Ancestry 6 - From Istanbul: Kotis & Dominique

Hotel Wow in the affluent Yeşilköy (or Ayastefano) neighborhood of Istanbul is a walled complex of two twin high-rise towers, two modern white boxes with perfectly symmetrical facades, that might have been pretentiously modeled on the architecture of some Las Vegas or other American hotel, thus, generally devoid of character and soul. It stands in the outskirts of a shopping mall, one of those malls who sprang up, one after another, in Turkey's cities, thanks to a breathless capitalist growth and expansion. From afar, the hotel does not stand out amongst the forest of tall apartment and office blocks that define Istanbul’s skyline in the 21st century. Nevertheless, ‘Wow’ is a convenient, if not ideal, place for visiting professionals and businessmen converging from the East and the West for business deals in Turkey, but also for groups of tourists and young people with rather superficial or dubious tastes in accommodation. Sometimes even for Turkish couples who find a convenient and affordable romantic refuge not far from home. In short, Hotel Wow has been erected primarily for servicing those in transit, who want or need a low-coast accommodation for a night or two at a strategic point in the gigantic city, with easy access to its international airport.

In one of the upper floors of the hotel overlooking the "Kemal Ataturk" airport with its runways at a radius of just a mile and a half away, visible from my window at the back of the building, I spent two sleepless nights. (Nights of Insomnia or, at best, poor sleep, have become inevitable ordeals of flash business trips.) With planes taking off and landing incessantly with only a few hours pause in the small hours of the night, the noise from the night-shift in the construction of an airport extension, the humming noise from the air-conditioner, the stifling heat taking seconds to fill the room when I turned it off, the moans from the love-making couple in the room next-door, the toilet flushing from the room above… How one to sleep under such conditions? I once formed the rather erroneous notion that a possible way to deal with humming noises penetrating doors and windows, walls and ceilings in hotels, was to focus my attention to the source of noise and the noise per se and listen to it attentively, so that the disturbance is somehow transitioned from the sensory organs, the ears, and the forefront of consciousness to the depths of the unconscious, where is eventually buried. On that occasion, as in most cases, it did not work. The sunrise found me awake standing at the window and looking towards the airport. Further south, behind the runways, I could take a glimpse of the coastline of the Sea of Marmara and a playful reflection of the morning sun on its waters.

A narrow strip of residential area in the seaside neighborhoods of Ayastefano (for the Greeks) or San Stefano (for the Levantines – Genoese, Venetians, and Franks, who settled in Constantinople and its surroundings after the Fourth Crusade), was barely discernible into the distance through the blurry, polluted atmosphere above and beyond the vastness of the airport. It was at that dawn that I found myself closer than ever, in space, to the roots of my family, from my Mother's side, in Istanbul. This subtle and fleeting connection to a distant past lasted a few moments but triggered several conversations with family members on the traces that my ancestors left on this earth, from Istanbul to Greece.   

Konstantinos, Kostis, "Kotis" to his friends, his acquaintances and associates, Mother's grandfather, was born sometime in the late 19th century, and made Ayastefano, the then rather cosmopolitan and relatively affluent coastal suburb of Istanbul, his home; at the very geographical coordinates where the Venetians of Enrico Dandolo first landed and then conquered and pillaged and looted Constantinople, thus setting the course for the irrevocable demise of Byzantium. They say that Kotis’ official surname, which he left behind in Constantinople along with the piece of land he owned and most of his possessions, was Nikolaidis: clearly, a Byzantine surname. Malik Bey, a landowner, and at the same time a merchant of nuts and fruits and vegetables, he would belong to the middle to high strata of a wealthy, prosperous and economically influential class of Greeks in the heart of the Ottoman Empire until the wars of the 20^th century, which, while those infidels or giaours were paying their taxes at the Porte allowed them to go about their businesses unhindered. In his manor and orchards, which at his time would have blossomed under the concrete mass of the airport, he cultivated his nuts and other seasonal produce, and then traded them in large local markets.English translation. 

He was married to Dominique, née Kountouras, whose Christian name, as well as those of her grandchildren -Stella, Dominique, Alice, and their pale, light skin color and fair hair, pointed to Frankish origins. I doubt whether Kotis himself or his wife revealed to the outside world or even harbored a Greek consciousness or Greekness, let alone considered themselves direct descendants of the lost Hellenism of the Byzantine empire from many centuries ago. I also doubt whether they had learned any of the history of Constantinople spanning the millennia before them, of the illustrious city in which they were born and lived in the heyday of their existence or, even, whether they had an elementary awareness of the historical heritage of previous generations on which their beings were founded. They spoke Greek, as well as Turkish. They were Orthodox Christians at least in name, either by conversion or compelled by tradition and local customs -no one knows. In the cauldron of Constantinople and its suburbs, various races and tribes merged over time: Turks, Armenians, Byzantine Greeks, Franks, Venetians, Genovese, and occupied various social and economic strata and posts, in a predominantly feudal and transactional society. To their only daughter Vasiliki, Kotis gave the upbringing that Greek landowners and merchants, with relatively open minds and wealth, intended for their children: a few classes of secondary school education, home instruction of French, the piano, the mandolin, and the like. Father, later in life, was joking that he had several conversations with grandmother Vasiliki over property and inheritance matters, purportedly including verbal promises for the concession of some land in Mother’s village, but conveniently discussed in the French language, so that no one present could understand them.English translation. 

The Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922 and the exchange of populations that ensued, the heavy invisible hand of history, forced them to the New Greece, to Greek Macedonia, not long ago liberated from the Turks and Bulgarians, in rural areas in the outskirts of the Thessaloniki. The implementation of the Treaty of Lausanne was on its track. Kotis with his wife Dominique and their daughter, the beautiful Vasiliki, a 17-year-old girl at the time, said their goodbyes to Ayastefano on a sunny morning of 1924, a morning which betrayed no insurgence, no persecutions, no commotions characteristics of such momentous historical and life-transforming events. It was like any other spring morning on the coast of the sea of Marmara, its waters sparkling as with any glorious Anatolia sunrise. There was even a farewell photograph, which showed them standing, three solemn figures, surrounded by neighbors and employees, in front of their two-storey house with the light blue gray walls they would leave behind; serious and expressionless, but dignified, standing in front of the threshold of a traditional front door of a high-ceilinged ground floor, where the tall shutters of the façade hinted at the empty from produce warehouses of Kotis’ business, under the large balcony of the first floor and the attic above. Their home looked grand and rich in the photo taken to commemorate the conclusion of a life-chapter. With Kotis at the center, the highly respected and honorable family head, a true Malik Bey –imposing, with sturdy chest and shoulders, a thick mustache, piercing eyes, below combed-back, gray hair. Whatever material fortune he had accumulated and possessed throughout his life, the house, the fields and the orchards, whoever people he loved, respected and was respected by as a boss, his neighbors and friends, his associates and employees, Kotis would leave behind once and for all. The faded photograph was left as the reflection of a bitter end, the last memory of a journey that was unknowingly and unwittingly destined to change towards paths that led to the unknown, a last stern dignified stance in the face of the unexpected vicissitudes of history. On the other hand, from that macroscopic and objective and callous point of view of history, this uprooting could be classified as yet another collateral damage, an insignificant detail in the margins of the wars and historical records.

