After her children disappeared, Eleni was questioned, tortured,imprisoned and ultimately executed on Aug. She chose herself and her 15-year-old daughter Glykeria, and said goodbye to her nine-year-old son, Nicholas and three older daughters.

(In the end 28,000 children were kidnapped in the pedomasoma.) The escape succeeded after two abortive tries-but on the third try, she was forced to stay behind, to provide two women from her household to harvest wheat for the guerrillas. When the guerrillas, who occupied the village in the last months of the Greek Civil War, started collecting children to take them behind the Iron Curtain, Eleni began to plan a nighttime escape for her own children. Before that day, she was imprisoned, crowded along with 31 other prisoners into the tiny basement of her own house-which had been taken over as guerrilla headquarters.

1948- her body left in a ravine along with 12 other murdered civilians.

24, the Dukakis group arrived in Lia to attend a memorial service for Eleni Gatzoyiannis, my mother-in-law and the mother of my husband Nicholas GageĮleni Gatzoyiannis was executed by a firing squad of Communist guerrillas in Aug. (The small village also produced the father of film director John Cassavetes.) Dukakis, with tears in his eyes, lauded the village which had produced his mother Euterpe, who became one of the the first Greek-American women to earn a college degree. After a lavish dinner hosted by the Mayor of Ioannina, they left the next day to see Vrisohori where Sen. The couple, along with Kitty's sister Ginnie and Ginnie's husband, Al, used the Grand Serai Hotel in Ioannnina as a base. Although Mike and Kitty have visited Greece many times, they had never visited Northern Greece and his grandparents' village. 24, causing great excitement throughout the country, and especially in Lia, where the village had been spruced up, pot holes filled, foliage pruned, and a heliport repaved to receive Dukakis' entourage, (although the man himself chose to drive up the vertiginous mountain roads so he could see the countryside on the way.)ĭukakis' maternal grandparents came from Vrisohori, another small and, until recently, isolated village not far from Lia. Michael Dukakis, who ran for the presidency of the United States in 1988 and was the longest-serving governor in Massachusetts history, arrived in the small northern Greek village of Lia last week on Aug.

Eleni nicholas cage