Ancestry 12 - Yiannis & Vasiliki: German Occupation

The misfortune that befell the family with Giorgos’ disability, and their shame, did not deter Yiannis and Vassiliki. In the peaceful interval before the war and the Occupation, they persevered to have more children: to perpetuate the family name and life. After Giorgos, Alice was born. She turned out to be the most dynamic and the, ultimately, domineering, and authoritative character in the family; three years later, in 1938, Mother and her half-twin sister who would grow to be rather meek and malleable personalities, certainly weaker and more insecure than their elder sister. Daily life in the village carried on as normal without many incidents, with Kotis and Dominique occupying the small old house built by the "Resettlement" Agency in the years of population exchanges, Mr. Yiannis, Vassiliki and their children in the more spacious, newly built house in one corner of the one-acre family plot. Yiannis’ main occupation was the teaching at local primary schools, but, as a side job, he was assisting the ageing Kotis with the bahçe and the wheat field, whilst maintaining and improving the two houses and the plots of land, as well supporting Vassiliki with the care of Giorgos, hidden from the prying eyes of fellow villagers.

The relatively serene and undisturbed family life was abruptly interrupted by the onset of war in the winter of 1940; a winter that was to mark a heroic epic in Greece’s modern history, endless accounts of which we were lectured at school. Grandfather Yiannis, along with Apostolis, Leonidas, and the other able-bodied young men from the village were conscripted and headed to the mountains of Albania to fight the invading Italians of Mussolini. They returned victorious after a few months, in their skanky fatigues, overwhelmed by lice, some disabled by severe frostbites, but most of them, thank God, safe and alive, into the peaceful realm of an everyday life in Magnesia. They had fulfilled their duty to their homeland and its people.English translation. 

The countryside of Thessaloniki was only scarcely affected by the war that got in full swing in Europe upon their return. In the villages, where the bulk of labor was committed to producing for own and family consumption, where the necessities for a man’s sustenance, milk, bread, vegetables, eggs, were rarely lacking from the dinner table, upheavals like the Greco-Italian war, and even the German Occupation that ensued, did not significantly affect lives, which, by and large, were immersed in the stillness of daily routine –at least from a materialistic point of view. The lifestyles were basic and elemental, the requirements and demands few, most households self-sufficient. They remained so: their lives were easily adapted to the circumstances that war and privation brought about. Yet, they fared better than the nearby city folk.   

Then, the Germans arrived. They emerged as grey figures amongst the hustle and dust of motorized battalions, the crackling of their boots on the streets dried and hardened by the summer sun behind securely locked shutters. Thessaloniki, its port and railway, its agricultural and industrial surroundings acquired some significance at that stage of the war, before the invasion of the USSR, although occupying Greece was probably a footnote in Hitler's "regional strategy" and grander domination plans. The house of Yiannis and Vasiliki, as well as the house next-door, where uncle Leonidas with his wife Fani and their children lived, was commandeered by the Germans, which, however, turned out to be not as ominous as it sounds. In practice, it meant that German officers from the local garrison would use one or two of their rooms for their sleep and toilette. The relations of those officers with Yiannis, Kotis, Leonidas, and other men of the village, with few exceptions, formed into something typical of the symbiotic, yet unwarlike relationship between the conquered, a fatalistically introvert community helplessly subjugated by force, and a foreign conqueror. An attitude was formed, that of tolerance or unwilling obedience by the powerless and unarmed, whose rhythm of life was somewhat unexpectedly upset, towards a powerful and conceited invader, who, fully aware of his power, commanded and imposed orders unchallenged. The occupier grabbed at will whatever they needed, in an explosive atmosphere of whispers and anxiety from the enslaved side and orders commanded by brutal foreign voices, with the sporadic non-compliance suppressed by force.

English translation. Then there were the few, the "collaborators" and profiteers of doom, who not only obsequiously bowed their heads, but actively supported and cooperated with the occupier: they sucked up to them, they extorted the populace, bought from the needy at humiliatingly low prices to resell with huge profits; they surrendered to the conqueror not just “land and water”, but also some unyielding human souls. At every sharp bend of history opportunism lurks, whether driven by cowardice and the instinct for self-preservation or motivated by greed.

Despite the oppressive atmosphere that spread over the village, Mr. Yiannis' daughters, especially the twin pretty sisters, Mother and Stella, became objects of sympathy from the Wehrmacht officers who dwelled in the family home. Apart from the petty teasing in a language incomprehensible to them and their parents, the officers regularly offered candies and chocolates, and these treats were greeted by the two children with the joy of those deprived of such luxuries. In the merciless and faceless souls of conquerors, barely mentioned in historical narratives that mostly overlook the individuality of characters of common people, there lurks somewhere hidden, genuine souls and manners of a timeless humanity.English translation. 

