Jason Francisco, Tanais memorial, Koum Kapi beach, Chania, Crete, 2023
The 9th of June 2024 marks the eightieth anniversary of the sinking of the Tanais, a Greek-owned German-requisitioned cargo ship sunk by a British torpedo while carrying approximately 500 captives being transported to German camps, most likely Mauthausen and Auschwitz. Those lost included members of the Cretan resistance, Italian prisoners of war, and the last of Crete’s Jews—losses which have rippled forward in meaning over the decades. The Tanais can be likened to a prism: it both splits apart and synthesizes Crete’s wartime experiences, depending on which way we look into it.
As part of the history of the Holocaust, the Tanais has come to stand for the genocidal destruction of Cretan Jewry, one of the oldest diaspora Jewish communities in the world, extending at least to the time of Alexander the Great. The Tanais is, just as much, a signal tragedy in the story of Cretan resistance against German occupation. The Italian victims were, one might say, casualties of the fog of war itself—they fought alongside the Germans until the Armistice of Cassibile, signed a few months before the Tanais’ sinking, made Italy a German enemy.
In contemporary Chania, a small sculpture outside the old city gates at Koum Kapi beach was dedicated in 2013 to the victims of the Tanais. Beside the sculpture is a tiny plaque installed at toe-level, which mentions the loss of the three groups in the briefest of acknowledgments. While something is better than nothing, this sculpture is, to put it graciously, a dead memorial. It sustains no meaningful reflection, and provides no depth of information. Passers-by learn nothing about the ship itself, or about the peoples and communities lost. And in this connection, the sculpture is in keeping with the dearth of public history on the intercultural world of pre-twentieth century Chania. The best that can be said for the sculpture at Koum Kapi is that it does function as a gathering point for an intercommunal ceremony of remembrance each June on the anniversary of the Tanais’s sinking.
Last year, I designed an exhibition to create a meaningful engagement with the legacy of the Tanais through contemporary art. In works that respond to all three groups of victims, the exhibition aimed to provide an opportunity for remembrance that emboldens imagination for historical loss, inviting the open-spirited mourning by which cultures mature.
The proposed exhibition was to have been held at the Dimotiki Pinakothiki, the Municipal Art Gallery of Chania, the city’s most important venue for culture. The venue alone would have indicated that the Tanais belongs to all of Chania equally, and is not merely a parochial concern of the Jewish community. The exhibition's appearance there would have signaled the city's willingness to take on subjects of difficult history, and indeed to recognize historical consciousness as a central part of the development of contemporary culture in the city. At the same time, the exhibition would effectively have recognized the importance of the Jewish community in collective memory, and specifically the value of Etz Hayyim in the city’s cultural landscape, since the synagogue’s rededication in 1999. The exhibition itself was based on Etz Hayyim’s values of reconciliation, remembrance, and repair, and its spirit of welcome, openness, and hospitality (φιλοξενία).
The city of Chania initially did not accept the proposal. In a replay of the hedging, dodging, dissimulating, and bad faith that marked his handling of my proposed exhibition remembering the 1923 Greek-Turkish Population Exchange, the vice-mayor for culture Giannis Giannakakis strung the proposal along for months, until finally claiming it could not happen due to pre-existing commitments from the Covid era. The lie was transparent, but clear in its vision of the kind of place Giannakakis thinks Chania should be: a tourist resort whose local culture is light and easy for visitors, deep and guarded for residents, in keeping with an aggressively parochial account of Crete’s own history.
Unexpectedly, the doors opened to a different venue—the old site of the city’s Archaeology museum, on Kondilaki street in the old town not far from the Dimotiki Pinakothiki, a cavernous space that had been shuttered for many years. The proposed exhibition was to have been organized in two parts. The first part would feature works by contemporary artists whose pieces contemplate some aspect of the Tanais’ prismatic character. These artists were to have been drawn from across the communal spectrum, including Jews from Greece and beyond, Christian Cretans, and Italians. The second part would collect ideas from an open call for what a Tanais memorial could hypothetically be, a compendium of possible remembrances. Given the difficulties created by Giannakakis and the need to pull something together on very short notice—the show is to run from August 1-15—only a version of the first part is possible. It includes works by George Sfougaras, Joshua Unikel, Konstantin Fischer, Milan Logar, Aliki Chiotaki, Lamprini Boviatsou, Yannis Markantonakis, and me. The curator is the Chania-based museologist and art historian Myrto Kontomitaki.
My own work for the exhibition is “Tanais,” a image-sound installation designed to induce an experience of contemplative immersion. The imagistic dimension of the project is a two-channel durational filmwork projected on opposing walls, each wall a looped visual statement of the movement of the sea, filmed at Chania’s seafront. The slow pace and monumental size of the images are meant to calm the mind and create a state of open receptivity, a visual field for the sonic element of the piece. Accompanying the double film is a reading in Greek and English of Iossif Ventura’s poem cycle “Tanaïs.” Ventura is a Greek Jew born in Chania in 1938, a child survivor of the Holocaust, and a prominent poet and translator.
Jason Francisco, stills from the two-channel video work, "Tanais," 2023
From Iossif Ventura, "Τάναϊς," bilingual edition, trans. Elizabeth Arseniou, Red Heifer Press, 2015.
Here is my own reading of Ventura's poem, in a translation by Elizabeth Arseniou, Professor of modern Greek literature at Panteion University, Athens:
And accompanying my piece in the show is the following text:
"If to generalize, I see two common approaches to the traumatic past, which I will call the way of the scholar and the way of the priest. The scholar’s concern is history, which emerges through critical acts of reading and is, by definition, open to perpetual re-reading. The priest’s concern is memory, which is a project of communal emotion treated as heritage, ultimately a sacralized state of meaning not fundamentally open to revision. And if so, I see another way—call it the way of the poet. Sometimes the poet’s preoccupations are with history, sometimes memory, somtimes both. But the poet concerned with history is not making arguments using methods other than demonstration and proof, much as the poet immersed in memory is not merely reinscribing pieties. The poet’s task, if I had to say it—admittedly a perilous undertaking—is to limn the differences between history and memory, and to present those differences for what they are: by turns calm and turbulent, suspended in time and haunted by it, evanescent and yet immediate.
"The work here, remembering the sinking of the Tanais in June 1944, can be understood as just such a setting-forth of a space of poetic overlap between history and memory. It does so by creating a formal overlap of independent works, a two-channel video I made in 2023 at the Old Venetian Harbor in Chania, and Iosif Ventura’s poem 'Tanais,' read by Ventura in the original Greek and by me in English translation. The exchange between image and word suggests that the work of remembering genocide—to speak specifically of the Jews who died on that ship—is an unfinishing of what historians and priests both seek to accomplish. The truth of the past 'itself' is not important, rather that truth’s grievability now, and for this we should look away from the already-given reasons and the preformed images. We should look elsewhere. Perhaps we should begin with the waters that drowned them."
Jason Francisco / Paris, summer 2024