Olga Mavrogordato | Photograph: Courtesy Adrian Camps-Campins
Olga Mavrogordato’s “Voices in the Street“, an Inprint Publication of 1977, is the most important reference book to Port of Spain’s Architectural and Colonial Heritage. Mavrogordato’s niece, Elizabeth Mowser, remembers that it was her nieces’ and nephews’ interest in their heritage that prompted her to put this history together. It is said, that she sought the advice of her friend, Dr. Eric Williams, for a list of books that she could read to prepare herself for her essays.
Mavrogordato’s detailed description of the styles and origins of Port of Spain’s diverse Architectural Heritage remains a complete and important historical record.
Dr. Bridget Brereton describes Mavrogordato as “part of a very, very small group of people outside the university who tried to revive and maintain an interest in the national heritage.”
She describes herself “as a creole born in the early 1900s” and she would have had her family’s oral tradition, a sort of collective memory, of most of the nineteenth century.
“Long ago“, she recalled, “our parents told us stories of the past, either about our family or the places they knew and the things they did when they were young …… there was time then to sit around and listen, but the pace of life has changed and today our young people, caught up in a jet age, with the vital present and bright future, have no time to look back at the past, or even to wonder about it.”
Mavrogordato had a large collection of historical documents, photographs and rare books, wrote numerous historical papers, and was an active member of the Historical Society.