In the middle of the 16th century, painter Domenikos Theotokopoulos, who would later become known as El Greco, paints an icon of the Virgin Mary in Venetian-occupied Crete. Wars, revolutions, massacres and persecutions follow, the icon crosses the Aegean and no one knows its creator anymore. Until one morning in 1983, in Ermoupoli, Syros.
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.