• 1 Online: http://lecad.arch.uth.gr/demuciv/index_en.php (accessed in March 2019).

2City museums are something new for Greece. The project for generating a collection of oral histories for one in Volos, in collaboration with the Department of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology at the University of Thessaly, was an innovation in several senses. The museum-form was new, the university collaboration was new, and so was the museum’s agenda. Τhis agenda aspired at “highlight[ing] the city’s social structure, economic and productive activities and its relationship with its surroundings within a local, regional, national, Mediterranean, European and global framework.”1 The connection of a local museum to different layers of history (local, regional, European) and the stress on social history was meant to make a difference, and to make the city more inclusive.

• 2 Schiller Maria, Hackett Sarah, “Continuity and Change in Local Immigrant Policies in Times of Auste (...)

3At the time of the museum’s foundation, Greece was experiencing economic crisis, and this was transformed shortly into a humanitarian crisis. The far right gained ground in Greece, even in the city of Volos, with its deep connections to refugees and migration. This framework emphasised how the museum might play a part in the new role assigned to European cities by the European Union (EU) as receivers of a great number of immigrants who need to become and to feel included. How do European cities consider their new role? What policies do they develop? As Sarah Hackett and Maria Schiller2 underlined in their comparative study of integration policies in different European cities, we still need to study the ways migration flows, integration policies and diversity interweave at the level of city policies. My paper explores one aspect of this approach regarding city cultural policies and integration.

• 3 Tamborrino Rosa, “Searching for a State-of-the-Art Public Space: City Museums among Archives and Ne (...)
• 4 Gazi Andromache, “Museia ke Episkeptes stin Epochi tis ‘Viomichanias tis Mnimis’” [Museums and Visi (...)

6According to Rosa Tamborrino,3 who compared several city museums in Europe, city museums, their collections and the way they approached the past introduced a new way of producing memory space within cities. The decision for such a museum is always political and engages different agendas, scales and actors. For years, urban memory was tied to nation-building. As Andromache Gazi underlined,4 museums were always part of a framework which included school history, monuments, textbook, high arts and cinema, and shaped what we call cultural memory. In other words, museums participate in the institutionalisation of memories through cultural discourses and practices that are aimed at disseminating specific meanings.

• 5 Kavanagh Gaynor, Dream Spaces, Memory and the Museum, Leicester, Leicester University Press, 2000, (...)

8Gaynor Kavanagh argued5 that museums traditionally shaped history by ordering traces of the past into a coherent narrative for all visitors, and that this generated a seemingly shared and homogenous experience. But within the above shift, museums developed a new strategy trying to evoke each visitor’s personal experiences. The change reflected the passage from dominant hegemonic narratives to an experiential relation among place, memories and community. In parallel, the increasing recognition of multiculturalism in the 1980s and 1990s within the European societies encouraged the recognition of diverse memories and voices. This shift was a political as well as an economic project.

• 6 O’Connor Justin, The Cultural and Creative Industries: A Literature Review. Newcastle upon Tyne, Ar (...)
• 7 Ibid., p. 41–49.

9Since the 1970s, the emerging neo-liberal politics (structural readjustment focusing on market-oriented economies, absence of national subsidies and trade protectionism) put an end to post-war state protectionism in the cultural sector. Culture and arts turned into significant economic resources for the regeneration of the decaying industrial economies of the cities and into a political tool for more inclusive cultural politics.6 Furthermore, state financing for arts gradually shrank allowing new stakeholders (international and supranational organisations, private sector, local authorities) to become involved.7

• 8 Plaza Beatriz, “On Some Challenges and Conditions for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao to be an Effecti (...)

10In the 1990s, culture through spectacles, festivals, galleries, conservation of historical buildings or neighbourhoods’ gentrification became key sources of capital for the economies of urban centres. Cultural heritage, city branding and tourism made urban economies more open and interdependent on the global economy. In this context, city museums – apart from pluralising memory – contributed to developing urban economies through extending the touristic season as well as enhancing and revitalising zone markets in less developed areas.8 How did these changes influence the decision for the construction of a city museum in a medium-size city in Greece?

