An Ethnography of Textile Preservation: Caring for the Wardrobe of a Missing Person

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When someone disappears without a trace, what remains are their possessions – objects that become anchors for memory and vessels for unresolved grief. The human urge to collect and preserve objects, what Jacques Derrida calls ‘archive fever’, takes on special significance when there is no body to bury, no grave to visit. This ethnography explores one such case of preservation: my grandmother’s decades-long stewardship of my grandfather’s wardrobe after his disappearance in the 1974 conflict in Cyprus. Through this intimate portrait, I discuss how objects can evoke a personal and intense care fever because of the people they stand in for.

My grandmother’s house has a dimly lit dark bedroom filled with pictures of her wedding day 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’t 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—or so I thought as a child.

I often discuss my grandfather’s 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; however, 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. The violent inter-communal conflict between Turkish- and Greek-Cypriots culminated to 1974, following a coup orchestrated by the Greek military junta, leading to Turkey’s 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’ 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. 

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’s 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’s claim that “[i]f home is where the heart is, then it is also where it is broken, torn and made whole.” This room was the heart of her house. Its purpose was to preserve what was hidden in the wardrobe—the clothes of my grandfather in pristine condition.

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—much like the preserved contents of my grandfather’s 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 “stuck” 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’s clothes from his passing in 1974 until 2020. She worked diligently and privately, with a compelling resilience to make these objects last. Thinking 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.

When a loved one dies, the conventional wisdom suggested that healing required “breaking bonds,” but my grandmother’s careful preservation reveals what scholars now recognize as “continuing bonds”: bereaved people often keep objects from their loved ones to continue their connection. This is especially the case when the body is missing and the stages of mourning are often projected to the objects left of them. Through storing her husband’s clothes, my grandmother resisted “materialist conceptions of death as the end of social and emotional relatedness.” 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 “I didn’t even touch them,” perhaps to preserve an essence of his presence. Through her long-lasting preservation practices, her love for him manifested into what is known as “object-love” in the field of conservation, making her conservational care “the working dimension of love.” 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 “return” 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 “[t]he thing is the person and the person is the thing.” 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. 

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. 

During one of our conversations, she uttered that “I would have given his clothes to you if I knew that you were this interested.” I would have loved to preserve some of my grandfather’s clothes to sentimentally and materially get to know the man I take my name from. Though this gift gesture signified my grandmother’s 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—a process that became an act of preservation and care for the equally fragile story associated with them. 

Clothing is critical in identity-making, yet giving up clothes is as critical to identity and memory as acquiring them. The philosopher Georges Bataille’s “sacrificial economies” suggests that “objects are withdrawn from one sphere of social use, wasted in relation to that sphere to constitute and materialize alternate ideal realms.” In sacrificial economies, objects are never lost or destroyed, they just change lives in another realm. In my grandmother’s sacrificial ritual of giving up his clothes, they did not lose significance; they signified the process of healing through their absence. While the other cabinets in the room are full of clothes and stuff, she has left these hangers empty, as their emptiness gained new meaning—where the absence of the clothes became as potent as their presence. As the place of the body is now known, the clothes no longer served their past purpose of standing in and resultantly were released into the wider economy of goods.

She mentioned that she “gave away everything from his shirts, shoes to even handkerchiefs.” 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 “transforming medium” or a “social skin” 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’s cemetery.

Perhaps I interviewed my grandmother in the later stages of her grief, when the wardrobe has been cleared of clothes, empty hangers signifying acceptance through absent-presence. His life, as well as her silent conservation and curations, will not be lost on me or in time and space. As an anthropologist and as their grandson, I will preserve her memory as a loving conservator with a care fever. Her four-decade vigil of preservation reflects not only personal grief, but also how humans create and curate meaning amid violent political upheaval. Her story is not isolated, as the Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus has been trying to recover the remains of over two thousand Cypriots who went missing during the inter-communal conflicts. Local and international organizations across the world, such as in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Lebanon, and Colombia, have been trying to recover missing persons of past wars. These make me wonder at the many silently maintained museums of absence that form an unofficial archive of conflict, telling stories that official histories often overlook. And, with every news article of violent conflict today, I lament how many wardrobes will be used to care for the missing—that is, if any bedrooms remain.