A staple of Greektown is closing in September
customers resorting to the convenience of online shopping. Although she was having trouble making ends meet, Morekas says, she didn’t want to be seen as abandoning her community or her friends.
Kentrikon has been a go-to spot for the residents of Greektown for more than six decades — first from the back of a building that now houses the Acropolis Restaurant, then at 4704 Eastern Ave. for the past 30 years. It was where the neighborhood came to buy decorations for their weddings and baptisms, to book tickets for a vacation back to their Greek homeland, to hear the latest Greek music. From the day it opened, the store was home base for “The Greek American Radio Hour,” a show John Morekas had started in 1952. Heard on WBMD-AM, it remained on the air until 2005, broadcast out of studios in Towson and elsewhere, but with its heart always firmly entrenched in Greektown.
More than anything, however, Nitsa Morekas didn’t want to wait until she had no choice. If Kentrikon was going to close, it was going to be on her terms.
Morekas, who came to the U.S. in 1951 with her parents and sister, made the decision to close on July 23. “I’ve really cried a lot,” she says. “I was just so stressed out. And I said to myself, ‘Nitsa, the store was a big thing, it was a destination place. We should exit the same way.’”
Nestled among a group of Greek restaurants still going strong, including Acropolis, Ikaros, Samos and Zorba’s, Kentrikon is the last commercial business of its kind in Greektown, an area east of Highlandtown that’s had a thriving Greek community since the 1930s.
“She’s the last of the Mohicans,” says the Rev. Michael Pastrikos, pastor of St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church on Ponca Street. “The online situation has really disturbed her. Whatever she has in her store, you can get from New York, even from Greece, at a much lower price.”
It also doesn’t help that Greektown is no longer as Greek as it once was. About 980 families still belong to St. Nicholas, Patrikos says, down from between 1,500 and 2,000 at its peak, in the 1980s. And less than half of those parishioners still live in the community, he estimates, with the rest returning for religious services.
“The flow is there, the people come in from other areas,” says Patrikos, who has been at St. Nicholas since 2007. “Greektown is still Greektown. As long as the church is still in the middle of Greektown, Greektown will never close.”
Real estate agent Jason Filippou, who lives in the nearby community of Bayview and is a board member of the Highlandtown-based Southeast Community Development Corporation, says the community is still Greek at its core. But it’s a younger Greek, a generation with different expectations and values.
“I would feel comfortable saying there’s still a lot of Greek Americans living in the neighborhood — I have three cousins looking for a house in the neighborhood,” says Filippou, former executive director of the Greektown Community Development Corporation and whose wife and daughter are vacationing in Greece. “But you don’t see the younger generation coming in and opening shops, so it’s not as visible.”
Still, losing Kentrikon will leave a gap in the spirit of Greektown that will be hard to fill. For decades, Morekas has helped book vacations to Greece for her neighbors (in fact, that’s often been the most lucrative part of her business, she says). When people needed something done or had a question about what was going on in the community, they came to her first.
“I would joke that she’s the oracle of the neighborhood,” says Filippou. “You would go there, and Nitsa knew everything. You would go to Nitsa for the cultural events, weddings, baptisms. You would go there to buy the trinkets, the candles that were needed for the baptisms, things like that.”
On Wednesday, Tina Halkias stopped by Kentrikon for the first time in about 30 years. She used to be best friends with Morekas’ sister, Eva, and the friends would hang out together at the store’s original location. But she’s hardly visited here since getting married in 1982 and moving to Charleston, W.Va.
The two women smile, embrace, say how nice it is to see one another after so long. It’s a happy reunion, if tinged with a bit of sadness.
“I can never remember not having a Kentrikon,” says Halkias, 67. “We used to get our tickets for Greece from here, we’d get our stuff for baptisms from here, we’d get records. It’s very sad that it’s not going to be here anymore.”
In Baltimore getting things ready for her niece’s wedding next month, Halkias needed a pair of thin white candles for the ceremony. She knew where to get them. For $15, mission accomplished.
Morekas shakes her head a little ruefully as her old friend heads out the door. Yes, it was great to see her. But if only…
“She hasn’t been here for 25 years, and here she is today,” she says, her voice trailing. “I can’t wait for 25 years for people to come to the shop.”
Morekas says she hasn’t finalized plans for the shop’s final days. She doesn’t want to advertise plans for any big going-out-ofbusiness sale, but acknowledges she’ll have to move inventory. Stop by and see if there’s anything in the shop you like, she says; prices are negotiable.
And it’s not like she’s going to retire, exactly. The owner of Zorba’s has given her a job as a weekend hostess, and she looks forward to staying in the community and meeting even more people. Just not at Kentrikon. “It’s time to go, that’s what I think you should put in [the story],” Morekas says by way of postscript. “The glory of Kentrikon will always be, but it’s time to go.”