On June 15, 2026, La Poste (the French postal service) issued a stamp in its art series featuring "Millennium Dance," a work by Nikos Aliagas in which two olive trees appear to unite, becoming "one" in a suspended movement.
Behind the media persona of journalist and television presenter, Nikos Aliagas is also a French photographer of Greek origin, born in Paris in 1969. A dreamy child, raised between two cultures, he observed the world and recorded thousands of intimate snapshots. In the 1970s, his father gave him a small camera, and he discovered the power of this device, capable of capturing what would otherwise be forgotten. Over the years, he began reflecting on temporality and the memory of the image. In his photographic manifesto, "The Test of Time," he explores what resists time, from the columns of a temple to the hands of a sculptor, to the weathered faces of the elderly.
As a teenager, he roamed the olive groves of Missolonghi and Stamna in Greece, the land of his ancestors. These landscapes became a space for dialogue and meditation. The olive tree, a symbol of peace and transmission, emerged as a foundational presence in his quest.
Behind his lens, Nikos Aliagas seeks what bears witness to and transcends time. His black and white work focuses on the traces left on bodies, faces, hands, and nature, in an approach attentive to silences, inherited from a humanist tradition.
In The Spleen of Ulysses, he extends this reflection on return, the ephemeral, and humanity's place in the long term. Exhibited and published in France and abroad (The Greek Spirit, Thalassa, Peoples of the Sea, Venetian Perspectives, Bodies and Souls, and, more recently, The Great Ages at the Musée de l’Homme), his works find an emblematic expression in Millennial Dance, where two entwined olive trees seem to rise together, carried by an ancient breath. The image evokes the persistence of life and the fragile continuity of a civilization rooted in the earth as much as in people’s consciousness.
