Speakers

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  Maria Vassilikou Researcher on matters regarding the Holocaust and Holocaust education at the Jewish Museum of Greece
  

  Maria Vassilikou

  Researcher on matters regarding the Holocaust and Holocaust education at the Jewish Museum of Greece

  Dr Maria Vassilikou received her PhD from UCL for her thesis “Politics of the Jewish Community of Salonika in the Interwar Years: Party Ideologies and Party Competition”. She has participated in international conferences in Great Britain, Germany, Greece and Israel and taught modern European and Jewish history at UCL and Potsdam University. She has published articles in English, German and Greek on the Campbell riots, the Jewish cemetery of Salonika, the education of Salonika Jews, Greek-Jewish relations in Odessa and Salonika as well as on postwar Greek Jewry. She is the co-editor of Der Ort des Judentums in der Gegenwart (2006), and co-author of volume XIV of the documentary edition Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland, 1933-1945 (2017). Since 2019 she has been working as a researcher on matters regarding the Holocaust and Holocaust education at the Jewish Museum of Greece. As of 2023 she has been teaching Modern Greek at the Volkshochschule in Berlin and the Auswärtiges Amt (German Federal Foreign Office).

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  Thedosios Kyriakidis Lecturer of Modern History at Intenational Hellenic University
  

  Thedosios Kyriakidis

  Lecturer of Modern History at Intenational Hellenic University

  Thedosios Kyriakidis holds a PhD in Modern History from The University of Western Macedonia, Greece. He graduated from the Faculty of Theology at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and attended courses at the Westfaelische-Wilhelms Universität, Münster. He also received a diploma in Greek Paleography and a master’s degree in Historical Theology. He is an alumnus of the Genocide and Human Rights University Program, organized by The International Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies and the History Department of the University of Toronto. Moreover, he has conducted post-doctoral research at the La Sapienza University of Rome. His research interests include the history and culture of the Greeks of Pontus and Asia Minor as well as the Genocide of the Christian population of the Ottoman Empire. He has been awarded with several scholarships from institutions in Greece, Italy and USA. His latest works include: In the Name of Faith and Civilization: Roman-Catholic Missionaries in Nineteenth-Century Pontus (2019), The multifaceted nature of an Identidy: Essays in Pontian Hellenism (2021), The Genocide of the Christian populations in the Ottoman Empire and its Aftermath (1908-1923), Rutledge, 2023 (with Taner Akcam and Kyriakos Chatzikyriakidis) and The Genocide of Orthodox Greeks and the Persecution of Christians in the Pontus Region according to Vatican archives Gorgias 2026. He is currently a Research Fellow at the Chair for Pontic Studies at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and a visiting lecturer at the International Hellenic University and the Hellenic Open University.

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  Kyriakos S. Chatzikyriakidis Assistant Professor of the History of Hellenism in the East (Anatolia) at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
  

  Kyriakos S. Chatzikyriakidis

  Assistant Professor of the History of Hellenism in the East (Anatolia) at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

  Kyriakos S. Chatzikyriakidis holds a Ph.D. in Modern and Contemporary History from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. During the academic years 2009-2010 and 2010-2011, he was a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of History and Archaeology at the University of Cyprus. From 2017 to 2025, he taught, with funding from the “Ivan Savvidis” Foundation, as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Chair of Pontic Studies in the School of History and Archaeology, Faculty of Philosophy, at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. In 2025, he was elected to the position of Assistant Professor of the History of Hellenism in the East (Anatolia) at the same University. He has also taught in the English-language postgraduate program “MA in Black Sea and Eastern Mediterranean Studies” at the International Hellenic University during the period 2019-2020, as well as at the Hellenic Open University as a Collaborating Teaching Staff in the years 2021-2024.

  His research interests, presentations at Greek and international conferences, and his writings relate to topics in Modern Greek History: Economic and Social History of Hellenism in the East and Cyprus (19th – early 20th centuries), Greek Diaspora, Greek Revolution, Refugee settlement and collective/associational organization of Pontic Greeks in Greece after 1922.

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  Giorgos Antoniou Assistant Professor in the History of Jewish Communities at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
  

  Giorgos Antoniou

  Assistant Professor in the History of Jewish Communities at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

  Georgios Antoniou received his PhD from the European University Institute in Florence in 2007. He was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah (2007) and served as a visiting lecturer at Yale University (2008) and the University of Cyprus (2009). Since 2015, he has held the Endowed Chair of Jewish Studies, and in 2019 he joined the Department of History and Archaeology. In the same year, he was appointed holder and visiting professor of the World War II Chair at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB).

  Since 2018, he has been a member of the Education Working Group of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). In 2018, Cambridge University Press published the volume The Holocaust in Greece, which he co-edited with Dirk Moses. He currently serves as the principal investigator for Greece in the Horizon 2020 projects REPAST (www.repast.eu), which examines the role of the past in contemporary societies, and EHRI (https://www.ehri-project.eu/), a project dedicated to developing digital infrastructures for Holocaust archives in Europe.

