Interviews & Presentations
Dora Giannakou-Parisi was born in Mithymna (Molyvos) of Lesvos. In 1958 she finished the Mytilene Girl’s School and in the years that followed she studied languages and accounting and obtained a diploma in sewing. In 1963 he went to Paris to study handicrafts, on a scholarship program developed by the cosmopolitan sociologist Michael Goutos; a program that sought to plant the seeds for an alternative form of local economic and social development. At the same time, Dora worked in a sewing atelier until 1968, when she obtained a modéliste diploma and trained in prêt-à-porter workshops. Early in 1973 she returned to Athens and in 1977 she came with her family to live in Mithymna in the house (the so-called Giannakos Mansion) where her family settled after 1922 and the Greek Turkish population exchange. Based in Molyvos and in collaboration with a group of women from the village, she designed and crafted ceramic dolls dressed in faithful copies of traditional Greek costumes which she exhibits in Greece and abroad. At the same time, she engaged with the traditional flavours of Lesvos and the Northeast Aegean in general, publishing a book of recipes by her godson Dimitris Talianis (Topio Publications) entitled “Aegean Flavours”. Dora opened her home to us for an interview in June 2024.
Dimitris Krallis was born in Athens where he lived during his childhood, teenage, and college years. At the University of Athens, he studied political theory and at Oxford he took a liking for Byzantine social and political history. After four years dedicated to military service and to teaching at the American College of Greece in Athens, he moved to the US and the University of Michigan for his doctorate. Upon graduation, he joined the faculty at Simon Fraser University, where he teaches at the Department of Global Humanities. With his cousin Mariza Krallis, who like him draws her origins from Molyvos, they developed and manage the Aegean Stories Vault, a digital portal decorated to bringing the history and culture of Lesvos and the North Aegean to both academic and lay audiences. In this interview Dimitris presents the Aegean Stories Vault in an interview that takes place in the Banaki Museum, drawing, among other things, connections between history, art, culture, and architecture of different parts of Greece.
Born in Athens in 1966, Mariza graduated from the Department of Forestry & Natural Environment of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and completed postgraduate studies in Landscape Architecture. In Athens, she was co-owner of a garden design and construction company, as well as an environmental consultancy. Later, she worked in the field of internal regulatory compliance supervision in a brokerage company and was co-owner of a catering business. She currently manages a tourist accommodation in Mithimna, Lesvos, where she lives permanently. Mariza also volunteers her time for cultural and environmental activities. Since 2020, as a local scholar, she has dedicated herself to researching, recording, interpreting and documenting her family archive. At the same time, she analyses her family’s genealogical trees, searching for roots and connections between generations. In this interview Mariza talks with Dimitris about aspects of the Aegean Stories Vault that relate to the archive that she has in her hands.
Niki Eleftheriadis was born in Petra, Lesvos in 1954. She studied Graphic Arts and Interior Design in Athens at the Centre for Technological Applications (1972-74) and Plastic Arts at the University of Paris VIII (1975-77). The love of her father, the painter Takis Eleftheriadis, for folk art in all its forms and family life in Petra determined the genre and subjects of her painting. She lives and works in Athens and Petra. From 1977 until today her works are regularly exhibited both in personal and collective exhibitions in Greece and abroad. Niki opened her home to us for an interview in June 2024.
Immigrant or ex pat? There is a large discussion on semantics around this very distinction, as the immigrant is often associated with lower socioeconomic status and lack of agency, while expatriates comfortably and purposefully cross borders. Either way, the participants in this interview settled in Molyvos years ago and have made a life of it. What does it mean to be an outsider joining a tight community? What are the limits of integration, if any? What is the scope of acceptance? What is expected of outsiders, as they enter the close-knit community of a North Aegean village? Our conversation with Tara, Eleonora, and Ilia took place in June of 2024, when they joined us for an interview addressing some of these questions. Like any such interview, this one was but the beginning of a conversation that touched but some aspects of such a complex story.
Born and raised in Manhattan, Ethan Schmidt is a Byzantinist, writer, and lover of books. With undergraduate studies in Medieval History at the University of St. Andrews, and an MSc in Late Antique, Byzantine, and Islamic Studies from the University of Edinburgh, he presently works on his doctorate in Byzantine History and Literature at Simon Fraser University. His research is concerned with the construction of imaginary worlds, or the evocation of lost worlds, in the literature and historiography of the long twelfth century (c.1080–c.1217), with a particular focus on the descriptive technique of ekphrasis. He joined the Aegean Stories Vault team in Lesvos in June 2024 and contributes reflections on the island’s nature and culture, but also creative writing inspired by the island’s deep history.
