23g - The Old Neighborhood: The Microcosm of our Apartment Block (The Distant Upper Floors)

Both floors above ours housed penthouses with large terraces. As a child I wished for a family home with a terrace spacious enough to accommodate improvised ball games and set up, at one of its corners, a tent to sleep in hot summer nights under the starry sky. Unfortunately, that dream did not materialise until I was too old to want to spend time at home with my parents.

My family's social contacts with the owners of the penthouses of the top floors were rather scarce. Their status in the building hierarchy, so to speak, and the one or two flights of stairs that separated us raised a minor barrier, more psychological than physical, whilst it harboured some envy towards the more privileged living environment, aggravated by the fact that the economic status of the families occupying them was on par with ours -as far as I could tell. In any case, there had been clauses in the contracts grandfather signed with the builder when he relinquished his plot of land, that limited the selection of the three apartments for him and his two sons out of the lot.

On the third floor lived a widow, apparently a dowager Mrs. Eftychia, whom Mother paid visits after rare casual invitations for a chat, whilst coffee drinking, taking place in her terrace in late summer afternoons or, in winter time, in her living room, which I felt not only dwarfed ours, but also boasted more expensive and comfortable furniture. Mrs. Eftychia had two boys much older than me. One had the glorious name of Cleon. He was a high-school student and of superior stature and whenever he came across me and my mate Costas, both of us still in primary school, sitting at the steps by the entrance of the building and chatting, he would pause at the threshold looking down at us. Then, he would say a few words, in condescending tone of voice and with an air of intellectual superiority, which we listened to silently. But his intentions, it seemed, were always well meaning.

Cleon had a younger brother, Nikos, ostensibly shy and barely spotted in the building or indeed the neighborhood. After our family relocated to the Harilaou district, we found out from a brief mention in a paper followed by a call to an old neighbour, that Nikos was killed in a side street off the ill-reputed Syngrou Avenue of Athens where he was allegedly loitering as a transgender prostitute. For the motives of the unsolved crime, one had to look in the largely untouchable underworld of pimping and drugs, the ‘world of night’, as they say in Greece. Those dark margins of society that common people normally stay away from, along with the secret passions and phantasies they foster, eventually engulfed Nikos’ life. He was the son of a respectable widow and brother to solemn Cleon and who would have expected this denouement!

The Aslanides’ family on the very top floor concluded our microcosm. Contacts with them were almost non-existent, limited to formal ‘good mornings’ or ‘good evenings’, for the sake of courtesy when you meet a neighbour on the stairs or the street, and, also, during the Residents’ Assemblies to discuss the allocation of shared expenses and service charges. Those gatherings were organised by a nominated resident-administrator (I remember my aunt being permanent in that position of power) took place periodically at the common entrance. It frequently ended in confrontations and petty-quarrels (typically over financial matters), and the occasional loud exchange of words, invariably between Father and the awkward head of that Aslanides family. These squabbles often reached my room through the staircase. A reason, on the part of Mr. Aslanides, could have been that he considered most of the residents as beneath him, and insulated himself from the trivial demands of cohabitating and sharing a building and contributing to a budget. Or, perhaps, from a different point of view, it could by that my family, Father in particular, was seeing the Aslanides’ as parvenues lacking in education credentials. For me, Aslanides’, that featured at the very top of the list of name badges at the entrance intercom, was nothing more than a hellenized surname of Turkish root, dissonant to my Greek ear, despite its decorous ‘Son of a Lion’ meaning.

I saw Mr. Aslanides on our street only a handful of times during my childhood, most often from over our balcony railings. He had the reputation of a difficult and awkward man, with a gloomy countenance usually facing down, attributes that would have inexorably made him Father’s adversary in the clashes over the economy of our building. His innate nature came further to the fore and his behaviour and manners worsened, after the stroke he suffered, which manifested itself with incomprehensible groans of frustration and indignation towards his wife and daughter, that could be heard from his apartment or the street when he was taken out for a walk. He eventually became bedridden and disappeared altogether from public view. Nobody noticed.

