Preservation of American Hellenic History
Preservation of American Hellenic History
by Jason C. Mavrovitis
Lily recalled many family members arriving from Europe and living with her, her mother and Louie in their west side flats. Eleni brought her relatives to America from France and Greece and helped them to find work in the garment industry. Once they were employed and able to earn, she sent them off to lead their own lives. In 1920 Eleni made plans to bring her mother, Vasiliki, and sister, Sophia, to America; but not to a flat on the West Side of Manhattan.
In October of 1920 Eleni purchased a three-story brownstone house(4) on Ovington Avenue in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn for $9,500.(5) She had title to the property in her name alone, perhaps as a means to assert her independence and assure herself and her daughter security. Still, Eleni and Louis had a loving relationship and were devoted to each other. They are an affectionate couple as shown in a photograph.
Eleni decided to buy the house the day that she first saw it. She and Lily had taken the Brooklyn Rapid Transit System (the BRT, in later years to become the BMT) from Manhattan to the last stop. In 1920 the BRT ended service at Sixty-ninth Street and Fourth Avenue. It was a short walk to the house. Eleni examined it and strolled through the rustic twenty by fifty foot garden. When rose bush thorns snagged the sleeve of her dress, she decided it was a sign that the house wanted her.
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Greece was on war footing in 1919 as it sought to bring to realization the "Great Idea" of a reconstituted Greek Empire. Premier Venizelos' political rhetoric and Greek nationalist fervor led to a war against the Turks to restore a Byzantine Empire to include Crete, Thessaly, Epirus, Macedonia, Thrace (to the coast of the Black Sea), the Aegean Islands, Cyprus, the Dodecanese, the Ionian coastlands of Asia Minor, and the Pontus of the Black Sea.[map / 6] By 1922, Greece lost all and had to make room in its economically ravaged society for one million refugees. Those unfortunates were part of the population exchange that eliminated most Greeks from modern Turkey.
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