Eventually, the Germans, as they had arrived at the tranquil, peace-loving village, so they departed: without as much “fire and steel”, without mass executions and killings and atrocities witnessed elsewhere. What could they burn and destroy in such an unremarkable village, apart from the bridges of Gallikos and Axios rivers nearby, and the railway lines that passed by the outskirts of the village? Whose killings and what destruction would the Germans benefit from, in a village of vegetable farms, at a fair distance from the mountains from where the guerilla army commenced their forays? What point would there be in the senseless obliteration of livelihoods when most of its inhabitants bowed down to their orders without much ado and continued with their lives, whilst some of them, prominent or not, collaborated with the enemy -even with zest?English translation. 

Nevertheless, the retreat and eventual withdrawal of the occupiers did not bring peace and order "overnight", against the expectations of many of the villagers. The grumbling tolerance towards the Germans was transformed, through whispers and news that overflowed throughout the country from radio broadcasts, from newspapers that passed from hand to hand, from conversations and political fermentation in cafes, into a sympathy for the guerrillas-cum-liberators; for those hitherto invisible, otherworldly, legendary characters of the EAM-ELAS organizations who resisted and fought the Germans. The villagers did welcome them, perhaps instinctively, as sole legitimate representatives of the masses of peasants, workers, and intellectuals, along with few enlightened members of the petit-bourgeoisie -at least during those drunken times. In the towns and villages, the bliss of liberation carried them away, the morale and their hopes for the future were elevated. Kotis greeted them, grim and expressionless behind his gray mustache, with his left fist raised in front of the front door of the “Resettlement” house. He was a rather apolitical man, by no means influenced by socialist ideas or allured by a “People’s Republic” communist future. In fact, he was totally ignorant of such notions. On the other hand, his son-in-law, Mr. Yiannis, the teacher, the de facto intellectual figure of the village, gave solemn speeches at gatherings of peasants and guerrillas, fronting his village community in his school yard and the village square: in popular plenums pulsating with the joy of liberation. Yet, his political sermons had no significant impact to the illiterate or semi-literate consciences, neither did they inspire any detectable enthusiasm for the new, but rather nebulous future, he was advocating for.

Peppered were those exultant and jubilant speeches of Mr. Yiannis, with charming words, such as a “People’s Republic” or "Power to the People", as they were aligned with the slogans, but generally ill-defined, un-crystallized and opaque political objectives of EAM-ELAS and the Communist Party behind it. Rather foggy, nevertheless, for the mostly illiterate populace, even perhaps for himself. Their content was rather vague and idealistic. His speeches were as exultant as when celebrating with his pupils and their parents the Resurrection of Christ at the end of the Greek Easter, but devoid of agitational content. No matter, however, that these speeches acquired for the ears of many people a pro-communist tinge at a time of relentless propaganda and ideological war. The threat of a communist movement, or rather a revolution, that would shake up the established order in Greece had already been identified before the end of the war by the so-called reactionary powers and propagated accordingly. It was consolidated as a “real and present” danger in many souls and minds, at a turning point in history when everything was in flux, where everyone was trying to pick up themselves and whatever remained of their lives. A few intellectuals amongst them were striving to put political thoughts in order, grasp certain ideas and values and form a credible worldview, emerging on the ruins and the poverty the war left behind. Stalin's Soviet Union, whose Red Army had marched as far as Berlin, was envisaged by a handful of conscientiously progressive minds, as symbol of a possible, viable, real socialism, a beacon of a bright historical future for humanity. The most daring amongst them even tried to propagate such beliefs and ideas, at a time when a global ideological struggle were reaching a historical climax. Yet, at this historical junction, who could have foreseen the ensuing armed conflict and the bloody civil war that would bring a poor, devastated country further down to her knees?

Ancestry 11 - Yiannis & Vasiliki: An Unknown Uncle

It did not take long before Vasiliki became pregnant. And it did not take long for Mr. Yiannis’ household to endure their first misfortune; one of several that would follow and eventually disturb lives and affect matters: in the house and the village community, with Yiannis’ employment his primary school teaching -with life as whole. Vassiliki, two months pregnant, fell seriously ill with malaria. The still uncultivated lands further west from the village of Nea Magnesia, where the family put down roots, an area between Gallikos and Axios rivers, was covered by swamplands. Mosquitoes were then a scourge; a mosquito bite potentially fatal. Still a pesky pest nevertheless, a major nuisance for the village inhabitants, from the dusk to the dawn of long summers, although not as life threatening as it used to be. Neither the doctor who prescribed quinine in unregulated quantities, nor Vasiliki did have any idea of the side-effects of those drugs could have, if any, to her or of any harm they could cause to the baby she was carrying. Bedridden, suffering with sweats and high temperature, her life seemed in danger; and there was neither enough accumulated experience, nor time to weigh trade-offs, or assess the long-term risks of any medication and treatment. A few doses of quinine helped her recover. Whether it was the medication or the disease itself or something else that impaired the health of the new born could only be hypothesized, but it sadly happened.

