In 1932 Kassandra Kostan (Aleksandra Konstantinovna Gargala, 1897-1939), published a book on the literature of the Greeks living in the Donetsk region of Southern Ukraine. It was a worthy undertaking because in her short anthology Kostan, a pioneer researcher in the history and folk traditions of the so-called ‘Roumaioi’, collected several poems and songs composed in the Greek dialects spoken in the various villages and communities around Mariupol. In her anthology she included old folk songs and poems, some of them dating from as early as 1778 or even earlier. One of the oldest songs composed before 1778 is about the city of Kaffa and another about the exodus of the Greeks from Crimea and their subsequent settlement around Mariupol under Catherine II in 1778-1779. It is only unfortunate that Kostan did not publish this interesting selection of songs and poems in their original Greek form, but instead translated them into Ukrainian. Now the loss is probably permanent, since most of these songs have been forgotten and, to make matters worse, nothing has survived to this day from the papers of Kostan, who died in St. Petersburg in 1939.