Hotel Wow in the affluent Yeşilköy (or Ayastefano) neighborhood of Istanbul is a walled complex of two twin high-rise towers, two modern white boxes with perfectly symmetrical facades, that might have been pretentiously modeled on the architecture of some Las Vegas or other American hotel, thus, generally devoid of character and soul. It stands in the outskirts of a shopping mall, one of those malls who sprang up, one after another, in Turkey's cities, thanks to a breathless capitalist growth and expansion. From afar, the hotel does not stand out amongst the forest of tall apartment and office blocks that define Istanbul’s skyline in the 21st century. Nevertheless, ‘Wow’ is a convenient, if not ideal, place for visiting professionals and businessmen converging from the East and the West for business deals in Turkey, but also for groups of tourists and young people with rather superficial or dubious tastes in accommodation. Sometimes even for Turkish couples who find a convenient and affordable romantic refuge not far from home. In short, Hotel Wow has been erected primarily for servicing those in transit, who want or need a low-coast accommodation for a night or two at a strategic point in the gigantic city, with easy access to its international airport.
In one of the upper floors of
the hotel overlooking the "Kemal Ataturk" airport with its runways
at a radius of just a mile and a half away, visible from my window at the back
of the building, I spent two sleepless nights. (Nights of Insomnia or, at best,
poor sleep, have become inevitable ordeals of flash business trips.) With
planes taking off and landing incessantly with only a few hours pause in the
small hours of the night, the noise from the night-shift in the construction of
an airport extension, the humming noise from the air-conditioner, the stifling heat
taking seconds to fill the room when I turned it off, the moans from the love-making
couple in the room next-door, the toilet flushing from the room above… How one to
sleep under such conditions? I once formed the rather erroneous notion that a
possible way to deal with humming noises penetrating doors and windows, walls and
ceilings in hotels, was to focus my attention to the source of noise and the noise
per se and listen to it attentively, so that the disturbance is somehow transitioned
from the sensory organs, the ears, and the forefront of consciousness to the
depths of the unconscious, where is eventually buried. On that occasion, as in
most cases, it did not work. The sunrise found me awake standing at the window
and looking towards the airport. Further south, behind the runways, I could
take a glimpse of the coastline of the Sea of Marmara and a playful reflection
of the morning sun on its waters.
A narrow strip of residential area
in the seaside neighborhoods of Ayastefano (for the Greeks) or San Stefano (for
the Levantines – Genoese, Venetians, and Franks, who settled in Constantinople
and its surroundings after the Fourth Crusade), was barely discernible into the
distance through the blurry, polluted atmosphere above and beyond the vastness
of the airport. It was at that dawn that I found myself closer than ever, in
space, to the roots of my family, from my Mother's side, in Istanbul. This subtle and fleeting connection to a
distant past lasted a few moments but triggered several conversations with
family members on the traces that my ancestors left on this earth, from Istanbul
to Greece.
Konstantinos, Kostis, "Kotis" to his friends, his acquaintances
and associates, Mother's grandfather, was born sometime in the late 19th
century, and made Ayastefano, the then rather cosmopolitan and relatively affluent
coastal suburb of Istanbul, his home; at the very geographical coordinates
where the Venetians of Enrico Dandolo first landed and then conquered and
pillaged and looted Constantinople, thus setting the course for the irrevocable
demise of Byzantium. They say that Kotis’ official surname, which he left
behind in Constantinople along with the piece of land he owned and most of his
possessions, was Nikolaidis: clearly, a Byzantine surname. Malik Bey, a
landowner, and at the same time a merchant of nuts and fruits and vegetables,
he would belong to the middle to high strata of a wealthy, prosperous and economically
influential class of Greeks in the heart of the Ottoman Empire until the wars
of the 20th century, which, while those infidels or giaours were paying
their taxes at the Porte allowed them to go about their businesses unhindered.
In his manor and orchards, which at his time would have blossomed under the
concrete mass of the airport, he cultivated his nuts and other seasonal produce,
and then traded them in large local markets.
