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GCSC Documentary Screening: Searching for Rodakis

When

Feb 13, 2026 from 06:00 (Europe/Berlin / UTC100)

Where

GCSC Conference Room

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"A house is supposed to keep your memories safe—but this one has been keeping someone else’s. One summer during a floor renovation in Karacaköy, two cousins find a marble slab set into the concrete beneath the tiles, inscribed in Greek. Once deciphered, the words are stark and intimate: Chrysoula Rodaki, “servant of God,” March 1887—dead in her late teens, yet somehow still living inside the architecture of a home.
What begins as curiosity becomes a moral pull: Soyyılmaz sets out to locate Chrysoula’s descendants and to understand why, decades later, her family left her behind—caught in the mass expulsions and compulsory resettlement of the 1923 Greece–Turkey population exchange. The film follows the investigation through local testimony and blocked archives, and it also confronts a darker logic of exclusion: accounts suggest that in some places Greeks were not allowed burial in cemeteries, leading families to bury their dead in gardens or within their homes.
As the trail widens, help arrives from the other side—messages, leads, and family trees from Greece and the diaspora—until the search culminates in a reunion that briefly repairs what states once insisted must be severed."

Director: Kerem Soyyilmaz