Nineteen imaginary figures of miners—a tribute to all those who lived in Serifos during the years of mining.
To the invisible ones.
To those who laboured, who risked their lives, and who were buried beneath the earth—inside the mines, within the very soil.
People unknown to me, yet deeply important to those who loved them and to the history of this place.
I have always been moved by our relationship with our ancestors—those who lived
hundreds or even thousands of years before us, under conditions we can scarcely imagine.
Their lives were brief journeys, seemingly insignificant against the vastness of time and the immensity of the earth.
And yet, it is their stories that brought us here.
Today, we lie on the pebbled shore after a refreshing dive into the Aegean, gazing with awe at the rusted iron structures of the mines.
We try to imagine the people and the ships that once came and went.
We look toward the silent mountains and
the abandoned wagons.
How did those people live their ordinary, everyday lives?
For them, the sea was never a place of freedom.
It was those lives I imagined—their anxieties, their hopes, their faces, carved and furrowed like the earth they walked upon. The same earth that sustained them, in whatever measure it could.
These figures emerged almost by themselves from the clay.
It was as though they
asked to be born.
The invisible, now made visible, once existed.
They still exist, and they will
continue to exist—in memory, in history, and in the traces they left behind.
They are the ones who quietly shape the world, placing one small stone upon another,
day after day, from sunrise to sunset.