Among the traditions that survive is a Byzantine-era inheritance system that gives a mother's property to the eldest daughter.
"Here it is women who command!" declared Rigopoula Pavlidis, as she sang the virtues of her remote village on the island of Karpathos, one of Greece's rare matriarchal societies."My husband can't do anything without me, not even his tax return," Pavlidis laughed as she embroidered a traditional dress inside her workshop.
Isolated from the rest of the Dodecanese island, the spectacular hillside village has safeguarded this centuries-old tradition, which has survived the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century and Italian rule in the 20th.Among the traditions that survive is a Byzantine-era inheritance system that gives a mother's property to the eldest daughter, said local historian Giorgos Tsampanakis.
And women's prominence is also reflected in their names. "The eldest daughter took the first name of the maternal grandmother, unlike the rest of Greece, where it was that of the paternal grandmother," said Tsampanakis.The role of women in Olympos was further strengthened in the 1950s when the village men began to emigrate for workleaving their wives and daughters behind to manage families and farms on their own."We had no choice but to work in the absence of the men.
Marina's daughter Anna is only 13 years old, but she knows that one day she will take up the torch. "It's my grandmother's legacy and I'll be proud to take care of it!" she said. Fourtina does not feel that Olympos society is particularly progressive:"It's a small society where a woman alone in a cafe is frowned upon," she said.
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