Ancestry 18 - Yiannis & Vasiliki: Young Mother

Mother was born from a different egg than her twin sister. More sociable and capable, more driven and willing to take risks outside the suffocating village environment than Litsa, although maybe not as fearless and adventurous as Aliki. Unlike Litsa, she faced up to the obstacles that life threw at her way, at work and family, always a good measure of one’s determination and will.

She was admitted amongst the top candidates in the Pedagogical Academy of Thessaloniki in 1956. However, with anti-communism still at its peak, enrollment in the Academy required a "Certificate of Healthy Social Convictions", identical to the one grandfather struggled to obtain to be reappointed as a public-school teacher after his exile. One morning, Mother in a flowery summer dress and her cat-eye glasses, Mr. Yiannis, impeccably dressed in a buttoned-up shirt and a grey suit, arrived at the Security & Police Headquarters where his and his family data were registered and kept and where he had to report in person regularly upon his return from exile. In a thick file folder in the basement archives, details of any suspect pro-communist or, generally, “anti-social” activities of the past were filed. Mr. Yiannis was well known amongst several senior officers in that department. He had been a regular visitor in the past and, not far from those headquarters, within the department's jurisdiction, he had been interrogated and eventually incarcerated in a basement cell, before his banishment to the isle of Lemnos. And his file in the security archives had barely gathered any dust. As it happened, between grandfather and the department’s commanding officer, a vehement anti-communist and nationalist zealot, there had been no love lost, due to some open accounts from their past; not an open personal vendetta, but some day, a few stray words against the security officer one his ilk or a transgression must have stuck in the officer’s memory. Not to mention that he had that great sense of a solemn duty to maintain “order and security”, characterizing many policemen, as that duty was perceived and ordered by his superiors and authorities, with an own touch of interpretation of such orders.

Mr. Yiannis did not want to enter or come too close to the offices of the Security Department: that would have revived the nightmares of a relatively recent past. He decided to wait outside, at a kiosk across the street, with his hands in his gray trouser pocket pretending to read that morning’s newspaper headlines. Mother, a seventeen- year-old trembling leaf, in a colorful and youthful, yet solemn dress, she entered the office that issues the specific certificate, with the application in her hands, signed-off and registered in a different office in the same building. She stood in front of the desk of the duty officer and timidly said:

"My name is Economou Theodora of Ioannis... I would like to apply for the Certificate of Healthy... for my enrollment in the Academy where I was admitted... Please, sir."

"For which Academy?", the frowning officer asked her abruptly, without lifting his eyes from the registered application that was handed to him for his perusal.

"Pedagogical Academy at the Archaeological Museum Street... I was the first to be admitted."

“I am not interested if you’re admitted first or last…”

After pulling out a thicker than average battered and greasy binder folder from a filing cabinet behind his desk, he leafed through it and momentarily huffed. A sardonic and crooked smile was quickly extinguished by an exhalation of smugness through the nose, and he exclaimed:

"Aha! You are Economou’s daughter, young lady! Don't you tell me, your dad sent you upstairs?"

"Yes, sir... He's waiting for me outside."

"Doesn't your dad have the courage to come upstairs and confront us himself?"English translation. 

He looked at Mother, who was standing at solemn attention in front of his desk, a beautiful, petite young girl with golden blond hair in two braids thrown on her back, the retro glasses in a black acetate frame, with one of her palms hiding the other on the summer dress. He raised his cold-eyes dispassionately upwards. With pursed lips, his mouth protruding forward under pressure from the lower jaw, signifying both disapproval and rigor, he crouched again his head on the piece of paper in front of him. Then, he returned Mother’s application in the open binder, took off his glasses, folded them and put them aside on his desk, as if to say "our interview is concluded," and in a calm and confident manner he said:English translation. 

"I will issue no certificate for you, young lady. I saw myself how well Greek children progressed and prospered under your dad’s tutelage… now he wants you to take on the same role!"

Mother walked away dejected and disconsolate, with the tail between her legs, whispering, or rather half-crying: "ΟΚ... Goodbye...", weak, crashed under a superior force. She met grandfather who waited patiently outside. In her face he could read the rejection of her application for this sine qua non for her admission in the Academy certificate. They took the bus back home gloomy and silent, but in grandad’s mind the only available course of action had already been formed.  A few weeks later, following a private phone call, Petros Garoufalias, the politician from Arta, grandfather’s hometown, would have to come again to the aid (or, rather, rescue) of his compatriot and intervene decisively, as he did when expediting the issue of Yiannis’ own certificate for his reappointment as a teacher. And Mother would have finally overcome the hurdle that the perverse behavior of the security officer raised, and enrolled in the Pedagogical Academy.

