The landscape of Didymotychos is cute but impressive at the same time. In front of me is Erythropotamos, a tributary of the Evros, with Roman trees along the banks. On their branches hung white robes with red embroidery. And from the depths came the soothing sound of a fox, accompanied by the rustling of leaves. At some point, I wondered where I was. And then I thought that there really is no better way for the Ethnological Museum of Thrace to celebrate its 20th anniversary: ​​where nature meets history, with an installation dedicated to Asia Minor and refugees – present and past – in the heart of this beautiful place, the Greek border, which remains unknown to many Greeks. The event, planned by the founder and “soul” of ETHM Aggeliki Jannakidu, with the participation of museum partner Philopoimenas Andredis and organist Yannis Sarsakis, united the present and the past. On the one hand, eleven woven shirts measuring a century of life and belonging to the exiled Greeks who arrived after 1922, embroidered with 732 place names of Eastern Thrace, and on the other hand, 11 garments left behind by immigrants who have recently crossed our borders, also embroidered by the hands of Giannakido. The entire region has remnants and “traces” of migration flows, as it is one of the narrowest passages with Turkey. Together with Andreadis, they read excerpts from Ritsos’s poem “When a Stranger Comes” and texts related to these routes.

“I thought that this action was the most appropriate to mark the 20th anniversary of the presence of the museum in Thrace, a place where the tragic experience of violence and eradication is recorded, because from antiquity to the present day it is a crossroads,” Angeliki said. Giannakidis is next in the column. Macedonian by birth, she married a Thracian and moved to Alexandroupoli in 1967, at the age of 18. With a keen sense and tireless energy, he began to collect stories about people and objects related to the cultivation of nature, religious customs, traditional techniques that tended to disappear, such as weaving, creativity, metalworking. Over the years, the collection has grown, and in 2002, a private museum was opened in a rented old mansion in Alexandroupolis, which informs the visitor in chronological and thematic order.

But Jannakida is not only concerned with the past. She is the person who knows every craftsman and farmer in Thrace, the one who found the right contacts for the house of Dior, and also contributed to the renaissance of silk in Soufli. So we hope that the museum will do its best to help the whole of Thrace come out of obscurity.