Ancestry 18 - Yiannis & Vasiliki: Young Mother

Mother was born from a different egg than her twin sister. More sociable and capable, more driven and willing to take risks outside the suffocating village environment than Litsa, although maybe not as fearless and adventurous as Aliki. Unlike Litsa, she faced up to the obstacles that life threw at her way, at work and family, always a good measure of one’s determination and will.

She was admitted amongst the top candidates in the Pedagogical Academy of Thessaloniki in 1956. However, with anti-communism still at its peak, enrollment in the Academy required a "Certificate of Healthy Social Convictions", identical to the one grandfather struggled to obtain to be reappointed as a public-school teacher after his exile. One morning, Mother in a flowery summer dress and her cat-eye glasses, Mr. Yiannis, impeccably dressed in a buttoned-up shirt and a grey suit, arrived at the Security & Police Headquarters where his and his family data were registered and kept and where he had to report in person regularly upon his return from exile. In a thick file folder in the basement archives, details of any suspect pro-communist or, generally, “anti-social” activities of the past were filed. Mr. Yiannis was well known amongst several senior officers in that department. He had been a regular visitor in the past and, not far from those headquarters, within the department's jurisdiction, he had been interrogated and eventually incarcerated in a basement cell, before his banishment to the isle of Lemnos. And his file in the security archives had barely gathered any dust. As it happened, between grandfather and the department’s commanding officer, a vehement anti-communist and nationalist zealot, there had been no love lost, due to some open accounts from their past; not an open personal vendetta, but some day, a few stray words against the security officer one his ilk or a transgression must have stuck in the officer’s memory. Not to mention that he had that great sense of a solemn duty to maintain “order and security”, characterizing many policemen, as that duty was perceived and ordered by his superiors and authorities, with an own touch of interpretation of such orders.

Mr. Yiannis did not want to enter or come too close to the offices of the Security Department: that would have revived the nightmares of a relatively recent past. He decided to wait outside, at a kiosk across the street, with his hands in his gray trouser pocket pretending to read that morning’s newspaper headlines. Mother, a seventeen- year-old trembling leaf, in a colorful and youthful, yet solemn dress, she entered the office that issues the specific certificate, with the application in her hands, signed-off and registered in a different office in the same building. She stood in front of the desk of the duty officer and timidly said:

"My name is Economou Theodora of Ioannis... I would like to apply for the Certificate of Healthy... for my enrollment in the Academy where I was admitted... Please, sir."

"For which Academy?", the frowning officer asked her abruptly, without lifting his eyes from the registered application that was handed to him for his perusal.

"Pedagogical Academy at the Archaeological Museum Street... I was the first to be admitted."

“I am not interested if you’re admitted first or last…”

After pulling out a thicker than average battered and greasy binder folder from a filing cabinet behind his desk, he leafed through it and momentarily huffed. A sardonic and crooked smile was quickly extinguished by an exhalation of smugness through the nose, and he exclaimed:

"Aha! You are Economou’s daughter, young lady! Don't you tell me, your dad sent you upstairs?"

"Yes, sir... He's waiting for me outside."

"Doesn't your dad have the courage to come upstairs and confront us himself?"English translation. 

He looked at Mother, who was standing at solemn attention in front of his desk, a beautiful, petite young girl with golden blond hair in two braids thrown on her back, the retro glasses in a black acetate frame, with one of her palms hiding the other on the summer dress. He raised his cold-eyes dispassionately upwards. With pursed lips, his mouth protruding forward under pressure from the lower jaw, signifying both disapproval and rigor, he crouched again his head on the piece of paper in front of him. Then, he returned Mother’s application in the open binder, took off his glasses, folded them and put them aside on his desk, as if to say "our interview is concluded," and in a calm and confident manner he said:English translation. 

"I will issue no certificate for you, young lady. I saw myself how well Greek children progressed and prospered under your dad’s tutelage… now he wants you to take on the same role!"

