 Thank you very much. Thank you for accepting my paper here. You might regret after, but we'll see The reason I should just say that the reason why the title is but it like this is that There are certain places in the world where we see that cultures have Intact it strongly. We can't see from out there There we only see the border between land and water We don't see the borders between people. We don't know do we see the connections between people? but there are places where people are impacted very intensively through history and These are places that can sometimes be very creative very productive very innovative very propulsive and other times they can collapse into conflict so These are places that could for instance be the Balkans It could be the Caucasus. It could be the Levant It could be East Africa Will the Bay of Bengal and there are certainly others All of these areas were until recently part of or maybe heavily influenced by empires If we take a look of the of the map back at 1700 AD We can see them that most of the eastern hemisphere is ruled by empires The only major parts which are not is Africa south of Sahara and is the inner part of the Eurasian continent and Then it is the westernmost part of of that same continent where what we would call Western Europe and the central Europe A characteristic of those empires was a different raison d'état than the one which characterizes nation-state So the cultural and religious and ethnic heterogeneity was Fully compatible with most of these empires. They live from absorbing different cultures and Sometimes play them cynically against one another, but basically containing them basically being able to Manage their coexistence their co-habitation as long as they were Loyal to the imperial rule and Out of this cultural co-habitation rose both the very rich repertoire of shared mixed cultures Material as well as immaterial think of food in Lebanon or Turkey or Many other places It's very rich. It's very mixed India as an example and think of architecture. It's extremely mixed And of course also the demography was characteristic by an ethnic patchwork of settlements. I Can illustrate that with this map This is a map which was Brought to the peace negotiations that followed the first world war the first world war broad as you Probably know the collapse of several empires the Ottoman the Austro-Hungarian The Russian which was transformed morphed into the Soviet Empire. But anyway, they collapsed and if you look at this map that was brought by a German delegation to the peace negotiations in Versailles and what is evident from them is that if you look to the western part of Europe you see that the distribution of colors is sort of fairly clear It's not muddled But once you go into a midline war path into central Europe and further east the cars begin to play They begin to sort of flow together with the little dots of Different colors mixing up you have scratches and things so These territories are the territories of the Russian Empire the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire in in Europe and They are much more blurred So that was the place where people lived together the different Identities religions and like it is and so on and so forth in the western part of Europe You might think that okay there people were sort of for some odd reason they were Homogenous and they were sort of Perhaps more smart people or whatever. No, they were not they had done the ethnic cleansing hundreds of years before So that's that's one basic difference Think of the Spanish Thank you the Spanish expulsion of the of the Jews or forced Christianization or the Muslims and the French getting rid of the ugonauts and suppressing the the presence and so on Okay So in areas such as the Balkans we see a shifting configuration through times of Empires that have competed for the same territories with the borders rolling to and fro and with Populations being pushed around and shifting and being also used sort of in the power play of the empires to Compete with each other's privileges So it has been a divided rule both within the empire and between the empires that has created an enormous mix of religions of language and and Immigrant culture of course as well as as Fiscal culture as architecture If we look to what happened with the breakdown of one of these great empires the Ottoman Empire this is The top row of pictures that's from that's about Salonika as it was called in the Ottoman Empire which became Saloniki under the when the Greeks conquered and Took over that part of the Ottoman Empire and claimed it for greatness if you look at the at the picture from the left you will see a Group of family outside outside the house the house and you may wonder what are they they look very turkish Don't they but they were not turkish. They were the Jews Jews inhabitants. It was one of the greatest Jewish cities in in Europe by then by the beginning of the Of the 20th century in the middle. You'll see a man who was born in Salonika or Salonika Kimalata took the founder of the modern turkish Republic and on the right. You see the graph which shows how the the demography changed from being a mixture of of the Jews turks and Greeks it became only Greek The Jewish story ended with the second world war as you may imagine On the bottom line. We have Smyrna which was a city which was green for Long time and Jews and Armenian it became also in the same period it became just More or less pure Turkish city Right What was that? Was it right? Yeah, okay with the implosion of the Ottoman Empire all these minorities didn't just disappear They are still around and And I show you these pictures just to show you that after The empire there's a diversity On the bottom row you see a Kurdish family and you see the father And one of the sons they're making this sign which is the site for pkk