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  George Kalantzis Secretary General for Religions at the Ministry of Education Religious Affairs and Sports
  

  George Kalantzis

  Secretary General for Religions at the Ministry of Education Religious Affairs and Sports

  George Kalantzis was born in Aigaleo in 1971. He is a graduate of the French-Hellenic School of Piraeus “Saint Paul,” the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Crete, and the Department of Sociology of the same University. He holds a doctoral degree from the University of Crete, awarded with distinction, for research concerning the factors that shaped the educational policy of the Greek state towards the Muslim minority of Thrace. He has taught at the Department of Political Science of the University of Crete, the Department of International and European Studies of the University of Piraeus, the Department of Social Work of the Technological Educational Institute of Patras, and the Nursing Officers’ School. His scholarly and public-interest writing includes articles on educational policy as well as on the Muslim minority of Thrace. His professional career includes longstanding service in positions of governmental responsibility. From 1996 to 1999, he served as Special Adviser to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Theodoros Pangalos. He subsequently held advisory and associate posts in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Culture, and later served as Head of the Cabinet of the Vice-President of the Hellenic Government, Theodoros Pangalos, from 9 October 2009 until 6 July 2011. On 7 July 2011, he assumed the office of Secretary General for Religious Affairs at the Ministry of Education, a position in which he has served ever since. He has also completed his military service in the Hellenic Navy.

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  Nikolaos Misolidis PhD Candidate at the Department of History, Archaeology and Cultural Recourses Management at the University of Peloponnese
  

  Nikolaos Misolidis

  PhD Candidate at the Department of History, Archaeology and Cultural Recourses Management at the University of Peloponnese

  Nikolaos Ath, Misolidis is a graduate of the History and Archaeology Department of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He obtained his Master with honors from the same department in 2013 and his dissertation handles “The demographic image of Thessaloniki Vilayet during the long 19th century (1789 – 1912)”. Currently, he is PhD Candidate in the Department of History, Archaeology and Cultural Recourses Management in the University of Peloponnese. His PhD thesis is related to “The work of the United Nations in Post-War Greece 1944 – 1949. The Repatriation and Rehabilitation of the Greek Displaced Persons from Axis Countries during the decade of 1940 by United Nations Relief and Rehabilitations Administration (UNRRA) and its successor International Refugee Organization (IRO)”. Furthermore, he has been a member of the Society of Macedonian Studies Research Center since 2010 and has participated in many research projects such as “The sightseers in Macedonia 15th – 20th century”( http://www.sightseers.gr/ currently only in Greek), “The Communities of Macedonians abroad in 17th to 19th century”, (http://www.grcom.gr/cms/ – currently only in Greek), The Greek Independence War through the American and British Newspapers 1821 – 1830”.
  From 2017, his scientific interests focus on the international and transnational humanitarian aid official and private to Greece in the first half of 20th century. Therefore, he has published several articles in conference’s abstracts and in international collective volumes about the work of American Humanitarian Agencies in Greece in the decades of 1920’s and 1930’s. Moreover, he is a Research Fellow in the Chair of Pontic Studies in the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and he participated in the research program under the title “Research and dissemination of the Culture and History of Asia Minor and Pontus Greeks” which was under the auspices of the Chair of Pontic Studies. He has conducted academic research in the Diplomatic and Historical Archive of Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs, British National Archives, United Nations Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center, and the Archive of Burke Missionary Library of Columbia University regarding to the work of the American and British Red Cross, Near East Relief/ Foundation and UNRRA to Greece in the first half of 20th century.

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  Mike-Sam (Mikis) Modiano President of the Jewish Museum of Greece
  

  Mike-Sam (Mikis) Modiano

  President of the Jewish Museum of Greece

  Mike-Sam (Mikis) Modiano is a distinguished figure in the Greek media production sector, with a long-standing record of entrepreneurial, professional, and institutional activity. He studied Electrical Engineering at Aston University in Birmingham, United Kingdom, where he obtained a Bachelor of Science degree, and subsequently pursued postgraduate studies in Electronics at King’s College, University of London, earning a Master of Science degree.
  In 1990, he founded Topcut-Modiano S.A., one of the major television and cinema production companies in Greece, where he has served as Founder and Chief Executive Officer to the present day. Through his professional activity, he has contributed substantially to the development of the audiovisual production industry in Greece, combining technical expertise, entrepreneurial initiative, and sustained engagement with the institutional representation of the sector.
  Alongside his corporate career, Mikis Modiano has held a series of prominent leadership positions in national and European professional organisations. He served as President of the Greek Producers Association (PACT) from 2000 to 2010 and again from 2019 to the present. He has also been a Board Member and Treasurer of the Greek Advertising Self-Regulatory Board since 2006. At the European level, he served as Vice President of the European Producers Association (CFPE) from 2014 to 2018 and has held the position of Vice President of the European Producers Association (EPA) since 2023.
  His public and community engagement is equally noteworthy. Within the Jewish Community of Athens, he served as a member of the Communications Committee from 2011 to 2016, later becoming its President from 2017 onwards. He also served as Vice President of the Jewish Community of Athens from 2016 to 2019. In addition, he has been actively involved with the Jewish Museum of Greece, serving as Vice President from 2019 to 2022 and as President since 2023.
  Overall, Mikis Modiano’s career reflects a sustained contribution to the fields of media production, professional self-regulation, cultural representation, and community leadership. His work brings together entrepreneurship, institutional service, and cultural engagement, positioning him as an important contributor to both the audiovisual industry and the preservation and promotion of Jewish cultural heritage in Greece.