The Memory of Home Across the Aegean
Greek and Turkish Reflections on Loss

Eleftherios Venizelos Chair Lecture
by Eleni Bastéa, PhD
Regents’ Professor of Architecture
Director of the International Studies Institute, University of New Mexico

When: Monday, October 9, 19:00

Where: John S. Bailey Library, Upper Level

Organized by: Frances Rich School of Fine and Performing Arts

Eleni Bastéa (2017-2018)

Regents’ Professor of Architecture, School of Architecture and Planning, University of New Mexico (UNM), and Director of the International Studies Institute, UNM. Author of many articles, poems, essays, book chapters and books including: The Creation of Modern Athens: Planning the Myth (Cambridge University Press, 1999), co-winner of the London Hellenic Prize and a finalist for the Runciman Prize; Memory and Architecture (University of New Mexico Press, 2004); and Venice without Gondolas, a poetry collection (Finishing Line Press, 2013). The recipient of several grants and awards, she lectures internationally on memory and architecture, cities and literature, and on modern Greece & Turkey.

Abstract

What were the memories of home that the Greek and Turkish refugees of the Asia Minor Catastrophe and Population Exchange (1922-23) carry with them and how how did they transmit them to the next generations? Given the long history of co-existence between the Orthodox Greeks and Muslim Turks, can we hear some echoes of a common past in today’s cultures on both sides of the Aegean? In this illustrated lecture, we will examine how the memory of place and the power of loss shape, in part, both our history and our identity.