23f - The Old Neighborhood: The Microcosm of our Apartment Block (Lazy Fanis)

At the other end of the dark corridor of the busy first floor, opposite to grandma's, was the door of the apartment of an unemployed slob and, by all indications, a lazy-born person: Fanis. From our point of view, he looked middle-aged and rather big, but age and stature are generally magnified in the eyes of a child, in proportion to the difference in years. He had gray-blond hair, which fell straight at the back of his neck without a parting and a fringe to his eyebrows. It was like a cheap wig. Could it have been one? He lived with his widowed mother in their small apartment, a mirror image of my grandparents’. There was a shallowness and a lack of cultural depth evident around Fanis’ personality, a biased opinion, it could be said, given the intellectual standards that Father had set in judging a humble environment, and he led an existence which many in our house, especially my parents, found socially marginal and irritatingly parasitic. His superficiality was further evidenced by the array of folk and light pop songs he enjoyed listening on radio or television, for the best part of the day: during working hours for most residents, as well as evenings. In warm summer afternoons, with his balcony door wide open, his music could be heard by housewives, children and traders, everyone on the street below, while he was enjoying his cup of Turkish coffee in the shade that our balcony above offered, usually still dressed in pyjamas from the afternoon siesta until sunset and his pair of beach flip-flops protruding through the rails. Watching us play ball and other games on the street below was one of his pastimes in those late afternoons. On a couple of occasions when his brother, a handsome young man with a more vibrant personality, was visiting from Athens, both left the apartment to participate in a makeshift footie, played on our alley downstairs or in the sandlot by the stream. A Peter Pan syndrome would be an apt term in the circumstance.

Any loud noise emanating from our living room -just above his, during the evening hours he normally spent watching TV, he found a nuisance -perhaps, understandably so given the poor sound insulation of the walls and ceilings. Whenever the three children, I, Brother, and my first cousin from next door got together into our relatively spacious living room, under my guidance, we improvised games, which often involved simply jumping around or aimlessly running back and forth from one end of the room to the other, carefree and tireless. Our piece of fun could not have lasted long; Fanis, with a broomstick, would knock at his ceiling, our floor viciously. On occasions, if noises from our living-room persisted for more than a few days in a row, he would complain vigorously to grandmother, who, however, conveyed his complaints with a gesture of the hand that meant: ‘Let him say whatever, don't pay too attention! Don’t bother!’, then tapping her index finger to her head as if to highlight Fanis’ empty-headedness.

Indolent, single, without mates, without major expectations from life, possibly without dreams or ambitions. His sole aim was to spend another ‘good day’ (whatever that meant for him) in peace and quiet -in the plainest definition of ‘good’, excluding the satisfaction of basic human needs. Goncharev's hero Oblomov was a personality I would most closely associate with Fanis, although Oblomov, unlike Fanis, enjoyed a rather wealthier lifestyle, had a few friends no matter how rogue, even once fell in love, although unreciprocated. We never got around to know about his main source of income and how he sustained himself. Bad rumours attributed it to a disability benefit fraudulently obtained without genuine medical grounds, as he always looked fit-to-work, or a rental income he was receiving from a parental property he inherited. Any income of his might have been complementing the mother's meagre pension while she was alive. In the eyes of my family, he was a personification of αραχτή [laid back attitude and aversion to strain] that on average terms characterizes Greek society at large and the αραλίκι [laziness and lounging] in extreme manifestation. In a plain English, Fanis was a loafer.

Echoes from the neighborhood we left years later whispered that he eventually got married and left behind him the idleness in the uneventful reality of the alley, which for him, as far as we could tell, fulfilled his life sufficiently in the apartment below ours. Before we left another tall building was being raised across from the narrow street, which would have eliminated the remaining traces of skyline visible from our balconies and blocked the last rays of sunshine in summer afternoons Fanis. Lost, along with the ghost of his mother on the threshold of their door gossiping with grandmother, along with Fanis’ figure on the balcony in his pyjamas and flip-flops drinking coffee and listening to Greek pop music of the 1970’s and, later, after the fall of junta, the formerly prohibited song ‘Good Morning, Sun, Good Morning!’, which became a favourite of his, evidence one would say of a progressive political inclination. Lost along with the sun and out kickabouts under his balcony with Fanis the sole spectator. 

23e - The Old Neighborhood: The Microcosm of our Apartment Block (Leonidakos)

For the L_’s living next door to Mrs. Evangelia, I always held the impression of a family in consonance with their fixed daily routines, their jobs and a quiet and peaceful life; the latter, at least, in contrast to our family –given Father's frequent outbursts in a thunderous voice, which often pierced the walls of the building and reached the street outside. I rarely met with the L_s within the building we shared: the couple was busy getting on with their jobs and chores, being, as they say, an honourable hardworking couple. The husband was a painter and decorator; I saw him on occasions in his stained with paint overalls on his motorbike loaded with brushes and buckets heading to work, whilst the wife took on temporary jobs caring for the elderly. They had a son, Leonidas, better known in the neighbourhood by the dimininutive but rather unfitting Leonidakos (little Leonidas). He was bigger and stronger than Brother although of the same age, both seven years younger than me. As such, they were rarely allowed to join me and friends in our street play. (Besides, they were growing up at a time when playing outdoors on the streets was dwindling, due to an incessant construction in the area, increased number of cars on the roads, and the side-effects of television. Detours from the short and well-trodden path from school to the house had its dangers and required the permission from parents and the accompanying by an adult. At their age, must be said, I enjoyed more luck and freedom with my outside ventures, but children’s lives were changing fast.)

