Thanasis grew up with his aunts, because he was orphaned from an early age. Despite the hardships and poverty, he managed to study and become a doctor, which was his life’s dream, despite the questioning he received from his social environment. A trip of a lifetime from Patras, to Sweden and to his beloved Serifos, where he currently lives with his family.
Narrator: Thanasis Kontaris
Researcher: Michalis Chrysoloras
Podcast Creation: Efrosyni Kyriazi
Sound Design: Dimitris Palaiogiannis
Audio Editing: Giorgos Gkanidis
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.