Introduction: the context
The Greek adoption flow with destination ‘rich America’ had been negotiated since 1948 and was well underway by 1950. The first half of the 1950s saw adoptions that addressed the needs of children, typically called ‘orphans’ or ‘war orphans’ (in the aftermath of World War II and the ensuing Greek Civil War of 1946-1949—a first and deadly proxy conflict of the global Cold War). Thus, the first wave of Greece’s history of ‘adopting out’ to the United States built on WWII relief efforts, post-war family migration or reunification, and the common goal to resettle stateless and ‘displaced persons’ (as per the well-known 1948 US Displaced Persons Act and the 1953 Refugee Relief Act and its successors). Models and legal provisions for European adult migration and refugee care were developed in the turbulent 1940s, with child migration and overseas childcare by way of ‘supply-driven’ intercountry adoption soon following. A precursor to formal or legal adoptions was the system of symbolic adoptions, whereby families in more prosperous countries committed to financially and morally supporting children from poorer countries. These families did so from afar, by sending money, letters, and care packages. Such symbolic and remote fostering arrangements, however, which were often called ‘adoptions’, did not alter the child beneficiaries’ family or legal status, whereas intercountry adoption re-created the child’s personal and legal identity and, subsequently, its nationality.
By the late 1940s, the United States was negotiating special immigration provisions for children fathered by American servicemen stationed abroad, focusing first on Germany and Austria, and, by the early 1950s, on Japan and Korea. Evangelical Christian adoptions became widespread in most Asian intercountry adoption flows, following the rationale that ‘mixed-race’ children needed to be rescued from the patriarchal societies that marginalized them. Greece never saw an American presence on the scale experienced in Korea. Therefore, the logic of saving ‘mixed-race’ children, ‘rejected’ by their local societies, did not apply to Greece. In the fervor of Cold War anticommunism, however, needs were easily exaggerated, and categories were routinely confused. The war-infused ideology of saving ‘orphaned’ and ‘abandoned’ or ‘relinquished’ children was applied time and again and kept blurring otherwise important geographical, historical, racial, and cultural distinctions (including diverging definitions of what overseas adoption legally entailed). The ideal of rescuing Greek ‘war orphans’ (whether the war had ended or not) took hold with good intentions but not necessarily with positive outcomes. The international adoption of any country’s children can hardly be equated with a post-crisis return to normalcy. In the case of Greece, it attests to America’s undue influence in the process of postwar state-(re)building. For a Greece committed to postwar economic reconstruction and to balancing transatlantic relations, the US-bound adoption traffic became one of the ideological but all-too-real battlefields of the emerging Cold War.
The first Greek-to-American adoptions were being formally discussed from 1948 onwards, along with other adoptions from the countries named above. The first petitions for sponsorships or adoptions from war-torn Greece originated in kinship networks already established in the United States. The first Greek American charitable group to commit to rescuing ‘orphans’ was the AHEPA, the American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association (founded in 1922 in Atlanta, Georgia). From the late 1940s on, the AHEPA preoccupied itself with adapting the patterns of adult migration to child migration. Through the late 1950s, the AHEPA tried hard to establish a monopoly on Greek intercountry adoptions, much like Catholic charitable foundations were doing in Italy and later in Ireland or like Evangelical Christian organizations in Korea and Japan. From the mid-1950s, other volunteers, agencies, and independent lawyers entered the fray: by then, they were actually trying to meet the demand for more healthy, white children for adoption—and Greece responded positively to American requests. By 1975, the total number of Greek children adopted in the United States, the Netherlands, and Sweden reached approximately 4,000.
