Hello and warm regards to the Tsintzina Society!
My name is Mary Cardaras. I live in California. I am an academic and a journalist who has just written a pretty incredible story about a woman who was adopted from Greece in 1958. In fact, her adoptive parents were very active Tsintzinians and lived in Ohio! She always believed her biological mother was from a village near Sparta. Nothing was further from the truth. I won't spoil the story. Hopefully, it will be published soon and I will be able to share it with you. My dream is that it will be made into a movie or a Netflix series. Yes, the story is THAT good.
I am also a Greek-born adoptee, born in Athens and left at the Athens Municipal Orphanage in 1955. There are thousands of us out there. We are connecting and we are looking for our biological families. This is a phenomenon that often happens after our adoptive parents die. We feel like orphans again and have the space and freedom to search for our roots and to know the circumstances of our birth.
If you are interested to know what happened to thousands of Greek-born children during and after World War II and the Greek Civil War, you may be interested in this incredible book, written by Dr. Gonda Van Steen, which brilliantly chronicles and explains our story, Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece.
If you are a Greek-born adoptee from World War II through the 1960's, and would like to get in touch, please contact me: Dr. Mary Cardaras, marycardaras19@gmail.com. We are trying to account for every one of us, who is alive and wanting to connect. I am interested in your stories. My next project is a collection of essays, the voices of "the lost children of Greece," and I will soon be organizing an international conference of Greek-born adoptees in Greece next year.
Got this from Tsintzinian JoAnn Pavlostathis: Interesting story on Greek Adoption Agency to Preserve Records of Thousands of Orphans.
https://greekreporter.com/2021/03/04/greek-adoption-agency-preserve-thousands-of-records-greece/
Nia ripped at the root. It is about my godmother, my name is Constantine Gregory Polites. It is about my godmother my family her adoptive family. Yassou 🤗💙🇬🇷💙🤗Tsintzinans. It is a Emotional part of 🇬🇷 History,a 💔 that remains.