32 - Our Family Friends: In the Shadow of Extroverts

Several insignificant at face value events occurred in hours and days I spent in Billy’s company, which however left an impression and affected me. By and large, they pointed to marked and irreconcilable differences between our personalities. There were of course the ‘elephants in the room’, as they say: his superior stature and physique, unmatched intellectual maturity and ostentatiously superior intelligence, an unbridled self-confidence along with his leadership skills (whether innate or nurtured was irrelevant), elements of a personality and traits of a character which feed each other, as is well known. These facts justifiably intensified a sense of inferiority in his presence. My timidity and dither were revealed in full-scale when asked to offer opinions or contribute to decisions, let alone take a lead, my insecurity in expressing thoughts and desires clearly manifested, in the presence of Billy and adults. (What would ‘others’ think and answer or what if I said something naïve or stupid, where often questions I asked to myself before opening my mouth.)

The older we grew and as our personalities and interests in life were diverging, the more I tried to avoid invitations to Billy’s home to play with him and friends amongst hid broad circle and the gatherings and parties his family organized, until, in adolescence, those invitations became scarcer before they eventually vanished, and I disappeared from Billy’s life. It was a winter day in my last year at primary school, at the threshold of adolescence, when Mother received via Kiki an invitation to the birthday party of Akis, a close friend of Billy’s by virtue of another family friendship. Warped by a shyness founded on introversion and inferiority complexes, my first reaction was to decline: I did not want to go to Akis’ party, amongst those ostensibly superior kids. It was the natural reaction of an extremely introvert and socially awkward, when confronted with people in a social happening, that triggers my ‘shrinking’ when amongst others, as Mother used to say. In a sense, I was overwhelmed by the invitation to a party where girls were likely to also have been invited, and where the only person I could associate with was the leader and very soul of that and every party - Billy. If I went, who else would be attending, whom would I talk with, what would I say? How would I, an outsider, stand among children I had not met before, apart from Billy and, to a lesser extent, Akis? Even more worrying: would girls be present, a species towards whom my shyness would multiply? Would I be dragged to do things like, for example, dancing awkwardly in the rhythms of pop-music I had never heard before, let alone danced? My presence at the party would be a leap over a huge gap, a fall into the void of the unknown, which I did not want and had to steer clear from. In the days before the party, I was trying to sweating with vigorous exercises in my small room, and then go out half-naked and barefoot in the balconies to ‘catch a cold’, to become ill, a credible excuse to avoid the party and have some days off school as a bonus. (I had not learned yet that one does not catch a ‘cold’ merely by exposing his warm and sweaty to low temperatures, yet such old wives’ tales were still persuasive enough for someone to cling on per instance). It was one of the first signs of a severe introversion at the edges of its wide spectrum, a first extreme manifestation of a lack of sociability, a social awkwardness and generally finding cumbersome communicating with people. A marked personal deficiency that I had to live with for the rest of my life.

Then again, I had to invent and try to implement and unorthodox and ultimately hapless method to avoid that social event. In later life, I present more plausible excuses, having developed the ability to fabricate more elaborate and better-thought-out lies in to turn away from similar social gatherings. And in the occasions that had proved impossible, drinking alcohol, before and during such events, became an effective elixir that would quash most of my inhibitions. But the attempt to fall ill, with a kind of fever or something, ahead of Akis' party did not bear fruit. I stayed healthy and found myself with no excuses and under the pressure of Mother and to carry along my shame until the Saturday afternoon of the party. There, however miraculously, I managed to relax quickly and damp my inhibitions, after a brief period of familiarizing with an environment that eventually proved less alien to my idiosyncrasy than I had expected. The party turned out to be rather ‘flat’, despite the wild, as well as meticulous, planning of Billy and Akis. Only a couple of girls were present, cousins of Akis, and not particularly attractive as it happened, against Billy’s hopes and expectations. I would not have been forced to dance to sounds of unfamiliar pop music hits, even though the atmosphere of the room was enhanced by some rudimentary disc light effects – of Billy’s inspiration, of course.

Most of my relief could be attributed to that we did not play the game of ‘bottle’ I was hearing about during the planning of the party and I knew that Billy, a lady’s man from pre-adolescence, was eagerly anticipating: a game which involved girls and boys sitting around in a circle and after the spin of a bottle at its centre, the persons the top and bottom of the bottle pointed they had, often against their will and under peer pressure, to kiss. I had been apprehensive that such games would have taken place, as they were in the original plans of Billy and Akis, both of whom, as said, excelled as the hearts and souls of children's parties. In the end, I courageously survived the party, as it somehow fizzed out down to a sufferable level, at the expense of that success its two organizers expected. After listening a few times to the hit Popcorn by Hot Butter, we resigned to quietly playing Snakes & Ladders and other broad games, until the party broke up. The electronic song Popcorn, a hit of the period that, unlike Billy and Akis, I was not aware until then, whenever I hear it takes me back to the faint memories of Akis' dull party, the first and penultimate party of childhood and adolescence, and the days of mental turmoil that preceded it.

