Ancestry 4 - From Melnik: Socrates

In his youth, great-uncle Socrates worked as a worker in a tobacco factory. Nevertheless, he used to reflect, during the long hours of factory work, on the scanty education he received in primary school, and endeavored to self-educate through personal study and active participation in the political and social struggles of his era. He managed remarkably well with his self-teaching struggles, despite his daily job in the factory; despite the demands of the long hours of manual labor in a tobacco factory of the pre-war Thessaloniki that could barely be comprehended by the populus petite-bourgeoisie strata of civil servants, shop-keepers, and the like, in his city; despite, most importantly, the consumption that tormented him since early adulthood and the lengthy convalescing spells in the sanatorium his illness required. A consumptive tobacco worker can be scorned and dismissed as an insignificant human being, an unnoteworthy existence amongst the lots of good hard-working people who disappear without a trace. Perhaps through his work in the factory, perhaps through his social interactions in cafés, tavernas, working-men unions and clubs, places fermented by socialist ideals, or, perhaps, enlightened by his older sisters, Calliope and Magdalene both married to progressive individuals, his eyes opened to the radical social movements developing in the city and maturing in the working-class neighborhoods and refugee slums. Movements, which eventually culminated in the resistance against the fascist occupation. In short, his mind opened-up to the worldview of the communist dogma, that is, to a future society, which hitherto seemed brighter and more just: a step up in the ladder of social evolution. So said the theorists and pioneers of the workers' revolution. Somehow as in Mayakovsky's verses:

“We opened
               each volume
                                 of Marx
as we would open
                          the shutters
                                           in our own house;
but we did not have to read
                                         to make up our minds
which side to join,
                          which side to fight on.English translation. 

Therefore, Socrates became a communist and, at the same time, a member of what Gramsci called "organic intelligentsia", the cohesive fabric of the class into which he belonged de facto from the onset, a class numerous and rather well-entrenched in Thessaloniki of the time. He became an element of an intellectual and organizational core, duty bound to instill in his class the social awareness and consciousness that he himself acquired step by step in life, in the factories, in the unions, in life.

The family of his first wife, Anna née Papachristou, were owners of one of the oldest non-Jewish owned bookstores of pre-war Thessaloniki, on the corner of Egnatia and Konstantinou Palaiologou streets. His marriage to a daughter of a bookseller must have contributed into his intellectual advancements beyond the six years of his unnoteworthy formal education. A sign "BOOKSTORE Christos Papachristou - Established 1922", hidden under the balcony of the first floor of an apartment building, above roller -shutters covered with dozens of layers of posters caught my eye in my student years. There, in his father-in-law's bookstore, a small hive of ideas and knowledge, I imagined Socrates, the primary school graduate, flipping through pages of magazines and books. (Later in life, in January 2017, when I walked by the same corner, the site of the bookstore, once upon a time my great-uncle’s secret private library, was housing one of the snack-bars that somehow sprang up everywhere in Greece of the debt-crisis and the bail-out memoranda. A sign of modern times and the evolution of trends and tastes, or the lack of business creativity and imagination in modern Thessalonian society?)

Apart from an open and lively mind and the thirst for embracing new ideas, Socrates was an exceptionally handsome man: tall, with large light-colored eyes, an intense gaze, a wide, proud, and intelligent forehead. Always clean-shaven, that is without the narrow trapezoidal mustache under the nose, which his brothers and brother-in-law permanently featured (as a symbol of status and maturity or of the dividing line between social classes, who knows?) His demeanor and presence did not suggest any of the stereotypes of factory workers of that era we tend to harbor. ln any case, he would have had no difficulty in attracting the attention and even raising the desires of women during his hours outside the suffocating environment of the tobacco factory. Women from good families, too, with sizeable dowries, for that matter, despite his humble roots in the lower social strata. Thessaloniki was a rather unique, dynamically changing amalgam of nationalities, shaped by centuries of wars and mass migration. The Greek contingent itself was dominated by the refugee element, a mixture of bourgeois and proletarians, of intellectuals and illiterate laborers, who shared the same beaches and piazzas, and often inhabited the same or adjacent neighborhoods. His youthful beauty and elegance, his imperious and arrogant gaze, his open mind ingrained with progressive ideas, even his manners and associations, counterweighted by far his working-class background and poor health.

