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By: Effrosyni Rantou.

Klironomia: Inspiration and Inception

Our most recent recorded interview focused on the founding of the Klironomia initiative and took place in a conversational setting, in the presence of her daughter, Sophia Grigoriadis, as well as Dora Zafiropoulos-Metaxas, who first participated in the Klironomia conference and is now a long-time contributor, continuing its legacy. In this interview, Lucy Grigoriadis reflects on how her role as president of Philoptochos—overseeing Greek communities across Canada—along with a trip to Tarpon Springs, Florida, to visit her mother, became key sources of inspiration for creating Klironomia: a biennial, four-day educational seminar of dance and music designed to bring people together and foster a deeper understanding of their roots and identities.

A decisive moment came through her meeting with dance instructor John Lulias at a festival (panigyri) in Tarpon Springs. Lulias, founder of the Levendia Greek Dancing Group in Florida, was not only a dance instructor but also a conference organizer. Lucy describes visiting his house as “like entering a folkloric museum,” filled with traditional costumes and objects from Pontos and other regions of Greece. This encounter opened up a new world for her and inspired her to bring new ideas back to Canada.

Through Lulias, she was also introduced to the Folk Dance Festival (FDF) of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese in the United States, which brought church dance groups together in large-scale competitions in California. Although she was not particularly drawn to the competitive aspect, she was deeply impressed by the scale of participation and the idea of people coming together through dance. Most importantly, this experience brought her into contact with a broader network of Greek dance instructors across the United States and Canada, which ultimately led her to initiate something new.

This initiative was driven by Lucy’s growing sense that something needed to change in the teaching of Greek dance in Canada. As also discussed more extensively in , for many years the teaching style and repertoire of traditional dances had been relatively limited, often presented in a highly standardized and representative way, while the educational dimension of dance remained closely tied to associations and church groups—something that, over time, limited the depth and variation of diasporic identities, while leaving little space for further curiosity, exploration, and more open-ended forms of engagement.

From Panigyri to Pedagogy: Klironomia as an Innovative Pedagogical Space

Lucy Grigoriadis’ realization that there was more to be done, taught, and learned marked a shift in both the approach to dance and its relation to Greek diasporic identity. As she reflects in the interview, what was at stake was not simply the expansion of repertoire, but a different way of engaging with dance—one that moved beyond repetition toward understanding. She organized the first Klironomia seminar in 1993 in Ottawa with only sixteen participants. At the time, it was connected to the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Canada as a dance component within a clergy-laity gathering, with instructors from Montreal and John Loulias himself contributing. The positive response that followed encouraged her to organize further seminars in 1995 and 1997, the latter held within the context of the All Saints festival (panigyri) of Agioi Pantes.

However, at the end of the 1997 event, she realized that this setting was not conducive to sustained learning, interaction, and focused engagement with dance, so she decided  to separate Klironomia from the panigyri structure. From that point onward, Klironomia developed independently from church and community associations, allowing for full control over its structure, content, and pedagogical approach. Her intention was to create something distinct from “just another panigyri”—a space with autonomy over what would be taught, how, and under what conditions.

Gradually, especially from the 2000s onward, when a new committee began to reshape its direction, the focus shifted from a panigyri-type model to a more conference-like structure, aiming to deepen knowledge around each dance—its movements, costumes, and musical context—expand the repertoire, and bring instructors from different regions of Greece into the program. At its core, as Dora Zafiropoulos-Metaxas emphasizes, Klironomia’s scope has been grounded in a commitment to preserving tradition in what participants describe as “its purest form”—a formulation that reflects participants’ own understanding of cultural transmission as requiring continuity with how dance is taught and practiced in Greece. While such a notion can be debated within social scientific approaches to culture and authenticity, in the context of the Greek Canadian diaspora it speaks to a desire to sustain a more direct and less fragmented relationship with living traditions. This becomes particularly meaningful when contrasted with earlier modes of transmission in Canada, where dances were often passed down through partial memory, shaped by what individuals recalled, and sustained within a relatively limited and repetitive repertoire. Detached from ongoing practices in Greece, this form of transmission risked becoming, one might say, like a language with a restricted vocabulary—preserved at a surface level but gradually losing its depth and dynamism across generations.

Therefore, the shift from the panigyri to pedagogy was not simply organizational, but relational: it created the conditions for new forms of connection—between participants, between regions of Greece, and, more broadly, between Greece and the diaspora—thus setting the ground for the transnational dialogue that Klironomia would come to sustain. What began in 1993 as a small gathering of sixteen participants within a church community setting has since evolved into a large-scale initiative, often bringing together more than 300 participants within an academic environment at the University of Toronto Scarborough campus—an environment frequently described as “village-like,” where, as participants note, Greece is not only remembered but, in meaningful ways, brought to life in Canada.

Bringing Greece to Canada

One of the key contributions of Klironomia lies in its role in re-establishing connections between Greece and Canada through dance. By bringing instructors from different regions of Greece, it opened up an ongoing dialogue through which Greek Canadian identities could be revisited and reshaped. At the same time, it created opportunities for participants to encounter dances, music, styles, and regional traditions beyond those associated with their own communities or affiliations, expanding their engagement with Greece as a diverse and internally differentiated cultural landscape. In doing so, it challenged more isolated approaches to dance that relied on fragmented memory or standardized choreographies detached from their local contexts.

Rather than reproducing a fixed repertoire, Klironomia enabled participants to engage with dance as a situated and evolving practice, grounded in regional specificity and lived transmission. Through this process, Greece itself emerged not as a singular or static point of reference, but as a dynamic field of differences—encountered, negotiated, and reinterpreted through embodied practice. Moreover, as participants often emphasize, the environment itself—such as the “village-like” atmosphere cultivated at the University of Toronto Scarborough campus—plays a crucial role not only in fostering immersion and connection, but in spatially reconfiguring the conditions of learning and performance. The gathering is organized in ways that bring people together—on the street, around the fire, in dance circles, and through shared meals and informal encounters—recreating a sense of village life central to how dance is lived and transmitted in Greece. In this setting, the learning of dance becomes inseparable from its performative and social dimensions: participants do not simply acquire steps, but inhabit a collective rhythm, where proximity, repetition, and shared presence shape both the experience of dancing and the process of knowing. Through this spatial and relational arrangement, participants not only remember Greece but actively re-enact it, bringing it into being in Canada as a lived and embodied experience.

Connecting Canada

*Klironomia will take place this year from May 15–18, 2026. Further information is available at Klironomia’s website

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