The lost El Greco [English Voiceover] | Sunday 20 August 2023

In the middle of the 16th century, the painter Domenikos Theotokopoulos, who would later become widely known as El Greco, painted an icon of the Virgin Mary in Crete. Wars, revolutions, massacres, and persecutions followed. People fled, taking this icon with them across the Aegean, and the identity of its creator was lost in time. Until one morning in 1983, in Syros.

Interviewee: Kostas Kontos
Interview by: Justine Arvaniti
Producer: Maya Filippopoulou
Sound Designer: Nikolas Konstantinou
Sound Editor: Dimitris Papadakis
Photos: Vangelis Jannis Voiceover: Steve Lever

Istorima is the bigest 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