‘Displacement, Occupation, and the Reconfiguration of Minority Identity: The Greek Communities of the North Azovian Region after 2022’ — Vladislav Ivatskyi

The Greek-origin communities of the North Azov region are a living fragment of the Ottoman Rum Millet: a pre-national, confessional political corporation whose members were carried out of Crimea in 1778 with a pre-modern identity intact, while the Hellenic national project was being constructed later. For two and a half centuries, successive regimes of classification (Rum Millet, Greek nation, Soviet nationality, and now indigenous people) have been imposed on and contested within this community. The 2022 Russian invasion removed the territorial container that had kept this tension manageable. What followed was not the dissolution of collective identity but its acceleration and transformation. This lecture asks: how does a community reproduce and reconstitute itself when its territorial base is destroyed, and why does deterritorialization sometimes intensify rather than weaken the struggle over collective selfhood?

Vladislav Ivatskyi is a Research Fellow at the European University Viadrina. His research focuses on minority identity, displacement, occupation, and the transformation of collective self-understanding among the Greek communities of the North Azov region after 2022.