The new Greek Citizenship Law
Greece holds on to the ius sanguinis principle: blood lines determine citizenship status; being born in Greece does not automatically convey citizenship (as per the ius soli, which the broader public knows best for its prevalence in the United States). But the citizenship of the Greek-born adoptees had been rendered inactive through the adoptions that changed their legal identities. Before April 2025, Greek-born adoptees trying to reactivate their Greek citizenship faced tremendous hurdles. On 22 April 2025, the Greek Ministry of Interior announced that it signed a new law into effect that creates a manageable pathway to finally restore the Greek citizenship of the hundreds of children who were adopted from Greece. The official publication of the law followed on 2 May 2025. The law addresses the long-term consequences of the ‘historic’ adoptions from Greece which began in 1950 and lasted through 1975 (with a decline from the mid-1960s onward). These twenty-five years saw some 4,000 Greek-born children dispatched, who, paradoxically, travelled on Greek passports, robust markers of their Greek citizenship. Their names and numbers were then conveniently forgotten, while other intercountry adoption movements garnered far more attention, among them those from South Korea, Guatemala, Russia, and China.
But these ‘historic’ adoptions are anything but historic for the people who still live with their repercussions. The ambiguous status of these adoptees’ Greek citizenship was hardly the worst consequence of their adoptions-of-no-return. Among the nefarious consequences of the first, hastily conducted adoptions of the 1950s was a deficit of papers for the adoptees to prove that their origins lay in Greece—or to gain any knowledge of their Greek identity before the adoption took place. Therefore, no matter how hard the Greek-born adoptees tried over the past many years, the path to restoring their Greek citizenship proved to be exceedingly arduous. Unnecessarily hard, too, was the process to obtain access to more adoption-related records that would have facilitated their application for Greek citizenship. Despite all the obstacles, the goal of most Greek-born adoptees alive has been to restore essential components of their first identity, through knowledge and nationality. They share this desire with many other adoptee ‘diasporas’ of children too young to make the decision to migrate on their own.
Reflecting on the first four months during which the new law has been in effect, interested observers have seen a marked change: adoptees are not only regaining their Greek citizenship but are also gaining access to their adoption files. The narrative has completely changed. Gatekeepers of sealed repositories of adoption files have also altered their attitudes. It used to be that the application for records and restored citizenship was the locus desperandus of the Greek-born adoptee. But now there is hope and optimism, which promptly manifested itself in the numbers of Greek-born adoptees who decided to travel to Greece this past summer to reconnect with their country of origin and to act on restoring their Greek citizenship (by seeking to formally register on the Greek citizen lists).
In the final days of 2024, Mr Athanasios Balermpas, Secretary General of Interior, announced the restoration of the Greek citizenship of members of the former Greek royal family. The matter of the citizenship of the Greek royals—and even their very place in the country’s history of referendums on the monarchy—was characterized by a complexity of a different nature. Nonetheless, the former royals retrieved their Greek citizenship and took the last name ‘de Grèce’, leaving Mr Balermpas to conclude: ‘A historically pending matter is being resolved. Let’s look to the future now. I think it’s a good moment because it closes an account from the past and we can now look forward as a people’ (quoted in the leading Greek newspaper Kathimerini, 21 December 2024, English-language edition). The same words could easily apply to the drastic shift that the new law of 2 May 2025 has powered.
The individuals and their experiences
Penelope was a foundling who spent her first months at the Foundling Home of Patras, on the west coast of the Peloponnese. She came with a note attached that said that her name was Penelope, but no last name was given. She became orphan no. 10939. The foundling home gave Penelope the last name of Odysseos, ‘of Odysseus’, ironically predicting a decades-long quest. Penelope’s search has now been going on for more than six decades, and breakthroughs have come only through her own, unparalleled tenacity. Penelope is just one of the approximately 300 Greek-born adoptees who are currently seeking their way back, patiently, to Greek citizenship. They were given the promise of an expedited track on 17 September 2024, by the Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis himself, when he met with Mary Cardaras and the author. The Greek government has now delivered on that promise, and Penelope’s Greek citizenship was reinstated in June 2025. Through this foundling’s restored Greek citizenship, her children can now apply for their own Greek passport based on a direct line of acknowledged Greek descent. Penelope’s story is a story of adoption and quest, and how, for more than half a century, she was never quite done with either.
But what came before the new law of 2 May 2025 was issued? The law responds to a campaign that started in 2020 and that has been steeped in research and data-driven activism. The researcher, too, had a lot of hurdles to cross, starting from the need to prove that the historic mass adoptions from Greece to the United States had ever even happened; secondly, proving that these adoptions affected no less than 4,000 Greek children; and, most importantly, that the repercussions of low-bar adoptions affect lives to this day.