That is, until the German Occupation, which turned life in the city upside down. The two-storey building in the Fleming area that the Ibrişimci family took possession of, in exchange and in lieu of reparations for their lost home in Melnik, housed along with great-Uncle Socrates the family of grandfather Leonidas and grandmother Evdoxia and their two children, my father and his newborn brother. Old great-grandmother Katina had passed away before the start of the war, and Magdalene, the youngest daughter, had married and left. When Socrates was overcome by his illness, my grandfather, incorruptible and of high moral standards, consistent with the family tradition of unconditional support to his siblings and any broader family member, true, that is, to the strong bonds of a family who stood together for better or for worse since their exodus from Melnik, in 1942, a year when hunger and poverty reigned over the city, sold the house to a rapacious black-marketer, a scoundrel called Demokas (every war breeds corrupt and avaricious individuals), in order to afford the medical care his young brother needed. In a year of universal misery, Socrates left for the sanatorium in Asvestochori, to restore his health and save his life. It was rather a one-way journey this for tuberculosis patients. Leonidas and the family of four moved to a tiny flat in Toumba, with barely one and a half rooms. Hearts had bled, anxiety levels had risen, but what else could be done?

Since then, Socrates’ presence on the earth was slowly immersing into the shadows of Father's, his dearest nephew’s, memory. I always sensed that Socrates: the brave, masculine figure of a worker with rudimentary education but handsome looks, like those in Soviet May Day posters or socialist realist paintings, who also effortlessly displayed an elegance, style and nobility normally attributed to the bourgeoisie, who embraced and defended with zeal views and ideas (for the materialistic advancement of his class or simply carried by an emotional drive for freedom and social justice), who broke through beyond the narrow intellectual boundaries of the Ibrişimci family, his place of work, even the city and life within it, left a long lasting impression on Father and the broader family. No doubt Socrates’ personality largely influenced, even more than grandfather Leonidas, even more than the other highly-esteemed family pillar, Elias, the political views, attitude, and dare say philosophy of Father. "Every man is a philosopher", and Socrates showed him a way, among the many others he could potentially pursue: the books he would select as a young man to read, the political points of view and way of thinking, where he should cast his vote in the highly politicized times the followed the German Occupation and the Civil War, during the years of the corrupt and ruthless reconstruction of a country shaped up by the heavy hand of Cold War politics. By extension, it influenced my own philosophy and ideology and my various political associations, where, admittedly, the emotional (subjective) element often blurs the (objective) reality, and frequently misleads us into a chaos of contradicting opinions diverging from a logical and dispassionate analysis, it entangles us in ideological rigidity and dogmas and dead-ends, it renders us unable to understand and assimilate the social process.

Socrates, having recuperated from his illness in the sanatorium of Asvestochori, however weak and sickly, took refuge in hidden corners of Thessaloniki’s neighborhoods, in the Communist Party’s secret hideouts. He had several, but unverifiable connections with the Greek People’s Liberation Army during the Occupation, and the Democratic Army of Greece in the Civil War years. All contacts and meetings were clandestine. He surfaced on the civil war stage of Thessaloniki rather forcibly, during the investigation of the murder case of the American journalist George Polk, who in May 1948 in the aftermath of mass executions of communists and the international condemnation that followed, had come to Thessaloniki to find a link that would lead him to Markos Vafiades and the leadership of the Democratic Army in the mountains of Macedonia: to witness first-hand what was happening and interview one of the main actors from the other side of the conflict and the fence, which shortly after would be known as the Iron Curtain. He was murdered, however, before embarking to his mission and his body was washed up in the city's port. In later years, an investigative journalist pointed to the Intelligence Service agent stationed in Thessaloniki, who disappeared inexplicably shortly after the murder, as the possible instigator to a murder, apparently motivated by post-war inter-imperialist frictions with the Americans in the Levante region. This rather credible evidence was ignored by the involved parties, that is the Greek government and its American sponsors. On the contrary, the Civil War government, under external pressure manufactured both motives and potential assassins amongst the communists and collaborators, concealed evidence, and, rather flimsily and desperately, accused them of the murder of journalist Polk. Adam Mouzenidis, a member of the Communist Party, was somehow charged in absentia as the main perpetrator, although the Party announced in its press that he had been killed before Polk’s arrival at Thessaloniki. Great-uncle Socrates, at the time a retired tobacco worker, was branded a "Bulgarian in soul and body" by the chief inspector who interrogated him, and, along with his sisters, Magdalene and Calliope, who had presumably offered hideouts to communists, was named among the liaisons of Mouzenidis and other communist party officials and complicit to the murder. The accusations led to Socrates’ arrest and incarceration, in an open-air prison fenced with barbed wire, where teenage Father brought him food. He was interrogated, he might have been tortured, but stood his ground: "Socrates was a rock in his testimony", according to investigative journalist Hadjiargyris, who studied the Polk case in depth.

