From Ruins to Monuments? Material Heritage and Archival Haunting in Marō Douka's Innocent and Guilty

In Marō Douka's novel Innocent and Guilty (2004), walking is employed as a narrative strategy that reconfigures a Modern Greek city as a site of Ottoman material heritage. Ottoman relics function as traces of a forgotten past in need of preservation, a past of one's own, lost and now reclaimed. By inscribing heterogeneous ruins under the code of heritage and family ties, the narrative claims the/an Ottoman past as familial, recalling a hushed genealogy and its ghosts. Douka's novel stages a common world of shared heritage, advancing a poetics of remembrance and recognition; at the same time, however, by reimagining the city as a contested archive of material and textual fragments, the novel complicates the understanding of the past through family tropes and fixed genealogies.