I thought I was going to eat jam and sweets for three months and then return home
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Eftichia Kiprovska, née Kostovská, was born on 15 August 1935 in the village of Vrondero in northern Greece. The year of her birth was ambiguous because she had no documents with her when she arrived in Czechoslovakia in 1948 and the authorities determined her age from her height and teeth to be 1937. She did not find out her true year of birth until she was in her fifties when she visited the registry office in her hometown. The family belonged to the Macedonian Slavs and the Macedonian dialect was spoken in the village. Eftichia Kiprovska attended school for only two years, it was a one-room school where children from the whole village attended. In March 1948 she was forced to leave her native village due to the approaching civil war. Together with 180 other children of various ages, she set off on a march to the border with what was then Yugoslavia, thinking that she would stay for three months and then return home. She arrived in Czechoslovakia in April 1948 and spent her adolescence in children´s homes in the Jeseník region and Chrastava near Liberec. She graduated from the Secondary Pedagogical School in Prague and worked as an educator in a day-care centre in the Jeseník region and in Brno. She met her mother after six years after leaving Greece in Czechoslovakia. To the joy of her family, she married a Macedonian with whom she had two children. She visited her native village for the first time in 1986. In 2025 Eftichia Kiprovská was living in Brno, where she had moved from Jeseník in the 1970s. Throughout her life she was active in the Greek community, where she participated in cultural life and maintained contact with her extended family and the compatriots with whom she came to Czechoslovakia.
