Diaspora Greeks’ pilgrimages to Pindos and their family roots
At 21, Olympia Zigoura, a slender brunette, left her lush green village of Vouchorina (sometimes spelled Vouhorina) in the foothills of eastern Pindos, never to return. It was 1956, and like many of her fellow villagers, she was embarking on a journey of migration, with destinations either in America or Australia. She was heading to Melbourne, bound by an arranged marriage to a man she had never met, chosen by her brother, who had emigrated before her.
Sixty years later, in the summer of 2024, her now-deceased daughter’s child, Greek-Australian Eva Root, returned to the nearly deserted Vouchorina to reconnect with her family’s roots and history. “I had seen photos of the house where my mother was born. It had a garden. What I really wanted was to touch the soil my mother had touched,” she tells Kathimerini.
At 58 and having recently experienced the tragic loss of her own daughter, Eva decided to travel to Greece to make a “pilgrimage” to the land of her parents. Her first step was to search online for living relatives. Through Facebook, she managed to contact her cousin, Andreas Zigouras.
Andreas’ mother, Aglaia, had married Eva’s mother’s older brother. Though her uncle had passed away, Aglaia was still alive. As soon as Eva arrived in Vouchorina, Andreas took her to meet Aglaia. “The moment we saw each other, we both started crying. It was a magical feeling. She had been my mother’s best friend. She told me she still vividly remembers the day – as she put it – when the men came to take my mother away. She said my mother cried, cried so much because she wanted to stay with her friend.”
Rediscovering the homeland
The 89-year-old Aglaia showed Eva photos of her mother, shared memories of their friendship, and displayed the jewelry her mother had sent as a gift from Melbourne. Aglaia, deeply moved, later told her son that she saw Olympia in Eva’s face. For Eva, the return was even more emotional. “For the first time in my life, I truly felt Greek. It was a unique, incredible feeling,” she reveals.
Eva’s mother, Olympia (pictured, on her wedding day), had a difficult life in Australia. She had five children, but soon developed severe mental health problems, leading the Australian state to take custody of the children from both her and her husband. “We didn’t grow up together. We didn’t grow up Greek. We had no contact with the Greek language, culture, or heritage,” Eva explained, highlighting just how significant the experience of returning to a homeland she was discovering for the first time was for her.
Before leaving the village, Eva fulfilled her long-held wish: She found the house where her mother had once lived, carefully explored its rooms, and reflected on what it must have been like for a whole family to live there. “The visit to the village gave me a strong sense of history and belonging,” she says, adding that she plans to return, bringing her children next time to introduce them to their grandmother’s homeland.
Makeshift map
Eva was one of five descendants of immigrants who visited their ancestral village, Vouchorina, this summer. Andreas, almost always the connecting link, helped them locate living relatives and shared the village’s history, which now has only about 15 permanent residents.
Speaking to Kathimerini, Andreas explains how it all began in 2018 when a Greek American named John Dimitri came to the village with a makeshift map of Vouchorina, hoping to find the home his family had left behind when they emigrated to the US, as well as any surviving relatives. Despite the language barrier – John didn’t speak Greek, and Andreas didn’t speak English – they managed to communicate and piece together the family’s history.
John eventually found his family’s collapsed house and met a cousin of his mother. That same year, he created a Facebook group titled “Zigouras Family & Vouchorina History Page,” where members exchanged information about the village and their family tree, one of the largest in the mountainous region. “That’s where it all started,” Andreas recalls.
With the same map John had used, Connie Zigouras arrived from New York in August. Encouraged by a Greek-American friend who often visited Greece, Connie decided to explore her own roots in Vouchorina. “My grandparents came to America in the 1920s and opened a Greek restaurant in Pennsylvania. My father was the youngest child. Some of his older siblings were born in Greece, but he was born in America.”
As Connie shared, her father, Arthur (Art) Zigouras (pictured), achieved something uncommon for an immigrant of that era: He attended college and earned an education. However, during that time, he faced discrimination because of his Greek heritage, leading him to decide to “stop being Greek.” He embraced American culture as much as he could.
That perspective shifted as he grew older. In the 1980s, he visited Vouchorina with a cousin. After his passing, Connie, wanting to honor his memory, made the same pilgrimage.
“The sad part was that no one knew who I was. My family had left so early that there was no memory of them. A century was enough for my grandparents to be forgotten,” she reflects.
With the help of the map, Connie found her family’s house, though it had collapsed. While she didn’t meet any relatives, she describes feeling a deeper appreciation for her roots, heritage, and the reasons why her family left a century ago – fleeing a place that offered little chance of survival. “As I walked through the village, I thought about how my grandparents lived here, my father walked these streets. It was – I can’t think of a better word – an out-of-body experience,” she says, adding that her perspective of people wanting to immigrate to the US had shifted. Connie took a picture beneath the village sign, just as her father had done in the 1980s, and lit a candle in the church for him and his siblings. Before leaving, she placed his old naval cap at the village’s community center. “He would have loved that I made this trip,” she says.
Scars of emigration
Both Eva and Connie remarked that this journey made them realize how little they knew about the history of the previous generations who had left Greece to immigrate to America and Australia. Now that many of them are gone, it is becoming harder to pass this knowledge on to future generations.
Vouchorina still bears the scars of its successive waves of emigration. As Andreas explains, the first members of the Zigouras family left the village in 1880. “A century ago, half the village went to America, and in the 1950s, the rest left. Then, during the 1970s and 1980s, people began migrating to Athens, Thessaloniki, Kozani and Kastoria.” He adds that while the few remaining villagers are always delighted to meet the descendants of those who emigrated, these visits rarely have a lasting impact. “Some have said they will return, but usually, they don’t,” she says. “The village is destined to fade away.”
