Thirty years old today, Giorgos Tzovanis grew up in the 1990s, very differently from other children his age. He lived with his family in a makeshift cattle hut in the mountains of Arcadia without electricity and running water, helped his parents with their work from the age of five and walked for more than two hours to go to school every day.
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 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.