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.