The formation and agenda of Nostos for Greek Adoptees
The historic mass adoptions were originally covered over by confidentiality and secrecy. Furthermore, initial archival research and interviewing had to be undertaken with discretion because premature publicity could have elicited defensive reactions from the authorities. With the issuance of the new law, the Greek government has actioned transparency on this forgotten chapter of its postwar history. By taking additional advice of the civic advocates leading the campaign for legal acknowledgement, the Greek state has further depolarized aspects of its Civil War trauma, related to child placements and evacuation campaigns, which had left an unbearably heavy legacy. The resolution of this charged legacy, which so often seemed to be beyond reach, is, therefore, far from an uncomplicated win.
Notably, too, resolving the citizenship status of Greece’s lost but kindred tribe of some 4,000 Greek-born adoptees is not a case of diminishing returns: these adoptees, now ageing adults, wish to give back to Greece, travel to Greece, learn Greek, join volunteer projects, invest money in Greece, introduce their children and grandchildren to their village, and so on. Also, their numbers and those of their offspring are putting a dent in Greece’s demographic problem. For decades, Greece has acutely felt the impact of declining birth rates. The adoptees and their families, that is, the new Greeks, will be counted among the numbers of diaspora Greeks. Given that some plan to settle in Greece in retirement, they will also directly add to the country’s population counts.
The breakthrough came with the book, Adoption, Memory, Cold War Greece, which I published in late 2019 and immediately stirred up some dust. Unfortunately, the pandemic soon followed, and lockdowns and travel restrictions went into effect. Dulled by the reality of restricted mobility, it felt tempting at times to leave the adoption history of Greece disconnected from any current practice or policy. But readers of the book spurred me to carry on, as they began to react to and implement the guidelines for adoptees’ searches incorporated in the book. In 2023, Greek adoptee Mary Cardaras, who had approached me with questions about searching, edited a collective volume of 14 adoptee testimonies: Voices of the Lost Children of Greece. With more adoptees speaking and writing confidently for themselves, the landscape of discoveries and demands began to change.
With Mary Cardaras, we formed a team called Nostos for Greek Adoptees and included Stephanie Pazoles, our Greek Penelope and DNA expert, and Olympia K. Anastasopoulou, our pro bono legal counsellor who has since been called to become Special Secretary for Alternative Dispute Resolution in the Greek Ministry of Justice.
First, the Nostos team needed to be clear and concise about its demands, which it captured under 3 R’s: Records, Research, and the Restoration of Greek Citizenship. But ultimately, the most important R may well have been a fourth R, Recognition: the formal acknowledgement of the adopted status of some 4,000 Greek children. With the preamble to the new law, the ageing Greek adoptees have now achieved this goal. This cathartic recognition befits an exemplary truth and reconciliation model. Furthermore, the effects of adoption are passed along to subsequent generations. We continue to work hard with the adoptees’ descendants, who have their own questions about their Greek ancestry. After all, adoptees and their children face lives of filling in the blanks:
I thought I was doing this roots search for my mom, but being a daughter of an adoptee still has affected me, too. To be so closely tied to a beautiful culture, but so far away and removed leaves a void. My dad laughs as he reminds me, I am 48 percent him too.
—J.C., daughter of a Greek-born adoptee, email communication, 17 April 2020
The work of Nostos
Combined expertise and hard work are what powered the process and led to tangible results. The results would never have been possible without first building trust and credibility through fact-based analysis and versatile expertise. I personally rediscovered the value of my classical language skills, which allowed me to penetrate the legal Katharevousa Greek of the 1950s and 1960s, seasoned with the occasional Latin legal term.