Mother walked away dejected and disconsolate, with the tail between her legs, whispering, or rather half-crying: "ΟΚ... Goodbye...", weak, crashed under a superior force. She met grandfather who waited patiently outside. In her face he could read the rejection of her application for this sine qua non for her admission in the Academy certificate. They took the bus back home gloomy and silent, but in grandad’s mind the only available course of action had already been formed.  A few weeks later, following a private phone call, Petros Garoufalias, the politician from Arta, grandfather’s hometown, would have to come again to the aid (or, rather, rescue) of his compatriot and intervene decisively, as he did when expediting the issue of Yiannis’ own certificate for his reappointment as a teacher. And Mother would have finally overcome the hurdle that the perverse behavior of the security officer raised, and enrolled in the Pedagogical Academy.

That was how many similar bureaucratic affairs were settled in post-war Greece, and, in a barely undiminishing rate, even today: an indication, they say, of Greece's poor political governance and low cultural development, through or, perhaps, despite its turbulent modern history. In the case of grandfather and his family, such means were employed to overcome unjust, arbitrarily erected obstacles rather than request unreasonable favors from a political system chronically plagued by corruption and cronyism. Following the ethical path of an uncompromising honesty many of the obstacles and barriers that a monstrous state mechanism erects, mainly to reassert its authority or, at least, justify its existence, would have proved insurmountable; not surpassing them timely would have drastically changed the course of my family’s history. In short, such "means to an end" were merely exercised to counterbalance gross injustices. In that respect, one cannot ignore the contribution of good fortune and the circumstances: in our case, the presence of some powerful political figure in the accessible social circle of grandfather and the power this figure could wield. 

Ancestry 17 - Yiannis & Vasiliki: Head of the Family

Grandfather was the undisputed head of his family in a patriarchal community. A traditional paternalism reigned at home, austere and incontestable, as one would have expected from a family with no male members other than grandfather and the disabled Giorgos who passed away at a young age. The condescending style of the old-time teacher, the pedantry, the sophistry and the sarcasms, the rigid opinions rarely inviting counter-arguments, the instructions and orders, the monologues with creatively composed phrases from of a rich vocabulary, were delivered with pomp to the four women of the house at the dinner table and, occasionally, to neighbors, shopkeepers and tradesmen. This eloquence created an aura of superiority and authority and erected unassailable walls around him against any attempts at arguing. Yet, it was the form and style of his presentations rather than the content, which, in the culturally backward environment of the village, often left his audience dumbfounded and in awe.

Vasiliki was fated to live on the margins and under the shadow Yiannis cast on his family. Her social life was rather non-existent and she spent most of her time within the confines of the small village, barring the rare recreational visit to Thessaloniki with her daughters. She got on stoically with everyday life, dragging her lame leg, in defiance of a debilitating arthritis getting worse with age, and a high blood pressure somehow under control with drugs. As the years were passing by Vassiliki’s wanders were mostly bounded by the house walls and the bahçe fence, with increasingly rare trips to the grocery store across the street or to the church on Easter or to attend a wedding or a funeral. Most of her diminishing with age energy was spent in cooking and cleaning, her only social interactions being through the bahçe fence, in the Turkish language with the Prousan neighbors (amongst the non-Greek speaking victims of the populations exchanges of the past, because of their Christian beliefs) or in plain Greek with passersby, members of the Dardonis’ clan and the other large families who lived further down the side lane. Grandmother Vasiliki loved me tenderly, as her first grandchild, and she manifested this love with cheese pies, sugar pies, pasties and patties, and other specialties from the rich culinary heritage of Istanbul she eagerly prepared when we visited. To her implicit appeals for appreciation of her cooking, I always responded in the affirmative, although without the formal "thanks" but a nod of the head and a smile, and the customary kiss when we said our goodbyes. She was pleased, even grateful, for seeing me enjoying the food she prepared especially for me to honor my visits, and addressed me kind-heartedly with spontaneous Turkish exclamations: "Ah, paşam!", "Ah, yavrum!" and, later as a teenager, "Ah, babacim!" It goes without saying that Mr. Yiannis, the intellectual, was not particularly pleased with Vassiliki expressing herself or conversing in the Turkish dialect he considered barbaric.English translation. 

