Tracing in the landscape: Thinking political violance in İmroz (Gökçeada) through the testimony of the non-human

I first visited Imbros in August 2018 to carry out my fieldwork. After this visit, I moved to Imbros in the winter of the same year, and since then I have been continuing my ethnographic research while living on the island. The research questions I asked before I started my fieldwork changed a lot during my fieldwork. The primary reason for this change was that I noticed the "silence" that emerged in different forms in the Greeks of Imbros with whom I came in contact. The questioning this silence triggered in me prompted me to discover new conceptual and methodological tools. At this point, asking the question of how non-human-centered witnessing of political violence is possible has become one of the main questions of the study. This question has placed my research on three axes of theoretical discussion. In this context, the first of the main theoretical axes of my thesis is the political violence that emerges in the context of nationalization and the destruction caused by this violence in the landscape. The fact that the affective landscape created by the ruins in question triggers a kind of witnessing made me think again about silence and forms of witnessing. Testimony and silence has become the second theoretical discussion that I deal with in my thesis. The ruins, which gain a kind of agency in the context of witnessing political violence, break the silence of people and haunt the people living on the island. This agency that the ruins gain in the context of my work constitutes the third theoretical element that I aim to discuss: non-human elements as witnessing political violence. Hence hauntology has been an important resource for me from the beginning. As a result of my long-term observations and interviews, I saw that some elements in the landscape of Imbros often appear in daily conversations, trigger/reveal narratives about the past, and reveal different emotions/memories in different communities living on the island. I think it is possible to consider these elements as coming together to form a paysage with two poignant aspects: First the houses left behind by the Greeks who were forced to migrate from the island, and second the nature that has gone wild, with goats and trees, as its most important elements.