29 - The Akrivides': 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!