Nina Houle hails from Vancouver where she still lives on unceded Coast Salish territory. She is currently writing an MA thesis on depictions of ancient Greece and the Byzantine empire within contemporary tabletop games. She began researching historical reception in tabletop games as an undergraduate, while completing the History Honors program at SFU. A lifelong lover of Greek history and culture, she is working towards a career as a reference librarian, assisting students and researchers in Hellenic Studies, archaeology, and other related subjects. As an aspiring librarian, Nina also worked at the SFU library organizing the McDonald Hellenic Collection. Nina joined the Aegean Stories Vault team when she visited Lesvos in June 2024. She has contributed reflections on the island’s Byzantine past.
Of Slovak and French-Canadian origins, Sam Adam lives in Vancouver and studies in the Department of Global Humanities where he encountered the Aegean Stories Vault at its inception, while talking to Dimitris Krallis on the sidelines of a Byzantine history class. Interested in the history of education during the time of the Medieval Roman polity, he has presented a paper on the subject at a recent conference in Sacramento and is studying classical Greek as he prepares for the next stage of his studies at the MA level. Along with Nina and Ethan, Sam joined the Aegean Stories Vault team in Molyvos in June 2024 and contributed entries on Greek education between nation and empire in late Ottoman Lesvos.
Noah Jozic lives in Vancouver and studies in the Department of History, where they are part of the Honours cohort. Noah also dabbles in all things Hellenic having taken numerous Greek-themed classes in the Department of Global Humanities. In the summer of 2024 they returned to Molyvos for the Aegean Stories Vault, having participated in SFU’s Lesvos field school in the previous year. At the end of their second journey in Greece Noah was awarded Honourable Mention for the undergraduate photo contest held under the auspices of Gefyra, titled: “The Fragments of Greece”. This contest featured works that “reflect the essence of Greece or are inspired by Greek culture through the fragment of an item”.
Dimitris Krallis studied political science at the University of Athens and Byzantine history at Oxford and the University of Michigan. He has published on Medieval Roman (Byzantine), social, intellectual and political history, with an added focus on governance. With his cousin Mariza Krallis, who like him draws her origins from Molyvos, they developed and manage the Aegean Stories Vault, a digital portal dedicated to bringing the history and culture of Lesvos and the North Aegean to both academic and lay audiences. This project then is for him a move into a new field of enquiry. The presentation available here outlines the types of stories that his early engagement with his grandfather’s papers and the diary of Efstratios Kalligeris (from the papers of Maria Koraka) made possible. It is a story of connections across time and space in the late nineteenth and early 20th c.
Nikos Papadogiannis is Senior Lecturer at the University of Stirling. His research focuses on Europe in the 1960s and 1970s from a transnational perspective, with interests in protest cultures, travel, youth lifestyles, gender, sexuality, migration, emotions and European identities. In 2019 Dr. Papadogiannis participated in a workshop titled: Sovereignty, Space and Aesthetics: Greece and Europe in the World. The workshop was held in Molyvos collaboratively by SFU and Rutgers Newark, and in its context Dr. Papadogiannis presented on the spatial mobility and sexuality of lesbian women from West Germany and Greece in the 1980s. His paper offered insights on the intersection of locality, mobility, identity, gender, and sexuality on the Island of Lesvos.
AEGEAN STORIES VAULT
North Aegean Stories
- Achliptarouda
- Administrative Continuities
- Allilodiplografia
- Barbarossa
- Daphnis and Chloe
- Dowry Contract & Residence Permit
- Education in the Ottoman Archives
- Egyptian Photo Parlours
- Egyptian stories
- Eleftheriadis: Paris/London
- E. Schmidt on Painted Houses
- Figures from Byzantine Lesvos
- Global Fashions
- Lomemili and Genoese trade
- Conze and Humann in Molyvos
- Nature in Lesvos
- C. T. Newton in Mytilene
- Ottoman Yearbooks
- Postcards
- Smyrna Photo Parlours
- S. Adam on Education in Lesvos
- Seismic Shifts
- Thinking about the state
- War Trauma
- Seals, Authentication and Identity
- A Medical Diploma and a world of connections
- The Vampire of Mytilene
- Women and Memory in Molyvos
Historial Background
Art Creation in Place
- Dimitris Krallis
- Mariza Krallis
- Aytek Soner Alpan
- Maria Mandamadiotou
- Aneurin Ellis-Evans
- Christina Sgouromiti
- Soloup (Antonis Nikolopoulos)
- Yannis Tentzeris
- Ethan Schmidt
- Nina Houle
- Sam Adam
- Emrecan Çelik
- Gregory Tsolakis
This project was supported by an SFU FASS Kickstarter Grant, by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies at SFU and by Gefyra, an SNF-funded collaboration between SFU and UCLA.
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