Giorgos E was born a stunted, weak, and sickly and a mentally retarded child. They cared for him, and cared for him as much as they could manage, until he met a premature, yet expected and in a sense welcome death at the young age of seventeen. He had been the family’s secret sorrow until his death, hidden from the outside world, kept within the walls of their house or the fenced bahçe: his whole world during a short life. Severely disabled and retarded children, within the small, backward society of the village and beyond, in the cosmopolitan city not far away– was considered a stigma, a cause of unreasonable shame and distress, compounded by the negligible care and support from the virtually non-existent welfare state of prewar Greece. We knew from the margins of the unofficial ancient history deliberately excluded from school textbooks, that the ancient Spartans threw their sickly and crippled babies into the notorious Καιάδας, an underground cavern of death. In Greece of the 1930s and 1940s, families were merely ashamed to show them to the outside world: to take them by hand or on wheelchair to festivals, celebrations, public gatherings; in short, to enjoy as a family the little joys life in the community had to offer. There were the prejudices. There was the continual concern of what people would whisper behind their backs weighing heavily upon them, their gossiping about in houses and doorsteps when drinking coffee or ouzo with the neighbors; there were stern or pitiful looks or even stranger’s finger pointing at them. All this would cause deep feelings of self-pity and shame and resentment to two otherwise proud and honest parents who were normally treated with deference. Such social behavior is difficult to analyze with the cultural and social metrics of today, but apparently this incomprehensible feeling of shame in disability has been interwoven with Greek culture and its inherent prejudices for centuries. Possibly, due to, on one hand, an innate superiority complex against neighboring nations lacking in glorious history, on the other, an inferiority complex against the more advanced and affluent societies of Europe. Or, it could simply be explained by the unbearable weight of ancient history and heritage on a young nation’s shoulders and, since the founding of the modern Greek state after centuries of Ottoman rule, the contrived indoctrination of a collective conscience with national myths or a sanitized and glorified historical past.English translation. 

Neither Mother nor any of his sisters who lived along with Giorgos ever mentioned anything about his days and existence -to me and the other descendants of the family. Almost seventy years after his death, on a spontaneous visit with my aunts to Agios Athanasios’s Cemetery, where my grandparents had been buried, inside its dreary ossuary—a stuffy, half-dark warehouse with dusty planks for shelves around its walls, next to my grandparents' bones, another chest named Giorgos E. caught my attention and surprised me, as it was labelled with Mother’s maiden name. “There had been a brother of ours in this world,” my aunt admitted when asked, in a whispering voice betraying a secret guilt. I understood. Once upon a time, a man of the same blood as mine lived. An uncle I have never happened to know from photographs or family narratives. Nothing about his life was uttered in numerous family gatherings of endless assorted stories and confessions and anecdotes from the past -until that moment of revelation of a family guilt in the ossuary. Giorgos’ few dreary days in the bahçe and the house had been consigned in the dark depths of the family history.

Ancestry 10 - Yiannis & Vasiliki: To Nova Magnesia

Mr. Yiannis left the village of his ancestors and the town of Arta and emigrated: he ‘threw a black stone behind his back,’ as the Greek saying goes, never to return, and studied to become a teacher at the Pedagogical Academy of Athens. That would be a remarkable accomplishment at that junction of modern Greece’s history and under the circumstances, family and national. Even more commendably, he completed a postgraduate course in Pedagogy, offered to select few young and ambitious teachers, under the auspices of the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Athens. During his studies, he also allowed time to develop a dexterity in playing the violin; a violin that is still preserved amongst other family relics in his house in Magnesia, but which I never heard him play. In short, the light of knowledge and education illuminated an open mind and he undertook, as he was approaching the prime of his life, to propagate it to a whole generation of refugees.

How he ended up, a young teacher in the early 1920’s, from Athens, the power base of Greece’s over-centralized administration, to the region of Macedonia and, eventually, the relatively deprived western outskirts of Thessaloniki, a cauldron of multiculturalism with complex and colorful characteristics, albeit also heir of an unshakeable, and, for the enlightened few from the old Greece of the south, unbearable Balkan heritage, remains unknown. In a historical phase that was characterized, if anything else, by the uncertainty of what tomorrow would bring and social volatility, it is difficult to imagine the grandfather I met and conversed with as a child, a rational and measured, a prudent and shrewd personality, undertaking on his own impulse a venture with substantial risks, potentially injurious to his career and life; a career that was seemingly built honorably with tenacity and toil. He never came across as overambitious or romantic; he was level-headed and a pragmatist. One can only presume that it was a kind of a ministerial directive or decree of appointment that dispatched him from the safety, peace and quiet of the South to this volatile region of the new Greek dominions, in the admittedly portentous drive of the Greek State to improve the literacy of the refugees, instil a national conscience and assimilate the still sizeable ethnic minorities, rather than an inherent propensity in search of diversity and a professional challenge into the unknown. After all, waves of migrants from Epirus and the provinces of modern Greece converged in unison towards Athens. But Greece’s territorial expansion and population explosion that the influx of refugees effected, the imperative of reconstruction and economic development also gave rise to centrifugal forces from the capital to the relatively more affluent and dynamic towns in the country, particularly the greater metropolitan area of Thessaloniki in the north, which established itself as the Second City, euphemistically called the joint-capital. Thus, he was appointed teacher to the primary school of Magnesia and, shortly afterwards, he became the principal of a school in the locality of Bosphorus, in the refugee working class district of Menemeni. But in which new district of Thessaloniki back then was not the refugee element from Asia Minor and the Black Sea becoming dominant, even surpassing in numbers some of the ethnicities cohabiting in and around the city for centuries, like Slavs and Jews? The school to which he devoted his teaching energy and passion, and most of his life for that matter, became known to the locals as the "School of Mr. E…", an informal title of recognition and honor. The worlds of his and theirs were still small. A few years before his retirement and despite the detrimental post-war political exploits in which he was involved and eventually repented, he was promoted to a School Inspector of the broader areas of Goumenissa and Ampelokipi, thus reaching the peak of the national teacher grades, albeit in rather unillustrious regions away from the capital.

