The refugee house of Kyriaki Moschou at 14 Kallipoleos Street

Her father died young as did her husband. Kyriakoula lived in this small house with her mother, Marii, and her two sons, Stavros and Nikos. To make ends meet, Kyriakoula worked as an embroiderer, a washerwoman, a cleaner and a worker at the Matsangos tobacco factory.

Her granddaughter, Kyriaki Moschou, tells us the story of her grandma, Kyriakoula, and her house at 14 Kallipoleos Street; the house Kyriaki inherited from her grandma along with her name and her stories:

 ‘The house was very small. It was just one room, no more than 20 square metres with a small yard in the front, which grandma later closed off and turned into a front room so that they could live a little better. Her father died early, before the Second World War, and essentially she lived in this house with her mother, Marii, and her two children, Nikos, the eldest, and Stavros, my father. My father told me that he and his brother slept in the front room, the one added later. Their bed was kind of tall and they kept chickens underneath. They had to eat, to survive somehow. They were extremely poor. So, my dad would wake up in the morning and his grandma, Marii, would say: “Get under the bed and check if the chickens have laid any eggs.” In the 1970s, I remember there was a sofa bed there with storage space for bed linen, rugs, etc. That’s where my grandma slept, with my uncle sleeping in the other room, until he moved to his own house. So, grandma used to sleep on the sofa bed, there was a small table where they ate, a small stove, grandma’s chair and the small kitchen that you saw earlier […]’.

It’s not the size of the rooms, the grand verandas or the spacious parlours that make a home. A 20-square-metre, sunless, ground floor house, with a washtub instead of a bathtub, can become an entire kingdom built on the relationships, the experiences, and the affection shared by the people inhabiting it. The story of Kyriakoula Moschou is a story of displacement, loss, poverty and hard work, but it is also a story of strength, perseverance, and tenacity; a testament to her determination to build a better life. As her granddaughter points out,  her grandma’s story is the shared story of all refugees.