Shadows in Pavros: Photographs by Elena Varga

Pavros is the kind of city that hides itself in plain sight. Wedged between a saltwater bay and the low green shoulders of the Omer Hills, it has a skyline no one photographs and a history too tangled to put in tourist brochures. But in the late 1990s, Elena Varga saw something different. Armed with her Leica M6 and a few rolls of Ilford HP5, she set out to catch Pavros in the spaces between—moments that felt unimportant until you looked again.

The photographs, collected simply under the title Pavros, don’t document landmarks or civic pride. Instead, they linger on geometry and gesture: a boy clutching three oversized balloons on an empty hill; the skeletal frame of a half-lit amusement ride; an alley where laundry ropes cut the afternoon shadow into perfect triangles. Every frame feels deliberate, but never staged—compositions balanced as if by instinct rather than calculation.

Varga, who was in her late twenties at the time, had been living in Pavros for only six months. She rented a single room above a bakery, and when she wasn’t working nights in a riverside bar, she walked. The Leica became a pretext for noticing—the way steam curled from the vent of an arcade snack counter, or how a pair of teenagers leaned into each other while waiting for the last bus, their silhouettes pressed against a wall of peeling posters.

Looking back, the series carries a quiet tension. Pavros in the ’90s was in flux: the factories that once fed its port were closing, and its narrow streets had begun to empty out. Yet Varga’s lens resists nostalgia. There’s nothing sentimental here—just the awareness that light and shadow can tell their own truths, even in cities no one is paying attention to.

What makes Pavros resonate isn’t its subject matter so much as its restraint. Varga never reaches for the obvious shot. She lets a railing bisect a frame, allows an empty stretch of cobblestone to take up half the composition. It’s in those choices that the city begins to speak—a place caught between working and fading, between the seen and the overlooked.

Two decades later, the photographs feel less like a time capsule and more like a conversation. They don’t ask you to imagine Pavros as it was; they let you stand there, in that thin winter light, listening for the sound of the bay just out of frame.