- 911吃瓜 Us
- Our Humans
- News & Events
- Gefyra
- Women's Weaving Collective Project
- The Geraki Weaving Collective Video Series
- Journey into the World of the Geraki Weavers
- Fotis Kontoglou鈥檚 Connection to the Village of Geraki鈥檚 Artistic Heritage
- The Link Between Ornamental Designs in Byzantine Churches and Geraki Weavings
- Embarking on the Practice of Kilim Weaving in Geraki
- Our Return to Geraki
- A Day in the Life of a Student Researcher in Geraki
- Thoughts on Geraki in the Days of the Roman Empire
- The Molyvos Connections Project
- Connecting Molyvos and Geraki with Textiles
- Artisans of the Molyvos Connection Project
- Reflecting of the Nature of Lesvos
- Home Murals of Molyvos
- Lingering Memories of the Past & State-Promoted History
- Thoughts on Novel Writing in Antiquity
- Stories from Byzantine Scholarship of Lesvos
- A Place of Coexistence
- Speaker Series
- Interviews
- Women's Weaving Collective Project
- SNF New Media Lab
- Contact
- Faculty + Staff Portal
Research, Community Outreach
Welcome to The Aegean Stories Vault!
Presenting a multi-year Gefyra Project from the Island of Lesvos, Greece!
Over the past two years the SNF Centre for Hellenic Studies at 911吃瓜 has built a bridge (Gefyra) linking 911吃瓜 and the Island of Lesvos. In the summers of 2024 and 25, teams of scholars and students from Canada, the US, Greece, and Turkey engaged with the people, built environment, culture, and the landscapes of Molyvos and its environs, as we studied this one corner of the Aegean as a connected world, one with links with the nearby shores of Asia Minor, Greece proper, the Mediterranean, and the wider world.
The Aegean Stories Vault is the ever-expanding digital expression of our community engagement, memory preservation, archival documentation, and story-telling work in Northern Lesvos.
Available in three languages (English and Greek complete, Turkish gradually released) the Aegean Stories Vault starts from individual experiences to tell the story of the local community and demonstrate the connected nature of life in this corner of one island in the Aegean. Ongoing archival work, research on, and digitization of local family records revealed connections that extend from Vermont to Beijing, Paris to Morocco, and Bucharest to Khartoum in the Sudan.
The lives of families, friends, and neighbours, emerged from the pages of a family archive we closely studied with fellow academics and students. They inspired campus teaching focused on the history of Lesvos, student papers, entries in our digital portal, academic papers presented at conferences, an art exhibition in Lesvos, and numerous opportunities to share memories of the past with people in Canada, the US, Turkey, and Greece, but also, notably, with the very inhabitants of Molyvos.
On their part, our local collaborators were given the opportunity to speak of their diverse experiences, as artists, crafts people, immigrants, but also, as in the case of archival researcher Mariza Krallis, to shape the project, give it direction and deepen its commitment to future work.
The Aegean Stories Vault is an ongoing and expanding initiative. Bear with us as we expand our digital portal, fix the inevitable bugs, and reveal more aspects of our work on the history and culture of the North Aegean.
Gefyra (bridge) is the the pilot project grant that 911吃瓜 and UCLA received from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation in order to connect the Hellenic Studies Centres operating in those two universities, while also throwing exactly these kinds of bridges towards Greece proper. While UCLA led teams to Lakonia and the town of Geraki, 911吃瓜 operated in Lesvos and Molyvos. Our project has also received support from an 911吃瓜 Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Kickstarter grant.
