![Struggling with my body [Greek Audio]](https://vog.ert.gr/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/istorima_ertecho-400x400-1.jpg)
Elena Topalidou has experienced both the light and the dark side of dance. She gladly started ballet at the age of ten. In adolescence, she wrestled with extreme physical stress and an eating disorder. Later on, she excelled in some of the most important contemporary dance performances. Today, she is a classical ballet teacher at the Greek National Opera Dance School and an actress.
Narrator: Elena Tsopalidou
Interviewer: Haris Pagonidou
Podcast Creation: Haris Pagonidou, Andreas Pappas
Sound Design: Giorgos Romantanis, Dimitris Palaiogiannis
Sound 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.