We just talked to Maria in London. She seems very enthusiastic about the project and we discussed some details. We are looking forward to working with her!

Marias Grandma „Γιαγιά“ Maria Tzika was born in September 1920 in a greek mountain village. Her granddaughter, Maria Tzika, is a visual anthro-pologist and currently living in London. Maria would like to capture her grandmother’s story for the European Grandma Project and gives us a special sneak peek of her grandma’s childhood:

„When my grandma talks about her past she describes how things smelled and tasted. She has wonderful memories of her shepherd grandparents, the butter and goat meat they cooked, her grandmother’s thin waist, even though she had her first child at the Age of 12. She remembers climbing trees with her cousin, who was recruited by the guerilla at a young age and died early on. You see my grandmother comes from a mountain village and she was only a child when the fight for the independence took place. When the bombing started she was a maid in a rich family’s house in a nearby town by the sea. She would hear the bombs exploding, hide in the basement and pray for one of them to fall into the garden to see how they looked like. Soon she had to go back to her village and do her bit for the fight for Independence…

She experienced German occupation, the civil war, the dictatorship and now the decline of democracy and prosperity of the last 30 years. All these (hi)stories are not in books, but in peoples’ heads and have created a collective memory that even now haunts the politics of the country.“