Konstantinos Nikolaidis was born in 1873 in Niğde, in the province of Ikonio (Konya). Konstantinos worked for the local branch of the Ottoman Tobacco Company known as Régie. His wife Ourania was also from Niğde and the couple had four children, two sons and two daughters.
They arrived in Greece as refugees in 1923 or 1924, disembarking in Corfu where they stayed for a few months. Then they moved to Thessaloniki where they finally settled down. Konstantinos Nikolaidis became involved in local politics and was a candidate for the position of substitute mayor with the electoral alliance of Theofylaktos Theofylaktou in the municipal election of 1930.
Their daughter, Olympia, studied dentistry in Athens in the 1930s. She worked in Thessaloniki as a dentist and a dental technician and was one of the first women dentists in Northern Greece. It was Olympia who donated an array of family heirlooms to the Folklife and Ethnological Museum of Macedonia and Thrace: household items, photographs, documents, a notebook with her father’s memoirs, and paintings he had made.
She also donated two bundles used to transport the family’s personal items, mainly clothes and rugs, from Asia Minor. The bundles are made up of pieces of cotton fabric sewn together and reinforced with a lining to make them sturdier. Not many bundles of this kind are preserved today, but for many years they were the main means of carrying and transporting objects, which made them a common sight in photographs depicting the population exchange process.
