2 - Education, the Importance of

Surprisingly, given the social status of the family and the difficult conditions they had to endure, the education of the two boys was not affected. Even though Leonidas’ education did not exceed a primary school level, whereas that of the autodidact Eudoxia not even that. Therefore, the two parents, by default, maintained a from indifferent to apathetic stance vis-a-vis the prospect of their sons acquiring some sort of higher education; simply put, their background ill-sufficed to opine on matters of education, and envision the wings an education could give to young people in a fast-changing world. However, the semi-bourgeois Melnikian tradition embedded in the culture of the wider Ibrişimci family and, particularly, of the most open-minded and enlightened of the uncles: on one hand, the leftist ‘proletarian-cum-intellectual’ Socrates and the ‘progressive bourgeois’ and liberal intellectual Georgios P and, on the other, the ‘conservative bourgeois’ Elias, inspired and encouraged Father indirectly and directly: from conversations at family gatherings on the virtues of education or by mere observations by Father of the lives of those who shone in their communities and valued human intellect. The very presence of Socrates, an active member of city’s labour avant-garde, in the parental home or close by during Father’s early years, as well as a few other personalities in the margins of the broader family, like the bookkeeper Papachristou, whose daughter Socrates married, played an important role, too.

A beacon of knowledge and education would, therefore, illuminate Father’s childhood and youth in difficult times and under adverse winds. Individual freedom, to the extent that is made possible and granted within the constraints imposed by the social environment and the historical context, the materialistic basis of existence and social progress, the understanding of the surrounding world in its dialectic contradictions, personal happiness (however one might have understood happiness at that historical junction), all those abstract or concrete elements of existence, in addition to one’s active participation in social progress, that potentially contribute to social ascent and mobility, all these elements, are manifestly facilitated by education and its principal products: knowledge and critical thinking. These gifts were offered to them by the state education system, public & free for all, almost socialistic, and received and embraced by Father in their different stages: four years in the 1st Gymnasium for Boys, in the historical neoclassical building of Queen Olga’s Avenue, a long walk through streams and the refugee neighbourhoods of Toumpa; another two years attending courses of "Practical Orientation" (or "positive" as the Father liked to call it) offered by the 5^th Gymnasium for Boys (further east along the same avenue and still a long walk from home), but not the 1st Gymnasium, which he left. The curriculum of the latter, which was considered more prestigious due to its history and the more affluent neighbourhoods within its catchment area, focused in ‘Classical Studies’ and, therefore, of no substantial future value in a rapidly growing materialistic economy. Father, with a remarkable foresightedness for his age realized timely that his horizons would broaden substantially should he pursue this ‘practical’ track with his studies. (For a reconstruction from the wreckage the German Occupation and the ensued Civil War left behind, the least Greece required from her youth would be to have their intellectual potential exhausted into classical literature studies, along with the counterproductive archaeolatry and ancestor’s worship that cultivates, as well as a range of dead-end professional careers these entailed -as Father rightly foresaw, and the Melnikian family who influenced him, traditionally engaged in productive activities,  concurred.)

During the summer school holidays, resembling his father Leonidas in pride, diligence and dutifulness –character attributes that the Greek word φιλότιμος encompasses, he took on the occasional odd jobs, mostly for meagre pocket money and for the sake of satisfying some of the temptations of adolescence, as offered by the city. At one point, he was commissioned to collect subscriptions from members of the Greek-French Association Club; that is, he was handed a list of names and addresses from the plump secretary of the Club, who answered to the oxymoron Eudoxoula (little-Eudoxia), to do the rounds and collect the money due. Other times, he helped with errands and small orders from a virtually illiterate tobacco merchant named Panitoglou, a rather foolish and crude person, incapable of performing basic arithmetic and accounting operations, which are of course indispensable to the survival and buoying up of any business in commerce. As Panitoglou was unable to grasp the meaning of percentages in his business books and bank accounts, let alone calculate interest on money owed based on rates and maturity, amongst other menial tasks he assigned to Father, timidly and apologetically, but in his stupid and crude ways characteristic of uneducated small-business bosses, he asked the secondary school student to calculate interests due, and, moreover, to explain the calculations to him. It goes without saying that tasks demanded exhaustive patience and tedious oversimplification for the thick-headed Panitoglou to comprehend. For such tedious mental chores, Father might not have been awarded monetarily, but, at least, they sharpened further the already bright mind of his.