31 - Our Family Friends: Unrivalled Sociability

There had always been people gatherings in the Akrivides’ Queen Olga's Avenue apartment. Friends of Billy and Maria, relatives and family friends and colleagues of Nikos and Kiki, a few amongst them distinguished in Salonika’s society, some members of the local political elite and bourgeoisie intelligentsia. They were hosted in their spacious salon with that impressive ceramic wall sculpture, creation of Kiki’s artist brother, against a wall above a four-seater sofa, flanked by tall Japanese vases and arm-chairs. Whilst keeping notions in proportion, a ‘drawing room’ emulating those of the Faubourg Saint-Germain society that we read so much in Proust’s writings would be a more apt term. Likewise, people also surrounded the Akrivides’ family in their exclusive space in the holiday camp of Skotina, under the shade of the poplars by their huge tent and later caravan, or in Nikos’ paternal home in his village in Pieria. People from different walks of life flocked around them: on New Year's Eve celebrations, on birthdays, on name days, in impromptu Saturday soirees with literary reciting or music intermezzos between conversations, wines and mezedes, on holidays and Sunday trips to Chalkidiki beaches on summer Sundays. All planned and coordinated by Nikos with his innate enthusiasm for pleasing friends and guests. It goes without saying that during my childhood, Mother and Father were amongst the first in their list of guests to be invited for their evening happenings. Old friendships and best men could not have been ignored by the gracious and generous couple. I had to be towed along and join despite my social awkwardness and a growing sense of inferiority when in their company.     

With their attention shifted away from house chores and such thankless tasks being usually delegated to cleaners, in the time interval between their social events most rooms remained in a state of disorder with clothes, toys, books, ornaments, gifts, scattered around. A state of house affairs that the ever so tidy Mother found distasteful and criticized vehemently after more casual visits; she had inherited a passion for order and cleanliness through her upbringing and a family tradition, which I found backward. For the Akrivides’, this domestic mess might have indicated and encouraged some sort of creativity and freedom in spirit and of thought, and a strong sense of initiative, especially for the two children.

The sociability of Billy’s family and Billy himself and the breadth and weight of the personalities in their social circle, exceeded by orders of magnitude those of my personal and family’s closed knit circle of relatives and friends, with which we felt comfortable interacting in daily life and convivial. Inevitably, and mainly – I would have liked to believe – because of an innate (that is of a genetic origin, rather than nurtured) introversion and a painful shyness, I used to withdrew timidly in the margins of those large group gatherings, always taciturn, without having much to say or contribute to the happenings, to the parties and group trips, when Billy was under the spotlight, ever the leader and coordinator of the children around him, later the seducer of girls.

30 - Our Family Friends: A Class Divide

The Akrivides’ couple had a son, Billy, of the same age as me, but taller and with a stouter body, and a plump daughter, Maria, a few years younger. In the first steps that I remember of a rather imposed from above friendship with Billy and in his company, early in our primary school education, the Akrivides’ family lived in an apartment on the third floor of a modern building, in a relatively affluent area at the borders of the city’s commercial center, on the then fashionable Queen Olga Avenue. Their home was located a short walk from the promenade, the historic building of the 1^st Public Secondary Public School for Boys I later attended, a few steps from the traditional "Averoff" patisserie and the small scouts' house beyond, adjacent to an apartment block the basement of which housed the ‘Laura’ cinema with weekend matinees for children, now a supermarket -all unforgettable childhood landmarks. I slept over in their spacious apartment several times on Billy’s demand. In the casual living-room in its corner with a large mahogany dining table against one of the walls, a piano in the corner, and windows around overlooking the broad avenue below, separated by a glass-door from their impressive salon. Falling asleep in that room always proved a struggle and I often stayed awake into the wee hours of morning, because of the incessant noise of cars and motorbikes in the busy avenue below, the adrenaline from our evening games with Billy, and many a time with a feeling of sadness that naturally affects a child when he is away from his home and family and neighborhood mates -not to mention the tranquillity of our street.  

Living in a small alley with old houses surrounding our monstrous block of flats, even a child could not fail to notice a social class gap. It was more than just the upper status of the Akrivides’ neighborhood and the interior of their apartment. Billy attended a private school rather than the state school in their area. He was taught French by a French lady tutor and from an early age he was capable to express himself in the then language of the Greek upper classes with self-confidence and mettle, demonstrating a fluency beyond his years in front of audiences of proud parents and friends, with their smiles and nods of appraisal. With the same ease he later became fluent in English, after intensive private courses; it would be the third language he learned to speak comfortably. Foreign languages sessions were followed by music lessons from a piano teacher, and Billy learned as quickly to play the piano, as well as the guitar, the latter with commendable dexterity usually at the centre of attention of his adolescent friends – and enchanted girls amongst them.

