In Greece in the 1950s, struggling to find its way through the wounds of the Occupation and the Civil War, a childless American couple adopted a baby girl, an infant just eight months old, from the Athens Infant Hospital. Her actual mother was unknown, they were told that she had probably died in childbirth.

The adoption did not occur by chance. It was initiated by a Greek priest, two lawyers, and an organization called POGO (Parents of Greek Orphans). In this way, about 70-90 Greek children were channeled at the time to San Antonio and the surrounding areas of Texas.

Her adoptive parents, James and Ruth Forrest, never hid the truth from her. From the age of two, they told her she was adopted and that her real name was Happiness, the only clue they knew. Linda Carroll Forrest, the adopted little girl from Greece, was very lucky. Her adoptive parents offered her love, affection, safety, and everything they could. An only child. She made a happy marriage, and she and her husband Bob Trotter had two children, Heather and Justin.

Growing up, she occasionally attended Greek club events and enjoyed Greek food. But when she lost her adoptive parents consecutively over two years in 2015 and 2017, the need to find her biological roots was “awakened” within her. Her real family tree, from which part of Greece she came from, who her parents or other close relatives were, and if they were alive, and to find them, to get to know them. Perhaps to solve decades of questions.

After a titanic struggle and with the help of her lawyer she found many clues. Most important of all, that her biological mother’s name was Charicleia Noula and she came from the village of Stranoma in the mountainous Nafpaktia.

She searched and managed to find her mother. Surprisingly, she didn’t have much difficulty. And from Texas he came to Greece in June 2017 to meet her. The moments of their first meeting were unforgettable.

Linda Carroll Forrest Trotter’s story is like a fairy tale. It could well be the script of a dramatic film not only of the Greek cinema of those decades, which as a rule ended in a happy ending, but even a modern one.

Since then, Linda Carroll, now Eftychia Noula, with her husband converting to Orthodoxy, and even being baptized Eutyches, has made it her life’s purpose to help those other adopted men and women of Greek descent under any circumstances who are seeking to find their biological roots in their homeland. She created an organization with an eloquent title, “The Eftychia Project,” for that very purpose. To help, completely free of charge, those Greek adoptees, presumably children of that difficult time, who are looking for their biological family.

They are not a few. They are estimated at 4,000-5,000. Mostly in the United States over 3,500 and the Netherlands around 600. She has now made the Texas to Greece route over 30 times in the last eight years. “The Eftychia Project” has already scheduled the fourth Annual Adopted Greeks Convention for June 19-21 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The “baby shower”

A few thousand more resemble this story. Children who were given up for adoption at that time because they were left without parents, orphans, either because of the harsh poverty and destitution of their families, or because they were the children of abandoned mothers, unable to raise them physically due to hardship, but also the unthinkable for the mores of the time, especially in the countryside, given the lack of a father.

These present-day 70-year-olds, then young children and infants, fell, along with their biological families, during that difficult period, victims of circles of con artists, who were contracted to meet the increased “demand” from the USA and other Western countries for children to be adopted by presumably well-off and childless families.

A ‘baby bazaar’ that is, which was proceeding with the assistance of lawyers, obstetricians, nurses, hospital, nursery, and orphanage employees, even priests, and even police officers who were legitimizing a process of what was essentially a legal transaction with the tacit acquiescence of all. On the other hand, it was mainly lawyers and rarely the families themselves who declared their desire to adopt Greek children. And in and around them obviously,y money, depending on the case. With prices reaching up to $3,500-5,000, an unthinkable amount by the standards of the time.

An adoption industry had essentially been set up, in which, as was later revealed, it seems that some executives of the well-known Greek-American organization AHEPA played an important role. Some lawyers of the organisation realised that the fast-track adoption story could bring them huge profits. However, they were not the only ones who went ahead with this heinous “project”. The competition was fierce, and it paid off.

The two scandals

On May 5, 1959, a front-page story in the New York Times revealed that former AHEPA president and New York judge Steven S. Scopas had been arrested on charges of trafficking infants from Greece to be given to American couples for a fee of $2,500-3,000 per adoption. An uproar was caused both in the US and in Greece, but Scopas was acquitted. However, the countdown to the investigation of the whole case had now begun.

Three years later, in December 1962, the operation for 13 consecutive years of a child trafficking ring at the Thessaloniki Municipal Nursery “Stylianos” was revealed. The director and eight employees were prosecuted on charges of forging documents and illegally selling infants for adoption. A trial followed. Despite their confessions, they got off with short sentences, and some were acquitted. However, the second ‘blow’ to the process of paid, uncontrolled adoptions was significant. They gradually faded away and were eventually wiped off the map. Of course, at the same time, economic and social conditions in Greece are improving.

