As an anthropologist, I prioritize direct fieldwork over library or archival research, in line with the methodological approach of my discipline. For over a decade, my most consistent fieldwork has taken place in the Balkans, in the historic settlements of the Vlachs or Aromanians, pastoral communities now primarily found in Greece and Albania, but also in the Republic of North Macedonia, Romania, and, to a lesser extent, Bulgaria. I have nearly always been accompanied by my colleague and good friend from New York, Dan Bora. We meet once or twice a year in Athens or Thessaloniki before setting off for the remote villages high in the Pindus Mountains. Likewise, I am deeply grateful to my cousin, Carmen Dobrotă, for the many journeys we have shared and for curating several of my visual anthropology exhibitions over the years.
In 2017, during an archival research session at the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant in Bucharest, I discovered that only a handful of photographs depicting Vlach settlements in the Manakia Collection — one of the most significant collections of early photography preserved in Romania — had been identified in detail. Many bore only brief, generic descriptions typical of the early 20th century, such as “Vlach village in the Balkans.” Today, anthropologists are expected to be much more precise. Some locations I identified immediately, drawing on past fieldwork, such as the photograph of Iliochori village in Zagori, where a thousand-year-old plane tree in the village square, one of the oldest in Greece, stands as an unmistakable landmark. With other photographs, the process was more of an adventure. It led to a new series of field investigations, chance encounters, and unexpected discoveries across the Balkans. It was during that time that I conceived the idea of recreating, in the present day, the photographs that the Manakia brothers took around 1900, using the exact same framing they once did.
The brothers Ianaki and Milton Manakia were born into a family of Vlach shepherds in the latter half of the 19th century, in Avdela, a village perched high in the Pindus Mountains, then still part of the Ottoman Empire and now located in Greece. History remembers them as the creators of an extensive collection of photographs of exceptional documentary value and as the first filmmakers to record a motion picture within the Ottoman Empire and the Balkans, just one decade after the Lumière brothers had made the first film in human history.
The two brothers attended the Romanian school in their native village, followed by the Romanian high school in Ioannina. Unlike their ancestors, who had been the owners of vast flocks of sheep, they took a different path. They became a new kind of “transhumants,” roaming the Balkans to take photographs during an extraordinarily complex political and historical period, marked by the final collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Balkan Wars, and the drawing of national borders. They first opened a photography studio in Ioannina before relocating it to Monastir (today’s Bitola in the Republic of North Macedonia), then capital of the Ottoman province of the same name and the second-largest city in the region after Thessaloniki.
Ianaki and Milton traveled through villages, some barely accessible, as well as through towns, taking commissioned photographs with a large, heavy camera and fragile glass plate negatives. Photography was not only a profession pursued with passion and great talent but also a means of making a living. Most of the photographs preserved in the archive of the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant are portraits of ordinary people from that era, dressed in either traditional attire or Western-style clothing. These images vividly capture the coexistence of modernity and tradition, more intertwined than ever during that early period of Balkan modernization. I was surprised to realize that these were not separate worlds as I had once believed, and as many historians of the period have suggested. Rather, they were overlapping worlds. Traveling through the villages of the Pindus, I discovered that the same individuals often appeared in different photographs, sometimes as shepherds in traditional garb, other times dressed in their “city best,” embodying European fashion and refinement despite living in seemingly isolated villages.
Beyond portraits, the collection includes photographs of family events, weddings and funerals, religious celebrations, as well as political moments, such as the Sultan’s visit to Bitola, which the Manakia brothers documented on film. While the photographs preserved in Bucharest are primarily of ethnographic interest, the thousands of glass plate negatives housed in the Bitola archive reveal an extraordinary kaleidoscope of early 20th-century Balkan life, often depicting the everyday existence of the time, astonishing in its richness, intensity, and contrast with the present. Many of the scenes photographed by the brothers display an exceptional artistic sensibility, an exquisite mastery of framing and capturing the moment, which continues to astound anthropologists who study the archives today.
In 1906, Ianaki and Milton Manakia were invited to Bucharest for the General Romanian Exhibition, and they were granted the title of Photographers to the Royal Court of Romania. On this occasion, a collection of their photographs depicting portraits of Vlachs and their settlements in the Pindus Mountains was acquired for the National Art Museum, the predecessor of today’s National Museum of the Romanian Peasant, founded in the same year by Tzigara Samurcaș. These were the very photographs that my American colleague and I set out to retrace in the summer of 2017.
