The Lausanne Project (TLP)

Francisco Javier Martínez and Ozan Ozavci discuss a distinctive form of sanitary internationalism that emerged in Morocco in the late eighteenth century, shaping the intertwined histories of pilgrimage, pandemics, and imperialism.

e-mail: [email protected]

Javier is Associate Professor at the Universidad de Zaragoza.

While doing his PhD in Barcelona, Javier began with what seemed like a fairly straightforward question: how did public health work in Spanish Morocco in the early twentieth century? But the further he looked, the further back the story seemed to lead. To understand Spain’s role in Morocco, he found himself tracing the history of quarantine, epidemic disease and international intervention in the nineteenth century. That trail eventually brought him to the Sanitary Council of Tangier, an institution founded by Moroccan officials and European powers to counter epidemics and pandemics.

Javier’s findings in the archives were far bigger than he expected. A body of material that goes against the mainstream analytical narratives of imperial hygien. These materials also showed him that the Council became a place where Moroccan rulers and officials sought to defend their own authority and shape reform on their own terms.

Recorded on 19 June 2026, Javier and Ozan discuss in our new podcast episode how Javier first entered this history and the discoveries that drew him towards Morocco, the Hajj and cholera. What exactly was the Sanitary Council of Tangier, and why did European powers become so involved in Morocco’s health affairs? How did Moroccan rulers respond? And why did Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca become such a source of anxiety for governments worried not only about disease, but also about political unrest and ideas moving across borders? Their conversation also takes us to the tiny island of Mogador, turned into a quarantine station for pilgrims and travellers.

This small island constitutes the core of a much larger story about Spain’s ambitions in Morocco, the politics of controlling movement, and the ways epidemic fear could reshape relations between states comes into view.

Podcasts are published by TLP for the purpose of encouraging informed debate on the legacies of the events surrounding the Lausanne Conference. The views expressed by participants do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of TLP, its partners, convenors or members.

Extending citizenship to marginal communities is one way states grab power and influence, as well as subjects, away from rival powers. But shopping among rival “protectors” gives individuals agency, too. Çiğdem Oğuz and Jonathan Conlin discuss the “paperscapes” of nationality on the margins of the Ottoman Empire.

e-mails: [email protected]

Çiğdem is a Researcher at the University of Bologna.

Among the regulars at the Ottoman Archives in Istanbul (BOA) the grandpas stand out. Advanced in years, these researchers are not retired professional historians. They are the descendants of Ottomans who were born or lived on the lost Empire’s edgelands and shatterzones, descendants who are hoping to find documents supporting their families’ claims to non-Turkish (Bulgarian, Romanian…) citizenship — and the free movement within the Schengen Zone that comes with it. In this conversation, recorded on 21 July 2026, Çiğdem shares her surprise at this latest manifestation of the “Ottoman paperscapes” of contested nationality with which she is familiar from her many years of research on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This research was the focus of a recent essay in Archiv Orientální.

Beginning with the inclusive model of nationality adopted under the Ottoman Empire’s 1869 Nationality Law, itself in growing tension with the privileges foreign citizens enjoyed under the Capitulations, an interlocking web of contested citizenship rights gave those on the margins of empire ample opportunities to opt in or out of citizenships as their families’ interests dictated. For the states and empires concerned, extending “protection” to communities on the margins of empire furthered their own economic, demographic and sometimes religious ends. The resulting “Ottoman paperscapes” boomed in the years after World War I, but then appeared to retreat.

Çiğdem explains how her social history approach endeavours to recover the lived experience of nationality, without losing hold of evolving legal readings of treaty articles and case law. A proposed book-length development of her recent article will, she explains, include oral history interviews with both the grandpas and the lawyers who advise on their claims. What, Çiğdem asks, might we as historians learn from them, as well as from the records they are sifting?

Podcasts are published by TLP for the purpose of encouraging informed debate on the legacies of the events surrounding the Lausanne Conference. The views expressed by participants do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of TLP, its partners, convenors or members.

