Archives

Last week, I was so fascinated by the Greek Literature that I had to do more research about this culture. I really wanted to see the primary resources that are available to the public. I traveled all the way to Mytilene, Greece where I came across the Historical Archive of the Aegean Ergani. There were multiple collections in this archive. They had personal archives that had pictures of some important people like Michal P. Koutzis. He was the founder of the Kourtzis entrepreneurial activities. He provided food and provisions to the markets in Mytilini and Constantinople. He was very well respected in the community. He served on the local council. A good majority of his family also has great prominence in the archives. Including his first son, Panos Kourtzis. He was one of the most important Greek entrepreneurs of the Ottoman Empire. In the archive they also had memorabilia of the different companies the Kourtzis family was involved in. The family was highly involved in the olive oil industry because they developed a new way of extracting oil from the olive. This has a lot to do with the oil we have today.

Another Archive that I found online was for the Sterling Memorial Library in New Haven, Connecticut. The title is the Mary M. Geran Starr Papers. It was a matter and memorabilia depicting the friendship of Mary Geran with the royal Greek family and with the members of German nobility. There were also photographs. But the collection was composed of a lot of letters. These letters were from Grand Duchess Helen of Russia and the princess of Greece, Sophia. This is amazing because the evidence of European history is located in the United States as well.

I found these archives extremely fascinating because our present day life can be traced back to a single group of people, like the Koutzis family, who pioneered a new way of creating olive out. The food that people make would have been a lot different with out these people.

References

Kortizis Archive.1850-1980. Historical archive of the Aegean Ergani. Web. Mytilene, Greece. http://www.ergani.org.gr/web/guest/collections/routes

Mary M. Geran Star Papers. 1910-1960. MS 459. New Haven, CT. http://hdl.handle.net/10079/fa/mssa.ms.0459