That was how many similar bureaucratic affairs were settled in post-war Greece, and, in a barely undiminishing rate, even today: an indication, they say, of Greece's poor political governance and low cultural development, through or, perhaps, despite its turbulent modern history. In the case of grandfather and his family, such means were employed to overcome unjust, arbitrarily erected obstacles rather than request unreasonable favors from a political system chronically plagued by corruption and cronyism. Following the ethical path of an uncompromising honesty many of the obstacles and barriers that a monstrous state mechanism erects, mainly to reassert its authority or, at least, justify its existence, would have proved insurmountable; not surpassing them timely would have drastically changed the course of my family’s history. In short, such "means to an end" were merely exercised to counterbalance gross injustices. In that respect, one cannot ignore the contribution of good fortune and the circumstances: in our case, the presence of some powerful political figure in the accessible social circle of grandfather and the power this figure could wield. 

Ancestry 17 - Yiannis & Vasiliki: Head of the Family

Grandfather was the undisputed head of his family in a patriarchal community. A traditional paternalism reigned at home, austere and incontestable, as one would have expected from a family with no male members other than grandfather and the disabled Giorgos who passed away at a young age. The condescending style of the old-time teacher, the pedantry, the sophistry and the sarcasms, the rigid opinions rarely inviting counter-arguments, the instructions and orders, the monologues with creatively composed phrases from of a rich vocabulary, were delivered with pomp to the four women of the house at the dinner table and, occasionally, to neighbors, shopkeepers and tradesmen. This eloquence created an aura of superiority and authority and erected unassailable walls around him against any attempts at arguing. Yet, it was the form and style of his presentations rather than the content, which, in the culturally backward environment of the village, often left his audience dumbfounded and in awe.

Vasiliki was fated to live on the margins and under the shadow Yiannis cast on his family. Her social life was rather non-existent and she spent most of her time within the confines of the small village, barring the rare recreational visit to Thessaloniki with her daughters. She got on stoically with everyday life, dragging her lame leg, in defiance of a debilitating arthritis getting worse with age, and a high blood pressure somehow under control with drugs. As the years were passing by Vassiliki’s wanders were mostly bounded by the house walls and the bahçe fence, with increasingly rare trips to the grocery store across the street or to the church on Easter or to attend a wedding or a funeral. Most of her diminishing with age energy was spent in cooking and cleaning, her only social interactions being through the bahçe fence, in the Turkish language with the Prousan neighbors (amongst the non-Greek speaking victims of the populations exchanges of the past, because of their Christian beliefs) or in plain Greek with passersby, members of the Dardonis’ clan and the other large families who lived further down the side lane. Grandmother Vasiliki loved me tenderly, as her first grandchild, and she manifested this love with cheese pies, sugar pies, pasties and patties, and other specialties from the rich culinary heritage of Istanbul she eagerly prepared when we visited. To her implicit appeals for appreciation of her cooking, I always responded in the affirmative, although without the formal "thanks" but a nod of the head and a smile, and the customary kiss when we said our goodbyes. She was pleased, even grateful, for seeing me enjoying the food she prepared especially for me to honor my visits, and addressed me kind-heartedly with spontaneous Turkish exclamations: "Ah, paşam!", "Ah, yavrum!" and, later as a teenager, "Ah, babacim!" It goes without saying that Mr. Yiannis, the intellectual, was not particularly pleased with Vassiliki expressing herself or conversing in the Turkish dialect he considered barbaric.English translation. 

The paterfamilias strongly urged his daughters to study. At all costs, often with arm-twisting and yelling. Aliki was left untouched by all this. She had been the house rebel and a free spirit, and was armed with a personality more dynamic than her father’s, and, for some unknown reason, she decided on her own volition to become nurse. After school she left the village for Athens, where she found her bearings, qualified as nurse, and built a life free from the overbearing paternal influence and the shackles of the small village community. Litsa, on the other hand, seemed less enthusiastic and rather disinclined to pursue any studies beyond the mandatory high school education; her comfort-zone was delimited by the narrow surroundings of the house and the yard and bahçe at the back, where she was happy to keep herself busy with housework chores and nurturing and patronizing her younger sister Domna. She spent her plentiful spare time in gossiping with visitors and neighbours in coffee soirees, which were culminated in Litsa’s “coffee reading” to the participants, a pastime in which she developed a remarkable skill, as I can attest from personal experience. After several failed attempts at the exams, at the exasperation of grandfather, she was eventually admitted to the Law School. After graduation, she practiced as a small-time solicitor, in a disinterested manner and charging tiny fees or no fees at all (barely amounting to a regular income), primarily having to deal with the ominous state bureaucracy on behalf of illiterate and ignorant clients, that is, to act on errands requiring nothing more than basic reading and writing skills.

