Ancestry 2 - From Melnik: To Salonika

Great-grandparents Panayiotis and Katina gave life to six children. Maybe more, but six survived to adulthood under conditions which can rather be described as adverse, despite the relative economic prosperity of the Greek community of Melnik. Elias was the privileged firstborn and the pillar of the family during the arduous years of the Balkan wars and in what would follow afterwards. He was a grown-up man, a newly married family man, when the uprooting of 1913 happened. He would eventually mature into a well-educated and highly respected citizen. Then Giannis was born, followed by grandfather Leonidas, Calliope, Magdalene, and the much loved last-born, sickly, and handsome Socrates. With the sole exception of great-uncle Elias, who managed to attain a higher education, graduated from the private School of Commerce of Mr. Noukas in Thessaloniki –rather prestigious among the few schools of higher education of that time, in an otherwise transactional city and who, together with great-grandmother Katina, took over the reins of the family after the death of the patriarch, the other children of Panayiotis did not progress beyond the elementary education of primary or the first years of secondary education. That is, they had not been taught and acquired more than the basic skills of reading, writing, and some arithmetic, along with what was patched up by personal initiative, self-study and, of course, whatever could have been learned in the so-called "university of life". The natural plight affecting any refugees with shattered livelihoods and the further historical upheavals that ensued and affected the lives of the city and the country that accepted them (their very own country as one might say), played the main role in the inadequate education of all but Elias. Inevitably, in the absence of any significant inheritance or revenue from property, that is with whatever valuables the family had managed to bring along from Melnik, and some meager reparations from the Greek state in the aftermath of the Balkan War and before the onset of WWI, it is easy to understand that social ascend from the strata of manual labor and low-level unskilled employment did not materialize for most of Panayiotis’ and Katina’s children.

Elias equipped with the skills he gained from his higher education and the natural gift of intelligence quickly took on a role of the manager in the business of tobacco processing and trading, owned by a virtually illiterate and, according to rumors, utterly incompetent and vulgar man, established himself and his family in the city center, became self-sufficient and prospered. Now undisputedly middle to higher middle class, they moved into a fashionable flat in Mackenzie King Street, in an elegant apartment building still standing in Thessaloniki city center. It was one of the first few buildings in the pre-war city which featured an elevator. Uncle Elias had suffered from niggling heart problems from early middle age, and climbing several flights of stairs daily would have been a struggle that could potentially put his life at risk. Yet, he escaped narrowly from the clutches of death in several occasions, and despite three and, perhaps, more heart attacks, he died in an old age.

Yiannis was the outsider of the family. He met a grass widow in the Upper Town, the old suburb below Thessaloniki’s Acropolis, primarily occupied by Turks before the “liberation” of Thessaloniki by the Greek Army in 1912, and cut himself off from the core of the family. Father remembers visiting him a couple of times in a small house where he and his partner lived as outcasts rarely venturing downtown or visiting mother and siblings. It was mentioned that the family disowned him. Most likely, Yiannis had fallen in love with that widow of the Upper Town, he had been enveloped by an unconventional, albeit deep and lasting love, and having thus rejected family and social conventions of the era, had alienated himself on his own initiative from the rest of the family. His traces and those of his children, if he had any and they still exist, disappeared after the war.

Grandfather Leonidas, after a few years as a manual worker in a tobacco processing plant, as he was approaching retirement with growing health problems, he was assigned a rather soft job of minimum responsibility, albeit low paid, as a concierge in the building that housed the association of tobacco merchants of Thessaloniki. Perhaps, older brother Elias offered a hand through some of his connections in the business in rather difficult circumstances for the working folk of the city. That would be the main employment in his unillustrious life before retirement, notwithstanding the couple of odd jobs during the years of the German Occupation and the Civil Ware: a peddler with a tray slung around his neck roaming the streets of the town selling candies and cigarettes or, more ambitiously, as a partner in the greengrocery he opened with his brother-in-law, which however was shut down after a few months of incurring losses. Nevertheless, Great-grandmother Katina with the help of Leonidas, who was third in order in seniority, if not lower in intelligence or ability amongst the family members (after the self-sufficient and established bourgeois Elias, and the defection or the alleged ostracization of Yiannis), with some gold sovereigns that the family had in their possession and the government compensation from the surrender of Melnik to the Bulgarians, purchased and settled in a house vacated by its Turkish owners, after the mass population exchanges that took place in the aftermath of the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922.   