One autumn afternoon, shortly after the end of the school day, Leonidakos, with whom I had barely talked in person till then, rang our doorbell. I opened the door and he asked straight for Mother to whom she announced, panting, with a face flushed from worry and a trembling voice that Brother had been ‘run over by a car’ -at the intersection of Xenofon and Gambetta Street, roads that the boys crossed every day from school on their way back home. He unwittingly sowed panic with his naïve and brutal phrasing of the incident. For Mother and me listening beside her, ‘run over by a car’ meant that a car not just knocked Brother out but also drove over him, leaving him seriously wounded and even dead on the tarmac. Leonidakos’ message without elaboration caused shock and distress, bordering hysteria, to Mother. I had not seen her that distraught until then and would not have ever since. It was, nonetheless, a natural and instinctive reaction for a Greek mother. For my part, I felt an agitation which triggered palpitations and my heart to bleed -so to speak. I was instantly moved by the news and tears filled my eyes; I might have taken away by a few sobs. The image of tiny Brother, lying somewhere pale and dead, flashed in my mind. I felt an unprecedented tumult, despite the age gap of seven years between us, our rivalries and the animosity that the daily friction between siblings inevitably causes, as they must share the attention and devotion of parents and a largely unexciting everyday life in a small apartment. Like the pain from the sudden and heavy blows of what we call fate (something not predetermined, but random, and often with inordinate consequences) can unexpectedly cause to off-guard human beings. Then again, vis-à-vis the emotional impact of Brother’s accident, as Greeks say, ‘family blood does not turn into water’.

Mother, overwhelmed herself as she was, paid no heed to my reaction to the news and my emotional state. She threw away her kitchen apron, took off her robe underneath, pulled and put on a random skirt from the bedroom closet, walked fast downstairs with her hands trying to zip up and straighten the skirt; she ran after Leonidakos, the big boy well beyond his years, lead her by two or three steps to the road intersection of Xenophon and Gambetta streets, where the accident occurred.  I followed them at a fair distance, inundated by the fleeting thoughts and premonition of a tragic and macabre spectacle that would traumatise deeply an unspoiled from misfortunes soul. A tragedy, indeed, was what was insinuated by Leonidakos’ restless demeanour and his laconically brutal and brusque account of what he witnessed.

Brother was fine! He was overcoming the shock of the hit by the car bumper that threw him a few meters down the road and over to the pavement. He was sitting on a chair at one of the tables, in the diary and sweet shop, with a glass of orange juice in front of him -courtesy of the shopkeeper, dried tears under the eyes and a skin pale from the shock, rather than pain or serious injury. There had been no further drama following up the incident. A lesson was learned and, in the future, Brother was told by all present and promised that he should be careful when crossing streets, no matter how narrow, no matter what time of the day. For me, the event was a first fleeting encounter with the spectre of death and his sickle by an insignificant road. Admittedly, shocking and unforgettable, yet of many more to come.  

23d - The Old Neighborhood: The Microcosm of our Apartment Block (Mrs. Evangelia)

 On grandmother's floor, at the other end of a narrow corridor, was the door of the L_s and next to it that of Mrs. Evangelia’s. A plump lady Mrs. Evangelia was, past her reproductive years; a simple uneducated housewife with a heart of gold, who at every opportunity displayed a special fondness for my little brother, the youngest creature in the building. She went on to look after the toddler he was for a while, for the pitiable fee child minders in petty-bourgeois neighborhoods command (a thousand drachmas or so per month) during the days when both parents were at work. Grandmother was disinclined to take care of him; understandably so, after tending an all-male family (and myself for a short period) for the best part of her life. I and my younger first cousin were also thereabouts, and required some supervising. To Mrs. Evangelia’s doting cries ‘Oh! My little love! My little sweet love!’ and her juicy kisses on the cheek, after she lifted and grabbed him in a tight embrace, little Brother retaliated with insults (in incredibly colorful language for a toddler, must be said), pushing her face away or turning his away in disapproval, and on occasions even delivering blows. In her tiny kitchen, on school mornings, I used to eat quietly my breakfast: a bowl of milk, mixed with a cocoa powder to moderate the taste of boiled milk with a skin I found disgusting, with crumbles of Papadopoulou biscuits or a slice of bread with butter, sprinkled with sugar. I left for school, after a brief stop at grandma’s apartment, whilst Brother, upset and angry from being left alone with Mrs. Evangelia, was crying for his mum. A similar breakfast and her son’s more agreeable attention would have eventually calmed him down.  