Domna, the youngest and prettiest of the four daughters, having, however, been nurtured into a feeble, hypersensitive and highly-strung personality, after similar struggles with her father’s intransigence and obsession for education, eventually graduated with a dubious degree in Business from a public college. She complemented this degree with some inconsequential qualifications in French and typing, but she remained unemployed for the rest of her life without having ever displayed any detectable effort or initiative to work -somehow, somewhere. Possibly, she was not attracted by any type of employment or, merely, because daily work seemed to her like a tall mountain that she felt too scared or too lazy or both to climb. Like her elder sister, she found solace in household chores and endless everyday gossiping.English translation. 

Ancestry 16 - Yiannis & Vasiliki: Political Compliance

 The political activity of the few petty-bourgeois intellectuals of semi-rural areas, like grandfather, during the German Occupation and the Civil War years, had begun to fade in the memories of fellow countrymen and colleagues. For the sake of his family and his own life, under the weight of the political developments in post-civil war Greece and the world, as projected through state propaganda filters and as perceived by citizens with a relatively narrow point of view, grandfather would gradually water down his radical leftist views. Some, however, still lurked in his conscience when, after the defeat of fascism, the USSR emerged, for many of his generation, as a beacon of an "actually existing socialism" and a global superpower. He retained some broad socialist convictions and values, despite the personal and family ordeals, the exile and the quarrels with the other side of the fence, despite the heavy shadows cast over lives by the ubiquitous National Security, despite an alien to his political past and forcibly obtruded ruling ideology. However, Mr. Yiannis, for the public eyes at least, would sail to moderate ideological and political shores.

In truth, a similar change in the perceptions of politics and political bias affected most local participants in the post-war dramas. The pillories, the People's Courts, the arrests and executions, were events unfathomable to their children and grandchildren, although they had a marked effect well into the maturity years of grandfather and many others around him. English translation. Magnesia and the surrounding villages made a predictable conservative turn, its people unconscious of the growing conservatism in their political minds and oblivious of what this might entail in post-war Greece. Things were going relatively well, so to speak. Everything seemed to fall in place, barring, as always, the occasional isolated tragedies of human existence in its microcosms. These tragedies, however, were "dictated by fate" or by an invisible hand of God, as the common folk often believed. Why should they try to change, adhere to progressive forces, transformative of the socioeconomic system, and take a leap off the mainstream into an uncertain future? Why should let anything disturb their "peace, order, and security"?

Ordinary people of the lower strata, especially in the countryside, became by and large politically inert or depoliticized, and, of course, political inertia and depoliticization are both inanimate souls of conservatism contrary to political activism. In years of adversity, they would rather safeguard their daily jobs, most of them in fields and shops or the factories that were springing up in the vicinity, a privileged minority in government positions, all furnishing small but regular incomes. In any case, most of the countryside folk did not possess a concrete ideological basis, some not even the intellect let alone a sophistication, to analyze, beyond the superficial and frivolous debates in cafés, complex economic processes and a political reality that stretched far beyond the boundaries of their villages and even their country. In elections, they sided with one of the legalized, mainstream parties, either like football fans supporting a club, without a well-founded rationale and driven primarily by instinct and emotion, or for the simple reason that their father supported the said political party, or because they were too credulous in believing the enticing, yet often implausible, pre-election pledges of politicians, or by reciprocating with their vote a favor by a politician, which was done or promised to be done. An ideological and political reconciliation took place through everyday life, family life, the trivial traditional social interactions, weddings, christenings, funerals festivals, as well through their daily toil in workplaces. Either way, in grandfather’s village in the outskirts of the big city, sizeable class divergence and a consequential struggle from excessive inequality did not occur; nor an unbridled greed against the welfare of the local community by individuals was evident. Mr. Yiannis realized that he was devoid of power and will to contribute in transforming Greek society or shaping the local mentality or altering historical prejudices as he might have wanted or, without expressing an ideological or political party affinity, might have envisioned in his youth. But he was frequently critical of both the established social norms and the locals’ indifference or reactionary conservatism. Greek civil society, the village and schools where he worked, the educational system in which he joined as a docile functionary, the State above all, were all well-formed and established forces not to be reckoned with: forces exerted by the centers of political power and the ruling class; more so given its under-developed economy and strong dependence on economic poles outside Greece for its modernization and growth.  English translation. 

