Portraits of an Aegean in Disappearance
An archipelago of faces. This is the Marabou Project: a years-long odyssey that began in September 2018 and concluded in September 2024. Konstantinos Sofikitis traveled to all 78 inhabited islands of the Aegean, photographing places and people to compose a chronicle of the open sea. Together with his brother, filmmaker Petros Sofikitis, they forged a twin gaze—photographic and cinematic. The result is a wandering that lifts the “dust of the times” and lets the soul of the islanders come back into view.
The idea took shape over years of wayfinding and conversations—in village cafés and kitchen gardens, in squares, on piers, outside little chapels, beneath lighthouses. Konstantinos approaches people as narrators. He often sets the camera aside, waits for the island’s rhythm, earns their trust. The stories unfold with disarming simplicity, as if an entire life had happened “just yesterday.” In this Aegean tongue, where a calm sea is called “kindness,” the photographer seeks that clear gaze that awakens memory: trades that are fading, customs that are being forgotten, small private mythologies.
Sosa from Ikaria: She lived through the civil war and witnessed more pain and blood than a single glance can hold. At some point the world went dark—a defense mechanism shielding her from what she could no longer bear. Years later, with perseverance and therapy, her sight returned. Sosa sees again—and with her, a piece of Ikaria is lit once more.
Mr. Markos, Amorgos (95): He became a café-keeper “because he loved company.” He struggles to walk, to speak, to hear—yet when asked about happiness, he answers “now”: feeling his great-grandchildren in the space he himself created. And when the time came for the photograph, he asked to stand beside his wife, because without her nothing would have been possible.
Fani Prasinou, Donousa: She spent 91 years in the same notch on the map. She remembers the war, the animals hidden away, the roads that did not exist. “I run my own self,” she says—a phrase that distills a life of independence: fearless, self-sufficient, mistress of her place and her time.
Three indicative stories from a larger anthology of faces etched by salt and sun. Marabou assembles an archipelago of memory that embraces the Aegean as a whole.
Konstantinos Sofikitis has presented his work in Greece and abroad, in print and online, and in exhibitions; in 2017 he received first prize at the Sony World Photography Awards and, in the same year, took part in the Venice Biennale. His gaze is travel-driven yet deeply human-centered: he looks for the person within the landscape—and the landscape within the person.
With the kind permission of Konstantinos Sofikitis, we present here unpublished images from the Marabou Project—small windows onto an Aegean that is vanishing, yet lights up again whenever there are people to tell it. https://marabouproject.com
