Our Greek Seniors Social Group and staff at ADS were very excited to celebrate the 100th birthday of Mrs Georgia Sioris in August.
Mrs Sioris has been attending the Multicultural Seniors Social group for over 20 years at ADS’s Bexley Centre.
Mrs Sioris is keeping extremely well at 100: socialising, going on bus trips and participating in all ADS’s Social Support Group indoor and outdoor activities, which includes visiting the Greek Orthodox Church and attending different social events and clubs.
She even performed a traditional Greek dance at home at her birthday party!
Mrs Sioris was born in 1922 in the Peloponnese region of Greece and migrated to Australia. She lived through three wars and was escaping from poverty and war with her three young children when she sailed to Australia on a warship.
Mrs Sioris has three children, nine grandchildren and 16 great-grandchildren.
She lives with her loving and caring extended family, children and grandchildren in the same house where she still does housework and cooks meals. She also works in her large vegetable patch in the backyard and uses her own produce for cooking. In summer she prepares big batches of a traditional Mediterranean wheat product called ‘Trahana’, which she uses in her winter cooking.
Mrs Sioris is very conscious of her health and has an extremely positive mindset, which she believes helps her to better recover from illnesses and injuries, including Covid and falls.
Her secret recipe for longevity and great health is:
1. Being surrounded by and living in close proximity with loving and caring extended family.
2. Keeping active, growing her own vegetables and making her own food from scratch, including baking her own bread. (Her advice is ‘Do not eat out in restaurants because you don’t know what is in the food!’)
3. Sitting out in the sun in her backyard for a minimum of one to two hours a day when the sun is out, which gives her plenty of vitamin D to keep her immune system and bones strong.
4. Staying positive: Mrs Sioris thinks stress is one of the biggest killers, and she advises not to get upset even over the most difficult life situations, and also to be grateful for family and health and all the good things in life.
5. Using lots of olive oil imported from Greece that is prepared from fresh olives without any chemicals and uses the first cold press.
6. Drinking one glass of red wine every evening.
ADS CEO Antoinette Chow congratulated the centenarian on reaching such a great milestone and thanked her for continuing to be such a vital part of ADS’s Greek Seniors Social Group.
‘Mrs Soiris is an inspiration,’ Ms Chow said. ‘And we are so glad to see her enjoying life at 100. We also really love having her in our seniors social group.’
