“ ‘Your home will be the one where you would put your head to sleep and for a pillow one dreamgrove.’ These words were pronounced by a prostitute, hosting a scared 12-year-old kid. He was one of thousands Greek survivors from the “Asia Minor Catastroph” of 1922. To reach Lebanon, he walked barefoot from Smyrna in Turkey, for days, before losing the rest of his family on the road and seeking refuge for 4 nights in a brothel in the port area of Beirut. For the rest of his life, this sentence and that city became his haven.
That kid was my grandfather, the one I never met.”
‘Refuge Dreamgrove’ is a photographic series based on the notion of hospitality, by Georges Salameh, a Sicily based Greek-Lebanese visual storyteller.
