Soloùp’s graphic memoir Aivali: Reconstructing a deconstructed community

Abstract

In 2014, the graphic memoir Aivali created by the prolific comics artist with the pen name Soloùp was published in Greece with great success. His book constitutes a mosaic of personal experiences relating mainly to the cities of Aivali, Chania and the island of Lesbos. More precisely, Soloùp’s sequential art recounts his own personal experiences and reminiscences from a day trip in Aivali sometime in the 2000s, the autobiographical memories of three Greek authors that refer to their lives in the same city before and during the Greco-Turkish war in Asia Minor and the story of a Turkish young man, a family member of the Turkish writer Ahmet Yorulmaz, who resided in Chania until his settlement in Aivali in 1923. The purpose of this article is to examine the way in which the spirit of community is revived, how the city of Aivali is socially reconstructed and finally, the manner in which community and space are connected with each other and also with social memory. The notions of community, space and social memory will be approached through the lens of classical sociology theories formulated by Ferdinand Tönnies, Emile Durkheim and Maurice Halbwachs.