Vasiliki Scotes

Vasiliki Scotes, née Papachristou-Kyrtsia, was born in Greece on January 18, 1908 in a cane hut near the lowland town of Katouna in Aitolo-Akarnania, where her transhumant shepherd family was at its winter pastures. She grew up, however, in Theodoriana, a remote, highland village in the Pindus Mountains of Epirus. She was only able to complete a year and a half of formal schooling, but as recompense acquired and retained over the years comprehensive, detailed and long-cherished knowledge of the still-living, rich, oral folk traditions and songs of Epirus as well as of the rest of Greece. She emigrated to the United States in 1931, as the young bride of Dimitrios (James) Scotes. She and her husband eventually settled in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where she reared a family of three children and helped her husband manage a restaurant business. Later in life she devoted her retirement time to the crocheting of colourful "Granny" blankets and elegant table cloths. In her mid-nineties at the urging of her son, Tom, she began recalling and reciting from memory the more than three hundred folksongs and poems, which appear in this collection first published in 2008. At the ages of 100 and 101 she completed two visits to Greece where she was received by the President of the Hellenic Republic, Karolos Papoulias and was honoured by the Pan Epirot Society. She died on January 10, 2012 and was buried next to her beloved husband, “Mitsos”, in Harrisburg and in the “xenitia”, which they had for so long shared together.