Istanbul, present
Refuge Metropolis between Normality and Precarity


“It’s an amazingly beautiful and devastatingly hard place to live.”
Alaa Hassan, 2021
We Refugees Archive is a digital archive on refugeedom, past and present. It focuses on individual micro-histories and the city as a microcosm of refuge and new beginnings.
“It’s an amazingly beautiful and devastatingly hard place to live.”
Alaa Hassan, 2021
“We have never been so ‘refugees’ as now.”
Mascha Kaléko, 1941
“We will always stand up for our immigrant and refugee neighbors. No one can change that.”
Bill di Blasio, 2019
“There I stood, a ‘Réfugié’ disregarded in the German homeland as a Jew, chased out of his offices because of his ‘inferior’ race, emigrated under abandonment of home and hearth into the foreign exile […] as a German professor counted among the upper thousand!”
Ernst E. Hirsch
“The foreigner feels at home in Paris, because you can live in this city as you would otherwise only live in your own four walls.”
Hannah Arendt
“Berlin is not just a city. It is a political laboratory that enforces a new beginning.”
Amro Ali, 2019
“I don’t have any places to go, I am not going anywhere. My place is Palermo … I am now a Palermitanian.”
Kadija J., 2019
“The writers heard about the Garden of Eden in Vilnius … They moved there when Warsaw was not able to protect them any longer in the same way.”
Emanuel Ringelblum, 1940
Nazeeha Saeed was harassed by state authorities because of her journalistic activities in Bahrain. In this interview excerpt she speaks about how she settled…
UNITED for Intercultural Action has been “collecting reliable data on refugee deaths related to Fortress Europe since 1993 in the ‘List of Deaths’”.
Isabel Vásquez is from Cantón El Rosario, Santa Ana in El Salvador. She fled to the U.S. with her 9-year-old daughter when she was…
George Edel, a Jewish doctor from Vienna (who converted to Christianity), tells of the flight preparations in the wake of the annexation of Austria…