These adoptions, while having a semblance of legality from the Greek courts, were at their base scandalous, full of irregularities, completely illegal, and were even done by proxy, with virtually no oversight, with a Greek lawyer as the adoptive parents’ proxy before the Court of First Instance.

Children were sent abroad with little documentation and virtually no hope of ever finding the road they started out on. They were thus deprived of their biological family, their culture, their heritage, above all their truth. So these people, then adopted in this unprecedented way, are now searching for their biological families.

Of course, to be fair, one should not demonize and excoriate the families of adopters. On the contrary. The vast majority of them were families of good Christians who wanted but had not had children. Some were Greek-American. And they adopted, even under these foggy circumstances, some Greek children to raise them as truly their own, with love, care and affection, and the benefit of offering them the possibilities of a better life.

A proper regulation at last

The official Greek state, it is true, has in turn adopted, with unthinkable delay, the logic that some people of Greek origin who, under often mysterious and unexplained circumstances, found themselves in presumed infancy being adopted by foreign families, deserved and should be made easier to find their roots by providing unstinting assistance to do so.

There were many other efforts, mostly individual ones, beyond “The Eftychia Project”, that ran into the wall of the immortal Greek bureaucracy and the long-rooted indifference. There was neither sufficient political will nor legislation, as those in power underestimated the importance of the issue.

After much effort and time, it took the interventions of those concerned at the highest level of government, in persons with strong social empathy, in order to initiate serious developments and to confirm that the Greek state, at last, decided to decisively assist these people.

However, it is true that while there had been a diffuse atmosphere for decades about this case of “infant pacifiers” and the consequent adoptions, it was only in 2012-2013 that historical research brought to light concrete evidence.

Therefore, May 2, 2025, is certainly now a historic date. Not just for the happy outcome of this pending issue, as the decision of the Minister of Interior Theodoros Livanios was published in the Official Gazette (number 1208, issue B’), which defines the terms and conditions for granting Greek citizenship to people who are entitled to it, because they had it at birth and never decided to grant it themselves, as others decided how they would grow up. But also because this is a major issue of national importance, a matter of social justice and moral debt to these Greeks of the Diaspora.

The solution was initiated when the issue came to the attention of Kyriakos Mitsotakis. At his instruction, the leadership of the Interior Ministry and the relevant departments were mobilized to find a way in which these Greeks, now foreign nationals, who are seeking their roots, could be re-registered in the Citizens’ Registry. Members of the Board of Directors of “The Project Eftychia” had in the past contacts with important government officials such as Makis Voridis, Andreas Katsaniotis, the former Secretary General of Citizenship and current Secretary General of the Interior Athanasios Balerbas, they had the important help of the MP of Kozani of ND Stathis Konstantinidis etc, as well as the support of all the parties of the Parliament in their demands, expressed in the information events held in various parts of the country.

The key point

For any process to proceed, those interested must have some papers proving their birth in Greece. First and foremost, the birth certificate, which in those years was compulsory for all children, even those abandoned in church entrances, houses, on the street. Of course, some took them to nurseries or orphanages and disappeared without leaving the slightest trace of identity. Also, for a child to leave Greece, there had to be either a Greek court decision for adoption or a decision to issue a passport for the child to leave and be adopted in a foreign country.

The recent ministerial decision specifies everything that these compatriots adopted by families abroad must do in order to regain their Greek citizenship. The difference and key point is that additional alternatives are given for the identification of each applicant, in addition to the two mentioned above, such as a certificate of registration in the Boys’ Registry, or a certificate from a maternity hospital or nursing home, if the birth took place there, or a certificate from an orphanage or other institution, or a chaplain’s certificate from the baptismal registers kept by the Church, or a school certificate or a certificate of registration in a consular register, or any other document from a public authority, duly certified and officially translated, to assist in the identification.

In other words, if the Greek court adoption decision or the adoption document of a foreign public authority does not provide sufficient information, the identification is carried out even with one of these documents.

Van Steen

It is estimated that between 1949 and 1962, there were approximately 4,000-5,000 adoption acts for infants, toddlers, and children, even up to 10 years old, from foreign families. According to Goda Van Steen, a Belgian-American academic and director of the Department of Hellenic Studies at King’s College London, these Greek children came from three “pools”: destitute families, orphans, and children of unwed mothers, a heavy social stigma at the time. So when Linda Carroll (Euthenia Nula) started her search for her roots… she was lucky enough to find Van Steen on her way. She helped her get her file from the Athens Infant School. It turned out that she had been admitted to it as Eftychia Noula, illegitimate daughter of Chariklia Noula from the village of Stranoma in Nafpaktos.

