Head of the Digital Archive, Istorima
ABOUT THIS SESSION
Eighteen thousand interviews in under five years. Kyriaki Fotiadou, Head of Istorima’s Digital Archive, walks through what happens between the moment a researcher presses record and the moment a story becomes part of a public archive.
The session opens with the scale and shape of the collection: 49 topics, 8,771 locations, 29 historical events, and 1,542 published interviews relating to WWII and the Holocaust, alongside recordings of dialects that are themselves disappearing. Fotiadou then makes the case for why this work is urgent, arguing that we are in the last window during which people with direct memory of the war can still be interviewed.
The practical core of the session is data organization. Fotiadou covers Istorima’s file naming conventions, the handling of raw data alongside consent forms and photographs, the distinction between administrative and descriptive metadata, and the backup logic that keeps a collection of this size intact. She closes with a survey of preservation options available to smaller projects and individuals, from cloud storage and the StoryCorps app to open-source systems like OHMS and Omeka.
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
BIOGRAPHY
Kyriaki Fotiadou is Head of Istorima’s Digital Archive. She studied history at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Oral history became part of her life during her postgraduate studies in Germany at the University of Siegen.
She has worked in educational, research, and cultural projects in the area of the collection and management of interviews. For Istorima she listens to, processes, and archives interviews, and this often makes her feel that she has lived many lives.
Head of the Historical Archive, Jewish Community of Thessaloniki
ABOUT THIS SESSION
Before the war, Thessaloniki held one of the largest and most significant Jewish communities in Europe. The archive Aliki Arouh oversees holds what remains of its administrative life: birth registers from 1924 to 1939, identity cards, property declarations filed in March 1943, marriage files, electoral registration applications, and the community census of 1945.
For more than fifteen years, Arouh has been reorganizing that archive and using it to trace the identities of Holocaust victims. The session shows the method in practice, following individual names through multiple record types until a life becomes legible again. She demonstrates the construction of the victims and survivors databases, the metadata work that makes them searchable, and the reconstruction of entire family trees, using the Arouh family as a worked example across both categories.
The session also covers the destruction that preceded the deportations, including the 1941 seizure of community records by Commando Rosenberg and the events of Black Sabbath in July 1942 — the context that makes surviving documents so consequential.
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
BIOGRAPHY
Aliki Arouh is responsible for the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki Archives, and a researcher. She was born in Thessaloniki in 1969 and is a graduate of the American College, Anatolia.
Having built a career in the field of exports as a textile agent for more than twenty years, she deserted the trade before it deserted her. Voluntarism has been and still is an integral part of her life, and she has participated in many committees of the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki, including the Youth Committee as General Secretary and that of the Elementary Jewish School, where she was chairman for many years. She is an elected board member for WIZO-ZIV Thessaloniki.
Since 2009 she has undertaken the re-organization of the archives of the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki, where she still works, engaged with the research and documentation of Holocaust victims’ names and the creation of processing tools that aim to enable genealogical and archival research. She is an avid reader and short-story writer.
Doctor of Didactics in History; Post Doc, National Technical University of Athens
ABOUT THIS SESSION
How do you turn a testimony into a lived experience for a student who was not there? Zeta Papandreou built an educational platform around that question.
Memories of the Occupation in Greece organizes oral testimonies into thematic units — children under occupation, concentration camps, resistance, massacres and reprisals, everyday life, the Holocaust — and surrounds each with the tools a classroom actually needs: biographies, maps, a glossary, timelines, witness photographs, and full interview texts.
Papandreou is explicit about the pedagogical stance behind it. The platform does not invest in what she calls the pedagogy of horror. The aim is critical thinking and historical consciousness, which requires giving students something to do with a testimony beyond absorbing it. The session works through concrete classroom activities built on the accounts of Argyris Sfountouris, who survived the Distomo massacre at the age of four, and Giota Koliopoulou-Konstantopoulou, who witnessed Kalavryta — combining testimony with visual art, educational drama, and group work on how trauma begins to find expression.
