Ancestry 15 - Yiannis & Vasiliki: Rehabilitation

He made the correct decision; he did the right thing. He returned home, where his wife and children were fervently waiting. His in-laws, Kotis and Dominique, had passed away within a few days between each other shortly after his banishment, and, God only knows, how Vasiliki coped alone with the three underaged girls and sustained themselves with the meagre savings Yiannis left behind, and the produce of their garden. But after that enlightened decision, the lives of all concerned would gradually change for the better and, ultimately, be restored to a normality akin to that of the pre-war years.

Less than a year after his return, in 1950, their last child, Dominique, known to everybody as Domna, was born. The elder of her sisters, Aliki, had left for Athens not long after Domna’s birth to study and become a nurse and only occasionally visited her home village ever since. The long distance from the family home, then half-a-day’s coach journey, and her rather despotic nature somehow checked the growth of closeness and a sense of familiarity. In phone conversations and during her visits, I used to call her ‘Aunt’ Aliki and listen quietly to the pedantic lectures she was giving to family assemblies in a strict tone of voice. On the other hand, Domna & Litsa, feeble characters as they were, were simply called by their nicknames, as we do with close friends. The rather atypical in old Greece names of Yiannis’ and Vasiliki’s four daughters, Aliki, Stella, Dominique, even that of Mother Theodora, after generations of families naming their children after a grandparent, as it was and still is a common practice in Greece, suggests a long ago forgotten and time-worn connection with the Frankish and Catholic element of the population of Constantinople of old, a faded trace from the depths of the history of Byzantium and its glorious capital.

The path to the daily round, the way back to the teacher's career and what we call everyday life, the desirable state of equilibrium, peace and security, which was abruptly disrupted by the political forces that emerged and prevailed after the conclusion of the Civil War, in that gloomy night of Yiannis’ arrest and, afterwards, during the months of incarceration and exile, forces acting fiercely and paying no heed to the impact on human lives (the discontinuities major historical events cause to human life can be profound), that path Mr. Yiannis and his family strived to walk again on his return was not paved with rose petals. As a humble aspiration as the reappointment to his teacher’s position in a public school might have been, it required, first and foremost, the notorious "Certificate of Healthy Social Convictions". Schools are workshops where young souls are engineered, consciences shaped and formed, young human beings “prepared for life ahead” –as they say. The political class, having asserted itself on the ruins of post-war Greece, sought to establish a new order, aiming primarily at serving the interests of the national ruling class, its wealth largely unscathed by the war (as it is often the case with the richest strata of society in periods of disasters and depression), and, of course, its foreign sponsors. Therefore, it contrived that these young souls are educated with respect to a set of preconceived notions and standards, selectively drawn from a biased, distorted view of history, adapted to the country’s new position in the new world order. The demands exerted on the educational system were aiming, amongst others, at the formation of a concrete national consciousness, unsmeared by communist or radical ideas, whilst maintaining the illusion of a “special people,” direct descendants of a glorious past.

The issue of a such ‘to whom it may concern’ certificate (essentially “certifying” one’s alignment with the dominant ideology) had first to be authoritatively approved by the higher echelons of State Security after an exhaustive search of someone’s past, then checked, stamped and counter-signed by several layers of the state hierarchy, which comprise the notoriously cumbersome Greek bureaucracy, and, finally, sent back to the point where the applicant formally requested it, typically the local police station, for a countersignature, before it was handed to the successful applicant. It was the sine qua non for public sector employment, amongst several other declarations and certificates that government agencies regularly demand as necessary supporting documentation to proceed with any kind of application, sometimes at periodic intervals, often from other government agencies, but with the applicant as the hapless intermediary; in an endless exchange of papers and stamps, seals and signatures, too many stamps and signatures from too many bureaucrats. All this by and large pointless individual effort was often a necessary condition for getting on with life for many modern Greeks between their birth and death. But, Mr. Yiannis, a citizen also of this "Kafkaesque" state, was further burdened by a dubious past, which forced him to oscillate between nonchalant public servants, seemingly with no end in sight, thus exacerbating an already difficult family and financial situation.

In the months that followed his exile, with the cogs of bureaucracy spinning at a familiar desperately slow pace, Mr. Yiannis, the ex-headmaster, still without a job and a regular income, was forced to sell pomegranates from his trees in the public markets of the western outskirts of Thessaloniki. Eventually, the desirable certificate with a ministerial seal of approval was dispatched, thanks mainly to a decisive intervention by a certain Petros Garoufalias, MP and minister of the "centrist" governments of that time; a peer, a fellow countryman and former classmate of Mr. Yiannis’ father from Arta. He was reinstated and reappointed as teacher, and resumed his teaching at the Bosphorus school in the working-class district of Ampelokipi, in the industrial west of Thessaloniki. His place in the local community, the respect by the people of his village and by the pupils of his school and their parents, a respect he valued highly throughout his life, was regained effortlessly. In the field of fundamental everyday human interactions and the essential in education parent-student-teacher relationship, there was no room for bias and prejudices. No further political obstacles were erected by the State Security in his career, no grievances from members of public were raised. His prestige in the local and teacher’s communities and his privileges as a teacher and headmaster were fully restored to the pre-war levels.