A sea of wreckage [Greek Audio]

One spring afternoon of 1954, a group of boys from Sofades, Karditsa are walking through a meadow, when a great earthquake lets them witness an unprecedented sight of nature. It was the earthquake of Sofades that left behind 25 dead, hundreds injured and 6500 damaged buildings.

Interviewee: Thanasis Stathopoulos
Rerearcher: Christina Petrou
Podcast Creation: Charis Pagonidou
Sound Designer: Dimitris Paleogiannis
Sound Editor: Spyros Lymperopoulos

Istorima is the largest project for recording and preserving oral histories of Greece. More than 1,000 young researchers find narrators listen, collect and preserve stories of people from all over Greece: Stories of their hometowns, stories of love, stories that changed Greece or defined it, modern or old stories. Stories that are not recorded in the history books and that could easily be lost in time.
It was created by the journalist Sofia Papaioannou and the historian Katherine Fleming and is implemented with a founding grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), as part of its initiative to Restart and Empower Youth (see more on www.snf.org). More than 20,000 stories are gradually being published in full on www.archive.istorima.org. Excerpts of the stories are published in the form of podcasts, videos, or written stories on www.istorima.org.