51a - Football! (On the Telly)

There are passions, which, after taking hold in childhood, evolve into an unquenchable devotion, in many ways pointless, that can last for as long as we have sense of space and time and retain some of our faculties, often to the very end. Football and chess were two of them for me, even though I did not manage to excel in either.

Father in his youth must have had this little fire in him which he tried to conceal -from me at least: a fire for playing football, the team sport of his time, the “beautiful game”, already popular in his city, the country and the world. Although, throughout his adult life, only on occasions did he appear to display a keen interest as a spectator-fan, as a boy and student he often played the game –in the streets and the sandlots of a rapidly expanding city landscape. This is what some of photos from the 1950’s evidenced, in which he posed in the football kit of his university team, over a skinny torso and rather stubby legs -a body cut for playing football, one might have said.

Before the purchase of our first TV set, on Sundays, when Father took his vital, couple of hours nap, I used to crouch in a corner of my room listening to the small radio and being enthralled by a full of drama broadcast from the hoarse and emblematic voice of Yannis Logothetis -the main state radio football sportscaster. How could a theology graduate manage to deliver live football commentaries with such eloquence and fervour and fluency, with no pauses, no errors, no faltering, in incredible detail and a tempo commensurate with the speed of passing the ball from one player to another? Concurrently with the ritual of Sunday afternoon broadcast, I kept notes of the scorelines on a notepad and had Father informed of those when he woke up. We would then check the results against the betting slips with his football predictions. When I grew up, I indulged in the same betting with some of my pocket money, with bets that rarely paid off.

Only a few Sundays that I remember, Father and I went to the stadium to watch our favourite team; a few because he would rarely sacrifice his afternoon siesta for a sub-standard sports event, still played amateurishly on dry unturfed grounds. Yet, football in all forms, either playing it or listening to or watching it, was my main entertainment of Sunday winter afternoons throughout childhood. It was entertainment for the masses, the common folk as they say, a game mainly embraced by the lower classes and my class, whilst considered déclassé and common by the elites. In a family, which was standing slight above the lower working strata of the city, my Sunday afternoon football fun was part of a leisurely routine that included a three-course meal of Greek salad, roast beef and galaktoboureko at Nionios' restaurant or a take-away from the legendary burger grill of Takis Kalousis; unforgettable flavours that seemed to go hand in hand with the anticipation of the afternoon events and audio broadcast that followed, before another week of routine at school or work began.

Then, in 1970, Father purchased out first TV! A magical cube, a box of wonders, the ‘mad-box’ as grandma called it. It was of a certain Grundig brand with a black and white display (as color television in Greece took a few more years before it was introduced) and hard-to-adjust controls, by pressing buttons or rotating switches in two columns. There were only two state channels then, but interruptions for ‘technical’ or other reasons in the broadcast were frequent and the tuning and control our TV awkward. It was placed centrally on the ad-hoc shelf of the bookcase, across the sofa and a pair of assorted armchairs in our long and narrow sitting-room. Since its purchase, we invariably watched the still rare live broadcasts of European and world football. The prelude with the Eurovision anthem always caused a stir in me, and raised the levels of anticipation and excitement. It was followed by the pulsating and enchanting commentary of the peerless sports commentator Yiannis Diakoyiannis, whose special voice tone caused a pleasant resonance to the senses and mind and added color to the action projected to the black-and-white screen from a stadium of an exotic European metropolis. Diakoyiannis’ skilfully interposed pauses, when only the noise and the chants from the crowd in the stands could be heard in the background, prepared us for his next comment or punchline: about the A or B footballer or coach, the team, the country, an associated historical event, criticism on tactics and techniques, as well as the occasional interjection of a political innuendo. His commentary always managed to enthral and thrill despite the primitive technology by today's standards. Yiannis Diakoyiannis was listened by my generation of football fans with reverence, no matter how uneventful the unfolding spectacle might have been, and became an icon of my childhood.  

