Greek grandmother welcomes refugee family into her home
82-year-old Panagiota Vasileiadou knows what it is like to be forced from her home.
The Greek grandmother's parents were ethnic Greek refugees who left Turkey in a population exchange in the early 1920s. The family lost their home again during World War II.
Now, she is opening her home to a new generation of refugees, who are camped in a field near her home in the northern Greek village of Idomeni.
You May Also Like
There are more than 10,000 people -- mostly refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan -- in the makeshift camp living in dire conditions after the border to Macedonia (FYROM) closed six weeks ago.
Vasileiadou offers them a place to stay while they wait in this limbo.
They call her Mama.
"I have company in the house," Vasileiadou said in an interview with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR). "I talk, we laugh, although we don't understand each other."
Vasileiadou was 7 years old when her house burned down.
"We didn't have a spoon or fork bread or clothes, " Vasileiadou said. "The only things we had were the nightgowns we were wearing."
When refugees and migrants began passing through her village, Vasileiadou began handing out food and supplies to them as they trudged by, carrying all of their possessions. But once people became trapped at the border as countries along the Balkan route shut their doors, she decided to open her home.
Five refugees are living in her home while others come and have a hot meal, take a shower, and wash their clothes.
They are among the estimated 53,000 people living in Greece in camps and detention centers who are living in limbo since the Balkan states closed their borders and the EU and Greece agreed on a new plan to turn back refugees.
Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.
Megan Specia was Mashable's Assistant Real-Time News Editor and joined the team in September 2014. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism & Mass Communications from the University of New Hampshire after growing up in the Jersey 'burbs. She made her way to New York via a four year stopover in Dublin. Megan previously worked as a journalist and editor at Storyful in both Dublin and New York. Before all of that, though, her claim to fame was as head cake arranger and purveyor of all things sweet at Queen of Tarts cafe in Dublin, where she developed a serious addiction to macarons.
