Welcome back to our podcast series, "Crossing the Aegean: A Century of People on the Move"! In our previous episode, before a brief hiatus, we discussed the Greeks of Istanbul and the narratives of those who migrated as well as those who remained. In the eighth episode, we will focus on how the exchange and the migrants rebuilt the urban geography and public space when they arrived in Greece, especially in Mitilini, the main town of Lesvos. Dimitra Glenti, our guest this week, studied architecture at the National Technical University of Athens. She completed her PhD in Social Anthropology and History at the University of the Aegean in Lesvos in 2023. In her dissertation titled “Living on the Outskirts of the City: The Assembly and Transformation of Refugee Settlements in Lesvos,” Dimitra focuses on the formation and transformation of refugee settlements in Lesvos.

As a native of Lesvos, Dimitri tells the spatial history of Lesvos through the eyes of both a native and an academic researcher in this field. Her work examines the city's landscape before the population exchange, the impact of the newcomers on the public image, and the step-by-step evolution of this spatiality up to the 1970s. Dimitra tells us about the rise of migrant neighborhoods in Lesvos, their class backgrounds and gender roles, and moreover, how all these factors have spatially transformed Lesvos over the last century. As an islander, she takes a snapshot of urban memory, resistance, and spatiality in Lesvos in the light of the connections between the migrants who came to the island in 2015 and afterwards and the stories she heard from the exchanged population during her research.

Ozan Mirkan Balpetek interviewed Dimitra in English. He also summarized and commented on her episode in Turkish, while Community Peacemakers Teams did the same in Greek.