French-Greek historian at the École Normale Supérieure - Paris, Lukas Tsiptsios, will present an online lecture entitled Bizim PAOK – Our PAOK: Refugees, Sports, and Venizelism in Interwar Thessaloniki, on Thursday 6 August, as a part of the Greek History and Culture Seminars, offered by the Greek Community of Melbourne.

PAOK, the Panthessalonian Sports Club of Constantinopolitans is the main club of Northern Greece. It is commonly related to the history of the Asia Minor refugees in Thessaloniki. But if the club is still carrying a «refugee memory», the history of its foundation is usually forgotten.

The aim of this presentation is to do a social history of Thessaloniki in the Interwar period through PAOK, by following the paths of the Constantinopolitan elite that founded the club.

Using a sports club as a research object reveals new ways of understanding the social configuration of Thessaloniki in the Interwar Period.

By this way, sports are linked with the issue of integration of the refugees, their politicization by the Venizelist movement, but also more generally with the conquest and the Hellenization of Macedonia.

Lukas Tsiptsios is a French-Greek historian at the École Normale Supérieure - Paris, he studied history and political science at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, in the same institution where he completed his Master in History of International Relations with a thesis on PAOK in the Interwar period. This last year, he was a teaching fellow at the French Department of Columbia University, New York. His research interests are around the history of the post-Ottoman World at the beginning of the 20th century: Asia Minor Greeks and refugees, Megali Idea, the building of the nation-state, etc. Let’s say the transition period between the empire and the nation state. In 2019 he also edited an anthology of Les Lettres françaises with Guillaume Roubaud-Quashie.

HOW TO PARTICIPATE

In order to keep everyone safe we have organized this seminar to be delivered online. However, we are well aware that for some, a large part of the appeal of our seminars is the very active audience participation. Therefore we are providing two ways for you to enjoy the seminar:

If you want to actively participate and ask questions at the end of the seminar you will need to join us through a Zoom Webinar - for which you'll need to pre-register by following this link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_RCC_gVMrQDiUxhyd0PZ3zg

If you prefer to sit back and enjoy the show, just join us through our Facebookpage or our YouTubepage where we'll be live streaming the event.