Ancestry 29 - Eudoxia & Leonidas: The Kampakis' in Salonica

The young refugees of my grandparents’ generation from Bayindir and Melnik, of Eudoxia’s and Leonidas’ families, came together in Salonica and left their traces in the town and the memories of the handful of still living descendants. A few amongst them, perhaps the most gifted, perhaps the most fortunate, managed to break the shackles of their low social class bound by in their youth from powerful historical and social forces. Even those, only a few rungs of the social ladder did they succeed to climb. The opportunities were few, sporadic and uneven at the time, the blows of history and war merciless and the obstacles life threw in their ways sometimes insurmountable. The pace of progress with the inevitable advances in productivity, dictated by the imperceptible laws of capitalist production (the “invisible hands of the markets”, some say) that reduce the toil required to obtain the necessities of livelihood and increase mobility between social strata, that is the entropy of society, all these fruits of technological advance taken for granted in contemporary life were hardly at hand for those generations who struggled to keep up in uneven societies of an uneven world and under adverse conditions.

Vasilis, the oldest of Eudoxia’s brothers, set up a tavern, which he managed until his death; that is, the basics he had learned in his youth in a café in Bayindir were those that he applied in the new homeland. Stelios, the short and slender uncle with the always rosy cheeks I remember, worked during the mid-war years as a hand in a textile factory whose ruins still exist by the stream of Toumpa in the parish of Agios Fanourios. Yiannis, the youngest of the Kampakis’ also opened a small tavern in the Fleming area, but died young of consumption shortly after the end of the war. The site his tavern was taken over by Stelios and his brother-in-law, grandfather Leonidas, who turned into a greengrocer’s store. They worked as partners for two or three miserable post-war years. Father assisted their enterprise as much he could, he said with the willingness of a ten-year-old child on his school vacations. The small business did not do perform as expected and folded. Leonidas took up initially a low-paid job as a worker in a tobacco factory before being assigned due to poor health, and with the intervention of the influential uncle Elias, to an usher’s job in the Association of Tobacco Merchants, a job that kept until his retirement. Stelios returned to the factory until he gathered enough work credits to retire with a meagre state pension. Once a retiree, he used to walk down the streets of Toumpa to visit his sister in our old neighbourhood in the Fleming area before he grew old and died an unnoticed by the broader family death. From what I was hearing grandmother was his favourite sister. During his visits to Eudoxia’s flat, she invariably treated him with a cup of Turkish coffee, and if she had prepared food he would have been asked to stay over for lunch. That offer Stelios always declined despite grandmother’s protestations. After their small talk by the door of the kitchenette on his way out whilst observing me with a gentle smile eating my food, after a wink and a few teasing words towards me, he departed before Leonidas returned from his morning rounds of grocery shopping, his club or café. If that little shop business of Stelios and Leonidas had not dried up and the vegetable and fruit trade in the old neighbourhood had turned a profit and had made a living for the two families, perhaps their fate would have been different, outside the miserable factories of the post-war city, just as the fate of many of their descendants might have changed. A different turn, an infinitesimal deviation of life along its way, a minute differentiation in the choices presented to man to choose with that ostensible "free will" can sometimes have a dramatic impact on the microcosm of the lives of common people, like the Kampakis’ family, although it does not affect in the least the course of history.

Chryssa, the older sister of Eudoxia, with her husband and children remained in the shacks of Toumpa, until Karamanlis, the statesman of modern era Greece, razed them to the ground for the sake of what many saw as an ill-conceived and poorly planned and distorted modernization of the city. The imperative at that time was to provide affordable accommodation for the masses descending into the city from rural areas in search of jobs and a future. During Karamanlis’ tenure as a minister, Chryssa’s family was given to rent a simple and affordable, but for the standards of the time modern flat in an estate built in the suburb of Foinikas for housing working-class families. We visited their flat regularly; I was towed along, sometimes reluctantly, by grandmother, who always seemed to yearn those outings and the endless chats and gossip with Chryssa and her two daughters, Diamanto and Despoina, that those visits entailed. The women chatted for hours on end, and if Diamanto happened to bring along her boy, we played together in the openness of the outskirts of the city, away from the dense urbanisation and the proliferation of cars that began to choke the old neighbourhoods and open spaces of Salonika. The houses in the settlement of Foinikas were low, with few floors, sparsely scattered in blocks, with pine trees surrounding them and rest benches in their shades and ample area for a kick about. It featured nearby playgrounds and kiosks with refreshments and candies. An amusement park was operated in the summer by the busy road that crossed the district. The Avenue of National Resistance as it is called today brought (and still brings) to mind family excursions by coach to the beaches of Peraia, Bahçe Ciflik, Nea Mechaniona and Epanomi, seaside towns along the coast of Thermaikos Bay, destinations of cheap holidays or a Sunday day trip to the beach for city's plebs. When Father eventually obtained his car, which was another small step on the social ladder, our weekend summer trips took us further along the same road to the then less crowded and still unexplored sandy beaches of Chalkidiki.

Of Chryssa's two daughters, Diamanto was the youngest and most beautiful. One summer, in Nea Fokea of Chalkidiki, the fishing village where a branch of the broader Kampakis’ family settled, after the Asia Minor Catastrophe to become farmers and taverners, a place where grandmother always spent a few weeks’ summer vacations with Chryssa and relatives, in that village her niece fell in love and eventually married a remarkable merchant navy lad, named Xenos. I was told that Xenos was a bright individual, with a sharp mind and a special talent for valuations, to have it wasted in long sea voyages. He became a renowned expert in estimating damages to ships and their cargo and quickly ascended the ranks of his shipping company, so much so that, he, with Diamanto and their children, settled and prospered in glamorous London. Young Despoina’s life, on the other hand, turned out to be joyless and beyond mundane. She worked for decades in the same textile factory, whilst taking care of the aging Chryssa, until she retired with the petty pension of a factory worker. She died as a spinster and a virgin just a few months after the death of her mother, alone and single in the long-neglected by the council estate flat of Foinikas. Despoina stands out in my mind as one of those human beings whose life seemed to have been heedlessly wasted; barely noticeable, between rows of looms in the factory and the four walls of a poor working-class flat she shared all her life with her old mother. It looked like a solitary walk in the human wilderness, which, until its very end, barely caught anybody’s attention, in any shape or form; a life which did not deviate from the monotonous, straight path of the daily grind and repetitive sequences of infinitesimal actions. The unworthy event that was Despoina's journey through this world, more insignificant than a drop in the ocean, recalls some of the questions existential philosophy has posed and tried to answer: What can make someone happy in life? Is there real happiness after all that we should strive to pursue? Is life without happiness worth living?

Ancestry 28 - Eudoxia & Leonidas: In the Shantytown

 And so, they arrived in Thessaloniki. Settling in the city, finding a roof over their heads and existing humanely, for those who did not possess and brought with them gold sovereigns, jewellery or anything of appreciable exchange value, meant facing another tall mountain to climb, another ordeal to endure. The support from the government of an inherently disorganized state and a society of meagre means to redistribute, which had to deal with a momentous disaster and national humiliation and was swamped by the influx of near two million refugees, was paltry and mostly relied on conditional foreign aid. After disembarkation many lived in tents erected in open areas, church yards, and military camps in the outskirts of the city, or makeshift shacks from sheets of metal or planks or whatever they could put their hands on. Such temporary shelters were set up randomly in slums (dare not say ghettos), far from the urban and relatively affluent core of the city and its seafront villas. Over the interwar years, the bourgeois of old Thessaloniki and the few wealthy people amongst the immigrants entrenched themselves in the city centre. Most local Thessalonians and the populus Jewish community of Salonica remained seemingly untouched by the influx and displayed an indifference towards the multitude of the newcomers from Anatolia. Several public remonstrances primarily stemmed from concerns about the impact on the economy of the city and the unpredictable and possible dramatic changes in the fabric of the society that would take place. The recent experience with the presence of foreign allied troops stationed in the city during the later stages of WWI had disturbed their lives and contributed to generally negative sentiments towards the immigrants from Anatolia. The resentment, more noticeable amongst Jews and Slavs, was counter-balanced by sympathy, even congeniality and camaraderie from Greeks, until then a relative minority in the city, who saw its ethnic profile changing to their favour.  

After the initial turmoil subsided, the Kampakis family and adolescent Eudoxia amongst them, were reunited in the slum of Kato Toumba, above the churches of Agios Therapontas and Agios Fanourios up the slopes of the Seih Sou hill. There, in shacks without electricity and sanitation, with makeshift toilets, drinking water carried in ewers from nearby wells, Vasilis, Stelios and Chryssa, the older siblings of Eudoxia with their families and a group of refugees from Bayindir, began rebuilding their livelihoods. Grandmother Eudoxia, with Yiannis, her younger brother, and their mother Anna “the Stork” Yiakoumis (because of her long legs and tall stature) set up their house a little further, in the Malakopi district. The end of their adventure marked the beginning of the struggle for survival in their new homeland -from ground zero.

Only few amongst the youngest of the refugees managed to complete an elementary education curriculum in Bayindir before disaster struck. Some attained basic reading skills, even fewer were able to write legibly. To enrol in the so-called tin-school of their shantytown was beyond consideration for most, under the harsh living conditions and the struggle for daily survival; a day-in and a day-out, as they say, for subsistence, which had inevitably diffused any notions for furthering their education amongst their aims in life. However, over time they managed to settle. One could dare say that they almost prospered -in a relative way and against the backdrop of a post-war vibrant and industrial city growing in a rapid pace. With personal and family toil and community support the shacks were gradually replaced by whitewashed houses, decent in their simplicity. The housewives filled the small front yards with pots of jasmine and basil. Their scents filled the still dusty or muddy streets of the shantytown, which, after decades, would eventually transform itself to a respectable suburb.

Most importantly, hopes and expectations returned to the hearts and minds -of the youngest and their offsprings, at least. For them, nostalgia did not carry the same emotional weight as for the elderly. Being branded a refugee did not affect their conscience and being. Salonica was their new home, the only home they grew to know. They discovered a zest for life in their relative poverty, were content with a simple existence of few materialistic demands, of their close-knitted family life and neighbourhood camaraderie, friendships and good humour. The optimism and longing for life, innate in most, found new roots and grew and strengthened by the experience and tales from the tragic events of the past. Indeed, the grandmother I knew and grew up with, her siblings, friends and old neighbours of Toumba and Malakopi to the north, and the working-class district of Foinikas to the east, where she used to take me along in Sunday afternoon after the church liturgy, were models of optimism and courage, were always content and benevolent people. Both her sons inherited this innate positiveness and confidence, but, unfortunately, that was not the case with me. Many a time life changing events and adversity, like war and persecution and forced immigration, are needed to form and crystallize into an optimistic and positive character, a fighting spirit, and the resilience and stoicism I observed in grandmother.

Ancestry 27 - Eudoxia & Leonidas: The Catastrophe

An historically misplaced and inglorious military intervention, which ultimately proved disastrous, apparently stemmed from the rekindling of a hollow grandiose nationalism –the “Great Idea” for a Greater Greece, after her political class decided to abandon neutrality and stand on the “right side of history” in WWI. With the Allies against the Central Powers, the Ottoman Empire amongst them, was thus entitled to a share in the spoils of victory in the aftermath of the Great War. An initial opportunistic encouragement and urging behind the scenes by the British (in pursuit of their interests in the region), after a few months of political and economic miscalculations and wrangling amongst the Great Powers, turned into cold indifference, albeit after the Greek Army had landed on the shores of Asia Minor and recklessly committed in invading Anatolia and advancing deep inland. Behind the petty nationalism were hidden, instigated or spontaneous, regional and universal imperialisms, small and large-scale interests and the conflict of political and economic forces. But this is not a place for an historical analysis. The historian Nikos Psyroukis, through his orthodox Marxist’s and materialist’s prism, in his volumes on the “The Asia Minor Catastrophe” that I read as a young man -in a first attempt to shed light on the details of my grandmother’s and ancestors’ turbulent past in the region and, consequentially, a large part of the history of my birthplace, documented coherently the root causes of the national disaster. At the end, the Greeks of Anatolia were abandoned to their tragic fate.

The railway line that passed through Bayindir, built by the British, evidence of timid steps in the  industrialization and modernization of an empire in its last throes, as well as attempts by the British imperialism to exert its muscle and expand its interests in the region, had perhaps contributed more than any other single geographical and historical factor into the development of the local economy, the movement of the goods it produced and, most importantly, the influx of new ideas and  in advancing the regional culture; the latter thanks to the mobility of people with open eyes, broad minds and an omnipresent appetite for wealth, which required establishing and maintaining strong materialistic and cultural ties with Smyrna, the undisputed cosmopolitan metropolis of Asia Minor. In 1922, that railway line proved to be a lifeline for many Greek families of Bayindir, while paramilitary Zeybeks and Çete (bandits) attacked homes and livelihoods with ferocious and vindictive moods: initially aiming more at looting property than motivated by a racial or religious fanaticism or nationalistic passions. The contingents of the Greek army, having come to the scene and presented themselves as liberators of the “Hellenism of Ionia” and resurrectors of ancient glories, surveyed the area and paraded in front of the hurrahing Greeks of the town, whilst the local governors renamed streets in honour of Greek military officers and organized sectarian celebrations and parades, thus alienating the non-Greek population and unnecessarily inflaming local nationalist sentiments and a vacuous religious fanaticism. After all this, after an uncalled-for chauvinistic marginalisation, even mistreatment and abuse of "non-Greeks and non-believers", which could only provoke an asymmetrical response in kind from the opposing side, the very same troops were recalled by mother Greece through an almost disorderly retreat. Their saviour and liberator, the Greek Army, left Bayindir, and then Smyrna.

It was a day in September 1922. With a few possessions that could fit in suitcases and torba, the teenager Eudoxia found herself with parents and siblings and crowds of thousands of other refuges at the waterfront of Smyrna, for the ships of salvation that would transport them to Greece, strained and terrified by the atrocities that were taking place behind columns of smoke in the suburbs and back alleys of the city. Many people were arriving at the Aegean seafront on araba, donkeys, mules or horses, fewer, the privileged and more fortunate ones amongst them, by train. Few elders stayed behind, insisting to die in the land where they were born. In a few days, Kemal Ataturk would enter Izmir victorious. There had been orders, with unwritten deadlines and ultimatums, for the Christians to evacuate their homeland. The Greeks strived to comply and catch up. As to whether in their minds Greece represented the hospitable motherland that would welcome them with open arms and offer protection, shelter and food, I doubt it. And those who had felt this way would have been disappointed at the end of their Odyssey.

The emotions that overwhelmed the soul of Evdoxia, her family, the pitiful caravans of refugees from Bayindir to Izmir, the crowded waterfront of Izmir, overflown by despair and anguish in the wait of helping hands and rescue boats (and there were scarcely enough, neither Greek, nor "allied" by the waterfront at the time to accommodate the multitude of refugees!) from the fires erupting around and the hell engulfing the promenade. The gravity of these emotions cannot be weighed on any scale or described lucidly by any language. Each distinct emotion succeeded another in a disorderly sequence, or merged with the previous and next ones, in each person individually, and in the mass of people in unison, under a cloud of panic that had spread over the city. Each emotion in all its possible grades and derivatives and superlatives: from the initial anxiety that rumours and news sowed, to fear, shock, terror, panic and hysteria, brought about by the awareness of a grim reality surrounding them, the realisation of their predicament. The shades of fear and terror were succeeded by the spectre of sorrow and misery, after they boarded a saviour boat. Fatigue and resignation to fate would turn into pain and suffering. The misery of fleeing would crystallize into sadness and aguish, even despair, ahead of a bleak future. For many, in the ports of Thessaloniki and the coastal towns and villages of Macedonia or the whatever alien shores they disembarked, that sadness and weariness, when minds began to ask the how’s and the why’s, would mutate into anger and rage, bitterness and indignation, against knowns and unknowns, culprits and non-participants.

I have not experienced, even approximately, a tragedy of the magnitude of the Asia Minor Catastrophe and, as such, not entitled to tell the tale of the storms of that time and the scars that left in the bodies and souls of the people who experienced them firsthand. A few lines from a haphazard and, maybe, biased outsider offers next to zero into this story, let alone history. The little it manages is to preserve, for him at least, a few precious threads with his past, vital to an existential self-consciousness.