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.