Ancestry 30 - Eudoxia & Leonidas: Under the Family Auspices

Grandmother Eudoxia was not in possession of a special beauty, but her face and mien had a few distinct attractive features -in view of the norms of her milieu, and her coquettish nature added some extra charm. As we would expect from a seamstress, she paid due attention to her appearance and developed a good taste in clothes despite the scarce financial resources. In old photographs from her youth, she showed a thick dark wavy hair cut short at shoulder length. Because of its unforgiving thickness, it was cumbersome to straighten with natural means, tidy it up around her small face or tuck it behind the ears. It turned gray early in life and virtually into white by the time she was around sixty-years-old or since the age I started to retain memories as a child. Her eyes were deep and rather small in an also small facial outline, suppressed down by a narrow forehead, but they were iridescent and bright, even when the cataract blurred the color of her iris, which faded toward the greyish-blue hue I remember. The line of her thick eyebrows fell on the eyelids, somehow enlarged the eyes in their sockets, and gave her gaze a rare and attractive depth and penetration. To the outside world, her face, worn out by time and hardships and mainly the eyes -the “window of the soul” as they say, radiated a determination and a strong-will, an immediacy and straightforwardness in her behaviour, along with kindness and sincerity, certainly a dignity; one could perhaps add that it even projected a fleeting sense of magnificence despite the humblest of roots and lack of formal education. She was rather self-aware of those eyes of hers, which she passed down almost unchanged in shape and depth to her eldest son, Father. How many times did she proudly mention in conversations the whispers she eavesdropped from two heart-throbbed girls passing in front of the gate of their house in Toumpa in Father’s late teenage years: "Here lives, the one with the big, beautiful eyes, Maria!"

Eudoxia was a petite woman, but by no means stunted despite the periods of malnutrition in her life as a child. Most of the Kampakis’ family members were rather short in stature having taken after their father's side, whilst their mother, the ‘Stork,’ stood out with her tall stature well above the family average. Grandmother was also a sickly woman, the result of the vicissitudes in her life, the years of hardships the refugees endured in the shantytown of Toumpa, followed, a couple of decades later, by the general privation the German Occupation brought about. She contracted tuberculosis sometime before the war and the discovery of streptomycin, when the disease was treated with pneumonectomies and artificial pneumothorax and spells in a sanatorium. Yet, the means available at the place and time proved effective in healing the consumptive grandmother, thankfully for her children and grandchildren. She survived the disease, which led many, including her youngest brother, to a premature end, but without half of the lung her God endowed her with. As expected, given the experiences that affected her childhood, she did not acquire any sort of elementary education. Whatever basic reading skills she managed to attain were patchy and incremental - admirably, through autodidacticism from newspaper and magazine headlines, from signs and picture captions. We have not found out how (perhaps from newspapers that Leonidas brought home, perhaps from her church diaries or the pocket Bible she kept at home, perhaps from the telephone directory or the very few printed documents one could find in their flat, perhaps from occasional assistance she received by her two sons), but to everyone’s astonishment she had managed to compile a handwritten phone book, complete with names, numbers, and sometimes addresses of family members, relatives and friends. In short, the rudimentary reading and writing skills, which proved sufficient to keep her afloat in the world, she owed it exclusively to self-learning.

A childhood friend from the years of their resettlement in Salonica, Dimitra, who escaped from the misery of the slum ahead of grandmother and settled a little further down, in the Fleming area where I grew up, endeavoured to make the matchmaking of a young neighbour, Leonidas, with her old childhood friend Eudoxia, the seamstress from Toumpa. (Such friendships could only have been broken by death and grandmother’s yelling from her balcony every time she saw Dimitra passing from our street below: "Dimitra, come up, καλέ, for coffee!" still resonate in my ears.)  Although one or two layers down in the social stratification of the city, the nearly lumpen Eudoxia, the refugee girl from a town in Asia Minor, with no dowry, no education, but a poorly paid job as a part-time seamstress, was accepted by great-grandmother Katina, the de facto head of the slightly more affluent, if not bourgeois, Melnikian Ibrişimci family, and the two younger siblings of Leonidas still living under the same roof. Katina was convinced, after meeting Eudoxia, that a marriage of Leonidas to the quiet and humble refugee girl would somehow calm grandfather down. Leonidas was clearly a difficult person to be with; frequently edgy and irritable and with a neurotic disposition, that later in life developed into some form of neurasthenia. Dimitra’s matchmaking was set up in the old family home of Deligiorgi Street (Eudoxia’s dwelling in Toumpa was not fit for purpose), with coffee and vanilla “submarine” and spoon sweets, and proved successful -at least, against the simple criteria that lower strata of Salonica’s society judged at that time the success of a marriage between two strangers from different walks of life and of different personality, which an unlikely concurrence of events brought together. Eudoxia tamed Leonidas’ nerves for the best part of their lives and made him a reasonable person. Katina’s instincts were vindicated.

Indeed, Eudoxia proved to be a distinctively stoic and patient character. A good housewife and, more importantly for a male family, a capable housekeeper and excellent cook -without the aid offered nowadays from recipe books or the internet or the technology and accessories of the modern house. The traditional recipes with their elaborate secrets were stored in her mind as they were passed down from the past generations that inhabited the Byzantine and Ottoman ruled Anatolia and Izmir. They were refined and enhanced by the mingling with the different cultures coexisting in Salonica’s cauldron, the Sephardic, the Slavic, as well as the omnipresent European influence, and culminated in a sublime fusion cooking: stuffed vine or cabbage leaves, giant beans, Smyrna meatballs, giouvetsi and braised meat (in later periods of relative prosperity which bringing meat to the table became affordable), and deserts, like revani cake and melomakarona, were recorded by her daughters-in-law and survived into my generation, along with the sumptuous flavours I enjoyed as a child -having been fortunate to be raised close to grandmother.

Therefore, Eudoxia and Leonidas complemented each other well, coexisted, and lived the rest of their relatively poor and unsung lives in an ostensible harmony; with the nervous disposition and disorders of the latter being accepted with patience and stoic sighs or resignation, but not with confrontations, from the former. With Leonidas struggling to earn a living from poorly paid jobs, Eudoxia took up the occasional sewing jobs for wealthier neighbours. They managed to raise and their two sons commendably and have them educated, under unfavourable conditions and with the several stumbles along the way through years of privation and wars. Notwithstanding my existence on this earth, I owe Eudoxia the solace and comfort she offered selflessly and passionately on occasions of trepidation and tumult naturally associated with growing up. She did as well, before me, with her two sons, although without the due appreciation