Seventy-six years later, the girls’ dowry was returned to their living descendants, fulfilling the promise made by the Yalcin family to their neighbours. Ramazan Yalcin used to say, ‘A dowry left behind should never be given away. A trousseau laden with sighs of grief cannot bring happiness to the girl who receives it.’ Ramazan never forgot his childhood friend Safie, as he called Sofia Minoglou.
After the Turkish coup of September 1980, Kemal Yalcin, now a professor, was forced to become a refugee himself. He found himself in Germany and only managed to reunite with his parents twelve years later. He asked his father to tell him the story of the Minoglou family again and it was his father who encouraged him to write about it and to look for the family in Greece in order to deliver the trousseau which was still in a chest in the Yalcin home back in Honaz.
Anastasia Ktypiadou met Ioakeim Prokopoglou at her father’s, Ioannis, grocery store and soon their acquaintance became a budding romance. Sadly, the couple was temporarily driven apart by the end of the Greco-Turkish war and the ensuing population exchange agreement, with Anastasia remaining in Constantinople, as her family was exempt from the population exchange, while Ioakeim
‘Kiz kilim. Bought in Thessaloniki in 1924 from an elderly Asia Minor refugee. Part of a dowry. It was the custom back then for all the friends of the bride to weave a kilim to which each friend would add some adornment as a memento; a piece of her dress, a lock of her hair, a feather from her favourite bird, a lucky charm.’ This short note handwritten by Chrysiida (Lou) Pierrakou (née Vatikioti) records the origins of this handmade rug and the starting point of its long journey.