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
BIOGRAPHY
Dr Zeta Papandreou has taught Studies of Memory and Historical Trauma: The Process of Collective Trauma in Historiography and Public History in the postgraduate program of the University of Western Macedonia. As a University Fellow she has taught History Teaching and Public History at the Pedagogical Department of Primary Education at the University of the Aegean in Rhodes. She worked for many years in Primary Education.
She is a postdoctoral fellow at the National Technical University of Athens, School of Architectural Engineering, on Space and Traumatic Memory: Meanings and Re-meanings.
Her numerous publications include the books Traumatic Memory and Public History: Distomo 1944–2018 (Taxideutis, Athens, 2018) and Space and Traumatic Memory: The Refugee Settlement of the Turkish-Cretans of Rhodes (Koukkida Publications, Athens, 2023).
Digital Humanities Researcher and Director, Toolbox 21
ABOUT THIS SESSION
Maria Dermentzi applies natural language processing to oral testimony, asking whether the memory of the same war is encoded differently in different languages.
Her work sits inside Project Avalanche, named after the Allied landing in continental Italy. The session presents a corpus of eight sub-collections across Greek and Italian, including 181 women’s testimonies from the Istorima archive amounting to roughly 1.17 million words, testimonies from Memories of the Occupation in Greece, USHMM Holocaust testimonies, and Italian Jewish testimonies from the CDEC archive covering Italy and Rhodes.
The analytical core is a bilingual lexicon of WWII memory, built from the testimonies themselves. Dermentzi demonstrates collocation analysis — which words travel together far more often than chance would predict — and what the resulting pairs reveal about each corpus. She closes with a clear statement of the method’s limits: this is distributional evidence rather than historical interpretation, Greek NLP tooling remains less mature than Italian, and the patterns the lexicon surfaces are starting points for investigation.
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
BIOGRAPHY
Maria Dermentzi is the director of Toolbox 21, a company offering custom software solutions and consulting on AI in the humanities and social sciences.
Previously, she was a digital humanities researcher at UVSQ – Université Paris-Saclay, and before that at King’s College London, where she developed tools for historical research within the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure.
She holds an MSc in Digital Humanities from KU Leuven, an MA in Digital Culture and Society from King’s College London, and a degree in Law from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
Visual Artist
ABOUT THIS SESSION
In Auschwitz, Esthir Cohen from Ioannina lost her name and became number 77135. Artemis Alcalay’s project begins from the work of giving those names back, combining oral testimony with photography, artwork, and video.
Over years of work, Alcalay has documented Greek Jewish Holocaust survivors from Ioannina, Corfu, Rhodes, Arta, and Thessaloniki, following them across the geography of their lives — from the communities they were taken from, to the camps, to Athens or Tel Aviv. The session presents these portraits alongside the forms the testimonies took: a Greek folk song with verses written by Greek women in Auschwitz, recorded on a mobile phone; Nata Osmo singing in three languages; a photograph of Heinz Kounio taken in front of a photograph of himself.
A significant part of the session addresses what happens when a witness is gone. Alcalay documents intergenerational transmission directly — recording Moshe Cohen’s daughter after his death, and three generations of the Azaria family in a single Zoom conversation during the pandemic. She closes with the digital infrastructure that holds the work: the website greekjewsholocaustsurvivors.art, exhibitions, publications, and the documentary The Art of Remembering.
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
BIOGRAPHY
Artemis Alcalay was born in Athens in 1957. She studied painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts under Dimitris Mytaras and Yannis Moralis, and set design under Vasilis Vasiliadis (1976–1981). She continued with postgraduate studies at New York University (Master in Studio Art, 1984–1985) under Gerald Pryor, Steven Madoff, Angiola Churchill, Idelle Weber, and Philip Rylands.
