Flisvos takes its title from a Greek word for the soft sound of a small wave gently hitting the shore. The book gathers photographs and text by Bernadette Mergaerts, made on Corfu over several winters beginning in 2015, when she noticed that, despite the cold weather, many people were swimming at various places along the shoreline of the capital city, Kerkyra. She was impressed that the bathers — all adults, some of them retired — seemed to find peace in the Ionian Sea. Over the following years she returned often, sometimes for long periods, and learned more about the lives of the winter swimmers.

Mergaerts follows them on their daily swims and attends to how they merge with the elements and to their participation in the ritual celebrations of the winter months — months that simply have to be endured until the following spring. She also records the concerns they share: pollution, the loss of touch with nature, health, the lack of social security, and the sometimes strict nature of family ties. How they survive on a green island in a country in crisis is part of the book’s subject. With sensuous images, Mergaerts shows the decline of nature but also its vitality, and that of the bathers themselves.

The book includes poems by Vasalis Pandis and Katina Vlachou. Text editing and translations are by Olga Ragos, Alfy Birkett and Alicia Van Coillie; design is by Rob van Hoesel, with lithography by Sebastiaan Hanekroot (Colour&Books), production by Jos Morree (Fine Books), print by Wilco Art Books (NL), and binding by Patist (NL). It is published in English by The Eriskay Connection in 2021: 128 pages, 210 × 280 mm, softcover with a dust jacket. The first edition is 750 copies.