What happened when Islamic judges (qadis) steeped in divine law found themselves answerable to Habsburg officials who had never opened a Quran? Ninja Bumann and Julia Secklehner discuss how Habsburg-occupied Bosnia dealt with sensitive matters of marriage and divorce.

e-mails: [email protected]

Ninja is a Research Associate at Justus Liebig University Giessen.

Alongside her work as a Research Associate at Giessen, Ninja is pursuing doctoral research at the University of Vienna, analysing the negotiation of marriage and divorce in Sharia courts in Habsburg Bosnia and Herzegovina. In this conversation, recorded on 16 April 2026, she explains how Islamic family law continued to operate under Austro-Hungarian administration after the Habsburg occupation of Bosnia in 1878. Drawing on archival records from the Supreme Sharia Court — an appeal body established in Sarajevo in 1879 — Ninja asks what happened when Islamic judges (qadis) steeped in divine law suddenly found themselves answerable to Habsburg officials who had never opened a Quran.

Legal pluralism in Bosnia was not (only) a matter of imperial pragmatism, but a dynamic space where competing legal cultures, questions of gender, and broader pan-Islamic debates about modernity and reform intersected and clashed. Ninja guides us through the difficulties of navigating marriage, divorce, and female agency in a society ruled by two empires simultaneously. As she notes, “reform is not only about ideas, but about very practical problems that we can encounter in court records.”

Bumann, N., “The Economy of Islamic Divorce in Habsburg Bosnia and Herzegovina (1878-1918),” in A. Griesebner and E. Doxiadis, eds., Gender and Divorce in Europe: 1600-1900. (New York: Routledge, 2023), pp. 195–212.

Giomi, F., Making Muslim Women European (Budapest: CEU Press, 2021).

Karčić, F., “Survival of the Ottoman-Islamic Laws in post-Ottoman Times in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” in T. Simon, ed., Konflikt und Koexistenz. Band II: Serbien, Bosnien-Herzegowina, Albanien (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2017), pp. 43–69.

Younis, H., “The Image of Women Life Through Documents of the Sharia Court in Sarajevo 1878-1914,” Journal of Balkan Studies 2.1 (2022): 9–27.

Younis, H., A Qadi in the Christian Empire. The Staff and Work of the Sharia Courts in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1878-1914 (Sarajevo: University of Sarajevo, 2023.

Podcasts are published by TLP for the purpose of encouraging informed debate on the legacies of the events surrounding the Lausanne Conference. The views expressed by participants do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of TLP, its partners, convenors or members.

Lausanne displaced the living, and it desecrated the dead that exchanged communities left behind. Jonathan Conlin talks to Leonidas Karakatsanis and Ülker Başak Yesilkaya about grass-roots initiatives that are reversing this necroviolence.

e-mails: [email protected] [email protected]

Ulker is a Research Collaborator at the University of Sassari. Leonidas is Assistant Professor in Comparative Politics at the University of Macedonia in Thessaloniki.

The Treaty of Lausanne was careful to spell out how the war dead were to be respected. The cemeteries of those so-called “minority” communities exempted from the Lausanne population exchange also enjoyed special protections. But the far greater number of cemeteries left behind by communities displaced by Lausanne were not so fortunate. Many were “quarried” for building materials and sold for agricultural purposes by the Bank of Greece. In a village named Panagitsa an Ottoman Muslim cemetery was purchased by a man named Ioannis, himself a refugee.

What Yannis did next, the chain of events that followed on from that choice are a remarkable, uplifting story, one of several acts of grassroots reconiciliation that Leonidas and Ülker have been researching as part of their ethnographic research project. In this conversation, recorded on 30 March 2026, they explain how they are addressing this history of necroviolence, and how it has changed, at a fundamental level, their own relationship to history.

If our Turkish neighbours ever return and ask about their ancestors’ remains, hand over the bones under the walnut tree. One day, our neighbours will come back.

Ioannis Gaisiris

Podcasts are published by TLP for the purpose of encouraging informed debate on the legacies of the events surrounding the Lausanne Conference. The views expressed by participants do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of TLP, its partners, convenors or members.

