Ancestry 28 - Eudoxia & Leonidas: In the Shantytown

 And so, they arrived in Thessaloniki. Settling in the city, finding a roof over their heads and existing humanely, for those who did not possess and brought with them gold sovereigns, jewellery or anything of appreciable exchange value, meant facing another tall mountain to climb, another ordeal to endure. The support from the government of an inherently disorganized state and a society of meagre means to redistribute, which had to deal with a momentous disaster and national humiliation and was swamped by the influx of near two million refugees, was paltry and mostly relied on conditional foreign aid. After disembarkation many lived in tents erected in open areas, church yards, and military camps in the outskirts of the city, or makeshift shacks from sheets of metal or planks or whatever they could put their hands on. Such temporary shelters were set up randomly in slums (dare not say ghettos), far from the urban and relatively affluent core of the city and its seafront villas. Over the interwar years, the bourgeois of old Thessaloniki and the few wealthy people amongst the immigrants entrenched themselves in the city centre. Most local Thessalonians and the populus Jewish community of Salonica remained seemingly untouched by the influx and displayed an indifference towards the multitude of the newcomers from Anatolia. Several public remonstrances primarily stemmed from concerns about the impact on the economy of the city and the unpredictable and possible dramatic changes in the fabric of the society that would take place. The recent experience with the presence of foreign allied troops stationed in the city during the later stages of WWI had disturbed their lives and contributed to generally negative sentiments towards the immigrants from Anatolia. The resentment, more noticeable amongst Jews and Slavs, was counter-balanced by sympathy, even congeniality and camaraderie from Greeks, until then a relative minority in the city, who saw its ethnic profile changing to their favour.  

After the initial turmoil subsided, the Kampakis family and adolescent Eudoxia amongst them, were reunited in the slum of Kato Toumba, above the churches of Agios Therapontas and Agios Fanourios up the slopes of the Seih Sou hill. There, in shacks without electricity and sanitation, with makeshift toilets, drinking water carried in ewers from nearby wells, Vasilis, Stelios and Chryssa, the older siblings of Eudoxia with their families and a group of refugees from Bayindir, began rebuilding their livelihoods. Grandmother Eudoxia, with Yiannis, her younger brother, and their mother Anna “the Stork” Yiakoumis (because of her long legs and tall stature) set up their house a little further, in the Malakopi district. The end of their adventure marked the beginning of the struggle for survival in their new homeland -from ground zero.

Only few amongst the youngest of the refugees managed to complete an elementary education curriculum in Bayindir before disaster struck. Some attained basic reading skills, even fewer were able to write legibly. To enrol in the so-called tin-school of their shantytown was beyond consideration for most, under the harsh living conditions and the struggle for daily survival; a day-in and a day-out, as they say, for subsistence, which had inevitably diffused any notions for furthering their education amongst their aims in life. However, over time they managed to settle. One could dare say that they almost prospered -in a relative way and against the backdrop of a post-war vibrant and industrial city growing in a rapid pace. With personal and family toil and community support the shacks were gradually replaced by whitewashed houses, decent in their simplicity. The housewives filled the small front yards with pots of jasmine and basil. Their scents filled the still dusty or muddy streets of the shantytown, which, after decades, would eventually transform itself to a respectable suburb.

Most importantly, hopes and expectations returned to the hearts and minds -of the youngest and their offsprings, at least. For them, nostalgia did not carry the same emotional weight as for the elderly. Being branded a refugee did not affect their conscience and being. Salonica was their new home, the only home they grew to know. They discovered a zest for life in their relative poverty, were content with a simple existence of few materialistic demands, of their close-knitted family life and neighbourhood camaraderie, friendships and good humour. The optimism and longing for life, innate in most, found new roots and grew and strengthened by the experience and tales from the tragic events of the past. Indeed, the grandmother I knew and grew up with, her siblings, friends and old neighbours of Toumba and Malakopi to the north, and the working-class district of Foinikas to the east, where she used to take me along in Sunday afternoon after the church liturgy, were models of optimism and courage, were always content and benevolent people. Both her sons inherited this innate positiveness and confidence, but, unfortunately, that was not the case with me. Many a time life changing events and adversity, like war and persecution and forced immigration, are needed to form and crystallize into an optimistic and positive character, a fighting spirit, and the resilience and stoicism I observed in grandmother.

