The Lausanne Project (TLP)

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.

In the second of a special series hosted by Alexandria Innes and Georgios Giannakopoulos, guests Giorgios Charalambous and Ibrahim Ince trace how identity intersects with partition on Cyprus.

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

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

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This podcast, recorded on 19 May 2025, looks at how identity intersects with partition. What does the partition of Cyprus look like and feel like, experienced first hand, growing up on a divided island in the shadow of a divisive history? The guests in this episode are both researchers working on questions related to Cypriot life, culture, identity, and politics. At the same time they are Cypriots who grew up in the partitioned island. We explore how partition intersects with identity, forming and being formed, in individual experiences, and in the collective making of contemporary Cypriotness as it may be.

This is the second 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: Julian Nyča, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>;, via Wikimedia Commons.

In the first of a special series hosted by Alexandria Innes and Georgios Giannakopoulos, guests Andrekos Varnava and Beyza Kiziltepe trace how Cyprus’s division continues to live in the memory.

Andrekos is Professor of Imperial and Colonial History at Flinders University.

Beyza is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at McMaster University.

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In this podcast, recorded on 14 May 2025, Andrekos locates the roots of partition in the early twentieth century, when rival visions of enosis—union with Greece—collided with British rule and Turkish-Cypriot opposition. Beyza brings the story into the present through oral histories with Turkish Cypriot families, showing how each generation remembers conflict differently: for some a trauma, for others a “peace operation.” Across communities, remembering and forgetting work in tandem to sustain national narratives. The episode closes by asking what kinds of memory might support reconciliation, suggesting that peace begins with honest listening and attention to everyday coexistence that has never fully disappeared.

This is the first 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).

Alan Mikhail speaks to Bryony Harris about the place of plague, quarantine and environmental history in Ottoman Egypt.

e-mail: [email protected]

Alan is the Chace Family Professor of History at Yale University.

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The plague. An inscrutable curse cast down from the heavens? Drawing upon his 2008 article “The Nature of Plague in Late Eighteenth-Century Egypt” and his 2011 book Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History, Alan Mikhail invites us, instead, to consider plague as part of Ottoman Egypt’s regular biophysical pathology. Described as an ‘icy gale of death’ by the eighteenth-century Egyptian chronicler ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jabartī, the plague struck Egypt approximately every nine years during the period from 1337 to 1894. Egypt suffered 59 separate plague epidemics between 1701 and 1844 alone. Viewing these epidemics collectively and taking the 1791 plague epidemic as a case study, Mikhail’s work has explored how the disease functioned alongside a regular set of environmental processes in Egypt, such as the annual flood, food shortages, famine, and sometimes drought. In adapting to this environmental cycle, Egyptians not only survived the plague, but built productive, generative and constructive aspects of society around the disease, from the devolution of property to funerary processions and burial rites.

“Part of plague being embedded in Egyptian society is understanding that it’s not singular, that it has a whole set of other forces, processes, occurrences around it that we have to understand as a kind of bundle.”

This bundle was disrupted with the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt, which ushered in a new, stringent, European-style of quarantine whereby the healthy and the sick were suddenly and utterly separated. The subsequent resistance of Egyptians to these new quarantine measures, which threatened their established rituals of death and dying, signifies how integral natural cycles were to Ottoman Egyptian society, and in turn, demonstrates the importance of environmental history as an essential tool for understanding this society.

As a historian who helped establish the field of Middle East environmental history, Mikhail explains its key tenets. In treating the historical relationship between humans and other parts of nature as the central motor force of any given society (but particularly the rural and agrarian) we can appreciate the environment differently:

It’s not simply a kind of setting in which society takes place or politics takes place, but an actual dynamic force in which humans are in a kind of push-and-pull relationship with environmental processes that shapes everything around them.

In this episode, Mikhail also recounts his archival experiences in Egypt and how environmental history, on a methodological level, enables us to transcend urban biases, to get into the countryside and to locate Ottoman Egypt’s majority rural population beyond Alexandria and Cairo. He ends by offering us a glimpse into his current research on the intertwined histories of Islam and colonial America.

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.

William Stroebel introduces Jonathan Conlin to the stories Lausanne tried to silence, that combined scripts and vocabularies in ways that challenged philologists’ obsession with linguistic purity and authorial intent.

e-mail: [email protected]

Will is Assistant Professor of Modern Greek and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan.

