Eleni N. Gage
Columbia University

Home Again: The Recreation of a House, and a History, in Epeiros

A simple stone dwelling in mountainous Epeiros, the house of Eleni Gatzoyiannis symbolizes Greece’s turbulent history in the early twentieth century. The home was built around 1856, but the household was divided when the head of the family immigrated to work in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1910. Left behind to raise five children, his wife Eleni survived the German occupation and much of the Greek Civil War. But in 1948, a few months before the Communist defeat, she met a cruel end, imprisoned in her own home, tortured, and executed for engineering her children’s escape to America. Her house fell into ruin, but its story was immortalized by her son, Nicholas Gage, in his 1983 book Eleni. Finally, in 2002, Gage’s daughter Eleni returned to Epeiros to rebuild her grandmother’s home. A small-scale, personal exploration of modern material culture in Greece, the excavation of the house unearthed a diverse assemblage of artifacts from agrarian objects such as horseshoes, which reflect the local economy at peace, to bullets and grenades, the armature of war. An Ottoman coin placed under the threshold to commemorate the original building’s foundation was discovered, as were remnants of the iron headboard Eleni’s husband had imported, one of several luxury objects that contributed to the labeling of Eleni as “the Amerikana,” and led, in part, to her execution. Such artifacts, along with the physical recreation of the house, present a dramatic cross-section of rural modernity, exemplifying the Greek-American experience and the volatile past of modern Greece.