10/05/2026
Our thanks to journalist Kostas Bourousis and ΤΟ ΒΗΜΑ for the wonderful story about The Eftychia Project and the Fifth Annual Greek Adoptee Reunion 2026. We are honored! ***English Translation below***
We can't believe that we are just 6 days away from the trip of a lifetime! Several adoptees have already arrived in Greece and to them we say καλώς ήρθατε. To those currently in transit to Greece or to those who are leaving for Greece in the next few days, we say καλό ταξίδι! We can't wait to welcome you home!
Adopted in the USA: The story of the Eftychia Project
Linda Carol Trotter grew up in Texas convinced that her mother had died in childbirth. When she discovered her mother alive six decades later, she founded the Eftychia Project. Today, she is organizing a major reunion of Greek adoptees in the homeland they never knew.
Long before the creation of the Eftychia Project and for most of her life, she was Linda Carol Trotter . She grew up in Texas, knowing that she had been born in Greece and adopted by American parents as an infant. Greece existed somewhere deep in her personal history, but not as an open wound or a constant question that demanded an answer.
Her adoptive parents had loved her. She created her own family, had children, built her life in America . Except the story they had told her about her life wasn't exactly hers.
Linda Carol Trotter's Greek name was Eftychia Noula. She was born in the village of Stranoma, Nafpaktia, and in 1958, at the age of eight months, she was adopted by American parents through the Athens Municipal Nursery.
One of the 4,000 adopted Greek children
Her adoptive parents had been told that her biological mother had died in childbirth. But not only had she not died, but she was still alive nearly six decades later. Linda found her in June 2017. She was 59 at the time. Her mother was 80.
The information didn't just give her a name or a place of origin. It overturned what she had taken for granted about her early days. Linda Trotter has alleged that her adoption file contained inaccurate or fabricated information and that the story given to her adoptive parents did not reflect reality.
She reiterated the allegations publicly in September 2023 at the United Nations in Geneva, where she spoke before the Committee on Enforced Disappearances, on the occasion of the first anniversary of the UN Joint Declaration on Illegal Intercountry Adoptions. There, she described her own adoption as illegal and spoke of coercion by her biological mother, forged or falsified documents, and falsely informing her adoptive parents that she had died in childbirth.
Her case is part of a much larger post-war wave of adoptions. Professor Gonda Van Steen , who has systematically researched post-war Greek adoptions, estimates that around 4,000 Greek children were adopted abroad from 1950 to 1975, with the main destination being the United States and smaller numbers going to the Netherlands and Sweden. There is, however, no reliable figure as to how many of these adoptions were illegal or carried out with irregularities. Many were processed through the courts and carried the cloak of legality, even when allegations of coercion, incomplete consent, or problematic or even forged documents later emerged.
Some of these adoptions were done through proxies. As Linda explains, the prospective adoptive parents might never have traveled to Greece: a lawyer would appear on their behalf in court and complete the process. Other agencies, such as the “Mother” Foundation or the International Social Service, followed stricter procedures and provided for some degree of supervision or subsequent control. This difference is crucial to understanding how unequal the framework within which intercountry adoptions took place at that time was.
Today, Linda Trotter speaks about all of this with the ease of someone who has been asked to tell her life story repeatedly, but also with the precision of someone who knows that behind the words "adoption" and "orphan" can be hidden very different but in any case painful realities.
"I'll take her to an institution until you get back on your feet"
Her mother, Chariklia, was 19 years old and unmarried when she became pregnant. According to what Linda learned decades later from her biological family, the pregnancy was enough to turn the young woman into a social nuisance. Her great-grandfather threw her out of the house. For a while, she lived outside, while a brother secretly brought her bread in the evenings. Later, an aunt took her in, and there, in a shed behind the house, Eftychia was born.
“My mother wanted to keep me,” says Linda. The great-grandfather, however, had a different opinion. According to the same account, the child’s godmother undertook to transport mother and daughter to Athens. There, at one point, she took the infant from Chariklia’s arms, telling her that she would temporarily place him in an institution until she could stand on her own two feet. “She told her: ‘You don’t have a job, you can’t take care of this child. I’ll take him to an institution and when you have enough money you can take him back.’” She never returned with the child.
Chariklia, illiterate and without a support network, was left alone in Athens. Linda says she wandered for months until she found work, not knowing where her daughter was.
Eftychia had already been taken to the Athens Municipal Nursery. A few months later, a couple in San Antonio, Texas, who had been trying for twelve years to have a child, entered the adoption process. A Greek Orthodox priest and two Greek lawyers intervened. The prospective parents were told that her biological mother had died in childbirth and that the child had been born prematurely. “None of this was true,” Linda emphasizes.
Orphaned for the second time
At the age of a few months, Eftychia traveled to America and became Linda. She was lucky, as she says today. "I was a child who was loved, adored. My father saw no difference between a biological and an adopted child."
She doesn't remember the moment she found out she was adopted. She knew it almost from the moment she started having memories of herself. Her parents told her she was Greek, that she had come from Athens, and that her first name was Eftychia. She didn't feel stigmatized nor did she believe there was a void within her that needed to be filled. That's why she never entered the process of searching for her biological family.
