By Kaitlin Candelaria
Niki Sepsas has been on the adventure of a lifetime for more than 30 years.
Some days you might find him mountain climbing at Mount Kilimanjaro, and others you may find him wearing a tuxedo on a cruise ship or dragging a canoe through the mud in the Amazon.
Sepsas, a Birmingham native, has been working as a tour guide since the 1970s. He spends about eight months a year working on cruise ships around the world. In his spare time, he writes travel books and guides for different cities around the United States. Some of his previous publications include “A Centennial Celebration of the Bright Star Restaurant,” as well as more than 900 articles published in a variety of national, regional and local magazines and newspapers.
“I stumbled into it – I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” Sepsas said. After getting out of college and the army in the late 1960’s, Sepsas bounced back and forth between Europe – where he had the “hair, beard and bike” – the U.S. and Southeast Asia, where he worked a variety of jobs.
“I had a friend when I went to school at West Point (who) worked for a tour company based out of Manhattan and he told me, ‘I know you’re never going to grow up and get a real job, so let me train you as one of our tour guides.’” Now, Sepsas said, his sister tells him he shouldn’t be allowed to celebrate Labor Day.
“Thirty years later, I’m too old to do anything else,” Sepsas said. “With 30 years working on a ship, you do miss a lot. I never had anyone to bounce on my knee on Christmas, but it’s a choice and I can’t imagine having more fun.”
Sepsas, who is based out of Homewood when he is in the U.S., recently released his newest book, “Hellenic Heartbeat of the Deep South,” which focuses on the history of the Greek community in Birmingham.
Although Sepsas doesn’t put a lot of emphasis on roots in his day-to-day life, his are buried deep in the Birmingham Greek community. His grandparents immigrated to the United States from Greece and his grandfather was involved in the founding of the Holy Trinity-Holy Cross Greek Orthodox Cathedral.
The Greek community in Birmingham started with a single man by the name of Cassius. According to Sepsas, three brothers were working on a confederate blockade during the Civil War and ended up in Mobile at the conclusion of the war. One stayed in Mobile, one headed north to Montgomery and Cassius traveled to Birmingham, which was just a muddy crossroads at the time.
“We did an announcement on the local church bulletin for about six months after the priest and the parish council commissioned me to do the book so that anyone who had any stories, anecdotes or photographs of their (family) could meet with me,” Sepsas said. “A lot of their stories are in there. I had a lot of information that I had already compiled when I wrote the stories about Bessemer and what drove the steel industry to Birmingham and the earliest Greek restaurants. Greeks weren’t working in the steel mills – they were working in the hotdog stands and diners serving the miners and the steel workers.”
The book includes many anecdotes relayed to Sepsas, including the time a live rabbit got loose and ran through Andy’s Diner in Birmingham and how the first priest of the church was paid $25 a month.
“The challenge is putting all the information together in a format that is historically factual; but people are lazy, they’ll turn on a TV and turn off their mind,” Sepsas said. “So if I want them to sit down and read this book, it needs to be a little humorous and include anecdotes and stories. I try to make it not only historical and factual, but a real tribute to the people who came here – many of them just wearing what they had on their backs – and put together a cathedral that 100 years later is very much a part of the local community, not only for spiritual guidance but for things like the (Greek) festival and the meals they serve at The Firehouse Shelter. This book for me was all a labor of love.” ϖ