By Natasha Karageorgos, Associate Professor of Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies

I am deeply honored to receive the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Ukraine Beyond Borders Award. This fellowship will allow me to go to Greece in 2027 for four months to work on the project, “The Legacy of the Mariupol Greeks.” The Fulbright program, “Ukraine Beyond Borders,” is designed for scholars who work on Ukraine but need to go to some other country to conduct their research, since travel to Ukraine is not allowed because of the ongoing war.

The purpose of my project is to enhance the visibility of the Mariupol Greeks’ tragedy for a global audience and help preserve this community’s oral and written histories. The Ukrainian city of Mariupol, besieged for three months and severely destroyed in 2022 in the course of Russia’s invasion, became known to most people in the world from the news back then. Much less known is the fact that Mariupol was the center of Ukraine’s Greek ethnic minority. The city’s destruction and occupation led to the erasure of the unique culture of this ethnic-religious community whose only home was Mariupol and the surrounding villages in Donetsk Oblast. Many of the activists of the Ukrainian Greek movement ended up in Greece as a result of displacement and formed the non-profit organization, “The Union of the Greeks of Ukraine in Greece,” that is focused on helping all Ukrainians in Greece and representing the voices of the Greeks of Ukraine in Europe. I aim to deepen my collaboration with this non-profit organization. 

I have been participating in the effort to help the Mariupol Greeks preserve their legacy and have their story heard, in collaboration with Ukrainian scholars, since 2023. We launched the pilot version of the website that should serve as a digital hub for scholarly information about this community and archival materials. In 2025, The Athens Review of Books published my article, “Voices of the Mariupol Greeks,” which features four interviews with Mariupol Greek women. During my Fulbright, I plan to collect more oral histories with Ukrainian Greek activists and work with the scholarly and archival materials available in the libraries of Greece.