Fault Lines & Front Lines: Disaster, Foreign Aid, and the Greek Civil War in Messinia
How is the urgent need for disaster relief complicated by geopolitical pressures?
In October 1947, Messinia, Greece was struck by an earthquake while in the midst of a brutal civil war and rapidly becoming a critical front in the global Cold War.
This workshop will explore the 1947 earthquake not just as a geological event, but as a human and political crisis, answering the following question: What happens when a natural catastrophe hits a society already affected by war?
Bringing together historians, archivists, geologists, and seismologists, this workshop, hosted by the Institute for Ideas and Imagination and Columbia Global Center Athens, will consider how people endured the double trauma of a civil war and a ruined landscape, how the politics of foreign aid shaped the physical and social recovery of post-war Greece, and how the study of natural disasters can shape the writing of social and political history.
Speakers
- Vicky Kouskouna, University of Athens
- Aggeliki Barberopoulou, Hellenic Center for Marine Research
- Panagiotis Andrianopoulos, Archeion Taxis
- Charis Marantzidou, PhD student in modern European history and a Richard Hofstadter Fellow, Columbia University
