Fieldnotes from the Athens archives
Throughout August and early September 2026, Panos Karagkounis was in Athens undertaking archival research for the Psypartitions project.
The itinerary of the research trip included visits to the central service of the Greek General State Archives, the Aiginiteion Hospital, and the National Library of Greece, with the aim of tracking down productive sources to approach the politics of psychiatry in the aftermath of the 1923 Greco-Turkish population ‘exchange’—an early example of population partition in the twentieth century.
In the General State Archives, the archivists kindly assisted Panos with his research, guiding him through the uncatalogued files of the Greek Ministry of Health and its early relief operations on behalf of Ottoman Christian refugees and exchangees during the 1920s and the 1930s. Among other important records, Panos found a document detailing the building of the Public Psychiatric Hospital of Athens, known also as Dafni.
At the Aiginiteion Hospital, Penelope Katsigianni, the librarian and archivist of the hospital, helped Panos to secure access to the rich archival records of the hospital, which are digitised, and its extensive library. Founded in the early twentieth century and located in central Athens, the Aiginiteion Hospital was one of the main institutions that hosted Ottoman Christian refugees and exchangees with psychiatric and neurological issues from 1920s onwards.
The National Library of Greece, meanwhile, holds the medical journal Klinikē (Κλινική; Clinic), which contains technical articles on medical practice and psychiatry.
This visit demonstrates the potential of the earliest case study of the project to shed further light on the various realms that psychiatry occupied in the aftermath of the Greco-Turkish partition, the ways in which health became interwoven with politics, and the relationships between Western humanitarians and Greek officials.