A new digital archive documents Serifos’s iron-mining history with more than 250 photographs, rare documents and press clippings, plus 10 first-hand accounts from miners and their descendants. QR-code panels at former mine sites let visitors read interviews.
The Friends of Serifos Association created the collection after a year of research, interviews and documentation, with funding from the Museum of Cycladic Art’s Cycladic Identity initiative. The project also produced a printed album; organizers said recording miners’ and descendants’ oral histories was important as generations pass.
Serifos’s mines closed in 1963, after iron extraction became more systematic from 1885. At Mega Livadi, a 1916 miners’ strike for an eight-hour day and better conditions ended with four strikers and two gendarmes killed. The municipality says it wants to turn the historic site into an open-air mining museum and return it to public use.