• 9 Online: https://www.uth.gr/panepistimio/me-mia-matia/istoria (accessed in August 2021).
• 10 From the old 457 municipalities and 5,318 communes, only one-fifth remain intact: 914 municipalitie (...)

11Joining the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1981, Greece embarked on modernising its administration by stressing the need for decentralisation and more efficient governance. For example, the opening of new institutions of higher education in the Greek periphery, like the University of Thessaly in central Greece (1984), was part of this new agenda.9 The first wide administrative reorganisation took place in 1997 (Law 2539/1997).10 The reform had as its primary objective the modernisation of the Greek administration, but also transparency in the management of local politics. In addition, the reform combined financial and administrative independence with the regional development of Greece through major public works of infrastructure in the peripheries of the country. The second wave of reforms took place in 2010 (Programme Kallikratis, Law 3852/2010). The goal was the increase of citizens’ participation in local politics. There was strong resistance to this reform. The reactions were related to immigration.

• 11 Zaimakis Yannis, Koinotiki Ergasia ke Topikes Koinonies. Anaptyksi, Syllogiki Drasi ke Popypolitism (...)
• 12 Appadurai Arjun, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis, University (...)
• 13 Gazi, “Museia ke Episkeptes stin Epochi tis ‘Viomichanias tis Mnimis,’” op. cit.

12These administrative transformations enhanced the transition, among museums, from the production of narratives about territorialised, culturally bounded “Greek” communities to those about locality.11 Like museums elsewhere, Greek museums were challenged to read historical heritage not as recollection of a national past; instead, they themselves became the space where historically experienced memories were brought forward to depict different, even controversial, lived pasts.12 This change needed to contextualise the “individual,” “private/domestic” and often “marginal” in wider “collective” and “public” histories and discourses.13 Oral histories became a central part of city museum exhibits. In Volos, to great extent, the oral histories collected by the soon-to-be museum concerned refugee and immigrant populations and their integration.

• 14 Dimoglou Aigli, Poli ke Topiki Aftodioikidi. H Periptosi tou Demou Paghason 1881–1944 [City and Loc (...)
• 15 Ibid., p. 152.
• 16 Ibid., p. 66–76, p. 123–162.
• 17 Most of the immigrants interviewed as part of my research first settled in Nea Ionia as land prices (...)

13At the end of the nineteenth century, the city of Volos began to develop mainly as a trading post. With the annexation of Thessaly to the Greek state (1881), Volos and its port began to attract populations from the mountain villages of Pelion and neighbouring areas.14 The city gained the status of municipality in 1883 (31/3/1883-Decree 126). However, it was the Asia Minor Catastrophe (1922) that shaped the wider urban area of Volos with the development of new residential areas to host the refugees —like Nea Ionia (in which 5,000–6,000 people initially settled).15 The refugee labour was channelled into the industrialisation of the city,16 and in 1947, a royal decree separated the urban area of Volos into two independent municipalities: the working-class municipality of Nea Ionia,17 and the more bourgeois city of Volos. In that way, it was believed that Volos would not fall into the hands of the Communists who were popular among workers of refugee origin. The Second World War, the Civil War, and then the catastrophic earthquakes of 1955 halted economic growth until the later 1950s and 1960s.

• 18 For statistics regarding immigrant population in Greece, see online: https://ec.europa.eu/migrant-i (...)

14The 1990s were considered a transition period for Greece.18 Until then, the country had considered itself as a migrant-sending country (the peak periods were the inter-war period, 1920–1930, and the post-war period, 1950–1970). This process began to reverse in post-junta Greece (since 1974), but it was the fall of the Berlin Wall that propelled more migrants to Greece from the Balkans and the former Soviet Union.

• 19 “Stoixeia gia tin Poli” [Infor on the City], 2015, online: http://dimosvolos.gr/?cat=95&lang=en (ac (...)
• 20 Greek Statistics Service, Demographic Characteristics, 2011, online: http://www.statistics.gr/el/st (...)
• 21 “I Files tou Volou” [The Tribes of Volos], Taxydromos, 3 March, 2011, online: https://www.taxydromo (...)

