Cinephile, comedy, adventure, cartoons: Maro Hatzeleni, owner of the last video store in Chios, could guess every customer’s preferences the moment she saw them. She could tell by the way they walked and greeted her. She had funny and amazing moments, including outrageous demands and outbursts, moments of laughter, but also moments of joy and nostalgia; she had a true contact with all of her customers at “Imagine”.
Narrator: Maro Hatzeleni
Researcher: Konstantinos Georgiakodis
Podcast creation: Andreas Pappas
Sound Design: Dimitris Palaiogiannis
Audio Editing: 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.