In the interwar years, as a newly appointed teacher in the village, he met grandmother Vasiliki, Koti’s beautiful daughter. Some matchmaking must have been organized; that's how things were done then: with a coffee and a teaspoon of sweet preserve or vanilla as a treat to one’s guests. Where and when exactly this matchmaking process was initiated, the background behind it, the matchmaker and the parties involved in the ‘negotiations’ and arrangements, any signs of consent or disapproval by the bride or groom, or any details of the discussions would remain unknown.English translation.  They were married under a tree, with the matchmaker appointed by default as the best man, and the blessings of the local priest and, of course, Kotis and Dominique. The family of Mr. Yiannis was conspicuously absent. Both of his parents had long since died, and he himself had been declared on paper as an orphan. Prior to the wedding his brothers and cousins, however, had made the long journey from Arta for the engagement and to acquaint themselves with the prospective bride and her family. But they were insolent in their discontent: neither did they like Vasiliki and Koti's broader family, nor Mr. Yiannis’ new homeland, in which he endeavored to set-up home and raise a family. Many things did they resent, and they made their displeasure rather unashamedly clear with the boldness of uneducated mountain people. Their recalcitrance and conduct, which could only be induced by prejudices and notions from a culture entrenched in the mountains of Epirus, provoked the wrath of Mr. Yiannis. He sent them away in anger and he would never see his brothers and relatives from Epirus again until the very last days of his life.

Nevertheless, the matchmaking proved to be successful in retrospect. It led, if not to a life of bliss (that rarest outcome of anyone’s destiny), to a rather peaceful, satisfying and, one dare says, mildly happy marriage and a content family life, always with respect to the standards of their generation, milieu, and environs. Let us stress again that Vasiliki was a beautiful woman – this was what all her photographs of the time portrayed. Based on external appearances, she seemed too good looking next to an early balding and short in stature Mr. Yiannis. She was also fairly cultivated, thanks to the relative prosperity her family enjoyed during her early years in Istanbul, although she fell short of obtaining a formal education and degrees –extremely difficult for women at that time. She was barely inferior in mind and spirit compared with her husband. Yet, she got on and by in life in his shadow, having accepted his role as the sole breadwinner, the major decision-maker, and undisputed head of the family. "You! Little woman of the common people...,” was a phrase Mr. Yiannis frequently used mockingly to address Vassiliki in some of their domestic disputes. It was an unjust, no matter if, for the most part, was expressed light-heartedly.English translation. 

The evidence overall suggests that Mr. Yiannis and Vassiliki spent a reasonably good life in the village, given theirs and the village folk’s expectations and ambitions. They might have at some point loved each other – like most people who start a family and share a home and a life together, regardless of the small likelihood that this might have been “love from the first sight,” a personal experience of instantaneous and thunderous love at the matchmaker’s first rendezvous, or of the possibility of love of some durable intensity. More important in marriages thus arranged, was that the unwritten agreement between Kotis and his sister was adhered to: in Vassiliki’s dowry, on the piece of land in front of their little house that sheltered them after their arrival from Istanbul, and the vegetable garden, next to the plot where uncle Leonidas set-up his home and grocery store, the newlyweds built a new house, with personal work and the help of Kotis and two or three local builders. There they brought up their offsprings, Mother amongst them, and spent the rest of their lives.

Ancestry 9 - Yiannis & Vasiliki: Mr. Yiannis from Tzoumerka

Grandfather Yiannis descended from the western part of mainland Greece; from a village called The Springs of Arta, best known amongst the locals by its slavic name Vrestenitsa -the place of elms, before modern Greece’s state annexation of Epirus effected the hellenization of many toponyms. The village was built on a small bucolic plateau east of the main bulk of the vast Tzoumerka mountains, under the Kokkinolakka peak, overlooking the river Achelous valley of outstanding beauty. A place too cumbersome to access, on foot or by the other transport means of the era, that is, donkeys or mules, so that one wonders how on earth people gathered a collective strength and will, and found the courage and the resources to climb these mountains, and made this habitat, perched amongst gigantic mountain peaks, viable and lived lives for generations.

Of course, they might have fled up there at a crossroads of history, persecuted by ominous conquering hordes; or their ascend might have been forced by brutal monarchs or avaricious plutocrats, who seized by force the fertile plain that expands from the foothills to the Ionian Sea shores, for the appropriation of wealth and the accumulation of power -those eternal lusts of humans. Hundreds of the oppressed souls of the region perished heroically and marked the history of the place. Not far upslope from the village, brothers Kitsos and Notis of the Botsaris clan, along with the heroic inhabitants of the legendary Souli, besieged in the Monastery of Seltsos, bravely resisted for weeks the Arvanites of Ali Pasha of Ioannina, until they were eventually overwhelmed; only a handful amongst them managed to find escape routes and survive the onslaught. Their women and children, as the legend goes, danced their way to the edge of the cliff of Zalongo before throwing themselves off it into the gorge below to avoid capture.

