Giorgios Sideridis

* 1943

  • "Us oldies, our lot is to stay and, as they say, to cultivate our grandchildren. Because as our little ones grow and grow up, and grandchildren arrive, then those are double children for us. How often my wife says: 'I'm afraid...' And I say: 'You're afraid for your child, but I'm afraid for the child of my child, I'm doubly afraid, so don't worry that I'd let the boy out for them to run him over, I don't know, someone by car, or by tram.' "

  • "All that talk, that 'You're eating our bread!', that's a paradox, that comes in the left ear, I let it go out the right, but that's usually just tittle-tattle, as they say. There isn't such enmity towards us, as people here hold against blacks, say."

  • "Of course, our village, I visit it to this day, I go there every year. But as a boy I remember the hamlet that was green all over, we head trees both of fruit and variously ornamental. I don't know, pomegranates in every garden, that was, when they started to ripen, just like the Garden of Eden."

  • "Someone plunged a knife between us, as they say, because beforehand we used to play Slavo-Macedonian songs, we danced, made merry, because they went about like Greeks. But now they don't participate in our Greek festivities, and those are times when we celebrate the state holidays of 25th March and 28th October."

  • "We were supposed to, our group, to go to Syria, well, and unfortunately, our crane operator came back after two weeks instead of three months, and he said: 'Boys, it's unbearable, the blokes there, when the sun comes out, they vanish into thin air and our engineers are left to dig the ditches.' "

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Brno, 18.02.2011

    (audio)
    délka: 01:42:27
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

When the apples began to ripen, it was like in the Garden of Eden.

Giorgios Sideridis
Giorgios Sideridis
zdroj: Pamět Národa - Archiv

Giorgios Sideridis was born in 1943 in Megali Sterna (Kozani district) in Greece. He fled to Yugoslavia with his mother, grandmother, brother and sister. They spent a year in Buljkes, from whence the siblings were taken to Poland in 1948. They lived there in children‘s homes until 1954, when they were moved to Czechoslovakia. They met up with their father, who had been wounded during the civil war, with their mother and their grandmother. After arriving in Czechoslovakia, Giorgios Sideridis finished primary school in Višnová (Znojmo district), where he lived with his siblings in a children‘s home. He then moved in to his family in Brno, learnt to be a car mechanic, and started working first in Pragovka in Prague, then in Avie Brno, Chemomont, and finally in a concrete plant in Chrlice, where he remained till retirement. He was the chairman of the Greek community in Brno after 1991, during the socialist period he was culturally active, he headed the Prométheus ensemble. He married a Greek woman from the same village, they have a son and daughter. He keeps up the Greek traditions, speaks fluent Czech, Greek and Polish, they have a Greek household and apart from a few classic Czech recipes the cooking is mostly Greek. He considered returning to Greece, but decided to stay - the children went to Czech schools, and then came grandchildren. He accepted Czech citizenship, but sees himself as Greek. As he says, every Greek is proud. He claims that he was born a Greek, he‘ll die a Greek. All his siblings returned to Greece, his daughter married off there, his son took a Czech wife and lives in the Czech Republic. Giorgios Sideridis visits Greece every year. He says that he still has much to thank Czechs for, and he does not think that Czechs feel any enmity towards Greeks. He says they are on friendly terms with the Macedonian associations on a personal basis, but not on societal levels.