This article explores the way that the voices of the past trickle through to the modern world in traditional Mediterranean societies, as portrayed in the works of women writers like Elena Ferrante and Elif Shafak, who both have served as touchstone writers for my thesis in Creative Writing. Contrary to northern European cities like London and Paris, both Rome and Istanbul are not so much built on ruins of the past as living amalgamations of past and present, where the physical remains of lost empires and the spectral voices of conquerors, concubines, slaves and new religions, take on a less disembodied but far more pervasive presence. A fruitful way of interpreting the nexus between past and present is that of trying to decipher the voices of spectral presences that haunt the cityscapes of today, as suggested by Michel Certeau. In this article, I study the importance that magic and sacred spaces take within the historical, spatial and architectural dimensions in Mediterranean cultures—especially in the writings of my touchstone writers but also in Grazia Deledda and Orhan Pamuk—at the same time as I analyse the way I navigate these historical/spectral places in my own short stories on the same theme. In the Mediterranean sister cities Rome and Istanbul, a strong spirit of citizenship and local patriotism makes many of their inhabitants, both in the real and the literary world, feel strongly that theirs is an ‘eternal’ way of living that is authorized and fortified by its sense of continuity with Antiquity.
Joanna Vadenbring
Joanna Vadenbring is a PhD student in Creative Writing at the University of Aberdeen. She has had short stories in two anthologies, Fusion (Fantastic books 2014) and Nivalis (Fabular Press 2014). Her poems have been published in The Lamp, The Carbon Review and Gilded Dirt. Joanna is also an EFL teacher and has worked in various European countries.