He was married to Dominique, née Kountouras, whose Christian name, as well as those
of her grandchildren -Stella, Dominique, Alice, and their pale, light skin
color and fair hair, pointed to Frankish origins. I doubt whether Kotis himself
or his wife revealed to the outside world or even harbored a Greek
consciousness or Greekness, let alone considered themselves direct descendants
of the lost Hellenism of the Byzantine empire from many centuries ago. I also doubt
whether they had learned any of the history of Constantinople spanning the millennia
before them, of the illustrious city in which they were born and lived in the
heyday of their existence or, even, whether they had an elementary awareness of
the historical heritage of previous generations on which their beings were
founded. They spoke Greek, as well as Turkish. They were Orthodox Christians at
least in name, either by conversion or compelled by tradition and local customs
-no one knows. In the cauldron of Constantinople and its suburbs, various races
and tribes merged over time: Turks, Armenians, Byzantine Greeks, Franks,
Venetians, Genovese, and occupied various social and economic strata and posts,
in a predominantly feudal and transactional society. To their only daughter Vasiliki,
Kotis gave the upbringing that Greek landowners and merchants, with relatively
open minds and wealth, intended for their children: a few classes of secondary
school education, home instruction of French, the piano, the mandolin, and the
like. Father, later in life, was joking that he had several conversations with grandmother
Vasiliki over property and inheritance matters, purportedly including verbal
promises for the concession of some land in Mother’s village, but conveniently discussed
in the French language, so that no one present could understand them.
The Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922
and the exchange of populations that ensued, the heavy invisible hand of
history, forced them to the New Greece, to Greek Macedonia, not long ago
liberated from the Turks and Bulgarians, in rural areas in the outskirts of the
Thessaloniki. The implementation of the Treaty of Lausanne was on its track.
Kotis with his wife Dominique and their daughter, the beautiful Vasiliki, a
17-year-old girl at the time, said their goodbyes to Ayastefano on a sunny
morning of 1924, a morning which betrayed no insurgence, no persecutions, no
commotions characteristics of such momentous historical and life-transforming
events. It was like any other spring morning on the coast of the sea of Marmara,
its waters sparkling as with any glorious Anatolia sunrise. There was even a
farewell photograph, which showed them standing, three solemn figures, surrounded
by neighbors and employees, in front of their two-storey house with the light
blue gray walls they would leave behind; serious and expressionless, but
dignified, standing in front of the threshold of a traditional front door of a
high-ceilinged ground floor, where the tall shutters of the façade hinted at the
empty from produce warehouses of Kotis’ business, under the large balcony of
the first floor and the attic above. Their home looked grand and rich in the photo
taken to commemorate the conclusion of a life-chapter. With Kotis at the center, the
highly respected and honorable family head, a true Malik Bey –imposing, with
sturdy chest and shoulders, a thick mustache, piercing eyes, below combed-back,
gray hair. Whatever material fortune he had accumulated and possessed throughout
his life, the house, the fields and the orchards, whoever people he loved, respected
and was respected by as a boss, his neighbors and friends, his associates and
employees, Kotis would leave behind once and for all. The faded photograph was
left as the reflection of a bitter end, the last memory of a journey that was
unknowingly and unwittingly destined to change towards paths that led to the
unknown, a last stern dignified stance in the face of the unexpected
vicissitudes of history. On the other hand, from that macroscopic and objective
and callous point of view of history, this uprooting could be classified as yet
another collateral damage, an insignificant detail in the margins of the wars
and historical records.
Whether, with the almost
violent and disorderly population exchange and the ill-advised ethnic cleansing
of the time, Kotis' flight was driven by conscience and volition and equanimity,
or under the fear of reprisals and the vindictiveness and savagery that lurked in
tandem with the emergence of Kemal's new post-war Turkey, nobody knows. I would
have betted on the latter. After all, who would voluntarily leave a world he
and generations of ancestors before him forged with blood and toil, a whole
life one might say, for a disorderly escape into a shapeless future, into the
void. Every farewell, definitive and final, to the living and the dead alike, to
the familiar places and things of a lifetime, is a stab in the heart, a
tragedy. Even for the strongest wills, it brings about emotion and tears, sadness
and stiffness in the heart, and, for the weak, crying and long-lasting sorrow.
The only remedy is time and the oblivion that its passage brings, and,
definitively, death.
Anyway, as the Greek saying
goes, they threw a “black stone” back into the land that they ploughed and from
which they prospered, and Kotis with Dominique and Vasiliki, his widowed
sister, Elizabeth and her two children, Leonidas and Paraskevi, left the house
and the fields, gathered as much as they could from the belongings for the caique
which would ferry them along the Thrace and Macedonia coastlines to Thermaikos Bay
and Thessaloniki. They probably had had low expectations of the life that
awaited them. Even those expectations nearly collapsed into the precipices of
despair, when the chest with some pieces of gold and other valuables, all the
wealth that could have been salvaged under the circumstances, fell from the
hook of the crane that loaded the refugees' luggage onto the boat deck into the
depths of the sea. They were left with nothing of any significant and
recognizable exchange value to take to their new homeland. The conditions of
their settlement in their new home country would have been substantially
different, if that chest of gold had not been lost in the depths of Marmara.
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