Thus, Grandfather and his village community became conformists. His attention turned to his family and work at school, until his retirement shortly after I was born. From the years of his professional rehabilitation, as teacher and headmaster at the school of Ampelokipi and, finally, shortly before retirement, as an inspector in schools in central Macedonia, a thick dossier survived with a collection of school works from the top pupils of the classes he taught (in geography, in arithmetic, in essay writing) and the several speeches he delivered on historical anniversaries and in school assemblies with "parents and guardians", providing further evidence of his conformism at work and in politics. He had succumbed and his alignment (forced or volitional) with the established national ideology and narrative, without the slightest of deviations from government mandates, tied always to the historically distorted nationalistic and anti-communist chariots, became complete. The petty-revolutionary, the quiet proponent of the Greek Liberation Front, the progressive left-wing "enlightener" of the village during the first months after liberation had put on a conservative façade, at least when under the public eye, and fully complied with the establishment directives. For some time, in the post-war years, he might have voted for the “Unified Democratic Left” party, and other center-left legitimized groups. In domestic discussions, he might have praised (always with due care) left-wing politicians of his time. He used to buy inconspicuously the only legal left-wing newspaper from kiosks in the busy Thessaloniki city center, cautiously wrapped by mainstream conservative papers, like "Macedonia", under his arm. In the privacy of his room, seeking pluralistic worlds news briefings from alternative channels, he secretively tuned his age-old radio by the couch into Slavic-language radio stations, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, whose news and announcements, strangely enough, he generally understood. Such trivial digressions, like keeping an open mind to non-mainstream information had no significant resonance, but they were constituents of a rather closed-in-itself whole, hermetically sealed from the world outside.English translation. 

With the priests and the church kept no open accounts beyond the absolute minimum necessary his role as school headmaster required. (He had to shepherd the pupils of his school class to the mandatory Sunday mass and make some dry and routine remarks to pupils, parents and local dignitaries on religious holidays.) Vasiliki, perhaps because of the multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism of the city she was born in and brought up, was neither a devout religious woman, nor did she regularly attend to the local church, nor did she hang icons of the Jesus Christ or Virgin Mary at noticeable places in the house. At least at home, Mr. Yiannis harbored an aversion, occasionally expressed as contempt towards everything related to the Greek Orthodox church doctrines and its ministers. In that respect, he remained faithful to the ideas of his youth, that is, to atheistic or agnostic notions.  His covert anti-church sentiments certainly influenced Vasiliki and their daughters, and, further down the generation ladder, myself and Brother –in as much as fragmentary opinions picked up early childhood can affect one’s beliefs. In public, in religious holidays, liturgies that his school was decreed by the Ministry to attend, christenings and weddings, whenever he was not assigned to deliver the customary meaningless speech, he presented himself discreetly in the background, keeping a good distance from priests and deacons, however, wary not to give rise to any malevolent whispers. A few might have still remembered his pro-communist past associated that in Cold War Greece has been associated with atheism. At his work, he transformed himself into the archetype of a teacher whom the state, which, though initially reluctant, had entrusted him to indoctrinate children within a framework of firmly established national and religious dogmas.

Ancestry 15 - Yiannis & Vasiliki: Rehabilitation

He made the correct decision; he did the right thing. He returned home, where his wife and children were fervently waiting. His in-laws, Kotis and Dominique, had passed away within a few days between each other shortly after his banishment, and, God only knows, how Vasiliki coped alone with the three underaged girls and sustained themselves with the meagre savings Yiannis left behind, and the produce of their garden. But after that enlightened decision, the lives of all concerned would gradually change for the better and, ultimately, be restored to a normality akin to that of the pre-war years.

Less than a year after his return, in 1950, their last child, Dominique, known to everybody as Domna, was born. The elder of her sisters, Aliki, had left for Athens not long after Domna’s birth to study and become a nurse and only occasionally visited her home village ever since. The long distance from the family home, then half-a-day’s coach journey, and her rather despotic nature somehow checked the growth of closeness and a sense of familiarity. In phone conversations and during her visits, I used to call her ‘Aunt’ Aliki and listen quietly to the pedantic lectures she was giving to family assemblies in a strict tone of voice. On the other hand, Domna & Litsa, feeble characters as they were, were simply called by their nicknames, as we do with close friends. The rather atypical in old Greece names of Yiannis’ and Vasiliki’s four daughters, Aliki, Stella, Dominique, even that of Mother Theodora, after generations of families naming their children after a grandparent, as it was and still is a common practice in Greece, suggests a long ago forgotten and time-worn connection with the Frankish and Catholic element of the population of Constantinople of old, a faded trace from the depths of the history of Byzantium and its glorious capital.

