“Project: Shepherds”
ONGOING documentary project
2025
I did not go looking for shepherds - they found me. On the first of August, crossing the border and driving through the mountains of Greece, the sound of bells and the sight of a herd crossing the road stopped me in my tracks. I kept meeting them again and again: men and women living simply, freely, and with a presence rarely seen in the modern world.
As I stayed, listened, and learned, I also discovered that this ancient way of life is under siege. Families who have lived off their herds for generations are now losing them through enforced culling and inconsistent state support.
This is my attempt not to explain, but to witness - to stay long enough for the viewer to sense what I felt: that shepherding is not merely labor, but a statement of existence, harmony, and human dignity.
Shepherding in Greece is one of the region’s oldest continuous land-based practices. Nomadic and semi-nomadic pastoralism shaped both cultural identity and the physical environment: seasonal grazing maintained open landscapes, prevented overgrowth, and supported biodiversity long before modern conservation policies. For centuries, ecological stewardship and cultural survival were intertwined.From an anthropological perspective, the shepherd embodies a relationship to land based on intimacy, endurance, and presence rather than extraction. Knowledge is accumulated through movement - through walking, observing, and adapting to terrain, weather, and the needs of animals. This form of ecological intelligence is deeply local and orally transmitted.
In recent years, however, state agricultural regulations and EU-aligned disease-control policies have destabilized this system. Mass compulsory culling, inconsistent compensation, and bureaucratic pressure jeopardize not only economic survival but the continuation of an intangible cultural heritage. Environmental history also reveals the paradox: the disappearance of pastoralism may lead to increased forest overgrowth, loss of open meadows, and reduced habitat for many species.
The project engages with these tensions by documenting shepherds from within their environments rather than through distant analysis. It examines how ancestral land practices confront modern governance, asking what remains when a way of life that has shaped landscapes and communities for millennia begins to vanish.
On a late afternoon, marking the first day of August, I crossed the border of Bulgaria, and after traveling across Europe from the north all the way to the south, I entered the rocky and winding paths of Greece. There, in the mountains, I took my first breaths of fresh, warm air and started hearing bells and whistling – in front of my car, a herd with the shepherd at the front was crossing the mountains. Suddenly it seemed that the reality behind me had faded, dissolved with the last area of phone reception. It felt so simply beautiful and real that I didn’t want to keep moving. I wanted to jump out of the car and follow them as they went.
The Project: Shepherds found me completely unexpectedly. As I was driving around looking for locals to share their music and culture, I kept meeting shepherds on my way – something to be seen up close rather than from afar.
Since the beginning of settled human existence, shepherds here have walked with the seasons, following water, shade, grass, carrying knowledge learned by being transit-humans - listening to the rhythms of the earth and the animals. I watched, listened, and felt the rhythm of their days, falling asleep with the last rays of sunlight and waking with the first light touching the mountain peaks, followed by the ringing of bells. I kept thinking to myself: this way of being is nothing else but true presence, revealing nothing but freedom, tradition, and harmony with nature.
As far as we look back, no matter when, there was a piece of land, a human, and their animals living in peace.
Yet today this freedom is under siege.
In Greece, over 300,000 sheep and goats have been culled in the past two years under government disease-control measures. Shepherds living on their own are often not allowed to call their own veterinarians for a second opinion before entire herds are destroyed.
Compensation promised by the state reaches less than half of affected families, often delayed or incomplete.
For generations, families have lived entirely off these herds, sustaining not only themselves but the land itself. Over thousands of years, grazing became a vital part of the functional ecosystem: it maintains forests, prevents overgrowth, and preserves biodiversity.
I learned a hard and very sad truth: the freedom of living alone on top of the mountains, having herds roam freely, is being taken under government control and quietly strangled.
The government checks animals almost yearly, claiming disease. By law, if one animal is sick, all must be culled. Diseases can spread quickly, and shepherds are left powerless to save the rest of the herd. Many never receive the promised support. This is not about profit or growth for the shepherds – they produce only what they need – but about control, bureaucracy, and, increasingly, corruption. Greece is under scrutiny for mismanaged EU agricultural funds, risking millions in fines.
Watching them, I realized that the life of a shepherd is not just a choice. It is a statement of human existence: listening, observing, caring, moving with the earth, and finding contentment in what is. In their songs, their quiet work, their traces across mountains, fields, and rivers, there is a presence we rarely see in the modern world. Not money, not city expansions, not screens or corporations, but life lived fully in rhythm with what surrounds us.
And yet this presence is endangered. Families who once thrived now face exhaustion, anxiety, and uncertainty. Their work is treated as a nuisance, their freedom curtailed, their identity eroded. And maybe the cruel irony of our age is that the more of the world we can see, the less of its humanity we can bear to witness.
What does it mean to live well, to preserve what matters, to coexist with the world rather than dominate it? And if such fundamental ways of life can vanish, what does that say about us?