On the contrary, the author, for his part, went to the 9th Primary School in an old building in Delphi Street, with his close friend Kostakis and children from our humble area. He struggled to learn English in the inexpensive tutoring school in which I was enrolled by Father in an old single-storey house on Fleming Street, along with Kostakis and Levi, the ginger-haired Jewish boy with the freckled face, and few other children from parents who in the 1970’s recognized the importance of learning a foreign language, but could not afford a private tutor. Our English tutoring school, which I started attending in the 4^th year my elementary schooling, was one of the city's small and independent foreign language (primarily, English and French) schools. It was originally owned and managed by a sullen and stern, bald and stout old man, Mr. Kokkinos, who, thankfully, after a year in our course he transferred his small business to a young, beautiful Jewish woman, Miss Varsano, whom Father missed no opportunity to visit to supposedly discuss my progress and pay the low-rate tuition.

I also failed to learn to play any kind of musical instrument or, at least, obtain an elementary musical education and knowledge. That was partly due to the dearth of musical and generally artistic sensibilities and any interest whatsoever on behalf of my parents, a practical and square-minded Father, and a Mother, who was brought up in the undistinguished village of below average educational attainment levels and low cultural standards; partly, to the absence of in-house musical stimuli, which, for instance, a record player and a decent collection of records and tapes might have offered; partly, perhaps, due to a lack of a detectable music talent in me. The latter, however, as things evolved could neither be verified nor refuted. With the cheap guitar of steel strings that Mother once brought me (cheap when compared to the one that Billy was presented well before me along with the piano), I tried to self-learn to play with the help of a beginner’s guide book. I tried hard in isolation, away from others listening: to read and play notes and elementary compositions in the pentagrams from the beginners’ guide. I even strung together a sequence of notes, which sounded like a melody and composition to a primitive musical sense. All this in vain. When one of the guitar strings snapped, I abandoned any further attempts of self-learning, having realised that I had reached the limits of any potential progress without a methodical and professional guidance. The class divide between me and Billy and our respective families, was widening. An inferiority complex was developing in me.

And there were instances of mortification! Among Billy’s toys there was an air-gun. In one of our evenings there, in his permanently messy room, using plasticine for a bullet, shot with it my bare thigh. It was an ‘experiment’, he said. It caused a sharp pain, and, naturally for a child, brought tears and rage, and my temporary withdrawal from a reluctant and inherited ‘friendship’ – until a stern rebuke from his parents and a humble apology in front of a group of grown-ups. In his room -I did not fail to notice- there were also a pair of expensive professional rackets for tennis. I had to convince my parents to buy me one, albeit much cheaper, for the games of tennis that we planned and would attempt to play against each other in the holiday park of Skotina, where our families spent joint holidays. It was a small consolation, somehow reassuring and confidence building, that I beat him in tennis and, in fact, in every game, team or individual that involved a ball of any size -Billy was markedly clumsy and untalented in sports!

There were other disparities in individual and family settings and status perceived by a child’s mind. Billy showed off and rode an elegant and expensive Motobécane bicycle of French technology, which stood out from the heavy and cheap bike of mine from a second-tier Eastern European manufacturer, in our ridings with his multitude of friends around the holiday park. He felt at ease when he was driven around, in Europe and poor areas of the city or his paternal village, in the family upmarket Renault and Citroen estate, and more relaxed than me in the rare occurrences he joined me in the back seat of the much smaller and of lower specifications, certainly cheaper, FIAT 1300 and 124 of Father. If there was something that I felt superior than Billy, and by a significant margin for that, was in sports, either elitist, like tennis, that we played against each other a few times on our holidays, or the more popular team games, like basketball and football. But he rarely joined those, less because of lack of motivation than coordination and skills. Such popular team sports seemed rather incongruous with the Akrivides’ lifestyle at that time, although Nikos, as a rising star in politics, portrayed himself as an avid fan of the most popular in the city football club. It apparently paid off in elections.

During visits to play with Billy, amidst the general clutter in his room, I always found things that as a child and later a teenager I longed for and dreamed of obtaining. At the end of the day, I felt the natural for a kid disappointment and envy for things which I did not, nor would not possess. There was a state-of-the-art stereo system and a rich collection of records of classical and modern music, Greek and foreign, whilst our house had nothing more than an old malfunctioning record player with a few-old, scratched 45 rpm records, which ended up in the loft, along with an already obsolete Grundig tape-recorder. Eventually, those sound systems after years of beings used to play the same-old-tape and then becoming disused and obsolete, once a teenager were replaced by a portable radio cassette player -on my own initiative and bought by pocket money. A rather belated and tiny consolation, considering...