English translation. Whether, with the almost violent and disorderly population exchange and the ill-advised ethnic cleansing of the time, Kotis' flight was driven by conscience and volition and equanimity, or under the fear of reprisals and the vindictiveness and savagery that lurked in tandem with the emergence of Kemal's new post-war Turkey, nobody knows. I would have betted on the latter. After all, who would voluntarily leave a world he and generations of ancestors before him forged with blood and toil, a whole life one might say, for a disorderly escape into a shapeless future, into the void. Every farewell, definitive and final, to the living and the dead alike, to the familiar places and things of a lifetime, is a stab in the heart, a tragedy. Even for the strongest wills, it brings about emotion and tears, sadness and stiffness in the heart, and, for the weak, crying and long-lasting sorrow. The only remedy is time and the oblivion that its passage brings, and, definitively, death.

Anyway, as the Greek saying goes, they threw a “black stone” back into the land that they ploughed and from which they prospered, and Kotis with Dominique and Vasiliki, his widowed sister, Elizabeth and her two children, Leonidas and Paraskevi, left the house and the fields, gathered as much as they could from the belongings for the caique which would ferry them along the Thrace and Macedonia coastlines to Thermaikos Bay and Thessaloniki. They probably had had low expectations of the life that awaited them. Even those expectations nearly collapsed into the precipices of despair, when the chest with some pieces of gold and other valuables, all the wealth that could have been salvaged under the circumstances, fell from the hook of the crane that loaded the refugees' luggage onto the boat deck into the depths of the sea. They were left with nothing of any significant and recognizable exchange value to take to their new homeland. The conditions of their settlement in their new home country would have been substantially different, if that chest of gold had not been lost in the depths of Marmara.

Ancestry 5 - From Melnik: Magdalene

Great-aunt Magdalene was the dark and obscure figure with the enigmatic personality amongst the seven siblings of Panagiotis' family. Dark, like her raven hair and black eyes, she produced the mysterious beauty on display in the family photo taken in the 1930s. It seems that life matched her mien and transversed dark and arcane paths, leaving only just a few family testimonies to illuminate some of their turns. The story of her short life remains grey and obscure and was concluded by a sad, as much as unjust and unresolved end. It could even be said, against our contemporary criteria in a judgement of one’s life, that Magdalene’s was wasted. She left early from the family home that she shared with her great-grandmother, Socrates and grandfather Leonidas, to be married. But then, she divorced her husband before the Germans descended to and occupied Thessaloniki. Divorced, perhaps, because of frictions of personal or, as it was common in Greek families, of political nature; perhaps, by the exertion of unidentified external forces; perhaps, as a sacrifice to the needs and demands of a higher ideological cause. She bore no children. Instead, she embarked, along with a handful of comrades, to raise the red flag and consciously and actively participate in the Resistance and the Civil War, alas, on the losing side of the conflict. She was executed by a firing squad at dawn in 1947, in a wasteland behind Yendi Kule, where several executions of communists took place at the peak of the Civil War in Greece. The exact date of the execution and death of Magdalene and the few comrades with her was not recorded. For it was yet another unceremonious execution, amongst dozens of anonymous people sided with the communist cause or eponymous party members, before the humiliating defeat of a futile struggle for dubious ideals. For nothing.

Magdalene was arrested in 1946. She and her sister Calliope, Father claims, offered clandestine hideouts to comrades, members of the Communist Part, in a house in Garibaldi Street, of those hidden behind one of the elevated banks of the Toumba stream. In the Party and Civil war jargon, she acted as a "link”, a liaison between the Party leadership and the rank and file, between the instructorship in the mountains or beyond the border and the militancy in the cities. She was arrested along with her brother-in-law and sister Calliope and sentenced to death by the so called "Third Special Military Court of Thessaloniki". Great-aunt Calliope was sentenced to life imprisonment, but after being granted reprieve, she returned to her home and children. Her husband was acquitted. Whether Magdalene’s offense, being a "link" in such a period of vindictiveness, intolerance, and blind hatred, justified a death sentence, or if there were other, more sinister causes, some personal vendetta or unjust slander, we will not know and will never find out. The trial, the accusation and condemnation, were not recorded or, were there a case file, it decayed or destroyed in a basement and lost. A notorious "Third Resolution" by the reactionary and compliant government, which led to summary executions of many communists and their sympathizers, provided unlimited scope to prosecutors and ample flexibility for subjective interpretations by any zealot to the main cause of cleansing Greece from the communist menace. With its generalizations and ambiguity, it unleashed the vengeful will and power of military commissioners: punishable by death is “He who wishes to wrest part of the national territory, or to facilitate plans to that end; He who conspires or instigates rebellion or colludes with foreigners, or forms an armed group, or takes part in any treasonous associations."English translation. 

Father, a child then and above all suspicions, brought food to her aunt, as he did to his uncle. This time into the confinement of a cell in the dark basement of the Police Headquarters, where she was initially held as prisoner. And those visits, to provide food for his aunt, were the last few fragments left of Magdalene’s existence in Father’s and the collective memory of the Ibrişimci family. Any traces of a still alive Magdalene were lost in that basement cell, and, along with them, the last threads that bound her to the core of the family. Nowhere in the internet and the blogosphere, nowhere in books and newspaper archives of the time or historical theses, no matter how exhaustively I researched with all plausible keywords in my searches (‘civil war’, ‘women/communist executions’, ‘ΟΠΛΑ’ (the Organization for the Protection of People’s Struggle -the communist urban militant group which she might have been a member of, etc.), through various historical paths and points of view -and I devoted endless hours, Magdalene’s name appeared nowhere, in itself or in association.English translation. 

I have been wondering… Why and how did that happen? What crime did she commit that would justify, without any reasonable doubt in the minds of prosecutors and judges, a death sentence and, eventually, a hasty summary execution? Was she afforded any defense? Were the anti-communist prejudice and high emotions of the time so strong that they clouded judicial proceedings and distorted life-and-death judgement? How was it possible that such sentence and execution that followed were reported nowhere (barring the few cases of members at the higher echelons of the Communist Party), let alone explained, at least for the benefit of an already brow-beaten and compliant public? How did Magdalene react to the death sentence? What went through her mind when the verdict of the biased, insulated from the press, Military Court was delivered? Did she cry, did she feel hopeless or she stood firm and proud? Did she regret her life choices? What did she say to any of her comrades or captors in the days leading to their execution? Had she been given the opportunity by anyone to denounce her beliefs, avoid death and get on with a miserable life in Greece or in exile, as many like herself did? Why did she not sign a ‘declaration of repentance’ that could have exonerated her? What feelings and thoughts overwhelmed her before the execution in a death row cell in Yendi Kule? Was she granted a last wish? Were there any last words? Was she hoping for a review of her case or clemency and a last-minute reprieve? How did the soldiers of the firing squad, reluctant conscripts from the same humble origins as herself, feel when firing at communists? Where was her dead body buried? Was anyone informed by the family? Did anyone care, or rather all involved, friends or foes, were enveloped by fear and horror?