Looking back, the Manakia brothers’ visits to Bucharest marked a turning point in their careers. From that moment on, their work took on profound significance for the visual history of the Balkans. It was in Bucharest that they saw a film projection for the first time and learned about cinematographic techniques developed by the Lumière brothers. They were so captivated that Ianaki traveled to London to purchase a film camera. By sheer chance, it happened to be the Bioscope camera bearing the serial number 300 in the world.
At a time when filmmaking was mostly focused on the latest achievements of modern technology — skyscrapers and transatlantic steamships — the two brothers returned to their mountain village and, around 1906 or 1907 (the exact year remains uncertain), created an ethnographic documentary. Silent and lasting about a minute, it was in keeping with the technical limitations of the era. Without realizing it, the Manakia brothers achieved a triple world record through this film. It became the first motion picture ever made in the still-vast Ottoman Empire, the first ethnographic documentary in the Balkans, and, in fact, the first documentary of any kind in the region. The subject? Traditional wool processing. The film captures groups of women dressed in folk costumes. Among them, standing at the very center, appearing in close-up for a few seconds, is Despa, the brothers’ grandmother, who, according to Milton’s later account, was 114 years old at the time. As astonishing as her age may seem, it was not an anomaly among the Vlachs of the Pindus. In other words, Grandmother Despa was born in the 18th century (1792 or 1793), during the time of Ali Pasha, when Napoleon was just beginning to rise. An incredibly distant past for someone we can now see moving on film. It was yet another record that the two brothers were unaware of as they filmed in their remote mountain village, unknown to Europe, unknown to the world. Contrary to official film history, it was not Pope Leo XIII (born in 1810) nor Rebecca Clarke (born in 1804 in Britain and recorded with a Kinora camera in 1912) who was the oldest person ever filmed. Instead, it was Maia Despa from Avdela, the grandmother of Milton and Ianaki Manakia. Not a famous figure from Western Europe, the engine of technology and “civilization,” but an elderly woman from the Pindus Mountains, from an isolated village in the Ottoman Balkans, an obscure region that Europe had barely begun to acknowledge at the turn of the 20th century. A Balkans in turmoil, reported on by Western newspapers with both horror and fascination due to the Balkan Wars. It is true that both Grandmother Despa’s age (under one of her photographs, Ianaki noted that she was 102 years old) and the exact date of the film remain open to debate. But beyond any precise dating, the achievement itself remains undeniable.
The maps displayed alongside this text illustrate the complexity of the fate of the Balkans during that era. These are ethnic maps of the Ottoman province of Macedonia.
To the south — though it does not appear on the map, as it held little significance at the time — lies Avdela, the village of the Manakia brothers. Slightly further north is the city of Monastir, known as the City of Consuls, which is marked on the map. It was here that the brothers founded their photography studio and later opened a cinema that quickly gained popularity throughout the province. Soon, Avdela would become part of Greece, and Monastir would be renamed Bitola as it was incorporated into the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. These changes were the result of immense historical tensions. The maps depict an ethnic mosaic so intricate that drawing precise borders — an imperative of the nationalist ideology of the time — was nearly impossible. The very name of the province, Macedonia, even inspired the French word for a mixed salad, macédoine, a reminder that the famously polite French were not always so delicate in their historical assessments. Beyond ethnic diversity, the maps also reveal the territorial disputes of the era. One bears the subtitle point de vue bulgare, another point de vue serbe, each reflecting political claims rather than objective demographic realities.
It was during this time that a new ethnic identity emerged in European historical, political, and cartographic discourse: the Slavic Macedonians, previously referred to simply as Bulgarians. The territory was equally contested by Serbia and Bulgaria, while Greece claimed the largest portion, invoking a historical legacy that stretched gloriously back to antiquity. In this era following centuries of Ottoman rule, when nations sought both independence and territorial expansion, ethnic maps were used as justifications for land divisions. But no map from that period offered clear ethnic demarcations. Nearly all of them exaggerated the size of one group at the expense of others, visually shaping history and geography to serve political and territorial interests. The situation became so absurd that even within the same family, some members would declare themselves as belonging to one ethnicity, while others identified differently.
