Christina Savopoulos has frozen her late Yiayia’s house in time. I knocked on the door of this 1960’s Doncaster home last week and was welcomed into the Kalos Irthate (Καλώς Ήρθατε) exhibition, where family heirlooms are displayed in every room — from her great-grandmother’s wedding dress to a Greek edition of Neos Kosmos folded on the living room armchair.
In the garden where I interviewed Christina, Jamie and John – the co-creators of Kalos Irthate – they’ve set up a coffee table as part of the interactive exhibit. On it are two empty Greek coffee cups placed next to a blue Ελλάδα (Greece) cap. There’s a thriving lemon tree in the corner of the yard, clearly lovingly tended to.
A home filled with memories
It’s important to the trio that they get the details of this migrant home snapshot right. “We’ve had a lot of people cry [when they come into the house]. It brings up a lot of emotions, and everyone seems to connect with something different.”
Christina’s pappou died in 2011, and her yiayia just two years ago.
“I think they would have been really proud,” she tells me with glassy eyes. “If [Yiayia] was still here, she would probably just set herself up on the couch and would have told stories to everyone that walked through the house. She loved to talk.”
“With the original [post-war] migrant generation starting to disappear, I think [young Greek Australians] are becoming more interested in exploring their Greek identity and heritage. We’re appreciating it more,” says John Gallos, a co-creator of the art space.
Also honouring their family traditions are artists Marianna, Demi and Maria, who recently hosted the Proika multimedia exhibition. Proika (προίκα) means “the physical and metaphorical heirlooms passed from generations of Greek-Australian families.” — heirlooms that the team have now repurposed into clothing and showcased through photography and stories.
For journalist Marianna, storytelling is preserving history.
“This is why we can’t discount the arts, because people don’t realise how much of it contributes to understanding who we are and where we came from.”
Redefining Greek-Australian identity
She is confident there is no one way to be Greek.
“For our generation, it’s showing [the older ones] there are different ways to engage [in our culture].”
“Sometimes the community can be a little rigid, and I can understand why.
“When you’re away from the Motherland, I suppose you want to hold on to a lot of the traditions … [but] when you grow up in Australia, you lose a bit of that cultural identity. It’s not necessarily a bad thing.
“We’re just Greek in a different way,” says Marianna.
To preserve Greek pride for the newer generations, Marianna says the key is “allowing [the kids] to celebrate their heritage in a way that feels right to them. Greek schools are dwindling, and that’s really sad… but if people aren’t connecting with the language or finding it too hard, there are other ways to be involved. For instance, we put on this Proika project.”
For Jamie Gallos, the connection to ‘home’ is more physical. “I have that yearning [for Greece]. I would move there and live there. I would do that now if I had the financial means of doing so. That ‘migrational return’ can be a very plausible reality.”
“From the older Greek community here, I always hear ‘you go for your holidays, but you don’t live there… you can’t work’ … I’ve visited a great many times, to the point where it’s like, I can gauge what it would be like living there.”
John Tzelepis doesn’t feel the same way — “at the end of the day, my family is here in Melbourne. What would I do over there? … if anything, it feels more Greek and more traditional being here than in Greece, because you’re honouring it so much.”
The role of art in preserving heritage
Curating the Kalos Irthate exhibition helped John honour his pappou in a surprising way. When digging through the family archives, he discovered an old poem in his grandfather’s journal from the 1950’s.
“In it there were a lot of emotions from when he moved to Australia, so we learned more about his journey coming here and how that affected him. He had a hard background, where he was quite poor … his Mum died when he was young. That really came out in the poem.”
“We put it up on the wall in the exhibition, and he came and he read it for the first time in 60 years.”
There are two people that are mentioned in every conversation with the Kalos Irthate and Proika project artists: Yiayia and Pappou. They are the ones who began carving out the Greek Australian identity. Now, the third generation Greeks have been passed the baton for upholding their cultural traditions, they’re excited to redefine what that identity means to them, and share it widely.
Marianna voices a shared sentiment: “I really love being Greek, and the sense of community it offers to me … the next step in celebrating our culture is sharing it with other people, who may not necessarily be Greek. I think that’s where my pride comes from; we have this philosophy of welcoming people in with open arms.”
