Her father was killed by the Germans. Her mother was killed by partisans. Ersaia Tsartianiou survives the massacres of Mesovouno, is tortured in the cells of the Civil War, and at just thirteen years old, she is left alone with one responsibility: to keep her younger siblings from starving. She is the voice of all the innocents caught in the crossfire during Greece’s most turbulent time.
Narrator: Ersaia Chatziioannidou
Researcher: Niki Fotiadou
Podcast Creation: Maya Filippopoulou
Sound Design: Iasonas Theofanou
Photographic snapshots: Michalis Bekos
Music: William Ryan Fritch
Istorima is the biggest project of recording and preserving oral histories of Greece. Over 1,000 young researchers find narrators, listen, collect and save stories of people from all over Greece : Stories of their place, stories of love, stories that changed us or defined us, stories modern or old. Stories that are not recorded in the history books and that could be lost in time. Istorima is the co-creation of the journalist Sofia Papaioannou and the historian Katherine Fleming and is implemented with a founding donation from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) as part of his Youth Reboot and Empowerment initiative (learn more at www.snf.org). The more than 20,000 stories are being published in their entirety in stages at www.archive.istorima.org. Excerpts of the stories are published in the form of podcasts, videos or written stories at www.istorima.org