Valias Semertzidis goes to the mountains to depict the saga of the National Resistance

"Some secretly, some openly, the Greek artists empathized with the pencil, told the sufferings of the People, helped in their struggle with the engraver's chisel which became a sharp weapon in their hands," Spyros Vassiliou said after the Liberation, referring to the flourishing of engraving art during the years of the German Occupation. But the battles were not only fought on paper or only in Athens. Special mention should be made to those who left the cities and went to the mountains, giving substance to the desire for freedom. Among them, painters Valias Semertzidis and Dimitris Yoldasis, photographers Spyros Meletzis and Costas Balafas, who, with their work, portrayed an emblematic picture of life in the Resistance. (in Meletzis' photograph, Semertzidis paints a guerilla fighter).

Valias (Valentinos) Semertzidis (1911-1983) was born in Krasnodar, Caucasus. In 1922 his family came to Greece and settled first in Drapetsona and later in Old Kokkinia. Semertzidis studied painting at the School of Fine Arts with Konstantinos Parthenis, and during the Occupation he joined EAM (National Liberation Front.) At the beginning of 1944, he left for the mountains (in Viniani, Evritania, and later in Agrafa) to paint the fighting guerillas and the simple mountain people.