Ancestry 11 - Yiannis & Vasiliki: An Unknown Uncle

It did not take long before Vasiliki became pregnant. And it did not take long for Mr. Yiannis’ household to endure their first misfortune; one of several that would follow and eventually disturb lives and affect matters: in the house and the village community, with Yiannis’ employment his primary school teaching -with life as whole. Vassiliki, two months pregnant, fell seriously ill with malaria. The still uncultivated lands further west from the village of Nea Magnesia, where the family put down roots, an area between Gallikos and Axios rivers, was covered by swamplands. Mosquitoes were then a scourge; a mosquito bite potentially fatal. Still a pesky pest nevertheless, a major nuisance for the village inhabitants, from the dusk to the dawn of long summers, although not as life threatening as it used to be. Neither the doctor who prescribed quinine in unregulated quantities, nor Vasiliki did have any idea of the side-effects of those drugs could have, if any, to her or of any harm they could cause to the baby she was carrying. Bedridden, suffering with sweats and high temperature, her life seemed in danger; and there was neither enough accumulated experience, nor time to weigh trade-offs, or assess the long-term risks of any medication and treatment. A few doses of quinine helped her recover. Whether it was the medication or the disease itself or something else that impaired the health of the new born could only be hypothesized, but it sadly happened.

Giorgos E was born a stunted, weak, and sickly and a mentally retarded child. They cared for him, and cared for him as much as they could manage, until he met a premature, yet expected and in a sense welcome death at the young age of seventeen. He had been the family’s secret sorrow until his death, hidden from the outside world, kept within the walls of their house or the fenced bahçe: his whole world during a short life. Severely disabled and retarded children, within the small, backward society of the village and beyond, in the cosmopolitan city not far away– was considered a stigma, a cause of unreasonable shame and distress, compounded by the negligible care and support from the virtually non-existent welfare state of prewar Greece. We knew from the margins of the unofficial ancient history deliberately excluded from school textbooks, that the ancient Spartans threw their sickly and crippled babies into the notorious Καιάδας, an underground cavern of death. In Greece of the 1930s and 1940s, families were merely ashamed to show them to the outside world: to take them by hand or on wheelchair to festivals, celebrations, public gatherings; in short, to enjoy as a family the little joys life in the community had to offer. There were the prejudices. There was the continual concern of what people would whisper behind their backs weighing heavily upon them, their gossiping about in houses and doorsteps when drinking coffee or ouzo with the neighbors; there were stern or pitiful looks or even stranger’s finger pointing at them. All this would cause deep feelings of self-pity and shame and resentment to two otherwise proud and honest parents who were normally treated with deference. Such social behavior is difficult to analyze with the cultural and social metrics of today, but apparently this incomprehensible feeling of shame in disability has been interwoven with Greek culture and its inherent prejudices for centuries. Possibly, due to, on one hand, an innate superiority complex against neighboring nations lacking in glorious history, on the other, an inferiority complex against the more advanced and affluent societies of Europe. Or, it could simply be explained by the unbearable weight of ancient history and heritage on a young nation’s shoulders and, since the founding of the modern Greek state after centuries of Ottoman rule, the contrived indoctrination of a collective conscience with national myths or a sanitized and glorified historical past.English translation. 

Neither Mother nor any of his sisters who lived along with Giorgos ever mentioned anything about his days and existence -to me and the other descendants of the family. Almost seventy years after his death, on a spontaneous visit with my aunts to Agios Athanasios’s Cemetery, where my grandparents had been buried, inside its dreary ossuary—a stuffy, half-dark warehouse with dusty planks for shelves around its walls, next to my grandparents' bones, another chest named Giorgos E. caught my attention and surprised me, as it was labelled with Mother’s maiden name. “There had been a brother of ours in this world,” my aunt admitted when asked, in a whispering voice betraying a secret guilt. I understood. Once upon a time, a man of the same blood as mine lived. An uncle I have never happened to know from photographs or family narratives. Nothing about his life was uttered in numerous family gatherings of endless assorted stories and confessions and anecdotes from the past -until that moment of revelation of a family guilt in the ossuary. Giorgos’ few dreary days in the bahçe and the house had been consigned in the dark depths of the family history.