Stories
–
Finikas, Syros
Two months in Syros: an interpreter’s diary
From September to November 2025, Mina and four fellow interpreting students lived and trained in Finikas. Her diary, in short.
Arriving in Finikas
In September 2025 Mina, a French interpreting student based in Rome, came to Syros with four classmates for a two-month Erasmus+ traineeship with Travel in Art. The group lived in Finikas: mornings in class, afternoons discovering the island, and the Aegean right outside the window. She kept a diary, day by day, in English, Italian and French. Here it is in short.
Learning to see through words
The programme combined consecutive and simultaneous interpreting, memory and diction training, menu translation and, above all, audio description: finding the words that let someone who cannot see “see” a film, a painting or a museum. The group worked on an audio description of the Archaeological Museum of Syros, guided by teachers who took turns on the island throughout the stay.
Some of the most intense moments came from meeting people. Alessandra Cinque, a dancer and inclusion activist, explained the difference between integration and inclusion: integration is inviting someone to a party and leaving them aside, inclusion is inviting them and actually dancing with them. Antonella Binetti shared her story of gradually losing her sight, and the group worked on an audio description made for her. At Voulgari beach, Mina tried the Seatrac, a device that lets people with reduced mobility enter the sea on their own, and found herself hoping it would soon be on every beach.
An island that teaches
Guided visits to the Town Hall of Ermoupoli, the Apollon Theatre and the church of Saint Nicholas; the island’s industrial history; a day on Delos; lessons on archaeotourism and iconography; a walk among the wild herbs of Syros with George, who looks after the garden. For a week the group also welcomed an Erasmus+ group from UniTre Caserta, showing them Ermoupoli and playing language games together.
What stays
Between gyros pita, first words of Greek taught by a young neighbour, crab hunts on the rocks and Italian film nights, the diary is above all a story of people. After one of many goodbyes at the port, Mina asked Carolina whether it was hard to see people constantly arriving and leaving. The answer: “It’s hard, but if people enjoyed themselves in Syros, they always come back.”
Mina left Syros in November with a clearer idea of her future as an interpreter, and, in her own words, a memory full of sun, laughter and dreams for the future.