The detention, interrogation and testimony, Socrates’ correspondence with Mouzenidis’ brother with secret notes to coordinate a rather desperate defense, delivered to the prison by young Father, were some of the last traces that Socrates left in post-war Thessaloniki. Anna, his first wife, had in the meantime died. Socrates left for Athens, driven by health issues or political reasons or both. He was classified ever since, in police records and archives, as an unrepented communist, but persevered with what life he had left. He was remarried, with a widowed architect, Xeni, and became the adoptive father of her architect-author daughter Lisa. He appeared with Xeni in a photograph in Moscow, against the snowy background of a Russian winter, a photograph from the early 1960s, amid the freezing and thawing of the relations between the Cold Ware superpowers. In an ushanka and a black overcoat, the handsomest of Ibrişimci family, held the hand of Xeni. The same tall stature, the same imperious gaze, a fragile smile, the characteristic slight tilt of the head towards Xeni to his right. Xeni, wearing also an ushanka and a similar overcoat, was standing between Socrates and a Soviet official –as far as one could tell from red star emblem pinned on the latter's ushanka and the overcoat with the two columns of silver buttons. It was said that they visited Moscow for the health issues that had plagued him throughout his life, and for Lisa's daughter studies. Socrates died in Athens in 1974, before I had any chance to meet him in person.

Apart from few scattered memories in Father’s mind from his childhood and youth, Socrates did not leave much behind. What he left, however, a rather colorful life story, an insignificant but distinct legacy, it acquired, as it happened, a special gravity in the life of Father and by extension mine, his existence became a kind of family myth in the otherwise prosaic family chronicles. Those few memories his presence on this earth left behind were imprinted in Father’s and my very own mind. I carried them along and enhanced them with some primitive intellectual and spiritual concerns of my own and a dilettante’s interest in philosophy, politics, and student activism.

A dozen, dusty volumes of the “Art Review” issues of the magazine Socrates collected continuously from 1955 to 1963 bound together by a gray hard cover, were one of his gifts to his beloved nephew. They remain in the same order that I last had sorted them as a student in Thessaloniki, under a thick layer of dust, on the very bottom-corner shelf of my student room bookcase, along with several black, thick tomes of a Soviet encyclopedia. English translation. (This bookcase still stands, two and a half meters tall, albeit almost crumbling, above Father's cheap IKEA armchair. It was built on demand more than half a century ago, with no much passion, we have to say, but hastily with poor workmanship by a sloppy carpenter of our neighborhood, a certain Traitsis. He was contracted by Father to assemble most of our furniture in the apartment that was granted in exchange, after the home of the Ibrişimci family was demolished and its plot was handed to a builder in order to erect another one the ugly blocks of flats that define Thessaloniki’s skyline. "He glued the veneer to the wood with his saliva", mother used to say at the sight of the protrusions of the veneers, as they were unfiled or at best poorly filed around the edges. After the delivery of the furniture, several Traitsis' visits ensued, whereby he stood in front of his creations, with a disarming and innocent smile revealing one or two golden teeth, a folding ruler in his back pocket and the pencil on the temple behind his ear. Subsequent interventions and corrections he attempted, however, with proper glue and filing were no more effective.)

Rather miraculously, the main body of Traitsis’ bookcase overloaded with books survived the passage of time, a removal, an earthquake, and two generations, along with the forgotten and scarcely used Soviet encyclopedia on its highest shelves, hidden from the eyes of visitors, and the bound issues of the "Art Review". In early childhood, Mother would not allow me to open any volumes of the latter and flip through their pages, as "these books were given to dad by an uncle who was consumptive." In fact, she was calling for their disposal, calls that Father would not even consider and discuss: the books were part of a precious family legacy. As I was growing up and rejecting that and others of Mother’s foolish cautions, I discovered, printed in these volumes, treasures from the golden age of Greek literature, creations of a predominantly left leaning intelligentsia. They could not have been the works of others in the post-civil-war period, in a broken, poor country, desperately trying to stand on its own two feet, claim her being and rediscover its identity in a world of sharp contrasts. A country, which Socrates, the consumptive tobacco worker, strived to change against grossly unfavorable odds.