The painter Sotiris Zisis was born in the village of Koulakia (modern-day Chalastra) in Thessaloniki in 1902 and passed away in Thessaloniki in 1989. He was a self-taught folk painter, descending from a family of iconographers who were refugees from Eastern Rumelia. Upon finishing primary school, he moved to Thessaloniki to learn the trade of typography and zincography from an uncle of his at the ‘Ermis’ printing house. He worked at various printing presses in Serres, Alexandroupoli, Athens, and Thessaloniki, and from 1934 onwards at the Makedonia newspaper, where he collaborated with the cartoonist Phokion Demetriades. During 1940–1941, he began publishing maps of countries involved in the war, while in the 1950s he started manufacturing globes in his workshop. He had been painting since he was a young child, but took it up systematically in 1959. In 1961, he painted the walls of his house and, at the urging of Vassilis Laourdas of the Society for Macedonian Studies, depicted themes from the Macedonian Struggle, in which his father, Zisis Zisis, had also been involved. Possessing a narrative character, his works—comprising landscapes, portraits, historical themes, and scenes from the rural life of his village and the early urban life of early 20th-century Thessaloniki—are distinguished by their immediacy and vividness. His reference models included old photographs, postcards, and printed folk prints. His work was promoted through Dinos Christianopoulos’s journal ‘Diagonios’ (1966, 1969), followed by his first solo exhibition at the ‘Techni’ Macedonian Art Society in 1971, while in 1984 a retrospective exhibition of his work was organized by the Municipality of Thessaloniki.