Adnen El Ghali talks to Giorgio Ennas about his recently published book Quand la diplomatie fait la ville, which brings together the consular and architectural histories of Tunis.

e-mail: [email protected]

Adnen El Ghali is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Turin

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In his book entitled Quand la diplomatie fait la ville, Adnen El Ghali reconstructs the heart of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century diplomatic and consular life of Tunis through the history of consular buildings, using a historical approach that combines architectural and consular histories. At the end of the eighteenth century, the consular situation in Tunis changed rapidly. Old powers like Ragusa and the Republic of Venice were toppled, and instead upcoming powers like the United States took up a consular presence in Tunis. In his work, El Ghali argues that the layout, space, and location of the consular buildings tell us more about both consular life in Tunis, and the relationships between different powers and the Ḥusaynid government. With his words, recorded on 8 December 2025, Adnen accompanies Giorgio through the streets of the bustling capital of the Ḥusaynids, a diplomatic and commercial hub of the Ottoman Empire, shaped by centuries of contact and interaction with populations from North Africa and Europe.

There is a clear link between architecture, urbanism, and the nature of the international
relations between these different actors.

AUTHOR PHOTO: AXEL DERRIKS

Podcasts are published by TLP for the purpose of encouraging informed debate on the legacies of the events surrounding the Lausanne Conference. The views expressed by participants do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of TLP, its partners, convenors or members.

Can satire build bridges between communities, as well as between past and present? Anna Kollatz talks Julia Secklehner through Erst lachen, dann denken!/Laugh first, think later!, a recent exhibition of caricatures from the Ottoman Empire and Egypt, on display in Heidelberg.

Email: [email protected]

Anna is Professor of Islamic Studies at Heidelberg University.

In this conversation, recorded on 15 July 2025, Anna Kollatz introduces the ideas and concepts behind the exhibition Laugh first, think later!, held at the University Museum Heidelberg in 2025, curated by Anna and Veruschka Wagner. The exhibition featured a combination of enlarged reproductions, original artefacts, and translations, inviting viewers to connect with the art on a personal level. Born out of a collaborative project during the COVID pandemic, the exhibition showcased caricatures from the Ottoman Empire and Egypt, dating from the 1850s to the 1940s. Anna also touches on the logistical aspects of sourcing materials, underlining the importance of digital humanities — a large part of the caricatures displayed came from a digitisation project involving Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish satirical magazines.

VERUSCHKA WAGNER AND ANNA KOLLATZ READING SATIRICAL MAGAZINES IN THE EXHIBITION’S COFFEEHOUSE

Anna discusses the importance of using caricatures to engage audiences unfamiliar with Middle Eastern culture, emphasising humour and visual satire as tools for dialogue. The exhibition sought to explore the complexities of Middle Eastern culture within today’s multicultural society, especially in Germany, which has a diverse population with ties to the region. By presenting these caricatures, the exhibition aimed to build bridges between communities, highlighting shared histories, colonial legacies, and the universal language of humour. As Anna suggests, this focus on laughter and satire reminds us of shared qualities that can unite people across different backgrounds.

AL-FUKAHA VITRINE

For the exhibition blog, click here. To download the catalogue, edited by Anna Kollatz and Veruschka Wagner, click here.

INSTALLATION VIEW (C) STEFFEN FUCHS.

Podcasts are published by TLP for the purpose of encouraging informed debate on the legacies of the events surrounding the Lausanne Conference. The views expressed by participants do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of TLP, its partners, convenors or members.

When the shooting starts, does the archaeology stop? Ceren Abi talks to Julia Secklehner about how the Ottomans and Allied powers engaged with and occasionally weaponized antiquities during the Great War.

Email: [email protected]

Ceren is program manager of MESA Global Academy, a program for displaced scholars from the Middle East.

In this episode, Ceren and Julia explore the relationships between the Ottomans and their allied powers, and examine their engagement with archaeology, museums, and antiquities during periods of conflict. Ceren challenges the idea that war results solely in destruction, emphasising how cultural heritage remained a central concern for both sides. Even during times of crisis, efforts to preserve and engage with cultural artefacts continue. Ceren also highlights the ongoing relevance of this issue, as we observe the impact of war on cultural sites in Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, and Gaza.

