Today it is synonymous with prestige, glamour, and extravagant parties, but the Greek island of Mykonos once lived a very different life—one marked by modesty, honesty, and hard work. Speaking about that forgotten side of the island, as well as her own difficult life, was 87-year-old Irini Marti in a deeply emotional testimony.
Grandmother Irini has spent her entire life on the island, watching it transform before her eyes.
“I am from Mykonos, and I have never left this place. Mykonos once had poverty, and now it has luxury—and the kind of luxury that is not good,” the elderly woman begins her story, recalling a time when the island had no luxury villas or yachts.
Back then, she says, life was simpler and more honest. People looked forward to Sundays, going to church, and the smell of freshly baked bread.
“People only cared about when Sunday would come so they could come down from the villages and go to church. Our parents would load flour onto a donkey, take it to the oven to bake bread, and then carry it home. They were good and honest people. And our only outing was taking small boats to the nearby island of Delos,” Grandmother Irini recalls.
She Was Married Off Without a Say, Raised Her Daughter Beneath the Kitchen Sink
Life in those days also came with harsh rules, especially for women. Grandmother Irini recalled how she met her husband without ever having the right to make her own choice.
“He came with his mother and father, and they simply told my parents, ‘This one.’ I had never been involved with him, and I wasn’t even allowed to go out. My father would just tell me, ‘I will do the talking—you will not speak.’ Back then on Mykonos, a child had no right to say, ‘I don’t like him, I don’t want to marry him,'” she says.
She had to begin working hard at an early age and continued doing physically demanding work even during the most sensitive periods of her life.
“I washed dishes from the age of 19. I was pregnant and still washing dishes. I practically raised my youngest child, my daughter Sofoula, beneath the kitchen sink while I worked… When I gave birth, there were no doctors. Back then, babies were wrapped tightly in swaddling cloths. Whenever I asked the midwives why they did that because I felt sorry for the babies, they would answer, ‘So they will have beautiful bodies.'”
A Tragedy From Which There Is No Recovery
Yet the hardest blows Grandmother Irini endured were not the years of hard labor or the modest life in which she was raised, but the immeasurable losses she suffered later in life.
“All of that is behind me now… Now I only pray that the children God has left me will be well, while I have another path ahead of me. All my sorrows are there. I lost two daughters—one in a traffic accident in 1980, and the other in 2018 from a heart attack. Isn’t that pain? Isn’t that pain? It hurt then, and it still hurts. I think about them every day,” Grandmother Irini concludes her heartbreaking testimony.
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