For decades, Menidi has been associated with images of crime, poverty, and social stigma. These images are not necessarily false, but they are incomplete. When a place is defined exclusively through its stereotypes, everything else gradually becomes invisible.
The Other Menidi is an act of resistance against this one-dimensional narrative.
Rather than photographing what everyone expects to see, I chose to turn my lens toward what continues to endure: memory, dignity, cultural continuity, and the women who keep their community’s traditions alive by wearing garments passed down from one generation to the next.
These photographs are neither historical reenactments nor a nostalgic return to the past. Traditional costumes coexist with contemporary Menidi: inside churches, in courtyards, on balconies, along the streets of the town, beside apartment buildings and electrical wires. They do not belong in a museum, they belong to everyday life. They remind us that tradition is not something static, but a living process that continues to evolve and be experienced.
Menidi is also a place where two historical communities coexist: the indigenous Menidiotes and the descendants of Pontic Greek refugees. Two distinct historical trajectories share the same place while preserving their own cultural memories and identities. This coexistence forms an essential part of the town’s history, yet it is rarely reflected in its public image.
At a time when images are produced endlessly, consumed instantly, and forgotten even more quickly, this work proposes a different way of seeing. It does not seek to idealize Menidi, nor does it deny the challenges the town faces. Instead, it resists simplification, refusing to allow an entire place to be defined by a single narrative.
The Other Menidi is not about preserving folklore as a museum relic. It is about preserving the visibility of people, memories, and cultural practices that continue to exist, even when they remain unseen. Because care, memory, and cultural heritage can themselves become acts of resistance. And perhaps today, the most radical image is the one that compels us to look again at a place we thought we already knew.
“Roudama“
(The woman of life)
Rouda, 84 years old, is a member of the Pontic community in Acharnes, Attica.
Her name derives from “Roudama,” an older folk name connected to “roudi” -a word referring to the color red and, by extension, to life and blood.
Like many names in Pontic culture, it is preserved through oral tradition and functions as a carrier of identity and memory.
Rouda belongs to a generation that carries tradition through lived experience, expressed in everyday life, faith, and family bonds.
Tradition does not return. It never left.
GREECE, Attica. Raphaela, 9 years old, wearing the traditional dress of Menidi inside her family home. 2026.
To create this series for the Mitos Project, we were granted special permission to enter the Holy Monastery of the Dormition of the Theotokos, a place where men are normally not allowed. As soon as we passed through the gate, one of the nuns rang a small bell at the entrance to notify the others that a man had entered the monastery. Throughout the entire photoshoot, the nuns remained in their quarters, praying the Paraklesis service, while we created these images.
Through the Mitos Project, I have had the rare opportunity to photograph both on Mount Athos, where women are not permitted, and in a women’s monastery, where men are not permitted. Two different worlds, governed by different rules, yet both preserving the character and tradition of monastic life in their own way.
Photography is not only the image we see. It is also the story that had to unfold for that image to exist.
GREECE, Attica. A young woman from the Pontic community of Menidi wears her traditional costume inside the Holy Monastery of the Dormition of the Theotokos. 2026.
Great-granddaughters of Pontic Greek descent, photographed in traditional Pontic attire and contemporary clothing.
Between past and present, what is carried does not disappear -it transforms.
Father Ioannis, 87 years old, in the Church of Archangel Michael, built by his son.
He and his wife Maria, 83 years old, have 11 children, 26 grandchildren, 15 great-grandchildren, and one great-great-grandchild.
A quit continuity of faith, memory, and inheritance.
GREECE. Attica. 2026.
Olga, 9 years old.
Between two worlds that do not collide, but continue within one another.
In traditional Pontic dress, she carries memory.
In judo, she carries discipline, strength, and a future.
She started at the age of four. To date: 18 gold, 2 silver, 2 bronze medals.
At home, tradition is not a story. It is present.
Her father, Giorgos, 44, once a champion in Greco-Roman wrestling.
Today, he carries it forward.
Nothing is lost.
It simply changes form.
GREECE. Menidi, Attica. 2026.
In Pontic Greek communities, women’s hair has long functioned as a marker of identity and social position.
In traditional Pontic dress (19th – early 20th century), long hair is braided and covered with headscarves or adorned with headpieces, not to conceal it, but to signify age, marital status, and modesty.
Ethnographic records note that hairstyles differed between unmarried and married women, while the cutting of hair was reserved for exceptional circumstances -most often mourning or profound personal loss.
Hair was never merely decorative. It was biographical.
Following the displacement of Pontic Greeks and the population exchange of 1923, many of these practices were carried into Greece, surviving within communities as forms of embodied memory. Not as strict rules, but as continuities.
Today, among Pontic families in Menidi, Attica, long hair reappears as a conscious choice.
Not as a reconstruction of the past, but as an active connection to it.
In these images, hair is not a visual detail.
It is time, left uncut.
A thread that persists.
Mitos Stories| 2026
VOGUE
GREECE, Attica. Monastery of the Dormition of the Theotokos, Thrakomakedones. A young girl from the Pontic community of Menidi wearing traditional dress. 2026.
A makeshift cross made of electrical tape is not merely an improvised solution, but a gesture of necessity.
Within the local Pontic Greek community, faith constitutes an element of continuity and identity. The cross remains a point of stability, even in its simplest forms.
Menidi, Attica, Greece. | 2026
photographed in traditional Pontic bridal attire, with her grandmother Rouda, 84 years old. 2026.
GREECE. Attica. Twin sisters of Pontic Greek descent, photographed in traditional Pontic attire. 2026.
Memory is not divided.
It is carried.
Lydia, 10 years old, stands between the living and the absent, holding the presence of her grandmother, Anna Boumpouridou.
A woman who, at 17, volunteered to enter the war -not to fight, but to keep others alive. Bullets, wounds, fear. And yet, she returned every time. Because some people don’t just learn to endure; they learn to save.
The medals on the fabric are not decoration. They are condensed memory. Time that has passed through the body.
And now, years later, at the cemetery in Schisto, on Thomas Sunday, her presence has not disappeared. It has been transferred. Into the hands, the gaze, the stance.
Anna lived to 95. She left full of days, but not full of absence.
Because some lives do not end. They continue through those who stand and carry them.
GREECE. Attica, Schisto. 2026.
photographed in traditional Pontic attire. 2026.
photographed in traditional Pontic attire and contemporary clothing. 2026.
photographed in traditional Pontic bridal attire. 2026.
GREECE, Attica, Menidi.
Sofia Lisa, 8, and Alisa Irida Main, 6, of Pakistani descent from their father and Pontic Greek descent from their mother.
They wear traditional Pakistani garments and traditional Pontic Greek costumes inside their home. 2026.
Project by
Michael Pappas & Anastasia Kyritsi
