New York 2026 Fieldwork

On this Mother’s Day, we commemorate the struggles of the migrant mother through the experience of “Eva.” Eva is a third-generation descendant of Ottoman Greek refugees from a small village on the outskirts of Trapezounta (Trk. Trabzon), who settled in a predominantly Pontic village in Kozani. Eva loved nature and fully embraced her agrarian lifestyle. When she turned nineteen, her father arranged her marriage to a young man, John, who was also a descendant of refugees but had already established himself in New York City. A local village boy who had been courting Eva tried to convince her to stay, but her father was adamant: “Now it is done.” Immediately after their nuptials, Eva and John moved into a small apartment of a multi-floor complex in New York City. According to Eva, “our apartment was so close to its neighboring building that you could not even see sunlight.”

One day, she ventured out to a nearby market to purchase the household's necessities, with no working knowledge of English and her apartment address in hand. She made a mental note that her building had a mound of garbage bags out front, but when she returned, they were gone. She cowered on the side of a nearby alleyway and cried fearful, silent tears for what seemed like eternity. “People passed by and looked, but no one stopped. Then an older man with a cane passed, but then turned back to address me in English. I fought through my tears to describe my situation with hand gestures and Greek. That is when he replied in Greek, ‘Don’t cry,’ and used the address to lead me to my apartment.”

On that day, and every day after, Eva committed herself to returning to Kozani. “When Charlie came home, I took down my suitcase and filled it with clothes. ‘It is nighttime, he said. Where will you go? Listen, I am your family now. I am here to protect you. I am saving money, and we will move to a home eventually.’ But I was not convinced. Every day I took the suitcase down, filled it, and then put it back. Days, months, years passed, but the suitcase was full of clothes.”

Charlie kept his word. They purchased a two-story home, and he protected her, but Eva’s commitment to return never wavered. With two children in tow, she and Charlie moved back to Greece and fought to remain there for six years. They established a business in Thessaloniki, only to burn through their savings, see it fail, and experience a second move to New York City.

Eva’s spirit to return to her village persists. Now a grandmother, she longs for her past life working the fields of her village and caring for the family’s farm animals. “I loved that life! The clean air, sharing time and space with friends and family members in the fields. Great memories!” Eva’s story reminds us that migrant women are often forcefully detached from their agency and coerced into settling in the US, but some women, mothers, and grandmothers resist assimilation and reject the American dream. 

Our FlagSHIP program kicked off yesterday with the arrival of two Flagler College students, Jack Bellars and Chris Kloosterman. As with many Ottoman Greek migrants, they immediately traveled to Ellis Island. On the Battery Park promenade, we discussed the significance of Castle Garden, the City’s first immigration station.

During our ferry ride to Ellis Island, Dr. Topalidis referenced the frantic race that many ships carrying Ottoman Greek migrants were forced to make due to the restrictive Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924. Those laws allowed only 100 Ottoman and Greek nationals to enter the US per year. Dr. Topalidis cited the Acropolis and the Madonna as a case study he published under the guidance of Dr. Ortiz, Ms. Deborah Hendrix, and Ms. Tamarra Jenkins at UF’s Samuel Proctor Oral History program. The S.S. Acropolis brought 200 refugees from Smyrna to Ellis Island, only to see them deported back to Piraeus on the S.S. Madonna because the quotas for Armenians and Greeks had been exhausted by December of 1922.

Landing on Ellis Island, Dr. Topalidis reminded the students of the anxiety and fear that many faced of being detained, held in quarantine, or deported on a case-by-case basis. As the students walked through the building, we talked about the questioning, documentation, and medical exams that Ottoman Greek migrants were subjected to. We continued our journey with a brief walk through the Lower East Side, where Dr. Topalidis indicated the approximate location of the Brotherhood of Marmarians at 25 Madison St. That location served as a safehouse, and its members helped migrants from Marmara find jobs and accommodations. Our travels concluded with a visit to St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church and a discussion of the site’s significance to Ottoman Greek migrants.

The word muhabeti (also parakathi), like so many other words, entered the Pontic Rümca language through Arabic and Ottoman (muhabbet). It is defined as “the practice of dialogical singing of the Pontic Greeks or Pontians” (Tsekouras 2024: 21). In practice, a muhabeti is a social gathering where (mostly) men sing to the sounds of a kemence over dinner. The songs often venerate love or memorialize the trauma of refugeedom. “Anna’s” four children recalled that their mother survived such trauma. Ottoman soldiers forced her, her mother, and grandmother from their village, Karakevezit. They were led on a death march that only Anna survived. “Her mother would beg and scavenge for food, which she then gave to her children. She died of starvation.” Her grandmother also succumbed to the burdens of the march. One of the few objects she carried was an icon of the Virgin Mary, which the family has preserved. Our two FlagSHIP students, Chris Kloosterman and Jack Bellars, digitized and curated the icon, along with many other photographs, documents, and objects, during our muhabeti at St. Basil’s Greek Orthodox Church in Troy, New York. 

By Chris Kloosterman 

Anthropology - Public Archaeology 

Flagler College 

The artifact from today’s interviews, an icon of Jesus and Mary, was a powerful reminder of how objects carry history. While the front of the piece showed a familiar religious scene, the back contained significant details. It featured a portrait of a man and a long passage of Russian text explaining the image's origins and identifying it as the icon of the Mother of God. 

The text on the back, in Russian, describes a miracle involving a monk and a mysterious stranger on Mount Athos. I am not a native speaker, so as we learned in Dr. Topalidis’s class, I used Google Lens to translate the text and deciphered the following to the best of my ability. According to the story, a guest who was actually an archangel appeared in a remote cell and sang a new hymn that had never been heard before. The monk had no paper or ink, and the angel miraculously engraved the words into stone. This story transforms the icon from a work of art into a record of a supernatural event. Seeing this text on the back of the artifact made it clear that for the owner, the object is a physical connection to a moment of divine intervention.

The addition of a (unknown) man’s photograph on the back suggests a personal history layered on top of the religious one. As her children indicated during the interview, the icon was “Anna’s (standing left)” cherished possession because it connected her to her past life in Pontos. The icon also represents a link between the legend of the angel, the power of prayer, which Anna strongly believed in, and the history of her family. Finally, the icon shows that people do not just keep these objects for their religious value, but because such objects represent the experiences of their ancestors. 

In Florida, we often think of the seagull as a pest, complicating our beach visits by petitioning us for food and lingering in our space mid-flight, but those behaviors have imbued them with a different meaning in literature and poetry (Rogers 2023). Seagulls symbolize the migrant. They are there to prepare us for the journey ahead. Their calls reassure us that “all will be okay.” They even fly alongside our vessels, wishing us well and showing the path as we set forth. And they are there when we arrive, warmly receiving us: “How was your journey? See! We told you everything would be okay!” When Chris and Jack arrived at JFK, seagulls were there to greet them, and on our last day in Buffalo, they were there to wish them a safe return. Στο επανιδείν! 

According to existing scholarship, Ottoman Greek migrants established 149 social organizations in the US in the early 20th century (Papadopoulos 2021). They aimed to preserve and promote the culture and traditions of their homelands in their US-based communities. While visiting Albany, the descendants of such an organization shared evidence with our project that has not been documented in scholarship. The Mutual Aid Society “O Pontos” of Watervliet, NY, was established in 1929 by migrants from Pontos. There was a separate Pontic organization in Albany, NY, and the two merged in 1941. At its height (1952 and 1957), the society had 27 dues-paying members and organized picnics and other community get-togethers.