The path to the daily round, the way back to the teacher's career and what we call everyday life, the desirable state of equilibrium, peace and security, which was abruptly disrupted by the political forces that emerged and prevailed after the conclusion of the Civil War, in that gloomy night of Yiannis’ arrest and, afterwards, during the months of incarceration and exile, forces acting fiercely and paying no heed to the impact on human lives (the discontinuities major historical events cause to human life can be profound), that path Mr. Yiannis and his family strived to walk again on his return was not paved with rose petals. As a humble aspiration as the reappointment to his teacher’s position in a public school might have been, it required, first and foremost, the notorious "Certificate of Healthy Social Convictions". Schools are workshops where young souls are engineered, consciences shaped and formed, young human beings “prepared for life ahead” –as they say. The political class, having asserted itself on the ruins of post-war Greece, sought to establish a new order, aiming primarily at serving the interests of the national ruling class, its wealth largely unscathed by the war (as it is often the case with the richest strata of society in periods of disasters and depression), and, of course, its foreign sponsors. Therefore, it contrived that these young souls are educated with respect to a set of preconceived notions and standards, selectively drawn from a biased, distorted view of history, adapted to the country’s new position in the new world order. The demands exerted on the educational system were aiming, amongst others, at the formation of a concrete national consciousness, unsmeared by communist or radical ideas, whilst maintaining the illusion of a “special people,” direct descendants of a glorious past.

The issue of a such ‘to whom it may concern’ certificate (essentially “certifying” one’s alignment with the dominant ideology) had first to be authoritatively approved by the higher echelons of State Security after an exhaustive search of someone’s past, then checked, stamped and counter-signed by several layers of the state hierarchy, which comprise the notoriously cumbersome Greek bureaucracy, and, finally, sent back to the point where the applicant formally requested it, typically the local police station, for a countersignature, before it was handed to the successful applicant. It was the sine qua non for public sector employment, amongst several other declarations and certificates that government agencies regularly demand as necessary supporting documentation to proceed with any kind of application, sometimes at periodic intervals, often from other government agencies, but with the applicant as the hapless intermediary; in an endless exchange of papers and stamps, seals and signatures, too many stamps and signatures from too many bureaucrats. All this by and large pointless individual effort was often a necessary condition for getting on with life for many modern Greeks between their birth and death. But, Mr. Yiannis, a citizen also of this "Kafkaesque" state, was further burdened by a dubious past, which forced him to oscillate between nonchalant public servants, seemingly with no end in sight, thus exacerbating an already difficult family and financial situation.

In the months that followed his exile, with the cogs of bureaucracy spinning at a familiar desperately slow pace, Mr. Yiannis, the ex-headmaster, still without a job and a regular income, was forced to sell pomegranates from his trees in the public markets of the western outskirts of Thessaloniki. Eventually, the desirable certificate with a ministerial seal of approval was dispatched, thanks mainly to a decisive intervention by a certain Petros Garoufalias, MP and minister of the "centrist" governments of that time; a peer, a fellow countryman and former classmate of Mr. Yiannis’ father from Arta. He was reinstated and reappointed as teacher, and resumed his teaching at the Bosphorus school in the working-class district of Ampelokipi, in the industrial west of Thessaloniki. His place in the local community, the respect by the people of his village and by the pupils of his school and their parents, a respect he valued highly throughout his life, was regained effortlessly. In the field of fundamental everyday human interactions and the essential in education parent-student-teacher relationship, there was no room for bias and prejudices. No further political obstacles were erected by the State Security in his career, no grievances from members of public were raised. His prestige in the local and teacher’s communities and his privileges as a teacher and headmaster were fully restored to the pre-war levels.

Ancestry 14 - Yiannis & Vasiliki: In Exile

What happened during the days of his detention in the Security “dungeons” of Olympus Street until his banishment was lost in the mist of time and family oblivion. That he was tried by one of the ad hoc military courts set up by a government, gripped by an anti-communist frenzy, to persecute and occasionally sentence to death communists and the like, as enemies of the state and order, remains unknown. In the throes of the Civil War, unrepentant communists were executed summarily, even without any due judicial process at all. Therefore, it could only be hypothesized that a trial was set up for the primary school teacher, the supposedly "enlightener", in the minds of a few extremists, however, an instructor-propagandist and agitator, who spread pro-communist propaganda and, consequently, anti-national ideas, and possibly participated in clandestine conspiracies to overthrow the established order, no matter how incomprehensible to the mostly illiterate folk of the village his speeches were and, hence, inconsequential. One would have assumed that if such a trial took place, some kind of suspension, a reprimand or even an acquittal would have been most likely be granted, a verdict that would have accounted for his honorable past, his family circumstances, his contribution to the community, etc. Nevertheless, such a judicial venture and outcome would be an oxymoron; such a refined process unimaginable under the circumstances. An indictment, which for the authorities had the advantage of serving as a deterrent, would be more plausible given the prevailing situation.