Mrs. Evangelia’s husband, was one of those toilers struggling for a living: a peddler who roamed the cafes and tavernas and squares of the city selling lottery tickets. His meagre income was complemented by that of his son on part time jobs whilst also attending an evening technical college. Their lives, however, were transformed one day, when they won the lottery from one of the husband’s unsold tickets. They bought a property in Kalamaria, the relatively more affluent, middle-class suburb of eastern Thessaloniki. Since then, only a couple of times did I see again Mrs. Evangelia; without the everyday apron she used to wear when she looked after my brother, but in a flamboyant dress. She was visiting grandmother, her next-door neighbour for years and daily companion in morning coffee sessions, chatting over the rails of their adjoining kitchen balconies. I heard from Mother that they behaved like nouveau riche. Then again, I had no idea then what it meant to be such a person and whether it was something bad or good. It sounded derogatory, but I found later that change in human behaviour and lifestyle is perfectly natural to those who, following a smile from Lady Luck, experience a steep social ascendancy, shaking off a seemingly predetermined miserable existence, and out of the blue finding themselves wealthy. Eventually, the family distanced themselves from the social circles of their poor old neighborhood, where the city’s relentless development and expansion to the suburbs were deteriorating quality of life. Mrs. Evangelia and her lottery ticket seller husband disappeared in the richer edges of the city and they must have concluded their own book of life in a better way than the one that might have been extrapolated from the morning experiences in Mrs. Evangelia’s kitchenette or the coffee-drinking sessions in their small balconies at the unseen from passers-by, dark rear of our building. 

23c - The Old Neighborhood: The Microcosm of our Apartment Block (The Gloomy Lower Floors)

My grandparents lived the rest of their lives on the first floor, in a small one-bedroom apartment less privileged than those of their sons on the second floor; primarily because of the fewer hours of bright sunlight through the front balcony enjoyed by their sitting room, and even less by the interior. Father and my uncle, both men in their prime and heads of growing families, no doubt, were given and occupied the best cuts from the builder’s compensation for the plot of land the family relinquished.

The apartment building did not feature an elevator and the floors were joined by a U-turns staircase, with steps and landing made of what the builders called ‘mosaic’ -nothing more artistic than gravel in different shapes and colors within a mixture of refined cement. The glorious Greek summer sun did not shed much of its light in that staircase, especially on its turns from the mezzanine to the second floor. A faint sunlight managed to escape through a square opening of the rooftop into the blue of the sky above and through the windows of the small interior light-duct, but it looked tired and oppressive. This duct was like a rectangular deep well few meters wide, and from the windows at each landing one could see small white balconies of concrete walls hanging outside the main bedrooms. The layout was designed, as the architect might have reasoned, with the intention of guarantee precious afternoon siestas for the hard-working residents, uninterrupted by the intrusion of the bright Greek sun, especially in the summer afternoons, when both sunlight and heat can become unforgiving enemies. The residual rays of light that penetrated through the opening of the duct at the roof down to the lower floors were ultimately blocked by shutters firmly shut in the afternoons; with the sunlight thus attenuated, a darkness as thick as that of a dungeon and coolness even in August afternoons prevailed in the bedroom of Mother and Father.

But as one climbed to the two topmost floors and their penthouses, the diffused light intensity increased, until, at very top floor under the roof, a square patch of sky became visible, the sun from the windows was blinding in the relative darkness of the corridors and the staircase. At the rooftop, a place of longing and hiding and refuge of solitude in my childhood, only light, a light cloudless blue sky above and the freedom to gaze over and explore the skyline of Thessaloniki, through the forest of TV aerials on the rooftops, all the way to the waters of the bay of Thermaikos and the cranes of Thessaloniki’s port; a view in clear transparent days extended beyond the sea and across the bay to the peaks of Mount Olympus.