The paterfamilias strongly urged his daughters to study. At all costs, often with arm-twisting and yelling. Aliki was left untouched by all this. She had been the house rebel and a free spirit, and was armed with a personality more dynamic than her father’s, and, for some unknown reason, she decided on her own volition to become nurse. After school she left the village for Athens, where she found her bearings, qualified as nurse, and built a life free from the overbearing paternal influence and the shackles of the small village community. Litsa, on the other hand, seemed less enthusiastic and rather disinclined to pursue any studies beyond the mandatory high school education; her comfort-zone was delimited by the narrow surroundings of the house and the yard and bahçe at the back, where she was happy to keep herself busy with housework chores and nurturing and patronizing her younger sister Domna. She spent her plentiful spare time in gossiping with visitors and neighbours in coffee soirees, which were culminated in Litsa’s “coffee reading” to the participants, a pastime in which she developed a remarkable skill, as I can attest from personal experience. After several failed attempts at the exams, at the exasperation of grandfather, she was eventually admitted to the Law School. After graduation, she practiced as a small-time solicitor, in a disinterested manner and charging tiny fees or no fees at all (barely amounting to a regular income), primarily having to deal with the ominous state bureaucracy on behalf of illiterate and ignorant clients, that is, to act on errands requiring nothing more than basic reading and writing skills.

Domna, the youngest and prettiest of the four daughters, having, however, been nurtured into a feeble, hypersensitive and highly-strung personality, after similar struggles with her father’s intransigence and obsession for education, eventually graduated with a dubious degree in Business from a public college. She complemented this degree with some inconsequential qualifications in French and typing, but she remained unemployed for the rest of her life without having ever displayed any detectable effort or initiative to work -somehow, somewhere. Possibly, she was not attracted by any type of employment or, merely, because daily work seemed to her like a tall mountain that she felt too scared or too lazy or both to climb. Like her elder sister, she found solace in household chores and endless everyday gossiping.English translation. 

Ancestry 16 - Yiannis & Vasiliki: Political Compliance

 The political activity of the few petty-bourgeois intellectuals of semi-rural areas, like grandfather, during the German Occupation and the Civil War years, had begun to fade in the memories of fellow countrymen and colleagues. For the sake of his family and his own life, under the weight of the political developments in post-civil war Greece and the world, as projected through state propaganda filters and as perceived by citizens with a relatively narrow point of view, grandfather would gradually water down his radical leftist views. Some, however, still lurked in his conscience when, after the defeat of fascism, the USSR emerged, for many of his generation, as a beacon of an "actually existing socialism" and a global superpower. He retained some broad socialist convictions and values, despite the personal and family ordeals, the exile and the quarrels with the other side of the fence, despite the heavy shadows cast over lives by the ubiquitous National Security, despite an alien to his political past and forcibly obtruded ruling ideology. However, Mr. Yiannis, for the public eyes at least, would sail to moderate ideological and political shores.

In truth, a similar change in the perceptions of politics and political bias affected most local participants in the post-war dramas. The pillories, the People's Courts, the arrests and executions, were events unfathomable to their children and grandchildren, although they had a marked effect well into the maturity years of grandfather and many others around him. English translation. Magnesia and the surrounding villages made a predictable conservative turn, its people unconscious of the growing conservatism in their political minds and oblivious of what this might entail in post-war Greece. Things were going relatively well, so to speak. Everything seemed to fall in place, barring, as always, the occasional isolated tragedies of human existence in its microcosms. These tragedies, however, were "dictated by fate" or by an invisible hand of God, as the common folk often believed. Why should they try to change, adhere to progressive forces, transformative of the socioeconomic system, and take a leap off the mainstream into an uncertain future? Why should let anything disturb their "peace, order, and security"?