15Today, the municipality of Volos covers 387.14 km and has almost 144,449 inhabitants (last census of 2011), making it one of the ten largest municipalities of Greece.19 According to the last census of 2011,20 there were more than 5,500 non-ethnic Greek inhabitants living in the area (nomos) of Magnesia, and almost 3,000 in the municipality of Volos. The majority, almost 4,000, are Albanian (1,500 of whom are in the municipality of Volos),21 less than 500 are from Bulgaria, almost 100 are from the former USSR and the rest from other Asian and African countries (especially from Pakistan, China and Nigeria). These numbers, however, should be treated with caution, as immigrants are often hesitant to register or take part in surveys.

• 22 Online: https://migration.gov.gr/ris/perifereiakes-monades/domes/domi-voloy/ (accessed in April 202 (...)
• 23 Pyrpiri Lydia, Khorikos Skhediasmos ke Diaxeirisi Prosfyghikon Roon [Spatial Planning and Managemen (...)
• 24 Online: https://www.ethnos.gr/ellada/71567_bolos-eftasan-horis-paratragoyda-oi-protoi-prosfyges-apo (...)

17Finally, even as tensions over immigration expanded after 2008, Volos has continued to play host to new waves. In 2015, a new Open Hospitality Refugee Centre was built almost ten minutes from the centre of Volos, in Moza, in 2016.22 Moza used to be an old car dealership. As a camp, it has the capacity to host about 130 individuals. These arrived mainly from Arab and Kurdish speaking areas (Syria, Iraq, Kurdistan), and consisted to a great extent, of children and women.23 Publications in the local press postulated mixed reactions of the local population to the presence of refugees, but there has been no major resistance.24

• 25 The Bulgarian immigrants were mostly female who, according to the interviews, wanted to return to t (...)

19These immigrants were helped to adapt to the city by informal networks of employers, co-workers, neighbours and – especially for the second generation – education. By the early 2000s, mobilisation among immigrants was also emerging. For example, the Albanian immigrants founded two associations (Illyria and the Association of Young Albanian Scientists). Similarly, the Edo immigrants from Nigeria organised an association in 2008 which could serve as a meeting point for the community,25 to “help our people to have a home,” as a member of the board told me.

• 26 Scholten Peter, Poppelaars Caelesta, “Two Worlds Apart: The Divergence of Local and National Integr (...)

20The politicisation of immigration in the 1990s was linked to the growing numbers of immigrants and the reshaping of the public sphere. Under the growing pressure of the EU political and economic agendas immigration became a focal point as central governments tried to “regain popular legitimacy by articulating populist ideas and sentiments concerning cultural identity.”26 When Greece entered recession in 2008, anti-immigration discourses made debates about identity the centre of public interest, drawing attention away from the political and economic agenda. Moreover, the growing lack of a strong political will to back up any changes regarding immigrants’ rights at the national level increased the reluctance of local authorities to implement them.

• 27 In the local government elections in 2010, Golden Dawn received 5.29% of the vote in the metropolit (...)
• 28 In December 2015, however, the mayor of Volos was removed temporarily from power due to pending fel (...)
• 29 Andersen John, Siim Birte, “Introduction: The Politics of Inclusion and Empowerment – Gender, Class (...)

21Anti-immigration sentiments continued to build in the second decades of the 2000s. The electoral success of Golden Dawn27 (the extreme right party) in 2012 generated a reaction from mainstream conservative political parties who tried to regain their popularity by bringing back voters from the extreme right by increasing their own rigidity over social and immigration issues. In the local elections of 2014, a new local government was elected in Volos, transferring the power from a socialist-leftist coalition to the conservative party.28 Moreover, frequent changes of the legal framework facilitated their lack of application; local administrations hesitated to implement innovations when they foresaw possible controversy among local voters, and it became convenient to claim that they could not keep up with the changing laws.29

• 30 Piperopoulos Panagiotis, “Ethnic Minority Businesses and Immigrant Entrepreneurship in Greece,” Jou (...)

