Resort of military operations in the civil war, Fthiotida. After the war she tried to heal her wounds. Poverty, misery and the neighborhoods full of small starving children who had no shelter to sleep.

Then a girls’ orphanage was created to serve more than 40 girls who found shelter and comfort. In 1960, the new director comes to the Lamia Orphanage for Girls… A young woman from Nafpaktos, only 22 years old, having finished Maraslio two years ago, is the teacher who takes over as director.

Stavroula Pelekis has never left until today. She has lived in the same place for 64 years, she is a councilor of the local community, but most of all, she is a mother with about 550 daughters, which are the children she hosted, nurtured, raised, married and rehabilitated along the way.

“I came to the beginning for a while because my house wouldn’t let me leave. I insisted. My mother kept it for me. I just caught up with her shortly before she died and she forgave me,” she recalls, now 87 years old. In fact, describing the situation for those first days when he arrived in Lamia, he remembers that “the Orphanage was an old house with 40 orphans without food. I went through the door and there was nothing. Lamia was a poor, closed society. I was completely alone in a place with unknown people and harsh situations. Many difficulties. Inside there were girls older than me. Everything is difficult. Many times I said to leave but my love for these children held me back. How could I leave these girls…” underlines Stavroula Pelekis who grits her teeth asking for help from here and there to get through the first 10 years and put the institution in a certain order.

“I may not have had a lot of things, but I never let the girls go hungry,” she emphasizes, adding that “the local community had its poverty, but they embraced us and we had food for the children.”

She herself at every moment of her life expresses her gratitude to the local community that provided every help. “We raised our children with these people. With the offers they studied and when the time came we led them as brides to the church to spread their wings in life creating their own family” said Stavroula Pelekis a few 24 hours ago when she was honored by the metropolis of Fthiotida with the Silver Stavron to complement “now we are proud of these children successful and blessed in their lives inside and outside of Greece”.

The almost daily visits of the citizens of Lamia to the Women’s Orphanage with their hands full

Help from professionals, especially in the food industry, goes from father to son and grandson. Dozens of professionals feel an obligation to continue that work that began in the 60s. In fact, in their weekly orders, they have in a separate place – in the form of a timeless order now to the successors – the various items that must go to the Women’s Orphanage.

“I did my duty, my duty. A duty of love. Nothing more. I just feel like saying a big thank you to all those who have been on our path, helped us and are helping us. May all these holy people who send us food every week be well, since the only thing we care about at this stage is that the children don’t go hungry, that our little angels don’t go hungry” as he typically says.

She herself may have joined the Girls’ Orphanage as a director in 1960, but she served as a teacher in various schools in Fthiotida and also in the Experimental School of Lamia from where she retired. Her refuge was always the “House of Love”, the orphanage, which served 24 hours a day.

“I dedicated myself to the children. I didn’t have children of my own. Like these kids I grew up with I don’t put any other. I loved them much more than even my own children. I loved them more than anything else. I fed them, I slept with them, I baptized them, I studied them, I took them as brides to the church so that they feel that they have a family” she repeats speaking to APE MPE and in this way describing her whole course until today. “My eyes have seen a lot. With God’s help we overcame a lot. I don’t claim that I didn’t make mistakes, but I always made sure to keep the balance so that I didn’t single out the children, no matter how difficult it was,” he says.

She herself, until now, has won many titles… She has been called “polymath”, she has been called “mother with 550 daughters”, she has been called “symbol of motherhood”. However, she answers with humility that “I loved all the children of the Orphanage as my own. I feel like their mother. I can’t steal the title from real mothers. After all, it is a multiple responsibility to raise and take care of orphaned children.”

“It is a debt to a true and real Lady, to a noblewoman, to a real queen with red and not blue blood, to a real mother, to a real person, to a real teacher, to a real teacher. A teacher not only at school and in the schools she served, but a teacher in life, because true teachers are those who teach with their lives, with their example, with their path and become a light in the world” noted the Venerable Metropolitan of Fthiotida Ms. Simeon as he awarded the now 87-year-old Stavroula Pelekis the highest honor of the Holy Metropolis of Fthiotido, the Silver Cross, to complete “God demands me, to bow down before you, to express to you an immense gratitude, an immense love, a huge thank you, that whatever human honor we may offer you, will be very small and very minimal…”