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Speaker Series
Gefyra presents Dr. Leon Saltiel and "Maternal Words, Community Anguish: Family Correspondence on the Eve of the Holocaust in Thessaloniki"
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Leon Saltiel is a historian specializing on the Holocaust in Thessaloniki, Greece. He holds a Ph.D. in Contemporary Greek History from the University of Macedonia, in Thessaloniki, Greece, and has been a post-doctoral researcher at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. His publications include The Holocaust in Thessaloniki: Reactions to the Anti-Jewish Persecution, 1942–1943 (Routledge 2020), which won the 2021 Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research, and ‘Do Not Forget Me’: Three Jewish Mothers Write to their Sons from the Thessaloniki Ghetto in Greek (Alexandria 2018), English (Berghahn 2021) and French (Denoël 2023). He also serves as Director of Diplomacy, and Representative at UN Geneva and UNESCO, for the World Jewish Congress.
Letters read by Nina Houle, MA Student, SNF Centre for Hellenic Studies & the Department of Global Humanities at Simon Fraser University
ABSTRACT
Between 15 March and 10 August 1943, some forty-three thousand Jews of Thessaloniki were transported to the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz. Of those, less than one thousand returned. This was a devastating blow to the Jewish population of Thessaloniki, a major Jewish center in Europe since the arrival of the Sephardic Jews after the Spanish Inquisition in 1492. The Jews had constituted most of the population —and at times even the absolute majority—thus marking the city’s character for centuries. Little is known about the everyday lives of individual Jews during the years of the Nazi occupation, let alone the period of ghettoization and deportation. This gap in historiography can be bridged by a unique find: a series of fifty-three letters written by three Jewish mothers living in Thessaloniki and sent to their sons, all residing in Athens—all three women victims of the Holocaust. This considerable number of letters from three different eyewitnesses, as well as the long period covered sheds light on the lives of ordinary Jewish citizens of Thessaloniki, free from hindsight and the influence of what had followed. The lecture will discuss the general framework of the Holocaust in Thessaloniki and the great contribution these letters can make in our understanding of this dark period.
Gefyra presents Dr. George Manginis and "Pretty in Pink: A Portrait of Queen Olga at the Benaki Museum"
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY
George Manginis is the Academic Director of the Benaki Museum in Athens. He has taught and researched Cypriot prehistory, Islamic art and architecture, Sinai studies, Chinese ceramics, European decorative arts and the Greek and Armenian diasporas. In 2016 he published Mount Sinai: A History of Travellers and Pilgrims and China Rediscovered: The Benaki Museum Collection of Chinese Ceramics, followed by Ceramics from Korea at the Benaki Museum: The George Eumorfopoulos Collection and Director's Choice: Benaki Museum in 2021, and Imperial China in 2023.
ABSTRACT
On the third floor of the Benaki Museum in central Athens hangs a portrait of Queen Olga, the consort of Greece's second king, painted a few years after her wedding to George I. In March 2021, the portrait, attributed to an unknown artist, was included in the Museum's anniversary exhibition celebrating the bicentennial of the Greek Revolution. This lecture will unfold the story of this radiant but enigmatic painting, from its creation to its bequest to the Museum, offering surprising insights into 19th and 20th century Greek and European history.
Gefyra presents Dr. Panagiotis Agapitos and "Byzantine Crime Novels in the Twenty-First Century: From History to Fiction"
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY
Panagiotis Agapitos is the Gutenberg Distinguished Research Fellow in Byzantine Literature at the University of Mainz. Previously, he taught for 25 years at the University of Cyprus as Professor of Byzantine Literature and Culture in the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies. He studied at the University of Munich and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. In his free time, he writes “mystery stories” set in ninth-century Byzantium.
ABSTRACT
This lecture tackles the question of “authenticity” when writing crime novels set in the remote past. The speaker’s three novels (published between 2003 and 2009 in Greece), that are set in the first half of ninth-century Byzantium during the rule of the last iconoclast emperor, Theophilos (r. 829–842), form the basis of a lively discussion about the challenges of producing a satisfactory narrative. The fairly clear generic conventions of a traditional British-style mystery are not applicable to a medieval culture such as Byzantium, starting with the basic issue of the absence of detection and the relevant detective. Contemporary fans of crime fiction have broad expectations about what a detective novel should be, but they also want a feeling of “real” history in the narrative. In his novels, the speaker tackles this problem by employing various techniques derived from Byzantine rhetoric and narrative, while, at the same time using archaeological, historical and textual studies to offer a medieval yet contemporary crime story that feels medieval but is, in fact, postmodern.