Perhaps, it was the imposing mountains and their unreachable peaks, the forests and the streams, the mystical life above the clouds, the starry firmament of the pitch-black nights, the closeness to their gods, all those elements that exert an irresistible spiritual attraction. Or, for a few, it might have been the solitude one could find there in abundance, far away from the hustle and bustle of the town of Arta at the foothills of Tzoumerka. For myself and many of my contemporaries, the place had been a terra incognita, my unique link, rusty from the passage of time, being that it was the birthplace of my maternal grandfather, Mr. Yiannis, the primary school teacher.English translation. 

Only once, did I try to climb the slopes of the Tzoumerka mountains by car in search of my grandfather's village and for a glimpse at my family’s heritage. It was a late spring morning, when we began our journey from Arta the largest town in the foothills. The orange orchards in the plain were sleeping under a warm sunshine, dressed in the white of their blossoms; the slopes of the mountains dark green against of the gray ridges, and the bright blue skies beyond. The road was narrow, poorly constructed, asphalted before times immemorial, with endless u-shaped turns, under a dense vegetation of oaks, elms, and beeches. A few fir trees were sparsely scattered on the huge bare rocks that rose above us. The exhausting uphill drive under the canopy, through just a few glades in the luxuriant vegetation, was abruptly interrupted by steep descents down to small ravines warn by crystal-clear water. These were inevitably followed by virtually vertical ascents that seemed to end up at the top of cliffs above us, yet never reaching them. A rare sample of life on our way, a shepherd with his flock of sheep on a plateau, scrutinized in wonder the unexpected visitors. At the end, the seemingly endless ascent through the wilderness frustrated us and we abandoned our trip a few kilometres before reaching our intended destination. It was the nearest to my grandfather's birthplace, where a vital branch of my family was attached to the trunk of our genealogical tree. English translation. With my friend Anna next to me, we had other things in mind and not much time at our disposal. It was one of those micro-existentialist decisions, however, that I regretted in retrospect. 

Then again, I had been thinking… the people of that seemingly oneiric place might have had their the lucid sunny days, their limpid water springs, their cool and crispy air of the mountain tops, their trees and lucid sky, their pitch-black silent nights, broken only by the rustle of the leaves, the songs of birds, the cries of animals or aeolian sounds, the moon looming and the stars, through the starry firmament, twinkling bright like nowhere else in the grand cities of civilization; the place and the landscape belonged to them -absolutely. Yet, they lived difficult lives of daily struggles. The beauty of cosmos around them falls, through habit, into the background of the daily grind. Before the naturalists and the tourists, those specimens of human existence, which evolved through the emergence of the bourgeoisie and the explosion of urbanization, in a period when grandfather was still a small child, this daily struggle withered their lives. Eventually, the materialistic progress spilled over and as far as those remote geographical margins. Some of the shocks of the industrial revolution have been felt all the way up to the mountains of Epirus and its people. The sirens of a breathless progress approaching and spreading could hardly be resisted, especially by the younger generation. Whose young person defenses could resist the lure of a richer and more comfortable life, materially and spiritually? Would one rather ride the train of progress towards a better life, from a valid hypothesis based on ample evidence and hitherto experience, or miss it and left stranded in a withering world of constant and irrevocable decline?

When the clock of existence strikes midnight, as it always happens everywhere and for everyone (and it happens with mathematical brutality), the weight of sorrow, bitterness and repentance weighs heavily on the heart of the mortals who did not seize the one or two opportunities presented to them, and missed that train for another life, albeit on the very same earth. Escapism and eventually migration from an asymmetrical and desperate poverty, from the visibly intolerable chasm between life in grandfather’s village and the attractions of the civilisation at the foothills and beyond was inevitable, unpreventable and to an extent predestined by the laws of economic and social advance. And it occurred in a massive scale.  Grandfather’s village deprived of its youth and vigor, languished, deserted by its inhabitants, barring some of its old folk. Just as it happened with most of the villages on the mountains of Epirus: stripped of human beings and life, which scattered themselves in the metropoles of Greece, America, Germany, Australia.English translation. 

The fact that Mr. Yiannis' father was a seminarian in the Springs of Arta and the small parish of the surrounding villages and communities, which implied that he was one amongst the very few literate persons in a sea of illiteracy, must have helped decisively: this provided Yiannis with solid foundations, as they say, carved out a perspective, opened a few wider avenues, amongst others more mundane. It is also possibly that his priest-father supported him materially and morally, as well as other practical ways conceivable, to escape from that dead-end everyday life and the cultural isolation of the village. There were some relatives in Arta with connections: a bridge to more distant places of even wider horizons. All these factors must have coalesced, together with an equally significant personal impulse and will, and led him far away –with a handwoven bag on his shoulders and several kilometers of daily walking to the distant high school, to be educated: to build up a different life in a completely different world from that of the Epirus mountains.

