"When we were in Brno, and I still remember it, we lived near the train station, and when we opened the window, we saw about ten tanks under the window, heading in all directions. And of course before 1967, 1968, it was such a beautiful two years of totally relaxed atmosphere, when foreign books and so on started to be published, which was not the case before. Which, for example, when I was studying psychology, when we wanted some of these world authors in that field, we had to buy them in English, just get them in different ways somewhere. Nothing was published here. Or occasionally something was published in Slovakia, which was interesting, but there were more courageous ones, even in those years 1967, 1968. And then it all... they slammed the door and there was nothing again."
"When we were little we used to go to, in those children homes we had choirs where the Greek educators taught us Greek songs. So in those choirs, I really stood out as a kid who was just more gifted than those around me, so I was getting a lot of these solo parts and stuff. So they pulled me right out there, right away, they found out that I had a talent for it. So we sang, I can't say that we ever didn't sing and then we started. No, we just, the music just flowed through our lives all the time. And when we came to Brno after the children homes, I was already in my third year at secondary school, I graduated that year, so we immediately started going to some bigbeat bands in the sixties in different clubs. To the university club in Brno, there was a hotbed of all kinds of musicians, and that Moravia is really very, very musical. I would say a few levels more than, say, the whole of Bohemia. It's true, I don't know why, but it's true. In every village there is some cymbalo band, some beautiful voices of people."
"My name is Martha Elefteriadu, the A is short, which is what Czechs do, they like to make it longer, but it doesn't belong there. And what does the name 'elefteria' mean too - one of the most beautiful words in the whole world, it means freedom. So we are the Svoboda [freedom in Czech, ed.] girls. And where I was born: we were born outside Greece, because my parents left Greece after the Second World War, where there was a civil war. They went to Yugoslavia and that's where we were born, in the small village of Bulkes."
“Greeks have a more fervent nature [...] it is normal for them to express their feelings. Whereas here that isn’t the case, people here, not that they’re colder, but they just don’t show it so much and say the ties between parents and children are stronger.”
“When we came home, I was in my graduation year - we came back from the children’s home in Ivančice - Dad thought that we were too young for all that, that we had time enough and that we hadn’t even talked about it. It hadn’t even occurred to us. We were constantly under surveillance when we were going out and when we were coming back home... [...] He said: ‘Girls, you’ll find yourselves Greek boys, because we’ll be going back to Greece.’ ”
“I think Dad left (the party) back then. [...] When I heard those Greeks talking about politics... As Mr Zamarovsky said: ‘When three Greeks meet, they form three political parties and one movement.’ And when I heard how, in what complicated way they tried to explain the politics (my father tried to explain it to me), I said: ‘Dad, this is terribly complicated for me.’ I know the name Markos, Markikoi cropped up now and then - that was our father.”
“Ke tu chronu stin patrida [in the homeland in a year]... We always used to say it, but no one believed it much then. Well, later I mean, when we were bigger. Maybe when we were really small, when we’d arrived, then I reckon a lot of people thought it’d be like that, for five, six, ten years. They stopped thinking it after that.”
Martha Elefteriadu was born on 12 September 1946 in Bulkes, Yugoslavia, or later Serbian Vojvodina. She has a sister Tena, two years older, with whom she has been a lifelong singing duo. She is the daughter of Greek immigrants, the family having fled Greece after the Second World War. She and her parents came to Czechoslovakia in 1950, and she and her sister spent part of their childhood in a series of children homes designated for Greek refugees. She graduated in 1964 from grammar school in Brno, then went on to study medicine, later switching to psychology at the Faculty of Arts. She subsequently completed her studies at Charles University in Prague. The singing career of both sisters took off after meeting the guitarist Aleš Sigmund and winning the silver Bratislava Lyra in 1970. In 1972 they represented Czechoslovakia at the Polish festival in Sopot, and also sang in Greece, Germany and Switzerland. She also worked for Czech Radio and Radio Echo. To this day (2024) she is very active and dedicated to culture, especially Greek culture, which she continues to promote in the Czech Republic, organizing, for example, Greek dance classes.