Political Quotes

“Every family who has come from Greece has stories. If we look at the ceremonial uniforms of the Greek soldiers, they have the pleated kilts; and these tall, strong-looking Greek soldiers, and there are 376 pleats in their kilt, one for each year that the Greek nation was held in domination by the Ottoman Empire. My own family, and I did not have the opportunity to meet the Greek half of my family, it is a long story which I will not go into here. But I did not have the opportunity to meet the Greek half of my family, because of estrangement and divorce, until I was almost 40 years old. I had the opportunity to go to Kalimnos, which is an island off the coast of Turkey where my family came from, as well as the family of the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Bilirakis), my dear friend. In fact, we found here we are a Republican from Florida and a Democrat from Pennsylvania, and our families lived on the same tiny island off the coast of Turkey. In fact, we were neighbors, when we got to talking about where we come from, and here we are neighbors on issues in Congress. They told us about what had happened to the family during almost 400 years of what was practically servitude and enslavement by the Ottoman Empire and by the Ottoman Turks. In fact, the family name at that point had been Papaelias, which meant there was a priest back in the family heritage whose name was Elias.”