On 21 April 1967, the day of the coup in Greece, the police comes knocking on Rinio and Chronis Missios’s door. Chronis has already escaped, but Rinio is arrested and taken first to the racetrack and then to the barren island of Gyaros, together with thousands of other citizens considered ‘dangerous’ to the dictatorship. She remains in forced internal exile for three and a half years under preventive arrest, a period that will change her as a person.
Interviewee: Rinio Missiou
Interview by: Fenia Chala, Dimitris Kolovos
Podcast creator: Maya Filippopoulou
Sound Designer: Iasonas Theofanou
Sound Editor: Dimitris Papadakis
Photos: Giorgos Kapsalis
Translator: Eva Kesserling
Voiceover: Eva Kesserling
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.