English translation. Nobody knows, nobody will ever know. It has not been recorded anywhere, in no footnote of the history of the City or of the Party she dedicated her life to, or embedded in tales of the neighborhood and our family, but unaccounted for in any of the many books written about the tragic events of that period. Likely, she was buried in some unmarked grave behind the medieval Yendi Kule, in one of the makeshift "invisible" graveyards for executed communists and criminals from the Nazi Occupation and the Civil War years, razed after the war ended, unbeknownst to her husband and family, if not forsaken. The deep and dignified gaze of the family photo hid untold courage and will and determination. From that photograph and the fragments of dad’s memory, I only know of you, Magdalene! Although, I did also raise the red flag in my youth, like you did, fascinated by a nebulous revolutionary vision on the side of the damned of this world and wept whenever I heard "You have fallen victims, brothers, you..." -the anthem of the fallen Resistance fighters, I came in my maturity to the blunt and unfortunate realization: your sacrifice was not worth it. And that filled me with the deep sorrow for the unjust loss in vain of you and many of your comrades.

Several times, alone or with a partner, I climbed to Thessaloniki’s Acropolis and the Yendi Koule fortress through the cobbled streets of the Upper Town several times. I told, Magdalene, your short story to everyone I had by my side in those visits. I walked into the detention chambers, into the solitary confinement cells, into the claustrophobic courtyards surrounded by tall walls. I walked around behind the walls of the Ottoman fortress, which the modern Greek stake transformed to a notorious prison, where communists, the Nazi Fritz Schubert, and other criminals, last being in 1968 of a certain Pagkratides, were jailed and executed. Unkempt grass, weeds, some scattered old trees, the floodlights that illuminate the grey walls of the miserable prison, for the benefit of tourists and passers-by, then houses, too many houses, the main road, the school that was built on the graves of the executed, the church of St Paul, the pine forest beyond. Nothing would have hinted to the horrors that unfolded further down the barren hill decades ago.

Ancestry 4 - From Melnik: Socrates

In his youth, great-uncle Socrates worked as a worker in a tobacco factory. Nevertheless, he used to reflect, during the long hours of factory work, on the scanty education he received in primary school, and endeavored to self-educate through personal study and active participation in the political and social struggles of his era. He managed remarkably well with his self-teaching struggles, despite his daily job in the factory; despite the demands of the long hours of manual labor in a tobacco factory of the pre-war Thessaloniki that could barely be comprehended by the populus petite-bourgeoisie strata of civil servants, shop-keepers, and the like, in his city; despite, most importantly, the consumption that tormented him since early adulthood and the lengthy convalescing spells in the sanatorium his illness required. A consumptive tobacco worker can be scorned and dismissed as an insignificant human being, an unnoteworthy existence amongst the lots of good hard-working people who disappear without a trace. Perhaps through his work in the factory, perhaps through his social interactions in cafés, tavernas, working-men unions and clubs, places fermented by socialist ideals, or, perhaps, enlightened by his older sisters, Calliope and Magdalene both married to progressive individuals, his eyes opened to the radical social movements developing in the city and maturing in the working-class neighborhoods and refugee slums. Movements, which eventually culminated in the resistance against the fascist occupation. In short, his mind opened-up to the worldview of the communist dogma, that is, to a future society, which hitherto seemed brighter and more just: a step up in the ladder of social evolution. So said the theorists and pioneers of the workers' revolution. Somehow as in Mayakovsky's verses:

“We opened
               each volume
                                 of Marx
as we would open
                          the shutters
                                           in our own house;
but we did not have to read
                                         to make up our minds
which side to join,
                          which side to fight on.English translation. 

Therefore, Socrates became a communist and, at the same time, a member of what Gramsci called "organic intelligentsia", the cohesive fabric of the class into which he belonged de facto from the onset, a class numerous and rather well-entrenched in Thessaloniki of the time. He became an element of an intellectual and organizational core, duty bound to instill in his class the social awareness and consciousness that he himself acquired step by step in life, in the factories, in the unions, in life.

The family of his first wife, Anna née Papachristou, were owners of one of the oldest non-Jewish owned bookstores of pre-war Thessaloniki, on the corner of Egnatia and Konstantinou Palaiologou streets. His marriage to a daughter of a bookseller must have contributed into his intellectual advancements beyond the six years of his unnoteworthy formal education. A sign "BOOKSTORE Christos Papachristou - Established 1922", hidden under the balcony of the first floor of an apartment building, above roller -shutters covered with dozens of layers of posters caught my eye in my student years. There, in his father-in-law's bookstore, a small hive of ideas and knowledge, I imagined Socrates, the primary school graduate, flipping through pages of magazines and books. (Later in life, in January 2017, when I walked by the same corner, the site of the bookstore, once upon a time my great-uncle’s secret private library, was housing one of the snack-bars that somehow sprang up everywhere in Greece of the debt-crisis and the bail-out memoranda. A sign of modern times and the evolution of trends and tastes, or the lack of business creativity and imagination in modern Thessalonian society?)

Apart from an open and lively mind and the thirst for embracing new ideas, Socrates was an exceptionally handsome man: tall, with large light-colored eyes, an intense gaze, a wide, proud, and intelligent forehead. Always clean-shaven, that is without the narrow trapezoidal mustache under the nose, which his brothers and brother-in-law permanently featured (as a symbol of status and maturity or of the dividing line between social classes, who knows?) His demeanor and presence did not suggest any of the stereotypes of factory workers of that era we tend to harbor. ln any case, he would have had no difficulty in attracting the attention and even raising the desires of women during his hours outside the suffocating environment of the tobacco factory. Women from good families, too, with sizeable dowries, for that matter, despite his humble roots in the lower social strata. Thessaloniki was a rather unique, dynamically changing amalgam of nationalities, shaped by centuries of wars and mass migration. The Greek contingent itself was dominated by the refugee element, a mixture of bourgeois and proletarians, of intellectuals and illiterate laborers, who shared the same beaches and piazzas, and often inhabited the same or adjacent neighborhoods. His youthful beauty and elegance, his imperious and arrogant gaze, his open mind ingrained with progressive ideas, even his manners and associations, counterweighted by far his working-class background and poor health.

That is, until the German Occupation, which turned life in the city upside down. The two-storey building in the Fleming area that the Ibrişimci family took possession of, in exchange and in lieu of reparations for their lost home in Melnik, housed along with great-Uncle Socrates the family of grandfather Leonidas and grandmother Evdoxia and their two children, my father and his newborn brother. Old great-grandmother Katina had passed away before the start of the war, and Magdalene, the youngest daughter, had married and left. When Socrates was overcome by his illness, my grandfather, incorruptible and of high moral standards, consistent with the family tradition of unconditional support to his siblings and any broader family member, true, that is, to the strong bonds of a family who stood together for better or for worse since their exodus from Melnik, in 1942, a year when hunger and poverty reigned over the city, sold the house to a rapacious black-marketer, a scoundrel called Demokas (every war breeds corrupt and avaricious individuals), in order to afford the medical care his young brother needed. In a year of universal misery, Socrates left for the sanatorium in Asvestochori, to restore his health and save his life. It was rather a one-way journey this for tuberculosis patients. Leonidas and the family of four moved to a tiny flat in Toumba, with barely one and a half rooms. Hearts had bled, anxiety levels had risen, but what else could be done?

