Ancestry 7 - From Istanbul: Two Small Pieces of Land

Once the passions of the uprooting subsided and the dense fog of uncertainty and the unknown began to diffuse, the group of refugees with Kotis at the lead, Dominique, their young Vasiliki, widowed sister Elizabeth, and her eldest son Leonidas, were given gratis by the government plots of land, some eight acres, to share and manage. Central amongst them was a square piece of land situated at the corner of two streets crossing perpendicular to each other, one of which, until my teenage years, was a dirt road grooved on either side by rain water. The last section of the other, after a sharp turn, was where the main and only asphalted road through the village ended, before it continued into a wide track that disappeared into the fields and the scattered farmhouses on its outskirts, before it crossed the railway lines and joined the so called "National Road", which connected Thessaloniki with the south of mainland Greece and the capital Athens.

Elizabeth’s son decided to become a grocer and build his shop at the crossroads. Indolent by nature, his idiosyncrasy did not draw him to growing tomatoes and vegetables (the main produce of the region) and the daily struggle and strain that this entailed. Therefore, perhaps wisely, he turned into trading food and other household necessities for a living. With this goal and a flourishing grocer’s business in mind, he was adamant, when negotiating with Kotis the dividing of the plot, his desire that the front of the shop he was about to erect to be facing the intersection, so that easy access be allowed from the main road through which carts and tractors and passers-by to and from the farms, as well as the surrounding localities would pass. As importantly, the only coach from Thessaloniki serving the area was stopping at the same junction. His wish was perfectly understandable from a business point of view. It was granted by Kotis, the hardworking breadwinner, the generous family man, the manager of past wealth and late poverty, the rock of the family in the despair of forced immigration and hopes of an as close to home-like resettlement as possible, who let Leonidas and Elizabeth have and appropriate the more privileged part of the plot, more than a quarter of its total area. On this piece of land, Leonidas built his shop and family house above it, as planned, developed it, later with the help of his two sons, into a profitable grocery retail business, and lived the remaining of their lives in relative prosperity.

English translation. That street corner, as the years were going by and in tandem with the economic development, the population growth of the village and its surrounding area, became livelier: a vigorous strategic point at the village borders, a busy spot at the crossroads of a bustling village, as Leonidas would have envisioned it in his business plans. With the increasing mobility of people and volume of trade, and the transportation and commuting the human activity required, the coach that transported people between Thessaloniki and “Nova” Magnesia, its neighboring villages, and the industrial area further, was stopping there -right in front of Leonidas’ grocery store!  

There, at the bus stop, in a space with a half-enclosed recess of corrugated metal sheet, a dirty bench on its periphery, an acacia tree at the center of a circular flower bed, where we often sat with Mother waiting for the last Sunday evening bus to Thessaloniki, after the war Apostolis set up his kiosk; in front of his own piece of land and house; behind a row of fig trees the produce of which we were allowed to pick in August. He had been granted a license to operate that little kiosk, like many retail licenses given by the government gratis to several people like him, as the Greco-Italian war veteran crippled by frostbites in the mountains of Albania in that terrible winter of 1940. He was a lanky guy Apostolis, with gray hair, and sunken but rosy cheeks. Only a few times, did I see him popping crouched out of his kiosk, limping on his weak and stiff legs: to pick up some parcel that the bus conductor dropped, to arrange or replenish the few items of his meagre merchandise displayed outside his kiosk window, before sneaking inconspicuously behind the windows and the cigarettes, the chewing gums, the chocolate, and the other trifles he sold. The nephew of Dominique's great-grandmother, he grew up as Vasiliki's stepbrother, promptly adopted without a second thought by magnanimous Kotis, after Apostolis, a young child, lost both his parents, fellow refugees of Kotis from the town of Kavakli. Mostly silent, a taciturn old man of just a few soft-spoken words, and those words when necessary, he smiled even less, if at all. Neither to me, or Mother, or other passengers waiting for the bus outside his kiosk, to children and elders, to neighbors and strangers alike. Something was eating his soul away – the orphanage, the war, the misery of a prospectless life. Only rarely he would hand me a candy or a chewing gum, as a distant nephew. But for the more expensive items, such as chocolates, nougats, sesame bars, soft drinks, even Chios mastics, which for some reason my aunts craved, he expected us to pay, as it was appropriate -despite some sort of kinship that bound us. It would be impossible for keepers of kiosks and shops of in a small community like that of Magnesia, to survive with complimentary giveaways to friends and family.English translation. 