Within the same year of his arrest after an indefinite period of incarceration, in contrast with any notional, if not constitutional, human rights, he was exiled, along with a batch of other politically like-minded fellows, to the practically inaccessible island of Lemnos, a few days journey by car and then ship from a northern Greece port. There, Mr. Yiannis and a handful of hitherto unacquainted “comrades” spent nearly two years in an ad hoc, squalid camping site under wretched conditions, savaged by lice. It was like a second or, rather, third military service he had to grapple with, away from wife and children, out of work and with no money; in a dark alley with no end in sight and the future ahead a vacuum. It was a predicament that could bring pain and despair in every human being, no matter how strong and stoic. From those days of his exile, a black-and-white, weather-worn photograph of him survived. He was standing next to a professor, as short in stature and bald as Mr. Yiannis, at a pebble sun-drenched beach possibly taken after they had enjoyed swimming in the sea. "They sent us on summer vacation, really!" he would later joke. The short and bald professor became one of his closest friends. Indeed, in places like the camp that was hosting the exiled intellectuals, close friendships are established on the rugged grounds of mutual plight, of mental and physical suffering. English translation. 

After several months of a pointless temporal deadlock in exile, inconsequential for the welfare of the country, but detrimental to the lives of those banished to a god forsaken corner of Greece: in a camp where the days were frittered away with unnecessary military drills and hazing by the guards, marches, endless weeding, and other pointless daily chores, considered by the absurd and uncouth NCO’s in charge as having educational value for the enemies of Greece, who were supposedly threatening the welfare of the nation with their deleterious dogmas, the purveyors of the red communist menace, of course. With Mr. Yiannis' egoism wounded, himself physically and mentally shattered, an existentialist choice was presented to him at a time the Civil War was reaching a painful denouement for the communist rebels; a choice that would decide the future of his life and that of his family. The ideas he embraced at some stage, perhaps, in the heat of an enthusiasm brought about by liberation, embraced, nevertheless, with reservation even doubt, without ever these ideas constituting in his mind a concrete worldview or a rigid unshakeable doctrine, those ideas he had to renounce: verbally and in writing, in front of officials. He was called upon to erase any remnants of such ideas and visions and ideological sentimentalities from his consciousness, as much as such a mental metamorphosis is possible in human beings. He signed the notorious “Declaration of Repentance” that would result into his immediate discharge from exile, and furnish him with an official certificate of purified and ‘healthy’ social views.

"Wash your sins and transgressions! Resuscitate Yourself!" It cost nothing materially, it was nothing more than a signature and an oath of allegiance to the (equally vague, one must say) national ideals. Perhaps, the denouncement of a vision and the ideas for a socialist and just future (after all unclear and hypothetical especially for an underdeveloped country) and the rejection and erasing of a past of perilous activism and militancy towards a noble goal, might have been spiritually humiliating for a few conscientious minds. But gaining back of one’s life by far outweighed a spiritually ambivalent loss. The gain, lest we forget, of a unique life with an expiry date, was glorious and priceless. A good chunk of the rest of his life would be brought back into his arms and will.

I do not believe  English translation. grandfather Yiannis subscribed verbatim to the contents of “Declaration of Repentance” he signed wholeheartedly, from as far as I have got to know him. Who could have read, in those hours of veiled remorse and repentance, the thoughts of the humiliated and persecuted. The feelings and longing for a return home and family would have prevailed over anyone’s emotional state and reasoning. A stubborn association to a cause, as loose as grandad’s, with ambiguous goals, already questionable by several quarters, even by former ardent and devoted supporters of that cause, a fruitless intransigence for the sake of a political struggle that no one knew where it would be leading, was deemed meaningless and it would not help him or anyone concerned, under the established status quo. In the view of most there was not a shred of shame in his action, but it was absolutely justified. He merely did something great-aunt Magdalene did not or was not given the opportunity to do, and she ended facing the firing squad. Mr. Yiannis signed up to save his life from exile, rescue his family from poverty and the continuing persecution. So did most of his comrades in the prisoner’s camp of Lemnos, and so did his short and bald professor friend, who upon his return later opened a school in Thessaloniki. Where, thanks to that profound friendship founded on the hardships of their exile, he offered Mother her first job in teaching after graduation from the Pedagogical Academy.

