Opening of Yiannis Skoulas’ photography exhibition “CHRONOS MEIZON-CRETE”

Wednesday, September 10

20:00

Stegi VITSENTZOS KORNAROS (V. Kornarou 97 Sitia)

EXHIBITION DURATION: September 10-17, 2025

Photographer YIANNIS SKOULAS works with themes, documenting Greece’s historical heritage. He has completed and presented in albums series such as the network of Stone Lighthouses, Railway Stations, Unknown Ancient Crete, as well as a series of Old Cars.
He obsessively photographs archaeological sites – 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 two decades he photographed ballets and dance groups that performed in Greece, and he possesses a massive collection of his photographs signed by the greatest jazz and blues musicians.
For the past 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 articles.
He has presented 22 solo exhibitions in Greece and abroad and has participated in 12 group exhibitions, while he has published six albums/monographs and contributed to 20 others. He has published dozens of travel and research articles in the periodical press.
His works are found in private collections in and outside Greece, in embassies and hotels, and have been issued by ELTA in a series of stamps.
His photographs have been used for book and album covers. He has worked as a photographer for the Greek National Tourism Organization (EOT) and has been a member of the Chamber of Fine Arts of Greece since 1996.

✳︎ “For a long time, I was swirling around Crete; two years passed and nine and a half thousand kilometers. I met many and conversed with many; lost relatives, old loves, new friends. I sang alongside lyre players, they wove mantinades for me, I tasted askolibrous and antikristo, I melted with apaki, I swelled from boubouristous and drowned in seas of raki. I entered History and became a part of it. I shouted and danced and beat my shield lest the cries of little Zeus be heard. I retreated with the last of my tribe high up in Karfi, feeling that something was changing in my homeland. I was engulfed by the great wave of the volcano.
In Lisso, I gazed at the Libyan Sea with the doctor’s apprentice at the Asclepieion, using my palm as a sunshade and competing in fishing. In Eleutherna, balancing on fear, I crossed the bridge to the necropolis – I had heard so much about such nights with a full moon. In Lato, I offered encouragement to the old man who found it difficult to climb the hill to reach the bouleuterion where the elders had a meeting. In Praisos, I swore oaths of eternal love – which, as a young man, I certainly had no intention of keeping – in a neighborhood on the west side of the city. And serving as the high priest’s assistant in Giouchtas, I became privy to the great secret of the Sacred Peaks and swore a terrible oath if I ever betrayed it.
Thus I lived within two years and two and three thousand. Through small human daily routines that are constantly repeated. Thus. Because a journey to the land of Crete can only be a journey through the time of Crete. And this time goes and hides in past millennia, and there you must chase it. And the more desolate the places high up in Petsofas, deep in Aradena, or in the depths of Eileithyia, the more unaltered they retain the images of the life they lived; the more charged I become…”

Yiannis Skoulas