More often, on Sunday evenings, our interest focused on the late sports program aptly name "Sports Sunday", which Diakoyiannis also presented alternatively with his rather less talented associate Fountoukidis. The program included some crudely edited clips from the artless and unspectacular matches of the day in Greek league, so often infested by time wasting, feign injuries, and was on occasions interrupted by the more interesting (for the boy fans or fanatics, at least) fights on and off the pitch, between players, coaches, officials and sometimes fans, and invariably followed by vehement protestations and expressions of indignation from the defeated team and bitter public comments from club officials. Especially, after the major local derbies in Athens or Thessaloniki, these matches were frequently culminated in violent incidents in and around the grounds. I realized from early on that in Greek football rarely a defeat was considered fair by the supporters of the defeated team, and based on merit and the ability of the opposition, and always left a bitter taste with insinuations of cheating and referee bias. On the other hand, the English league matches I watched videotaped from the muddy and sometimes snowy grounds on Saturday afternoons captivated me as much as those of my local team, which I supported as a child. But I noticed the contrast: in England, winners and losers shook hands despite the brutal tackles and fouls or the refereeing mistakes. I found out later that this style of competing had a name: ‘fair play’.  

50c - At Mum's Village (Aftermath)

After the end of Primary School visits to the village became scarcer. I had a tall mountain of education and exams to climb, under the intense pressure and watchful eyes of my parents, along with the travails of adolescence. Yet, Vassilis, his future in life somehow predetermined, kept asking Domna of any plans I might have to visit the village -for a long while, even after I left to study abroad. Years later, in one of our rare visits to the old house, which, after grandpa’s passing became auntie Domna’s and her husband’s home, uncle Peter through the front window pointed to me the stout figure of Vassilis standing in the courtyard of the old grocery store, in front of its adjacent warehouses. "Do you want to go and talk with him? He always asks about you…" I declined: "Let’s leave it for now, maybe another time... It’s awkward after so many years." Decades had passed, personalities reformed, faces and bodies aged and became frighteningly unrecognizable from the children we once were. I saw little meaning in digging out scattered memories from that distant childhood. Their recollection through a small chat between two persons who, once upon a time, were related as friends and playmates renders melancholy, even depression. Besides, conversations about the past with an introvert would have inevitably ended in platitudes and pointless statements and cliches about the irreversible passage of time: "Wow, how come time flies like this… It was like yesterday that we were playing marbles under the tree that is no more, or singing the carols hoping for money instead of treats, or targeting birds with our catapults or getting filthy in your dad’s warehouses..." My introverted nature could hardly have coped. A message exchange after a few months on Facebook, with a vague promise of meeting up in the first opportunity, was the most convenient way out from a return to a past that cannot be relived.

The apples fall under the tree that bore them, as the saying goes, and the two brothers, Vassilis and Alekos, continued and expanded the grocery business of Petros. Judging by the general lack of camaraderie between the two siblings as they were growing up, having divided the inheritance, they set up and established independent, most likely competing chains of convenience stores in the same and the surrounding villages: “Everything Low Price and High Quality!" was the slogan of one, "Whatever you Need is Next to your Doorstep!" of the other. Petros would have been proud. Auntie Domna and uncle Peter, however, like many others in a changing world, opted for the supermarket franchises for their weekly shopping.

Years were gone by, people left so as not to return. Grandparents’ house in the village was rented by an Albanian neighbour after uncle Peter’s passing. One of Vassilis' convenience stores with large, clearly visible signs from afar, across the street from the wholesale drinks trade of my cousins, still thrives at the crossroads despite the competition from major supermarkets nearby. Petros' old grocery store and its warehouses, with their windows covered with shutters, devoid of goods in their emptiness and darkness, are still there, a reminder of a carefree childhood in the rare times I visited ever since.  Oh, and the mortadella, the ‘Macedonian’ halva, the olives, the other delicacies that Domna bought for me from that store.   