22The economic crisis also had a direct impact on the economic lives, legal status and social integration of immigrants. Foreign workers, who were over-represented in the construction and tourism sectors, suffered disproportionally from the economic crisis. As a result, a considerable number of immigrants preferred to return to their original countries or, if they had the chance, to move to another European country. Unemployment also changed legal status: those who were unable to renew their work permits ceased to be “documented” and became “undocumented” immigrants. Immigration policies that local authorities, like that in Volos, had developed in response to immigrants’ needs before the crisis, such as immigrant councils, language courses and cultural activities to promote interculturalism (festivals, theatre) came under review.30 Relations between local administrations and immigrants changed, too, as the austerity measures and enforcement of the economic Memorandum in 2010 limited the resources of local authorities and reshaped local power relations.

• 31 Pentazou Ioulia, “Sxediazontas to Mouseio tis Polis tou Volou. H Yposxesi kai oi Prokliseis ton Pro (...)
• 32 “Ta Egainia tou Mouseiou tis Polis tou Volou” [The Inauguration of the City Museum in Volos], TRT C (...)

23In this context, the Volos City Museum envisioned to include and consider the diverse, ever-changing history of Volos in connection to refugee and migration flows. “The history of Volos is nothing else than the history of its inhabitants,”31 stated Aigli Dimoglou, a local historian who oversaw the city archives, at the inauguration of the museum’s first exhibition.32 This inclusivity is characteristic of city museums. However, interesting observations can be made when we take a closer look at what this inclusivity meant and who was included.

• 33 “To Mouseio tou Volou anoigei tis Portes tou” [The Museum of the City of Volos Opens its Doors], Na (...)

26The museum was planned to complement the resources on local history taking a more open approach. It was to be hosted in a building already owned by the municipality,33 and was to have a collection based on donations (photographic archives and material culture) already made to the Center for History and Documentation, as well as a collection of oral histories. To collect the oral histories, the local authorities decided to collaborate with the academic community. In this sense, the museum was a joint initiative that overcame a number of economic difficulties (budget restrictions, delays in the disbursement of the funding).

• 34 Dimoglou, Poli ke Topiki Aftodioikidi, op. cit.

28The area where the museum was founded is called Palea (Old) and the building was an old tobacco storehouse (Kapnapothiki Papandou) until the 1920s, which also hosted refugees from Asia Minor when they first arrived. Palea was the first and the oldest settlement of the city of Volos, and bears traces of prehistoric times, a Byzantine castle and a small market near the port. During the twentieth century, Volos developed along the beach of the Argonauts, where all the business and administrative functions of the new city were concentrated. Thus, Palea was degraded aesthetically and became isolated from the rest of the city. As a result, the area was reduced from a historical centre to a peripheral area.34

• 35 Papagianitsis Georgios, Astiki Anasygrotisi, Ikonomiki Anaptyksi ke Agora Akiniton. I Periptosi tis (...)

29Since the 1990s, a process of gentrification started in the area, including the opening of new companies related to transportation and small-size enterprises related to entertainment (taverns, bars, take always), which complemented the old artisans’ shops (now renovated), along roads that were re-zoned for pedestrians only. The changes altered the physiognomy of the hitherto undervalued neighbourhood of Palea, but maintained its special character and historical heritage from Byzantine and Ottoman times.35

• 36 The opening of the permanent collection took place in 2019.

30I worked (between 2013–2015) on the collection of oral histories as part of my post-doctoral research on urban memory among immigrants who arrived in Volos since the 1990s. The immigrants with whom I worked originated from Asia (Chinese, Afghans, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis) and Africa (Nigerians). Migrations and crises were two fundamental categories, both for the museum and for our university research. Migrants were depicted through the collection of stories from various categories of older and new immigrant communities. Crisis was addressed in relation to moments of economic and social transformation of the city, for example, wars, natural disasters and economic plights. Moreover, as the oral interviews and the archival research postulated, these moments of crisis in the history of the city related to different forms of migration. This connection between economic crisis and migration was reflected in the first exhibition hosted in the museum in 2014. 36

• 37 Online: https://www.elculture.gr/blog/volos-10-istories-mouseio-polis-tou-volou/ (accessed in Febru (...)
• 38 Online: https://www.kathimerini.gr/culture/arts/1063598/to-paradeigma-toy-moyseioy-tis-polis-toy-vo (...)

