Greek Grandmother in Idomeni Shares Her Pension and Home With Refugees

In the spring of 2016, as thousands of refugees were stranded at Idomeni on the Greek border with North Macedonia, an 82-year-old local woman, Panagiota Vasileiadou, opened her small home to some of them. Living on a state pension of about €450 a month, with help from her children and neighbours, she gave her guests food, water, a roof and company. They called her "Mama". Her reason was simple: as a child she had lost her own home, and her parents had arrived in Greece as refugees from Asia Minor.

Who is Panagiota Vasileiadou?

Vasileiadou lives in Idomeni, a small farming village in the Kilkis region of northern Greece, right beside the border crossing. Her parents were among the Greeks of Anatolia who were uprooted in the early twentieth century and resettled in Greek Macedonia. She told the UN refugee agency that her family's house was burned when she was seven, during the Second World War, and that they were left with almost nothing except the nightclothes they were wearing. She recalled having "no spoon, fork, bread or clothes".

That memory shaped how she saw the families sleeping in tents outside her village. In interviews in 2016 she said she understood their suffering because her own family had lived through the same thing.

Idomeni in 2016: a village turned into a camp

Idomeni had become a crossing point for people travelling north through the Balkans towards Germany, Sweden and other countries. In 2015, Médecins Sans Frontières and UNHCR set up a transit camp beside the railway station, designed for people passing through within a day or two. In October 2015 alone, more than 211,000 refugees crossed there, about a fifth of them children.

When Balkan countries along the route began closing their borders in mid-February 2016, the flow stopped and the transit point became an overcrowded, informal camp. More than 12,000 people, and by some counts over 15,000, were living in tents in muddy fields and along the tracks, in a village with only a couple of hundred residents. Conditions were harsh, with rain, cold, long queues for food and little sanitation.

Sharing a pension and a home

Against that backdrop, Vasileiadou began inviting people into her house. CNN reported in May 2016 that she had been hosting five young Syrian men for about two months. She kept chickens and grew vegetables, and neighbours and a local baker helped with food. Other reports describe guests from Iraq as well. She was honest that she had been afraid on the first night and had not slept, but the fear soon gave way to friendship.

She shared what little she had. Her pension was well below the average for Greek retirees during the depths of the country's economic crisis. She told CNN that she wished she were younger and richer so that she could do more for the people in the camp.

One guest, an Iraqi refugee named Baraa, told the UNHCR film crew that she had made their lives easier and that, to him, she represented the Greek people. The guests spoke mostly Arabic and she spoke only Greek, but the household found its own language of gestures, food and laughter. For Vasileiadou, the company changed her own life too, filling a quiet house with conversation, even when neither side could follow the words.

Watch her story

This short film, made for UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, shows Vasileiadou at home in Idomeni with her guests and in her own words.

Why her family history matters

Vasileiadou's compassion has deep roots in Greek history. Between 1914 and 1922, the Greek communities of Anatolia suffered the Greek genocide, with death toll estimates ranging from about 300,000 to 900,000. After the Greek defeat in Asia Minor and the destruction of Smyrna in 1922, more than a million Orthodox Greeks fled or were expelled. The Lausanne Convention of January 1923 then formalised a compulsory exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey.

Many of the refugees were settled in Greek Macedonia, the region around Idomeni, where they often started again with nothing. By the 1928 census, refugees made up about 45 percent of Macedonia's population. For families like hers, the experience of losing a home was not an abstract news story but a family memory, deepened again by the burning of villages during the wartime occupation.

That is part of why so many Greeks in border villages and on islands such as Lesbos responded to the 2015 to 2016 crisis with practical help, even while their own economy was in deep trouble.

What happened next

On 24 May 2016, about a month after her story spread, Greek police began clearing the Idomeni camp. The roughly 10,000 people still there were taken by bus to army-run camps, many of them near Thessaloniki, to have their asylum claims processed. Some later moved on to other European countries through relocation or family reunification; others waited in Greece for years.

The village returned to its quiet farming life, but Vasileiadou's story continues to be told as an example of how one person with very little can still make a difference. Her hospitality did not solve the crisis, and she never claimed it would. It simply meant that, for a handful of young men far from home, there was a warm kitchen and someone they could call Mama.

Sources: Originally reported by The Pappas Post (20 April 2016), with video by UNHCR. CNN: Greek grandmother hosts Syrian refugees (4 May 2016); Wikipedia: Idomeni; NPR via KAXE: Greece begins evacuating thousands of asylum seekers from camp (24 May 2016); Wikipedia: Population exchange between Greece and Turkey.

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