#aidonia

Labor Day Weekend is fun because everybody in Brooklyn is outside from sun up to sun down, partying four days straight like we're homeless.

I didn't know about Aidonia to be honest because it is a pretty small village but I gathered some general information about it!

Aidonia is a small semi-mountainous agricultural village of Grevena in a 760m altitude.

The village was previously called Stizahion (some idiomatic phrase associated with the walnut tree lumbering in the region) and must have been founded around 1692. It was renamed to Aidonia, after the many nightingales that can be heard in the area.

During the Ottoman period, the village was a chiflik, meaning a piece of land which belonged to an Ottoman military officer and where poor farmers could settle and cultivate the land with most profits going to the lord in exchange for some protection. In 1862, the villagers gathered money and bought the land from the lord.

It is very very small. It now has around 53 permanent inhabitants, but the population doubles in the summer. In its heyday it might have had around 500 people.

Athanasios Broufas (1850 - 1896) was raised and lived up to his adulthood in Aidonia. He was a loved Makedonomahos (= Macedonian fighter) in the region. (aka Greek Macedonian fighting for the liberation of Macedonia from the Ottoman Empire) He sold all his fortune for the Macedonian Struggle and he later fell in the battle. He had also built the old school of the village. There is a bust of his in the village's main square.

I found an old list of all the voting male members of the village, dating from 1914. Perhaps you will find your grandpa's ancestors here! The list also includes their birthyear and profession.

Because you don't know Greek, I can give you the family names mentioned here. I used the conventional English transliteration. They are: Athanasiadis, Alexopoulos, Vorsiotis, Vezaris, Gyftos, Gioulekas, Giarakaris, Georgopoulos, Dimou, Zounis, Zisopoulos, Thanasi, Thanaseos, Karas, Kolousopoulos, Kotopoulos, Kitsiopoulos, Kosmiopoulos, Karaliatos, Karagiozis, Loukas, Misiopoulos, Deropoulos, Nikopoulos, Nakos, Nianiopoulos, Papadopoulos, Papazoglou, Papakosta, Palas, Papanikolaou, Rezniotis, Rizou, Stergiou Papa, Spanopoulos, Stagikas, Startsios, Spanos, Samaras, Skentou, Tzikopoulos, Tsipopoulos, Tsoliades, Tzimoulas, Tzimos, Tsiolas, Tsiokiris, Tziatzou, Tzifkas, Hondros, Hatsiou, Psanopoulos.

Boy yes indeed -poulos is the most common surname ending in Greece but your village has blown this out of proportion XD