BOSTON – The history of one of the most vibrant Greek-American communities, in the Boston area, is falling apart with the archives of the venerable Hellenic Chronicle deteriorating fast, threatening the loss of a vital record.

They are literally crumbling like filo dough left on the kitchen counter,” former Editor-in-Chief Nancy Agris Savage told the Boston Herald’s Mary Markos in a report. “The Greek-American community has just exploded in the United States and the history of it is about to disappear if we don’t do something about it,” she told the paper.

Agris Savage, daughter of the Boston-based paper’s founder Peter Agris, is leading a fundraising campaign in collaboration with the Alpha Omega Council to preserve that history by bringing the remainder of the records online. About 54,000 pages would be lost, she said, if not digitized and housed in a database.

“My father, when he founded this newspaper, its sole reason for being was not to report news from Greece in a way that benefited any particular party or anything else. It was to unite Greek-Americans assimilating in the U.S.,” Agris Savage said. “This information is not available anywhere else.”