31The exhibition was dedicated to the division that set up the modern history of the municipality of Volos. The split between Volos and Nea Ionia reflected economic and political divisions that produced Volos as a city. It was visited by a total of 50,000 visitors,37 an unexpected number for a provincial city museum. Reviewing the collection and the museum itself in 2020, one of the most respected newspapers in Greece, Kathimerini underlined, “All the people who worked, sang, struggled and sacrificed, are all there [in the collection].”38 In this sense, it seemed that the Volos City Museum was more than successful. It captured a history and created an experience of that history for the visitor.

• 39 Pelsmaekers Katja, Van Hout Tom, “People on the Move: How Museums De-marginalize Migration,” Social (...)
• 40 Migration is often a popular theme for urban museums due to the history of migration flows in Europ (...)

32Nevertheless, other museums featuring immigration have been criticised for this very success in creating “experience.” In their comparative research on museums in Germany and Belgium (Antwerp, Bremerhaven and Hamburg), Katja Pelsmaekers and Tom Van Hout postulate an argument that museums of immigration are a creation of post-industrial capitalism’s economy of experience.39 The museum exhibits are intended to produce “empathy,” especially for less visible histories, but they commodify immigration to produce a marketable, less complex and superficial “experience” of tough issues and painful stories. 40Could we find this contradiction in Volos too?

• 41 Teloglou Tassos, “I Ptosi tou Volou” [The Fall of Volos], Protagon, 2014, online: https://www.prota (...)

36In this “first crisis,” it was ethnic Greek refugees who arrived in a city in need of cheap labour for its industrial production. These immigrants were recognised, to a great extent, as Greek citizens. The impact of this in-flow on the municipal institutions was great, as it reinforced the labour class of the city leading to the formation of the two municipalities, Nea Ionia and Volos,41 as discussed above. This crisis caused by the war between Greece and Turkey eventually contributed to the development of the country and the city. The crisis of 1922 was depicted as a transformative moment with which Greek society and Volos coped, mostly through individual initiatives and ingenuity. It seemed that the same qualities were expected from more recent immigrants, neglecting or minimising the responsibility of central and local governments regarding integration.

• 42 Online: https://e-thessalia.gr/aigli-dimogloy-mia-ekthesi-apo-voliotes-gia-ton-volo/ (accessed in J (...)

41Since opening, the museum has been highly active. Apart from the first exhibition I described above, the permanent collection opened its doors in 2019. The official title was Volos in 10+ Stories. The number ten corresponded to five stories/themes from the pre-war period (between the nineteenth century until 1940) and five stories for the post-war era (from 1940 to present).42 The ten stories covered topics such as urban planning and infrastructure, demographics and diversification, city networks (Mediterranean, cultural, economic networks), the city in times of crisis, modernity and urban transformation, reconstruction, the world of work, tourism, culture and sports. Donations from residents of Volos to the museum and their stories were the basis of the collection, reflecting its participatory logic. The donations included photographs, tools, clothes etc.

• 44 Online: http://www.vmoc.gr/sw2/sw_home.html (accessed in April 2020).

44The second axis focused on local history and how it was included in national and world history. For instance, exhibitions showing local participation in the First and Second World Wars (in 2016) and in the Greek-Turkish War of 1897 (in 2017) were organised. Finally, the third axis was dedicated to less visible histories of ethnic communities who lived and still do in Volos, such as Jews and Greeks from Asia Minor. For example, the museum organised an exhibition concerning Jewish participation in the Greek Resistance (in 2015). The exhibition was organised in collaboration with the Jewish History Museum in Greece and the Embassy of Germany as well as the Israeli Community of Volos (Isdrailitiki Koinotita tou Volou). It should be underlined here, that the museum, as well as the university’s Department of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology paid special attention to the period of the Second World War. The museum also organises (virtual and real) walking tours dedicated to this period of the city.44 Another exhibition presented the Holocaust experiences and the resistance of Jews in Greece against the Nazis. As a result, the Jewish presence was represented through its participation in national and world history, but less through its everyday urban life.

