Two migration stories intersecting in Canada

In the mid-1960s, Maria Papadaki, daughter of a large family from Neapoli in Lasithi, travelled by plane with her family to Canada. She was 10. The family went to Canada on a tourist visa. Maria’s parents were both wage workers and had five daughters. The Papadakis family took out a tourist visa because that was the means that would allow them to arrive legally in the country on which they had pinned all their hopes for a better future. They initially settled in the house of a relative, who was also a Greek migrant, and found employment: the father and one of Maria’s sisters worked at an amusement park which belonged to another Greek migrant. Their tourist visa expired soon, but a few years later they found a way to gain legal status and the whole family still lives in Canada.

Eftychis Litsakis, son of a large family from Galatas in Chania, worked as a house painter from a young age, when he first apprenticed with one of his compatriots. He usually had to commute from Galata to Chania for work, a distance of about 7 km. Eftychis had an older sister who had already migrated to Canada as a potential bride. It was her photograph that had made the journey first and then herself. The news of her life reaching the village painted a picture of happiness. Soon, a second sister followed the first. At the beginning of the 1970s, Eftychis was invited by his sisters to resettle in Canada. He invited his parents in turn and at the beginning of the 1980s, his twin sister. His parents and his twin sister, Maria Litsaki, who participates in the second part of the interview, ended up returning to Greece.

Maria and Eftychis met in Canada through the Cretan Association of Montreal. ‘She had this Cretan accent that people from Lasithi have and I loved it!’, says Eftychis, laughing. The couple has been together for 50 years. They built a ‘good life’ in Canada, achieved professional success, made a home and a family, and all in all, enjoyed a life that they believe they could have never had in Greece. But now that retirement affords them more freedom of movement, at least once a year and for a long period of time they find themselves in Galata, in the house they have built there. Their son has resettled in Chania. This is how they keep in touch with their birthplace as a family and, as can be expected, their constant movement causes them to repeatedly renegotiate their migration experience.