12 - A Year in the 'Cold Trough': The Village Fabric

Embedded In the local community, there was a distinct fringe group: of primary school teachers, a few shopkeepers (of the café and the tavern, the grocery store, the square kiosk and the small stationery and bookstore at the main junction), the rural doctor, the village priest and a police constable, belonged to this group, and all subsisted in the periphery of an agricultural in its core society. A hardcore Marxist would have promptly noted that this unproductive and some of it parasitic group, which, although the farmers accepted it as a ‘super-structure’ complementary to the main occupation, lived off, imperceptibly to them, from a fair portion of the exchange value of their hard labour products, that is, largely thanks to the sweat of their brows.

On a different note, the community although aware of its status at the base of the national economy and class society, it had, nevertheless, conscience of ‘the nation’ -the adhesive of its classes and strata, as everywhere else in the modern world. A predominantly Slavic-speaking population, once a relative majority in the region, had long since been assimilated by an a-historical Hellenism. Some protestations about maintaining their language and heritage had been decisively suppressed, condemned in post-civil war Greece for pro-communist links, and the once predominantly slavic past of the region fell into obscurity. In the ‘Cold Trough’, known by the slavic toponym Plasnitsovo before the war, there were no distinctively rich or poor, neither nobles or plebeians, nor space in the conscience of its people for ideological analyses and arguments of the kind. After all, such thoughts and arguments would not have helped anyone more than ignorance and apathy, during a politically turbulent period and an oppressive national environment.

The peasant families cultivated their allocated plots of an equitably divided land and got on uncomplainingly with their lives, coexisting harmoniously with the guests of their hospitable community, welcome strangers of their own respectable ways and culture, in full knowledge of everyone concerned that they who would relocate away at the first opportunity. Village residents, permanent or temporary, converged in the square and its one café and tavern on Sunday afternoons or watch traveling troupes in the evenings. The children were drawn to the primitive amusement park set-up during school holidays -like flies drawn to a honey pot. They endured long, solemn patriotic speeches by the headteacher and visiting officials, before parading reluctantly, in front of a more enthusiastic squad of National Guard volunteers, through the main street, before the laying of wreaths at the statue of the local hero. They joined the celebrations on the village patron’s saint day, organized by the parish, for its own and neighbouring communities, and attended tortuous church liturgies, which on Good Friday was followed by the Epitaph procession. And they participated in laboriously rehearsed gymnastics displays, for the proud eyes of their parents and teachers, at the end of the school year.

All these ethnic and religious festivals and celebrations, in form and content mandated by the Colonel’s junta and its dictatorship, established since 1967, were attended, by believers and non-believers, by nationalists or genuine patriots or covert renegades alike. The slogans ‘Fatherland, Orthodoxy, Family’ and ‘Hellas of Christian Hellenes’ encapsulated an ‘ideology’ devoid of substance and were promoted as mottos in a vassal nation's course to a dead-end. In most communities of the Greek Macedonian countryside, at least, such ‘ideals’ had long since begun to be interwoven with its social and cultural reality and behaviour. However, they barely affected the daily life and routines, which hardly deviated from national and religious traditions and norms that had been established for decades.

11 - A Year in the 'Cold Trough': into the ‘Lame Village’ then

‘Cold Trough’ like most villages in the predominantly agricultural region of Central Macedonia, was surrounded, as is today, by cultivated fields amidst the fertile plain that extend to the town of Giannitsa in the north, Thessaloniki in the west and south, and the town of Veroia on the slopes of Vermion Mountains in the east, which enjoys panoramic views overlooking the plains below. At times when private car ownership and use were not widespread, the first impression of ‘Cold Trough’ for the unsuspected visitor would have been, proverbially, that of ‘a place in the middle of nowhere’. From a geographical point of view, however, reality might not have been that disheartening. There was life and transport links amongst the villages and nearby towns of the region, thanks to the regular routes that a vibrant franchise of privately owned green-grey coaches established, as well as the agricultural vehicles of local farmers. Nevertheless, it was still a place burdened by dullness and a dire lack of sophistication that characterize many villages of the Greek countryside. There were always the few, especially amongst the older and retired of the village folk, who were contented with uneventful or indolent lives, even if for a cosmopolitan outsider they appeared trapped in an inescapable boredom of a daily routine, oblivious to a monotony that gnaws away invaluable time on this earth and, at the end, reduces a life an amorphous mass of trivial, repetitive and forgettable days.

Agriculture, therefore, was at the heart of the economy of the village and its region, as it has been for generations in the long history of Macedonia and the Balkans. At that time, cereals and tobacco accounted for the bulk of the local produce. I remember, from my first autumn days there, the bales of grain stacked on tractors or horse-drawn carts, going back and forth along the central and peripheral roads and, later, on school excursions the tobacco dryers in tall wooden warehouses.

There has been raising of cows and pigs, too, for our meat on the table, as I realised in another school walk that passed by a local slaughterhouse. A wretched and gray building, covered by corrugated metal sheets, in the middle of a muddy patch dried by the spring sun, with only a few scattered, sad acacia trees behind a broken wooden fence. The barren landscape, a calvary -so to speak, that the children procession traversed was crisscrossed by rough, makeshift dirt roads, marked by animal footprints and cart and truck and tractor wheels; in grim contrast against the deep blue firmament, the glorious sun, and the green fertile plains beyond. It was an intimidating place for virgin souls. The mind inevitably conjured images of living creatures indoors suffering horrible deaths, by cruel men in blood-stained overalls with butcher-knives in hand, wandering nonchalantly in pools of blood. (The horrors emanating by such mysterious buildings, perceived as haunted by young children, exerts an unwarranted attraction and intensifies the vivacity of an already vivid imagination.) I was shaken by those fantasies then, as triggered by the ugly site. Feelings with the intensity of ‘first time’ tightened my heart. The natural curiosity that the unfamiliar attracts is combined with a primordial feeling of fear springs instinctively from every soul in the face of the unknown.

Our eyes probed for glimpses of death, or at least shadows of it through the openings into the dark enclosure, our ears were grasping for groans of suffering, but in vain. Escaping, however, from the pervasive and unforgettable stench of death, which I have not experienced again ever since, proved impossible. Many children used their fingers to trick their noses. It was the very first sensation that bore witness of death -through the stench it left behind in its path. And the sense of its presence nearby causes dread even amongst the young, no matter how detached and distant in time still are from the event per se. Admittedly, the feeling was fleeting and shallow. Beyond a momentary strong heartbeat and the memory of that smell, it left no other imprints and was quickly forgotten in our plays and relaxation, later in our trip. It was nothing more than a little stepping stone in the building of our living consciousness. Besides, later in life I learned that the idea and expectation of death can be more distressing and frightening than witnessing it happening. But I had still a long way to go.

Childhood innocence could have hardly been compromised in that school trip. It was not in our teachers’ intentions their school children to conjure images of the horrors of death taking us around the slaughterhouse, for the educational purposes of maturing and toughening our souls. The autumn walk ended up in a citrus orchard in its full blossom, in a fruit and vegetable farm, where enjoyed our play and snacks, followed by fresh fruits and cool spring water from a trough in the yard of an old farmhouse. It was just unfortunate that the path to a pleasant destination had to pass through the hell of that dreary site, which inevitably would intrigue children and stimulate their imagination far more than an orchard, whilst it leaves indelible, yet thought provoking, imprints in memory.