23b - The Old Neighborhood: The Microcosm of our Apartment Block (The Mezzanine Floor)

The right side of the staircase led upstairs to a mezzanine of a single, small one-bedroom apartment with a proportionally small balcony by the main entrance, at a tall man’s height above street level. This belonged to an old man called Iatrides, who crumped in there for a while with a wife and a daughter. Mother frequently referred to the ‘nasal mucus’ of old-Iatrides, I presume metaphorically, to point out his low hygiene standards. Perhaps, such a derogatory remark had more to do with the conspicuous poverty of the family and a rather unwarranted insolence stemming from covert class prejudices of Mother and other residents from the more privileged top floors. A micro-apartheid had already been established between the poor Iatrides family on the mezzanine floor and the rest of the building residents, a regime still evident in the communities of apartment blocks in the city's petty-bourgeois neighborhoods. Yet, every single resident had to pass by their front-door of when entering or exiting our building, therefore, encounters and interchanges were inevitable.

The Iatrides’ did not stay long enough to get better acquainted with their ways, the family members themselves, and ultimately find out a bit more about their cleanliness standards. They could not bear their relative poverty, whilst the attraction of decent employment and prospects of wealth that Northern Europe offered must have enticed their daughter and her fiancé. They left their small apartment in the early 1970’s, amid the years of dictatorship in Greece, and emigrated en masse to Sweden. We have not heard from them ever since, and the small apartment of the mezzanine floor remained uninhabited and haunted for the rest of our stay in that address. The labels bearing the family name on the front-door, at the top of the first short flight of stairs, and at the very bottom of the intercom residents’ list by the entrance remained for years after their departure, testament that someone named Iatrides owned and once upon a time lived in that mezzanine apartment.  

23a - The Old Neighborhood: The Microcosm of our Apartment Block (A Dark Basement)

The main entrance to the building, a low-cost minimalist design devoid of superfluous features, was through a transparent glass panel door with a pale-green metal frame that opened to the U-turn landing of the staircase. Its left side led to a dark basement comprising two apartments, whose windows, the only source of light and air, opened level with a minuscule pavement. The narrowness of the alley in front did not lend itself for daring architectural interventions at and around the entrance of the building -at the time of its construction, and for decades after.

During our stay none of the basement apartments had I seen occupied. They were abandoned by the builders at their poor original states: undecorated and unfinished, dark and cold, forsaken. At a time when local and state authorities, in the name of growth and development, were sweeping under the carpet the last remnants of postwar poverty, most basements were not designed for humane occupation in their darkness and dampness; in our childhood imagination they were habitats of ghosts and monsters. Decades later, around the turn of the millennium, on the first wave of immigration from Albania and Eastern Europe, in one of my rare walks by our old street, I saw for a first the shutters of the two basement apartments open and curtains hanging from behind the window panes: human beings, immigrants or homeless or a gang of delinquents made it home -I thought. Later in the history of the city, after several booms and busts in the construction industry, on another visit to the old neighbourhood, the two basement apartments had their shutters firmly closed. They were left deserted again, as they were half a century ago, abandoned by their tenants, whoever they might be, or, less likely, after police having enforced eviction of any squatters.

What looked like a long corridor separated the two basement apartments. Pitch-black and suffocating by its dampness and frightening ended to a concrete wall dead-end. The light from the central lighting system was too weak to illuminate more than a few steps down the flight of stairs to the basement. Neither the builder, nor any of the permanent residents bothered to install some lighting that would alleviate our childish fears in the long winter evenings by the entrance, I spent with my friend discussing horror and ghost stories. Towards its dead-end, that corridor opened through a permanently locked iron door to the main light duct on the side of the building, not visible by passers-by, where skylight and open air conflicted with the darkness and stale odor of the unventilated basement. Occasionally, one of the residents would go downstairs to the duct through the basement corridor and its door, to pick up clothes fallen from the balcony airer or a children’s toy thrown through the railings.

The only life in that dirty and neglected space consisted of mice and rats, seen from our balconies scurrying across from one corner of the duct to another, and the occasional stray cat wandering aimlessly or in search of food. There had been occasions when mice overcame their fears of humans and climbed the drainpipes, in daring wanderings for food in the kitchens and toilets of the apartments of the first and even the second floor -our floor! The sight of them, even the idea of their presence in our apartment, triggered a sense of panic mixed with disgust in Mother and the child in me -and it still does. Father was brave enough to chase them away or even try to kill them with a broomstick.

22 - The Old Neighborhood: Our Little Street

The apartment building where my family settled for the years to come and I spent my childhood was one of the first to be erected in the old neighborhood. It was a tall and graceless building, a rectangular box with narrow cantilevered balconies and façade plastered in a pale shade of gray; a rather ugly, no-frills utilitarian design with brutalist influence -one might say. It stood out of sorts looking down the more colorful and stylish, yet humble single-storey houses with tiled-roofs, remnants of a bygone era. That block of apartments became home and refuge and hideout of my childhood years.

