‘It Was the Jest for the Athletes’: Memory, Humor and Gender in Oral Testimonies about the Arkadian Races

Abstract

The Arkadian races were institutionalized in 1936 as a commemorative initiative that pays homage to the people who died in November 1866 in the Arkadi Monastery, the headquarters of the Great Cretan Revolution (1866–1869). Employing oral testimonies of veteran athletes of the Arkadian races, the longest-lived sports institution in Rethymnon, Crete, the paper interrogates the interconnections between oral (sport) history and memory studies. The aim is to explore the polysemous nature of this sporting realm of memory. The analysis addresses three central issues. Firstly, the paper discusses the role of the Arkadian races in forging a community of memory in honor of both the Arkadian Holocaust heroes and the distinguished athletes who competed in the local sport races. Secondly, it reveals how the races constituted an alternative space of entertainment, satire, and humor. Lastly, it provides insight into how the sporting institution reinforced gendered inequalities that were widely manifested in popular sport. The paper concludes by discussing the nefarious uses of sports and the potential of sporting spaces to contribute to the construction of a more democratic public memory.