At first glance, none of this political and territorial conflict is visible in the faces of the ordinary people or the ethnographic scenes captured in the Manakia Fund photographs preserved at the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant. Yet, from an anthropological perspective — one attuned to detail — the entire era is perfectly legible, with all its turmoil. The Manakia photographic archive serves as an indirect yet impeccable fresco of the tensions that shaped the early 20th century in the Balkans. It is extraordinary, and difficult to grasp today, that Milton and Ianaki created portraits without regard to ethnicity at a time when national conflicts were at their peak.
Indeed, the brothers photographed the Sultan, the patriarch of Constantinople, the Romanian royal family, and even had the opportunity to create portraits of the Greek and Yugoslav kings. Later, Milton would also have the chance to photograph Tito, long before he became the leader of socialist Yugoslavia, an encounter that would ultimately prove to be a stroke of luck in his later years.
The Vlachs, too, were caught up in the identity struggles of the time. A deep rift divided their community. A significant portion firmly embraced a Greek national identity, fighting wholeheartedly for Greece. Others, given their language, identified with Romania. In the context of shifting borders, many chose to leave their homeland and settle in Southern Dobruja, which was then part of Romania, only to see it transferred to Bulgaria in 1940, triggering further waves of forced population exchanges. Nevertheless, I like to believe that most people simply carried on with their lives, preserving traditions while adapting to the spirit of the times, without burdening themselves with such identity dilemmas. Today, the Manakia brothers are widely discussed in Greece as pioneers of Balkan cinema, celebrated extensively in the Republic of North Macedonia, though only sporadically in Romania. Each of these Balkan nations lays claim to them as their own. But in our time, such narratives should no longer matter. The Manakia brothers belong, quite simply, to Balkan history.
Even the lives of the Manakia brothers themselves reflect the fate of the Balkans. After 1935, they were separated. Ianaki died in Thessaloniki in 1954, in Greece, impoverished and devastated by the premature death of his son. From 1935 until his passing, for nearly two decades, Ianaki was unable to see his brother again, as Milton remained in Bitola, Yugoslavia, which had become a socialist state in 1943. The borders were rigid and impassable. This, in a region where, for centuries, free movement had been the natural rhythm of life, regardless of ethnicity or religion. Milton, on the other hand, received national recognition in Yugoslavia, due in part to the chance circumstance of having photographed, several future Yugoslav communists in their youth, including Tito, as previously mentioned. Milton’s archive was purchased by the Yugoslav state, he was interviewed, and a documentary film about him was produced in Zagreb during his lifetime. He passed away in 1964, and since 1979 (the year I was born…), an international documentary film festival, Camera 300, has been held annually in Bitola, making it one of the longest-running documentary festivals in Europe. The Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos’s masterpiece To vlemma tou Odyssea / Ulysses’ Gaze (1995) tells, with extraordinarily melancholic artistic language, the tragic story of the fragmentation of the Balkans into states with closed borders and the harrowing experience of uprootedness. The film takes inspiration from the footage of Maia Despa, filmed by the Manakia brothers in Avdela. Angelopoulos constructs the journey of a contemporary character through the Balkans of the 1990s — when borders were reopening after decades of division — in search of a supposedly lost Manakia brothers’ film. In reality, it is a search for his own lost identity.
This exploration of the brothers’ story is essential for understanding the context of my visual anthropology research. Of the approximately 200 photographs housed in the Image Archive of the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant, a significant number include Vlach settlements, panoramic shots taken from a distance, showcasing villages with their distinctive architecture. Some are little known; others hold legendary status among the Vlachs, such as Samarina, the highest-altitude settlement in both Greece and the Balkans, or Moscopole, a once-flourishing mountain city. In the 18th century, Moscopole was the second-largest city in the Balkans after Istanbul, home to printing presses, libraries, and dozens of churches. Today, it lies in Albania, reduced to a small historical settlement, having been burned and razed in the late 18th century by Ali Pasha, its fame and potential for rebellion making it a target for Ottoman suppression in the Balkans.
With one exception, all these photographs of settlements exude the tranquility of isolation in nature, nestled beside mountain peaks, surrounded by forests, far removed from the major trade routes that once traversed the peninsula. Yet beyond this stillness, in the background, the anthropologist’s eye perceives the noise of the era, the conflicts and identity struggles of the Aromanians of that time, followed by their departure from these villages and mountain towns to distant places, their division between rival nations, and the abrupt impossibility of practicing transhumance along routes suddenly severed by borders. Among the settlements captured in the Manakia brothers’ photographs reproduced on the following pages, the majority are now in Greece, four are in the Republic of North Macedonia, and one is in Albania. When Tzigara Samurcaș purchased these photographs from the two brothers for the National Art Museum, he recorded the names of a few settlements. However, most of them bear no specific name, only the vague annotation, written in the nationalist spirit of the time: “a Romanian village in the Balkans”.