Since then, Socrates’ presence on the earth was slowly immersing into the shadows of Father's, his dearest nephew’s, memory. I always sensed that Socrates: the brave, masculine figure of a worker with rudimentary education but handsome looks, like those in Soviet May Day posters or socialist realist paintings, who also effortlessly displayed an elegance, style and nobility normally attributed to the bourgeoisie, who embraced and defended with zeal views and ideas (for the materialistic advancement of his class or simply carried by an emotional drive for freedom and social justice), who broke through beyond the narrow intellectual boundaries of the Ibrişimci family, his place of work, even the city and life within it, left a long lasting impression on Father and the broader family. No doubt Socrates’ personality largely influenced, even more than grandfather Leonidas, even more than the other highly-esteemed family pillar, Elias, the political views, attitude, and dare say philosophy of Father. "Every man is a philosopher", and Socrates showed him a way, among the many others he could potentially pursue: the books he would select as a young man to read, the political points of view and way of thinking, where he should cast his vote in the highly politicized times the followed the German Occupation and the Civil War, during the years of the corrupt and ruthless reconstruction of a country shaped up by the heavy hand of Cold War politics. By extension, it influenced my own philosophy and ideology and my various political associations, where, admittedly, the emotional (subjective) element often blurs the (objective) reality, and frequently misleads us into a chaos of contradicting opinions diverging from a logical and dispassionate analysis, it entangles us in ideological rigidity and dogmas and dead-ends, it renders us unable to understand and assimilate the social process.

Socrates, having recuperated from his illness in the sanatorium of Asvestochori, however weak and sickly, took refuge in hidden corners of Thessaloniki’s neighborhoods, in the Communist Party’s secret hideouts. He had several, but unverifiable connections with the Greek People’s Liberation Army during the Occupation, and the Democratic Army of Greece in the Civil War years. All contacts and meetings were clandestine. He surfaced on the civil war stage of Thessaloniki rather forcibly, during the investigation of the murder case of the American journalist George Polk, who in May 1948 in the aftermath of mass executions of communists and the international condemnation that followed, had come to Thessaloniki to find a link that would lead him to Markos Vafiades and the leadership of the Democratic Army in the mountains of Macedonia: to witness first-hand what was happening and interview one of the main actors from the other side of the conflict and the fence, which shortly after would be known as the Iron Curtain. He was murdered, however, before embarking to his mission and his body was washed up in the city's port. In later years, an investigative journalist pointed to the Intelligence Service agent stationed in Thessaloniki, who disappeared inexplicably shortly after the murder, as the possible instigator to a murder, apparently motivated by post-war inter-imperialist frictions with the Americans in the Levante region. This rather credible evidence was ignored by the involved parties, that is the Greek government and its American sponsors. On the contrary, the Civil War government, under external pressure manufactured both motives and potential assassins amongst the communists and collaborators, concealed evidence, and, rather flimsily and desperately, accused them of the murder of journalist Polk. Adam Mouzenidis, a member of the Communist Party, was somehow charged in absentia as the main perpetrator, although the Party announced in its press that he had been killed before Polk’s arrival at Thessaloniki. Great-uncle Socrates, at the time a retired tobacco worker, was branded a "Bulgarian in soul and body" by the chief inspector who interrogated him, and, along with his sisters, Magdalene and Calliope, who had presumably offered hideouts to communists, was named among the liaisons of Mouzenidis and other communist party officials and complicit to the murder. The accusations led to Socrates’ arrest and incarceration, in an open-air prison fenced with barbed wire, where teenage Father brought him food. He was interrogated, he might have been tortured, but stood his ground: "Socrates was a rock in his testimony", according to investigative journalist Hadjiargyris, who studied the Polk case in depth.

The detention, interrogation and testimony, Socrates’ correspondence with Mouzenidis’ brother with secret notes to coordinate a rather desperate defense, delivered to the prison by young Father, were some of the last traces that Socrates left in post-war Thessaloniki. Anna, his first wife, had in the meantime died. Socrates left for Athens, driven by health issues or political reasons or both. He was classified ever since, in police records and archives, as an unrepented communist, but persevered with what life he had left. He was remarried, with a widowed architect, Xeni, and became the adoptive father of her architect-author daughter Lisa. He appeared with Xeni in a photograph in Moscow, against the snowy background of a Russian winter, a photograph from the early 1960s, amid the freezing and thawing of the relations between the Cold Ware superpowers. In an ushanka and a black overcoat, the handsomest of Ibrişimci family, held the hand of Xeni. The same tall stature, the same imperious gaze, a fragile smile, the characteristic slight tilt of the head towards Xeni to his right. Xeni, wearing also an ushanka and a similar overcoat, was standing between Socrates and a Soviet official –as far as one could tell from red star emblem pinned on the latter's ushanka and the overcoat with the two columns of silver buttons. It was said that they visited Moscow for the health issues that had plagued him throughout his life, and for Lisa's daughter studies. Socrates died in Athens in 1974, before I had any chance to meet him in person.

Apart from few scattered memories in Father’s mind from his childhood and youth, Socrates did not leave much behind. What he left, however, a rather colorful life story, an insignificant but distinct legacy, it acquired, as it happened, a special gravity in the life of Father and by extension mine, his existence became a kind of family myth in the otherwise prosaic family chronicles. Those few memories his presence on this earth left behind were imprinted in Father’s and my very own mind. I carried them along and enhanced them with some primitive intellectual and spiritual concerns of my own and a dilettante’s interest in philosophy, politics, and student activism.

A dozen, dusty volumes of the “Art Review” issues of the magazine Socrates collected continuously from 1955 to 1963 bound together by a gray hard cover, were one of his gifts to his beloved nephew. They remain in the same order that I last had sorted them as a student in Thessaloniki, under a thick layer of dust, on the very bottom-corner shelf of my student room bookcase, along with several black, thick tomes of a Soviet encyclopedia. English translation. (This bookcase still stands, two and a half meters tall, albeit almost crumbling, above Father's cheap IKEA armchair. It was built on demand more than half a century ago, with no much passion, we have to say, but hastily with poor workmanship by a sloppy carpenter of our neighborhood, a certain Traitsis. He was contracted by Father to assemble most of our furniture in the apartment that was granted in exchange, after the home of the Ibrişimci family was demolished and its plot was handed to a builder in order to erect another one the ugly blocks of flats that define Thessaloniki’s skyline. "He glued the veneer to the wood with his saliva", mother used to say at the sight of the protrusions of the veneers, as they were unfiled or at best poorly filed around the edges. After the delivery of the furniture, several Traitsis' visits ensued, whereby he stood in front of his creations, with a disarming and innocent smile revealing one or two golden teeth, a folding ruler in his back pocket and the pencil on the temple behind his ear. Subsequent interventions and corrections he attempted, however, with proper glue and filing were no more effective.)

