Research carried out in the different fields presented above leads us to question the origins of a common misconception about the Balkan countries. Where this region is concerned, both the academic and the political world generally portray an image of a society grounded in small, bounded areas, where local belonging strongly influences how groups are defined (Prevelakis 1994). This leads in turn to a rather limited understanding of the locality, inhabited by the ντόπιοι (dopii, or ‘locals’ – the popular Greek term). The transformations of the last few decades, which I have seen in many different parts of this region, make one wonder just how this society, supposedly anchored in tiny spaces, is today confronted with, reacts to or interacts with, the increased mobility of actors who become, at one and the same time, both ‘locals’ and ‘strangers’, ‘tourists’ or ‘inhabitants’, ‘returnees’ or even ‘ghosts from the past’ (Givre and Sintes 2013). These various terms highlight the multiple upheavals which, over time, and still today, affect the various case studies chosen specifically for their marginal or peripheral location, where the relationships with places can seem problematic, conflictual and even traumatic, as we have already seen for Rhodes and for the Epirus region of Thesprotia. In these remote regions, nevertheless, current processes suggest new forms of appropriation of space, involving numerous interactions between society and the places, justified by twenty-first-century lifestyles but which also take into account (or make do with) the territory's turbulent past, as shown so clearly by the frequent promotion of its heritage or, more generally, of its past.

Such processes, linked to migratory movements or other geographical mobilities, are good indicators enabling us to foresee how spatial mobilities shed new light on social relations with places, which appear less like fixed entities and more like situated, contextualised and, occasionally, performed experiences. This is particularly true when one realises the capacity of some mobile actors to create ‘new links to old places’ for themselves (Givre and Sintes 2013), as the Rodeslis or the Albanian migrants have shown us in previous chapters.