Hi, I’m Antonia Callas
I’ve been facilitating, teaching, creating, and holding space in the healing community for more than a decade. I’ve been a seeker for even longer, and I’ve come to understand that part of me is firmly linked to my Greek heritage.
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t creating something.
From the first time my mother told me my Giagia (grandmother) had a gift for knowing things and hoping I would inherit that gift, to listening to my Papou (grandfather) sing Byzantine hymns thousands of years old at the altar every Sunday, I understood there were worlds beyond words and easy explanations.
I began my career as a crayon artist (yes, that is supposed to be funny) and moved into pastels and pencil drawing. When I was in second grade, my work was included in an exhibition on child artists at the Art Institute of Chicago.
But I found my true passion as a dancer, studying and performing as often as I could. Dance is and always will be my first love and happy place. Choreography flowed naturally as I wanted to express my “self” more deeply. That expression fed me for quite some time and I choreographed and produced events across the United States
As time went on, I evolved again, turning to the written word as part of my artistic toolkit. I became a filmmaker, script writer, journalist, poet, essayist, and performance artist.
Each stage of my journey has felt profound, yet also full of struggle. I believe a full human experience is one that changes, grows, flowers, and yes, dies over time. We are not one thing. We are not here on this beautiful planet to run like human automatons year after year, never varying our pattern.
We are here to experience all life offers. Joy, pain, sorrow, happiness, love—all of it. We are here to fully express our authentic self with the gifts we are given. We are here to heal our soul and open to the sacred gift that is life.
Like others in the creative fields, I have lived my life at the intersection of art and business. I worked for many years in dance and film production and eventually found my way to art administration.
When I began working at the National Hellenic Museum in Chicago, I healed my relationship to my patriarchal culture and found I had a passion for all things Greek as well as a mission to communicate that passion.
WHY RETREATS IN GREECE?
I wish I could say that I grew up going to Greece every summer, but I did not. While my cultural identity was strong, assimilation and the demands of modern life took me some distance from my heritage. As a result, I had a nagging sense of imposter syndrome. I didn’t quite belong to the Greek community and I didn’t quite belong to American culture either.
“Belonging” is a real human need, right alongside food, clothing, and shelter.
It was this longing for belonging that motivated me to visit Greece with my eight-year-old son for the first time in 2006. I felt an immediate connection to this beautiful country. I finally felt that I belonged. I fit in. I met extended family and practiced my language skills, soaking up as much of the culture as I could.
I found myself in Greece.
I visited again. Time passed. Eventually, I was able to go again, and this time I traveled mostly alone. During this solitude I experienced the mythic potency of Greece in full force.
Like Athena springing from the head of Zeus fully formed and realized, so did the idea for holding retreats in Greece. Admittedly, no-one struck me in the head with a hammer, rather, the shimmering voices of gods and goddesses, deities, kings, queens, and mortals revealed themselves to me in ways that felt unworldly, yet completely real.
As I traveled through Greece, I felt a magical portal opening up.
Voices from the past whispered to me, urging me to bring others here. To help others remember the stories, myths and legends of a unique civilization that once set the world on fire, and that still reverberate today with profound meaning.
In Greece, the history of the past informs every moment of the present and invites you to imagine a shining future.
It is my goal, my mission, and my complete happiness to inspire you experience this Greece, to find yourself while gazing at the expansive sea in utter contentment, to find your soul’s next evolution, to find yourself in the vast sweep of history.
