Background on Athena Savas
A resident of Springfield, Mass., Athena Savas was a passionate collector who assembled a massive trove of cookbooks over the course of almost forty years. The third child of Albanian immigrants George and Eva (Gribizis) Savas, Athena was born in Rhode Island in January 1930 and as a young child, followed her father, a Greek Orthodox minister, as he relocated from church to church. By the mid-1930s, the family settled in Holyoke, and then Springfield, where and his family eventually ran a small grocery. The family remained in Springfield even after he took the pulpit in Thomsonville, Conn.
Savas worked as a typist and clerk for many years, attending garage sales and flea markets and haunting bookstores to build a collection of cookbooks. Savas's brother, Milton George Savos (1927-1993), was a longtime professor of entomology at the University of Connecticut.