Childhood 10 - A Year in the 'Cold Trough': Mother's Assignment

I did not take the first steps on the path of school education in my hometown. I had just turned five years-old and legally too young for the first year of elementary school. I don't know with how much enthusiasm, if any, Father had begun his own new professional career in the state telecom monopoly (a productive and fast-growing state run company at the time, despite the oxymoron scheme in the phrase). There he worked henceforth and for the next thirty years, until his retirement. Grandmother Eudoxia, as she was entering old age and many burdens of home and family care were lifted, could not and probably would not sacrifice the minimal freedom she gained and valuable time left in this world with pre-occupations of looking after a child. Her duties as a wife and a mother of three awkward and demanding men in the household had been fulfilled and, in fact, without much either moral and practical support or gratitude from husband and sons. She was understandably tired of looking after men. It was said that she categorically declined, in her honest and straightforward Asia Minor manners, to nanny a grandchild of a demanding age, despite the unequivocal love she had nurtured towards her first grandchild, since his birth. She also knew firsthand that Father’s help and support in the practical matters of child care and its growing demands would be negligible; as always, his attitude towards and might compromise his well-being, towards trivial household concerns, was like a wet towel. 

It was likely that neither mother wanted to have left me with grandmother just for the sake of her profession, but she realised that she had to work for better long-term family stability and well-being, but also to put in good use, maybe under pressure from her own family and peers, her teaching degree and qualifications. Graduate teachers, then and up to the present day, began their careers with a series of deployments to places ‘away from their home base’, normally in under-developed and under-privileged rural towns and villages, away from major metropolitan areas where most had found home and started a family. Such deployments, however, were deemed necessary by the Ministry that was paying her wages, despite and against the tide of urbanization that was tearing the flesh of the Greek countryside. Therefore, I had to join Mother, with two suitcases full of clothes, to her pre-ordained assignment away from home, in a village in the northern Macedonia plains, for an entire school year and a heavy winter in its course.  

Shortly after my birth, she was reappointed as teacher in the public school system, determined to endure again what was in store for the first years of a young teacher’s career. She had been assigned to wretched parts of northern Greece, to nondescript villages, before and after her maternity leave. Elementary education had long ago become a non-negotiable right and compulsory for all Greek children, but there were still some backward regions that had accepted this legal imperative with reluctance or indifference, and rather as an unwanted obligation imposed by an impersonal state to their progeny, simply incomprehensible for many peasants, who were either illiterate or functionally so, having obtained a hotchpotch education. Deep in rural Greece and the provinces outside its major metropolitan centres, the economy was based on small-scale, traditional farming, which, at that time, did not incentivise education. Persistent drives by post governments to modernize the agricultural practices and processes had not borne many fruits yet.

In the 1968-69 school year, an invisible hand from the Ministry of National Education (and, certainly, of Religious Affairs) ordained Mother to take up teaching duties in a village named ‘Cold Trough’ within the border of the Prefecture of Pella, not far from the birthplace of Alexander the Great. In the slang of young teachers, like Mother, such villages were branded as ‘lame’. The Ministry appointed young teachers to vacant positions within the public ecosystem, here and there, many of them to undesirable destinations. For members of the lower strata of the civil servant class, whether they could micro-manage and shape their lives around preconceived notions and plans or, perhaps, desires and even dreams, relied more on acquaintances in the state bureaucracy and access to its higher echelons, and less on an apparently objective, but complex “points” based, appraisal system- a system incomprehensible to many, arbitrary and pliable, that was supposedly taking into account individual and family welfare and concerns, in addition to qualifications, skills and experience. Perhaps out of prejudice, but most likely based on experience passed in the teachers’ trade by word of mouth, some of the village or small-town destinations of deployment were qualitatively classified as ‘lame’. In short, those were places, which, a new teacher from one of the two major metropolitan centres in Greece, of Athens and Thessaloniki, would likely never have heard of.

At best, it would have been a dull village or a small provincial town with some amenities and the basics life then could offer, such as a telephone at a neighbour’s home or a nearby shop. The qualitative classification of destinations was based, first and foremost, on the ease of access and transport between the place of work and the family home in the far away city. Secondarily, on the outlets that place of employment could have offered to young, relatively educated people in their limited yet valuable leisure time during difficult (then six-day) term weeks. Other, rather more objective attributes, such as the ethnic and cultural profile of the local population, its materialistic wealth and average education level, were normally ignored in the assessments and projections, although it was recognized that all these factors were intertwined.

x

9 - Return to the Alley

Before entering the last stage of their lives, Leonidas and Eudoxia moved back to the two-storey house in the alley off Deligiorgi Street, nearly ten years after they had first left it in the trying days of the German Occupation of Thessaloniki. They repossessed it after a chaotic period of unwilling relocations and financial despair that tested the family resilience. Along with Marios, the lanky and emaciated teenager, his sickly state blamed by Father to the privations and famine of the Occupation, and Father, now in secondary school, with a thin figure, too, but in better health, charming features and a bright mind, as well as a combustible temperament. He was an avid learner and determined to obtain a college and university education, which, he had considered a priceless asset ever since. He eventually got a degree and became a cultured and knowledgeable young man, full of ideas and bravado in his social circles.

In the early '60s, the family submitted to calls of the times and handed their house to a constructor to erect a block of apartments on its plot, in exchange of three flats -one for the grandparents’ and their retirement, the other for their two sons and their prospective families. There was a drive for the replanning and modernization of major cities, instigated by statesman Karamanlis, in the face of the relentless urbanisation that followed the war years. The grandparents’ house was built in the late Ottoman Empire years and formerly owned by Turks, then offered by the government to refugee families after the population exchanges of the 1910’s and 1920’s. Construction of the four-storey block of flats on the plot of the old house lasted years: the productivity and efficiency of builders was still anaemic, as it were for the Greek economy as a whole; construction of tall apartment buildings, despite the frenetic pace in which they were springing up amongst the old low dwellings of its Ottoman era became big business for decades, until the skyline of the city was utterly transformed, and its historic legacy distorted by faceless blocks of concrete.  

My family had to wait to settle down in our first very own flat. In the meantime, we had to relocate a few times. My birth found us far from the later neighbourhood of my childhood on the upper floor of an old apartment building at No 1 Spyros Louis Street, in an alley at one of the corners of Navarino Square. Each time my home-city walks bring me to the area, I do not fail to look upwards to the balcony of the fifth floor, the flower pots and the clothes hanging from their lines –out of a mysterious allure. As if I was paying homage to my birth. Behind the shutters, once upon a time an insignificant human being began his life, something that would not have concerned the tenants that succeeded us under the same roof. All beginnings, even the unconscious or forgotten ones, carry secret traces of nostalgia, whilst melancholy and sadness reigns at the conclusion of every chapter of our lives, as much as sorrow at the very end of it.

