Nedie Antoniades

Members of the Baltatzis family recount the 1922 burning of Smyrna, Greece, including the assault on vibrant Greek and Armenian communities.

Filio Williams, an elderly Greek-American woman, rushes to Mytilene with her granddaughter Helen to offer support to Syrian refugees. No one knows her background; no one knows that her grandmother—Filio Baltatzi, a native of Smyrna—had once found herself on that very same island, a persecuted refugee. A small notebook containing the recipes of her namesake grandmother unfolds the turbulent history of the cosmopolitan Baltatzi family, a story shaped by the tragic international events that determined the fate of entire nations. Across time and space, different generations of women from the same family are united by the threads of history. Past and present merge into one.