I wrote this as a short ten-minute presentation of an ongoing research project on Agios Sozomenos. For more information, please visit the landing page here.
If you visit the abandoned village of Agios Sozomenos when the wind blows the right way, an unmistakable scent wafts through the air: cow manure. Green stalks of barley stood proud in the fields nearby when I arrived on one sunny day in spring. Visitors stream to the ruins every day — farmers done with their chores, suburban office workers taking the day off, wannabe Instagram influencers, and seemingly everyone in-between. It doesn’t take long to start wondering: just why does this place attract so many different people? Answering this question, I argue, helps us see how this site functions as a public thing that brings people together, in all their plurality, around a common object.
I took the wrong exit the first time I tried to go to Agios Sozomenos. I wandered through a maze of roads past a pasta factory, dairy farms, and fields of hay, before finally finding the sign that pointed towards the village. The road hugs the banks of the Alikos river — really, nothing more than a dry streambed — as it passes under the gaze of high bluffs. Nestled in one of these caves is the chapel that gave its name to the village: the resting place of a medieval hermit whose name was Sozomenos, or “the one who was saved.” The houses below are crumbling at an alarming rate, as the hay and mud their walls are built of melt away a little more with every passing storm. The road winds past these houses and through the narrowing bluffs before ending a few meters before the buffer zone, the UN-patrolled strip of land that separates the island of Cyprus.
But most visitors focus on neither the chapel nor the ruined houses: rather, they are attracted by the Gothic ruins of the village’s second church. People wander through these arches, gazing at the stonework, or simply stopping to take a call or rest on the steps. The last time I visited, we struck up a conversation with a few of these people, to ask just what it was that drew them to this strange place. Some people said they came for recreation: in March, the weather is beautiful and the fields are green, dotted with daisies. Others come as pilgrims, attracted by the healing cult of Saint Sozomenos in much the same way medieval visitors also were. But other motivations abound: young families flying kites and picnicking; teenagers who learned about the place from their friends’ social media posts; older generations who remember all too well the trauma of 1964 with which the village is, for them, indelibly associated; and foreign tourists and Cypriots returned from abroad visiting for the first time, too. And that’s not to mention the drug deals and rave parties with which the village was associated, especially before the pandemic.
Here we begin to see what draws me, too, to the place: its sheer plurality. For the political theorist Hannah Arendt, plurality is at the core of the human condition. Politics, she thinks, has generally been wrongly conceived by political philosophers as the means to ends like freedom, justice, and the common good. “Philosophy,” she characteristically wrote, is “concerned with man,” and thus would be just as valid “if there were only one or two men or identical men.” “Politics,” by contrast, “deals with the coexistence and association of different men.” Thus, “politics arise between men, and so quite outside of man.” True freedom consists in this activity of acting together in our plurality, not in an ideal we achieve by escaping the messy realm of politics. We ought to lean into the plurality we encounter at Agios Sozomenos and celebrate it in the terms of Arendt’s freedom-centered conception of politics, rather than mutilating the complex site by fitting it into a Procrustean bed.
One way to get a handle on all of this, a way that ties together the broad themes of plurality and objectivity, is the thread of graffiti in Agios Sozomenos. Some of the oldest graffiti was etched into the frescoes in the cave. It’s easy to imagine pilgrims arriving from Nicosia to visit the cave chapel as part of a multi-day stay. The villagers might have offered weary travelers hearty food and a good night’s sleep, so they could wake up with the first light and climb up to the cave chapel, where the travelers felt compelled to leave their own mark on their material surroundings. The cave bears the traces of many other graffiti, too, from more recent times — some unobtrusive, but some on the walls outside amounting to little more than crude vandalism. Another layer of graffiti is visible in the village itself. In an interview filmed by Panicos Chrysanthou for his 1987 documentary A Detail in Cyprus, a Turkish-Cypriot villager (speaking in flawless Cypriot Greek) describes how the Greek-Cypriot guerillas terrorized her and her children and wrote slogans like “EOKA B” and “HELLAS,” graffiti still visible on some of the ruined houses.
Graffiti in Agios Sozomenos, in short, testify to a continuous practice of interaction between people in their plurality and between these people and their material surroundings. This gestures towards what I mean by objectivity: not a supposedly impartial kind of truth, but instead a new orientation towards objects as things we relate to in common. This new turn towards things has animated diverse areas of humanistic scholarship in the past ten to fifteen years — from the political scientist Jane Bennett to the sociologist of science Bruno Latour to the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. This “ontological turn,” as it is often called, has diverse motivations, from a genuine interest in taking seriously the philosophical perspectives of indigenous interlocutors to a generalized conviction that new ways of thinking are needed in the time of the climate crisis. I am especially interested in how the ontological turn maps onto the Arendtian conception of politics: an extension of her idea of plurality to the more-than-human. Things, objects, what she calls the world in common, are crucial to the Arendtian activity of politics. “To live together in the world,” she writes, “means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time.” Without these things in common, we would be “imprisoned in the subjectivity of [our] own singular experience, which does not cease to be singular if the same experience is multiplied innumerable times.” To borrow the words of the political theorist Linda Zerilli from her 2016 book, A Democratic Theory of Judgment: “Rather than yield the term objective to the philosophical tradition (or modern science), we might reclaim it for democratic theory … as we advance a practice of judging politically that resonates with Arendt’s own refiguration of a humanly possible conception of objectivity in the political terms of a “common world”” (pp. 29–30).
As you climb up the hill behind the churches in the village, the valley floor stretches out green below you. Birds swoop overhead, moving from their nests in the ruined houses and trees of the village to the shelter provided by hollows in the cliff walls. You can imagine the vibrant village in the thirteenth century, proud of its healing saint and its fields, heavy with crops of grain, watered by the meandering Alikos river. It was a dispute over this same water that lit the spark for the traumatic events on 6 February 1964. For some people today, the ruins are indelibly marked by this dark history; for others, Agios Sozomenos has always been primarily a sacred realm inhabited by its eponymous saint. Many today know little about either of these histories: the pull of the site is merely aesthetic. I am interested in recuperating this “merely”: to call an object beautiful is to say that it brings people together in their plurality. It is in this sense that Agios Sozomenos, for me, exemplifies a different sort of politics, one rooted in a different sort of object-ivity.