My birth home must have been one of the first modern block of flats built in pre-war Thessaloniki. It even featured an elevator which Father brought up in conversations with auntie Lizza. Because of one of the phobias, she and her sisters suffered from in abundance, she refused to use it in her frequent visits to see her sister and the newborn baby. Instead, she used to climb the five flights of stairs. She managed admirably, but Lizza's out of breath ‘good morning’ greetings were answered by abrupt and ironic comments from Father – an inappropriate response conforming to his personality. Himself never climbed more than a few steps in his lifetime unless necessary.

I was still a toddler to remember anything, when we moved into the brighter apartment of a building with its façade and our balcony overlooking the broad and busy Constantinople Street, the wide avenue below, with its hum of traffic of buses and cars, even trucks, until late in the night. A photo of Father resting his elbows on the balcony railings and staring across the street on a sunny spring morning was the only surviving relic from that short tenancy. The extended family of Leonidas, with Mother and myself, the now three-to-four-years-old toddler, reunited a few months later in another apartment building, off the quieter Karaiskaki Street. We occupied the more spacious and privileged second floor, the grandparents dwelled in the smaller first floor flat below us, with young Marios, an occasional night-lodger in one of their rooms during the years of his studies and military service. There, below the major Delphi Street, Karaiskaki Street and the other nearby streets that bore names of heroes of the Greek Ware of Independence from the Ottomans in the 19^th century: archimandrite Papaflessas, Commander Athanasios Diakos, freedom fighter Andreas Zaimis, whose life stories fascinated me in my primary school, in the same neighbourhood, where I began to collect my first memories:

I remember… The butcher’s corner shop across the street from our block and the brusque demands of Father for good quality meat for his meat grinder. The greengrocer around the corner, on Delphi Street, with the cunning face and smile under his moustache, who refused to sell his precious bananas to any customer who did not regularly buy from his shop a minimum of quantity of less exotic fruits and vegetables. An argument with Mother forced her to shop greengroceries from further away and without the desirable fruit amongst them. I remember the incident with the heavy bronze mortar and its pestle that I threw from grandmother’s balcony. (She was looking after me during Mother’s absence at work.) Accidentally or out of childish naivety or curiosity, I do not know and it does not matter. What I know is that it caused a great uproar and upset to grandmother and the eyewitness neighbours, the butcher across amongst them, as it could easily have killed an unfortunate unsuspecting pedestrian passing under the balcony. (An imaginary or hypothetical event, however, potentially tragic, causes despair and hysteria among the easily perturbable Greek common folk. Thus, the mortar incident became a family legend recounted by grandmother until dementia wiped it off her memory.) I remember Mother feeding me pan-fried liver or brains or yuvarlakia or a beef soup with a strong celery flavour, all dishes considered nutritious and essential in a growing child’s diet and, more importantly, liked and asked for by Father, but the flavours and textures of which my untrained palate found repulsive. Yet that was some of the food that I had to eat by force to the point of queasiness. I remember the intrigues of my explorations of different corners of the rooms of grandmother’s flat, lying and crawling on the wooden floors, under beds and tables, in closets and wardrobes, organizing battles with my sets of miniature soldiers, organising races with my toy cars. For a four-year-old child, a simple unassumingly furnished room, with its dark corners and hideouts, and any kind of object that could arises his curiosity and interest, and easily transformed into an adventure world where a vivid imagination runs wild. I remember the gifts that uncle Marios brought, his playful teasing, his participation in my games; he might have loved me more than Father. I remember the allure of the Toumpa stream, at the end of our lane, a few meters down from the main entrance to our building, flowing under a bank of nettles and shrubs. In days of heavy rain, it swelled with muddy water becoming a torrent, which I was itching to observe in its fascinating wilderness, but strictly not allowed to approach.

The time would eventually come for me to explore that fantasy stream. The flow of its muddy waters, perilously approaching the banks and the streets, would have to wait for me at the bridge of Deligiorgi Street, next to our old grandparents’ house, where another modern, rectangular, a kind of an artless and shapeless brutalist form, block of flats, had now been erected house our families. It was meant to be last home of my grandparents and my last home before I reached adulthood. It is still standing more than half a century after it was built, in the dark alley, face-to-face and next other tall sister-buildings, thankfully most built after we had been able to enjoy our childhood games in the open plots of neighbourhood, devoid of cars streets, and its stream.

8 - The Family and Social Mindset

The emigration of both of their sons abroad and their partnering with foreigners were developments our parents had not foreseen, not even conceived. In fact, they were surprised and saddened by these transformations of the family fabric. For both parents, like many others of their class and generation, having rarely ventured outside the borders of our small and of minor importance country and for no more than a few days holidays, for their offspring to embark on a better life and settle away from their birth place was inconceivable. That despite admittedly striking flaws with both the country and its society, that is, the dominant culture and social mentality and mindset. Interestingly, those defects were pointed out and, on occasions, vehemently criticised by our parents themselves, contrary to the strongly held view that ‘all is well’ around us.

The prevailing view made more sense to them, however, despite obvious contradictions with reality. The attitude of ‘priests blessing their own beards’ -as the Greek saying goes, that is, an effort by oneself to justify to conscience one’s existence and way of life is understandable. Otherwise, one would be inclined to admit, introspectively and retrospectively, that one’s life has been unfortunate, which, in turn, would lead to denouements often drowned in resentment, bitterness, and regrets from several unanswered ‘what ifs.’ After all, everyone's philosophy reflects -to an extent- an adopted lifestyle, and everyone, once maturity is reached, leads a way life that that is disposed to advise on and even preach to others. On many occasions, although our parents reacted to our decisions at each of life’s major cross-roads in such a manner that pushed us further away from their small world and alienated us from an inertial national culture and heritage, they maintained the pretences of respecting the autonomy we strived to gain in adulthood, our self-acting and initiative, and they could hesitantly acknowledge that there might have been alternative paths potentially offering in some respects a better ‘quality of life’ than the one they themselves, consciously or, most likely, unconsciously pursued. Eventually, they reluctantly accepted that a different family status quo that was taking shape than they had envisaged, despite initial objections and their deep-rooted, rigid perceptions of life. Besides, there was not much they could do, as they were aging, to hinder their relatively intelligent offspring and divert them from the life journey they decided to embark. Their two sons had spread their wings, and flown away on a way of no return.

Other than some property and social traditions passed down from previous generations, the parents and the family that we left behind on our way to foreign lands walked the well-trodden path of the petty-bourgeoisie and civil servant classes they belonged to –their fate and curse. These particular classes in Greece, with a double steady incomes and state benefits, and possibly the land and property they inherited from previous generations, distinguish themselves by their banal objectives and trivial ambitions in life: the purchase of a second and sometimes third home ‘for the children’ and (who knows?) their expanded families, a holiday home in the Chalkidiki peninsula, the ever so popular summer destination of Thessalonians following the frenzy amongst the aristocracy of the city and parvenus displaying a newly acquired prosperity; the continuous process of furnishing, re-furnishing, and meaningless ‘chop and change’ of expanding property portfolios, savings for a ‘rainy day’, which, however, rarely comes to civil servants, with their jobs for life, who collect a salary and then a generous state pension uninterruptedly until death, or stashing money for the ‘old age’ and its diseases, which seems like a rather self-defeating aim.

