Margarita asked her grandmother to pass the icons on to her when she would no longer need them and Kallino agreed. After her death, Kallino’s three icons stayed with Margarita. The third icon is a relatively newer one, painted in the Russian style and depicting Agios Nikolaos.
According to family history, Anna Raizopoulou was a particularly pious woman who lived an ascetic life. After 1922, she found herself displaced from Apollonia or Apolloniada, Prusa (today’s Gölyazi, Bursa) to Thessaloniki. Anna managed to bring several icons with her.
The small display contains an icon of the Virgin Mary, a pouch filled with soil and a note. This is a recent find by Michalis Kokkinos, a third-generation Asia Minor refugee, whose mother died in 2021.
On her father’s side, Gogo Rakopoulou hails from Prousa, while on her mother’s side, her ancestors were originally from Smyrna. Their original surname is not known, since they adopted the surname ‘Tsichlakis’ upon their arrival in Chania. These four icons travelled with them and, after the family had settled in Greece, they adorned their homes and, later, their descendants’ homes.
Gogo Rakopoulou describes how, when she took the icons out to clean them, she noticed that some of them had writing on them. As she says, one of the icons was probably her family’s diary.