In August 2017, on the very day I was set to leave Romania with my American colleague for another round of field research in Greece, I stopped by the museum to show him the original photographs (he had just arrived in Bucharest). Together, we realized that the exact locations of many images were missing from the museum’s catalogs. Some villages we recognized immediately, as we had visited them many times during previous research trips. Iliochori (Dobrinovo in Aromanian) was easy to identify. It still has, in its central square, what is perhaps the oldest plane tree in Greece, over 1,000 years old. Today, however, the once thriving and populous settlement looks entirely different, having been brutally burned by retreating German troops during World War II. Just as easy to recognize were Kallarites (Călarli, in Aromanian) and Syrrako (Sereacu, in Aromanian), with their characteristic stone architecture, unchanged to this day. I had spent entire weeks there while writing a chapter of my doctoral thesis in architecture. Our observations were immediately recorded in the museum’s registers. The archive coordinator, Simina Bădică, later wrote in a post on the museum’s webpage that “the best day for an archive curator is the day they learn something new from others about the glass plates in their own collection.” The adjacent photograph was “stolen” by Simina while my research colleague and I were recounting stories of these villages, calling them by name, recalling the Aromanians and the histories embedded in those places.
Still, some of the photographs remained a mystery even to us. Right then and there, we decided to alter our planned route through Greece in an attempt to identify all the locations featured in the photographs. Our goal was to recreate each of the Manakia brothers’ images, with the same framing, more than a century later, in the Aromanian villages they once captured.
Two days later, we were in the Republic of North Macedonia. The photograph of the town of Kruševo (Crușuva, in Aromanian) bore a note from Samurcaș: “Crușuva commune, burned by the Turks during the Bulgarian revolution of August 15, 1903.”
Our task was to identify the exact spot from which the Manakia brothers had taken the photograph. Kruševo is not a commune but a town, the highest-altitude town in the Balkans. It became a refuge for some of the Vlachs who fled Moscopole after its destruction, as previously mentioned. Over time, they were joined by the Mijaci, an intriguing group of Slavic Macedonians, Orthodox Albanians who had been gradually Slavicized, as well as Greeks and Slavic Macedonians from the surrounding areas. By the 19th century, Kruševo had grown into an important commercial hub. The Vlachs in the town maintained trade connections with Vienna, Budapest, and other major cities in Central Europe. This prosperity led to rapid modernization and Europeanization, reflected today in the town’s charming yet decaying architecture, a blend of Ottoman style with Venetian influences and Central European details, a mix one might call a Balkan style.
On St. Elijah’s Day in 1903, the people of Kruševo rebelled against Ottoman rule in what history books call the Ilinden Uprising. The leader of the rebellion was Pitu Guli, a Vlach. A republic was proclaimed, and the Manifesto of Kruševo was written, an appeal to all nationalities of Macedonia, regardless of religion or ethnicity, to unite against the Ottomans. The idea of a multiethnic and multireligious republic was astonishingly progressive for the early 20th-century Balkans. At first, the Ottoman authorities dismissed the revolt, considering the town too small and remote to be a real threat. But when alarmed, they dispatched an overwhelming military force. Against all odds, Kruševo resisted for ten days. The townspeople organized themselves remarkably well: they formed a city council of 60 members (20 Vlachs, 20 Macedonians, and 20 Greeks, to ensure equal representation from all ethnic groups). They melted the church bells to make weapons and even set up an improvised munitions factory.
The Manakia brothers arrived two days after the Ottomans destroyed the town and took the photograph that had come to us. With that photograph in hand, in August 2017, we walked through Kruševo, trying to pinpoint the exact location where it had been taken. We found it quickly, but something seemed imprecise. Depending on which street we were on, the angle of our modern image was either too low or too high compared to that of the old photograph. We soon realized that the original photograph had been taken from a position between two streets, where a house now stood. A century of history changes many things. Naturally, we turned to the tools we had at our disposal — my drone — to take the picture from above the property. The homeowners, understandably startled, rushed out to confront us. But after a few kind words, we found ourselves exactly where any anthropologist hopes to be: inside the house, sharing coffee and stories in the living room of Vasko and Ljubica, surrounded by their children and grandchildren. Despite their Slavic-sounding names, our hosts were Vlachs. Their stories poured out, giving the town’s history a human face. I won’t recount them here. Perhaps they will find their place in a future book.
