Article begins<\/h2>\n
When someone disappears without a trace, what remains are their possessions \u2013 objects that become anchors for memory and vessels for unresolved grief. The human urge to collect and preserve objects, what Jacques Derrida calls \u2018archive fever<\/a>\u2019, takes\u00a0on special significance when there is no body to bury, no grave to visit. This ethnography explores one such case of preservation: my grandmother\u2019s decades-long stewardship of my grandfather\u2019s wardrobe after his disappearance in the 1974 conflict in Cyprus. Through this intimate portrait,\u00a0I discuss how objects can evoke a personal and intense\u00a0care fever<\/em>\u00a0because of the people they stand in for.<\/p>\n My grandmother\u2019s house has a dimly lit dark bedroom filled with pictures of her wedding\u00a0day in gold-colored frames, lace-trimmed bedsheets and curtains, and the faint smell of dust. This room always felt like the least frequented one, but also the most ornamented and tended to in her house. I cannot remember the last time she opened the windows to let in sunlight and fresh air. I also don\u2019t remember entering the room much as a child. Neither she nor any guest would sleep in that room; she preferred to sleep in the other bedroom with a single bed. The room seemed to serve no purpose\u2014or so I thought as a child.<\/p>\n I often discuss my grandfather\u2019s life and loss with my grandmother. She appreciates sharing details about his biography to me, perhaps because I carry his name. He had studied History in university;\u00a0however, struggling to find a job as a new graduate in 1970s turbulent Cyprus and under pressure to support his family, he resorted to a job in the Turkish-Cypriot military.\u00a0The violent inter-communal conflict between Turkish- and Greek-Cypriots culminated to 1974, following a coup orchestrated by the Greek military junta, leading to Turkey\u2019s military invasion\/intervention. Amidst this turmoil, my grandfather was lost to the conflict. I say lost and not dead, because he was a missing person, meaning his remains were not found. During this turbulent period, my grandmother was moved to one of the houses allocated to Turkish-Cypriot war refugees and martyrs\u2019 families. She moved with the furniture from her wedding dowry, such as their bed, wardrobe cabinet and her vanity table. Not receiving any confirmation of his death, she also moved his clothes, including his shoes, suits, pajamas and socks, keeping them for four decades.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCredit: <\/span> \t\t\t\t\t\t \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tMy grandfather\u2019s wardrobe cabinet. \t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n I now understand that this bedroom was meant to be a foil for the one my grandparents shared, with the same furniture and his clothes kept there, albeit in a different home, time, and space. It could not serve its original purpose as a couple\u2019s bedroom to sleep in until his return. So, it became a storage room in disguise, where she kept all the mementoes that help her wistfully grieving heart process. As my grandmother turned on the dim yellow light and brought the key to the wardrobe, I could not help but think of anthropologist Daniel Miller\u2019s claim that \u201c[i]f home is where the heart is, then it is also where it is broken, torn and made whole<\/a>.\u201d This room was the heart of her house. Its purpose was to preserve what was hidden in the wardrobe\u2014the clothes of my grandfather in pristine condition.<\/p>\n In the absence of concrete answers, my family created their own oral mythology of preservation. His children, my father and my aunt, used to share phantasmagorical tales about his whereabouts. One such narrative was about a room that only opens once every forty years in a castle on top of the Kyrenia mountains, called Saint Hilarion Castle. According to the myth, inside this castle room time stood still\u2014much like the preserved contents of my grandfather\u2019s wardrobe. Decades passing in the outside world felt like mere minutes for someone inside. Maybe he was locked there, as confused as his family stuck outside the mythical room. Forty years did pass, yet the door was still locked. My grandmother, too, quietly held onto futile hopes of his return. As a Turkish-Cypriot person living on the northern side of the island, she hoped that he was \u201cstuck\u201d on the southern side, unable to return because the dividing border was uncrossable until 2003. Yet he never came back when the border did open and all that was left of him was his wardrobe. She stored and preserved my grandfather\u2019s clothes from his passing in 1974 until 2020. She worked diligently and privately, with a compelling resilience to make these objects last.\u00a0Thinking of all the different ways we as a family have cared for him, through physical, oral and even ethnographic gestures of preservation, helps me process his loss and tend to intergenerational traumas.<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCredit: <\/span> \t\t\t\t\t\t \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tThe soap to keep moths away.\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n When a loved one dies, the conventional wisdom suggested that healing required \u201cbreaking bonds,\u201d but my grandmother\u2019s careful preservation reveals what scholars now recognize as \u201ccontinuing bonds<\/a>\u201d: bereaved people often keep objects from their loved ones to continue their connection. This is especially the case when\u00a0the body is missing and the stages of mourning are often projected to the objects left of them. Through storing her husband\u2019s clothes, my grandmother resisted \u201cmaterialist conceptions of death as the end of social and emotional relatedness<\/a>.