Let's talk about PAOK, refugees, Venizelos and Constantinople

PAOK FC, the Panthessalonikian Athletic Association of Constantinople, is the main football club in Northern Greece. It is usually related to the history of the refugees of Asia Minor in Thessaloniki. Historian and researcher Lukas Tsiptsios talks to SBS Greek.

Greek-French historian Lukas Tsiptsios. Source: Supplied

PAOK, the Panthessalonian Sports Club of Constantinopolitans is the main club of Northern Greece. It is commonly related to the history of the Asia Minor refugees in Thessaloniki. But if the club is still carrying a «refugee memory», the history of its foundation is usually forgotten, according to French-Greek historian at the École Normale Supérieure - Paris, Lukas Tsiptsios.

Mr. Tsiptsios explores the social history of Thessaloniki in the Interwar period through PAOK, by following the paths of the Constantinopolitan elite that founded the club.

Using a sports club as a research object reveals new ways of understanding the social configuration of Thessaloniki in the Interwar Period.

In this way, sports are linked with the issue of integration of the refugees, their politicization by the Venizelist movement, but also more generally with the conquest and the Hellenization of Macedonia.

PAOK FC flag. Source: Lukas Tsiptsios

Lukas Tsiptsios is a French-Greek historian at the École Normale Supérieure - Paris, he studied history and political science at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, in the same institution where he completed his Master in History of International Relations with a thesis on PAOK in the Interwar period.

This last year, he was a teaching fellow at the French Department of Columbia University, New York. His research interests are around the history of the post-Ottoman World at the beginning of the 20th century: Asia Minor Greeks and refugees, Megali Idea, the building of the nation-state, etc. 

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