My origin is from Smyrna. Ever since I was a girl I used to dance and my grandmother, a ‎Smyrna lady, wept because I was reminding her of the Mother Country. We danced to the sound ‎of karsilamas and other oriental rhythms, with verses in turkish, on 45 rpm records. In the 1970s ‎and 1980s there were no schools and teachers to teach oriental dances, at least in Athens and on ‎a large scale. Teaching was provided at home in family feasts, from generation to generation. In ‎the decade of 2000 I met female groups, which got together, learned and rejoiced in merriment ‎by rejecting the “guilt of their hips”, imposed by the western culture of self-inflicted shame and ‎submission of women and their body. I met Mariam in her classes, five years ago. I immediately ‎sensed her deep knowledge of the body, as it applies to the dances she teaches, but, more than ‎that, her relationship with Holy Femininity, in the name of which she “officiates in a rite”. Every ‎one of her lessons is a ritual. It is a learning process on how motion is linked with the nature and ‎qualities of The Woman; on how dance is an Immortal Source that nourishes your deepest roots ‎and then every cell of your Body, your Heart and Soul. Through this bond with our Being, which ‎materializes in our hips and hands, throats and eyes, a secret thread wakes up and finds its ‎meaning, with beauty and mystery! This is the thread leading to Mother-Earth, the rope that binds ‎us with Father-Heaven, that joins us to a Whole. Then, lo and behold, all these feelings are ‎weaved together and are then metamorphosed, they emerge to the surface, their beauty shines, ‎they become stronger and tender, they breathe freely. Life regains her meaning, its hidden Joy! I ‎thank Mariam with all my heart! May she stand among us till old age, always watering women ‎with her magic potion, still full of love! May all women flock to the source, to satisfy their thirst ‎with the Immortal Water!‎ ‎