Mother became, thus, the housekeeper of two or three different homes, and the guardian of the petty interests and the daily well-being of family life. In tandem, she nurtured a growing suspicion towards the world, outside an innermost circle of relatives and close friends, which was apparently eying, at every opportunity, to take advantage and cause harm -materially and financially. Father was the arrogant ‘czar’ managing the family’s financial micro-affairs: one of many stereotypes he was harbouring was that women were incapable of dealing with money affairs, let alone investments, in as much as their brains are not made to adapt to new technologies. Such tendencies and pursuits, amongst others, describe what I believe is a Greece, generation-specific petty-bourgeoisie mentality. It has been solidified further in the post-dictatorship years by the defects of a country heavily dependent on foreign economic centres, sustaining itself οn the margins of an industrialised Europe, a country which always struggled to adapt to technological innovations, and always with a hysteresis for that matter, with marginal participation in the ‘division of labour’ of the global capitalistic system, a country that produces neither significant material wealth, nor, in the decades of its transition to western type democracy, presented a notable creativity and innovative spirit of a global reach in both the sciences and the arts. That established social mindset I made great efforts to eradicate from my way of thinking and acting, being aware of its essence and the dead ends that it could have led me to.

Sometimes, meanness and malice, and rejoicing at the misfortunes of others, a schadenfreude in a word, characterized Mother's behaviour in many of her interactions with the outside world and, particularly, with people she a priori disliked, despite a feignedly polite demeanour she always publicly exercised. She treated with suspicion and a generally negative predisposition strangers and people who found themselves either permanently or temporarily outside a well delimited circle of close, loved ones. Even those intimately close to her, like her sisters, were occasionally, privately and in absentia, targeted with derogative remarks and even bitterness, usually within the context of arduous gossiping with others from the same group. This behaviour and generally private criticisms of Mother towards individuals and social groups, regardless of any traces of objectivity or prejudices we all harbour, helped me understand some of the contradictions (or latent or side-struggles and conflict) that had been taking root within Greek society since its transition to democracy in the ‘70s, and are still evident today.

Because Greece’s economy lacked sound productive industrial foundations, intra-society and -class conflicts have not directly reflected the fundamental contradiction inherent in capitalistic production since the industrial revolution, namely, between capital and labour, but they are rather by-products of a dependent economy with significant parasitic elements born out of its unorthodox development. On the contrary, from the experience of coming of age and studying, I learned that Greek society and its political superstructure have been shaped by struggles and conflicts amongst various layers of a largely counterproductive middle-class, fragmented into guilds and groups of well-guarded individual interests, acting insularly from the rest of the society and with disregard to broader social concerns. With two large groups roughly within the same income and wealth percentiles, claiming their share in the limited material wealth of the nation: the legions of civil servants, employees of state-sponsored enterprises, and central government bureaucrats and state affiliates, on the one hand, and all kinds of self-employed freelancers, small businessmen, dealers, rentiers, etc. on the other. The former group shifts the blame for the country’s deficits, its own class -barring a privileged elite- relative income poverty, and the poor public services offered by the State on the widespread tax evasion of the latter, while the other group derides the state and its services for over-centralisation and bureaucracy, for parasitism and corruption, as the main hindrance to the latter’s apparently more ‘productive’ and entrepreneurial activities, a hubris to its diligence and work ethos. Both operate relatively tightly within the narrow confines of their guilds and organisations, defending their petty interests, blind to the interests of the wider society and unwilling to compromise a stake of their own share for the sake of the whole. It is left to one or two visionless governing parties of our bourgeois democracy to moderate such conflicts with haphazard and hit-and-miss policies. However, administration of the state affairs and governance by the political class, with the makeshift reforms it introduces now and then are bound to be ineffective and deficient, merely because this class either originates from or is intertwined with the parochial groups of the middle-class whose votes is elected from. The political class that is supposed to monitor social class struggles aiming at temporary respites and reconciliations, instead, it is focused mainly to sustain and perpetuates itself, for the sake of votes and conserving its main attributes, like privilege, nepotism, and cronyism, which in turn warrant its self-preservation in power.

We also learned from our families that "everyone should look after his own interests" or ‘himself’ or his ‘own party’ -as the general Greek public would say. The only notion that unites these diverse and divergent substrata of the ‘people’ or, better, of the populus and fragmented middle-class, is a sterile nationalism against fictitious or manufactured enemies, a skewed and in many cases unsubstantiated and even falsified historical narrative, a pre-election populism that brings individuals with conflicting interests once every few years under the same political party umbrella and on nebulous or unrealistic or simply false premises, that satisfy their passive audience temporarily, until many are changed or forgotten, whilst in the background its main actors provide the necessary reassurances to ‘allies’ and foreign patrons. Above all, a political class, which was able to sustain its populist policies with excessive borrowing until the debt crisis of 2009, and which, when, cornered between policies that kept it in power and the spectre of bankruptcy, barely managed to survive amidst the economic ruins with conditional bailouts -until the next crisis, that is.

At the end, I resented my petty-bourgeoisie roots and the mindset of the class which I was born into. No matter, I am still formally part of this class on a marginally elevated stratum and somehow feel bound by some of its prosaic ‘aspirations’, albeit detached from the mainstream norms. Daily contradictions that are recognized and expressed by some of those unconsciously trapped within the invisible shells of their class, in schools and universities, in the army, at work, in shops and services, in parents’ advices, all these contradictions daily life presents, I could not unravel and reconcile, let alone accept consciously and live a life riding on their waves. The future could not wait. The place that gave birth to me was shrinking before my eyes, the distance from my children years under the family roof was growing. I threw a black stone behind, as the Greek saying goes, despite the emotional threads that connect me with hometown and family and which often drew me back -and still does, like an invisible magnet, thanks to a nostalgia grown on ingrained memories of childhood and youth, some of them unforgettably beautiful. But I struggled to change my culture and the mindset I inherited, to reshape it and move on in life with a somehow different perspective. To a certain extent I succeeded. In the end, I felt I might have been partly vindicated as, for good chunks of my lifetime, conscience has been in accord with praxis – or so I do think.

7 - A Marriage and Life Carried on

And so, they did get married. With formal and phlegmatic blessings from ‘neutral’ families. The best man and later my godfather was Father’s brother, the only person sporting a smile in the photos of the wedding. There has been an unspectacular gathering of family members and close friends in a taverna, but no honeymoon. A quick calculation shows the big event happened seven months (not nine) before my birth day. It is therefore plausible that an unwanted pregnancy hastened the wedding. Less likely marriage was scheduled in advance before my conception. Whatever plans and even dreams, if any, they might have conjured up for a future and life together until, as they say, ‘death did them apart’ -a flame of love that might have burnt once had been flickering and extinguished fast, well before the birth of little Brother seven years after mine. There were not even embers of that initial fire left, and I did not sense any of the warmth that affection and love between my parents, ever since I began to become aware of what love between two people can be all about. Did it ever really exist, I wondered, or was it a mirage from a fling that led into a reluctant marriage?

