In 1961, an eleven-year-old boy runs away from his home in Mytilene, sneaks aboard a ship, and ends up alone on a dock in Piraeus at night. There, he meets a “madam,” one of the women in charge of the brothels in Trouba, who takes him under her protection.
Narrator: The narrator requested anonymity
Researcher: Vasilis Koutsoyannis
Podcast Creation: Euphrosyne Kyriazi
Sound Design: Iasonas Theofanou
Sound Editing: Thanos Zampoukas
Istorima is the biggest 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.