Creative Europe
Desk UK
for Culture

Twice a Stranger is a travelling multi-media exhibition which tells the story of the most significant population exchanges of the 20th century. Hosted by the Benaki Museum (Athens), the Leventis Municipal Museum (Nicosia) and the University of Oxford, it will run in parallel with outreach programmes for schools, community and refugee groups and an interactive internet site. Largely based on the testimonies of people forced to migrate from their birthplace, the exhibition will explore the relevance of mass expulsion for our past and future and discover what it means to be’Twice a Stranger’: both in the place where you were born and in the place where you grow old. From the compulsory Greek-Turkish population exchange in 1922 to the massive forced migration after WWII in Germany and Poland, from the partition of British India (1947) and the Israel-Palestinian Conflict (1948) to the inter-communal violence and division of Cyprus (1963-1974) and former Yugoslavia, we try to understand the enormous consequences of population transfer – through the common ground of human experience- and to discover what lessons are to be learnt. The exhibition aims to encourage museum visitors to draw broader lessons about how the cause of peace can be advanced, as societies across Europe and the world are becoming increasingly affected by the ceaseless movement of peoples across international borders.

Monograph by Roger Zetter ‘Lands of No Return, Population Exchange and Forced Displacement in the 20th Century’, Athens, Anemon Productions.