1 - In Streets of Old Salonica

The first years of his life, in the relative tranquillity of the pre-war period, Father and his parents, Leonidas and Eudoxia, lived in a house in a non-descript alley without a name, off a so certain Deligiorgi Street, which could be described as equally insignificant, albeit it bore the name of a former Greek prime minister. Fleming Street was the most notable in the area -often referred to as ‘Fleming Area’. It begins at the Baron Hirsch Hospital, later renamed Hippocrateon, and, descending towards the seafront, it meets the broad Queen Olga’s Avenue, at a corner where once Villa Ida, a mansion named after the beautiful wife of the Jewish banker Levi Modiano, stood.

It was a narrow, dirt alley Father’s nameless street. It raised clouds of dust in the dry summers, became a muddy street, crossed by water furrows in rainy days. In the absence of any sewerage network of note, rainwater flowed through cracks in the soil and further swelled the mucky ephemeral stream, which flowed downhill the slope of Seih Sou and Toumpa into the gulf of Thermaikos. The area was part, in short, of a somewhat popular, predominantly petty-bourgeois neighbourhood, melding, nevertheless, several relics of Thessaloniki’s Ottoman past and its rich Jewish heritage. It was not a slum, a term preserved for the remoter from its centre areas: the infamous Vardar district, the refugee districts around the west entrance of the city, and the outskirts of Toumpa –with the refugee element from Anatolia also numerically dominant after the Catastrophe of 1922.

In the two-storey house in that alley, abandoned by its Turkish inhabitants after the traumatic population exchanges, Father was fetched newborn from the Russian Hospital of Papanastasiou Street, in the month of February of 1935. A few years later, before the outbreak of the War, his little brother, Marios, came into the same world and house, whom I envisage as a smiling, happy and kind-hearted child -as I remember him from the years I was growing up in the next-door to his family apartment: always with good humour and a cheerful attitude, never in anger or miserable.

We have been told that the German Occupation turned the lives of most of the city's population ruthlessly upside down and disarranged them to extents much greater than in the countryside. It pushed those who were born in the lower social strata and grew up in the city's poor refugee neighbourhoods to odd jobs; to a ceaseless and barely tolerable, largely thankless struggle for self-preservation and the daily subsistence, in short, a bio-struggle: to ensure there is food on the table, to maintain a roof over their heads, afford electricity and access to drinking water. Reliable plans for the day after tomorrow could not be drawn. The dense fog of uncertainty that enveloped the present rendered the future impossible to foresee. There was only a crooked today, then a tomorrow likely a carbon copy of today. With slack and joblessness prevailing and amidst the general privation, Leonidas' family relied on a few chickens, carefully guarded from the prying eyes of the starving outside world, above all the thieves amongst them, as well as a lame goat they kept in the yard for its milk. Grandmother Eudoxia’s relatives from the seaside village, who grew wheat and owned a small olive grove, once in a blue moon, Father remembers, brought a bushel of flour and demijohn of olive-oil.

In their despair from the financial deadlocks they encountered along the way, they were forced to sell off a few possessions of value, some silverware and heirlooms and, finally, the sewing machine of Eudoxia, whose earnings of few drachmas from her sewing contributed something to the meagre family income in the pre-occupation years. Hollow cheeks and protruding ribs from malnourishment was an inevitable denouement, afflicting especially the two growing boys in their early childhoods, but also Leonidas and Eudoxia, and the majority of the city population. Overwhelmed by their predicament, like scattered scarecrows under the indifferent skies of occupied Thessaloniki, amongst better-nourished and carefree German and Bulgarian soldiers; like feathers carried by the windblown dust the Vardar wind lifted off deserted streets. In the end, however, they succeeded. They survived and we existed.

