By Kostantinos Tsavalos
“How I got in touch with my roots” -A Greek-American woman’s journey to Greece
Shannon McMahon-Hamdy has a background in news and travel destination features, and previously reported on travel and the coronavirus pandemic for the Washington Post.
Originally from Boston, he is considered an expert on Greece, Egypt and New England travel and has written and edited articles for CNBC, NPR, National Geographic, People.com, MarketWatch and others.
“My mission”
“In the five years since my grandfather died of COVID-19 at the beginning of the pandemic, an event that deprived us of a final goodbye, I had taken… patriotic to bring my mom back to the Peloponnese for the first time in three decades. It would be my first time beyond the islands and Athens, a city that, from the first time I visited my family there as a teenager, felt almost as if it had once been my home. From my childhood, I sought out the distinctive Greek accent of my quiet yiayia and my rambunctious papou and enjoyed listening to my mom and aunt speak fluent Greek with them during their vacation by their backyard pool on Long Island.”
“I intended my mother’s first time in Greece in decades to be a break from caring for her elderly mother. But most of all, what happened on this trip for both of us was a new beginning, not the goodbye I originally thought it would be.”
As McMahon admits that realization came in waves during her stay and visit to Greece.
“I realized that instead of losing the culture and connection we were worried would disappear, we could carry it with us where we were going back. I signed up to take Greek classes at the Greek university located a mile and a half from my home in Boston, hoping that my Spanish would help with some level of conversational Greek. Apart from that, we are also reviving old cooking recipes of my yiayia, who died six months after our return from Greece,” he concludes emphatically.
“‘What do you think Grandpa would say about all this?” I asked my mother as we prepared to board the plane home. ‘I don’t think he would have believed it,’ she replied…”