Her children had been urging her to do it for years. She didn't feel ready, and today she insists that this moment can't be forced on anyone. "You have to be ready. Not your parents, not your friends, not your husband, not your children. You yourself."
The need arose when she began to lose the family she knew. In 2015, her father died from complications of Alzheimer's. Two years later, on February 21, 2017, the exact same date, her mother died. "I felt orphaned again," she says.
Then she began her search from almost nothing. The only evidence she had in her hands was a paper from the Nursery that listed her as an “exhibit of unknown parents,” the plane ticket from her first trip, and her small Greek passport. But when she gained access to more information in her file, she found what had been missing from the official narrative for decades: her mother’s name, her village, her family.
In the maternal embrace half a century later.
The communication with the village brought the big twist. As soon as Linda’s relative from the US explained over the phone that they were looking for Chariklia Noula, the person on the other end of the line immediately understood who she was. “He said: ‘Oh my God, it must be Chariklia’s lost daughter, Eftychia.’” The village knew. And Chariklia was still alive.
For years, she had been searching for her daughter. Linda's relatives had tried to find any trace, but without knowing that the child had left for America. They believed until then that she was somewhere in Greece.
A few weeks later, Linda boarded a plane with her daughter. At the airport, relatives she had never met were waiting for her. And her biological mother, Chariklia, holding a huge bouquet of flowers. “She took me in her arms and we just cried.” It had been 59 years.
Linda had brought with her from America a photo album of her entire life. She wanted, she says, to show her mother that she had grown up well and that she did not need to be tormented by guilt.
At one point, Chariklia placed her hand on a baby photo. “I didn’t have a single photo of you,” she told her.
Later she cried about the lost years. "I told her we can't regret them, because we can't get them back. But we have the now."
Since then, Linda has divided her life between the United States and Greece. She comes to our country often, spends a lot of her time here, and has bought a house in Nafpaktos. “Once I started coming to Greece, I couldn’t stop,” she says, laughing. “Maybe some things are really in the DNA.”
"They took our children away": The other side's investigation
Panagiota Vrysiotis, currently vice president of the Eftychia Project , is on the other side of the same story. She is not adopted. But she is the woman who has been helping her husband for decades in his search for two siblings he never met.
His family lived in Christianoupolis, a mountain village above Kyparissia. In 1958, a boy was born. The doctor who had taken care of the mother wanted to baptize him. “At that time, for a farmer to have a doctor baptize your child was a great honor,” says Panagiota.
The baptism took place when the child was about nine months old, on the day of the village festival. Shortly afterwards he developed a fever. His father put him on his horse and took him down to Kyparissia, to the doctor who was now also his godfather. “As soon as he saw him, he said to him: ‘Why did you take so long to bring him to me?’ And the father replied: ‘What took me so long? Today he developed a fever.’”
The doctor took the child to be examined. A little later he came out alone. “He said to him: ‘Unfortunately, best man, we lost the child. But don’t worry, you will have more children.’” The father returned to the village without the child.
They didn't hand over the body to him. There was no funeral by the family. "They told him that the hospital would take care of everything. Farmers, illiterate people of the time. They couldn't have known what that meant."
In 1963, the same woman gave birth to a second boy. On the fifth day, as mother and child were preparing to be discharged from the hospital, the family was informed that the infant had died. This time, too, they did not receive a body. For years, they believed they had lost two children.
From doubt to search
The seed of doubt was planted in them much later. According to Panagiota, a publication about illegal adoption cases included the name of this particular doctor. Her husband then went to his mother and asked her exactly what had happened. “He says to her: ‘What does it say here? Which children did you lose?’ And she said to him: ‘They took our children away.’”
It was, says Panagiota, the moment when the woman began to grapple with the possibility that her children had never died. The family has not been able to prove to this day what happened to them. That is precisely what she is still searching for.
The research also revealed another gap. For the first child, because he had been baptized, the parish kept records. There was evidence of his baptism and birth. “The priest had impeccable records,” Panagiota recalls. In the registry office, on the other hand, she says, they found neither a birth nor a death record.
Then the official requests, the prosecutor's orders, the visits to services began. And, when the official roads led nowhere, the Internet came along. Panagiota began searching for people with similar stories, trying to understand what could have happened to her husband's siblings.
Somehow, in 2019, she found herself at a table in the Gyzi area with about fifteen people, most of them Greeks who had been adopted in America. Eftychia sat next to her. “Since that day, we haven’t stopped talking,” Panagiota says.
The two women seemed to have arrived at the same point from different starting points. Linda was the child who had left and returned to find the family she left behind. Panagiota was the representative of a family that stayed behind and waited for children who might have been adopted abroad.
Shortly before she died, her husband's mother asked him not to give up the search. "She swore to him to find her children," Panagiota says. "It's an incentive to calm her soul."
This search has since become part of their daily lives. Panagiota says that through the Eftychia Project they have managed to reunite about fifty families. Every time such a reunion occurs, her husband tells her with the same complaint: “You are uniting them all. You are not finding mine.”
