Ioanna Sakellaraki, a Greek photographer based in Brussels, left Athens at the age of eighteen to get an education abroad. She’d lived in seven different countries by the time she returned a decade later to attend her father’s funeral. The ceremony took place on a hillside of Mount Poikilo, where one of Sakellaraki’s aunts, Katina, hoped to perform a ritual lament in the style of the nation’s famed moirologists, or hired mourners. Since antiquity, women in Greece have been called on to voice the collective grief of the bereaved, gathering at gravesides to wail and pull their hair. Sakellaraki’s family decided against the idea; it didn’t seem to suit her father, a quiet man who’d died at ease, in the shade of his favorite orange tree. But the possibility of such a performance stuck in her mind as she spent the next months in her homeland, mourning.”

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