Before They are Gone: A Portrait of Traditional Greece

Modernization can be cruel to traditions. As young people leave the village for the bright lights of the city, whole communities may be hollowed out, and the customs and traditions that bind these communities may fade away with it, sometimes forever.

For several years, the photographer George Tatakis has traveled to lesser-known corners of his home country to capture images of local Greek customs and rituals. His journey has taken him to the island of Karpathos in the south part of the Aegean Sea, Tetrafolo, a small village in northern Greece with a population of just 300, the historic region of Macedonia, famously associated with Alexander the Great, and Thrace, a region in northeastern Greece that shares borders with Bulgaria and Turkey (see map). His black and white photos of the people of these regions, dressed in traditional garbs, are a poignant window into aspects of Greek culture that could be on the verge of disappearing. “Ultimately, my work attempts to highlight such customs: to present vivid, complex depictions of fading traditions, and to help us avoid the pitfalls of monotony in our modern lives,” he writes.