Jannis Ioannidis

* 1949

  • “[Granddad] came down from the mountains. He wanted to see his family, which was pretty big... a lot of siblings and Grandma.... He wanted to meet them one evening. But they couldn’t do that in our village, because everyone knew he was in the mountains (as a partisan), and so they agreed to meet in a different village. It was called Cherso. They met there in the night, but Granddad was betrayed by one of his acquaintances who told the police or the militia that Jannis Ioannidis - because I’m named after him - had arrived. Then they caught him and shot him on the spot.”

  • “My repatriation started with my brother being one of the first to leave for Greece in 1975. I left in ’79. I was exactly thirty years old. I had gotten my papers. I had been to the embassy here in Prague, and there was unbelievably long queue of all Greeks from Czechoslovakia. Whether from Krnov, Ostrava, Šumperk, from all those cities we lived in.... Brno and so on. I met many people I knew. There were queues of people at the embassy--everyone saying we’d be going home, we’d repatriate. I got the papers - because we didn’t have passports - allowing us to move to Greece. So, that was for me like I had some huge intrinsic wealth. I was so unbelievably happy that I would be returning to Greece, the land which I had never known, but which was the land of my parents and of all the others.”

  • “That time I flew to Bulgaria from Prague to Sofia. There, I got on to a train to Thessaloniki, to Solun [note by translator: another name for Thessaloniki]. And for the first time in my life there at the train station--I can hardly even believe it, in 1979--I met real Greeks for the first time. And, for the first time in my life I wasn’t talking to political emigrants. For the first time at that station. When I heard their Greek, my heart jumped with a start. I went after them and said: ‘Are you going to Greece as well?’ And the answer was right there: ‘And where would we be going? We’re going home.’ Those were, for me, the moments that stay with me to this day: there I felt for the first time that I did have a homeland.”

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Praha, 20.08.2010

    (audio)
    duration: 01:03:36
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

I was unbelievably happy that I would be returning to Greece, to the land I had never known.

Jannis Ioannidis was born on the 22nd of June 1949 in the “Greek” village Buljkes in Yugoslavian Vojvodina. His father was a partisan in the communist army DSE (Democratic Army of Greece) who had, at eighteen years of age in 1948, lost a leg during military operations in northern Greece - he was subsequently taken to the hospital in Buljkes, where he got to know the seventeen-year-old nurse Margarita, Jannis’ mother. In August 1949 his parents had to take Little Jannis and leave Buljkes for Czechoslovakia. His father was placed into the Greek clinic in Jablonné, while Jannis stayed with his mother in the sanatorium in Ústí nad Orlicí. The family settled down in Krnov in the early 1950s, moving to Bohumín soon after. Jannis was one of the small Greek children who did not go through the Czech children’s homes. He grew up purely among Greeks right until he started attending a Czech school. He was nineteen years old during the Greek emigrant communities split and the Soviet armies invaded Czechoslovakia. The effects of normalisation were felt by his family as well. He returned to Greece in 1979, from whence he observed the events surrounding the Velvet Revolution in 1989. Jannis Ioannidis returned to the Prague with his Czech wife in the year 2000; he still lives there.