Rather miraculously, the main body of Traitsis’ bookcase overloaded with books survived the passage of time, a removal, an earthquake, and two generations, along with the forgotten and scarcely used Soviet encyclopedia on its highest shelves, hidden from the eyes of visitors, and the bound issues of the "Art Review". In early childhood, Mother would not allow me to open any volumes of the latter and flip through their pages, as "these books were given to dad by an uncle who was consumptive." In fact, she was calling for their disposal, calls that Father would not even consider and discuss: the books were part of a precious family legacy. As I was growing up and rejecting that and others of Mother’s foolish cautions, I discovered, printed in these volumes, treasures from the golden age of Greek literature, creations of a predominantly left leaning intelligentsia. They could not have been the works of others in the post-civil-war period, in a broken, poor country, desperately trying to stand on its own two feet, claim her being and rediscover its identity in a world of sharp contrasts. A country, which Socrates, the consumptive tobacco worker, strived to change against grossly unfavorable odds.

Ancestry 3 - From Melnik: The Family of Elias

Aunt Anna died in 2016. The exact date I do not remember, nor does it matter. It did not register in the mind when it was mentioned on Skype, amongst several conversations with Father about unconnected everyday matters and other rather trivial events, and I was not paying the due attention. Two generations of my family passed away and buried in the shadows of time from the days of the flight from Melnik, and Aunt Anna, the unmarried daughter of Elias, a first cousin of Father, was the last remnant of her generation from the branch of Elias in the grand family tree. Father was her closest relative and, by law, responsible for the procedural issues that needed to be sorted out after his cousin’s death. Anna had lived more years than most of us humans are entitled to, and her death, one might say, took none of the few involved by surprise. (I seem to be counting many deaths lately, of friends, relatives, and personalities whose lives were connected and, for short or long periods of time, concurrent with mine, partly, of course, due to the advanced age of mine, too. As the years go by and my turn gets closer, the more frequently and intensively death plays games with consciousness and thoughts and emotions, the closer He will be breathing to the necks of Father and Mother, that is, not far away from me.)

Aunt Anna was a rather forgotten existence living at the fringes of what had remained of that great family. The Immediate concerns following her death came temporarily to the fore and confronted what one would call the "close family circle", mainly Father, unexpectedly, whilst her carer and neighbors were counting the last days of her life. I mean posthumous concerns with regards to settling unfinished business, inheritance, etc., of anyone who leaves the worldly, so they are concluded in the best possible way and in the interest of the remaining relatives. Until her death aunt Anna featured in the margins of my own book of life and memory banks, a leaf of a distant, almost obscure branch of my family tree, which was not long ago before her death I had begun to explore. Naturally, her death affected me only imperceptibly, hardly at all, from either an emotional or material point of view. It did not bring any emotions of sorrow, as had been the case with my grandparents and uncle Marios. I would not be endowed with any inheritance.

That was not a matter of indifference or stone-heartedness on my part. After all, she was a member of the broader family, that much I could not ignore. On the contrary, I was moved by the way Father, as by default her closest relative, squeezed the last remnants of his strength and energy from the depleted reservoirs of old age, and settled the formalities of Anna’s death, and protected her meagre possessions, her tiny apartment and a few thousand euros, from some shady characters of her environment who coveted them. From a pragmatic point of view, she was a second-degree relative of mine, a first cousin of Father’s, and the surname we shared was the obvious thing that linked us: two consecutive lines in the white-pages, in addition to several obscure genes, a common DNA -as they say. But when a leaf turns yellow and falls under the generation tree, when a branch of that tree dies, as it happened with aunt Anne's family, we tend to look a little further down the tree: its trunk, its roots, its history.

And so it happened. As if her death were a milestone in my own life journey, made me pause and turn my head back: into the past, as deep in it as possible, as deep as the memories and testimonies of the still living allowed. I am fully aware that most of the road I have, myself, left behind. It is well-known and logical and commonplace: as the years go by, as the future ahead shrinks, as memory and recollections from the past outweigh ambitions and expectations and dreams for the future, the more the mind is inclined to stare back and delve into the realms of the past, sometimes gratefully, other times with regrets, poignancy or nostalgia, the more it strives to hold on to the accumulated past, retain it in the memory banks of his brain, tooth and nail, perhaps to nurture and keep it alive in his mind until the end. We observe this tendency in conversations with the elderly -and ourselves, as we grow older. Plans for a contracted future are limited to the food we will have for lunch or what the weather will be like, today or maybe tomorrow, what necessities we need to purchase, or whether will hear news from children and grandchildren soon, maybe a walk in the park or a brief and low-key holiday. Some say all this weighing and re-weighing of the past is a subconscious effort to relive parts of our past lives during the remainder of our days, as many times as possible, through memories and experiences, under the light of the knowledge we acquired.

The death of aunt Anna was therefore expected and happened naturally. After 88 years of life, she had her fair share of life, as one may say rather inappropriately and with a dose of cynicism. Anyway, “let’s live to remember her” as we would like to wish after the death of someone in lieu of condolences. In the Ibrişimci family photograph taken around 1930, signed by a Jewish photographer, a certain E. Ahilla, Anna, a nearly three-year-old girl sitting at the feet of her dad great-uncle Elias, the latest offspring of a vibrant and thriving family from Melnik, looks with admirable seriousness at the lens – with the same big eyes that characterized the whole family from Father's side. Her hair was straight, short, well combed, dark, shiny from the brilliantine applied for the occasion, matching a dark dress and patent leather sandals. Her complexion was swarthy nearly of a chocolaty tone -perhaps from tanning under the summer sun, perhaps from the uneven lighting in the studio, or perhaps from not being enough photogenic. Little Anna's dark complexion were contrasted with her white socks, the light-gray suit of her father, and the white face of a male doll with a hat –a caricature of a dancer of the time, the kind of item photographers of the time gave to toddlers to keep them still and quiet. But Anna focused with discipline and seriousness on the lens, holding the drooping doll indifferently. She was to be the last of the family members in that 1930 photo to bid farewell to the worldly.

As a child, I met aunt Anna a couple of times that I can remember. The first, with a cousin who lived across the street from her apartment, was on a Sunday morning before, whilst we were both excited and could not wait to watch in a cinema called “DIMITRA”, next door to aunt Anna’s apartment block, the double and sometimes triple-film show –one of those that inevitably included an animated and or a Laurel and Hardy comedy short film, along with a Hollywood western or historical epic. Aunt Anna, I remember, offered us in her tiny kitchen, on a small table crammed next to the glazed kitchen door, a little breakfast comprising a cup of milk and biscuits to dunk in it. In truth, there had not been much give-and-take with Elias’ household, as the greater family grew and spread out in the suburbs, in tandem with the relentless construction and its merciless expansion, and the prolonged absences of Father and Mother in out-of-town employment assignments. Nor do I remember us talking, let alone what was said, when Father presented me, a shy and tacit teenager to Elias in his 28^th of October Street apartment where he was staying with his children in his late years, as a farewell visit shortly before his death, at his wish it must be said. At that time, I was one of the young and promising hopefuls to carry and honor the name of the Ibrişimci clan whose reins were held by Elias during the years of the uprooting and immigration.