50b - At Mum's Village (Its People and a Couple of Friends)

I once wrongly assumed that the family who lived in a hovel across the street from grandpa’s was Turkish, as I had inferred from the traditional şalvar both husband and wife I saw wearing and the hijab that covered the hair of the women of the house. I learned later that these neighbours were in fact Turkish-speaking Christians of unidentifiable (of course) ethnic origin –of minor significance in the historical process and whom the population exchanges, based solely on the criterion of one’s faith, uprooted them unwillingly from Bursa in exchange of Muslims of the Thessaloniki region. Their native Turkish language, the silk şalvar and scarfs, the Turkish amanes heard from their radio, the food they cooked over a brazier in their small yard, their apparent poverty, all this I found odd and alien, despite the inherently open mind and the innocence of a child. Grandma and my aunties were in good friendly and neighbourly terms with them, and speaking to them in the Turkish grandma learned as a child in Istanbul, mingled with Greek words. Grandpa barely interacted and regarded them with mistrust and maybe contempt.

At the end of the dirt lane, along the fence of the backyard and grandpa’s bahçe, was another hovel that of the D family. It was built along a few others in the area haphazardly in the 1920’s during those years of the brutal population exchanges and the acute demand for the housing of refugee families from Anatolia. The D’s, like our neighbours from across the street, were also from Bursa, having suffered all the same from deprivation and misery. Grandpa, on the other hand, the well salaried headteacher, built his on the plot that the government granted to great-grandfather Kotis, the relatively wealthy refugee from Istanbul, and then became the dowry of grandma Vasiliki. And this house seemed like a modern mansion compared with the houses of our next-door neighbours and the D’s further up the lane. In fact, it was built on proper concrete foundations, its only floor was raised a few feet from the ground, the bedrooms were laid with wood and the kitchen with mosaic, it had some basic toilet facilities and a basic drainage system, and regular doors, instead of the kilims that were often used to separate rooms between the four bare walls of the ‘resettlement’ dwelling, like that of the D’s as well as that of the great-grandfather, which had remained unoccupied since his passing  and used only for storage.

Mr. Thanasis, the illiterate head of the D’s family, was a lame, life-worn little man who dragged his right leg on a semi-circular arc whilst using the left as pivot. This peculiar and rather amusing limping of his and a crooked mouth that impaired his speech, became the butt of auntie Stella’s cruel jokes in family gatherings. But Thanassis possessed a kind soul and a dignity, in proportion to the poverty that befell his family. He made a living as a handyman, looking for day's work in odd jobs and he was always grateful for the occasional material support, like a bag of flour or sugar, grandma and my aunties offered the family in times of dire need. With only reward a cup of coffee, he once fixed the bike grandpa had bought for me. Of bikes and similar toys and joys the village children afforded at the time, the three young boys of poor Thanasis were of course deprived of. The eldest, Kostas, whom the potential engagement with Mother grandpa blocked for rather obvious reasons, nifty Giorgos, and the little Vassilis or Vassilakis, of the same age as me, were the three sons who survived into adulthood from the six or perhaps more offsprings of Thanasis and his wife Vasiliki; one of them I was told died tragically under the wheels of a bus at the age of six. There is no let-off from misfortune for the poor, as the saying goes. With Vassilakis, the painfully shy and timid youngest son of Thanasis, we hung out for some time in the days of my early visits to the village, before the D’s family gather their few belongings and emigrated to Boston.

Giorgos D maintained his ties with what was left of the grandpa’s family, especially Domna, well after their immigration. After grandpa’s passing, he arranged the pairing and marriage of auntie Domna with a friend from within the Greek-American community of Boston, Panayiotis, registered as Peter in America, pronounced "Pira" in the Greek-American lingo. Later, when in the first month of my studies in America I ran out of money, the same Giorgos, after a call from Father, spearheaded the raising of some funds from the members of the extended, and now wealthier D family, and sent me the $500 that I needed to make ends meet. On the first and only visit to auntie Domna and uncle Peter in Boston, some fifteen years after the D’s immigration to New England, we were invited for lunch at their home in Newton. Giorgos, now well-bred by the American materialistic abundance, poked some fun at me. He thought me small compared to the Father he remembered stout and tall, and said in a crude manner: "Hey, is that you really, L? What’s this? I thought you’d be grown like your dad! Big and tall!” What could I answer? I smiled and said, embarrassed: "Hey, what can one do"? Vassilakis, the timid and feeble boy we played few times as children, had become totally Americanized, and had understandably forgotten, along with the Greek language, the village and its people and his joyless and deprived childhood in it. Sitting next to his Greek-American from a corner of the table, he was smiling timidly, quiet and shy, as I remembered him.