When comparing our fieldwork photograph from August 2017 with the image that the Manakia brothers took in August 1903, we realized that surprisingly few of the original houses had survived. Tourist guidebooks describe Kruševo as having been rebuilt almost identically after the 1903 destruction, but our visual comparison suggested otherwise. The reconstruction was approximate at best, far from the town’s 19th-century prosperity. Only the Vlach church had been faithfully restored. Kruševo’s people were renowned woodcarvers, and we heard a local legend about the church’s iconostasis. It is said that the master carver spent years working on it, completing the intricate details only shortly before the Ottomans razed the church. Upon hearing of its destruction, he lost his mind and spent the rest of his life wandering aimlessly through the town, riding a donkey and muttering incoherent words.
One small detail in the Manakia brothers’ photograph led to a surprising discovery. Our hosts in Kruševo subtly expressed their dissatisfaction with Samurcaș’s inscription on the image, which referred to the “Bulgarian revolution” of 1903. “It was the Macedonian revolution,” they gently corrected us. “We are not Bulgarians…” The question of identity in the Balkans is deeply complex and ambiguous. Until the early 20th century, European travelers and historians referred to the Slavic inhabitants of what is now the Republic of North Macedonia as Bulgarians. They themselves often identified as Bulgarians, while referring to their western neighbors (those in what is now western Bulgaria) not as Bulgarians, but most commonly as Šopi. But in 1900, these names did not carry the same meaning as they do today; they were more ethnographic descriptors than rigid national identities. The importance of identity beyond religion took shape in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an era of intense political and historical transformation. Today, the people of the Republic of North Macedonia take great pride in their unique historical and ethnic identity, one that, according to some, can be traced all the way back to Alexander the Great. Of course, from a historical perspective, Alexander was not Slavic or Vlach. The identity web becomes even more intricate when the same people tell you, “We are Macedonians, not Bulgarians,” and then add, “But we are Vlachs, and the Vlachs are Latin, not Slavic.” What can one make of this? Quite a lot, actually.
For an anthropologist, the goal is not to determine absolute historical truths, but to understand how identity is shaped within a community, with all its inherent vagueness and contradictions, often marked by myths and imagined histories that hold deep meaning for the people who believe them. Personally, beyond any historical, genetic, or anthropological truth, I will always hold the view that every individual has the right to define themselves as they wish, so long as they do not deny the same right to others. To avoid sparking a national debate that might have disrupted our conversations, we decided to cut off the inscription from the printed reproduction of the Manakia brothers’ photograph that we had brought with us. Only later did we realize something extraordinary: without planning it, we had taken our photograph not only from the same spot, but on the exact same day, 114 years later. At first, we hadn’t accounted for the difference in calendars. In 1903, the Julian calendar was still in use. Once we adjusted for the 13-day difference, the alignment in time became clear. We had taken our photograph on the exact same day! An anthropologist is rarely one to believe in signs or cosmic alignments. But this coincidence felt like a good omen for the journey ahead, as we retraced the Manakia brothers’ photographs.
It would be too much to recount the entire journey of recreating these photographs from the early 1900s. Sometimes, the process was straightforward. Other times, it was challenging. And sometimes, it was purely a matter of luck! In Pisoderi, a remote corner of Greece near the borders with Albania and the Republic of North Macedonia, everything had changed since the original photograph. The village was completely deserted during our visit, but by sheer coincidence, we crossed paths with a man who had been born there, left long ago, and was now stopping there briefly for coffee at the local tavern. He was the one who confirmed that we had found the correct location from the Bucharest archival photograph. His house had been the last to survive in the original village, until it burned down three years before my visit. He recognized it immediately when we showed him the Manakia brothers’ photograph, saved on my colleague’s tablet.
It is infinitely harder to track down an unknown village from an old image than it is to recreate a century-old photograph of a famous and immediately recognizable place. We traveled extensively and with great pleasure through the hidden corners of northern Greece. Stories abounded, some even more symbolically coincidental than what we experienced in Kruševo. I imagined Milton and Ianaki Manakia, over a century ago, carrying their enormous camera on muleback, navigating trails that even today I found difficult to traverse. In December 2021, just after Christmas, I completed the series of re-photographed Manakia images with a final shot in Metsovo (Aminciu in Aromanian), the largest Vlach settlement in Greece, a place of exceptional beauty and poetry, very dear to me. My photograph, like the original one by the Manakia brothers, was taken in winter. Contemporary Greece owes a great deal to the Metsovo community. The country’s modern history cannot be fully understood without this small Vlach town in the Pindus Mountains — if only because the Athens Polytechnic University is still called Metsovion, and because the Averoff family, one of Greece’s most significant modern benefactors, came from here.
For this project, I had to consult old maps (foto 8, 8a, 8b, 9).
The routes leading to these isolated settlements have changed drastically over the past hundred years. Even the natural landscape has transformed. Contrary to my expectations, Greece’s mountains are far more forested and wilder today than they appear in the Manakia brothers’ photographs. I quickly realized why: the great flocks of sheep that once grazed the mountainsides are gone, and many of the settlements are now nearly depopulated, with only a handful of remaining inhabitants. I also had to consult archives, as many village names have changed since 1900. One particularly valuable resource was a remarkable book from the period, The Nomads of the Balkans: An Account of Life and Customs Among the Vlachs of Northern Pindus.
Written by two British archaeologists, Alan J.B. Wace and Maurice S. Thompson, and first published in 1914, this work provides an extraordinarily detailed, firsthand account of Vlach village life in the early 20th century. It covers the exact time frame of the Manakia brothers’ photographs. I am grateful to have an original edition of this book in my personal library, as its story is, in many ways, a reflection of the curiosity that drives all anthropologists. The British archaeologists stumbled upon this world entirely by chance. While conducting excavations at ancient sites near Volos, they encountered shepherds speaking a peculiar language, one they partially understood because, like all classical archaeologists, they were well-versed in Latin. They listened with fascination to the shepherds’ stories about an isolated mountain world that seemed almost unbelievable. Intrigued, between 1910 and 1912 — just before the outbreak of the First Balkan War — they abandoned their primary passion, the archaeology of the Hellenistic world, without hesitation, in order to study the Vlachs. They traveled on foot with the shepherds from Tyrnavos to Samarina, conducting what was essentially an avant la lettre example of participant observation in anthropological field research. This approach, which would later become the foundation of anthropological disciplines, was formally theorized only a few years later by Bronisław Malinowski. The originality of their endeavor makes their book relevant not only to the history of the Vlachs but also to anthropology as a whole.
Photo-elicitation is a commonly used method in visual anthropology, based on the understanding that people react emotionally to images. In the villages of the Pindus, where people remain deeply attached to their place of origin (even if they now live elsewhere and only return for short periods in the summer), I met locals who were profoundly moved to see a century-old image of their village, likely the first photograph ever taken of their settlement. Their stories and histories flowed far more freely than they would have if I had arrived without these frames captured by the Manakia brothers.
I must admit, there is something profoundly moving, something that feels like a rupture in the flow of time, about standing in precisely the same spot, a century later, yet feeling no distance at all from the reality depicted in the photograph you are holding. A present moment dissolved into the past, preserved by the image. In some places, I discovered photographs identical to the ones I carried, displayed in homes, though the homeowners had no knowledge of their age or origin. This was the case in Laista / Laka, once the largest settlement in the Zagori mountains, where an image captured a festive day in the village square. There, too, I experienced a special story. One that belongs in a future book. And in September 2024, in the archives of Bitola, I was fortunate to find a third version of the same image, a fragment of its shattered glass negative. The same moment, preserved in three different countries of today’s Balkans.
But my goal has never been simply to recreate century-old photographs with the same framing. This was merely a way to enter these isolated Balkan communities, to witness their way of life. Their life today, not yesterday. (foto 11, 12, 13) That was why, at some point, I gave this visual anthropology project the title Beyond Yesterday. To what extent has the world of the Vlachs changed? And, more broadly, how have the Balkans changed over the past hundred years? This is the main question that preoccupies me. Photography proved to be an invaluable tool for my field research. A path to insights into how small worlds and isolated communities evolve under the weight of history. This is why, even though I have completed the recreation and localization of the old photographs, my fieldwork is far from over. One day, I hope, it will materialize into a book or a documentary film. In the coming years, I intend to continue following in the footsteps of the Manakia brothers, seeking out present-day life stories that reveal the continuities and ruptures of time, tracing the century that has passed between then and now. To understand, through personal narratives, the course of our shared history. At home, in the Balkans.
