Zeese Papanikolas
At the Edge of the Diaspora

When I was growing up the 1940s and 1950s the original Greek Town in Salt Lake City, with its Greek-language newspapers, its coffeehouses and restaurants and cheap hotels, was gone, and its only relic was the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral. On Good Friday afternoon my sister, my cousins and I were taken out of school to crawl under the flower-covered bier of Christ in order to receive the blessing that would protect us from the evils of the world. Above the icon screen the immigrants who build the church had installed a neon eye that blinked on and off to tell us when to stand and when to kneel. My Yiayia Yoryia, slightly witchy in her widow’s black, pointed to it and told us it was God’s eye watching to see if we were talking, fidgeting or chewing gum. By the time I was 12, quietly and without resentment, I was an atheist. Today when I find myself in an Orthodox church for a wedding, a baptism or, sadly, more recently a funeral, in spite of the haunting liturgical music and the memories, I feel more and more uncomfortable, like a tourist among the earnest believers on either side of me.

The Greek community in Salt Lake City was small. My paternal grandfather had died young, and I never knew him. My Greek world was my widowed grandmother, my mother’s father, the tall man they called the tsélingas, the head shepherd of the Salt Lake flock, and the faint smell of garlic and cinnamon on my Yiayia Emily’s small hands. It was the table at Easter and Christmas and New Years and that strange American holiday, Thanksgiving, where we ate turkey and remembered Our Pilgrim Fathers. There were no Greek families in my suburban neighborhood, and I had no Greek friends. But I had cousins, hundreds of them it seemed, and I had history. My mother, Helen Zeese Papanikolas, is remembered as the first historian of Greek immigration to the Rocky Mountain west and a writer of fictions chronicling the complexity of memory and assimilation for the immigrants’ children. My father was a fabulous, not necessarily accurate, teller of tales of immigrant life in the industrial town of Magna, Utah. But it wasn’t until I came across a pamphlet in the depths of a university library talking about a violent strike in Colorado in 1913-14 and the murder of the organizer Louis Tikas, “Louis the Greek,” that I fully and emotionally entered the immigrant world. It changed my life. I traveled through Utah and Colorado searching for old men and women who had been in the strike and had known Tikas. I remember Gus Papadakis. He left Crete in 1911 and stayed in the mines. He was a union man. He’d never bought a pit boss a drink in his life, or a cigar to get a job or a better room in a mine. Some of the Union organizers in Colorado were socialists. I asked him what he knew of socialism. “I eat, you’re hungry,” he said. “It isn’t right.” I will never forget it.

The immigrants had come to earn American dollars and return to the homeland. We forget those who were buried in factory town cemeteries or in a hole in the sagebrush along an isolated railroad line. We forget those who returned to Greece broken by America. By the 1950s prosperity had “whitened” the Greek Americans and amnesia had erased prosperity’s cost.

I often think of America as the Galapagos of the Greek Diaspora. In 1924 the Johnson-Reed Act reduced immigration from Greece to a trickle. Cut off from the Old Country by war and civil war, Greek Americans had little first-hand knowledge of the cultural and economic struggles of their ancestral land. In spite of the endless Twenty-Fifth of March encomiums on the Cradle of Democracy, the tanks that rolled past the Parthenon in 1967 brought only seven years of shameful silence from the Churches and the Greek American community and even praise for the Colonels who had killed Greek democracy.

Borders are imaginary lines drawn on the earth by fear of others, by bloated nationalism and by a specious defense of something nations call the “purity” of their culture—as if a culture is some ethnic and racially homogenized, unchanging, imperative. Greek Americans whose own families once had their labor exploited, their Greek Towns burned, and finally, the borders of the United States virtually shut against them, have a special obligation to act against the criminalization of migration in their own country, where masked police roam the cities breaking up families, handcuffing men and women and deporting them without hearings or counsel sometimes to countries they’ve never even heard of. Greece itself has now become a country of immigrants. They are desperate. They perish crossing the sea, camp in cities and walk along tracks trying to cross borders into richer countries. Greeks remembered the flood of their own desperate compatriots from Turkey following the Greco-Turkish war of 1919-22. But what was once sympathy for today’s refugees has begun to produce an ugly backlash. Wars between nations and tribes, climate disaster, political repression, and desperate poverty have caused massive migrations worldwide. Migrations today demand a world solution, and Greeks and Greek Americans must not retreat from these challenges and the obligations their own histories demand of them.

December 26, 2025

Zeese Papanikolas was born in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1942. He is the author of three studies of American culture, the dual language book Hugo Dux, M. D.: The Chief of All the Dadaists in Czechoslovakia, and Buried Unsung: Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre, translated into Greek by Pelagia Marketou.