15/02/2026
📌 Conference recap | 12–14 February 2026 | Gießen, GCSC - International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture
This week, Justus Liebig University Giessen hosted the interdisciplinary conference “The Shadow of the Aegean: Memory, Identity and Trauma: Aftermath of the Population Exchange (1923) between Greece and Turkey.” Scholars from history, anthropology, and related fields came together to examine how displacement is remembered, narrated, and lived—across families, communities, and generations.
✨ A key milestone: this was presented as the first conference in Germany dedicated specifically to the aftermath of the 1923 population exchange, creating a rare space for cross-disciplinary exchange on a topic that is often discussed in fragments rather than in dialogue.
What was discussed:
✔️ Keynote: “Path to Population Exchange” (Erik Jan Zürcher), setting the broader historical frame for why and how the exchange unfolded—and why its consequences still shape memory and identity today.
✔️ Personal perspectives & intergenerational memory: sessions that connected academic approaches with lived experience, including a special talk framed as “The Tale of Two Refugees” (Remziye Koşar Yiğit & Christina Dongas).
Major thematic clusters across the program:
✔️ Politics, state narratives, and identity-building
✔️ Gendered narratives and women’s postmemory
✔️ Space, monuments, and material traces of memory
✔️ Sacred/symbolic culture and community practices
✔️ Literary and cinematic representations
✔️ Performance, media, and pedagogy as ways memory is transmitted and contested
What stayed with us most was how consistently the discussions returned to one point: the population exchange wasn’t only a historical event with an “after”—it remains an ongoing framework through which belonging, loss, and identity are negotiated. It was a real privilege for GiZo to co-organise this conference and help create a much-needed platform for the inspiring interdisciplinary dialogue!
![[English below]📣 Im Juli 2026 findet an der JLU Gießen, organisiert vom Gießener Zentrum Östliches Europa (GiZo), eine i...](https://img5.glunis.com/635/974/1322445236359747.jpg)