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In his recent book Literature’s Refuge: Rewriting the Mediterranean Borderscape Will Stroebel focuses on the stories that the “checkpoints of modern philology” either sought to exclude or which were permitted to pass only if they changed their clothes, accent and backstory to fit a national norm. Although Will’s book points to examples from the preceding centuries, Lausanne and the population exchange dramatically ramped up this regime through their attempted “unmixing” of the peoples of the Near and Middle East, displaced into territories whose schools, critics and publishers sought to “purify” these refugees’ vocabulary and literature of “corrupt”, “barbaric” or supposedly “non-existent” words and accents. An Ottoman space and an Ottoman scriptworld, in which different faith communities used the same script to write in different languages, became a “universe of the in-between”, “a linguistic no-man’s land.” In this conversation, recorded on 8 September 2025, Will explains how he came to study this topic, before addressing the analogies between two testimonies of the events around Lausanne: Halide Edib’s Shirt of Flame and Stratis Doukas’ Captive’s Story. He then introduces Agathangelos, a Greek cleric from the Anatolian village of Andaval (near Niğde in today’s Republic of Turkey), whose manuscript novels and commonplace book joined displaced Ottoman Greeks in Wisconsin, where they circulated among a Karamanli diaspora. The podcast closes with Jon challenging Will on his optimistic call to his readers to train themselves “to cross alphabets, languages, and confessions, mixing our own scripts into the scripts we encounter.” In a world of AI and monoglottism, how realistic is this vision?

For Will’s PMLA article about the commonplace book discussed in this podcast, click here (or, for those without online access to this journal, click here for an open-access draft). To get a discount on his book, please use the discount code P327 at check out from Princeton University Press’s online bookshop.

The philologist’s job ought not to be to single out and canonize any single voice but to recover the trace of each within and beyond the page, to recover likewise the spaces of collaboration and struggle that play out as the text evolves and changes…My aim is not to critique in any absolute sense the testimonial and the very real historical truths that it articulates; instead, I want to better curate them.

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.

Özge Baykan Calafato introduces Julia Secklehner and Enno Maessen to her work exploring the role of photography in developing modern Turkish citizenship.

e-mail: [email protected]

Özge is Lecturer in Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam.

As Assistant Director of the Akkasah Center for Photography at NYU Abu Dhabi between 2014 and 2020, Özge not only added more than 17,000 photographs to the institution’s collection, she also sought to “activate” this vast archive. Dating from the 1920s and 1930s, the photographs were acquired from second-hand book dealers in Istanbul and Izmir. They were the work of studio-based photographers and more itinerant alaminüt photographers. In these “everyday” photographs we see sitters constructing and expressing their social and class identities, while negotiating with the state’s aim to establish a new Turkish identity. In this conversation, recorded on 9 December 2024, Enno and Julia ask Özge about her new book, Making the Modern Turkish Citizen: Vernacular Photography in the Early Republican Era. They discuss how the photographers understood their own art and craft, as well as the way in which alaminüt photographers became associated with spaces such as parks and beaches, republican spaces in which regional characteristics influenced nation-building processes.

By fostering a new social imagery, these photographs reflect the Treaty of Lausanne’s broader impact on the construction of a new Turkish national identity.

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.

FEATURE IMAGE: BELLOWS PLATE CAMERA, WITH A DALLMEYER 3.B PATENT LENS, C. 1900. SCIENCE MUSEUM GROUP, Y1978/51.

Peter Hill talks to Charles Ough about Mikha’il Mishaqa, the Mount Lebanon-born polymath and US Vice Consul in Damascus.

e-mail: [email protected]

Peter is Associate Professor at Northumbria University.

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Peter Hill’s most recent book, Prophet of Reason: Science, Religion and the Origins of the Modern Middle East (2024), traces the life of Mikha’il Mishaqa over the course of the nineteenth century, examining the origins of his intellectual and religious development. The length of this one man’s life and the breadth of his interests and contacts across the region, from the ports of Egypt to the villages of Mount Lebanon and the ancient capital of Syria, make this book as much a study of this turbulent period across the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. At its heart, this wide-ranging study seeks to answer the question: What did people in the Middle East actually believe in this period?

How does the personal and individual and intellectual relate to the political and social? Every time Mishaqa changes his world view and his intellectual beliefs it seems to be in response to a new set of “vicissitudes of time”, of instabilities that make him rethink whether he had a good explanation of the world around him. He doesn’t just surrender to this, saying it’s fate, but says no, we need to use our reason to understand why this is happening.

Hill discusses the importance of Mishaqa to our understanding of this question and, more broadly, how the Middle East changed dramatically by the end of the nineteenth century. Where most studies have focused on the Vice-Consul’s reports and account of the 1860 massacre, Hill starts with his childhood and the first glimmers of a fierce intellectual curiosity which would lead him to convert from the Roman Catholicism of his upbringing and embrace Protestantism, under the influence of American and British missionaries. In this conversation, recorded on 12 July 2025, Hill discusses the impact of “vicissitudes” – the dramatic and sometimes cataclysmic events of Syria in the nineteenth century – on Mishaqa’s religious development and the decisions he made. In a world where many were questioning their beliefs even as others were engaging in violent religious sectarianism like that which threatened Mishaqa’s own life in 1860, Hill sheds light on how these two trends coexisted. He brings to life the lived experience of the actors who made and experienced the massive changes of the nineteenth century and draws out the relevance of his analysis to today’s world.