Kotis was also given some land behind a well-rounded hemispherical mound covered with weeds. What was hidden under that mysterious solid heap of soil nobody knew, but it stood out from afar on the plain outside the village. Kotis’ field, surrounded by tomatoes and vegetables farms, was granted to them in order to produce their wheat and thence flour and bread for their domestic consumption, whilst the rest of the plot, at the junction behind Leonidas’ grocery store, was for their small household, his vegetable allotment, along with a piece of land intended as Vasiliki’s dowry. At the back of the plot, the government agency for the resettlement of the refugees built a dwelling as a permanent family home; a lodging of rather poor quality built in a rush in the midst of the human drama of the time. It was a house of rectangular perimeter base but no basement, with roof tiles, uncomplicated and economic in its design, as in a children's drawing, built empirically by journeymen builders over a few day shifts. It was dark and cold indoors, despite the usually sunbathed open space around it. Its windows, on the one side, faced the same street as Leonidas' grocery store, just a little further from the junction, towards the outskirts of the village and the surrounding farms. It still stands more than a century after it was built, in the corner of the courtyard of Mother's family home, now serving as a kind of family museum, with a few cheap and frayed by time heirlooms and furniture saved by the previous generations. There lived the three of them, Kotis, Dominique, and Vasiliki, during the first years of their re-settlement, with the few square meters of floor space divided into two bedrooms, a large one for the couple and the smaller neighboring one for the young Vasiliki, a kitchenette and nothing else. An outbuilding shack housing a pit latrine served as their toilette. There were no floors, the hard soil of the ground was their floor. Four walls made of lime, earth and water, and the ceiling –tiles on a wooden frame, protected them from the elements. Whatever land was left from the allocation of the plot became a yard and a garden, where chickens and hens roamed freely amongst the vegetables and the few trees, nibbling on the corn grains that Domnique and Vasiliki (and later myself) scattered at strategic points. Apparently, before my birth, on the same ground, a dairy cow and a goat were grazing for the family needs in milk and butter.  

Next to Leonidas' grocery store in the southeast quadrant of the plot, grandmother Vasiliki and grandfather Yiannis, ten years later, built their own home. It was bigger and more dignified, sunnier, and airier, with a front door behind an arched vestibule, facing a front yard. A raised roofed veranda at the back overlooked the vegetable garden of Kotis’ plot. A fitting house, one might say, for a primary school teacher and, later, a school principal that grandfather was and Kotis’ beautiful only daughter. That was his gift to his precious Vasiliki, the dowry on which to found their own lives and raise their children – my mother amongst them.

During my childhood years, the area between Kotis' little house and the more modern and adequate one of Yiannis and Vasiliki was tidied up. The plot was fenced with a wall and railings. In the courtyard, in front of the two houses, and on the floors of the house they laid cement. They built a chicken coop for the poultry, as well as two enclosed toilets, relatively decent for the time. Above the small courtyard of Kotis’ house, the vine climbed higher and spread over a wire roof on four beams, generating a patchy, yet cool shade during the hot summer days. The grapes of the vine might have been sour to my taste, nevertheless its leaves proved an appealing ingredient necessary for the grandmothers' stuffed vine leaves, their renowned dolma dishes.

(Grandmother Eudoxia, in one of her last visits to the village of her in-laws, on the Easter Day on May 4, 1986, a few days after the Chernobyl disaster, she brought some of her delicious stuffed dolmades, wrapped in leaves from that arbor. That Easter was also destined to be my last in the village and grandfather's yard, before my departure for foreign lands, an occasion that might have also triggered grandma’s arduous cooking. Two of the hypochondriac daughters of Yiannis, that is my aunts, whispered to each other something about radioactivity they heard in the news. Surely, they kept whispering, some of the radioactive cloud escaped from the Chernobyl nuclear site could have found its way, over the arbor, the vine, its leaves, to wrap the stuffing for the recipe of the unsuspecting grandmother; thence, to the inner sanctum of our bodies. No such association had crossed my mind before I ate some of the brilliant dolma from the traditional Asia Minor recipe, but, as a bit of hypochondriac myself, I concern myself for several days about the cancer the radioactive Chernobyl cloud via my grandmother's dolma would have brought and planted inside me.)English translation. 

For as long as he was alive, Kotis and, after him, my grandparents and aunts, took good care of the few lonely and unpaired trees in the plot, and even planted some more. Several survived two generations; a few made it through and even outlived my childhood. The apricot tree at the center of the garden, the pear tree a little further, some fig trees large and small along the fence -I picked and tasted their fruits; a large acacia tree that reached the roof of Leonidas' rear veranda -its trunk I bravely climbed many times. A shorter acacia, right above the water tap and the stone sink at the back entrance of the courtyard –I drank from its water and washed face and body under it, I played water games with friends in summer days. And among the scattered trees, there were the rose trees with their unmistaken scent when they blossomed, the flower and the vegetable beds with tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, and many other vegetables for own domestic consumption, the surplus to share with neighbors and friends and family, and in the early days of great need, to exchange it for other necessities. For a young child, it was like the garden of Eden, a playing heaven on school holidays.