Ordinary people of the lower strata, especially in the countryside, became by and large politically inert or depoliticized, and, of course, political inertia and depoliticization are both inanimate souls of conservatism contrary to political activism. In years of adversity, they would rather safeguard their daily jobs, most of them in fields and shops or the factories that were springing up in the vicinity, a privileged minority in government positions, all furnishing small but regular incomes. In any case, most of the countryside folk did not possess a concrete ideological basis, some not even the intellect let alone a sophistication, to analyze, beyond the superficial and frivolous debates in cafés, complex economic processes and a political reality that stretched far beyond the boundaries of their villages and even their country. In elections, they sided with one of the legalized, mainstream parties, either like football fans supporting a club, without a well-founded rationale and driven primarily by instinct and emotion, or for the simple reason that their father supported the said political party, or because they were too credulous in believing the enticing, yet often implausible, pre-election pledges of politicians, or by reciprocating with their vote a favor by a politician, which was done or promised to be done. An ideological and political reconciliation took place through everyday life, family life, the trivial traditional social interactions, weddings, christenings, funerals festivals, as well through their daily toil in workplaces. Either way, in grandfather’s village in the outskirts of the big city, sizeable class divergence and a consequential struggle from excessive inequality did not occur; nor an unbridled greed against the welfare of the local community by individuals was evident. Mr. Yiannis realized that he was devoid of power and will to contribute in transforming Greek society or shaping the local mentality or altering historical prejudices as he might have wanted or, without expressing an ideological or political party affinity, might have envisioned in his youth. But he was frequently critical of both the established social norms and the locals’ indifference or reactionary conservatism. Greek civil society, the village and schools where he worked, the educational system in which he joined as a docile functionary, the State above all, were all well-formed and established forces not to be reckoned with: forces exerted by the centers of political power and the ruling class; more so given its under-developed economy and strong dependence on economic poles outside Greece for its modernization and growth.  English translation. 

Thus, Grandfather and his village community became conformists. His attention turned to his family and work at school, until his retirement shortly after I was born. From the years of his professional rehabilitation, as teacher and headmaster at the school of Ampelokipi and, finally, shortly before retirement, as an inspector in schools in central Macedonia, a thick dossier survived with a collection of school works from the top pupils of the classes he taught (in geography, in arithmetic, in essay writing) and the several speeches he delivered on historical anniversaries and in school assemblies with "parents and guardians", providing further evidence of his conformism at work and in politics. He had succumbed and his alignment (forced or volitional) with the established national ideology and narrative, without the slightest of deviations from government mandates, tied always to the historically distorted nationalistic and anti-communist chariots, became complete. The petty-revolutionary, the quiet proponent of the Greek Liberation Front, the progressive left-wing "enlightener" of the village during the first months after liberation had put on a conservative façade, at least when under the public eye, and fully complied with the establishment directives. For some time, in the post-war years, he might have voted for the “Unified Democratic Left” party, and other center-left legitimized groups. In domestic discussions, he might have praised (always with due care) left-wing politicians of his time. He used to buy inconspicuously the only legal left-wing newspaper from kiosks in the busy Thessaloniki city center, cautiously wrapped by mainstream conservative papers, like "Macedonia", under his arm. In the privacy of his room, seeking pluralistic worlds news briefings from alternative channels, he secretively tuned his age-old radio by the couch into Slavic-language radio stations, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, whose news and announcements, strangely enough, he generally understood. Such trivial digressions, like keeping an open mind to non-mainstream information had no significant resonance, but they were constituents of a rather closed-in-itself whole, hermetically sealed from the world outside.English translation. 

With the priests and the church kept no open accounts beyond the absolute minimum necessary his role as school headmaster required. (He had to shepherd the pupils of his school class to the mandatory Sunday mass and make some dry and routine remarks to pupils, parents and local dignitaries on religious holidays.) Vasiliki, perhaps because of the multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism of the city she was born in and brought up, was neither a devout religious woman, nor did she regularly attend to the local church, nor did she hang icons of the Jesus Christ or Virgin Mary at noticeable places in the house. At least at home, Mr. Yiannis harbored an aversion, occasionally expressed as contempt towards everything related to the Greek Orthodox church doctrines and its ministers. In that respect, he remained faithful to the ideas of his youth, that is, to atheistic or agnostic notions.  His covert anti-church sentiments certainly influenced Vasiliki and their daughters, and, further down the generation ladder, myself and Brother –in as much as fragmentary opinions picked up early childhood can affect one’s beliefs. In public, in religious holidays, liturgies that his school was decreed by the Ministry to attend, christenings and weddings, whenever he was not assigned to deliver the customary meaningless speech, he presented himself discreetly in the background, keeping a good distance from priests and deacons, however, wary not to give rise to any malevolent whispers. A few might have still remembered his pro-communist past associated that in Cold War Greece has been associated with atheism. At his work, he transformed himself into the archetype of a teacher whom the state, which, though initially reluctant, had entrusted him to indoctrinate children within a framework of firmly established national and religious dogmas.