29 - Our Family Friends: Two Good Old Friends

Two friendships, one at the peak of its maturity before the inevitable slow demise with age, the other yet unripen and, eventually, untested by time, I witnessed and experienced in the first distant years of my life. Both left indelible imprints on the soul, and influenced and to an extent shaped my personality, as it often happens with experiences of magnitude and duration at a young age. The second of these two friendships involved myself. It was not developed organically and naturally, like the ones with boys from our old neighborhood and my first school, but it somehow was bequeathed from the deeper and more genuine friendship between fathers. That was rooted in their dramatic and colorful, as we were told, university years in the 1950s -years of youthful dreams and drive.

Nikos and Kiki, the Akrivides’ couple, met and fell in love whilst both students in the city’s university. A deep and fascinating to the beholder love that was. It began then, continued unabated and matured in the latter stages of their youth and beyond. That conspicuously affectionate love was noticed and frequently talked about by Mother, who witnessed and observed it unfolding and settling on solid grounds, with a concealed envy -it must be said. Nikos and Kiki, so I heard, well before their marriage, in joint outings with Father and Mother on Saturday nights, were dancing with their dreamy eyes shuts, cheeks touching, their love enraptured.

The friendship between Nikos and Father, with its deep roots in the vibrant student life of Thessaloniki and their first ambitious professional steps together, extended to their families. We became close friends of the Akrivides’ family and assumed a distinguished place within their (very) wide social circle. They remained our good family friends long after their marriage and the birth of Billy, their first child, just a few weeks before mine. Father was naturally selected as Nikos’ best man in their wedding and godfather in Billy’s baptism.

One could say that the two men embarked upon their life journeys under similar circumstances, in terms of the opportunities that the Greek class system would have presented and the doors it would have opened, and, perhaps, from just as humble origins. Nikos was the son of a farmer from the small Katachas village in the Pieria province, the other descendant of refugee city dwellers of mostly working-class status conscience. And, as is often the case, such humble family origins and the relative poverty they had to endure as children bring two young people closer together. After graduation from university, however, their paths began diverging, both professionally and socially. And this journey in time brought the Akrivides’ family one or two strata above ours in Salonika’s society· and later in life, in maturity, may be a scale above in the nation-wide social stratification. There had been many reasons for this divergence, but the different paths the two friends pursued somehow reinforced the existential view of life we tend to adopt as we mature. This view highlights the subjectivity of human nature, the role of personality and character, where individual decisions and choices, either small or large, can guide people who started from about the same point in space and time to different shores; it can even lead them to social antipodes. “Our lives are the sums of our choices,” undoubtedly.

The two good friends from university, apart from the different features and physiognomy (Father slim and handsome, with thick black hair, always well-groomed, shiny with brilliantine and meticulously parted on the left, Nikos portly, but short of being fat, with a broad brow typical of people of Pontian origin, puffy cheeks in a radiant and warm round face, and wavy hair, combed back) had also distinctly different personalities. Father was straightforward and direct in his talking. He often spoke with a brusqueness that his interlocutors could perceive as offensive and even insulting, was lacking polite manners, and showed a general indifference to savoir vivre. Categorical  and stubborn with his arguments, he never explicitly admitted being at fault or mistaken, and rarely (if ever) listened and accepted views disagreeing with the voice of a rigid conscience. He was certainly a glib talker in conversations and, perhaps, the more intelligent and sharp-minded of the two, but he always took a risk adverse approach to his career choices and transactions. Nikos, on his part, was generally more low-key and composed, mostly cheerful and agreeable, diplomatic and conciliatory in arguments, with cadence and eloquence and warmth in his speech, yet also blunt and persuasive when the circumstances demanded it. And he took greater risks with his career. Whereas Father married the daughter of teacher from a village in the outskirts of the western industrial districts of the city, over whom, without resistance, he imposed his personality and will, becoming the undisputable head and often authoritarian ruler in our family, Nikos married a philologist from a family of intellectuals and artists, a woman of an as assertive personality, with whom they lived a harmonious and loving life, with mutual appreciation and respect.

