Dead bodies on edge: Misfitting graves and awkward repair on the Georgian – Turkish border

Questions of belonging are especially acute for border dwellers, who do not easily fit the exclusivist logics of the nation state. This certainly has been the case for inhabitants of Sarpi ever since their village was cut in two by the border separating the Soviet Union from Turkey. In Soviet Sarpi, villagers had to navigate a state suspicious of their Muslim and ethnic minority Laz identity, and their potential loyalties to the other side. When the border reopened many decades later, these same villagers had come to see themselves as Georgian nationals and were converting to Orthodox Christianity. To capture their tumultuous trajectories of belonging, this article focuses on the village cemetery as a place where villagers’ social identities are both ‘engraved’ and ‘uprooted’. It is a place where older graves had become misfits – reminders of a past that needed to be forgotten – resulting in the refitting and repairing of graves. The material, social, and imaginary dimensions of graves illuminate the textured and fractured nature of collective identification on the state’s edge.