Despite his limited capacity and intelligence, and equipped with only few rudimentary skills from a fragmented and ultimately pointless education, despite his nervous disposition and often tyrannical behaviour towards his lowly wife -the poor refugee girl from Bayindir, despite all these counterproductive traits, good grandfather Leonidas possessed remarkable deposits of honour and integrity and, perhaps, industriousness. He was generally a loyal, good family man, a decent pater-familias so to speak, as this could be understood by common sense at that time. In other words, he was conscious of his responsibility as a head of a young family, and displayed remarkable stoicism and perseverance, a prerequisite for survival in the brutal reality of the Occupation, and possessed, like everyone, the primal instinct of self-preservation -kicked in, no matter how adverse the situations one had to confront. As it was to be expected from events unfolding relentlessly around the family, but far and beyond their control, they became financially strained, despite Leonidas’ laudable efforts to make a living: peddling with a chest hanging from his neck trying to sell petty items like sweets and cigarettes, later working in the makeshift grocery store he set up with his son-in-law in Fleming Street. But these jobs yielded next to nothing.

His younger brother Socrates, meanwhile, a housemate and with a share in the family home, needed money for the cure of the tuberculosis that afflicted him. He was young and handsome; he wanted to live and who could blame him for that? Worried sick (or ‘girded by snakes’ as the Greek saying goes) and in a state of collective despair, they agreed to sell the one and only family asset of value, the house standing in Deligiorgi Street’s subordinate alley to a black-marketer at the peak of the privation and misery the German Occupation had brought about to the bodies and souls of the poorest and weakest amongst the populace. And they sold it, predictably, for a mess of pottage. Leonidas gathered the few remnants of strength at his disposal, his family, and the few gold sovereigns that the home sale transaction yielded, paid for Socrates' care in the sanatorium, and moved into a pitiful two-room dwelling at 153 Papafi Street they bought from a retired army officer -equally desperate to sell.

With the end of the Occupation the dark clouds from the near future ahead began to dissipate. The circumstances were changing to the better. New forces of optimism amongst the people of Thessaloniki barring its decimated Jewish community were developing, as the weak tailwinds of post-war recovery in local society and the country were blowing. The goddess of luck, if we could summarize in two words the coalescing of favourable circumstances, began to smile at the family of the always politically neutral, even apolitical and with limited socioeconomic insight, Leonidas, if not, however, the wider family, some members of which got involved in the Civil War struggle through its defeated factions and found themselves, as it turned out in retrospect, on the wrong side of history. In times of great upheaval, when no one knows where the next hit will come from, a low profile, a politically neutral or a-political stance, can be an appropriate and the most beneficial attitude.

Despite grim premises still hanging in the air, the worst years, those of war and occupation, of hunger and misery, were behind them. The then Prime Minister, Georgios Papandreou, cancelled all property transactions that occurred during the Occupation and, thus, opened the door for them to reclaim their old home via a proper judicial route, albeit at a typically Greek slow pace. So, they did. A court inspector visited the Papafi Street house one spring morning in 1945, with a leather portfolio underarm, to check firsthand the living conditions of the family with the two young boys. Although any well-meaning person would find them utterly miserable, Eudoxia arranged to be alerted good time in advance of the inspector’s visit by Father, who was covertly waiting for him by the corner of their street. And once Father signalled his arrival, she locked the door of the second room in the house. 'For better or for worse...'

The inspector’s recommendation was positive. Backhanders to any official in the chain proved necessary. The family moved out of the Papafi Street’s house, or, rather, they were evicted from it, and temporarily rented a barely more humane dwelling in Proussis Street, until the court case of the ‘paternal’ house of Deligiorgi Street, still under the ownership of the black marketer, was heard. The family of four lived in Proussis Street for another two years -between 1951 and 1952. And then, they returned to their old neighbourhood where Leonidas and Eudoxia would live the rest of their lives, barring a two-year gap, when the old two-storey house gave way to the bulldozer for the erection of an ugly block of flats -the home of my childhood.