A personal will and a right frame of mind must have proved critical in Mr Yiannis’ development, evidence of this had been that he abandoned, when still young, the god and the religion his father preached and served –genuinely and with reverent sincerity, I imagine, whilst indoctrinating his son and other local souls in his beliefs and dogma. We should point out, however, that, barring a few exceptions, an individual’s will and initiative, personal gifts, talent, and charismas, do not always prove sufficient conditions for major social leaps and life transformations. Even those personal, doubtlessly valuable, traits, are molded by the environment and reinforced by tailwinds (or, as it may happen, weakened, or diverted by headwinds): the priest father who knew how to read and write amidst an ocean of illiteracy around him and kept a small theological library at home, some more cultured relatives in the town below with political connections. At the same time, there are innumerable circumstances and infinitesimal forces, often acting imperceptibly or unconsciously in the background of our existence, unaccounted for, whose resultant may push a man in one direction at one stage or pull him in another at the next one. Always, as someone said, the customs and traditions of previous generations "weigh like a nightmare" on the consciousness of young people, along with numerous regressive or progressive factors along the way: sometimes insurmountable obstacles, sometimes wide, free avenues to follow, not at one’s behest or of one’s choice, and which might never have occurred to them that they would encounter. A few manage and overcome these obstacles and survive, better their lives, even prosper, the weakest may crumple under their weight.

Ancestry 8 - From Istanbul: Two Deaths

Kotis passed away after a brief illness, in 1947, at the age of 63. There was something wrong with his throat, a lethal infection or maybe cancer, which he initially ignored and, then, resisted any medical help, as rudimentary as this might have been under the circumstances, until it killed him. In his last photo, with Vasiliki who grew into a young beautiful woman, at his side, he posed as the strong and determined captain of the family ship in the sea of life he had been, undaunted by the fierce storms along his voyage. Himself, a miniscule subject of history, was tossed by her storms towards the edge of a cliff along with many of his fellow immigrants on the same boat, but he resisted her forces with bravery and courage. He stood upright and strong, walked with decency and dignity the humble path of his maturity, with one acre of garden and another acre of a wheat field, amidst a war, illness and death, poverty, and misery. It was not just the mustache the edges of which twisted downwards on either side of the smiling lips, nor the rolled-up sleeves covering his two sturdy arms. It rather was the determined look at the lens, declaring: "I am here, and as long as I exist, none around me needs not be afraid."

Two images from Kotis' last days were imprinted in the memory of auntie Litsa, one of his granddaughters, a nine-year-old girl at the time of his death. Kotis shunned any participation, either covert or active, in the resistance movement or the guerrilla warfare during the German Occupation of Greece. Besides, he was rather old when the war started for such a struggle. Instead, he devoted that period to his daily chores, to his vegetable garden, his animals, and the wheat field, to his wife and daughter. Nor he was explicit in expressing any sort of political views. However, perhaps influenced by his son-in-law Mr. Yiannis, the then enlightened-turned-enlightener left-wing teacher, and to a lesser extent Leonidas, or, perhaps, carried away by the emotions the liberation and approaching end of the war stirred, he briefly came out of his political shell in the last days of the Occupation. Standing solemnly at the gate, he raised his left arm and fist, the unmistaken gesture of communist militants, to express his pride and support, or even gratitude, towards the guerrillas of ELAS -The Greek People’s Liberation Army, who were marching armed along the road in front of his house. It was more an instinctive and spontaneous gesture, rather than one prompted by some ideological beliefs.

The other event Litsa recalled occurred a few days before he died. Bedridden by his illness, he sensed the indifference and ingratitude in his little circle as displayed by the conspicuous absence of his nephew, Leonidas, the grocer. “Not even a lemon soda, did he bother bring to me… that mean and ungrateful nephew of mine; nor did he even bother to visit,” despite Kotis' generosity and help to him and his late mother Elizabeth during the harsh days of immigration and resettlement.  And he cursed him. "Don’t he dare to set foot here again!" was his late aphorism. But then he died. A few words with a muffled voice, a whisper in the wilderness of human existence in the moments before the end, like the sound of waves or rustling leaves, that is, without consequence. Nevertheless, his last words echoed for years in the family and his village neighborhood.English translation. 

In the very same month, great-grandmother Dominique, who was five or six years younger than Kotis, died too. She was crashed by the body of a cow while she was milking her; the cow they had purchased just before the war erupted for the family dairy needs. After Kotis, with his sturdy arms and strong will, managed to navigate his broader family through the plagues of history and the struggles forced immigration to their survival and resettlement in their new home, in his last years, whilst contemplating the remaining of the lives of the old couple, he prophesized the scenario of their death: “Forty days after one of us dies, the other will follow to the other world." Together in life, together in death, as they say.

