This talk will discuss how the 1923 Greco-Turkish compulsory religious minority exchange has been instrumental in engaging the previously “distant” Ottoman past and identifications, which had been less accessible and, to a certain extent, unfamiliar in Turkey through policies of governmentality. In this light, revisiting the population exchange has been a means to question nation-state homogenization policies in contemporary Turkey and to address the multi-layered post-Ottoman identities that span across the Mediterranean.

Drawing from the theoretical frameworks by Walter Benjamin, Peter Burke, and Michel Espagne, these dynamics will be explored through different examples to question "humanism" in an age of post-nationalism in general, in contemporary Turkey in particular.

Photo below: Kayaköy / Levissi : A Ghost Town