Pastel Pagona Series

Maria Pagona Stratakis was born in New York City in 1924, but moved back to Greece with her Greek family in the early 1930s, just in time to miss the Great Depression and just in time to live a life of idyllic luxury as the returning “successful” family to the tiny village of Agios Nikolaos.

Life was wonderful until Adolph Hitler decided he wanted to rule the world, and brutally bailed out Mussolini and vanquished Greece. She survived the Nazi onslaught. But after the war, the communist party in Greece tried to conscript her (there are rifle butt scars on her back to prove that).  And her father decided to leverage her dual citizenship and send her to live with family back in America.

he never returned to live in her beloved country with her beloved family. But she left a legacy of beauty, tenacity, unrealized potential, and unfulfilled dreams as pictured in these four “Pagona Pastels” showing the changes in an ever-beautiful face through four distinct phases. As an older woman, she wonders---what might have been, if I’d been played a different card in life?

Her beauty leads us to wonder as well.