The many carefully planned actions of the Nostos team have led to the momentous policy reform, but, most importantly, the actual process and the close involvement leading up to this change had already begun to heal the wounds of the past. The programmed actions of the Nostos team included: two book publications, various documented and fact-checked press features, scholarly presentations and more popular interviews, intense social media networking, consulting on podcasts and documentary films, a film screening enhanced by an archival exhibition, an online petition, and even the production of a testimony theatre play (For Three Refrigerators and a Washing Machine premiered in London on 24 October 2024; published in 2025). The online petition was propelled by the unwavering advocacy of Mary Cardaras. It garnered 75,000 thousand signatures from all around the world, which speaks loudly to the goal of identity preservation that is shared with adoptee activist groups across geographical borders: they, too, seek to restore the recognition and citizenship of the adoptee’s first family and communal identity. Holding that passport of the country of origin, that is, holding the key to the right to return of one’s own volition and for as long as one wishes, is a shared objective among thousands of intercountry adoptees, of older and more recent generations alike.
The debates about historic intercountry adoption flows hold tremendous currency not only in the UK but also in Sweden and the Netherlands, where recent, state-mandated diachronic investigations have laid bare illicit or illegal practices of the past. The Dutch investigative report (published 8 February 2021) and the Swedish report (issued 2 June 2025 at nearly 1,600 pages), which were authored by independent committees of experts, have sent shockwaves through the world of adoption and family formation. Both reports reflect on 65 years of intercountry adoption history and document numerous irregularities and illegalities, of which state authorities had some knowledge. But what was overlooked in both reports, clouded by the dust stirred by their disturbing findings, is that intercountry adoption to the Netherlands and to Sweden started from Greece. Both countries took in their first ‘orphans’ from the Babies’ Centre Metera after its opening in 1955.
For the Greek Nostos team, momentum has always been enhanced through personal contacts in addition to deliberate actions: on 17 September 2024, the author and Mary Cardaras met with the Greek Prime Minister at the iconic Maximos Mansion. They explained the issues, found common ground, and discussed practical solutions. Prompt and unstinting support followed, and many key actors in the government contributed: Messrs Livanios, Spanakis, Balermpas, and Karnavos, and their teams of experts, of the Greek Ministry of Interior, and Mrs Olympia K. Anastasopoulou, Special Secretary for Alternative Dispute Resolution of the Ministry of Justice. Thus, the author and Cardaras could collaborate with new, committed supporters while building on the numerous prior interactions with officials, policymakers, and journalists that they had been pursuing over the course of many years (including with the very helpful office of the Greek Ombudsman). Meanwhile, research was always ongoing, and new data and contacts kept coming in. With the Greek-born adoptees coming out of the woodwork and sharing their documentation and lived experience, there was a robust feedback loop that kept the issues current and urgent. When the tide finally turned, the Nostos team was not only ready but better informed than ever before.
Conclusion: a model for civic action?
Are there ways in which the new Greek law can go even further and push far into the twenty-first century? Yes, additional clauses can allow descendants of adoptees to restore the Greek citizenship of their deceased Greek parent and thus open a path to gaining their own Greek citizen status. The registration offices could start to accept evidence obtained from professional, controlled DNA tests, as one of the items of permissible proof of connection. And let’s not forget that last R, of Research:
the Greek state first promised a long-view investigation in the late 1950s, when less than a decade of intercountry adoptions could easily have been scrutinized. A diachronic investigation, which would now look back on seventy-five years of history, has yet to be carried out.
The new law presents a bipartisan political solution that has brought only benefits; it has not incurred any political nor economic expense. It is the firm expression of political will and willingness to respond to external and grassroots demands. It marks the courage to engage with new legal territory—the well-guarded domain of Greek citizenship no less—and to do so well-equipped with historical knowledge and a clear read on the adoptees’ demands.
The new law represents the conscious pursuit to right a historical wrong, to rectify a pending injustice. The law is also a superb example of a research-informed and citizen-centred approach to policymaking. The Greek Ministry of Interior entered a dialogue with Nostos and took our recommendations to heart. Practical solutions were adopted that our Nostos team had suggested. The Nostos team participants engaged with each other as civic equals in a cooperative spirit, without any interference from either external officials or funders. Let it be noted that there was never any large grant or staff behind our progress, and that the many obligations of our more-than-full-time jobs were constantly calling. The momentous change that Nostos was able to achieve, and the way in which it was achieved, may rightly leave models for other adoptee activists, for remedying other historical deficits. The opportunity for the future to catch up with the past lies right ahead.