In that diner party, Thanassis, despite his years, looked sprightly in the presence of the couple from motherland. He dominated the chat from the head of the table, with animated gestures and conversing, mingling his poor Greek vocabulary with English words in that strange, unlovable Greek-American accent. It seemed that they all found a better place and a true home in America, above all dignity and status. He lived for many years after that dinner, as the head of his large and once destitute family, who threw a black stone behind and prospered in their new world. I still remember him, his lame body and big heart, half a century later, bent over my bike in grandpa’s backyard, fixing the punctured tube, tightening the brakes, in the end polishing the frame with a piece of cloth, whilst sipping grandma's Turkish coffee and chatting with my aunties.

But my regular company for most of my days in the village was another Vassilis, whom I carried on playing with for years after poor Vassilakis and his family left. In truth, the three of us never settled down as a trio of neighbour friends. The burly Vassilis mistreated the feeble Vassilakis and often our games ended with the latter withdrawing to his hovel in tears, despite the compassion I and auntie Domna showed for his distress from the bullying he was subjected by big Vassilis. The latter was the well-fed son of a greengrocer, Petros, who came to the area War from a town in the Macedonian planes with the Slavic name Karatzova after the Civil War. How he ended up in grandpa’s village in after that tumultuous period and with what capital he set up a sizeable and respectable grocery store across the road from grandpa’s house, which, incidentally, dwarfed the other grocery store in the same road, that of uncle Leonidas, is shrouded in mystery. As a child, I wondered how the two competing grocery stores, on the same street, one directly opposite the other, could survive competing in the village over a clientele without much purchasing power, and puzzled by the fact that my family preferred stranger Petros’ store for their groceries instead of their relatives’ next door. The two enterprises, however, evolved along different paths over the years. Petros' grocery store, in addition to the goods he bought and sold loose: the halva, the coffee and the sugar, the cheese, the olives, the mortadella, and the other goodies, which my aunties rushed to procure for my pleasure each time I visited. Petros also maintained a couple of warehouses where he stored sacks of flour and wheat. In those warehouses, Vassilis invited me to play, by climbing up to the tall ceiling, jumping from the top of the pile to a soft landing on the sacks, whilst his dad was busying himself with customers in his store. For their part, uncle Leonidas and his sons diversified into selling drinks in the village and its surrounds, drinks that were distributed in a classic Volkswagen campervan, until the sons and grandsons of old Leonidas transformed it into a warehouse for the wholesale and distribution of alcoholic beverages: to cafes, taverns, clubs, and some suspect establishments. The people of the broader region, once a backward agricultural zone, naturally followed the trends of the advanced bourgeoisie of the neighbouring city, and became enthusiastic drinkers of Scotch whiskey. Old Leonidas himself used to wash down his afternoon meal with a full glass of the tipple.

The times with Vassilis were admittedly full of fun. We played marbles under the acacia tree, furtively jumped from the top of the piles of sacks in his dad’s warehouses and jumped joyously, jarped eggs at Easter, sang Christmas carols, designed and made catapults and practiced shots on fixed targets and, sometimes reluctantly and, thankfully, unsuccessfully at birds. At later years we went to the football ground of the local non-league team which despite the poor condition of the pitch sported sought-after goalposts. For all those treats and joys, Vassilis longed for his cosmopolitan friend from Thessaloniki, who carried the aura and had the experiences of the big city. It never took Vassilis long to sense my presence in grandpa’s house and abandon the chores he was assigned in the family store, despite the scolding that inevitably followed. Then he would send his poor young brother away (who sadly had his face scarred by the hot iron Vassilis once stuck to his cheek to satisfy a morbid childish curiosity about the result), order Vassilakis, if he was around, to leave us alone, and allowed himself the exclusive privilege of my company. It was his escape from a miserable routine of the grocery store and the otherwise dull village life

50a - At Mum's Village (Beautiful Days)

Born and raised in a big city amongst a few neighbor mates, near to the school and the refuge of my room always handy, a doting grandma downstairs and a charming uncle next door, our bourgeois family friends, the Akrivides, in the same side of town, visits to Mother’s village hardly appealed to me, alien as its culture and customs seemed to me. Nevertheless, for the sake of my maternal grandparents and Mother’s sisters who wanted to see their precious first grandchild and potential heir of their small estate, I was expected to accompany her to frequent visits to her family home, without looking indifferent or dejected -wearing a happy face, that is.