From Eftychia to Eftychia Project
The Eftychia Project was born out of this very need to bring the two sides of the story together. Linda didn’t start out with the ambition of creating an organization. She initially envisioned a simple website with practical information for other adoptees. But in 2019, her daughter met a reporter from The Tennessean by chance and told him about her mother’s story.
He asked to meet her. He went to their house for an hour and ended up staying for four. The article had an unexpected response. Linda began receiving messages from adoptees in different parts of the United States. A few days later, relatives in Greece told her that the story had begun to repeat itself here as well.
“I thought: if we’re going to do something to help other adoptees, we need to capitalize on this publicity.” And so the Eftychia Project was born. “I called it the Eftychia Project not because Eftychia is my name, but because of what the word means.”
There was, of course, a deeper personal connection. Her biological mother had baptized her when she was just fifteen days old and, as she later explained, had named her Eftychia so that she would have “happiness and good luck in her life.”
In addition to people who knew they had been adopted, families like Panagiota's began to approach her. Many repeated variations of the same narrative: a woman gave birth, a short while later she was told that the child had died, they did not give her a death certificate, they did not hand over the body.
DNA testing from village to village
With records often incomplete or inaccessible, the two women say, DNA became one of the key tools in their research. In 2020, Linda purchased twelve tests and began traveling to different parts of Greece, looking for people who had asked for their help.
She went all the way to Corfu for a single sample. Later, in Halkidiki, she met a woman who had been adopted but had remained in Greece and had been searching for her biological family for years. A month later, looking at the results, Linda saw one word: “sister.” The woman had found her sister.
It was almost ironic: for about seventy years, the two sides of the family lived just fifty miles apart. “So close and yet so far,” says Linda.
Today she and Panagiota continue to do what one might call field research. They get in the car with DNA tests, names and, often, little more than a case and drive across Greece — from big cities to small, remote villages. On one of these missions, they reached a village just three kilometers from the border with Bulgaria. Panagiota, Linda recalls with a laugh, was whining the whole way.
“I told her, ‘I know we’ll find something. We have to go to this village.’” Two hours after they arrived, they had found the family they were looking for. “See?” he said. “It was worth it, we almost made it to Bulgaria.”
When I ask them if the two of them are essentially the Eftychia Project’s action team in Greece, Linda laughs. “We’re like Thelma and Louise.”
The return to the homeland they never knew
From October 11 to 17, approximately fifty Greeks adopted abroad will gather in Greece for the fifth annual meeting of the Eftychia Project. According to Linda, this is the largest gathering of Greek adoptees to have taken place in the country to date.
For some of them, it will be their first return to Greece since the day they left as children. For others, it will be a journey to a place they first knew as information on a birth certificate or in an adoption file and only much later as their homeland.
The group will depart from Athens for a road trip that will cross a large part of the country: Thessaloniki and Vergina, Meteora, Ioannina and Arta, Messolonghi, Nafpaktos, Kalavryta and, finally, Corinth, where the organizers have announced a surprise connected to the history of adoptions.
The choice of route is not accidental. The reunion was not designed as a tourist tour but as a shared acquaintance with a country from which most people were disconnected before they could even remember it.
“This is not a vacation, we are not tourists,” says Dimitrios Christou, also an adoptee and secretary of the Eftychia Project. “We are returning to the land where our stories began.”
The same need is behind the creation of the Eftychia Project meetings. People who for decades considered their own history a private, often lonely affair, discovered that there were many others who had grown up with similar questions.
“All our stories are different and yet the same,” says Linda. “We wanted to be able to talk freely, share our experiences, and help each other.”
The first meeting was held in Nashville. It was followed by Greece in 2023, Louisville, and Las Vegas. When, at the last meeting, Linda asked the participants where they would like the next one to be held, the answer was unanimous. In Greece.
An intergenerational story
This time, in fact, many will not return alone. They will be accompanied by their spouses and children. Linda's thirty-year-old son will be one of them. In other families, the adoptees themselves have already died, and it is the next generation that continues to search for places, names, and relatives. "Our heritage is also their heritage," says Linda.
Perhaps this is what transforms the story of post-war adoptions from a single-generation affair into an intergenerational story. The search does not necessarily end when the one who left or the one left behind dies.
It took Linda 59 years to discover that the mother she thought was dead was still in Greece. Today, she has a home in Nafpaktos and spends much of her life in the country she left before she could remember.
Panagiota's husband, on the other hand, is still searching for two brothers who may never have learned what happened at the beginning of their own lives — nor do they have the slightest suspicion that, somewhere in Greece, a family is still looking for them.
Starting October 11, dozens of people will cross the country they were born in together. Some come having already found the answer. Some are still searching for it.
Among them will be Eftychia: the woman who left Greece without choosing it, took almost six decades to return to her mother, and today she is trying to help others find the beginning of the thread of their story.
Η Linda Carol Trotter μεγάλωσε στο Τέξας με τη βεβαιότητα ότι η μητέρα της πέθανε στη γέννα. Όταν την ανακάλυψε ζωντανή έξι δεκαετίες αργότερα, ίδρυσε το Eftychia Project. Σήμερα οργ...
