The end of the Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean witnessed the destruction and abandonment of fortified citadels and the collapse of the cultures that sustained them. Recent scholarship in the Aegean has focused on the immediate aftermath of these circumstances, the re-constitution of elite activities among ruins, and the materialization of nostalgia in objects and ceremonies that commemorated or even fictionalized the past. My presentation will focus on the curation of the past at citadels such as Troy and Mycenae, the symbolic construction of memory through rituals enacted at these locales, and the invention of novel arrangements in architecture and other monuments to frame the past.  My goal will be to trace the development of narrative means of re-writing the past, not just in poetry but in permanent monuments and in enactments of imagined scenarios at these sites, and to compare these narratives as they evolved in the Near East as well as Greece.