One example she shares is of an Ottoman soldier in the Gallipoli campaign who wrote to the Imperial Museum in Istanbul about antiquities he discovered while digging trenches, illustrating his commitment to cultural heritage even amid the horrors of battle. Ceren also discusses the planned actions taken by both Allied and Ottoman soldiers to study and protect monuments. When Russian forces entered the Ottoman Empire, for example, they brought scholars and archaeologists to focus on Byzantine and Christian history, aiming to substantiate territorial claims. Meanwhile, military leader Djemal Pasha established a monument protection unit to survey and safeguard cultural sites in Syria.

Ceren’s research highlights the competitive dynamics surrounding cultural heritage in wartime, as nations seek to assert historical claims that support territorial ambitions. It illustrates how the past influences modern conflicts and emphasises the importance of safeguarding cultural heritage during crises.

To find out more about the exhibition, click here. To read a TLP blogpost about it, click here.

Podcasts are published by TLP for the purpose of encouraging informed debate on the legacies of the events surrounding the Lausanne Conference. The views expressed by participants do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of TLP, its partners, convenors or members.

Abi, Ceren. “‘If It Is Not Too Paradoxical’: Archaeology in İstanbul under Occupation as a Window into Understanding the Creation of a Post-War Cultural Heritage Regime.” New Perspectives on Turkey 71 (2024): 62–82.

MacArthur-Seal, Daniel-Joseph. “Musical Convergence and Divergence in Occupied İstanbul, 1918–1923.” New Perspectives on Turkey 71 (2024): 43–61.

Özlü, Nilay. “Under the Shadow of Occupation: Cultural, Archaeological, and Military Activities at Topkapı Palace during the Armistice Period, 1918–1923.” New Perspectives on Turkey 71 (2024): 83–113.

Papatheodorou, Artemis. “Antiquities in Exile: Ottoman Greek Refugees’ Trauma and Ionian Antiquities.” New Perspectives on Turkey 70:71–88 (2024).

Tongo, Gizem, and İrvin Cemil Schick. “Islamic Art and Visualities of War from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic.” New Perspectives on Turkey 71 (2024): 14–42.

Tongo, Gizem. “Mini Dossier: War, Occupation, and Culture: Arts, Heritage, and İstanbul, 1918–1923.” New Perspectives on Turkey 71 (2024): 4–13.

Winter, Jay. “Postscript to the Mini Dossier on İstanbul, 1918–1923.” New Perspectives on Turkey 71 (2024): 114–20.

Woodall, G. Carole. 2016. “Listening for Jazz in Post-Armistice Istanbul.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 48 (1): 135–40.

In the last of a special series hosted by Alexandria Innes and Georgios Giannakopoulos, guests Harry Tzimitras, Ahmet Sözen, Ipek Borman and Ibrahim Ince confront Cyprus’s present impasse.

Ibrahim is a DPhil student in Anthropology at the University of Oxford.

Ipek is a researcher at Cyprus International University, and consultant at the PRIO Cyprus Centre.

Ahmet is Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Eastern Mediterranean University, and founding Director of the Cyprus Policy Center.

Harry is Professor of International Law and the Director of the PRIO Cyprus Centre.

In the final episode of our Cyprus series four guests confront Cyprus’s present impasse. They note that while violence has ceased, division has hardened. Greek-Cypriots favour a unitary state. Turkish-Cypriots favour a two-state model. Only a bi-zonal, bi-communal federation bridges the gap, yet publics remain unprepared for shared governance. Generations born after 1974 have only known partition, but young activists and artists are beginning to re-imagine coexistence from below. Harry warns that no conflict is truly “frozen,” while Ahmet and Ipek emphasize protecting the fragile peace that exists. Ibrahim ends with a metaphor of hope: Hermes Street in Nicosia—once a river, later a marketplace, now a border—reminds us that places can change meaning. Perhaps borders can too.

