The Greek community of Warren, Ohio
===================================

The Greek community of Warren, Ohio is the community John Kiriakou describes as the setting for his first divorce, a place where both his mother and his first wife were born and raised.

Kiriakou calls Warren a very small town with a very big Greek community in which everybody knows everybody. He puts the composition at roughly 75 per cent from the island of Chios, with the remaining 25 per cent from Rhodes, representing an earlier generation of migrants. There is a chapter of the National Chian Society in Warren.

He illustrates the concentration with an experience on Chios itself. On his first visit he was asked whether he was Greek-American, said yes, and was then asked whether he was from Warren. Told that he was not, the questioner wanted to know how on earth he knew Warren, and answered his own question: all the Chians moved to Warren.

The coffee house

Kiriakou's example of how tightly the community was bound is an incident on the day his divorce became final.

A group of Greek men were sitting in the Greek coffee house where his grandfather had spent seven nights a week smoking, drinking coffee and playing pinochle. They began discussing Kiriakou and his divorce.

An old man Kiriakou says he had never met announced that the boy was no good and that he had abused that girl, and kept going.

A dentist in the shop, a Rhodian, stood up and said he had known the family for sixty years, that they were an honourable family, and that the man should take it back. The Chian stood up. The Rhodian stood up. Kiriakou's cousin telephoned to tell him that fists were flying.

The police were called, and Kiriakou reports their intervention verbatim: you Greeks, you need to calm down.

Afterwards

Kiriakou telephoned the dentist to thank him, and describes him as a real gentleman. The man told him that although the two of them had never met, he had known his father, his mother, his grandparents and everybody in his family, and that when the other man started talking trash, he knew he had to stand up.

Kiriakou's assessment is that he found the whole thing incredible, and that it shows how contentious the divorce was, completely unnecessarily so.

The divorce itself is treated at the Tiffany stationery letter and in Kiriakou's account of his attorney Mary Jane Stevens, whom he found by asking six divorce lawyers in turn whom they would hire if they were getting divorced, five of them named her.

See also

- Mary Jane Stevens
- The Tiffany stationery letter
- John Kiriakou
- The custody standoff
