In 1903, the year Mary Dimakis was born, the Wright Brothers put the first plane in the air, Henry Ford rolled out the Model A and the first World Series game was played.
Dimakis, the oldest Greek-American living in the United States, died Oct. 5 at her home off Coral Way. She was 109.
At the time of her death, she was also one of the oldest living Greeks in the world, according to The National Herald.
She was born Sept. 9, 1903 in a Greek community in Turkey, but her family fled to New York in 1920 shortly after the start of the Greco-Turkish War.
She moved to Miami in 1921 with her husband, Nicholas Ponticos, a fruit shipper.
She and her husband hunkered down through the 1926 hurricane and saw first hand the building of the Biltmore Hotel and the Freedom Tower. She was among the pioneers who founded Miami’s first Greek community in 1927, around Northeast First Avenue and 15th Street. Together, they had a daughter, Evelyn.
Ponticos died in 1935, and five years later she married James M. Dimakis, a land developer.
Mary Dimakis was a pioneer member of St. Sophia’s Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Miami, which was built in 1948. That same year, Dimakis and other Greek families established their presence in The Roads neighborhood by moving near the church.
A housewife her entire life, Mary Dimakis took pride in the traditional Greek baking she learned from her mother, which meant using lots of olive oil, real butter, nuts and honey.
(source, foto: miamiherald)
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