Ancestry 27 - Eudoxia & Leonidas: The Catastrophe

An historically misplaced and inglorious military intervention, which ultimately proved disastrous, apparently stemmed from the rekindling of a hollow grandiose nationalism –the “Great Idea” for a Greater Greece, after her political class decided to abandon neutrality and stand on the “right side of history” in WWI. With the Allies against the Central Powers, the Ottoman Empire amongst them, was thus entitled to a share in the spoils of victory in the aftermath of the Great War. An initial opportunistic encouragement and urging behind the scenes by the British (in pursuit of their interests in the region), after a few months of political and economic miscalculations and wrangling amongst the Great Powers, turned into cold indifference, albeit after the Greek Army had landed on the shores of Asia Minor and recklessly committed in invading Anatolia and advancing deep inland. Behind the petty nationalism were hidden, instigated or spontaneous, regional and universal imperialisms, small and large-scale interests and the conflict of political and economic forces. But this is not a place for an historical analysis. The historian Nikos Psyroukis, through his orthodox Marxist’s and materialist’s prism, in his volumes on the “The Asia Minor Catastrophe” that I read as a young man -in a first attempt to shed light on the details of my grandmother’s and ancestors’ turbulent past in the region and, consequentially, a large part of the history of my birthplace, documented coherently the root causes of the national disaster. At the end, the Greeks of Anatolia were abandoned to their tragic fate.

The railway line that passed through Bayindir, built by the British, evidence of timid steps in the  industrialization and modernization of an empire in its last throes, as well as attempts by the British imperialism to exert its muscle and expand its interests in the region, had perhaps contributed more than any other single geographical and historical factor into the development of the local economy, the movement of the goods it produced and, most importantly, the influx of new ideas and  in advancing the regional culture; the latter thanks to the mobility of people with open eyes, broad minds and an omnipresent appetite for wealth, which required establishing and maintaining strong materialistic and cultural ties with Smyrna, the undisputed cosmopolitan metropolis of Asia Minor. In 1922, that railway line proved to be a lifeline for many Greek families of Bayindir, while paramilitary Zeybeks and Çete (bandits) attacked homes and livelihoods with ferocious and vindictive moods: initially aiming more at looting property than motivated by a racial or religious fanaticism or nationalistic passions. The contingents of the Greek army, having come to the scene and presented themselves as liberators of the “Hellenism of Ionia” and resurrectors of ancient glories, surveyed the area and paraded in front of the hurrahing Greeks of the town, whilst the local governors renamed streets in honour of Greek military officers and organized sectarian celebrations and parades, thus alienating the non-Greek population and unnecessarily inflaming local nationalist sentiments and a vacuous religious fanaticism. After all this, after an uncalled-for chauvinistic marginalisation, even mistreatment and abuse of "non-Greeks and non-believers", which could only provoke an asymmetrical response in kind from the opposing side, the very same troops were recalled by mother Greece through an almost disorderly retreat. Their saviour and liberator, the Greek Army, left Bayindir, and then Smyrna.

It was a day in September 1922. With a few possessions that could fit in suitcases and torba, the teenager Eudoxia found herself with parents and siblings and crowds of thousands of other refuges at the waterfront of Smyrna, for the ships of salvation that would transport them to Greece, strained and terrified by the atrocities that were taking place behind columns of smoke in the suburbs and back alleys of the city. Many people were arriving at the Aegean seafront on araba, donkeys, mules or horses, fewer, the privileged and more fortunate ones amongst them, by train. Few elders stayed behind, insisting to die in the land where they were born. In a few days, Kemal Ataturk would enter Izmir victorious. There had been orders, with unwritten deadlines and ultimatums, for the Christians to evacuate their homeland. The Greeks strived to comply and catch up. As to whether in their minds Greece represented the hospitable motherland that would welcome them with open arms and offer protection, shelter and food, I doubt it. And those who had felt this way would have been disappointed at the end of their Odyssey.

The emotions that overwhelmed the soul of Evdoxia, her family, the pitiful caravans of refugees from Bayindir to Izmir, the crowded waterfront of Izmir, overflown by despair and anguish in the wait of helping hands and rescue boats (and there were scarcely enough, neither Greek, nor "allied" by the waterfront at the time to accommodate the multitude of refugees!) from the fires erupting around and the hell engulfing the promenade. The gravity of these emotions cannot be weighed on any scale or described lucidly by any language. Each distinct emotion succeeded another in a disorderly sequence, or merged with the previous and next ones, in each person individually, and in the mass of people in unison, under a cloud of panic that had spread over the city. Each emotion in all its possible grades and derivatives and superlatives: from the initial anxiety that rumours and news sowed, to fear, shock, terror, panic and hysteria, brought about by the awareness of a grim reality surrounding them, the realisation of their predicament. The shades of fear and terror were succeeded by the spectre of sorrow and misery, after they boarded a saviour boat. Fatigue and resignation to fate would turn into pain and suffering. The misery of fleeing would crystallize into sadness and aguish, even despair, ahead of a bleak future. For many, in the ports of Thessaloniki and the coastal towns and villages of Macedonia or the whatever alien shores they disembarked, that sadness and weariness, when minds began to ask the how’s and the why’s, would mutate into anger and rage, bitterness and indignation, against knowns and unknowns, culprits and non-participants.