Father after being employed in teaching positions in private schools – including for a period in the technical college founded by Nikos, and during a thankless spell as a graduate assistant to a certain Professor Mavridis –he ended up an employee of a monopolistic public organization, where he climbed to a few managerial positions in its rigid hierarchy, with a monotonically growing income, limited but secure, until his retirement. Nikos, after going through a similar series of temporary teaching jobs, he founded and became the owner of a technical college. He gradually relinquished his business activities, after the change of government in the early 1980’s, to concentrate in his political engagements. Since the fall of the dictatorship, he had become increasingly involved in public affairs, after being enlisted as a member of the rising in the political arena Papandreou’s Socialist Party. The large Pontian community and PAOK, the popular football club of Thessaloniki, furnished a good social networking base and potential, as well as a sizeable pool of voters amongst the local electorate. In short, Nikos had the perspicacity to choose the right political camp and the will and drive to achieve the career goals het set out from the onset. It is rather immaterial whether the choice of his political allegiance was opportunistic or in accordance to some inherent ideals and convictions about the course of the social or economic transformation of Greece –as the leader and founder and manifesto of the party he had joined proclaimed when parliamentary democracy was restored in Greece. The ideology of the wider "socialist" space, so to speak, was generally nebulous and in many respects contradictory, without concrete principles, but prolific with demagoguery; and such was finally proven to be in practice, merely another side of the same political coin in two-party democracies.

With a large pool of vote from the generally progressive (anti-conservative) Pontian community of the city, he was elected municipal councilor and then a deputy mayor. A long advancing political career followed, which culminated in the roles of deputy minister and minister in several Papandreou governments. Father, for his part, in the intense political discussions and confrontations amongst friends in the heavily politicized years after the restoration of democracy, discussions in soiree’s interspersed, as they say, with “cheese, pears and wine", distinguished himself for his unbridled spirit of counter argument and criticism of everything political and partisan, mostly in controversial, argumentative and on occasions quarrelsome fashion, regardless of the interlocutor. His attitude in such social gatherings, coupled with an imposing, thunderous and piercing voice dominating the space around him, did not leave much room for a calm dialogue, so much so that after a while many people found it offensive and withdrew from conversing. Only Nikos managed to stand his ground in the company of Father in those heated discussion. He would get up from his armchair, raise his stout body in front of Father, usually with a glass of wine in his hand, and with an untypically raised voice he would say: "Now, Panayiotis! You will shut up and listen to me!" -a reflection of “Listen first, then strike!” of Themistocles to Evriviades prior to the Battle of Salamis. At which point Father’s arguing stopped at its tracks and followed by an innocuous smile.

In fact, Father has always been deeply politicized and politically aware, mainly thanks to a complete daily perusal of newspapers affiliated to different sections of the political spectrum. He was also an avid reader of books, bringing stacks of them after each visit for a political chat and book browsing in his cousin's bookstore. Once, he was given the opportunity to become a candidate local election with an independent scheme, but he declined, and throughout the rest of his life, unlike Nikos, he was not actively involved in partisan politics. It would have been simply impossible to envisage aligning himself to policies and views dictated from the top in a party hierarchy. In short, he maintained a distance from political parties and a critical opposition to any government, either conservative or progressive, until he grew old. Admittedly, given his personality, he would have negligible chances of success and prominence in Greece’s political life: he was not born a "politician" or a "diplomat". As Nikos once put it in front of a group of friends in one of his soirée’s: "Panayiotis may as well have a really sharp mind and good intellect, but severely lacks in his interactions with people." So true what Nikos said!

28 - The Old Neighborhood: The Jews and Other Neighborhood Wonders

Next to Christakis’ house on Deligiorgi Street stood the modest old house of Isaac and his older brother Aaron, two Sephardic Jews of Thessaloniki who survived the concentration camps and the holocaust and returned to the city where they grew up. They managed to reclaim ownership of their house they were forced to abandon, amongst thousands of their race during the wholescale deportations of 1943. There was a vague aura of mysticism in the Ladino songs the radio was playing behind their half-closed shutters I listened to, sitting on the kerb under their window in the summer afternoons whilst waiting for Kostakis or Christakis to commence our games. Neither Isaac, nor Aaron interacted much with our common neighbors. Neither did I ever come across them outside their house. On rare occasions, I observed a couple of sad stooping figures from above our back balcony sipping coffee silently under the acacia tree in their sunless backyard overshadowed by our tall building, separated from its light-void by a concrete fence. There must have been once some light that backyard. They were the odd, lonely pair of siblings simply waiting for the rest of their little miserable lives broken down in their youth to expire. How they or their family -surely, they must have had one, survived the holocaust remained a mystery no rumors could dispel. Later, having read Primo Levi's "If This Is the Man," I could only surmise that they might have been Kapos in a concentration camp or, merely, by just being young able-bodied men amongst the few fortunate whenever the dice over human lives was thrown in those hells we read and heard so much about.

