By Maro Rempoutsika & Gregory Kontos In a notarial record signed on the island of Kythera in 1564, back when the island was under Venetian rule, we learn about the details of an adoption contract.[1] In particular, a man named Georgis Maneas, agreed to accept a...

By George Zimmar The end of senior year was festive as I joined classmates to party. My parents had purchased a new 1955 Mercury sedan, with a blazing red and white two-tone color. Since my parents did not drive, I was charged with driving duties and used the car to...

By George Zimmar In my years at Hyde Park High School in Chicago, I was not a model student, as evidenced by my three expulsions: two for fist fights and one for smoking in the park across from the school. Hondo, the eagle-eyed cop, spied the canopy of cigarette smoke...

“We are goblins, we are out and about after normal hours, we want the lalagia, we take the children, give us the rooster or the hen, or we’ll break the door!”

By George Zimmar Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us Oscar Wilde A visit to my Uncle Tom Zoumaras’s store involved a series of transit switches from the southeast side of Chicago to the northwest section of the city. We would walk from Drexel...

Raise your glasses! Long live Greece! Long live the allies!

By George P. Zimmar for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God Romans, 3,23 Shortly after WWII ended, Greek immigration to the United States reopened, especially to those without communist sympathies. After Winston Churchill’s March 5, 1946 Iron Curtain...

By George Zimmar When we think of a pilgrimage, like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a spiritual journey comes to mind. My grandfather Georgios Zymaras (or Zoumaras), made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1900, where he prayed before the tomb of Christ, and earned Hadji...

Once in Athens, my sister and I were embraced by loving aunts, uncles, cousins, and various other family members. Everywhere we went in Europe, we enthused, we encountered Greece.

Our identity is not a matter of place, customs, or traditions but of an ideal.

By George Zimmar In 1953, my parents purchased a luncheonette on the corner of 75th and South Park Avenue (later named Martin Luther King Drive) in Chicago for about $7000. Actually, for the residents in the neighborhood it was a more than just a place to eat: It was...

Maybe Aspasia or her descendants are among the readers of this article. Maybe not. What is certain is that this archival material gives hope to anyone trying to discover more about family members and ancestors who were abducted during the dark times of the Second World War.