Painting, sculpture, textile art (weaving, embroidery, carpet design), photography and digital art, along with sets and costumes for contemporary dance, alternate as expressive media in her work, often in mixed technique. She exhibits in Greece and abroad, collaborates as set and costume designer with contemporary dance groups, and designs handmade carpets. Her work engages questions of identity, personal and historical memory, and trauma.
Since 2012 she has been meeting, photographing, and recording testimonies from Greek Jewish Holocaust survivors. In 2016 she was named an honorary member of the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation. Her work is presented in Anneta Papathanasiou’s documentary The Art of Remembering (2025).
Founder and Director, Archipelago Network
ABOUT THIS SESSION
The pottery of Sifnos was a working economy until the war interrupted it, and plastic finished it off. Jacob Moe led a project between 2023 and 2024 to document that arc through three parallel methods: digitizing audiovisual archives, producing documentary films about the workshops still operating, and completing interdisciplinary research.
What makes the case instructive is the mismatch between the sources. On one side, telegrams and correspondence from the Italian occupation authorities on the island in the early 1940s. On the other, the testimonies of potters who lived through that period. Institutional record and lived account, describing the same island from entirely different positions.
The session works through how those materials were assembled into a single digital narrative, and what is gained and lost in the process of making archival evidence and living voices speak to one another.
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
BIOGRAPHY
Jacob Moe is a researcher, filmmaker and translator. He received his BA in Politics from Pomona College, a Certificate in Literary Translation from the Academy of Athens and an MFA in Social Documentation from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
He co-founded and directed the Syros International Film Festival (2013–2023) and since 2019 is founder and director of Archipelago Network, an initiative for research and documentation of material knowledge and audiovisual culture in the Cyclades islands.
His research practice involves community media, radio and film documentary work, with a focus on peer-to-peer methodologies for knowledge building in island communities.
Assistant Professor, Department of Archival, Library and Information Studies, University of West Attica
ABOUT THIS SESSION
Angeliki Antoniou presents DIGISTORYTELLER, a digital platform documenting the refugee memory of Attica through geolocated content, phygital products, and material contributed by citizens and descendants themselves.
The educational arm of the project ran as a competition across 17 lower and upper secondary schools. Teachers were trained in digital storytelling, personal data management, and intellectual property, then students produced original digital narratives over three months. The results surfaced family archives, urban landmarks, and lost neighbourhood memory, and connected the arrival and settlement of earlier refugee populations to contemporary refugee stories.
Antoniou is direct about the difficulties. The session covers the practical challenges of crowdsourced heritage: motivating participation, moderating and verifying contributed content, documentation standards, mobile usability, and the ethical and legal frame of GDPR, content licensing, and intellectual property. She closes on sustainability and the open question of which European infrastructures such projects should be building toward.
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
BIOGRAPHY
Angeliki Antoniou is an Associate Professor in the Department of Archival, Library and Information Studies at the University of West Attica, specializing in Adaptive Educational Technologies in Cultural Information. She has many years of teaching experience at undergraduate and postgraduate level, is a course coordinator in the postgraduate program Cultural Heritage Materials and Technologies of the Department of History, Archaeology and Cultural Materials Management at the University of the Peloponnese, and supervises doctoral dissertations at University College London, the University of the Peloponnese, and the University of West Attica.
She is a collaborating researcher at the ATHENA Research Center and at the Department of Information Studies at University College London. She has coordinated and participated in many national and international research projects. She has numerous publications in conferences and international journals, and also organizes scientific conferences and publication of proceedings.
She holds a degree in Preschool Education from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, a BSc in Clinical with Social Psychology from the University of Kent at Canterbury, an MSc in Human Interaction with Ergonomics from University College London, a music degree, a Piano Diploma, and a PhD in Educational Technologies from the University of the Peloponnese, Department of Computer Science and Technology.
Doctoral Candidate, Panteion University
ABOUT THIS SESSION
The history we know is largely the history of decisions. The history people actually lived took place in houses, streets, squares, and neighbourhoods — and most of it was never recorded, because no one considered it important enough at the time.