The house, where the Ibrişimci family barring Elias, Yiannis and Calliope resided for the best part of the interbellum years was built in the days of the Ottoman rule of the city, in a neighborhood which remained vivid amongst my childhood memories: the stream that was brimming from the Upper Town in the rainy days, dry otherwise, through vacant dusty lots and the small back streets of childhood games and adventurous wanderings. The local urban landscape was still dominated by two-storey houses that belonged to Greeks, previously and large owned Turks and handed over to or bought by Greeks after the ordered population exchanges and migration waves in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars and the Asia Minor Catastrophe. Many of those houses before the War, indeed the most impressive ones with views on the bay and the Olympus Mountain across, mainly belonged to wealthy Jewish families, some of them to Turkish beys or Bulgarian landowners. Scattered amongst them there were smaller dwellings, even shanties, for the poorest classes of each ethnic group.

The family house stood in an anonymous alley between the Deligiorgi and Gambetta Streets, close to the more prominent Fleming Street and the Hippocratic Hospital (the gift of Baroness Hirsch to the Jewish community), east of the city center. Much later, the Municipality named our alley by the more glorious ‘Hekabe Street’. Even later it laid asphalt on its dusty and muddy soil, uneven by the gullies from the water of rain or the house drains. In 1935, the year Father was born, in the two-storey family house lived grandfather Leonidas along with his young wife Eudoxia, the refugee girl from Bayidir of Izmir, the mysterious Magdalene and the handsome Socrates, the youngest of the Ibrişimci family, Father’s favourite uncle. In the same house, somewhere between 1936 and 1937, great-grandmother Katina breathed her last breath away from the place where she was born and brought up, but content with the knowledge that most of her children had settled and were rebuilding their lives in a welcoming environment with opportunities that a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural new homeland had to offer. They became, we all became Thessalonians. The war, the German occupation, the tragedies, big or small, national or family, that followed, the limp national restoration after the Civil War, the fate of her children and grandchildren, for better or for worse, Katina did not live to see. But she endured in life her share of calamities with the perseverance and strength and the will that her determined countenance in the family photo amongst her children and their young families betrayed.

All the houses of the neighborhood, of the Thessalonian roots where I sprang up from: of Victoria and Mary the Jewesses who survived the concentration camps; of Isaac, also amongst the few who survived the holocaust and the even fewer who returned to their birthplace; of the Tsiotas’ family of my childhood friend Christakis; of the Kazineris’ family, with their enclosed yard; of the mansion of Tsapatsarena, the legendary amongst the town-folk tavern owner, and of her partner, across the street from her tavern, itself a shanty; the more imposing house of the misanthropic theologian at the other side of the stream, with views from its balconies, on the vacant lot where we played football. Most of the two-storey mansions and more common dwellings and hovels, with a few exceptions of families who resisted the temptation of some flats in lieu of their plots to erect ugly multi-storey buildings, were swept away by the bulldozers in the frenzy of urban construction that followed the war, along with the stories and livelihoods of generations, of Greeks and Turks and Jews, who inhabited the neighborhoods of the city.

Calliope, for her part, was well and presumably happily married with an educated man, a compatriot of hers, Georgios Papazoglou, from a wealthy and renowned family of Melnik. Papazoglou's silk mill along with that of Tsopros is mentioned in books and narratives about the town, employed up to eighty workers. Georgios was educated at a vocational school for dyes and paints and other such chemicals in Paris. Of course, studies in Paris in those years could only be financially maintained by wealthy families. In Thessaloniki, he set-up his own business, a workshop dyeing furs and other fabrics. Father still remembers the fur garment, which Giorgios had presented grandmother Eudoxia, his sister-in-law, as a wedding present, and which survived decades in her wardrobe before she handed it to one of her daughters-in-law. It was not a big deal, Georgios then said, just a scarf. But any fur garment in such years of misery and poverty for the working classes were for the very few bourgeois of the city, a timeless symbol of wealth and status. How could this befit a refugee girl from the slums of Toumba?

A magnificent photograph of the surviving members of the family, one, two and three generations before mine, was taken around 1930. The late patriarch was absent. It shows Georgios and great-aunt Calliope as a couple in affectionate harmony, Calliope's hand resting, with an expression of marital trust and devotion on Georgios' left thigh, while Andreas -their one-year-old baby child- with a face full of wonder about what was happening, sitting on his dad's right thigh. Their eldest son of Georgios and Calliope, Takis, the first cousin of Father, with the sly smile and wearing, inevitably, for such occasions a blue naval uniform of official occasions, was looking at the photographer with his head bent and his eyes looking up. He became a close friend of Father’s and a frequent visitor to our house until his late years, often bringing with him a bottle of whiskey and a sack of photographs and books about Melnik: to discuss the past, the family, their common roots, the life evolving along the different branches of the big family tree. Great-uncle Takis in the books he left with Father, and I found in our bookcase, had highlighted with a bright yellow highlighter all passages pertaining to the Papazoglou silk mill, every single reference to his name. He recognized in these books with pride something more important than a common place of their origins as human beings, one that would transcend the narrow confines of his own and his ancestors' existence.