On the road to Greek roots
Stáhnout obrázek
Jiří Georgios Grigoriadis was born in Jeseník on 16 August 1966 into a Czech-Greek family. His father Georgios Grigoriadis and part of his family left their home land afflicted by the civil war in the late 1940s. Two more brothers were born during the journey. They settled in Kobylá nad Vidnavkou in the Jeseníky region. The family was communist-minded and took no issue with the regime of the time. The mother died when the witness was 12 years old. His father‘s family members returned to Greece in the late 1980s. The witness‘s family also planned to move but the father‘s serious work injury put a stopped them. Jiří was not interested in politics growing up. He grew his hair long, listened to music he liked and went to concerts of prohibited bands. In 1983, he was one of the brutally dispersed visitors to a cancelled festival in Žabčice near Brno. The raid took place in Brno‘s Pisárky quarter in front of the Na Střelnici restaurant. Having trained for a fitter at an apprenticeship school in Žulová, he joined the local construction enterprise. Despite struggling to avoid military service, he enlisted in in Bílina near Teplice in 1988 where he also witnesse dthe Velvet Revolution. That same year, 1988, he married Karin née Sokolová a nurse in a home for the elderly. He adopted her daughter Tereza (1985) and the couple welcomed son Jiří in 1995. Jiří Grigoriadis started a construction business in 1993. He lived in Javorník in 2025.
