A third dimension to recent history
Testimonies was George Petritsis’s longest-running series. In his own words, its aim was to rescue documents, memories and personal experiences about the people, events, moments and situations that have made history.
When the series premiered on the first channel of Greek television, the press described it as a programme that “gives a third dimension to events of our recent history”. Each episode opened as a chronicle of its period. Then the people who had lived it took over: their testimony let the viewer approach the event from the eyewitness’s point of view, alongside the opinions of historians and the way the newspapers of the time had reported it. As the press put it, the goal was to let viewers form their own opinion and reach their own conclusions.
The films were built from rich visual material, old cinema newsreels as well as new footage, and George Petritsis tried to bring together the scientific approach of the historian and the approach of the journalist. He wrote and directed the series; the journalist Giorgos Koukas was its general coordinator and Professor Giorgos Kontogiorgis its historical adviser. The very first episode was on the anti-Greek riots in Constantinople in September 1955.
The 1993 cycle
A new cycle began on Sunday 9 May 1993, described as a kind of “television anatomy” of events that are less well known, or less well understood. It opened with the heroic deeds of the Occupation. Charilaos Florakis was among the people who spoke, Leonidas Kyrkos gave his own account of the road of the Greek left, and Konstantinos Mitsotakis recorded two episodes, one on the Cretan resistance and one on his first political steps.
Other films of the cycle told the story of the “Sabotage Squad” that blew up the offices of the pro-Nazi organisation ESPO, told by two of its last surviving members; the Dodecanese from the Occupation to their union with Greece, with the former President of the Republic Michail Stasinopoulos; the Greeks of Egypt and the battle of El Alamein, through the memories of Patriarch Parthenios of Alexandria; and the massacre at Monodendri, where 118 residents of Sparta were executed by the Germans.
The second series
From 2004 George Petritsis returned to ERT with a second series of research documentaries; the episodes ran from 2006 to 2012, and the films were also shown on the television channel of the Hellenic Parliament. From 2006 until the end of the series his son, Adam Petritsis, worked with him as director of photography and assistant director. The new episodes, with their own title sequence, testimonies, memories: of people, events, situations and moments that have made history, ranged from the funeral of Georgios Papandreou and the night of the 1967 coup to the excavations at Vergina and the pioneers of Greek heart surgery.
Credits
- Script, direction and presentation
- George Petritsis
- General coordinator (first series)
- Giorgos Koukas
- Historical adviser (first series)
- Prof. Giorgos Kontogiorgis
- Research and reporting (first series)
- Antigoni Panelli, Nancy Kotrotsou
- Production manager (first series)
- Thanasis Panousis
- Editing (first series)
- Nikos Michail
- Narration
- Telis Zotos, with George Petritsis in the second series
- Research and coordination (second series)
- Pantelis Virvidakis
- Director of photography and assistant director (second series)
- Adam Petritsis
- Editing (second series)
- Marios Zogkas