Anectry 13 - Yiannis & Vasiliki: The Arrest

Nazi collaborators and informers were rounded up and pilloried in the streets. Mr. Yiannis’ daughters, perched on the windowsills behind the shutter grilles, secured for better or worse by Vasiliki, witnessed a sad procession of “traitors” in front of their house on its way to the schoolyard, their dragging feet on the dry dirt of the streets raising a cloud of dust behind. Uncle Leonidas, the grocer, stood out tall and husky, leading a band of fellow villagers and guerrillas of the Liberation Army who had dragged those "traitors" from their homes. Some hearts of the former beat eagerly in anticipation of some justice and retribution, the hearts of the latter were nearly broken by anguish, in fear of the worst, their faces pale in horror under the winter morning sun. The guerrillas of the “People’s Liberation Army” would not be taking lightly any crime that would have cost lives in the hands of Germans –they knew that much; summary executions of informers and collaborators took place after a rudimental process from make-shift courts, sometimes on the flimsiest of evidence or on biased testimonies from vigilantes. Mr. Yiannis participated in these shaming and pillorying in a rather measured and restrained manner. In the People’s Courts that had taken place in the small village square, he might have been appointed chairman or moderator, he might have been summoned as a witness, or he might have been acting as a prosecutor -the least likely. Whatever happened to the most prominent of the German "collaborators", amongst those escorted under the eyes of Mother and her sisters and tried in the small square, I could not find out. Few knew, and even fewer witnessed their fate in the aftermath of these trials, and any attestations would have been buried under the anti-communist fear that gripped Greece in the aftermath of the liberation. Rarely would the punishment, in such cases, have been commensurate with the misdemeanors or even "crimes" committed, in an ambience of bias and anxiety, and a general lack of moderation and equanimity from the two extremes of the political spectrum, which ended up being belligerents in the ensuing Civil War. The tensions were high, strong emotions of anger and revenge prevailed and, like a black storm, they darkened reason. There were few in the small rural communities of Magnesia and the surrounding villages that their active collaboration with the Germans and snitching would have cost lives of fellow villagers, even fewer were directly involved in war crimes against civilians; and those would have been handed over to the rebels to be summarily executed. Others, with minor misdemeanors and extenuating circumstances, petty servile confidents or, simply, obsequious lackeys of the occupiers, who frequented their headquarters and camps for some business, had likely been allowed to return home after some reprimands, some wagging of the finger, as in naughty schoolchildren, or, at worst, some spitting and cuffing, that is the mildest possible forms of public lynching, supposedly cathartic for all parties involved.

The local authorities, police and security services of post-occupation Greece were made up of par excellence ideologically ignorant ignoramuses, vassals of an already subservient and dependent on foreign power political system; several among them were possessed fanatics and paranoid of a looming communist threat or simply paid agents, their job merely being spying on fellow citizens. Some, in this rather menacing to the common folk pack, discovered in the various "enlightening" lectures of Mr. Yiannis, which were no more than superficial school-level speeches addressed to a semi-illiterate audience, unmistaken communist propaganda elements, emanating by dark forces, with the Communist Party and the Democratic Army being their long arm. They were considered, therefore, threats to the socioeconomic system and the “way of life” imposed onto the general populace by the establishment, a servile government and its American sponsors.  The boundaries between truth and false propaganda were murky. Mr. Yiannis was branded as, at least, sympathetic towards the left movement after liberation, with the communists at its core threatening with social upheaval and revolution, although he himself had never been an active member or associate or even conspicuously supporting the Communist Party -the number one bogeyman for those striving to preserve, tooth and nail, the national and international status quo.

The "national unity" government had a few former National Liberation Front members progressive actors (“progressive” in the broadest sense of the term) alongside several liberal and open-minded ministers. One of those ministers, a family friend from the same hometown, appointed him superintendent of schools in the area at the end of the war, the onset of a national reconstruction effort. It was a promotion. He no doubt possessed the qualifications, while he was also recognized in that largely volatile political climate as "progressive", professionally, "enlightened", a charismatic teacher by his counterparts and the few educated people in his social circle. The tide of liberation and the progressive visions with socialist hues that accompanied it, thanks to the new political landscape that seemed to have started taking shape after the war, began to recede, and the socialist movement with nebulous or unrealistic aims in the post-war Greek society was disintegrating. The hitherto described as "reactionary" forces, by and large rooted in fascism, Nazism, and ultra-nationalism, were now finding their nerve and determination, further encouraged and funded by the well-known foreign factor. On the other hand, the "spheres of influence" in the post-war division of Europe had already been decided at the highest levels of the hierarchy of the planet between the great powers that won the war. They began, without necessarily a broader acceptability and credibility or moderation and even a democratic mandate, but with extreme zeal and determination and few scruples, to proceed with the plans of their own counterrevolution: to quickly regain the lost ground in the consciences of the common folk and mark victories in the struggle of ideas and the distribution of wealth. Their influence was expanding rapidly: on the lower and middle strata of society, the people of a country exhausted by war, on urban populations affected by unemployment, privation and hardship, the principal concerns being their survival amidst the rubble and the gradual rebuilding of their lives on what was left, instead of an ill-defined socialist future. Eyewitnesses of the grandfather's "enlightening" speeches, from that other side, which after the war started erecting embankments against the “communist tide” and went on the counterattack, existed, and lurked from many quarters of the local society. There were policemen in abundance, there were former and current informers, civilians frightened or greased by the authorities, vengeful former collaborators and black-marketeers, victims of pillorying and abuse by the guerrillas of the Democratic Army.