turkish independence And and in the middle on the bottom you see three men. You can't see who they are But they are Armenians Armenian survivors in the mush written of the eastern part of turkey And they are They're inside that Behind the facade and on the facade it says it says The Armenian Social and touristic organization for for Bommush Which is another term So that's the Armenians are coming back sort of they have been there all the time But they've they've survived, but they've been hiding the identities and now they're going to show it again Which is a great thing on top You see the some of the demonstrations Around the gezi park in 2013 A man who's using immaterial counterattacks to manifest the insistence of keeping this democratic space In the midst of Istanbul which gezi park is And he's wearing a gas mask because it was necessary those days In the center you see on the Front seat on the right. It's an Armenian expert traveling together with me in Turkey to discover Armenian hers is there At the same time lots of military outside because the Syrian war was raging on the other side of the border And there's a lot of tension with Kurdish people being killed by Turkish military So there are a lot of issues still in The post-imperial situation on top right a young Girl on a school excursion Using her mobile phone camera to take pictures of the Wall paintings in an old Armenian church She is obviously from a dress a Muslim, but deeply occupied with learning about these Christian pictures Right, liberalization you could imagine a future For places Perhaps closer to here You can go to Lebanon and study what happens when things are splitting up in different identity identity territories and Here we are passing in Beirut from one territory which is ruled by by gangsters Into another territory which is ruled by by Hezbollah And when you travel through Lebanon through Beirut and and around the country You will all the time meet these shifting territories controlled by different identities That's when you have broken down the ability to talk together to understand together To share heritage with each other to share culture with each other in mutual respect Then you have this territorial fragmentation You can compete with your buildings. Who has got the tallest Minaret or belfry The left side is Saudi spawned spawned mosque on the right side. It's it's a christian church Maronite church With equal high belfry So these have been restored after the civil war to compete who has the biggest one If you go to East Africa, we have the slave trade there and That has brought the slave trade and hybrid trade had brought together people of different cultures from the inland of Africa with people living on the on the eastern coast of Africa And today The Swahili language Is a mixture of Bantu with this spoken widely in Africa, but with 30 percent Mix of Words adopted from from iranian and arab languages The slave trade was cruel Slaves were shipped from the mainland of east Africa to Zanzibar to the slave market there in stone town But when you look at stone town today where the slave markets were it's a beautiful city. It's a word hurt its side And if you look to some of the of the Architectures there, you will see a mixture of of elements from all over the indian ocean Arab iranian african Subcontinental mixing together the tomb on the right hand Is Is a muslim burial and it is it's a pearl that has You see there's some Marks in that that used to be chinese porcelain pearls imported and being high status They were used to mark that you were something special If you had could afford to put something like that in your in the wall of your house or your tomb You were someone special hybridity Was celebrated in food and in architecture and music and everything So, I think I'll just go swiftly past that And go to the Rohingyans There's a city in the northern part of of Myanmar called Brau it used to be a center of a small empire on the bay of Bengal and there are people mixed Muslims hindo Bengalis with the people of Of Burmese origin or rakhine origin so they were buddhist and and hinders muslims Living together today That small empire has been destroyed and it's it's a place where also The Rohingyan The tragedy is taking place now UNESCO on the advice of of the recently deceased former president Nations want to make now A heritage site the chinese people involved the question is now Will that be a heritage site that marks diversity? Celebrates the muslim culture as well as the buddhist and the hindu culture or will it be Edited and become only An expression of the of the buddhist part everywhere in in Myanmar you'll see mixtures of different cultures And it's very important to stress that quality This is Anglo-Indian architecture with that Burmese touch I could talk more about that, but I don't think I should because my time is running out I just want to say to finish with this and see that say that what you see is what you think you see This is a picture I took in 2014 in the musk region in In eastern Anatolia. I was together with some Armenians We were visiting a Kurdish village where we found some remains of earlier Armenian settlement And this young girl carrying her much younger sister Met us and the Armenian said Ah, it's young from Maria And that was what they saw. They didn't see too sister. They saw the holy virgin and Jesus and So you perceive things that according to how you have been sort of raised and conditioned by your culture The important thing is to see hypothesis and mixes and recognize them Once you start to edit and say our identity is just one We have never received anything from anywhere anyone else. We've just created it all Then it's heritage is becoming dangerous And it's heritage is being abused for political purposes, which are Extremely unhealthy and which we see too much of today Thank you