The interviews that are included in the "Testimonies" collection as well as the written or audio taped autobiographic texts rely on the narration on the part of the "informants" of incidents, experiences and situations of their life. Contrary to folklore oriented collections, the emphasis is not on how things were "done", like in the case of customs, ceremonies etc, but on how they happened to our "informants", how they experienced them and how they remember and recall them during an interview which is recorded once and usually lasts for one or two consecutive hours. Even the recollections that are related by third persons are concentrating on how the informants participated in narrations and how they themselves were affected by the continuous negotiation between memory and identity in the frame of family and mnemonic communities of villages, associations and refugee hang-outs.

The regular order of the interview includes a first contact or pre-interview -usually without the use of a voice recorder (tape recorder, digital recording device) to get to know the informants- and the preparation of the questions and the course of the interview, so that prefabricated and closed narrations are avoided and the informants are not troubled by illogical conclusions and time discrepancies during the interview. Roads are opened by recording the genealogical tree and doing a short tour of the past and present life of the informants, so that situations and events that may even be forgotten by the informants are activated.

The main interview is audio and often video recorded, only with the consent of the informants, and provided that there are no ethical concerns for the opposite. Reasons to cancel an interview are the mental and intellectual situation of the witnesses, their physical ability to complete without discomfort the interview and the possibility of offending them by recording and exposing them in a state of injury, pain or destitution.

The way the interview is conducted is the same for all and only differs in its flow and its range of topics according to the different age-groups - generations of the informants. The autobiographical character of the interview that begins with the self presentation of the informant and a free monologue constitutes constituent element (sine qua non) of the interview. Because of the variety of informants but also because of the dynamics of the interview, we generally consider the strict observation of questionnaires and a series of standardized questions ineffective to our project´s purpose. Instead, we chose to create two lists of thematic ranges, for those who belong in first and those who belong in the generations that followed. This allows us to explore the memory for the cores of personal and social experience. Many of the thematic ranges aim to draw information while others aim to record the informants´ mentalities, sentiments and opinions, like the final question after the retrospection of the informants´ life, which evokes a philosophical attitude

The basic difference between the topics of the two groups is transferring the emphasis from the remembrance of the old homeland to the experience of refugee life and to the new life that was built in the lands of reception. Differentiations exist in parts of the topics list, depending on the regional peculiarities that the interview refers to, the particular history of each community, the individual features and the family background of each informant. The aim -through the differentiations and the varied articulation of questions, depending on the situation and the interlocutor- is to find a minimal field of common understanding of whatever is uttered, in a way that combinations and comparisons between interviews are allowed, since as a rule, different people understand and consequently answer identical questions differently.

Something that we usually forget is that the interview is shaped -unequally even- by both parts, that is to say, the one that makes the questions and the one that answers. It is only by unfortunate concurrence of events that for practical reasons we don´t have a video camera to record the "researcher" whose voice is heard. The standard interview includes a camera frame that focuses on the head or the upper body of the informant, with minimal movement and angles´ changes. The technical equipment is minimal -usually a DV camera and natural or very little artificial lighting- and two people who make up the crew, so that the witnesses are not distracted and the autobiographical and contemplative mood is maintained.

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