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.