Eleftheria Lialios
A Greek Revolution in America

Being born in Greece and growing up in Detroit during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s made me deeply aware of the divides shaped by race and wealth. We were a street-vending family, and I watched my parents struggle as they tried to find their place in White America. Being Greek in a country that didn’t always consider Greeks “white” was an uphill battle. Even though my parents had no schooling themselves, they pushed me toward education, believing it was the only way to survive. Upon receiving my Undergraduate degree in Psychology, with a minor in Sociology from Wayne State University in Detroit, I began working as a Vietnam Veterans counselor for the City of Detroit and later became the agency’s coordinator. I struggled with the emotional demands of the work and with the government’s evident lack of concern for these deeply distressed veterans. During this period, while conducting data analysis for my advisor at Wayne State University, I was asked to photograph a baboon troupe at the Detroit Zoo, an experience that drew me toward the arts and initiated a deep, lifelong engagement with photography. I obtained my Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I received a Fulbright Research Scholar grant to Greece in 1986, returned to Chicago and began teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago till 2010. It was through working with veterans and students that I understood that learning wasn’t just a lifeline for subsistence, but a doorway to new cultures, new ideas, new ways of thinking, and new pathways for how to think with different roads that could possibly be taken, something that only education can offer an individual.

At home, I was expected to uphold Greek traditions, especially when it came to religion and marriage. As a child, I found my escape in the church choir, using music to push back against the sense of control that hung over me. Greek girls were expected to marry within the culture to preserve the purity of the bloodline, a rule no one questioned. Because dating was not permitted in my very traditional home, I had no experience interacting with the opposite sex in the American context. As I adapted to the gender expectations of the 1970s, I inevitably made a few mistakes. And while the church tied Greek American identity to ancient history and ritual, my mind was opening to new worlds through writers like Simone de Beauvoir, Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Erica Jong, and Angela Davis, women who gave me language for the freedom I felt myself reaching toward.

My inner transformation deepened when I read the books of Nikos Kazantzakis. His work revealed a Greece far removed from the rigid, patriarchal version I had been raised to protect. In Zorba the Greek, I didn’t see recklessness but a way of living fully, emotionally, and without apology. Kazantzakis showed that intellectual depth and passionate living were not opposites but equal forces in the shaping of a meaningful life. Over time, I came to imagine myself as a kind of female Zorba, guided not by obedience to family or church but by instinct, curiosity, creativity, and emotional truth. His Letter to Greco taught me that liberation and learning are inseparable, a lesson that shaped my adulthood, my art, and my teaching.

The pressure to maintain cultural purity fell heaviest on women. Greek American girls grew up under strict rules meant to protect the bloodline, the language, and the church. Boys, meanwhile, moved freely through American culture without the same scrutiny. Many families, including my own, denied their Albanian roots while obsessing over purity, revealing how fragile and constructed the notion of “Greekness” often was. These gendered expectations created deep personal conflict, especially as I began to question the authority of the traditions I was told to protect.

Beyond my household, I saw similar tensions unfolding within the Greek communities of Detroit and later Chicago. The church, which dominated Greek American life, was obsessed with tradition and reluctant to acknowledge the living and changing Greece that existed beyond its walls. Greek radio stations played only old songs, ignoring the contemporary music that carried the voice of a modern Greece. Some broadcasters even supported the Junta of 1967–1974, choosing nostalgia for dictatorship over the cultural renaissance that followed. As Greek communities moved to the suburbs, Greektown in both cities became a tourist backdrop rather than a lived neighborhood, hollowed out of community and culture. Greeks in Greece often regarded Greek Americans as bound to outdated customs, a perception that was not entirely unfounded.

A clearer contrast emerged when I looked at the Jewish community. Jews built a network of enduring cultural institutions in the United States that honored both heritage and modern life. They invested in bookstores, film screenings, newspapers, youth programs, intellectual circles, and historical societies. They preserved their past while generating new thought, new art, new literature, and new scholarship. Their centuries-long diasporic cultural life was multilayered, forward-moving, and rooted in continuity. Greek Americans, on the other hand, relied heavily on the church and clung to an antiquated image of Greece that bore little resemblance to the vibrant culture evolving overseas. Instead of building contemporary forums, libraries, or artistic institutions, our community often narrowed its identity to food festivals, folk dance, and a selective retelling of ancient history.

This refusal to integrate the present became one of the greatest failures of Greek American identity. Greece itself was embracing its modern achievements in the arts, sciences, and intellectual life, while Greek Americans remained fixated on antiquity and orthodoxy. Greek schools centered on religion and ancient history but offered almost nothing on modern Greek literature, modern history, or the remarkable work Greeks are doing today in every field. Contemporary Greek artists and thinkers, including those of us born in Greece and working in the United States, were repeatedly overlooked. I felt that dismissal personally as museums preferred to display village costumes and folk rituals rather than the work of living Greek American artists who were contributing to the cultural fabric of this country. Greek women artists working in modern, non-religious, or non-folkloric themes and who eschew picturesque landscapes of Greece have often found themselves unwelcome in community institutions, a dynamic that devalued their work and left them feeling alienated, a pattern that continues to this day.

The political choices of many Greek Americans added to my concern. A large number supported ultra-conservative platforms in recent elections, hoping to protect their financial interests even as those policies undermined democratic values and targeted vulnerable communities. It felt as if many were clinging to an imagined past rather than engaging with the complexities of the present, forgetting that democracy itself was one of Greece’s most profound gifts to the world.

What I imagine for the future of Greek American culture is a shift toward intellectual life, modern engagement, and genuine openness. We need to build institutions that celebrate contemporary Greek and Greek American contributions to art, science, and global thought. Young people should see their heritage not as a burden or a set of restrictions but as a living identity shaped by both past and present. Assimilation should not be viewed as loss but as evolution, much like Kazantzakis urged us to wrestle with our heritage and transform it into something new.

The Greek American community must stop clinging to a Greece that no longer exists. We need a new vision rooted in the depth of our history and the vitality of our present. We need to honor the work of living Greek artists, thinkers, scientists, and creators. We need forums for conversation, spaces for learning, and institutions that reflect the dynamism of modern Greek American life. We must honor not only the Greece of statues and ruins but the Greece of living voices.

It is time for Greek Americans to step out of the shadow of ancient Greece and face modernity with courage, imagination, and openness. Only then can our culture grow in a way that is meaningful, relevant, and powerful for future generations. I call for a Greek revolution in America, one that is expressed through a chorus of living and multiple modern voices rather than the revered echoes of antiquity. A heterogeneous chorus that is meant to take root, evolve, endure, transform, and help shape the future of Greek America.

January 16, 2026

Eleftheria Lialios lives in Chicago and works as an artist, educator, and activist. She is the mother of Violeta Lialios-Bouwman and of Elektra Lialios, who died of cancer at the age of five. She has received numerous grants and is the 2026 Guest Artist at Fermilab. Her work and teaching are driven by a continual search for new ways to articulate emerging visions.