Recorded on 19 May 2025, this is the final episode in a special series of podcasts that emerged from Partitioning for Peace,TLP’s 2024 conference at City, University of London. For an introduction to the series as a whole, click here. These podcasts were supported by the Modern Greek Studies Association Innovation Grant, and the UK Prevention Research Partnership (Violence, Health and Society; MR-VO49879/1). 

Podcasts are published by TLP for the purpose of encouraging informed debate on the legacies of the events surrounding the Lausanne Conference. The views expressed by participants do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of TLP, its partners, convenors or members.

MUSIC CREDIT: Gregory Davis, Ocean View (Epidemic Sounds).

In the fourth of a special series hosted by Alexandria Innes and Georgios Giannakopoulos, guests Ibrahim Ince and Ezgican Özdemir explore how the material world records Cyprus’s division.

Ibrahim is a DPhil student in Anthropology at the University of Oxford..

Ezgican is Assistant Professor at the Department of Anthropology, Özyeğin University.

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Ibrahim Ince and Ezgi Özdemir explore how the material world records Cyprus’s division. Ibrahim recounts his grandmother’s decades-long care for his missing grandfather’s clothes—an act of mourning through objects. Ezgi follows water and electricity across the Green Line, showing how pipelines, dams, and informal exchanges reveal both cooperation and denial between north and south. Everyday items—a refrigerator too wide for a checkpoint, a rusted washing machine, a protest against privatized water—become metaphors for living with constraint. Through ethnography and material culture, the guests show how infrastructure shapes moral and political life. Their conclusion: the partition is felt not only in treaties and maps but in the intimate textures of homes and streets, where adaptation and endurance coexist.

Recorded on 19 May 2025, this is the fourth in a special series of podcasts that emerged from Partitioning for Peace,TLP’s 2024 conference at City, University of London. For an introduction to the series as a whole, click here. These podcasts were supported by the Modern Greek Studies Association Innovation Grant, and the UK Prevention Research Partnership (Violence, Health and Society; MR-VO49879/1). 

Podcasts are published by TLP for the purpose of encouraging informed debate on the legacies of the events surrounding the Lausanne Conference. The views expressed by participants do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of TLP, its partners, convenors or members.

MUSIC CREDIT: Gregory Davis, Ocean View (Epidemic Sounds).

In the third of a special series hosted by Alexandria Innes and Georgios Giannakopoulos, guests Panikos Panayi and Giorgios Charalambous trace how Cypriots have made lives for themselves across the island’s global diaspora.

Panikos is Professor of European History at De Montfort University.

Giorgios is a PhD researcher in the Department of History of the European University Institute.

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In this podcast, recorded on 19 May 2025, we discuss the history of Cypriot economic migration and displacement, from the late nineteenth century to 1974 and beyond. In some places migrants were subsumed into a Greek diaspora, in others (London included) they established a distinct community. Panikos and Giorgios outline the shifting set of connections between this diaspora and the homeland, and how diaspora and homeland viewed each other, and how colonial politics informed these relationships.

It seems virtually impossible to be non-politicised in Cyprus after 1955. But once you leave that situation and move to London, it’s television media, the letters to your family back home…you know exactly what’s going on. And it’s traumatizing you. But on the other hand you are still developing your diasporic life in Britain. Diasporic life doesn’t mean that you are trapped in this community. If you move to London you are moving to this multicultural society, it is impossible for you to just associate with your family and Cypriot political organisations. It’s an incredibly complex picture, and one needs to dissect it at a variety of levels.

This is the third in a special series of podcasts that emerged from Partitioning for Peace,TLP’s 2024 conference at City, University of London. For an introduction to the series as a whole, click here. These podcasts were supported by the Modern Greek Studies Association Innovation Grant, and the UK Prevention Research Partnership (Violence, Health and Society; MR-VO49879/1). 

Podcasts are published by TLP for the purpose of encouraging informed debate on the legacies of the events surrounding the Lausanne Conference. The views expressed by participants do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of TLP, its partners, convenors or members.

MUSIC CREDIT: Gregory Davis, Ocean View (Epidemic Sounds). IMAGE CREDIT: Movement for Colonial Freedom Cyprus Rally, 1956. HG1707/12 © Henry Grant Collection/London Museum.