One could maintain that such denouements are largely predictable in many relationships, under the conditions that unfold along the paths of common, mundane lives, much of which are occupied by routine work, the needs for self-preservation, raising children, marching monotonously towards the inevitable end. ‘The boat of love crashed on the rocks of everyday life,’ was something that Mayakovsky wrote in his suicide letter and left an impression in my youth. It happens to most who fall in love, as I realized in my youth: the monotony, the inevitable weakening of the emotional bond, the fatigue, the gradual reduction of once a passionate love into a symbiotic tolerance –often not even that, sustained as such by basic needs, barely surviving amidst the friction that routine and boredom and unfulfillment bring along. Many a times what we fundamentally mean by love, the golden crown of eros and passion, that warmth remnant in a corner of the soul retained after passion subsides, and which usually survives longer than love, also melts away. And the few moments of normalcy and rapport, the occasional tenderness and intimacy, give way at best by indifference, at worst by intolerance and hostility, at extremes by pure hatred.

When I was old enough and able to analyze emotions in relationships, superficially it must be said given the lack of conducive life experiences, I came to realize that a possible long-lost love of my parents, in as much as it once existed, was never transformed into some form of conjugal love and affection, even understanding, whilst with the years passing the last remnants and memories of the brief period over which a romance might have flourished disappeared. It did not even transform into a scarcely harmonious, even on conventional terms, coexistence, however unfeeling that might have been. I witnessed fights with Fathe’s terrifying voice echoing down the street, his fists bagging down on tables, I saw dishes flown at the walls of the kitchen, I was frightened by doors slamming, shocked by shoves and the ejections of Mother from our flat. I remember with sadness the sobs of Mother in a locked room, my grandmother coming upstairs to intercede and calm things down and, with her legendary stoicism, saying: “All of them, dear, are worth no more than a bucket of shit thrown at their faces!" She was always comforting, as she had experienced similar arguments and fights of her own accord, with an equally difficult husband and two unruly boys to raise.) Final, poorly patched-up reconciliations merely papered over the cracks that over time, and until their later years, became an unbridgeable rift. Brief periods of calm and quiet did not alter the substance of their relationship, but relegated it to even lower rungs, whence new rounds of quarrels would start, widening further the emotional distance and growing alienation. Those, in short, were the unpleasant parts of family seen through my child’s eyes. Since I began to sense and process what was happening around me usually from emotional starting points (as pure logic can hardly suffice to analyze psychological storms of that kind), I reached the conclusion that growing as a child in a family atmosphere tainted by vicious arguments between my parents left indelible marks on the soul and greatly influenced the formation of my character, on top of underlying, yet unidentifiable, genetic reasons. A minor consolation from such memories was that physical violence, in its crudest versions, apart from the few petty shoves and ejections out of the flat or a car, I bore no witness.

We had, between Mother and Father, a clash of characters who forgot or neglected their beginnings, their romance, the timid hugs and touches of their first love, and who soon after their marriage became unconscious or indifferent  to what had brought them together, and they did not seek and fall back to it in everyday life; who ignored each other in their interchange with the outside world;  who finally let the ravaging stream of time to carry them apart. On the one hand, there was the wounded ego of Mother, whose perceived sidelining and suppression found temporary relief in endless murmurs of protest (‘moaning’, ‘nagging’, ‘carping’, etc. as Father dismissively was labelling it). A predicament compounded by indecision and diffidence and hesitation in taking more radical actions. On the other hand, there was the extreme intransigence and egotism of Father, which was manifested and imposed against the other’s opinions and desires with a stentorian voice, loud enough to wake up the neighborhood and petrify children and adults alike. We were blocking our ears and eyes, keeping silent, withdrawing quietly and shutting ourselves in our rooms during such incidents. Time with the family hardened us and made us less empathetic. Nevertheless, our childhood survived without significant losses or traumas, almost unscathed, one may argue and, in some respects, composed and even enhanced. The generation gap was widening between us and our parents, until we were alienated from the family core, if there has ever been a concrete one. Eventually, we left home to distant places, away from home and country for long periods of time. But on our occasional visits home and family gatherings a similar state-of-affairs, the same mentality and behavior, persisted in the atmosphere -stale and dried out since long ago.

A barely perceptible reconciliation between our parents occurred in old age, under the weight of countless years of friction and discordance, of shouting and fights on their shoulders; rather late in their life, perhaps too late, when the most painful of memories of the past had faded enough to cause regrets. Their monasticism and chronic mutual chronic isolationism under the same roof (of the ‘each minding one’s business’ kind) were abated; a little more understanding and consensus were reached, some signs of tenderness and affection of a different type, I would say similar to those displayed by inexperienced and awkward novices in love, timidly appeared between the two aged parents. Primarily in the face of a need for daily sustenance and survival, whose service becomes increasingly difficult at old age, and the imperative of emotional support: the fear of loneliness lurking, as death approaches, brings people closer.

A few times I asked myself: From more than half a century of our parents living together, was there anything that would have proved worthy of being depicted in some more vivid colors? In a perfectly established, unbroken daily routine, afternoon dining followed by a nap became central to Father's world from early maturity. Mother retired as early as the generously social welfare laws of Greece allowed that to happen. A diminishing passion for teaching, if there was ever any, dried up. The chores, Father's prepared dinner on the table, and the daily cleaning and tidying up of the flat, absorbed her compulsively in a uniform succession of days and years. She devoted herself to these daily chores with zeal, and they became a core and integral part of her existence. Rather inexplicably, she carried those thankless chores in a backdrop of grumbling and resentment emanating from feelings of regret and that she had been taken advantage of from her husband.

The rest of their spare times was mainly dissipated in thinking and unnecessarily worrying about their ‘children’, me and Brother now in advanced adulthood. In their minds they must have always felt, as a parental duty, the need to advise and support, materially and morally, while Father, with Mother’s underlying murmur, engaged in various mini-crusades of our repatriation – because ‘Is there anywhere no than our Greek paradise?’ Sterile thoughts, nevertheless, inconsequential words, ineffective actions, uncalled for interventions, that somehow were enhancing the profile of a veteran in his field of work and, more importantly, generating a sense of purpose: that he was offering something useful, making a difference in the lives of his sons, as old ‘Schmidt’ of the homonymous film tried in vain to affect his daughter’s life. These were some highlights of a life amongst shopping for groceries, phone calls to relatives and friends, the compulsory daily reading of the newspapers, TV viewing and light reading, and, later, as far as Father exclusively concerned, hours on end in front of a computer, browsing the internet. The days passed, they passed ruthlessly, imperceptibly. Both grew old away from us, until, as they pledged in that uncelebrated wedding, ‘death did them part’. Have they been content with the lives they lived together?