Behind our building, overlooked by the main balcony of my uncle's family, the first also anonymous alley off Deligiorgi Street, later named Eurydice Street, there was a house belonging to another Jewish family, apparently wealthier than that of Isaac and Aaron. The house had a large courtyard behind iron gates and a well-kept garden with a lawn and trees, even a palm tree. It was the home of a widow called Victoria, a renowned resident of the area pre- and post-war, who, according to Father, survived the camps thanks to her fluency in German, having graduated from the Deutsche Schule of Thessaloniki. The Jews of the city were not an amorphous mass. Amongst those I knew of or got to know them there were was Isaac, Aaron, Victoria, least but not last Miss Varsano, our English teacher, who dazzled us young boys with her beauty. We even had a Jewish classmate in her English tutoring classes: the red-haired Levi who escorted us furtively Maccabi gymnasium, one block from Miss Varsano’s school along Fleming Street, to see some Jewish kids training in the indoors basketball court. Therefore, I had caught up with few remnants of the last generation of the Jews of Thessaloniki, a race that for centuries, since their expulsion from Spain and Portugal, formed a major and vibrant part of the city –so much so, that it was nicknamed “Mother of Israel”. Today only the ghosts of the city’s past hover over its streets -as Mazower would have put it, joined by waves of tourists from Israel visiting for a glimpse in the past of their ancestors.

In the same 1st alley, in the basement of an apartment building, one of the first in the block, at the corner with Deligiorgi Street, there was a carpenter’s workshop, another place of intrigue for curious children. We were attracted by the pleasant smell of wood and varnish, by the sawdust we could collect in bags for no apparent reason. We peeped down the stairs leading to the basement to observe the carpenter's craftsmanship -as much as was possible to discern through the open door and the low, dirty ground floor windows with the grilles, against the bright sunlight outside during the day or through a pale artificial lighting in the evenings. And there was no piece of furniture the carpenter of Deligiorgi Street could not build-to-order! Sofas, tables, desks, bookcases, all this with the help of two young apprentices, with his tools hanging in rows around the walls (hammers, planes, saws, screwdrivers) -the awe and longing of myself and any aspiring artisan. An electric saw was the unique mechanical equipment in the workshop, a hunched figure amidst workbenches, like what I saw displayed in the city’s annual International Exhibition. The sweet and whirring sound of the planer was pleasing to the ears; the thwacks of nails hammered an annoying racket, the thuds at the end a relief. At the piercing sounds of the electric saw we blocked our ears; the ultra-high pitch tones when the saw blade cut through hardwood knots unbearable. On few occasions, we were called in inside by the master carpenter to be handed, a kind of treats, unwanted pieces of wood, short planks and slats for our wooden swords and weaponry, and rods as possible candidates for our birching at school. The teachers asked for a supply of them from schoolchildren at the beginning of each school year. (The brown-noising of a teacher by a few classmates and their parents, to pre-emptively win favors and good grades, manifested itself as an untoward eagerness to procure the perfect rod for our corporal punishments: a necessary component of the educational and disciplinary process that still in force in my time at primary school, in short, a tool for discipline through the exercise of pain. The rods amongst the carpenter's scraps were not as well refined and had no chance in the selection process: the teachers invariably picked ones from the handful of carpenter dads: smooth and round, straight and unyielding, tailor-made to some agreed specifications.

The carpenter of Deligiorgi Street was not the only artisanal producer in our neighborhood. In the spacious basement of the apartment building at the corner of our alley with Gambetta Street, a small shoe factory (yes, a factory!) flourished during my childhood. His middle-aged owner always sported a benevolent smile displaying a couple of golden teeth whenever he greeted our neighbors and always bowed to stroke the hair of children, all potential customers for his shoes. One afternoon, I was watching him from our balcony stacking boxes of shoes of his production in the boot of his estate car, for sale or distribution, personally, to shops in Thessaloniki and towns in Central Macedonia. A salesman, a distributor, a craftsman shoemaker, a cobbler, and the boss of a dozen workers. I had not yet formed any conceptions about small and large-scale capitalist production and the private ownership of its means, or the role of a businessman-proprietor and entrepreneur in it and its place in class society. He gave the impression more of a kind and soft person than a ruthless boss, in the one and only time we went down to his basement with Mother to try a pair of black floaters from the shoes made in that factory. It goes without saying that the range on offer would be considered unfashionable, even crude, by modern standards. He proffered Mother a generous wholesale or ‘factory’ discount, whilst the worker who measured my feet and brought us the suitable size of shoes to try sounded proud with the end-product of his craft and flouted his skills; or he might have been simply taking guidance from his boss's salesman book.

