The Truth is in the Soil

Ioanna Sakellaraki

In The Truth Is In The Soil, Ioanna Sakellaraki, a finalist for the Inge Morath Award 2019, portrays the sole remaining community of female professional mourners on the Greek peninsula of Mani.

After losing her father, photographic practice became a means for Sakellaraki to understand and cope with her own grief. She returned to her Greek homeland and examined how grief is lived there as a shared experience of loss.

It is a tradition in Greece for families to hire professionals to conduct the ritual lament. Over the centuries, this profession has established itself as an exclusively female domain. The women’s funeral chants, also known as ‘moirologia’, are regarded as an improvisation-based art form that can be traced back to the chorus in Ancient Greek tragedy. However, now that the villages are dying out and the country is beset by economic woes, this art of professional mourning is at risk of becoming extinct.