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.