In Australia, Chrysanthi Zantioti discovered two bundles of letters after her mother’s death – one written “from Nick to Popi” and another “from Popi to Nick,” revealing the early correspondence of a couple whose lives were shaped by migration from Kythira.
Her father, Nick, had first left for Australia, where an uncle ran a café in a small town in Queensland. Popi later followed him, and the couple married in 1955. Their daughter, Chrysanthi Zantioti – now an artist and co-curator of the exhibition “NOSTOI | Homecomings: Stories of the Ionian Island Diaspora in Queensland” – reflects on the distance between expectation and reality.
“She may have romanticized that journey,” she says of her mother, in an interview with Kathimerini. “She had seen Hollywood films in Athens and may have imagined her departure as a scene from a movie, with her beloved waiting on the other side of the world.” Instead, Popi arrived in a remote town “that didn’t even have a sewage system,” where she later survived a flood, “clinging to a rope while the water carried away her shoes and clothes.”
Zantioti says her mother’s story reflects a broader migrant experience, especially for women. “At least my mother knew my father, even vaguely. Other women arrived to marry men they had only seen in a photograph.”
