She passed away Anna Theophylaktouthe “last great Lady of Pontic Hellenism”, as the action union Nikos Kapetanidis mentions in its farewell address for the woman who was “a bright beacon of unity, dignity, reliability and knowledge, as the daughter of the great man father of Theophylaktos Theofylaktos, who he was one of the founders of the Black Club of Thessaloniki”.

Anna Theofylaktou herself, as noted, “was the crucial link in the chain, which preserved the institutional and historical memory of the bourgeois class of Patrimonial Trebizond”. As for many years the president of the Historical Care of Pontian Ladies, which had its beginnings in 1904 in Trebizond of the Komnenians, “he kept the prestige of the Care at unsurpassed heights with its incomparable ethos, which it generously spread not only to its worthy children but also to all the members of Merimni and more broadly in the Pontic Community”.

Its work was varied and rich and “Pontian Hellenism is poorer and more orphaned than today”, reports the Nikos Kapetanidis action union.

In 2006, APE-MBE had met Anna Theofylaktou at her home, in Thessaloniki, and there she told us her story as the first female ophthalmologist in Northern Greece.

The following is the text of that interview from the archive of the Athenian/Macedonian News Agency:

It was April 1, 1943. In the middle of the war and the Occupation, the first students of the Medical School of Thessaloniki received the “baptism of fire” in the premises of the city’s Experimental School. Sixty-three years later, Anna Theophylaktou, a member of that group of students, who was to become the first female ophthalmologist in Northern Greece and the first ophthalmologist surgeon in the entire Greek territory, unfolds to APE-MPE her memories of that period .

“We entered medicine as paratroopers. We did not take exams because we entered the war and the Occupation. The first lesson was held on April 1, 1943, at the Experimental School, by the professor of anatomy, Nikolaos Michalakeas,” recalls Mrs. Theofylaktos and explains that all the students in the first year of operation of the Medical School of Thessaloniki were transfer students, since the registrations had to be done in October, while classes started in April.

“I transferred from Athens. Many took from Physics, from Mathematics. We were a lot of students for that time. We were 400 people in the first year. A fact for the season. There must have been about thirty of us women. There were many of us, but not all of them finished, nor did they all sign up to finish”, he notes and explains that “many signed up to have the right to the pension”.

Those who stayed had to “fight” not only with the adversities of the war, but also with the strong objections of the then Medical Association, which was against the operation of the School and fought, as Mrs. Theophylaktos characteristically says, to close it.

“We were faced with the medical world of Thessaloniki, we who were fighting for the School to remain,” explains Mrs. Theofylaktos, who “inherited” her love for medicine and ophthalmology from her father, an accomplished ophthalmologist of the time and the first General Director of Thrace.

It took endless hours of personal work and large doses of ingenuity on the part of the students to make the School work.

“We had the big disadvantage of not having a background. And we did a lot of personal work ourselves […] I remember, in some things where we needed to put bricks, we would sit in a row and one would throw bricks at the other”, says Mrs. Theophylaktos and explains that the students needed to use all their imagination in order to solve problems such as the lack of windows in the classrooms of the morgue. “We went to the then Municipal Hospital, today’s “Agios Dimitrios” and took the x-rays they had to throw away. We put in a cauldron that we boiled water in, dipped the X-rays in and then scraped them to get the color off and made them into glass and put them in our windows,” he notes.

The only thing that was abundant in the halepo in those days were corpses, because, as Mrs. Theofylaktos notes, many were forced to leave their dead on the street in order not to lose the food ration. “And so, every morning, the city hall’s bin collected them, passed after us and left the best”, he points out and explains that the tables where the dead were deposited came from the marbles of the Jewish monuments, in the area of ​​the current university campus, which they erected the Germans, as soon as their “boot” set foot on Thessaloniki.

The war ended, the post-war problems were overcome, and those of the students of that period who made it, got their medical degrees. Mrs. Theofylaktos graduated in ’52, married and already a mother of two children, and started practicing medicine in ’56. Despite the fact that many of her clients had known her for years – when she was still a child wandering around her father’s clinic and either helping to sterilize instruments, or perched on a stool reverently observing some cataract surgery – she was initially approached with distrust, due to her gender. “Even though I was living in my father’s clinic and the whole clinic knew me, they asked me: well, are you going to operate on us?” she remembers and admits that if she didn’t have her father, she would be in more trouble.

Comparing her father’s era and hers with today’s, in terms of medical events, Mrs. Theofylaktos remembers that back then, cataract surgery was a difficult and complicated procedure, from which the patient could even to lose his eye, while today, with the leaps that science has made, it is a simple process.

Her father was her inspiration and motivation to pursue medicine, while her daughter, the third generation of ophthalmologists in the family, is following in her footsteps.