6 - Unrequited Loves

They both had opportunities to pursue different romantic paths, albeit within the limits of the rather puritanical environments they were brought up. They exchanged glances and smiles, and their hearts raced for others, before for each other in that school. Even in an era still dominated by old-fashioned and outdated values, in the backward regions of Europe, at the cusp between youth and maturity, when beauty and the power and vigour of body and mind peaks, love lurks around every corner, undaunted by any restrictions of oppressing family and social environments and the prevailing culture in their milieu. The phrase of Sophocles, which we were not taught in school for similar reasons, sounds like a cliché: “Eros, invincible in battle…"

Lampouras was a kind, young mathematician who was also employed in Katsikopoulos' establishment. He timidly courted Mother on the margins of their work and family lives, before Father came to the fore. “What a nice young gentleman!” Mother exclaimed several times with a touch of nostalgia, whereas Father, after mentions of his name in his presence usually smiled condescendingly, perhaps sardonically. Death did not reciprocate the kindness and grace of that young man. He was tragically killed, before he had the chance to enjoy the delicacies of youth and love, crushed by an elevator in a block of apartments, after having opened its door and fallen into the pit before the car had reached his floor level. Without tasting Mother’s love who liked him. A dance with her at a Christmas party, immortalized in a photo, was sole remainder and reminder of their brief and hapless affair. But he was deeply engraved in her memory of Mother –and that of Father, too: Lampouras, the young, noble mathematician.

On Father’s side, before my parent’s lives eventually converged into the same path not without a few stumbles and setbacks along the way, a certain Mary appeared. She was the daughter of a personage renowned in the old neighbourhood and legendary in the family annals, a widow aptly named Charikleia, a close friend of grandmother’s and frequent visitor in her house and, later, flat for coffee and gossip. Mary was a kind and beautiful girl, I heard, and, once she was envisaged as Father’s favourable match, if not his aspiring wife. Father, as far as I understood from Mother's take of their affair, ‘fancied Mary a lot and fell head over heels in love with her.’ Unfortunately for him, well before the first buds of a love began to blossom and any engagement discussions, Charikleia vetoed any notion of this happening. Rather instinctively and without communicating her reasoning to the primarily interested parties, Father and Mary, she dismissed outright any possibility of her daughter marrying him, as that seemed to be implicit from the onset in their brief affair. She possessed an irrefutable intuition (mainly thanks to her maternal instinct and a rationale supported by various observable signs and clues) over the prospects in store of her daughter’s life with a problematic character. Unmistaken indications, such as Father’s behaviour in Charikleia's presence or rumours and gossip that might have reached her ears from acquaintances and mutual friends, as these always made the rounds of the neighbourhood and beyond. Her ruling out of Mary sharing a future with Father was categorical and indisputable. In retrospect, Charikleia's intuition about her daughter's future beside Father might as well have proved correct (who knows?), and as such is claimed by Mother's accounts of Father’s unrequited love. Many a time, in the years after their marriage and my birth, with no little bitterness, Mother contemplated her unfulfilled, even wasted life, and perhaps an unjust destiny. If only there was one ‘Charikleia’ for her, she used to point out, who would have given sound and persuasive advice in time, without munching the words about Father and his idiosyncrasy.

Katsikopoulos expressed similar concerns, to put it mildly, about a ‘vocal’ Father and his ‘difficult’, ‘temperamental’ and easily combustible character, and his stubbornness and intransigence, in conversations with Mr. Yiannis: “Mr. Economou, I see your daughter standing at the bus stop and chatting playfully with this Ibrişimci gentleman – they seem too friendly and uncomfortably close for my eyes...  Not just smiling innocently, but flirting too... I suggest you keep an eye on your daughter’s contact with him. He has been hard to deal with, raising his voice in board meetings, being awkward in his relations with several members of our staff...” Perhaps, he even went as far as to brand Father ‘weird and cranky.’  Nevertheless, being fair to Father, in those school board meetings under the tutelage of an arguably ‘wretched’ character like that of Katsikopoulos, I am sure he would have boldly defended his own and other colleagues’ corner. His core beliefs and principles were virtually unshakeable and his arguments indomitable even by well-intentioned and even persuasive reasoning; they were defended with arrogance and stubbornness, at the forefront always of the immense egocentrism that distinguished his personality. His overall attitude in the presence of others was amply assisted by a piercingly loud, and often uncontrollable voice –a handy tool in his toolbox for imposing ideas and opinions and crushing counter-arguments. The frictions and conflicts with Katsikopoulos and possibly other colleagues, whom might have implicitly or slavishly aligned themselves with the views of their boss, would be part of an almost daily order in School's life.

In any case, I do not know what background discussions took place between Mr Yiannis and Mother precisely, but Katsikopoulos' intervention did not appear to have greatly influenced the progress of their affair. All this behaviour, the ‘spirit’ and the ‘dynamism’ and self-confidence of Father, amongst other commendable attributes, must have exerted an irresistible attraction to Mother and charmed her. Many years later, Brother, when discussing Mother’s lifetime subservience to most of Father’s whims, correctly pointed out that “Mother, as the feebler and weaker personality she was nurtured into by her father, was naturally looking for a dynamic and domineering figure in her life.” Surely those trivial episodes did not foreshadow the future and duration of what turned out to be an extremely long and arduous coexistence.

The early end of Lampouras, Charikleia's blocking Mary’s and Father’s affair, the inconsequential effects Katsikopoulos’ criticism had over grandfather’s stance on his daughter’s plans, the ingenuousness and plasticity of young Mother's soul, partly, perhaps, due to the natural giddiness and recklessness associated with a first love, have now sealed my parents' fate en route to marriage and setting up a family. The love of Lampouras, a bud that did not blossom but pruned by his tragically premature death, remained a fond memory. Charikleia and her daughter moved to Athens, where Mary married a watchmaker -whom Father mentioned on occasions, with a tone of mixed disappointment and contempt, likely due to a secretly harboured jealousy, an unfulfilled romance, and an unrequited desire. I am convinced that Mary and Father sincerely fell in love with each other, and, perhaps, both were temporarily hurt as things turned out, and were dictated (rather forced) to follow divergent paths. Any relationship that could have hypothetically thrived, had been erased by the geographical distance, after Mary’s departure and her settling permanently in Athens. The emotions from that period, however strong, dissolved into the oblivion of an increasingly distant past. Their communication became more sporadic. A fleeting love that did not manage to fully materialise into life camaraderie had long since faded, and in the end only a distant memory remained, and reduced to the occasional greetings exchanged over the phone between two aging people. In later years, they were calling each to exchange wishes on their name day on the same day in the Orthodox calendar. Until a recent August and an Athenian heat wave, when Father’s call for wishes was not answered. Mary, Father learned, died of a heat stroke. “It was the fault of that trader idiot, her son, who filled their apartment with boxes and blocked ventilation grills,” Father remarked. And Ι saw his eyes watering as he announced Mary’s death, sixty years after his first and arguably greatest love. For some reason, mine were, too.  

