The Forgotten Peace?

The Lausanne Project was conceived in 2017, partly in reaction to the raft of scholarly projects then in preparation for the centenary of the Paris peace conference of 1919. We were struck by the contrast between these initiatives and the dearth of scholarly attention paid to Lausanne outside Turkey. Although diplomatic historians had long recognized Lausanne as exceptional, as “the longest-lasting of the post-war settlements” (Alan Sharp), as well as the treaty that ended that “Greater War” which began (again, in the Ottoman Empire) in 1911, it continued to figure as an outlier or semi-detached epilogue in accounts focused on the 1919-20 treaties.

Encouraged to find other scholars exploring the role of NGOs, the press, diaspora groups and other non-state actors in reshaping the relationship between “East” and “West” in the interwar period, we organized a workshop on Lausanne in Paris, to prepare a co-edited book of centenary essays that was published by the Gingko Library in April 2023.

This group of scholars has since been joined by others – all of whom are introduced on the members page of this site. Many have shared their insights and discussed their current research projects in contributions to the TLP blog and TLP podcast, published fortnightly. Our second conference was held in Thessaloniki in November 2023, and the resulting volume will be published by Gingko in 2026. Our third conference, held in London in November 2024, marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Cyprus events of 1974. Plans are afoot to devote a fourth workshop in 2026 to the historian and classicist Arnold Toynbee, whose 1922 book The Western Question sought to turn what had been known as the “Eastern Question” on its head.

The convenors recognize a duty to share their insights with a range of publics, as well as to engage in co-creation with artists, curators, teachers and others. In November 2022 we launched our Lausanne Diary on Twitter, which provided a daily “hit” of up-to-the-minute news from Lausanne a century ago. Published in Greek, Turkish and English, the diary used images and quotes from the archive to bring the richness of the negotiations to life. We were proud to assist In Flanders Fields Museum and the Musée Historique Lausanne curate exhibitions marking the centenary of Lausanne in 2023. April 2024 saw the publication of Out of Shadows, a graphic novel inspired by Guignol à Lausanne (1923), a collection of caricatures by Hungarian Jewish artists Aloïs Derso and Emery Kelèn. We are now working on a children’s book about the Lausanne population exchange, to be published in 2026.

Since 2022 we have also been working with high school history teachers in Turkey and Greece, in collaboration with Tarih Vakfi and AHEG, to co-create teaching resources, enabling the generation that is coming of age in the centenary to make their own narratives. We hope to encourage them to approach the population exchange and other aspects of the Lausanne settlement as part of a shared trauma of imperial collapse, rather than a zero-sum game of winners and losers. After the success of our first teacher workshop, held in Lausanne in 2023, a second, larger workshop was held in June 2024, as well as workshops in Istanbul and Athens, at which teachers and pupils provided feedback. That feedback has enabled us to refine our lesson plans, which are available for free on this website (in Greek and Turkish). In 2025 we wrote a 45,000-word Teacher’s Guide to Lausanne that provides accessible background essays on the conference, population exchange and its contested legacies in Greece, Turkey and the wider world. These essays are accompanied by practical suggestions for in-class use, providing a “one-stop shop” for busy high school history teachers on both sides of the Aegean. We are planning to translate, print and distribute this guide (ideally for free, or at least at cost) to teachers via our partners, AHEG and Tarih Vakfi.