Gefyra Presents Professor Julia Tulke, Emory University & "Aesthetics of Crisis"
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY
Julia Tulke earned her Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. Her longitudinal research project Aesthetics of Crisis won the 2022 Prosser Award for Visual Methodologies from the International Visual Sociology Association.
Abstract
This talk recapitulates the first ten years of Aesthetics of Crisis, a longitudinal research project that has documented and examined political street art and graffiti in Athens since 2013, generating an archive of nearly 7000 photographs. Initially probing the walls of the city as an artifact of and site of performative response to the Greek debt crisis, the project has since adopted Lyman Chaffee’s notion of political street art as a “barometer,” attending to shifting currents of crisis and newly emerging discourses: the austerity referendum and so-called refugee crisis of 2015; the growing visibility of feminist and queer protest and expression since the mid-2010s; the emergence anti-Airbnb and anti-gentrification graffiti since 2019; the response to the COVID-19 pandemic since 2020; and, most recently, the turn to graffiti removal as an aspirational performance of the end of crisis. By weaving together ethnographic and documentary sensibilities attuned to the complex and ever-shifting material realities of everyday life, Aesthetics of Crisis offers a polyphonic counterpoint to the narrow and often fetishizing representation of the “crisis city,” i.e. through so-called ruin porn, or the uncritical celebration of “crisis creativity” that casts Athens as “the new Berlin.
Historical Trajectories of Hellenism in Asia Minor with Paschalis Kitromilides
Speaker Biography
Paschalis M. Kitromilides, Ph.D. at Harvard University, is a Greek-Cypriot political scientist and intellectual historian. He is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Athens and a member of the Academy of Athens. He has been director of the Centre for Asia Minor Studies since 1980 and was Director of the Institute of Neohellenic Research / National Hellenic Research Foundation (2000-2011). He has held visiting appointments at Harvard and Brandeis Universities, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, the European University Institute and the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies Villa I Tatti. He is the author or editor of over fifty books, including Enlightenment and Revolution: The Making of Modern Greece (Harvard University Press, 2013), and over two hundred and sixty articles and book reviews in academic journals and collective volumes in Greek and English. Besides English and Greek, his books have appeared in Russian, Romanian, Serbian and Bulgarian.
Abstract
Professor Paschalis Kitromilides will present a survey of the Greek presence in Asia Minor from the original Greek colonization in antiquity to the exodus of the Greek population of the peninsula in the third decade of the twentieth century.
He will examine the unity of the Greek world on both shores of the Aegean, East and West, for three millennia. Special attention will be paid to the modern period and to the cultural achievements of the “last Hellenism in Asia Minor.”
My Rembetika Blues: Love, Life & Greek Music | A Discussion with Director Mary Zournazi
Speaker Biography
Mary Zournazi is an Australian film maker, author and cultural philosopher. Her multi-awarding winning documentary Dogs of Democracy (2017) was screened worldwide. Her most recent documentary film, My Rembetika Blues is a film about life, love and Greek music. She is the author of several books including Hope - New Philosophies for Change, Inventing Peace with the German filmmaker Wim Wenders and most recently Justice and Love: A Philosophical Dialogue with Rowan Williams.
Abstract
My Rembetika Blues is a film about the power of music and what makes us human. Rembetika music or the Greek blues is a music of the streets and a music of refugees. The film explores the heart and soul of Rembetika music through peoples’ stories of love, loss and belonging.
Rembetika developed its roots from migrant experience. Zournazi's grandmother was one of the 1.2 million refugees who fled the Smyrna disaster in Turkey in 1922 and arrived at the Port of Piraeus in Greece. She, like many, became part of a movement of people, and of tradition, which saw the birth Rembetika. Through its rawness and unique style, Rembetika provides one of the world’s foremost musical accounts of migrant experience.
Through her grandmother's story, Zournazi narrates a personal account of the depth of longing and belonging that is part of the migrant life. By weaving together different stories and interviews, the film looks at the legacies of history and migration, and how music can connect people in times of struggle and in times of need.
Drawing on the parallels of the migrant and economic crisis in Greece, the film explores the revival of Rembetika today, and how it continues to convey everyday life and struggle through the fusion of street music, hip-hop, and other influences such as Byzantine music and the Blues.
The film documents peoples’ memory and experiences that are often left out of the chronicles of history. It is a universal story about love, life and music.