It was the summer of year 1968 when we moved: Mother and Father, uncle and godfather Marios -newlywed with aunt K, and my grandparents from Father’s side, occupied three self-contained flats on two different floors. The alley the block stood (only with a stretch of the language could be labeled street proper) was aptly named: ‘Passage B off-Deligiorgi Street’. Our alley, still a dirt road when we moved, like many others around the city, was fifty meters-long and no more than four-meters wide; with potholes and grooves carved by the drainage water from the wash and laundry of the old houses, which, through the alley or some other way trickled into the Toumpa stream, a little further down. A few years later the alley was eventually asphalted and upgraded to a normal street, so to speak, after it was respectably named ‘Hecuba Street’ by the council.  

Even Deligiorgi Street, which our alley joined at one end, was narrow and short itself and barely recognizable by name from city residents outside our neighborhood, although it existed for years in the heart of the old city not, fat from the center. But it was already asphalted and paved and featured a small bridge over the stream, for cars and animal drawn carts to cross. It connected Xenophon Street to the east with the broadly recognizable Fleming Street to the west, which begins at the more affluent Queen Olga Avenue and ascended north to the Hippocrateon Hospital. Across our alley and stretching parallel to Deligiorgi Street, was the narrow and claustrophobic Gambetta Street known as one of the longest streets of old Thessaloniki. As a child, I never walked Gambetta along its entire length, as it stretched west to the Archaeological Museum Street (actually featuring ‘museum’ that was a conversion of the excellent Yeni Mosque of the city's vanished Ottoman past -as I learned from Mazower) and ended at its perpendicular 25^th of March Street, in the Harilaou district at the eastern edge of the city; more half an hour walk amongst still unknown neighbors of Thessaloniki, it exceeded the permissible range of my childhood wanders. Deligiorgi, Xenofon, Fleming, Gambetta and the other decent streets, which surrounded our anonymous alley hidden amongst them, became central and integral part of many children lives.

This happens with every life. It begins within the confines of a room or a flat or a little house, then it spreads wings to explore one’s hometown, later, in its heyday and maturity, it flies to distant places and countries, before, in an old age, retires in another obscure neighborhood, in another little flat, where it expires. It was the same with me: in the early years of school, naturally for a sensible and disciplined child under the discreet supervision of adults, had its life centered in our apartment building and its alley. Early solo journeys, before my family relaxed the reins and I myself found the courage to discover and reach the real limits of freedom offered by the great city, were constrained within short sections of Gambetta Street, that took me to my primary school on Delphi Street, a couple of minutes’ walk from the grocery store of the ‘black-marketer’ (as Mother called him) Malides for daily petty shopping, the dairy shop across on Xenophon Street with the delicious syrup sweets, or the tiny convenience shop for Father's cigarettes and newspapers and chocolate wafer or chewing-gum treats; or a little further on, a five minutes’ walk to the intersection of Gambetta and Athanasios Diakos streets where grandmother regularly sent me for a fresh loaf of her favorite ‘Regal’ or ‘Rustic’ breads, which I could not help nibbling on the way back.

My family life had a long history in that alley. It was where two generations of a branch of the Ibrişimci family lived major parts of their lives. Father was born and grew up there before and sometime during the German Occupation, in a two-storey house, which, a constructor contracted by grandfather in the early 1960’s had it demolished to build a five-floor apartment block, in-lieu of three flats, one for the grandparents, and two for the brothers and their growing families. In this unremarkable alley and its surrounding streets, the first strong and unforgettable friendships were built. It is where, on either bank of the Toumpa stream, we set up games of all sorts. In this part of city, I wandered up and down the perpendicular to the city axis roads from the seafront and the promenade all the way up to Toumpa. I explored the uncovered stream that descended from the Seih-Sou hill, dry in the summer months, overflowing with muddy water in days of heavy rain, carrying it under the Deligiorgi Street bridge all the way to Thermaikos Bay, under the sorrow facades of derelict and haunted Jewish houses on its bank. It was in this corner of the city where I grew up and spent childhood and adolescence, years of mood swings and the emotional turbulence that changes in mind and body bring about. There it was, in short, that life began in earnest.