English translation. Uncle Elias, as the eldest son, had emerged early on and, since the death of the patriarch great-grandfather Panayiotis de facto, as the central figure of the family. He was the rock in the chaotic days of the forced immigration from Melnik and the cohesive link of the family in the first difficult months, on their way to Sidirokastro and then Thessaloniki. He was the only one among the seven brothers who had proper education and managed to climb the social ladder, yet not reaching the maximum of his potential, given the aura of suspicion which envelopes refugees wherever they end up. He graduated from the Commercial School of Stefanos Noukas, of almost tertiary level education at the time, got a job in the processing and trade of tobacco, and became a manager in the business of an illiterate, but wealthy owner, who, clueless as he was, without Elias’ acumen would not have learned anything about commerce and his business would have collapsed. Elias held its reins almost on his own, turned it around and made it profitable, back then in the interwar years, when tobacco processing and trade in the area was a large and growing business.

Elias married Katina nee Tsoprou, "Tsoprouda" as grandfather Leonidas teasingly called her. She descended from the distinguished family of Konstantinos Tsopros of 19^th century Melnik and as an educated woman of a dynamic personality, suited the ambitious Elias. In the family photo, Katina, dignified, almost imperial, gazes away from the lens, with her right palm placed on her left in an almost reverential way, perhaps a reflection of the personality behind the pose. I found Katina's short biography, a typewritten page framed and hung for years on one of the walls of Anna's apartment, only remnant of Katina's existence in this world, in a plastic carrier bag with photograph albums that Father collected and brought home after her death. In the biography, in a purist and archaising from of modern Greek, it was written: "She was born in Melnik in 1895... With a scholarship from the Hellenic State, she attended the Gymnasium of Serres, from which she graduated with HONORS for her excellent performance in her studies, especially, in vocal music performance... Forthwith after graduation, she was appointed as a teacher at Melnik’s Girls' School until 1913, whence she resigned because she was married to Elias P. I., after whom she had seven (7) children, of which only two (2) survived. She passed away at the age of 78 in Thessaloniki."  Her life had a beginning, a middle and an end. She left her trace the world of her time. One could say, in retrospect, that almost everything in her life was somehow predetermined, and determined by the environment and zeitgeist. It happens with every life -more or less.

English translation. Elias’ political conservatism was radically opposed to the views and political leanings of the other members of the family, at least the politicized ones. "He’s right-wing" was one of the phrases that the Father used regularly and emphatically, almost derogatively, in characterizing politically his uncle’s rigid political stance, when he himself for most of his life was a conscientious voter of the Left. Elias’ beliefs had their deep roots in history and his Melnikian heritage. On one hand, there was the instinctive conservatism and a reflexive, natural suspicion of the new in a society, by default deeply conservative, almost backward, however pushed from many quarters of society towards progress and development, that is the typical bourgeois anti-liberalism. On the other hand, and above all, it was founded and consolidated within the anti-Venizelist faction, in so far as Venizelos represented the progressive and extrovert part of the Greek political and national scene after the Balkan wars. Venizelos, one of the protagonists in the post-war negotiations and signatories of the Treaty of Bucharest, was stigmatized in Elias' mind, with some, one might say, anti-dialectical reasoning, as the chief responsible for handing over Melnik to Bulgaria, an arch-antagonist and enemy state of Greece when dividing the spoils of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, which led to the tragic end of the affluent community he had grown into, the uprooting of his family of which he was the de facto head. In a few words, Venizelos betrayed the dreams and ideals of himself and hundreds of his fellow compatriots, turned their lives upside down and brought about uncertainty and misery. Perhaps, his ascend to the managerial positions of a medium-sized enterprise in interwar Greece, that is, at the doorstep of the Thessaloniki’s upper middle-class, as the city was emerging from the set-backs of successive wars, despite the relatively small fortune he eventually managed to accumulate, contributed to the crystallization of his political ideas or, if not ideas, an unshakable political persuasion. He represented the extreme right in the political spectrum of the broader family, which although had no working-class traditions ingrained, it nevertheless found itself positioned closer to the considerable and militant working-class of the city. Elias followed his conservatism with extreme consistency and zeal until the end of his life. An avid reader of the conservative newspaper Βραδυνή, intertwined in life with the conservative politician Stefanos Stephanopoulos and other political actors of the same ilk, he detached himself from the rest of the family and built a very own autonomous circle in life. Any testimonies about paternalistic interventions or intra-family political conflicts and quarrels did not reach my ears. He must have respected the opposite political views and will of the others.

Katina and Elias raised Dimitris, the serene and composed teenager in that same family photo who stood smiling behind his mum and dad. He was their beloved ‘Takis’ who studied and became a lawyer, promising to climb one step higher than his father in the social ladder. I discovered his name, after an internet search, in a picture of a hand-written page with the “List of lawyers crossed off from the Register of the Bar Associations in year 1943”.  The word "deceased" was scribbled next to his name. His was amongst twenty-two other names: Yomtov Yakoel, Camhi Elias, Cohen Abraham, Cohen Alfredo, Cohen Elias, Cohen Lazarus, Cohen Simandov, Kisspi Isosif, Levis Abraham, Masarano Albert, Moses Saul, Nahmia Samuel, Ovadia Elijah, Revah Joseph, Shiaki Albert, Shiaki Isaac and Faratzi Menahem; the names of Jewish lawyers, threads in the fabric of the pre-war society of Thessaloniki, who were expelled from the bar on February 27, 1943, just two weeks after the arrival in the city of the Hauptsturmführer of the SS and Eichmen's henchmen Dieter Wisliceny and Alois Brunner, along with 100 men following an order from the Military Administration of Thessaloniki. And then, they were uprooted from the city. What preceded and followed in the tragic lives of the Jews, not just the lawyers amongst them, is well known and documented. History rarely dwells on the fate of ordinary mortals, who think, act, work, struggle, and fight in the background of the great historical events, while without these actors, constituents of what we call social classes and human mass, there is no historical movement. The early death of Takis is still recalled by Father· an eight-year-old child then, he remembers hearing of his death at the threshold of his Toumba's poor dwelling, and crying at the news.

