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My family’s escape during the December events of 1944 in Athens | Monday 19 February 2024
Istorima
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My family’s escape during the December events of 1944 in Athens | Monday 19 February 2024

[Greek Audio]

During the German occupation, a gendarme saves a guerrilla from the security battalions. A few months later, during the December events (”Dekemvriana”), when the life of the gendarme’s family is threatened, the guerrilla appears and escapes them. At dawn, December 4th, the family of Ioanna Lezou, a woman, a man and two young children run away in the night to seek safety, while fighting rages. A story of humanity and survival, about the people caught between fire.

Narrator: Ioanna Lezou
Researcher: Margarita Koronaiou
Podcast Creation: Effrosyni Kyriazi
Sound Design: Dimitris Palaiogiannis
Sound Editing: Spyros Lymperopoulos
Photo Highlights: Damianos Aronis


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.