5 - When They Met

The first steps of my parents’ working lives brought them together, under the same professional roof of an independent secondary school, run by a certain Katsikopoulos. It was located between Nea Magnesia, Mother’s village, and the western outskirts of the noisy city, in the ‘Eleftheria-Neo Kordelio’ district, surrounded by polluted and shabby industrial sites with factories and workshops, and, insofar as I can recall, in a perennial state of urban degradation. It seems odd a businessman to have had an educational establishment of note set-up in a predominantly working-class and underprivileged part of the city, but by then social strata had not yet been entrenched in clearly class-distinct districts. The urban and industrial development after the Civil War had been rapid and disorderly and, during the following decades, resulted into a more rigid class segregation, before that was dissolved by the de-industrialisation of the once industrious city -and the country overall.

Katsikopoulos the headteacher, owner, and uncompromising and unapologetic boss of the eponymous, rather provincial education establishment, was, for many who got to know and work for him, an unsympathetic and avaricious, as much as miserly, businessman. Perhaps, the word badass would suffice to describe him. It was claimed that he was a gambler, frequenting semi-illicit underground dens to exercise his gambling addiction, a vice that often goes together with avarice and greed. The Father described him several times as a ‘scoundrel’, encompassing in a word his first boss’ not just flawed but, as also seen by many, abhorrent personality. Katsikopoulos, although he must have obtained some sort of university education, all he was interested in was to make a quick buck in the education trade, whilst exploiting the brains of young university graduates, who were desperately looking for their first job to kick-start their careers, and were willing to accept anything that came their way, regardless of a pitiful wage on offer and poor employment conditions. For most graduates, like Father, a quick career start was an imperative, whilst waiting for an appointment in the public education system or public sector in general, and, for that matter, a job for life.  

It was rumoured that the businessman in question hired Mother so that he can establish a link with Mr Yiannis, who, as the principal of a nearby populous primary school, could recommend and supply, albeit unsuspectedly, for the cunning Katsikopoulos ample clientele. That was evidenced by Father's rather biased opinion of Katsikopoulos, with whom he fell out not long into his tenure at his school. Anyway, he could never have got along with his first boss! (It is parenthetically worth noting that Father did not get along with most of his superiors, largely due to a rebellious spirit, excessive obstinacy and intransigence, and no more than his know-all attitude. However, there had been grounds for most of derogatory claims about Katsikopoulos’ personality, as that was painted by Father, even if one accepts more benign versions of the opprobrium by his former employees-including Mother.)

Some love, an eros perhaps, of indeterminate complexity and intensity, commencing, as is often the case with a glance and a smile and few forgettable words, at the forefront of an implicit physical attraction (a necessary condition of many a love), must have occurred and blossomed in the daily life of that school. That falling in love preceded their marriage I firmly believe, although I never witnessed any clear public demonstrations of it, not even subtle manifestations of an underlying primordial love, in as much as that love was weakened by years of friction, habit, work, chores, and raising a family. Neither have there been testimonies of a probable ‘love at a first sight’ and stories by third party witnesses from their first encounters and dates. One is tempted to accept that the prevailing social norms and mores of the times did not allow for overt public courtships, and overcoming such barriers required character traits, like impulsiveness and spontaneity, which were not intrinsic elements of either of my parents’ personalities. Yet, faint dribs and drabs of this love had been timidly appearing in photographs of the two together from excursions or balls, mementos and nostalgic stories from their youth. Despite the mundane, stale and frequently rancorous marital relationship that followed (of which I was the unfortunate eyewitness!), and bore no evidence of love and affection, this perhaps unsubstantiated belief, that once, for a little while, there was love, brings to me, the fruit of their marriage, a bit of comfort.

Incidentally or coincidentally, it was at the same school and around the same time that, Nikos A, one of Father’s best friends since his university years and for decades into their maturity, met and indeed fell in love with Kiki, a young, witty and brazen philologist from a family of artists; only to marry a few months later with Father being Nikos’ chosen best man. But Nikos’ and Kiki’s romance was openly demonstrated and witnessed on several occasions, no less than their harmonious married life. Ever since, the two couples followed parallel and, one might say, symmetrical paths. And, along the way, as much as my family lived well, theirs lived an arguably better, fuller, more illustrious and prosperous life. It might have been because it was built on the solid foundations of a deep, unshakable love. But I am fast-forwarding my story...

Camus wrote that not being loved in one's life is unfortunate, but not to love is misery. I recognized this in the lives of previous generations. The character and power of such love, if it existed in some shape or form, eventually and rather sadly, remained a secret between the two souls who gave birth to me. After all, love, this spiritual-psychical-biochemical synthesis of countless sensations and emotions, currents that meet at the innumerable nodes of the soul and mind and then flow away in a process of constant movement, progression and regression, stands out for its uniqueness, peculiarity, and subjectivity. It characterizes exclusively two universally unique consciousnesses that connect, and its whole is hidden inside and at best between them, like a well-kept secret. It is related to the era, space and culture of the society that surrounds these two beings. Only the number of works of art, which expressed love over the centuries of human civilisation, can be compared with the number of variations of love that somehow affected the respective artists. Written in a simpler way: love, and its sensations, can be as diverse as the billions of people who were fortunate enough to love and fall in love. And its precise nature becomes exclusive knowledge of the two people who experience it. It largely remains their occult secret, and, over its course, only few samples are manifested to the outside world: smiles, looks, touches, dances and songs, artistic creations. The latter, as a legacy for future generations to realise its existence and the full extent of its importance, to be moved by its greatness and the emotional and sensual peaks it can reach.

4 - Mother & Father

As the saying goes, Mother and Father were not born for each other. Both possessed a youthful beauty and, arguably, they could ostensibly be considered a good match, should personalities and behaviour be taken out of this equation. Father had a deep and piercing gaze through light brown eyes, crowned by masculine, shapely curved eyebrows which accentuated their size. He owed his noticeable eyes and gaze to his mother, but the broad brow was taken after his father and his Melnikian family, and projected an open mind, a restless spirit, and high intelligence. He used to meticulously comb his thick, dark and slightly wavy hair backwards with a becoming parting on the right. He clean-shaved and freshened up his face with cold water, before attending to his hair and every morning, until very old age, with narcissistic sessions in front of the bathroom mirror. His hair began to turn gray from his early thirties, whilst retaining a healthy thickness, adding prestige and distinction to his countenance. The slender body of his youth and an above average stature rounded off a masculine and, by all standards, handsome fellow. The weight he put on and the paunch he developed in maturity added imposingness to an already charming presence.

Mother had the nicely shaped mouth and lips that she inherited from her mother, a sweet and soft voice, worthy of the Academy choir she was selected to be a member of, and golden blonde hair with a French braid falling on the back of a petite, well-proportioned figure. Her horn-rimmed glasses added an intellectual touch. Therefore, at first sight and from a superficial point of view, anyone of goodwill observing Mother next to Father would say they made a lovely couple. No doubt there had been a mutual attraction; a physical attraction and compatibility are often prerequisites for falling in love, if not, ultimately, sharing a life together.