Grandma and aunties Lizza and Domna, perhaps even the normally aloof grandfather, showed what I sometimes found overbearing love, expressed in all possible ways within their means and the limitations of an unremarkable village environment. They strived, thus, to please a child who however was raised in and used to the markedly different ways of life in the big city. The limited possibilities the alien environment offered I did realize at a very young age, on the early occasions my parents handed me over to my aunties and grandma’s care for a Saturday night sleepover. When the dusk fell and my parents left, having been weighed down by sadness, I could hardly contain my tears, despite Domna’s efforts to console me and the tenderness she showed. Eventually, in the little room where the floor mattress was laid for my sleep, the feeling of sadness and emptiness from missing home, from the distance from the old familiar neighborhood and comfort of the little room with my books and toys, was abated -thanks to the entertainment and laughter from Lizza’s politically incorrect jokes, the impersonations of the invalids and fools of the village, from the loud voices and swearing emanated late at nights from the dodgy café nearby, from the sight of the staggering shadow and incoherent cries of Simos, the village drunkard, whilst being bullied by the café punters.

As I was growing up, I became more intrigued by grandad’s large and full of mysteries backyard, with the vegetable garden and trees, the empty old great-grandparents house in the corner, the chickens in their pen or roaming the yard, the streets and wheat and vegetable fields that surrounded the village -enough for the mind to forget about the games I would be missing with my friends in our neighborhood. I was fascinated and drawn to the little unknowns the city was unable to offer, to the delights of spring and winter seasons it lacked. With Domna, the meticulous devotee of local and national customs, we used to set out to ‘catch the May’ and ‘welcome the Spring’ on the first day of that month, in fields resplendent with poppies, daisies and hyacinths. On Good Fridays, we laid flowers on Epitaphios, kissed the embroidered icon and crawled underneath the adorned with flowers bier on display in churches, for being sanctified, then received the communion and attended the long tedious liturgy and, eventually, the more interesting, somber and candlelit procession around the village, with the bier flanked by uniformed officers and members of the national guard in their fatigues, holding semi-automatic weapons boys found awesome. Then, looking forward to the ‘Resurrection’ on Saturday night, when the unforgettable scent of lilac pervaded the spring air, on our way to the remote church of Agios Athanasios outside the village by its cemetery, and our return to the house holding candles, protecting the flame, the Holy Light, from the night breeze. On Easter Sunday mornings, we went through the ritual of selecting eggs with the hardest shells, from the sound light knocks to the teeth emitted, to prevail in egg jarping competitions before the Easter Sunday lamb family feast. In the autumn, I found delight in offering help to grandpa with the stacking and cutting wood for the house hobs, which, first a horse-drawn cart, then a small track, disposed untidily in the backyard. The lighting of the wood stove in the winter months, sustaining the glowing fire whist staring at its flames, being engulfed by their intense but pleasant heat, along with some pocket money from grandpa on my departure, were ample reward for those chores.  On Christmas Eve, with my local friend Vassilis, we wandered around the village streets and knocked the doors to sing the carols in exchange for treats, like nuts and fruits, but preferably small change.

Being a shopkeeper and selling stuff one of many a boy’s early dreams, and naturally I enjoyed dusting and tidying up the various items on the shelves of the grocery store "I. & Sons" next door. The ‘Sons’ of the great-uncle Leonidas left me unimpeded to do it, despite the protestations of the old father each time he saw me crouching in the aisles. And I was looking forward to the rides with Spyros, mum’s cousin, in his Opel Kadett to nearby villages to watch Sunday footie between non-league teams on uneven pitches with their patchy turfs, attended by handful of spectators in their tractors and vans - before he dropped me back at lunch time to make his way to watch his favourite team, PAOK, playing in a stadium  proper in the city-without me, the PAOK rivals’ supporter.