"Here you saw all Greece"

A man refers to the establishment of the Greek community in Montreal.

G.Μ.: The friendships we formed, we slowly became acquainted with people. I met my wife in ’65, in ’67 I got married, the other friends got married too and so, eh… we ended up, let’s say, being around five hundred from the same place, from the Dodecanese. From Cos, from various other islands. From Syme, from Chalke and such, eh… the life… we didn’t lack in anything, I think that those of us who emigrated to Montreal, or to Toronto even, I don’t know how it is over there, we were fortunate enough to settle close to one another. That is, from Park Avenue up to Park Station and that. You see, we had created a, a multitude of Greeks, which numbered sixty-seventy thousand. Therefore, it was like a nice, second Greek state. And you know what? T he beauty was that it was diverse. That is, you saw here all of Greece, from the islands, Crete, the Peloponnese, Central Greece, Epirus, Macedonia, Thrace, the Ionian Islands and so… I mean, this mosaic was a beauty, eh… you could see all of Greece, you had it in here, in front of you. This was a big grandeur. We might had had differences, first and foremost all those inhabitants from Greece, the Peloponnesians and such, because of that drama which they went through with the Civil War.