Traditional Arranged Marriages in Greece
If you are looking for love today, you need go no further than your smart phone for an arranged marriage. However, for your Greek grandparents, the matchmaker, the “Proxenitis,” was the key to wedded bliss — or not.
Matchmaking, the practice of putting two people together for the purpose of marriage, has existed across many cultures of the world for untold thousands of years.
In contemporary Greece, the arranged marriage, also know as “synikation,” or “proxenio,” is no longer widely practiced. The matchmaking term proxenio originates from the word proxy.
In an arranged marriage it is the parents, with help from family members, who choose a spouse for their child. Arranged marriage, however, is not a form of forced marriage; however, they do not always include consent. Parents have been known to arrange marriages without consulting their children or
