In 1828, Harvard Prof. Alexander Negris, a colonel in the Greek army during the 1821 revolution and a great grandson of independence leader Alexandros Ypsilantis, published in Boston the first U.S. edition of a Greek grammar book in Greek (right). He started Harvard’s Modern Greek Language Program in 1828. Below, Negris’s 1838 certificate of marriage to Eliza Sweet in London. His profession is listed as “Professor of Greek.”
The Petros Papadakis came to Boston from Greece in 1815 and married Louisa Miles. At the insistence of his wife, he changed his last name to “Patterson” (“father’s son”). He died in 1833. Their son, Rev. George Papadakis (1828-1902)(above), was born in Boston, became an Episcopal priest and served in North Carolina and Memphis.
Gregory A. Perdicaris (1808-1872) was born in Naousa, Greece, educated at Amherst’s Mt. Pleasant Classical Institute, taught classical Greek at Harvard and was appointed U.S. Consul to Athens in 1837-47. He returned to Boston in 1866 to raise money with S. G. Howe for the Cretan revolution. He wrote The Greece of the Greeks in 1845 (above). A year later he moved to Trenton, N.J., where he became involved with the Trenton Gas Co. His son Ion was kidnapped in Morocco by notorious bandit Raisouli in 1904, thus creating the “Perdicaris Incident” between the United States and Morocco during which Pres. T. Roosevelt sent a naval squadron to Tangiers to demand his release. The Moroccan government paid the ransom and Ion was freed. Below is the 1850 U.S. Census entry of Perdicaris and his family.
John Rodocanachi (1829-1906) was born in Smyrna and studied at the Andover Academy. He was a successful businessman and in 1865 he was appointed Greece’s Consul to Boston, a position he held for 26 years. He was a great benefactor of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and Harvard’s Fogg Museum. His uncle Constantine was adopted by the Newell family in Boston and he was listed in the 1835 Boston Business Directory as a Constantine Newell & Co., located on 679 Commercial St. Right, the passport application of J.M. Rodocanachi.
Nikolaos Tsikliteras or Alatas was born in Pylos, Greece, was an assistant to Admiral Sahtouris of the Greek Revolution and a member of the Friendly Society. He settled in Boston in 1823 and befriended the poet John Pickering, whom he taught Greek. He married a French woman named Catherine Ouvre with whom he had two children. After she died, Tsikliteras returned to Pylos, and remarried. One of his children, Nikolaos, was the father of Iraklis, a well known physician in the region. Iraklis was the father of Kostas Tsikliteras (1888-1913) (above), the most decorated Greek in Olympic history, who won several medals in the Olympics of London (1908) and Stockholm (1912).
Maria Kalapothakes, the first Greek woman to earn a medical degree, also studied and lived for a time in Boston. She was born in Athens in 1859, the daughter of Michael Kalapothakes, a physician who later founded the Greek Evangelical movement, and Martha Hooper Blackler of Marblehead, MA. After her mother’s death in 1871, Maria was sent to New York and Virginia for her secondary education. She then attended Radcliffe College, where she earned a degree in classics and an apprenticeship to shadow nurses at Massachusetts General Hospital. Upon her return to Athens she founded a training corps of hospital deaconesses, which became the precursor to Greek nurse education. Her interest in getting a medical degree could not be satisfied in Greece since Greek universities were not admitting women at the time, so Maria started attending Paris University’s medical school in 1886. In 1894 she passed her medical license examinations and was authorized to practice medicine in Greece. She concentrated in gynecology and pediatrics. Kalapothakes offered medical care to the wounded in the Greco-Turkish war in 1897, the Balkan Wars 1912-13, World War I and the Asia Minor Catastrophe in 1922. Queen Olga honored her with Greece’s Royal Cross in 1899. Kalapothakes opened a clinic to serve poor women and children and wrote books on hygiene for school students and the status of health care in Greece. She wrote articles on health issues and women’s rights for magazines, including “Ephemeris ton Kyrion,” a women’s rights journal, and “Ephemeris ton Paidon,” a youth journal published by her father. She set the foundations for the education of Greek nurses and was the first doctor in Greece to successfully use a ventilator to treat premature newborns. In 1909 she married Theodore Stergioglidis, a former monk, in an Orthodox ceremony, which resulted in a year of banishment from the Evangelical Church. She dedicated her life to helping the weak and died penniless in 1941. Today, the New York Hellenic Medical Society sponsors an annual symposium in her honor. (Photo courtesy of NYHMS/Harvard.)