• 45 Central Greece, Magnesia and Volos host several Roma settlements involved in agriculture as well as (...)
• 46 Online: https://e-thessalia.gr/stigmiotypa-apo-ti-zoi-ton-tsinganon-ston-volo/ (accessed in Februar (...)
• 47 Online: vmoc.gr/el/2017/05/12/η-συρία-που-αγάπησα/ (accessed in February 2020).

46The inclusion of other ethnic communities, however, has remained limited. Only in a thematic exhibition, Co-Existence, the special theme launched in 2017 by the International Council of Museums (ICM) in which the Volos City Museum participated, were Roma people45 depicted through photographic material.46 The exhibition was supplemented with an educational action which introduced elementary school pupils to stories from Roma living in Volos and the wider area of Magnesia. Furthermore, there was an exhibition on Syria (Syria which I Loved)47 based on the travelogue of a well-known Greek historian, who travelled and wrote extensively in the Black Sea and Eastern Mediterranean.

• 48 Online: http://www.vmoc.gr/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Image00008.jpg (accessed in February 2020).

47From the above, it seemed that the periodic exhibitions complemented the permanent collection in three ways. Firstly, they brought up aspects of local history which were not covered in depth by the permanent collection. Secondly, they created ties with local artists and artistic innovation. Thirdly, they connected local history with other layers and scales of history (national and world), as well as social history (for example, the life of ethnic communities). However, in terms of these ethnic communities, it appeared that the communities which had the longest presence in Volos’s history (Jews and Asia Minor Greeks), and those more documented in world or national history (the Jews), were the most exhibited. Moreover, the themes of the exhibitions put emphasis on the resilience of these ethnic groups and their social integration through culture. For example, the poster for the exhibition about Iones48 was dedicated to the Church of Evaggelistria which was founded in 1969, replacing a smaller church destroyed by the earthquake of 1955. The poster showed a crowd of people going to the church. Faith, endurance and progress are three factors that connect Iones and their refugee background to the city itself.

• 49 Pelsmaekers, Van Hout, People on the Move, op. cit., p. 612–621.

48Pelsmaeker and Van Hout underlined that the needs to offer positive immigrant representations in European museums and to struggle against xenophobia and stereotypes often led museums to over-stress a “success story.” By insisting that in the end, “the immigrants made it,”49 exhibit strategies normalised and erased the hardships along the way, and also turned the experience of immigration into an individual undertaking, erasing the inequalities of global and national political economies. In the Volos City Museum, the same pattern can be discerned. The city is rendered a space of modernisation and resilience despite individual misfortunes, natural disasters or historical tragedies. This strategy of emphasising reinvention does open up social and cultural histories that are often overlooked in official history, but it still avoids more sensitive political and social issues. Stories like that of Harir, which I related in the beginning of this paper, remained invisible. Nevertheless, some of these stories were recorded and can be found in the museum’s Oral Histories Archive, waiting for the right moment. Until now, the refugee and immigrant flow into Volos presents an open-ended project for policy, research and representation.

• 50 Vigh Henrik, “Motion Squared: A Second Look at the Concept of Social Navigation,” Anthropological T (...)

49Henrick Vigh proposed to study crisis as context and “as such to notice provisional praxis and navigation.”50 The Volos City Museum partook in European integration policies, and envisioned an ideal process of equal opportunities and democratisation within local administration and politics. In theory, it tried to shape a more inclusive city through the pluralisation of the narratives included in the collection. In this sense, it served the spirit of diversity and democratisation often found in many EU policies, although these policies did not target, a priori, the immigrants of Volos. Despite the above-mentioned weaknesses of the museum’s early exhibitions and activities, the museum nevertheless has the potential to produce a space of communication between different memories and voices.