NS derived inspiration from the history of the Jewry in the context of the Eastern tradition. He used to look for authentic cultural documentation and if the tradition gave incomplete replies, his art came to combine existing and missing elements and cover the gap. An example is how diligently the distinctive Jewish costumes of the Byzantine and Ottoman periods, based on rules of religious discriminations, have been reconstructed in painting, in his Sephardi and Romaniote Jewish Costumes. In other cases, like the Cookbook of the Jews of Greece, Nikos Stavroulakis reconstructed in sketches the human factor involved in cooking and the relevant Jewish customs.
