Galery

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"Photographic Portraits from Kastoria and Its Vicinity from the Time of the Macedonian Struggle" is the title of the exhibition of pictures of Leonidas Papazoglou showing Kastoria and the region in the early 20th century.

Picture: http://fouit.gr

The exhibition will be shown from 9 August to 30 September at the Cultural Convention Centre Drosopigis in Konitsa municipality and the collection belonged to George Golobias, who, before leaving life early, was able to save the archive of Papazoglou (Archive of the Museum of Photography, Thessaloniki).

Life in Kastoria, as well as the entire country of Macedonia, was hard during the last years of the centuries of Ottoman rule, since it is located in a key geographical region - a place where the Greek and Bulgarian community were in a critical blood battle over who would annex those territories. At the same time, European trends began to shift from inherited ancestral traditions and this happened most dramatically with clothing. In parallel, the venerable multicultural and multinational character of the area where Greeks, Turks, Jews, Albanians and the Slavonic population lived together was experiencing the last period of its existence.

Picture: www.tovima.gr

The heroic and restless character of the era can be seen mainly in the eyes of the people depicted in Papazoglou’s photographs - eyes that have something special, decisive and courageous. Traditional costumes that everybody without exception wore before 1912, were replaced by modern clothes for men and European-style dresses for 

young women, mainly from the urban centres of the region.

However, besides the wide variety of clothing, the archive also enables us to make various analyses, e.g. with regard to the types of weapons, shoes, jewellery and hairstyles of the era. It should be noted that Leonidas Papazoglou did his job based on professional rather than ideological criteria. His camera captured Greek andartes, Bulgarian rebels, Turkish soldiers, residents of cities and towns, and peasants from small villages in the periphery.