The South Caucasus as a Space of Memory

In his Theogony Hesiod mentions Mnemosyne, Titaness and daughter of Uranus and Gaia, goddess and personification of memory. Zeus visited her for nine consecutive nights, and, as the hymnist states: “Again he took love of Memory with her beautiful hair, from whom the Muses with their gold diadems were born to him, nine of them, whose pleasure is in feasts and the delights of song” (Hesiod 1988: 30). One of these was Clio, the muse of history, depicted holding a scroll of papyrus. Interpreting this mythological allegory, it can be said that memory is essential for the appearance of the muses of various arts. Mnemosyne embodies pure memory, the ideal type, while the muses symbolise the cultural and social framework without which its representations are impossible. Memory is omnipresent in poetry, in music, in dance and in history. Yet, Mnemosyne may also exist independently of her daughters. Uncommented, marginalised, forgotten, sometimes forbidden. Memorised in the rituals of everyday life, embodied in non-obvious representations. The discourse of memory thus consists of official representations and the social need to remember. Take the example of Herodotus’ Histories—this imagined beginning of historical thinking that in reality was more a representation of memory, laced with imagination, myths, oral transmissions, be it things overheard. Interest in the extratemporality and ambiguity of memory—and the fascinating relationship between memory and the political and politics in the practice of action, but also in institutional form—constantly prompts the search for and study of contemporary issues that are governed by what was. It is not revelatory to say that the past exists only in the present; today has always focused on relating to yesterday based on the categories assigned to that yesterday. A current question remains whether late Modernity, following the mnemonic turn and memory boom, attaches more importance to the past than earlier eras.