I was unbelievably happy that I would be returning to Greece, to the land I had never known.
Jannis Ioannidis was born on the 22nd of June 1949 in the „Greek“ village Buljkes in Yugoslavian Vojvodina. His father was a partisan in the communist army DSE (Democratic Army of Greece) who had, at eighteen years of age in 1948, lost a leg during military operations in northern Greece - he was subsequently taken to the hospital in Buljkes, where he got to know the seventeen-year-old nurse Margarita, Jannis‘ mother. In August 1949 his parents had to take Little Jannis and leave Buljkes for Czechoslovakia. His father was placed into the Greek clinic in Jablonné, while Jannis stayed with his mother in the sanatorium in Ústí nad Orlicí. The family settled down in Krnov in the early 1950s, moving to Bohumín soon after. Jannis was one of the small Greek children who did not go through the Czech children‘s homes. He grew up purely among Greeks right until he started attending a Czech school. He was nineteen years old during the Greek emigrant communities split and the Soviet armies invaded Czechoslovakia. The effects of normalisation were felt by his family as well. He returned to Greece in 1979, from whence he observed the events surrounding the Velvet Revolution in 1989. Jannis Ioannidis returned to the Prague with his Czech wife in the year 2000; he still lives there.