This document discusses the importance of historical conscience and collective memory in shaping society and its orientation towards the future. It argues that a society's view of its history reflects how it functions presently and its future goals. Historical knowledge is constructed through official narratives, education, and collective memory sites. Developing historical consciousness allows people to understand current issues through a temporal lens. Teaching history aims to cultivate this skill in students and avoid narrow perspectives through questioning narratives and counterstories. The study examines youth perspectives in Greece, Turkey, and Italy on how history education influences societal development and a constructive future orientation.

1. THE IMPORTANCE OF HISTORICAL CONSCIENCE FOR A CREATIVE
RETURN TO THE FUTURE: RESEARCHING COLLABORATIVELY THE
LIBERATION OF THESSALONIKI AS A CASE EXAMPLE FOR LIBERATION BY
OUR MODERN ‘ENEMIES AND DEMONS’
Dimitris Kiritsis,
Franco di Cataldo
Cennet Engin-Demir

2. THE FORMATION OF SOCIETY AS A RESULT OF CITIZENS’
HISTORICAL CONSCIENCE
 The way how a particular society views its
history reflects the fact that how this society
functions in the present situation and how it is
oriented to its own future.

3. HISTORY
 The term ‘history’ is often used to describe
representations of the past that appear in written or
narrative form, a primary medium through which
states, elites or dominant groups take over linear
time and declare official chronologies as master
narratives (Titarenko, 2008: 33).

4. HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE
 Historical knowledge can be categorized as an aggregate of
ideas, views, concepts, feelings and sentiments that
reflect the perception and evaluation of the past in all the
variety inherent in and characteristics of society as a
whole. (Toshchenko, 2011, p. 5).
 Only after learning the past we can understand what was good
and what was wrong there.
 In the future, it will be necessary to reasses the past again as
it is a non-stop process of construction and reconstruction of
the history with the help of the memory within political, spiritual
and psychological context of the present day
(Titarenko, 2008).

5. HISTORICAL MEMORY
 There is no national history, if the nation does not know
it. Historical facts or events are not significant and
visible, if they are not kept in the memory of the nation.
 Historical knowledge exist to the point of our interest to it
and to our ability to connect this history with the present-
day life.
 In general, the nation can always navigate its future on
the basis of its past through evaluationg, reflecting and
re-thinking.
 That is why historical memory helps to keep the
past, involve the past into the present life and receive
some historical lessons from rethinking it.

6. HISTORICAL MEMORY
 Historical memory of a nation is directly connected with the
socio-cultural identity and therefore it is connected with the
national identity as the national identity is based on the
national culture such as language, folklore, myths and
stereotypes.
 Historical memory is often focused on the things that can be
referred as historical heritage.
 Historical heritage can be presented in several forms: material
objects such as building monuments, any objects of the past;
folklore such as myths, fairy tales and proverbs; language and
communication and cultural space where all the above-
mentioned objects are situated (Titarenko, 2008: 35).

7. COLLECTIVE MEMORY
 There are means of remembering the past and
shaping historical memory: children’s
books, museums, memorials and historical sites.
 The way in which current politics and existing
collective memories influence the stories told in the
children’s books, at the museums and in historical
sites and how the story told at one site can change
over time.

8. COLLECTIVE MEMORY
 Collective memories work much the same way as
historical memories, that is they foster and define group
identities, tell a group of people where they have come
from, who they are and how they should act in the
present and future (Gillis, 1994).
 Collective memory gets passed on through schools, from
parents to children and in public commemorations, and
its implications are enormous.
 Each of these modes of representation (historical
memory and collective memory) offer different
possibilities for how conflicts between neighbouring
countries should be remembered.

9. HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS
 Historical consciousness can be described as the ability
to recognize the irregular quality of an event that is
happening now; in other words to see the event with the
eyes of future generations.
 The esense of historical consciousness lies not in
merely remembering and transmitting the past but in the
way we see the present (Schieder, 1978: 1).
 Thus, historical consciousness uses the knowledge of
what happened in the past and has become history, as
an element in shaping the thoughts and actions that will
determine the future.

10. TEACHING HISTORY
 Schools play an important role in shaping historical memory
and historical consciousness because they are often the first
places that children learn about important historical events.
 Teaching history should aim at helping students to
understand the present existing social, political, religious and
economic conditions of the people (Trofanenko, 2008).
 Through learning history students need to develop historical
consciousness. That is, they need to learn ways of thinking
about the past that will help them to orientate themselves in
time, bringing past, present and future into a relation that
enables them to cope with living their lives as temporal
beings.

11. TEACHING HISTORY
 Historical knowledge should not be treated as ‘a fixed, static, given
matter of human consciousness and cognition, but as a dynamic
process’ (Rüsen, 1990: 53 cited in Lee, 2004, p. 4).
 Therefore historical consciousness is not static, but something that
develop over time mostly through education at schools.
 Traditional narratives in teaching of history need to be questioned
and counter-stories need to be produced. By means of counter-stories
students will say no to pre-given temporal orientations to their lives.
 These counter-stories provide a critique of moral values displaying them as
having immoral origins or consequences (Sexias, 2004).
 To avoid the narrow context of chronicle, i.e. the plain chronical listing of
events, we need to reconstruct the past by interpreting it with a
critical eye and mind. In the end different narratives will emerge most
times incongruent and most times antogonistic if not downright opposite
(Giordano, 2008: 12).

12. THE STUDY
 The study is focused on tracing the
opinions, experiences and attitudes of young
Greek, Turkish and Italian students towards the
importance of the knowledge of History and the role of
the subject of History for the development of a better
society and for a creative return to the future.
 As mentioned earlier historical memory is a collective
memory but each individual has his/her own perception
of historical facts. Therefore, getting the ideas of
students from different nations will help us to
understand history teaching in these countries.