". A town that never exceeded 3.000-5.000 inhabitants – let alone once it reached 6.000, if one also counts the temporary soldiers. An insignificant settlement and Turkish homestead in the 19th century, it was transformed with the advent of the railway in the early 20th century into a prosperous and lively town, commercial center and transport hub of Western Macedonia. Throughout the 20th century, Amyntaio experienced all the dramatic events up close and personal, as well as their consequences: the Balkan wars, World War I, the arrival of refugees from Asia Minor in 1922, World War II World War, the Occupation, the absurdity of the Civil War, the harsh post-civil days with the police and the parastatal, immigration... And now, at the beginning of the 21st century, the little girl awkwardly and anxiously tries to find a way to escape from the gloomy future that the governments that serve the "rationality" of the Memorandum have prescribed for it. Amyntaeo, which endured the hunger and hardships of two World Wars and a Civil War, is in danger of shrinking, as now sentimentality has no place in the "New Order" that the "Brahmins" of the central government are preparing. Services are being dismantled, young people are immigrating once more, the once thriving trade is withering and the suspicious calmness of the times is in the air. The profane dared to stop even the train from an ever-present "trenoupolis", but they failed.... This collective volume is not a sterile historiography, nor a piece of folklore. It is not a hodge-podge of vignettes, nor is it prepackaged information about the place, like the kind you find in hotel brochures or mass-produced tourist guides. This book clearly has a more "literary" orientation and definitely a different feeling within it. If it survives and well it must be classified in some way, let's say it is a series of texts of experiential nostalgia for the birthplace. Narratives that unfold personal memory and relationship with the birthplace, the place of infancy, childhood, adolescence and early youth. Words that touch in a special way the collective nostalgia and vibrate the collective emotion. The texts are either a realistic record of the social life of the town, or fictional, or they refer to stories that the author heard and wants to save in time. Often through the personal experience and private memory of each author, the surrounding history of the place emerges, in a clearer, revealing, and therefore completely valid way.