Digital Museum - Makronissos Military Camps

MAKRONISSOS DIGITAL MUSEUM - https://www.makronissos.org/en/

From 1947 until 1961 the island of Makronissos was used as a space of confinement and exile for over 40.000 Greek citizens who were discriminated by the anti-communist State for their political beliefs.

The ASKI Digital Museum offers a unique insight in the exile experience illustrating the everyday conditions, the politics of repression, and the traumatic legacies of this important chapter in the lenghty history of state-organized persecution.

The establishment and operation of a military compound on Makronissos marked an upturn in conditions of exile existing at the time: an uninhabited area would be “settled” exclusively by exiles, citizens and soldiers, to be “rehabilitated” through an unprecedented programme of propaganda, psychological warfare, and physical and mental torture. The plan had two aims – the professed goal of reinstating the prisoners to the “healthy national body” and a second, undeclared, one of crushing them, thus making it impossible to resume their political action after returning home.