Monday, August 5, 2025 – The community of the initiative “Ink on Paper“, created to highlight visual artists who primarily use ink and paper as their medium of expression, warmly welcomes its newest member, Sarantis Karanikolas.
Sarantis Karanikolas was born in 2006 in Athens and is a student of Linguistics at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He is also studying Byzantine Music, while from an early age he has cultivated a unique artistic path that began with graffiti and gradually focused on Greek calligraphy—and more specifically, the calligraphy of Byzantine music, which he now practices professionally.
Artistically, he draws inspiration from the scribes of the Byzantine and post-Byzantine periods, from the 10th to the 19th century, aiming to connect tradition with the present. He has attended seminars in paleography and codicology at the Cultural Foundation of the National Bank of Greece in collaboration with the Democritus University of Thrace, as well as calligraphy workshops under the guidance of Maria Genitsariou.
In his artist statement, he writes:
“My engagement with Byzantine music calligraphy began at the age of 15, when I first came into contact with Byzantine neumatic notation. Gradually, through my deeper study of medieval Greek manuscripts—musical and otherwise—I realized that, despite their age, these manuscripts still exude a remarkable freshness and vitality. Each letter, each musical note, each symbol becomes a carrier of a message that is complementary to or even independent of the text written on the page. This kind of visualization of language, I believe, makes the written message more attractive to the modern eye, without altering its content, whether using analog or digital tools. Moreover, I believe that highlighting the centuries-old handwritten tradition and the artistic trends that emerged in the field of musical notation, as well as Greek script more broadly—through the work of hundreds of known and anonymous scribes—is a historical duty, as this tradition is an inseparable part of the written culture and history of the Greek people.”