Elias' and Katina’s two other children, Lakis and Anna, did not distinguish themselves in life as much as their parents or even their prematurely deceased brother. In the 1930 photo, Lakis' eyes did not have the spark and glow of those of his brother. However, his smile betrayed an inexhaustible childlike vivacity, sometimes associated with an innate intelligence. There are always exceptions to any rule or stereotype. The early death of Takis in 1943 and then of Katina in 1978, the steely and impassionate personality of Elias, brought the two siblings closer, but at the same time lowered their horizons. Perhaps, the individual personality and intelligence played its part, in addition to the conservative dogmatism and authoritarianism of Elias, which could have suppressed many of their ambitions, guided them to well-trodden paths of post-war Greece. Lakis became a civil servant, Anna took over the housewife duties from Katina, whilst attending Sunday schools, and assisting the local priest in her parish. Both lived under the same roof with their father, until the end of a life in January 1983 which spanned ninety-four years. Despite his weak heart and several heart attacks, the bourgeois tenant of Mackenzie King's “first apartment building with elevator”, during his late years bedridden in the lesser apartment of October 28^th Street, maintained until his very last day his clarity of mind, along with his stern political conservatism. Such was the testimony of Father, who had great respect and esteem for his uncle, and revered him even more than his own father.

Lakis with the early but small pension of the former tax collector, married a widow from the town of Sindos in the outskirts of Thessaloniki, left the family apartment in search of a last sparkle in love and maybe solace, before a rather premature death despite his not much advanced middle-age. Anna ended-up a spinster, rather predictably. Perhaps from personal disappointments in her life, perhaps from vanity and setting high standards to possible suitors due to an arrogance and complacency bred by her beauty as a young woman, or perhaps as a conscious choice to turn mind and body away from love and lust, dictated by her strict adherence to her religious dogma; that is, the fear of God and the hell that awaits sinners in after-life. Who knows? She was undoubtfully beautiful as a young girl and woman. In the plastic carrier bag Father brought home after her death, there was a photo-album and in it, amongst the photos of countless excursions to various parts of Greece with groups, mostly with friends from Sunday Schools and her parish, I found the portrait of a young man in the uniform of a merchant marine officer, and a love note written on the back: "To beloved Annoula to remember me with love". That seemed the only circumstantial evidence of an apparently short and frivolous love affair in Anna’s existence.

In short, the life of aunt Anna could be described as measured and sedate, if not outright dull, without distinctions, devoid of any drama and emotional peaks and troughs, deep sorrows, and exaltations. She eventually found certainty and solace in the church. Her life could by no means be described as full and colorful, even by her close friends, relatives, and neighbors. On the contrary, colorless, lukewarm, monastic, would be more apt adjectives. Like walking on an open plain without trees, under gloomy gray skies. That life of hers must have passed quickly, albeit without much stress, without worries about work or raising children, without the inevitable quarrels of a married couple or the frictions of a love relations: there had been no man in her life and, thus, no object to fight with. With the small joys of carefree group excursions to the country, to the mountains and the coast, to monasteries and the holy destinations Greece can offer, her daily occupation with the affairs of her parish and attending to the church, her devotion and saintly work was awarded with a certificate of praise, framed, and hung on a living-room wall next to her mother’s biography as a highlight of her uneventful life.  English translation. 

With the world of the Greek Orthodox Church I had no open accounts, apart from the mandatory, nearly coercive attendance of liturgies and services. Only prejudices have I formed, which daily life in Greece retrospectively justifies. Yet, I presume, apart from those unbearably lengthy liturgies and services, like weddings and funerals, outdated and kitsch church festivals with the main purpose of fundraising from church flock donations, and the like, the life of a religious person can follow other paths, more secular, cosmopolitan, colorful, even spiritual. But how should I know? In aunt Anna's case, a noose was tightening around her in tandem with the growing mental helplessness and senility and the deterioration of her eyesight until virtual blindness. There remained two or three shadowy characters from her parish, another devout Christian named Karapetsa, a certain Petros, apparently the chief candlelighter in her church, along with a few Albanian and Georgian paid carers who looked after her in the blindness and senility of her late years. It was rumored that some of these parishioners, purportedly genuine caring friends, preyed like crows on her micro-deposits and little apartment, until they were scattered by the intervention of Father, the closest remaining relative for all intents and purposes, including inheritance matters. Those characters were unseen in the funeral and memorial service of Anna, therefore, all previous talk of heartfelt friendships and compassion for the helpless woman rendered itself meaningless.

Eventually, as it is with most mortals, aunt Anna’s memory faded away, "defeated by time." The sun set, and her grey, unillustrious life was consigned to oblivion. The family branch of patriarch Elias, in the absence of any descendants fell from the tree of generations and was scattered by the winds of time. The plastic carrier bag with the photo album, the framed portrait of her brother's Takis, the sign with his name outside his law office, Katina's CV, the death certificate of Elias, a certificate from her church praising her philanthropic activities, those and only those, are buried amongst other odds and ends in a corner of a family basement storage room, until the future clears them. 

Ancestry 2 - From Melnik: To Salonika

Great-grandparents Panayiotis and Katina gave life to six children. Maybe more, but six survived to adulthood under conditions which can rather be described as adverse, despite the relative economic prosperity of the Greek community of Melnik. Elias was the privileged firstborn and the pillar of the family during the arduous years of the Balkan wars and in what would follow afterwards. He was a grown-up man, a newly married family man, when the uprooting of 1913 happened. He would eventually mature into a well-educated and highly respected citizen. Then Giannis was born, followed by grandfather Leonidas, Calliope, Magdalene, and the much loved last-born, sickly, and handsome Socrates. With the sole exception of great-uncle Elias, who managed to attain a higher education, graduated from the private School of Commerce of Mr. Noukas in Thessaloniki –rather prestigious among the few schools of higher education of that time, in an otherwise transactional city and who, together with great-grandmother Katina, took over the reins of the family after the death of the patriarch, the other children of Panayiotis did not progress beyond the elementary education of primary or the first years of secondary education. That is, they had not been taught and acquired more than the basic skills of reading, writing, and some arithmetic, along with what was patched up by personal initiative, self-study and, of course, whatever could have been learned in the so-called "university of life". The natural plight affecting any refugees with shattered livelihoods and the further historical upheavals that ensued and affected the lives of the city and the country that accepted them (their very own country as one might say), played the main role in the inadequate education of all but Elias. Inevitably, in the absence of any significant inheritance or revenue from property, that is with whatever valuables the family had managed to bring along from Melnik, and some meager reparations from the Greek state in the aftermath of the Balkan War and before the onset of WWI, it is easy to understand that social ascend from the strata of manual labor and low-level unskilled employment did not materialize for most of Panayiotis’ and Katina’s children.

Elias equipped with the skills he gained from his higher education and the natural gift of intelligence quickly took on a role of the manager in the business of tobacco processing and trading, owned by a virtually illiterate and, according to rumors, utterly incompetent and vulgar man, established himself and his family in the city center, became self-sufficient and prospered. Now undisputedly middle to higher middle class, they moved into a fashionable flat in Mackenzie King Street, in an elegant apartment building still standing in Thessaloniki city center. It was one of the first few buildings in the pre-war city which featured an elevator. Uncle Elias had suffered from niggling heart problems from early middle age, and climbing several flights of stairs daily would have been a struggle that could potentially put his life at risk. Yet, he escaped narrowly from the clutches of death in several occasions, and despite three and, perhaps, more heart attacks, he died in an old age.