But the artificial light of the basement full of moulds and tools and leather cutting machines, contrasted with the sunny morning outside, the smells of leather and polish were heavy, the eight-hour shifts of the proletarian shoemakers tedious and repetitive, detached from a bright and playful and happy life outside. If I did not do well in school, I was told by adults in the family, I would be condemned to do manual labor in a similar and even worse environment. A life of work in a dull and acridly smelling basement did not appeal to me, indeed; the human spirit was wasted on repetition and monotony. Worse than working in the carpentry around the corner!

The pair of shoes we bought were stiff and uncomfortable. We had to return and exchange them. The worker happily had them remolded, but did not go down that basement of the factory to buy its cheap shoes. Besides, Father had a friend in the same line of business: a merchant owner of a shoe-shop call “The Nest” in Vasilissis Olga’s Avenue, who offered a wide range of more fashionable shoes. Thereafter, he became the exclusive purveyor of shoes for me and Father. It would not have been long before the deindustrialization of the city and its gradual shift to a service-based economy. The workshops and small-factories in our area, the carpentry and the small shoe-factory were not spared and were swept away. Their decline of their business until their folding had been a slow and arduous process –for the owners, the wage-laborers and their families in those basements. They remained shut and deserted in their darkness ever after. The fate of the workers, the master carpenter and the petty businessman-owner is unknown. Few if any people in the neighborhood cared about such trivial events. 

27 - The Old Neighborhood: The Taverna of Deligiorgi Street

The wall of an uninhabited single-room dwelling in our alley, a storeroom more like, with a pyramidal tiled roof without windows and a hidden back door, formed an L-shaped recess with the façade of the Kazineris’ house. The recess and the windowless wall offered a natural, small but useful, area for ball games; for kicking the wall against it wall which also serve as an imaginary goal post, when Kosmas, Kostakis' father, had not parked his car there or Yiannis was not asleep in the bedroom above. Kosmas, a former mechanic then a radio broadcast engineer, was the proud owner of a German Opel from the 1950s, his precious possession was the first car I ever saw parked in our alley. He brought it regularly to wash with a hose and water from his mother-in-law's tap, polished, for hours in a tattered uniform either squeezed under the chassis or peeking under the hood into the engine, inspecting or fixing I don't know what. He enjoyed taking care of his car, the good man Kosmas with the golden teeth and smile, and showed it off to neighbours, proud of his rare acquisition. It was also one of the first cars I remember riding on a summer Sunday for a trip to the seaside village of Epanomi: I, Kostakis and his chubby sister Katinoula were squeezed in the back, Mrs. Foula on the passenger’s seat. Everything was simple and beautiful in that day trip with Kosmas' car: swimming in the sea, our on a blanket picnic with meatballs and bread and tomatoes, kicking a ball in the shade of the pine trees by the beach. It was very much like a trip to the seaside and in a similar car of Mimi and Lola and their parents, the main characters of our first reading book in primary school, which made us dream the Greek summer ahead by the sea.

At the corner with Deligiorgi Street, separated from the storeroom by a narrow corridor behind an old black wrought-iron gate that opened in our alley, a staircase led to the back of the upper floor of one of the most respectable houses in the block -nearly a mansion. It stood out from the Kazineris’ behind it, because of its high ceilings and a balcony protected by decorative wrought-iron railings of its façade above Deligiorgi Street and an elaborate two-leaf front door with ironwork and carved wood. The porch entrance was elevated from street level with five marble steps which led to the first floor with weather-worn railings on either side. The external walls of the house were painted in hues of beige and yellow, matching the brown varnished wood of the door and the shutters of the two large front windows, and the faded earthy red of the ceramic roof tiles -the same color with that of Kazineris’ and the other surviving old houses of Deligiorgi Street, all pale and unkempt and weather-worn. It was the house where the renowned in that area of Thessaloniki taverna proprietor, a widow called Tsapatsaraina, lived with a middle-aged male stout figure, whom Mother called her "partner". In contrast to the house, the taverna that this lady ran was of petty-bourgeois insignificance, frequented by workers, taxi drivers, and other petty businessmen and pensioners, less by intellectual types like Father.

The taverna was an unassuming low-house with a flat-roof on Deligiorgi Street, opposite the front door of Tsapatsaraina’s house, between the corner with our alley and the bridge over the stream. Its pale blue wooden front door was normally locked during in daytime and until dusk. Between the two doors, of the taverna and the grander house opposite, on the tarmac of Deligiorgi Street and its narrow sidewalks, and up to the five marble steps of the porch, the three friends and other children from the wider neighborhood set up our games: single- or two-goalpost mini-tournaments, hide-and-seek, “aiutante”, marbles, skipping, hopscotch.

