Open Daily 4:00 pm –8:00 pm
Opening of the Photography Exhibition – Yannis Skoulas
«Images of Ancient Crete»
«Images of Ancient Crete»
Wednesday, September 10th
20:00
Stegi VITSENTZOS KORNAROS (97 V. Kornarou St., Sitia)EXHIBITION DURATION: September 10–17, 2025
The photographer YANNIS SKOULAS works in thematic series, documenting the historical heritage of Greece. He has completed and presented in albums collections such as Stone Lighthouses, Railway Stations, Unknown Ancient Crete, as well as a series on Vintage Cars.He photographs archaeological sites obsessively—he has visited more than a thousand—and in 2015 he undertook the photography for the Re-exhibition of the Archaeological Museum of Ancient Corinth.
For twenty years he photographed ballets and dance groups performing in Greece, and he holds an extensive collection of signed photographs of the greatest jazz and blues musicians.
For the last 15 years, he has been researching, studying, photographing, and documenting the remnants on the ground of the three land border lines (1832, 1881, 1897) between Greece and the Ottoman Empire, participating in conferences and publishing related work.
He has presented 22 solo exhibitions in Greece and abroad and has taken part in 12 group exhibitions, while publishing six albums/monographs and contributing to another 20. He has also published dozens of articles in magazines, focusing on travel and research themes.
His works are found in private collections in Greece and abroad, in embassies and hotels, and have been issued by the Hellenic Post in a series of stamps.
His photographs have been used for book and record covers. He has worked as a photographer for the Greek National Tourism Organization (ΕΟΤ) and has been a member of the Chamber of Fine Arts of Greece since 1996.
✳︎ «I “gyrated” in Crete for a long time; amounting to two years and nine and a half thousand kilometres. I encountered many things and met many people – relatives I’ d lost touch with, those I had loved in the past, new friends. I sang along with lyra-players, they wove me mantinades couplets, I tasted askolimbri onions and antikrysto lamb, I drowned in seas of raki. I entered into history and became a part of it. I cried out and jumped up and down and banged my shield so that the crying of the new-born Zeus should not be heard. I saw the great wave of the volcano coming. I withdrew with the last of my tribe to high up on Karfi, feeling that something was changing for ever in my homeland.At Lissos, I looked out at the Libyan Sea in the company of the young apprentice of the Asklepieion, shading my eyes with my hand and outdoing him at ducks and drakes. At Eleutherna, balancing on fear, I crossed the bridge and followed the road through the necropolis; I’ d heard so many things about nights like these with a full moon. At Lato, I encouraged an old man who was having difficulty climbing the hill to reach the bouleuterion, where the elders were meeting. At Praisos in a neighbourhood to the west to the city, I swore oaths of eternal love, which of course, being a young man I had no intention of keeping. And performing the duties of assistant to the high priest at Juktas, I was admitted to the great secret of the Peak Sanctuaries, and took a fearful oath never to reveal it.
This is how I experienced two or three tousand years in the space of two. Through little human moments of everyday life. Because a journey in Crete can be nothing but a journey through Crete’s time. And time hides itself in past mellenia –there you have to chase it. And the quieter, the more deserted the places high up at Petsofas, deep down in Aradaina or in the caves of Eileithyia, the more striking the pictures from the life they lived. And the more charged I am…»
Yannis Skoulas