Yiannis was the outsider of the family. He met a grass widow in the Upper Town, the old suburb below Thessaloniki’s Acropolis, primarily occupied by Turks before the “liberation” of Thessaloniki by the Greek Army in 1912, and cut himself off from the core of the family. Father remembers visiting him a couple of times in a small house where he and his partner lived as outcasts rarely venturing downtown or visiting mother and siblings. It was mentioned that the family disowned him. Most likely, Yiannis had fallen in love with that widow of the Upper Town, he had been enveloped by an unconventional, albeit deep and lasting love, and having thus rejected family and social conventions of the era, had alienated himself on his own initiative from the rest of the family. His traces and those of his children, if he had any and they still exist, disappeared after the war.

Grandfather Leonidas, after a few years as a manual worker in a tobacco processing plant, as he was approaching retirement with growing health problems, he was assigned a rather soft job of minimum responsibility, albeit low paid, as a concierge in the building that housed the association of tobacco merchants of Thessaloniki. Perhaps, older brother Elias offered a hand through some of his connections in the business in rather difficult circumstances for the working folk of the city. That would be the main employment in his unillustrious life before retirement, notwithstanding the couple of odd jobs during the years of the German Occupation and the Civil Ware: a peddler with a tray slung around his neck roaming the streets of the town selling candies and cigarettes or, more ambitiously, as a partner in the greengrocery he opened with his brother-in-law, which however was shut down after a few months of incurring losses. Nevertheless, Great-grandmother Katina with the help of Leonidas, who was third in order in seniority, if not lower in intelligence or ability amongst the family members (after the self-sufficient and established bourgeois Elias, and the defection or the alleged ostracization of Yiannis), with some gold sovereigns that the family had in their possession and the government compensation from the surrender of Melnik to the Bulgarians, purchased and settled in a house vacated by its Turkish owners, after the mass population exchanges that took place in the aftermath of the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922.   

The house, where the Ibrişimci family barring Elias, Yiannis and Calliope resided for the best part of the interbellum years was built in the days of the Ottoman rule of the city, in a neighborhood which remained vivid amongst my childhood memories: the stream that was brimming from the Upper Town in the rainy days, dry otherwise, through vacant dusty lots and the small back streets of childhood games and adventurous wanderings. The local urban landscape was still dominated by two-storey houses that belonged to Greeks, previously and large owned Turks and handed over to or bought by Greeks after the ordered population exchanges and migration waves in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars and the Asia Minor Catastrophe. Many of those houses before the War, indeed the most impressive ones with views on the bay and the Olympus Mountain across, mainly belonged to wealthy Jewish families, some of them to Turkish beys or Bulgarian landowners. Scattered amongst them there were smaller dwellings, even shanties, for the poorest classes of each ethnic group.

The family house stood in an anonymous alley between the Deligiorgi and Gambetta Streets, close to the more prominent Fleming Street and the Hippocratic Hospital (the gift of Baroness Hirsch to the Jewish community), east of the city center. Much later, the Municipality named our alley by the more glorious ‘Hekabe Street’. Even later it laid asphalt on its dusty and muddy soil, uneven by the gullies from the water of rain or the house drains. In 1935, the year Father was born, in the two-storey family house lived grandfather Leonidas along with his young wife Eudoxia, the refugee girl from Bayidir of Izmir, the mysterious Magdalene and the handsome Socrates, the youngest of the Ibrişimci family, Father’s favourite uncle. In the same house, somewhere between 1936 and 1937, great-grandmother Katina breathed her last breath away from the place where she was born and brought up, but content with the knowledge that most of her children had settled and were rebuilding their lives in a welcoming environment with opportunities that a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural new homeland had to offer. They became, we all became Thessalonians. The war, the German occupation, the tragedies, big or small, national or family, that followed, the limp national restoration after the Civil War, the fate of her children and grandchildren, for better or for worse, Katina did not live to see. But she endured in life her share of calamities with the perseverance and strength and the will that her determined countenance in the family photo amongst her children and their young families betrayed.

All the houses of the neighborhood, of the Thessalonian roots where I sprang up from: of Victoria and Mary the Jewesses who survived the concentration camps; of Isaac, also amongst the few who survived the holocaust and the even fewer who returned to their birthplace; of the Tsiotas’ family of my childhood friend Christakis; of the Kazineris’ family, with their enclosed yard; of the mansion of Tsapatsarena, the legendary amongst the town-folk tavern owner, and of her partner, across the street from her tavern, itself a shanty; the more imposing house of the misanthropic theologian at the other side of the stream, with views from its balconies, on the vacant lot where we played football. Most of the two-storey mansions and more common dwellings and hovels, with a few exceptions of families who resisted the temptation of some flats in lieu of their plots to erect ugly multi-storey buildings, were swept away by the bulldozers in the frenzy of urban construction that followed the war, along with the stories and livelihoods of generations, of Greeks and Turks and Jews, who inhabited the neighborhoods of the city.

Calliope, for her part, was well and presumably happily married with an educated man, a compatriot of hers, Georgios Papazoglou, from a wealthy and renowned family of Melnik. Papazoglou's silk mill along with that of Tsopros is mentioned in books and narratives about the town, employed up to eighty workers. Georgios was educated at a vocational school for dyes and paints and other such chemicals in Paris. Of course, studies in Paris in those years could only be financially maintained by wealthy families. In Thessaloniki, he set-up his own business, a workshop dyeing furs and other fabrics. Father still remembers the fur garment, which Giorgios had presented grandmother Eudoxia, his sister-in-law, as a wedding present, and which survived decades in her wardrobe before she handed it to one of her daughters-in-law. It was not a big deal, Georgios then said, just a scarf. But any fur garment in such years of misery and poverty for the working classes were for the very few bourgeois of the city, a timeless symbol of wealth and status. How could this befit a refugee girl from the slums of Toumba?

A magnificent photograph of the surviving members of the family, one, two and three generations before mine, was taken around 1930. The late patriarch was absent. It shows Georgios and great-aunt Calliope as a couple in affectionate harmony, Calliope's hand resting, with an expression of marital trust and devotion on Georgios' left thigh, while Andreas -their one-year-old baby child- with a face full of wonder about what was happening, sitting on his dad's right thigh. Their eldest son of Georgios and Calliope, Takis, the first cousin of Father, with the sly smile and wearing, inevitably, for such occasions a blue naval uniform of official occasions, was looking at the photographer with his head bent and his eyes looking up. He became a close friend of Father’s and a frequent visitor to our house until his late years, often bringing with him a bottle of whiskey and a sack of photographs and books about Melnik: to discuss the past, the family, their common roots, the life evolving along the different branches of the big family tree. Great-uncle Takis in the books he left with Father, and I found in our bookcase, had highlighted with a bright yellow highlighter all passages pertaining to the Papazoglou silk mill, every single reference to his name. He recognized in these books with pride something more important than a common place of their origins as human beings, one that would transcend the narrow confines of his own and his ancestors' existence.