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.

Bariş Altan introduces Julia Secklehner to Cahide Tamer, a pioneer in architectural restoration and one of the first women architects in Turkey. Recently rescued, her archive fills a gap in the story of Istanbul’s historic landmarks, while her example of courage gives inspiration to today’s preservationists.

e-mail: [email protected]

Bariş is Teaching Associate and PhD candidate at Brandenburg University of Technology.

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The architect Cahide Tamer (1915-2005) is a figure that looms large in the restoration histories of Byzantine monuments in Istanbul. In this conversation, recorded on 16 April 2025, Bariş emphasizes the importance of preserving and restoring Byzantine heritage as part of nation-building processes in the First Republic. Among the most notable of these projects was the Hagia Sofia. Bariş traces the history of restoration practices from the 1940s until today. The discussion concludes by presenting Tamer’s archive, in which she kept unusually detailed records of restoration projects from the 1940s until the 1970s. This open access resource is an important point of reference today, providing a missing chapter in the ongoing history of these landmarks. Alongside plans and photographs, Tamer’s archive includes other forms of documentation, such as correspondence and budgets, for more than 150 buildings in Istanbul. The conversation concludes with Bariş’ reflections on the challenges confronting Tamer’s successors – the preservationists and activists of today.

In a male-dominated environment, in 1950s Turkey, it might seem surprising that a woman architect was the chief architect of the body responsible for historic monuments. Being an activist today still requires strong nerves, because most of the time we are unsuccessful. But I still have hope for the future.

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.

Long before the Turkish State Opera opened in 1949, Halide Edip Adıvar was among those imagining what Turkish opera might sound like. In this conversation Jonathan Conlin asks Ici Vanwesenbeeck to explain how this remarkable polymath conceived of an opera that was neither alla franca nor alla turca.

e-mail: [email protected]

Ici is a professor of literature at the State University of New York, Fredonia.

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In a short story of 1938 Halide Edip Adıvar transported the reader into the future, imagining a music competition taking place in 1955. The conceit of a future contest challenging Turkish composers to write an opera set in Istanbul allowed the author to reflect on how an art form seemingly wedded to a court-centred cosmopolitanism could transcend the sound-worlds of “old” and “new” Turkey and be accessible to a broad audience. In this conversation, recorded on 20 May 2025, Ici begins by explaining how she came to research Halide Edip’s thinking about opera, and briefly outlines the historiographical state of play. She interprets the 1938 story as a response to a 1934 opera competition won by The Village Wedding, a work still in the repertoire today. Although Halide Edip was in exile for much of the period under discussion (1924-1939), she used her voice to challenge Ziya Gökalp and others who viewed Turkish music as degenerate. Drawing on encounters with Italian opera and Wagner’s Ring Cycle at performances inside Yildiz palace during the late Ottoman period, yet cherishing “the east in the Turk’s heart”, she developed a model of east-west musical synthesis that avoided the pitfalls of pastiche, and put the local in place of the national. Rather than resulting in a musical motley, made up of “separate pieces put on a mannequin unstitched”, Halide Edip argued that synthesis could produce something with an authenticity all its own.

She is always remembered as someone who coins the term Turkey Faces West, the title of her 1930 book. I always take that as more of a question, because her book ends with an epilogue entitled “Whither Turkey?”, which is a question that’s still with us today. And she applies that to music: “Whither Turkish Opera?”

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 Eyüp Çekiç and Enno Maessen revisit liberal internationalist David Davies’ 1919 proposal to establish the League of Nations in Constantinople, making that city the seat of a truly international order – of a kind that the League failed to establish in Geneva.

e-mail: [email protected]

Can teaches history at Nevşehir Hacı Bektaş Veli University.

In 1920 a Welsh MP named David Davies (1880-1944) published A Suggestion Concerning the First Meeting of the Assembly of the League of Nations, a pamphlet making the case for Constantinople as the proper location for the League’s headquarters, rather than Brussels or Geneva. In this conversation, recorded on 26 March 2025, Can talks to Enno about his research exploring the proposal. Davies’ vision of a “Headquarters of Peace” on the Bosphorus leaned into familar cliches of the city as the crossroads of East and West. But it also formed part of a much less hackneyed vision of a League that transcended nationalism and imperialism. A League based in Constantinople, Davies argued, would reassure Muslims that the Wilsonian ideals ostensibly behind the League were not mere window dressing. Although Davies does not appear to have consulted any Ottomans and his plan would be firmly resisted by Turkish Nationalists in later years, for a short period in 1919-1920 the proposal was seriously considered.

This was a missed opportunity for a more inclusive international system. The story of Constantinople’s rejection is more than just an interesting footnote in diplomatic history for me: it reveals the fundamental tensions between Davies’ liberal idealism and the power politics that shaped the the modern international order.

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.