The neighborhood was by no means affluent, neither impoverished. It was in the other side of the city, in its far western districts, where, through endless wanders in later years, I discovered its hidden slums and encountered real poverty. Besides, our apartment building was constructed, as I was overhearing in conversations between Father, my uncle and builder friends, on relatively modern albeit minimalist specifications, and designed to withstand the passage of decades and, indeed, survive the big earthquake that shook the city. It intended to house, in addition to the core of the Ibrişimci family who owned the plot it was built on, a few other relatively hard-working individuals and families. An exception was an indolent individual, Fanis his name, who lived with his mother off a possibly false disability benefit, and a dowager with her two boys. For most of its residents, it was a step up to an improved quality of life, at a convenient distance from the historic and commercial center of a city that was expanding in height and breadth at a breakneck speed.

21 - A Year in the Cold Trough: Passers By as Adults

It was not the only reason that my girlfriend from the university days and, as it turned out, one of the greatest loves I had in life (judging by the depth of the feelings and intensity of the memories from our time together) grew up in the nearby town of Giannitsa. It was also the call of a latent nostalgia that drew me back to the Cold Trough again, several years later, through the same road with the poplars, even though this distinct feeling is not yet that strong in young people. Avramidis' bookstore was still located at the junction, as it was the kiosk at the same corner of the square renovated beyond recognition, which was now paved and featured flower beds and a fountain at the centre. I mentioned all those remnants in memory to Eve before we passed through the village in my Yugo on our way to her hometown to meet her family. Eve was impressed with me retrieving such trivial elements, like the name of the proprietor of the bookstore I frequented as a five-year-old boy or the kiosk – all now distant childhood memories. I spent a few seconds to behold our former landlady’s Mrs. Meli’s home and that only through the car window. The house and its front courtyard, behind the gate and the low fence looked quiet without visible signs or sounds of life. It was a sleepy hot summer afternoon, siesta time, and, therefore, inappropriate for intrusive peeps behind the fence. Besides, if I was caught peeping, queried about my indiscrete presence outside the gate and tried to explain, who from the still alive members of Mrs. Meli’s family would remember a five-year-old child who lived under the same roof for a few months nearly two decades ago?

Many streets of the Cold Trough were now asphalted, the ones around the square even featured slabbed pavements in place of the trenches outside the yard fences that were inhabited by the frogs I used to observe. By instinct, I drove to the outskirts of the village in the direction of my first school. The old rectangular building with the tiled-roof and its two chimneys, the always open, two-leaf decorative door at its entrance to which a broad staircase led, with the large windows, was gone. In the same site, a prefabricated, impersonal building was built by, a rectangle without a façade and a flat roof, in the centre of a concrete, fenced yard. No eucalyptus trees, no flower beds, no annex for the breakfast of milk and buttered slices of bread I queued up on occasions to enjoy. Nothing apart from the flag post by the staircase, recalled memories of the old-school, as it was painted in my mind that first school year, as it was by all children in their ‘Painting’ class.

We left taking the same road with the poplars on either side without wandering around the rest of the village. The canteen at the intersection where the plane tree in front had long since been abandoned. Coach passengers, its main clientele, had decreased. It was the last time I said goodbye to the Cold Trough, with a sense melancholy: for a past that will never be relived, for the nostalgia, that very human feeling, which does not fade away, or when it seems lost, it reappears more vivid and intense with each passing year, when we reminisce about our childhood and youth. A consolation, that partners nostalgia at each instance, is that our minds have managed to retain memories from the past, the building stones of the being-in-itself, of existence before its end.

20 - A Year in the Cold Trough: A Misfortune Before our Farewell

Our life in the Cold Trough culminated with an impressive experience, ingrained in memory, which for the soul of a five-year-old child had the hallmark of a tragic incident. It happened one dusk in the paved square of the village, in the eve of St John's Day, close to the summer solstice. Later in life, each time I was listening to a song from one of Greece’s popular singers, Hari Alexiou's, saying: ‘And fires were lit by the kids in the back streets // It was St John’s Day, I think’, my mind was brought back to that evening. Schools closed for summer a few days ago and our stay in the Cold Trough was nearing its end. Children from the village, mostly schoolmates, gathered in the square and started a fire with papers, dry tree branches and, also, plastic objects. I don't remember how I found myself amongst them, being relatively young for that sort of extravaganza. Along with them I was enjoying the freedom from the shackles of the school routine, longing for a summer vacation by the sea and, in that evening, I was attracted by the adventure the moments offered and the pleasure of the company of other children, left in their own world, to improvise games out of nothing. Kids are fascinated by fires and so was I -throughout my childhood, for that matter.

I was next in the queue to jump over that makeshift fire from garbage, but I naturally hesitated from fear and the awe from the unprecedented and daring undertaking. An older boy behind me, fearless and with the experience of a few jumps already under his belt pushed me, out of malice or, more likely, impatience and his eagerness to repeat an exciting feat before the fire went out. With the push I fell into it. ‘A tramp! A bully!’, were the first thoughts of the culprit, although unspoken. I got up from the fire terrified and realising that ‘bad’ boy had disappeared, out of fear himself and cowardice. I was wearing shorts and both of legs and arms were bare and after landing onto the fire my upper and lower left leg was covered in black soot and ashes. Worse, pieces of a melted plastic materials were stuck on the skin. I cried; the kind of refuge or line of defence for every child in physical pain and a mental impasse -in despair, without knowing what to do and fearing the worst. I began to run instinctively towards Mrs. Meli’s house and our room, a little further down from the corner of the square, seeking the protection and consolation of Mother. I was running crying: ‘I got burned! Mom, got burned!’ The owner of the kiosk owner in the corner of the square stood bewildered outside, and asked foolishly and rather jokingly: ‘What’s happened, boy? Have they given you onions to eat and got burnt?’ A cruel and non-sensical joke that was, hardly comforting for my physical and mental pain.

At an older age the mind would pause and ponder for a few moments after the shock, before externalizing any sensations and feelings. But when pain abruptly hits a child's nervous system, it instinctively and vividly expressed with what we consider a natural reaction: crying and, then, uncontrolled sobbing. A rational mature mind would have moderated consequent feelings and emotions, no matter how an innate impulse forced a reaction, before their intensity reached a peak; it would consider the circumstances, pay heed to the surroundings. Containment mechanisms within would have tamed the effects and outwards expressions of the shock, that is loud crying in public; composure would have restrained from running in panic to some harbour for solace. The reaction would not have been the instinctive of the spontaneous child of that moment. Equanimity, however, presupposes the hardening of the soul and a maturity of the spirit. And these, in turn, presuppose accumulation of knowledge and the experiences life sows on our path. Aging and the years weaken extreme tensions caused by sensations and emotions born out from impressions of life events. Bravery and courage are not innate traits, but are cultivated. However, that and other similar experiences were still unprecedented for a still immature spirit and shook his world of emotions at that time, as triggered by that fall in the fire on St. John’s Day.

The crying stopped when I got home and the stinging from the burns, admittedly of relatively low degree, was soothed thanks to Mother’s tender care who washed them with cold water, and then the junior doctor of the village who removed the pieces of plastic with tweezers, before smearing my skin with ointments. The pain subsided to give way to anger, a tide of rage more like. A mood of vengeance flared up inside and a desire for retribution against the ‘bully’ who pushed me into the fire. Even this rage weakened with time, until a catharsis was provided from our visit to the perpetrator's home. He wasn't there or, more likely, he was hiding and didn't want to confront his victim and his mother. He was probably harbouring his own fears, stemming from a subconscious guilt, but more from the fear of punishment: at worst, a father’s hiding or a house detention in days that his mates enjoyed playing in the open. The mothers exchanged a few words, apologies were offered, and forgiveness was granted. As they say, the incident was considered over and done with.

After the gathering of the teachers and their families, at the customary farewell dinner at the end of the school year in the village hall, paid for by parents’ donations as a token of appreciation, we bade farewell and left the Cold Trough for good. A fellow villager known to Mother drove us with our two suitcases, for the last time through the road with the melancholy poplars on either side, forming like farewell arches, and dropped us at the plane tree and the coach stop, outside the junction canteen. The village and its winter were printed on the very first pages of the very first chapter of the book of conscious life: the reading and writing I learned, the first kick-abouts, the first TV program I watched at Mrs. Meli’s and Mr. George’s living room, Mrs. Lola, the kind teacher with the genuine love and interest in my learning she showed, the older girl who became my partner in the gymnastics demonstrations, the melancholic evenings in Mrs. Meli’s cold room and Mother’s tearful songs before going to bed, the bookstore of Mr. Avramides, the slaughterhouse, the tall tobacco warehouses; all these were stored in the mind and have been with me to the present day, along with the faded scars on the burnt skin. Several other faces and events from that time were lost deep in the subconscious and might have unknowingly resurfaced in night dreams.

In the Cold Trough I began developing consciousness and, ultimately, forming a personality. It was there that some of the first building stones of my ‘being-in-itself’ were laid from very first memory imprints. Early foundations, I have later discovered, obtain great significance in shaping one’s future, whatever walks of life he pursues. A slight change in the initial conditions of a chaotic process, like life in our world appears to be, can later lead to dramatically different behaviours and journeys.