Their bones are found in adjacent boxes in the ossuary of Agios Athanasios, near the field that Kotis cultivated when young. They left behind several descendants, who will also die when their time on this earth expires, some furniture faded by the passage of time, the small house with its courtyard and ardor, barely noticeable by passers-by, which, one day, after a few more instances of eternity, a bulldozer will raze to the ground. I hope their minds, whilst alive, rejected vain thoughts of after-life; I hope that whatever they built and created, they did it for themselves, out of daily necessity and for a few moments of pure happiness, that necessary ingredient of human existence for this to be considered meaningful. The did it and enjoyed it there and then, within the confine of their lifetimes, not for some vague goals in posterity. I hope they felt, before they were caught up by their last breath, that they lived worthwhile lives. The above clumsy words are the least I could offer against what I partly owe them: my existence.

Ancestry 7 - From Istanbul: Two Small Pieces of Land

Once the passions of the uprooting subsided and the dense fog of uncertainty and the unknown began to diffuse, the group of refugees with Kotis at the lead, Dominique, their young Vasiliki, widowed sister Elizabeth, and her eldest son Leonidas, were given gratis by the government plots of land, some eight acres, to share and manage. Central amongst them was a square piece of land situated at the corner of two streets crossing perpendicular to each other, one of which, until my teenage years, was a dirt road grooved on either side by rain water. The last section of the other, after a sharp turn, was where the main and only asphalted road through the village ended, before it continued into a wide track that disappeared into the fields and the scattered farmhouses on its outskirts, before it crossed the railway lines and joined the so called "National Road", which connected Thessaloniki with the south of mainland Greece and the capital Athens.

Elizabeth’s son decided to become a grocer and build his shop at the crossroads. Indolent by nature, his idiosyncrasy did not draw him to growing tomatoes and vegetables (the main produce of the region) and the daily struggle and strain that this entailed. Therefore, perhaps wisely, he turned into trading food and other household necessities for a living. With this goal and a flourishing grocer’s business in mind, he was adamant, when negotiating with Kotis the dividing of the plot, his desire that the front of the shop he was about to erect to be facing the intersection, so that easy access be allowed from the main road through which carts and tractors and passers-by to and from the farms, as well as the surrounding localities would pass. As importantly, the only coach from Thessaloniki serving the area was stopping at the same junction. His wish was perfectly understandable from a business point of view. It was granted by Kotis, the hardworking breadwinner, the generous family man, the manager of past wealth and late poverty, the rock of the family in the despair of forced immigration and hopes of an as close to home-like resettlement as possible, who let Leonidas and Elizabeth have and appropriate the more privileged part of the plot, more than a quarter of its total area. On this piece of land, Leonidas built his shop and family house above it, as planned, developed it, later with the help of his two sons, into a profitable grocery retail business, and lived the remaining of their lives in relative prosperity.

English translation. That street corner, as the years were going by and in tandem with the economic development, the population growth of the village and its surrounding area, became livelier: a vigorous strategic point at the village borders, a busy spot at the crossroads of a bustling village, as Leonidas would have envisioned it in his business plans. With the increasing mobility of people and volume of trade, and the transportation and commuting the human activity required, the coach that transported people between Thessaloniki and “Nova” Magnesia, its neighboring villages, and the industrial area further, was stopping there -right in front of Leonidas’ grocery store!  

There, at the bus stop, in a space with a half-enclosed recess of corrugated metal sheet, a dirty bench on its periphery, an acacia tree at the center of a circular flower bed, where we often sat with Mother waiting for the last Sunday evening bus to Thessaloniki, after the war Apostolis set up his kiosk; in front of his own piece of land and house; behind a row of fig trees the produce of which we were allowed to pick in August. He had been granted a license to operate that little kiosk, like many retail licenses given by the government gratis to several people like him, as the Greco-Italian war veteran crippled by frostbites in the mountains of Albania in that terrible winter of 1940. He was a lanky guy Apostolis, with gray hair, and sunken but rosy cheeks. Only a few times, did I see him popping crouched out of his kiosk, limping on his weak and stiff legs: to pick up some parcel that the bus conductor dropped, to arrange or replenish the few items of his meagre merchandise displayed outside his kiosk window, before sneaking inconspicuously behind the windows and the cigarettes, the chewing gums, the chocolate, and the other trifles he sold. The nephew of Dominique's great-grandmother, he grew up as Vasiliki's stepbrother, promptly adopted without a second thought by magnanimous Kotis, after Apostolis, a young child, lost both his parents, fellow refugees of Kotis from the town of Kavakli. Mostly silent, a taciturn old man of just a few soft-spoken words, and those words when necessary, he smiled even less, if at all. Neither to me, or Mother, or other passengers waiting for the bus outside his kiosk, to children and elders, to neighbors and strangers alike. Something was eating his soul away – the orphanage, the war, the misery of a prospectless life. Only rarely he would hand me a candy or a chewing gum, as a distant nephew. But for the more expensive items, such as chocolates, nougats, sesame bars, soft drinks, even Chios mastics, which for some reason my aunts craved, he expected us to pay, as it was appropriate -despite some sort of kinship that bound us. It would be impossible for keepers of kiosks and shops of in a small community like that of Magnesia, to survive with complimentary giveaways to friends and family.English translation. 

