Archive · Journalism & Reportage

The Aegean, 1996–1997

Argyris Dinopoulos's reporting from the frontier islands of the Aegean, centred on the 1996 documentary «Οι ακρίτες του Αιγαίου». It was filmed by helicopter across the islands of the subsidised «barren line», in the months after the Imia crisis. With it, the seamen's wives on Chios, the doctor who sailed to Agathonisi, and the school on Arkoi with its one child.

Argyris Dinopoulos reported repeatedly on the frontier islands of the Aegean, and in 1996, after the Imia crisis, on the instruction of Minos Kyriakou he and Nikolas Vafeiadis presented the documentary «Οι ακρίτες του Αιγαίου» — The Akrites of the Aegean.

It was a «flying» journey (ΜΞΚ made his personal helicopter available to them at the time) across the islands of the άγονη γραμμή, the subsidised «barren line» sea routes.

In this strand of his journalistic work Argyris had already presented (in 1995) the dentist Alexis Charalambidis, who sailed from Leros to Agathonisi in his own sailing boat to offer free dental care to the inhabitants.

On Chios (in 1997) he made the documentary on the wives of the seamen who lost their men in shipwrecks, while the report (of 1996) on the school at Arkoi with its one child remains perennially topical, since in the decades that followed the demographic situation on the barren line stayed the same.