“She grew up listening to stories about her grandfather and remembers her grandmother showing her treasured items like his medical degree from March 2, 1901, and a faded sepia photograph of the elegantly lanky young man with a faraway look in his eyes. The stories haunted her. “I never could have imagined that we’d be experiencing such a similar situation a century later,” says Theodoropoulou.
Tzortzis, as he was known, was born in the village of Emborio on the southern Aegean island of Santorini. The youngest of five in a family of grape farmers, he managed to attend medical school in Athens and returned to the island to work as an obstetrician and gynecologist.
“He traveled to the surrounding islands a lot to visit patients and met my grandmother Maria in Anafi. They fell madly in love, got married and moved to Athens, where my mother was born,” says Theodoropoulou.
Two years later, in the summer of 1918, their lives were turned upside down as the Spanish flu made its first appearance in Greece in late July. While the situation at first seemed under control, it deteriorated rapidly over the course of a few months. When Tzortzis was called on to help, he accepted without a second thought. He threw some clothes into a suitcase and said goodbye to his toddler daughter and wife, instructing her not to leave the house unless absolutely necessary, to wash her hands diligently, to change and wash her clothes often and to treat the smallest of symptoms with antiseptic gargles and inhalations – the only known response at the time. He was assigned to a field hospital in Oropos, eastern Attica, which had been set up after facilities in Athens became overwhelmed.”