Kotis was also given some land behind a well-rounded hemispherical mound covered with weeds. What was hidden under that mysterious solid heap of soil nobody knew, but it stood out from afar on the plain outside the village. Kotis’ field, surrounded by tomatoes and vegetables farms, was granted to them in order to produce their wheat and thence flour and bread for their domestic consumption, whilst the rest of the plot, at the junction behind Leonidas’ grocery store, was for their small household, his vegetable allotment, along with a piece of land intended as Vasiliki’s dowry. At the back of the plot, the government agency for the resettlement of the refugees built a dwelling as a permanent family home; a lodging of rather poor quality built in a rush in the midst of the human drama of the time. It was a house of rectangular perimeter base but no basement, with roof tiles, uncomplicated and economic in its design, as in a children's drawing, built empirically by journeymen builders over a few day shifts. It was dark and cold indoors, despite the usually sunbathed open space around it. Its windows, on the one side, faced the same street as Leonidas' grocery store, just a little further from the junction, towards the outskirts of the village and the surrounding farms. It still stands more than a century after it was built, in the corner of the courtyard of Mother's family home, now serving as a kind of family museum, with a few cheap and frayed by time heirlooms and furniture saved by the previous generations. There lived the three of them, Kotis, Dominique, and Vasiliki, during the first years of their re-settlement, with the few square meters of floor space divided into two bedrooms, a large one for the couple and the smaller neighboring one for the young Vasiliki, a kitchenette and nothing else. An outbuilding shack housing a pit latrine served as their toilette. There were no floors, the hard soil of the ground was their floor. Four walls made of lime, earth and water, and the ceiling –tiles on a wooden frame, protected them from the elements. Whatever land was left from the allocation of the plot became a yard and a garden, where chickens and hens roamed freely amongst the vegetables and the few trees, nibbling on the corn grains that Domnique and Vasiliki (and later myself) scattered at strategic points. Apparently, before my birth, on the same ground, a dairy cow and a goat were grazing for the family needs in milk and butter.  

Next to Leonidas' grocery store in the southeast quadrant of the plot, grandmother Vasiliki and grandfather Yiannis, ten years later, built their own home. It was bigger and more dignified, sunnier, and airier, with a front door behind an arched vestibule, facing a front yard. A raised roofed veranda at the back overlooked the vegetable garden of Kotis’ plot. A fitting house, one might say, for a primary school teacher and, later, a school principal that grandfather was and Kotis’ beautiful only daughter. That was his gift to his precious Vasiliki, the dowry on which to found their own lives and raise their children – my mother amongst them.

During my childhood years, the area between Kotis' little house and the more modern and adequate one of Yiannis and Vasiliki was tidied up. The plot was fenced with a wall and railings. In the courtyard, in front of the two houses, and on the floors of the house they laid cement. They built a chicken coop for the poultry, as well as two enclosed toilets, relatively decent for the time. Above the small courtyard of Kotis’ house, the vine climbed higher and spread over a wire roof on four beams, generating a patchy, yet cool shade during the hot summer days. The grapes of the vine might have been sour to my taste, nevertheless its leaves proved an appealing ingredient necessary for the grandmothers' stuffed vine leaves, their renowned dolma dishes.

(Grandmother Eudoxia, in one of her last visits to the village of her in-laws, on the Easter Day on May 4, 1986, a few days after the Chernobyl disaster, she brought some of her delicious stuffed dolmades, wrapped in leaves from that arbor. That Easter was also destined to be my last in the village and grandfather's yard, before my departure for foreign lands, an occasion that might have also triggered grandma’s arduous cooking. Two of the hypochondriac daughters of Yiannis, that is my aunts, whispered to each other something about radioactivity they heard in the news. Surely, they kept whispering, some of the radioactive cloud escaped from the Chernobyl nuclear site could have found its way, over the arbor, the vine, its leaves, to wrap the stuffing for the recipe of the unsuspecting grandmother; thence, to the inner sanctum of our bodies. No such association had crossed my mind before I ate some of the brilliant dolma from the traditional Asia Minor recipe, but, as a bit of hypochondriac myself, I concern myself for several days about the cancer the radioactive Chernobyl cloud via my grandmother's dolma would have brought and planted inside me.)English translation. 

For as long as he was alive, Kotis and, after him, my grandparents and aunts, took good care of the few lonely and unpaired trees in the plot, and even planted some more. Several survived two generations; a few made it through and even outlived my childhood. The apricot tree at the center of the garden, the pear tree a little further, some fig trees large and small along the fence -I picked and tasted their fruits; a large acacia tree that reached the roof of Leonidas' rear veranda -its trunk I bravely climbed many times. A shorter acacia, right above the water tap and the stone sink at the back entrance of the courtyard –I drank from its water and washed face and body under it, I played water games with friends in summer days. And among the scattered trees, there were the rose trees with their unmistaken scent when they blossomed, the flower and the vegetable beds with tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, and many other vegetables for own domestic consumption, the surplus to share with neighbors and friends and family, and in the early days of great need, to exchange it for other necessities. For a young child, it was like the garden of Eden, a playing heaven on school holidays.

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.