Narratives of the Greek Civil War

This proposal brings together an established team of community researchers and builds on interdisciplinary pilot research to expand a corpus of generational life histories of the Greek Civil War. Apart from securing a vital set of testimonials for posterity from first-generation survivors who are now in their late 80s and 90s, this data set will be supplemented by narratives from subsequent generations and comparative sources from participants residing in other regions of historical interest (Skopje, North Macedonia). Drawing on these innovative research pools, the analytical phase of the project will offer new conceptual pathways to key concepts that are of relevance to humanities and social science researchers, as well as educational curricula, policy makers, and practitioners. One of the key objectives of this study is to create new networking opportunities for a larger funding application to involve external partners, NGOs, and the third sector in combining a multi-modal, multi-method, and multi-sited approach to bringing to the fore questions and answers on trauma, memory, conflict, division, identity, nationalism, and other core concepts. The central focus of the research grapples with historical, spatial, and temporal diversities of intergenerational national memory, regional legacies of the Civil War, and political identities. In this direction, we seek to take a bold, immersive, community grass-roots approach to craft an accessible and honest understanding of the layers of historical and generational trauma, the gendered aspects of such experiences, and the vitality of linking local histories to global issues. The project maximises synergies in developing comparative and transnational interdisciplinary research. Finally, future objectives include collating all transcripts to host in an openly accessible server so they can be placed in the public domain. This way, our data will contribute to future academic research and through a humanities-driven approach, other researchers can build on our study.