Why Myths, Fairy Tales, and Legendary Heroes Hold Such a Deep Place in My Heart
Why myths? Why fairy tales and their characters? Why is this theme so close to my heart, so intertwined with my life? It feels as though this fascination has always been there, never changing, never fading. As far back as I can remember, I’ve always lived in a world that ran parallel to the ordinary one. Not because I was hiding from anything—my family was happy and supportive. My mother, a physics teacher who taught in English, and my father, a geologist and traveler, provided a stable and loving home. My younger brother was always by my side, part of both my everyday world and my imaginary one.
Yet, imagination and strange, wonderful adventures were always a part of my childhood—and have remained part of my life ever since.
I was eight years old, walking with great importance into the second grade. My brother, two years younger, had just started school. He looked up to me and one day asked how he should behave around girls and how to make friends. As the “older and more experienced” sibling, I didn’t just give him ordinary advice. I created a whole strategy. But I didn’t write it as myself—I wrote as a dragon. It felt like the advice would carry more weight coming from such a powerful figure.
Every day, for a month or more, the Dragon wrote my brother secret notes about making friends and behaving at school. I don’t remember all of them now, but I do recall outlining steps for how to walk a girl home, open doors for her, and carry her school bag.
I have a vivid memory of myself at ten years old, sitting in math class with a fairy tale book hidden on my lap. I would secretly read under my desk while the lesson was going on. Eventually, my teacher caught me, confiscated the book, and called my mother to the school. But surprisingly, my strict mother didn’t scold me at all. She simply handed the book back. I even remember what the book was: part of the “Precious Books of the World’s Best Fairy Tales” series. There were 12 books in the series, and I was completely absorbed in them.
As I grew older, my love for stories expanded to Greek myths and Homer’s Odyssey. Around this time, I started attending art school, and Odysseus’s adventures became an obsession that filled my thoughts and conversations.
It felt natural then to start performing in theater. But since there were no theaters nearby, I created my own traveling theater group. For three seasons, we developed plays, rehearsed, improvised, built sets, and performed. Our stages were unconventional: we approached the directors of local kindergartens and asked if we could perform for the children. They agreed, and we brought our shows to them. These performances always took place during school holidays, which made our vacations full of adventure and creativity.
So, from a very young age, I was immersed in fairy tales and myths, transforming them into performances and reimagined stories. In a way, this has been my art practice since I was ten years old—a lifelong journey of merging storytelling and creativity.