\u201d For her, his clothes were not only of him, but they were him, since there was not a tangible signifier of his passing, such as a resting place. She never washed his clothes, saying \u201cI didn\u2019t even touch them,\u201d perhaps to preserve an essence of his presence. Through her long-lasting preservation practices, her love for him manifested into what is known as \u201cobject-love<\/a>\u201d in the field of conservation, making her conservational care \u201cthe working dimension of love<\/a>.\u201d By storing the clothes in the dark and utilizing cloves, soaps, and mothballs to keep moths away, she did not simply keep his memory preserved. She also kept him preserved, these fabric extensions of him, with the hope of his eventual \u201creturn\u201d where the memories of him wearing these clothes will not need to be memories anymore. Anthropologist Christopher Tilley beautifully phrases that often in material culture \u201c[t]he thing is the person and the person is the thing<\/a>.\u201d Indeed, these clothes became surrogate persons where her care for them became a way to compensate for the impossibility of caring for a missing loved one.\u00a0<\/p>\n After years of stagnant bureaucratic negotiations to find and excavate his remains, they were finally identified and his death was made official with a belated funeral in 2020. When he was found, his wedding ring was intact. My grandmother, too, never took her ring off. She did not request to keep his ring, preferring instead that he keeps wearing it in his resting place, perhaps signifying a sense of closure. Similarly, there came a change in her approach to his wardrobe as a response to the discovery of his remains. The social life of these clothes had a shift, akin to the widely discussed binary shift from commodity to gift within anthropological discourse. The remains allowed the act of parting with his clothes, as she decided to donate them, transforming them from memory objects to second-hand charity items. She donated them to a cancer charity that is known to sell well-kept clothes and recycle worn-down ones. In her eyes, this was the most reliable charity option because she knew where the clothes would go, giving a sense of reassurance that they would not lose value but just change it.\u00a0<\/p>\n During one of our conversations, she uttered that \u201cI would have given his clothes to you if I knew that you were this interested.\u201d I would have loved to preserve some of my grandfather\u2019s clothes to sentimentally and materially get to know the man I take my name from. Though this gift gesture signified my grandmother\u2019s trust in me to continue the preservation, I was aware that to continue her bond with my grandfather in a more cathartic way, she needed to sacrifice his wardrobe. Hence, I resorted to the process of interviewing her about his clothes\u2014a process that became an act of preservation and care for the equally fragile story associated with them.\u00a0<\/p>\n Clothing is critical in identity-making, yet giving up clothes is as critical to identity and memory as acquiring them. The philosopher Georges\u00a0Bataille\u2019s \u201csacrificial economies\u201d\u00a0suggests that \u201cobjects are withdrawn from one sphere of social use, wasted in relation to that sphere to constitute and materialize alternate ideal realms<\/a>.\u201d In sacrificial economies, objects are never lost or destroyed, they just change lives in another realm. In my grandmother\u2019s sacrificial ritual of giving up his clothes, they did not lose significance; they signified the process of healing through their absence.\u00a0While the other cabinets in the room are full of clothes and stuff, she has left these hangers empty, as their emptiness gained new meaning\u2014where the absence of the clothes became as potent as their presence.\u00a0As the place of the body is now known, the clothes\u00a0no longer served their past purpose of standing in\u00a0and resultantly were released into the wider economy of goods.<\/p>\n She mentioned that she \u201cgave away everything from his shirts, shoes to even handkerchiefs.\u201d I find this statement particularly poignant, as through the emphasis on his handkerchiefs, she was suggesting that she was ready to give up even the most private pieces. Nevertheless, a brown uniform that blends in with the wooden wardrobe and a cap hiding in a bag remained. Interestingly, she donated everything except his military uniform. When I asked her why, she was not sure why she made this decision. It is true that clothing is a \u201ctransforming medium<\/a>\u201d or a \u201csocial skin<\/a>\u201d that makes us and assigns us certain roles. Perhaps it is easier to remember certain roles more than others. It might be easier to remember him as a noble soldier, which provides an emotional buffer, rather than remembering the more delicate bits of him as a husband, as articulated through his handkerchiefs. His remembrance as foremost a soldier is encouraged by state practices too. Usually, when a loved one dies, the family of the dead can decorate their grave and pot flowers as they wish. However, we are prohibited from individualizing his grave, as it is part of a strictly uniform martyr\u2019s cemetery.<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tIbrahim Ince<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n![\"My](\"https:\/\/www.anthropology-news.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/Ince-Wardrobe-856x612.jpg\")
\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tIbrahim<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.anthropology-news.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/Ince-Soap-856x575.jpg\")
\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
![\"His](\"https:\/\/www.anthropology-news.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/Ince-Hangers-856x575.jpg\")
\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n![\"His](\"https:\/\/www.anthropology-news.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/Ince-Cap-856x575.jpg\")
\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n