Hidden for decades in a locked cabinet at the Center for Asia Minor Studies in Athens, Eva Palmer Sikelianos’s love letters (1900-1910)—personal, creative, and revealing networks of desire and kinship—challenge expectations about what belongs in Greece’s archival record.
These scattered, stuttering papers sat uneasily within an institute dedicated to Orthodox Christian refugee history, raising new questions about whose lives and stories find a place in official memory.
What happens when a collection resists straightforward histories—when archiving itself becomes an act of negotiation, improvisation, and listening for what’s unsaid? What can these fragments teach us about the possibilities of cultural memory, and how listening to stutters and silences might open new ways of understanding the past?
In this talk, I explore the process of archiving Palmer’s collection: the hurdles, improvisations, and acts of care involved in bringing these materials from secrecy to public view. Inspired by Patricia Keller’s idea of the “stutter in the archive,” I show how gaps, interruptions, and incomplete stories invite us to rethink what archives can do, and how they respond to lives lived beyond conventional narratives.