Tsapatsaraina became a legendary character in my childhood mind, as I never came across her in the alley, or the street in front of her house or taverna. The latter we visited only once in a late evening with my uncle, but she was busy in the kitchen throughout our meal there. She must have been a kind and benevolent character, sympathetic towards children and tolerant of their voices and kicks of the ball at her doorstep; we were always left unimpeded to get on with our play -in contrast to the hostile moods and tellings-off we encountered, sometimes from generally friendly people of our alley, but almost always in the open plot on the other side of the stream. One afternoon, a stray kick of the ball from Kostakis' foot hit and smashed the glass of the side door of the taverna. We panicked and quickly dispersed, in naivety and innocence, before anyone would find out anything about it, and sought refuge in the safety of our homes from Tsapatsaraina’s anticipated wrath. But the incident was dealt casually and sedately between Tsapatsaraina and Mrs. Foula, Kostakis' mother, without reprisals or even restrictions to our noisy games. And we continued them unhindered in the friendly and still clear of cars Deligiorgi Street -with only an innocuous "be careful with your football next time" reprimand by Mrs. Foula and my grandma.

The taverna opened late at night after most children had retired to their homes. Tsapatsaraina’s patrons stemmed mainly from the lower strata of the eastern half of the city. Taxi drivers were regulars of the taverna, too; from our balcony I could see blue Thessaloniki taxis parked on Deligiorgi Street. Most of Tsapatsaraina’s customers were attracted to her taverna for its specialities: char-grilled or fried sardines and anchovies, freshly caught from Thermaikos bay, the smell of which on Saturday evenings pervaded the streets. They were washed down with draught retsina dispensed from wooden barrels. There was not much else in the menu, other than some salads and chips. The sardines and the bulk retsina, which she procured weekly in those enormous barrels brought to her taverna from a cart with tyres that was pulled by a horse, were seemingly enough to content a customer base drawn from the common folk of the city.

No music was played inside barring the sound of the barrel organ played by itinerant musicians in busy nights. Even that was drowned by the ceaseless clamour through the open front door. Late on Saturday nights one could hear the incoherent shouts from drunk customers leaving, but most of the time, as in basement tavernas or cafes for the elderly, the Tsapatsaraina customers enjoyed her sardines and retsina civilly, with low-key conversations and jokes. She was the iron lady, the boss, who would not tolerate trouble and quarrels, as much as she benevolently tolerated the shouts and the occasional mischiefs of children playing at her doorstep in the afternoons. Besides, there was no place for controversial political arguments when Greece was under the rule of a military dictatorship and the police force was still fearsome not just for children. Love affairs and jealousy on the one hand, business and politics on the other, were (and have been through history) the main causes of skirmishes in places where mortals gather. There was no ground in Tsapatsaraina’s taverna did not provide for that type of quarrels, despite (or because of) the predominantly male clientele. There were no memorable incidents triggered by drunken patrons, and the only intriguing events related with the taverna business for the children were the monthly laborious offloading of the retsina barrels of retsina from the horse-drawn cart and loading empty ones for their refill, spreading the unfamiliar but a peculiarly attractive to our noses heavy smell, which in the dusk was overpowered by the unattractive stench of grilled fish and the smoke from the grill charcoals and cigarettes.

Only once did we drop in and have dinner with Uncle and one of his friends, in one of the little rooms into which the small taverna was separated, all of them crowded by patrons. On the back end of the taverna a two-leaf door opened to a back yard with a few tables under a vine, on the bank of the dry in summers Toumpa stream, but that area was reserved for the regulars. Grilled sardines and fried anchovies were unfamiliar and generally undesirable flavors, not to a young child’s taste; nor was the smoky and noisy environment child-friendly. It was not a place for children. But I endured it patiently and quietly amongst the grown-ups, who seemed to inexplicably to me greatly enjoyed all of this: the food and drink and the atmosphere. Our order was taken by Tsapatsaraina’s stout partner, who also brought us the bill at the end. The food and drink were served by the single boy waiter of the taverna, whereas the legendary Tsapatsaraina was rooted in a hidden kitchen, dedicated to the cooking of fish, invisible throughout. And she remained an invisible and mythical person then, as in all my years in the neighborhood. We left the taverna with the smoke of cigarettes and the fetor from the grill absorbed deeply by the fabric of our clothes and the foul smell lingered around us for days after.

After we moved out, years later, Tsapatsaraina’s house and her little taverna were both demolished and gave way to more vulgar apartment buildings. The stream behind its back yard became a busy asphalted road. Deligiorgi Street, which hosted so many of our games on its concrete surface, was inundated by parked cars. Tsapatsaraina and her partner, the old-fashioned male figure in a dark suit and with a fedora hat, had the fate that awaits every common mortal. Just as the idiosyncratic souls who enjoyed the mezes, the retsina and the warmth in the convivial atmosphere of the smoky taverna, a little joy in their short lives, were lost too.