English translation. A spring evening of 1947, late, with the Civil War in full swing, national security agents knocked on the door of Yiannis’ home. Such heavy knocks late at night by “Security Guards” appeared in the family life of Yiannis and others like him, in a way as something inevitable at this historical conjuncture, as an anticipated consequence under the circumstances of one’s actions and political footprint until then. Mr. Yiannis had already been blacklisted, in the minds and files of vindictive or "loyal" characters, who, nevertheless, did not necessarily possess any firm political opinions or ideology or even traces of a political conscience. These are the apolitical shadows of every regime, either "useful idiots" or opportunistic individuals motivated by self-interest, and who tend to side with those in power and serve them for survival and profit. After all, political power, especially of the authoritative type, likes to anchor itself firmly on the pedestals it has erected and to eliminate any small or large, real or imaginary, threats that can potentially challenge it.

In this environment, few informers sprang around, known and marked in the consciences of ordinary people. Through the gossiping that followed the arrest of grandfather a few were named and exposed to no purpose: a certain H, a coach driver from a neighboring village, or J -another local bus driver, but, especially, G, a well-known scumbag and owner of the café-pool club at the intersection, where the coach from the city stopped; all were central figures in spying and snitching, thanks to a strategic business location and verbiage of drinkers in the café or from the daily murmuring of passengers in the coach, having established links and in cordial relations with the police and security officials, who, in turn, relied on such snitching to demonstrate effective policing and establish civil older. In short, these were the shady characters who muttered and "confirmed" to the willing and smug ears of the Security, the supposedly pro-communist, propagandistic activity of grandfather.English translation. 

The girls were fast asleep that night when the door thundered, but the knocks and the kerfuffle that followed woke them up. Yiannis was in his pajamas, Vasiliki in her nightgown. It was shortly after a meagre evening meal -yoghurt and bread. Everything happened callously and hastily. A security guard with a rifle on his shoulder grabbed him from the shoulder, with no excuses or declarations of rights, just incoherent threats, and ushered him towards the “Jimmy” truck whose engine was rattling outside; in front of the acacia tree at the edge of the small front yard and the three concrete steps leading to the front door, while Yiannis’ girls watched in horror from the crack in the door of their room. Bewildered, with no idea what was going on, without daring to pop up to ask, Vasiliki remained silent, numb by surprise and fear. Feeling the cold night outside, she impulsively ran behind them, as they were lifting him onto the truck, and managed to throw on her husband's shoulders one of the woolen cardigans she had knitted for the winter.

She was strong enough for either hysterics or whining, while she knew that protesting would have been pointless and it could even have caused harm: you are not supposed to argue with the authorities in Civil War Greece, in any shape or form. She stood expressionless, firm as a rock, almost imperious, apparently undaunted by the uncertain and turbulent times ahead, next to her old parents, rushed out of their beds from their elder granddaughter instinctively reacting to the inexplicable commotion. No one in the family was aware of the precise “how and why” of all this, nor what was about to come, where they would take him, what they would do to him. Nor did anyone know what course their lives would follow from that moment on, and how long that course would last in the darkness. There was no compass no more: the old parents, the three daughters, the handicapped Giorgos, their household, without Mr. Yiannis' wages, was left high and dry.English translation. 

The American “Jimmy” disappeared in the darkness of the night, with only the very close neighbors having come to realize what that whole episode had been about. The Security gang led grandfather, along with a handful of other hapless souls from the same security black-lists they picked up on the way, to a detention center in Olympus Street, in the old Vegetable Market of Thessaloniki, near the Government House. He was imprisoned in an underground cell or ‘dungeon,’ a bodrum as Vasiliki described it. She paid frequent visits to Yiannis during the days of his detention there, carrying baskets with food. A small window of the underground cell facing upwards from an elevated corridor, opened to the visitor’s cell above for a few words of conversation with Vasiliki and the eldest daughter Alice. For the two younger girls and for their virginal psyches, the environment and conditions of detention, the brutal faces of uncompromising security guards, the pitiful spectacle of their teacher father who, they knew, left one night for “some business”, would not be becoming, but unwelcome features in their nightmares.

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?