Archive · Assignments

Wherever There Are Greeks

1994–2007 · Six documentaries on Hellenism worldwide, from Latin America to Smyrna — with five photographs from the 1994 assignment.

From 1994 to 2007 Argyris Dinopoulos undertook a series of journalistic assignments to various points on the planet, to record and to set down in documentary form the presence of Hellenism worldwide.

So in October 1994, as Antenna's correspondent, he travelled — at the invitation of the Greek communities — to Argentina and to Chile, to present the life of the Greek diaspora in those two countries of Latin America.

The reporting also took in interviews with the oldest immigrants of the day, who set down memories of the «mythical age» (before the Second World War) of Greek migration to Argentina, when the country commanded one of the strongest economies on the planet.

The testimony of Panagiotis Manikis stands out — he came ashore at the port of La Boca in 1930, and describes what life was like, before the war, for immigrants in Argentina.

The Greek commercial and shipping genius, the Greek virtue of adapting to the hardest conditions, the stubbornness to get on, the capacity for work, and the love of the mother country besides, all emerged through a series of interviews and documents that the reporting presented.

That same year (1994) he visited Odessa, on the occasion of the opening in the city of the Foundation of the Hellenic World, and recorded — together with his colleague Korina Xypolitidou — the historical course of Hellenism in Ukraine, through interviews and filming of the city's buildings and monuments connected with Greek history and human geography.

Almost ten years later (in 2005) he went to the Middle East, to one of the most «heated» regions of the planet, but this time not for any war reporting: he went seeking the traces of Hellenism in Syria and in Lebanon.

The testimony of the physician Angelos Kioseoglou had (as of 2005) a particular value, since at an advanced age by then — though still practising medicine — he was the last Greek alive who had fought in the Second World War in the Middle East.

Argyris Dinopoulos gathered another such rare testimony at the opposite end of the Mediterranean, in Southern Italy: that of Cosimino Surdo, who at nearly ninety recounts episodes from the course of Hellenism in the region of Grecìa Salentina reaching as far back as the 1940s. The documentary on Southern Italy deals with the griko dialect, with interviews of Greek-speakers who speak what is called «worn Greek» and who set down material on the history, the culture and the art of the Greek-speaking populations of Southern Italy.

That same year (2005) one more journalistic assignment was made, this time to record the — sadly — declining course of Hellenism in the villages of Northern Epirus; while in 2007, in the documentary on the 85 years since the Asia Minor catastrophe, there is the testimony of Abidin Bayraktaroğlu to Argyris Dinopoulos, of a particular symbolic value since he had been born in 1922.