o_19heefouak9i9v4do11ac41pi7a.pdf

DESPINA VLAMI
Working in this area has led me to review existing material and try to uncover new
evidence of the female experience of migration and business. The merchant Mihail
Vassiliou’s regular correspondence with women in the early nineteenth century offers
some really unexpected glimpses of female positions and roles in relation to the
phenomenon of the diaspora.
Mihail Vassiliou probably started his career as a merchant in 1804 when he became
one of the associates in his brother Alexander’s enterprise, founded in Vienna
in 1803. Mihail represented the interests of the commercial house in Constantinople.
In 1813 two more associates, Efstathios Sougdouris in Constantinople and Constantinos
Othonaios in Vienna, joined the business. This new association traded Levantine
goods, like the previous one, lasting until 1817. Vassiliou and one of his sons
moved from Constantinople to Trieste in 1821 for reasons that probably had to do
with the outbreak of the Greek revolution. His wife and children found their way to
Odessa where members of his wife’s family resided. While in Trieste, Vassiliou travelled
often to Vienna and Venice and spent some time in Baden. Some members of
his father’s family still lived in Epirus and Thessaly, others in various outposts, centres
of Greek activity in the Habsburg Empire, Tuscany and Moldavia. Of the 1,944
letters he sent to various addressees in the periods 1821-26 and 1828-29, 251 letters
were addressed to women, both relatives and non-relatives. Sixty letters were sent to
him by women –a poor number that is justified by the absence of all but one letter
from his wife Smaragda Sevastopoulou 8 .
Vassiliou corresponded with his wife Smaragda and his daughters Elego Vassiliou
Mela, Efrosini Vassiliou Mavrou and Zoi Vassiliou in Odessa, his sister
Haido Vassiliou, his cousins, sisters-in-law and nieces Kyratzo Vassiliou, Chariklia
Vassiliou, Varvara Vassiliou, Kyratzo Margariti, Haido Mela, Eleni Margariti, Alexandra
Vassiliou and Ecaterini Margariti, and his sister-inlaw on his wife’s side,
Sevasti Scanavi. He was also in contact with Alexandra D. Vella, Domna Rallou
Karatza, Zoi Papanikolaou, Zoi Paraskeva, and Mariettoula Nikolaidi 9 .
The women in Vassiliou’s family and social environment were Greek and were of
different economic, social and cultural status. They resided in sophisticated Odessa,
cosmopolitan Trieste and Ancona, or Ottoman Metsovo and Arta. They were of two
kinds, those who had followed their relatives in their migration experience and those
who remained at a distance, firmly connected to their original or attained social
world; some others were deeply involved in a lifestyle that served business and therefore
required constant movement from one country to another.
diaspora. Some examples of women having a career in international business are given by Igglesi,
Βορειοελλαδίτες έμποροι, pp. 64-65, 170, 182-5.
8 The Vassiliou archive contains 10 volumes of manuscripts. The letters were sent to collaborators,
associates, friends, relatives and women in Constantinople, Odessa, Metsovo, Corfu, Cefalonia,
Venice, Pisa, Vienna, Baden and Kisnovi in Moldavia. Five more volumes contain various documents
and letters received by him during the same period. See Γενικά Αρχεία του Κράτους
[ΓΑΚ], Αρχείο Μιχαήλ Βασιλείου, Κώδικες αρ. 72 α , 72β, 72γ, 77, 110, 195, 196, 197, 198.
9 See Table I and Table II.
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