Kostis Kosmeas researches that gap. His argument treats the city as a palimpsest of layers written and rewritten over time, and micro-history as the spatial dimension that conventional history leaves out. Micro-history, he is careful to note, is not small history. It is the part of history that was never fully archived.
The session works through WWII examples in Athens: the public kitchens, and the buildings connected to the Occupation that still stand without marking. Kosmeas then turns to whether social media can function as a new kind of archive, and answers with qualified caution. These platforms lack verification, hierarchy, and any guarantee of preservation, but they generate micro-history continuously and in real time. Digital storytelling, in his account, is what assembles those fragments and reconnects history to the places it happened.
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
BIOGRAPHY
Kostis Kosmeas is a content creator, historical researcher, and doctoral candidate in Political Philosophy and Social Theory at Panteion University.
He has become widely known through TikTok and Instagram for short, well-researched videos that surface unknown stories and overlooked places in Athens.
Author and Educator; PhD and Postdoc, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki; Yale Artist-in-Residence 2025
ABOUT THIS SESSION
“If I survive this, I will dedicate my life to the children.” The promise a man made to himself inside the camp became the organizing principle of Evlampia Tsireli’s graphic novel, and the reason the book turns testimony toward the future rather than only back at the suffering.
The session addresses the formal question directly: why a graphic novel. Tsireli argues that the medium does specific things that prose and recorded testimony cannot — it visualizes fragmented memory as fragmentation, it layers past and present on a single page, and it opens Holocaust history to readers who would not pick up a written account.
The book is bilingual, written in Greek and Judeo-Spanish, and is the first bilingual graphic memoir of its kind internationally. That choice does its own work: it preserves Sephardic heritage, reintroduces Ladino to contemporary readers, and materializes memory through the language in which it was originally lived. Tsireli frames the whole project as an argument about how the past continues to be told, transformed, and lived.
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
BIOGRAPHY
Dr Evlampia Tsireli is Yale Artist-in-Residence 2025. She holds a PhD in Biblical Literature and Religion and a Postdoc in History and Archaeology, both at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
She is a published author and creative writing instructor.
MA Archaeologist; former Field Researcher and Field Project Manager, Istorima
ABOUT THIS SESSION
People born in the late 1920s and early 1930s were children when the war reached them, and they are rarely the focus of historical interest. Iasonas Nestoridis closes the webinar with what their testimonies contain that other accounts do not.
The session is built around four narrators from the Istorima archive. Thodoros Valachas was twelve when he and his mother were imprisoned in the Pavlos Melas concentration camp, where he witnessed the destruction of his own village and warned the other prisoners of an execution nobody believed was coming. Aspasia Karra survived the burning of Livadi in 1943, and describes the grandmothers who smeared soot on her teenage sister’s face so the soldiers would take her for an old woman. Miltos Myronis watched a convoy of Jews pass through Thessaloniki and later joined the resistance at fourteen. Valentinos Tselios traded cigarettes for food along a retreating German train.
Nestoridis draws out what distinguishes these accounts as a body of testimony. Children and teenagers remember differently from adults, and from each other. Their memories settle on the texture of daily life rather than on the major events historians index by. And, eight decades on, many of these narrators recall the war with a humour that sits oddly and instructively alongside its horror.
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
BIOGRAPHY
Iasonas Nestoridis holds a bachelor degree in History and Archaeology and a master degree in Prehistoric Archaeology from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. From July 1st he is a PhD candidate at the University of Tübingen, Department of Geosciences, studying the occupational intensity and impact on cave ecosystems during the Middle Palaeolithic.
Between 2022 and 2024 he worked for Istorima, both as Field Researcher and Field Project Manager, where he developed his interest in oral history, specifically for the WWII and the Greek Civil War era. The interviews he conducted focus on the personal experiences of people who participated in or became witnesses to major historical events in Greece, as well as the recording of everyday life of the era from people who were children and adolescents during those years.