Although the socio-economic backgrounds of the places and communities they had been brought up within, the dull and virtually classless village community, on the one hand, and the vibrant neighbourhoods of the multicultural city with its colourful ethnicities and heritage, on the other, differed substantially at face value, the circles of the respective families had some points of tangency. Mother's family settled in an area bordering the western outskirts of the city and comprising a cluster of village communities, with wheat and corn and vegetable farms surrounding islets with factories and workshops which sprang up hither and thither thanks to the rapid post-war industrialization of Thessaloniki. It could be described as semi-provincial or semi-urban. It still is. The daily minds of the people of her village, Nea Magnesia, might have been preoccupied by agricultural activities, the wholesale of grains and vegetables being the main source of income, but the city and its temptations were not far away –half an hour to an hour by a regular coach.

At its undisputed head Mother’s family had Mr Yiannis, a distinguished in the local community primary school head-teacher and custodian of traditional values from ‘the good-old times’ of an inherently conservative society. Their importance he tried to have ingrained in the minds of his pupils and daughters alike, with endless sermons at school assemblies or the family table. Amongst those traditional principles, however, some more modern conceptions of life and the world appeared to flourish on the fertile soil of his fundamentally ‘progressive’ political views; not necessarily within the family confines, but rather with respect to broader social relations and interactions. Besides, he had married a beautiful, elegant and at heart relatively cultured woman from a formerly wealthy family of Istanbul, even though much of its wealth was abandoned behind or lost along the migration paths they had to follow, after the brutal population exchanges of the early part of the 19^th century.

On the other hand, one branch of Father’s family, that is his mother’s, stemmed from the poverty-stricken refugee district of Toumpa, where the privations of war and the forced migration triggered by the Asia Minor Catastrophe triggered and, later, the German Occupation of the city left intractable wounds to their generation’s lives and conscience; the other, from the petty-bourgeois to middle-class intelligentsia of the city, who also found refuge in Salonica after their uprooting from Melnik. At home and in family life, the nobler elements of the Melnikian immigrants’ ethos and pride merged with the kindness, generosity and dignity the refugees from Izmir and the ancient Ionia regions carried along: the kibarlik -in a single Turkish word, encompassing all these merits. In short, there were not many questions of a class disparity or other prejudices of the sort, that could be asked when comparing the ilk of Father with that of Mother. And, for that matter, there were no grounds for negotiating a dowry and no intentions were expressed to discuss it, despite the fact that a dowry, either from goodwill or, even, as a product of sometimes disagreeable negotiations was still a common feature in premarital arrangements of that era.

Father, after all, stood tall above such social-anachronisms thanks to an innately open-mind, his association with his cultured uncles, cousins, and university friends, that is, his family cultural heritage, augmented by a relatively enlightened social circle, and a decent education. By no means could Father be described a radical, but rather as a moderately progressive individual who had adopted and projected modern political at least convictions in his social interactions. His perceptions and world views were further positively reformed by the experiences of the German Occupation and the Civil War, the transformative post-war growth that was taking place, the relative prosperity that growth was bringing about, and, certainly, the university education he managed to acquire and the broader learnings he embraced.

3 - A Difficult Person with a Good Mind

 Indeed, Father was mentally strong, open-minded, his mind sharp, an avid learner. He could have accomplished more in life than a rather colourless and odourless career as a member of staff in a public utilities’ monopoly, however productive and growing this organisation might have been considered at a time of Greece’s post-ware reconstruction and timid technological development. Having become self-conscious, fully aware of his intelligence, and even been arrogant about it (it was a child’s play to intellectually assert himself in that respect in the environment he was growing up), he developed a stereotypical, almost Manichean perception of people and their minds: in terms of their abstract thinking, and the output and ideas of this thinking, but more in terms of their complexity than the depth or gravity of these ideas and the impact they might have on the movement of the world around.

His criticism and judging of people stemmed from a rather narrow and highly subjective definition of intelligence and intelligence quality, the main criteria being an ability to solve logical puzzles and cumbersome mathematical problems, the logical analysis of natural phenomena, the clarity of speech and fluency in public presentations and the concise formulation of thoughts in groups of people. The world in his mind was divided into two categories: the stupid and idiots on the one hand, whom he treated from the outset aphoristically and with contempt up to categorical and unconditional dismissals, and the intelligent, on the other hand, to whom he regularly bestowed flattering comments and praises (having accepted them as members of the same elite group he belonged to), attentively listened to them, and, rarely and over time, embraced some of the points of views that differed from his. However, most opinions, regardless of apparent and sometimes unequivocal validity were crushed against an inner wall of prejudice and obstinacy.

The reflexive spirit of rebuttal and self-contradictory trains of thought, which in the case of Father assumed pathological dimensions, are often the results of acute intelligence, which hastens to claim its own pedestal and distance itself from opposing or any views for that matter, even from common sense. Similar views, or rather prejudices, I observed in many who had the self-assuredness of their intellectual brilliance, mainly as a congenital gift further shone through learning. This conceit, so to speak, becomes especially enhanced when they do not receive a commensurate recognition by their social and professional groups, or there is not a significant uplift in their social and economic status. In a way, it could be summed up as a rather sterile superiority complex.

He was admitted in 1953 rather effortlessly by School of Physics of the major university of the city, without being prompted by anyone, on his own accord and his own effort and initiative, who knows under what preparation for the exams. His family could not afford the pre-exam tutoring. This success went almost unnoticed by parents and the neighbourhood, and was not accompanied by family celebrations that normally follow such milestones in a young person’s life in modern Greece. Yet, it was a big deal for his time, a remarkable achievement for the son of a lowly usher in the Association of Tobacco Merchants of Thessaloniki, an insignificance in the social strata of urban Thessaloniki in par with the workers in the tobacco processing factories, and the illiterate refugee girl from Bayindir who grew up in the slums of Toumpa. Individual and social accomplishments are relative and must be assessed with regards to the environment and time of one's life, to the dimensions of space and time man perceives during his existence, and to the forces, often powerful and unsurpassed, that this space-time exerts on conscience. As a restless scientific spirit that Father had been, upon graduation he left for Athens, where he was appointed as a teacher in a tutoring school under contract, whilst pursuing a postgraduate degree in Radio Engineering. In short, Father achieved a rather remarkable personal and social leap, relying almost exclusively to his own ability and judgement, from the poor household of his proletarian parents and Uncle Socrates, and joined the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia of the city.

The Greece of his youth was developing with a rapid pace, as most post-war societies in Europe that had to emerge from the ruins of war and stand on their feet, with or without outside help. With own choice and initiative, he made the most of the narrow margins of freedoms and liberties allowed by his environment, and with the broader horizons his education opened-up, he rode with his open mind the waves of economic growth. But limits of the urban society of his hometown and Greece would not be surpassed, despite his initial enthusiasm; the constraints imposed by a marginalised and dependent, albeit ‘emerging’ economy would eventually check his drive and the lively spirit he had displayed early in life, despite his sharp and open mind. If he was conscious of these limits himself, if he aspired to exceed them but he got stuck somewhere along the way, I do not know, nobody knows, but he would he not admit otherwise it if I had asked. And the most likely reason for reaching a plateau early in his career, when compared against the accomplishment of several of his friends and peers?  His intelligence, an unbridled propensity for argument and his unbending intransigence, a problematic character especially in his relationships with other human beings, ultimately acted as a brake and checked his career and, ultimately, life.