“When my sister-in-law Ermioni died in 1992, we found among her things a package wrapped in newspaper. Inside were designs for the carpets she wove in her mother’s home workshop in Constanța, Romania. They had fled there in 1925 from Burdur in Asia Minor after her father was rounded up with other non-Muslim males and taken on a Death March to Diyarbakir in the East. By 1950 her mother, too, had died and her two brothers had long-since moved to Greece.

Four times refugee or migrant, Ermioni spoke a mixture of Turkish, Greek, Romanian and American English when she retired to Athens from the US in 1976, to be near her beloved brothers. Once settled here, her only request was to somehow source a large carpet loom: she was itching to weave again.  

Perhaps we didn’t try hard enough; we were never able to oblige her.”

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Angela (Athens, Greece)