Van Steen then contacted the village president, Konstantinos Noula, who is a cousin of Eftychia. And who, after recovering from the shock, informed her that her biological mother was alive. She was 79 years old at the time, had married, but had not had any more children.

A week later, Eftychia traveled to Greece with her daughter Heather to meet her mother and the rest of the family.

Mairi Kardara

Dr. Mary Cardaras, associate professor and chair of the Department of Communication at California State University, East Bay, and director of the Demos Center of the American College of Greece, is also doing a great parallel activity. An adoptee herself since 1950, she has written the book “Ripped at the Root: An Adoption Story,” which tells the story of another adopted Greek woman, Dina Poulios. With her groundbreaking initiative, “Nostos for Greek Adoptees,” she aims to compile an anthology of stories of adopted children from Greece and facilitate their reunions with their birth families.

Her story began when, at the age of one, she was chosen for adoption by the parents of a Greek-American couple. Her adoptive parents, Aristotle and Amelia Kardara, were exceptional people, as was her foster brother Nick. Thus, due to circumstances, she did not give up her religion, language, and Greek identity. At 17, she visited Greece with her foster grandmother. She searched for many years to find her biological parents. She found her mother in the 1990s. However, a date that never happened shattered her expectations. Despite this, she didn’t give up. She tried again some years later, but her mother had since passed away due to leukemia.

Reunion stories

Merrill Jenkins, based on a Patras Police report, was left on the steps of a Patras church at about 15 days old with a note saying he had been baptized with the name “Mitsos”. He was taken to the nursery and, a few months later, was adopted by American parents in St. Louis, Missouri. As he discovered, none of the agencies involved had any record of his parental family, which he eventually found thanks to DNA testing and the contribution of The Eftychia Project. He met 50 members of his biological family in Patras three years ago. His story, as well as that of Eftychia and all the other adopted children, was also made into a documentary. Entitled “The “Orphans” from Greece”, produced by VICE, based on the excellent research of journalist Andreas Bousios.

Another Greek adopted in the US, Steven Greter, found his biological father with the help of “The Eftychia Project”. The beginning of the mystery lay in the black and white photograph of him, four months old, in the arms of his adoptive mother on the balcony of the Mother’s Baby Center in May 1960. He went with his adoptive parents first to the Netherlands for eight years and then to the United States.

In 1977, with their encouragement, he tried to trace his biological parents. He encountered a wall of obstacles and difficulties. His participation in the First Annual Reunion of Greek Adoptees, in Nashville, Tennessee, on August 4, 2022, proved decisive. He then gave every bit of information he had gathered to Eftychia and Toula Vrysiotis of The Eftychia Project. They helped him catalytically. In October 2022, his DNA was sequentially matched with that of two cousins from his mother’s and father’s families. His father was alive, and on August 4, 2023, exactly one year after Nashville, he met him after 63 years. The only time. Sadly, his 84-year-old father passed away three months later after surgery. But overjoyed…

Denise from Nafpaktos

Another woman, Denise Madeleine from Orlando, Florida, was also reunited with her biological family 60 years later. Born in Greece in May 1958 to a 38-year-old widow from a small village in Naupaktos, the youngest of seven children, she was given by her mother to a priest. She ended up in the Athens Infant Home and was subsequently adopted by non-Hellenic American parents. She lived from an early age with a longing to find her biological family. She tried hard, even fell victim to scammers once, came close to her goal, was disappointed, but not discouraged. She got lucky when she came across Carol Trotter’s story in the Tennessean in March 2019. She found her. Within weeks, the Eftychia Project was able to locate Denise’s lost family in Nafpaktos.

Despite initial skepticism, Denise came to Greece in July 2019. She was welcomed by several of her nieces and their daughters with bouquets. They called her Paraskevi, the name by which she was christened at the orphanage all those years ago. She also found her beloved sister Helen. She lost her two years later, as she passed away. But she had caught up…

Another adopted child from Greece is Katiana Balandin, mayor of Somerville, a city of 100,000 people very close to Boston and Cambridge. Born in Greece, she was orphaned and immigrated to the United States at the age of four, having been adopted by a Scottish father and Czech-German mother. A family of immigrants to the US from three different countries. She grew up, got degrees, married, and had two daughters. She proudly states her ancestry and background publicly. However, she has never mentioned whether she has searched in Greece for her biological family.