Οία

Oia is one of the most significant traditional settlements in Europe. It used to be one of the five Castles of Santorini, known as Saint Nicholas Castle, and its settlement was known as Epanomeria. Today Oia comprises a residential mixture of neoclassical houses, belonging to the captains and ship owners, and underground houses built within the lava, belonging to the seafarers and the laborers. This peculiar infusion, with the thousands of steps that unravel enigmatically like tree branches, is recorded in detail through the lens of Yannis Yannelos. The details are transformed into paintings, creating new colours and new aesthetic pleasures, resting on the endless blue that goes as far as the eye can see. Even in the most beautiful place on earth, if you allow your eyes to roam on detail, you are bound to discover a different world, which vindicates all those who believe that the miniscule is beautiful and the grand marvellous. Oia is a place of contradictory compositions; from a multicultural and geographical aspect, all sorts of things have been recorded here: nations and religions, conquerors and defeated, lords and servants, earth and lava, a colourful mosaic of myths and narrations. Its oldest structures, the Castle of Saint Nicholas, residence of the Venetian aristocracy, and the Orthodox church of Aghia Ekaterina, which miraculously still stands tall, after so many earthquakes and volcanic eruptions since 1600, testify to the fact that here, in this settlement coexist all periods, with their vestiges. If Santorini is a place of immeasurable beauty and history, the diachronic Oia is its far removed Homeric halo. These compositions of nature and of the art of simple people are recorded by the lens of Yannis Yannelos in detail, giving a new dimension to the aesthetic elation rendered by the image. The colours white and blue, reflecting the gloss of a red door with a church dome in the distance, the pink of the walls and the indigo of small house courtyards, the first leaves of a dry vine on the ground, the multicoloured lava stones, out of which sprout small heathers, the narrow steps and the terraces, the mills and campaniles, they all seem to rise up and surround the enchanting settlements of Castle and Fanari, whose underground houses resemble a child's drawing. Oia, rising up from the lava and the sea, receives through the elegant brush strokes of Yannis Yannelos' lens a new dimension in the time and space of the history of Santorini. The Homeric, "remote" Oia becomes more accessible, entering our visual field, and, through our minds' processes, finds its way to our hearts, just like a love poem. Yiorgos Anomeritis