Societies, like individuals, remember—albeit in different ways. Knowledge of folk culture does not derive solely from objects that have survived through time, but also from narratives, practices, skills, beliefs, and experiences transmitted from one generation to the next. These intangible expressions of culture—customs and traditions, techniques, oral literature, religious beliefs, and everyday practices—are now recognized as an integral part of cultural heritage. According to the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003), they encompass practices, knowledge, and expressions that communities themselves recognize as part of their cultural identity.
The recording of this rich cultural legacy has long been the task of folklore and ethnographic research. Through fieldwork expeditions conducted across rural Greece during the postwar decades, researchers, teachers, students, and local collectors documented valuable information about the ways of life of communities throughout the Greek world. Through interviews, observation, written records, and systematic documentation, they preserved testimonies of a rapidly changing world. These manuscripts safeguard voices, experiences, and knowledge that in many cases have now disappeared.
Fieldwork has been a fundamental method of Greek folklore studies since the late nineteenth century. The development of questionnaires, collection guidelines, and networks of collaborators enabled the creation of extensive archives that systematically recorded traditional life throughout the Greek-speaking world. Today, in the era of Digital Humanities and participatory documentation, these collections acquire renewed significance, linking scholarly research with the communities that create, maintain, and transmit cultural heritage.
Beyond serving as repositories of information on traditional life, manuscript folklore collections reveal how communities remember, narrate, and interpret their past. Contemporary folklore and ethnographic research approaches memory as a dynamic social process through which people construct collective identities and continually redefine their relationship with place and history.
The narratives, songs, traditions, descriptions of customs, and personal testimonies contained in folklore notebooks constitute forms of social memory. Through them emerge the values, experiences, and lifeways of local communities, while at the same time they illuminate the mechanisms through which communities represent themselves across time. The documentation of intangible cultural heritage is therefore not only an act of preservation but also a process through which collective memory is sustained and renewed.
A central place in the history of Greek folklore research belongs to the Folklore Archive, founded in 1918 by the pioneering folklorist Nikolaos Politis. Professor at the University of Athens, founder of the Hellenic Folklore Society and of the journal Laographia, Politis established the methods for the systematic collection and classification of folklore material. Through an extensive network of collaborators—including teachers, scholars, and enthusiasts of folklore—thousands of handwritten testimonies were gathered from across Greece, documenting traditions, songs, beliefs, customs, and everyday practices.
Particularly important were the specialized questionnaires used to document traditional life, which contributed to the development of a common framework for recording and comparing aspects of Greek folk culture.
Another significant body of evidence is preserved in the manuscript collection of the Folklore Archive and Museum Collection of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. These collections were compiled primarily by students conducting fieldwork, following the methodological guidelines of folklorist Georgios K. Spyridakis and later Professor Maria Miligou-Markantoni.
The manuscripts cover almost the entire spectrum of folk culture: housing, clothing, foodways, occupations, social relations, seasonal and festive cycles, songs, folktales, proverbs, local traditions, and oral testimonies. They are often accompanied by photographs, maps, drawings, samples of weaving and handicrafts, as well as everyday documents such as dowry contracts and legal agreements, providing valuable insights into the social and economic history of local communities.
Their geographical scope is exceptionally broad, encompassing more than 1,200 settlements across Greece, as well as material relating to Cyprus, Asia Minor, and Pontic Hellenism. Chronologically, the collections extend from the 1960s to the present day, preserving memories and practices that often reach back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Taken together, these manuscripts reveal a richly textured map of Greek folk culture. They document not only the past itself, but also the ways in which local communities remembered, narrated, and continually redefined their cultural identities.
This exhibition highlights the importance of these records as invaluable repositories of knowledge and memory, inviting visitors to discover the cultural heritage of the local, the everyday, and the deeply human.
The exhibition contains items from the following institutions:
