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?
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