Die (P)ostkutsche Kurztrip 7: Rigorous historical scholarship meets genuinely beautiful storytelling

00:00:06: Hello everyone and welcome back to the Postkutsche.

00:00:09: My name is Benita, And today we will be taking you on a short journey To the Aegean coast!

00:00:15: To Izmir.

00:00:16: There...a

00:00:16: project from us took place over the last few weeks The Izmir Memories Lecture Series.

00:00:22: Shahin Yaldis One of Nicole Imik's PhD candidates here at the Jusus Gibig University Gießen gives you some insights into this project and lecture series.

00:00:32: Enjoy

00:00:32: listening.

00:00:44: Welcome back to the podcast, The Post-Kushe Everyone.

00:00:49: Today we are diving into something genuinely close our hearts in our department, a brand new academic and audiovisual initiative called Hafizah Izmir, Izmir Memories Lecture Series.

00:01:01: This project comes out of our university, Easton University's Eastern European History Department in cooperation with the Izmir Development Agency in Turkey.

00:01:12: It is one Those rare projects where rigorous historical scholarship meets genuinely beautiful storytelling and we have been looking forward to talking about it for weeks.

00:01:23: The whole thing, the whole project was conceived by Professor Nicole Emig and her PhD candidate Charmin Yaldes who together designed a project as a bilateral academic partnership between our university an Israel Development Agency.

00:01:39: Staying alongside them on the academic side is Dr.

00:01:42: Marta Furman A historian whose work on Mediterranean port states, Izmir Istanbul's Salonika has contributed.

00:01:50: now how we think about these places as spaces of exchange rather than isolated national capitals.

00:01:58: So what is half the Izmir memories lecture series concretely?

00:02:02: At its core it s a series more then twenty filmed academic lectures featuring around thirty internationally recognized scholars coming from US, Germany UK Turkey and Greece many other places.

00:02:20: And they are all focused on the multicultural multilayered history of Ismere from the eighteenth century through the twentieth century with few episodes themed before eighteenth.

00:02:33: Think Ottoman commercial hub, Levantine port city side of catastrophic events and forced migration.

00:02:39: And eventually modern Turkish metropolis.

00:02:42: All that history gets unpacked lecture by lecture.

00:02:47: What we love about the interviews is how it turns an academic syllabus into something closer to a academic root movie.

00:02:56: The team started shooting in Izmir in May, then moved to Amsterdam and Berlin.

00:03:06: It's genuine near Joachim production in its truest sense.

00:03:11: Historians filmed whenever they happen to be based which keeps the project's academic ambition honest without forcing everyone onto a plane.

00:03:23: Let me give you a flower of the actual content, because the range is wonderful.

00:03:27: The Mayshoot in Esmer opened with an academic lecture on the mythological creation delivered a foundational talk asking what is local history, essentially the methodological anchor for this whole project.

00:03:59: A few days later, Malter Furman filmed his lecture on Esmer as an Ottoman port between Eastern Mediterranean and historian Fikret Adaner took to crew out of Foca with a sweeping look at city's five hundred years' history.

00:04:17: Ardujal Kaya spoke on the land ownership and property regimes in the morning about Izmir, And Aleksandar Murgu followed in afternoon with playlists of empires tracing Izmir's musical heritage at the Izmah Music & Instruments Centre.

00:04:37: Of course In project sensitivity to trauma Tuncay Ercan's sepeciolus lecture on the nineteen-twenty three population exchange between Greece and Turkey was filmed in location at a Buja Population Exchange Memory House, site literally built for that memory.

00:04:59: The interviews then jumps abroad!

00:05:01: In Amsterdam Erik Jan Zürher discussed Esmer's role in young Turk era and birth of new Turkish state and Fatma Tanish about the narratives of old Ismer in travel books.

00:05:16: While in Berlin, Philipp Mansell tackled the catastrophic fire of nineteen twenty-two and Elena Frangaki-Siret spoke about European financial networks in Ottomanism.

00:05:28: Dr Sebastian Willard also filmed in Berlin on German Ottoman archaeological revolution a topic that quietly reminds us how entangled European and Ottoman intellectual histories really were.

00:05:44: Now, here's the question I wanna sit with for a moment Why go to all this trouble?

00:05:51: Cameras professional production companies makeup travel subtitling editing instead of just publishing another edited volume of essays?

00:06:03: And we think that honest answer is that History has an audience problem.

00:06:09: Brilliant!

00:06:11: Amazing research sits in journals that almost nobody outside the discipline ever opens.

00:06:20: Filming these lectures on location, a population exchange house inside Esmer's old streets at Exheim Senegal does something a printed page simply cannot do.

00:06:34: It lets viewers see the physical trace of past while hearing an argument being made.

00:06:42: That's not decoration, that is evidence delivered through a different register!

00:06:48: This really what science communication about at its best – it isn't dumping research down but translating this research into form that respects both material and audience.

00:07:03: When, for example, Maltefirman talks about levanting communities living double lives or when a dance historian narratives the Zabek dances tradition on stage you are getting scholarship that argues and shows simultaneously.

00:07:20: Duel channel is enormously persuasive And frankly it's how most people now actually engage with history not through monographs but through documentary & video especially at the age of digital consumption.

00:07:36: True science is a science which finds ways to communicate itself.

00:07:42: The other piece I want you underlined, it's the institutional architecture behind this because its not incidental It's the whole point.

00:07:50: You have German universities South East European history chair and Eastern Europe History Department partnering directly with the Turkish regional development agency and municipalities, other international NGOs.

00:08:04: That's not a small thing.

00:08:06: Projects on contested sensitive history like the nineteen twenty-two fire, population exchange, erasure of cosmopolitan automopord carry very different weight depending who tell them from where.

00:08:22: By building this project as a genuine bilateral partnership with German academic rigor and Turkish local infrastructure and access, half of the Izmir-Izmir Memories Lecture series avoids the trap off either side telling a one sided nation story.

00:08:41: Nikol Imik's team brings comparative Southeast European and Mediterranean frameworks... ...and the agency bring archives, sites & local networks.

00:08:54: And this is not.

00:08:56: And one of the plans already includes a conference in June, and an edited volume on history & culture of Eastern Mediterranean and Balkans via The Isreal Lands to be edited by Nikolimik, Shahin Yaldas and Malta Furman.

00:09:15: So To bring this together what we are watching unfold between May and June is more than lecture series.

00:09:23: it's an argument made in practice that history belongs outside the Seminar Room, not only to the Seminary Room.

00:09:32: That cosmopolitan European port cities like Izmir deserve to be studied precisely at the scenes where empires, religions and languages met.

00:09:44: And this requires two countries' institutions working as genuine equals rather than one exporting expertise.

00:10:17: Thank you for listening from me as well.

00:10:20: We will update when the videos of the lecture series are online and where to find them!

00:10:25: And with that we are saying goodbye, since the semester is almost done.

00:10:29: Until next semester have a great summer!