Another member of the Greek community has become a centenarian this past week, with Angela (Argyro) Kritikos celebrating her 100th birthday last Sunday, January 14.
With help from her family and carers, the following is a brief description of her character and life.
Angela is known for her cheerful personality, friendly smile and great sense of fun, which makes her popular with people of all ages and backgrounds.
She especially enjoys the company of young people as she says it keeps her young.
In her heyday the housewife and mother loved cooking, gardening and entertaining others.
That entertaining came in the form of making people laugh, as a great comic, mimic and story teller, with a “wicked” sense of humour.
Angela enjoyed sharing her Greek cakes and home-grown fruit and vegetables with neighbours and friends.
Also, a lover of Greek music and Elvis Presley, Angela is said to have a great singing voice and still loves to sing to this day.
Born in the small Greek rural village of Filatika, Kynouria, in the province of Arcadia in the Peloponnese, she was the youngest of five sisters and a brother.
Her fondness of music was developed in school, alongside a love for history and poetry.
Her family survived many hard times, from the Great Depression, World War II and the civil war.
In 1951 she married Panagiotis Kritikos and had three children, Nicholas, Konstantina and Theo. She has a grandson named Matthew.
Angela and Panagiotis were married for 55 years until he passed away in 2006. The couple and their young family left Greece for Australia in 1955.
They arrived in Melbourne on the Tasmania passenger ship on September 23 1955 and lived their early years in Fitzroy.
Like many Greeks, they bought a shop and ran a family milk bar on Lygon St, East Brunswick from 1963 to 1977, where they also lived.
Over the years she returned to Greece many times to visit her family and friends.
Angela also worked at the Rosella factory in Richmond and as a seamstress in Brunswick St, Fitzroy, and in Lygon St.
In 1977, they moved to Thornbury where she lived until 2016, and now resides at an aged care centre in Brunswick.
