Elli Papadimitriou

Elli Papadimitriou was born in 1906 in Smyrna and grew up in Athens, where she studied agriculture. She published the poetry collection "Response" in 1946, featuring poems from the Middle East during the war, and the play "Anatoli" in 1952, focusing on the Asia Minor Catastrophe. Her subsequent works include: "Poetic Knowledge" in 1952 (in a limited edition), "Eight Notebooks of Poems" in 1961, "The Mountain" in 1963, and "Greek Aid to America" in 1964. In the same year (1964), she published a series of seventeen oral testimonies from people who survived the Asia Minor Catastrophe, the Occupation, the Resistance, and the Civil War, titled "We Hear Your Voice, Homeland." Between 1972 and 1979, this material, expanding to about 100 narratives, was republished by Kedros Editions of Nana Kallianesi (in four volumes) under the title "Common Word." In 1984 and onwards, the publishing baton for "Common Word" was taken over by Hermes Editions. Theatrical adaptations of her work were staged in Athens by Vangelis Theodoropoulos in 1988, 1997, 2004, and 2013—the last three after the author's death in Athens in 1993.