YouSaid · the spoken record

Hannah Lucinda Smith

lines on the record: 55
first: 2026-06-20
most recent: 2026-06-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“But sort of marketed as these in between places. And I think, you know, those kind of places are very interesting, not just for journalists, just generally. Like there's a class of traveler and more laserly social media influencer who really like going to these kind of places because not many people go there. They're super interesting. You know, if you're bored of going to the Costa del Sol or to wherever. Go somewhere out of no one else has been. There are kind of good places to go. So I was really interested by them, you know, Istanbul, when I first moved around in 2013. Very, very cheap actually. There's a budget Turkish airline called Pegasus.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know, fucky arm, I had that famous now sort of infamous and derided phrase the end of history. And they were seen as kind of throwbacks, kooky, quirky places where, for example, in Transnistria, you still have the Lenin statues up. We still have the House of Soviets. You still have all this kind of Soviet ephemera around that makes it very visually interesting place. Nagorno-Karabakh was referred to as a country that doesn't exist. They were kind of bootique tour companies that could take you there and, you know, take you to see these what they would call ghost towns. They're actually, you know, inhabited by Azerbaijanis as late as the kind of early 90s, but had been abandoned than had been looted and then sort of left as a military buffer zone, heavily land mined.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, liminal places like, for example, Cyprus, the island of Cyprus has been split since 1974 between north and south and north, Turkish-speaking, South Greek speaking. And these places sort of. Over the past three decades, they were looked at as not particularly important geopolitically. The idea was the Cold War was over, the European Union was expanding.”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And places that change hands quite often. And these are quite often, you know, just fascinating places in themselves. A few of them, places like Transnistria, in Moldova or like Nagorno-Karabakh in the Caucasus, they were sort of born of the breakdown of the Soviet Union, the kind of imperfect borders that were drawn national borders when that empire broke down. So Transnistria, although it was part of Moldova initially, mainly Russian-speaking rather than Moldovan-speaking and didn't want to be part of that new nation state. It actually wanted to rejoin the Soviet Union. Nagorno-Karabakh was a mixed region, both Muslim-Azerbaijanis and Christian Armenians lived there and became the center of a kind of tug of war. And then you have other kind of”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, sure. So one of the joys of being based in Istanbul as a journalist is that you have access not just to Turkey, which is an interesting story in itself, but also to a really, really kind of wide region because Istanbul, you know, the clich ⁇ s that it sits at the bridge between east and west, but actually it sits at the kind of center point between the old Soviet Union, Europe, Iran and the Caucasus and the Levant, the Middle East. And it's also the place or in the middle of places where empires, the edges of empires kind of bump up. And it's in those places that you find the in-between places, or what I call the hinterlands. So places that are generally kind of ethnically mixed, maybe sort of ambiguous in terms of who do they belong to or what are they? Are they a nation state? Are they part of a different nation state?”
2026-06-20 · Intelligence Squared · What Can Europe's Borderlands Tell Us About Its Future? With Hannah Lucinda Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT