Panagiota Pimenidou

[instrumental music] Welcome to Global Greek Influence.

I'm Dr. Panagiota Pimenidou.

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Nikos Michaelides, an anthropologist and ethnographer whose work focuses on culture, politics, music, identity, and human rights in the Eastern Mediterranean.

His research moves across Greek, Turkish, and English contexts and blends fieldwork, sociocultural theory, Pontic Greek music, community formation, and the politics of memory.

So these people went to different villages.

They went to Pontos, to the Black Sea, they went to Eastern Anatolia, they went to the Kurdish regions, they went to other areas, and they collected thousands of songs.

But there was a problem with these songs, uh, Yota.

The problem was that the lyrics of many of these songs that had been collected were not in Turkish because the people who were singing the songs were not Turks.