I have not experienced, even approximately, a tragedy of the magnitude of the Asia Minor Catastrophe and, as such, not entitled to tell the tale of the storms of that time and the scars that left in the bodies and souls of the people who experienced them firsthand. A few lines from a haphazard and, maybe, biased outsider offers next to zero into this story, let alone history. The little it manages is to preserve, for him at least, a few precious threads with his past, vital to an existential self-consciousness.

Ancestry 26 - Eudoxia & Leonidas: Once in Bayindir

 Grandmother Eudoxia and her refugee family arrived at Thessaloniki from Bayindir after the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922. Bayindir, the hometown of the Kampakis’ family, did not feature in the annals of history as much as Smyrna or even Aydın further south and inland. Nor did that town, a few hours by train from Smyrna, was endowed with the cosmopolitanism and the cultural backdrop that history and refugee testimonies and legends attributed to the beautiful metropolis of the Eastern Mediterranean and its iconic waterfront promenade. Alas, when the maturity of adulthood generated a long overdue interest in the lives and history of past generations, my beloved grandmother was not in the full possession of her faculties to tell stories of her childhood, the very details of her distant past that had begun to intrigue me. On the other hand, it is possible (and in a respect comforting) that the impressions from that dramatic and, for many, a tragic period in their lives might have faded, because the destruction and passions and sufferings of those directly involved blurred their memories and inadvertently pushed them to the margins of their conscience from early on in their lives.

Until recently, long after her death, I did not even know she originated from Bayindir. To my old Greek friends, former comrades and acquaintances, in my ignorance I used to say that part of my family and relatives descended to my hometown as refugees from Smyrna. I was saying this with the covert pride of being a descendent of a family of persecuted and destitute refugees, who, nevertheless, managed to stand on their feet despite the stumbles and challenges and insurmountable obstacles history presented them with· despite the cynicism of the Great Powers, and the insensitivity of the Greek state and its political arrivistes. Along with their pride and inherent passion for life, despite their abject poverty, but thanks to their culture, the generosity and dignity, the sociability and the humility, the honesty and gentle manners, thanks to their food and songs, the innocent and benevolent 'καλέ!’ instead of the slang 'ε!' or ‘ρε!’ of the locals, brought with them color and warmth and life and character to the city I was born. Just a short time before I embarked on this narrative, I spotted Bayindir on the map and read about it in the only remarkable source I could find: in the book "Bayindir 1922" by a certain Iris Tzahili, whose family shared the roots and adventures of the Kampakis and grandmother, then a young girl.

The Greek community of the town, although a relative minority in the years leading to the Catastrophe and its final uprooting from the land of their ancestors, had remained relatively compact and cohesive under Ottoman rule and in peace with their predominantly Muslim neighbours; with their church and seminary and their social events on the religious holidays of the saints of Orthodox Christianity. Even joint holidays with the Muslim population of the town were celebrated in Bayindir, such as that of St George, which brought the communities of the small town closer together, putting aside the economic inequalities in the stratification of the society that the industrial development formed and established amongst coreligionists and ‘non-believers’ and largely entrenched them in classes. The Greek Orthodox community had generally an envious upper hand in the productive and socio-economic relations of the region. The landowners and the bosses in workshops and factories, which gradually began to appear in the area, were mainly Christians and predominantly Greeks. However, along with the cultural, historical, and local differences and social friction, a racial segregation had apparently been forming: Turks and Greeks inhabited different district and neighborhoods and settlements in the countryside. From conversations I recall amongst relatives of my grandmother, I could only detect a handful of Turkish words in their discourse, apart from those that had already penetrated the Greek vocabulary from the Ottoman era. I compared this linguistic purity to the other side of my family, from Constantinople, who adopted more elements of the Ottoman heritage, and preserved despite decades of grinding in the mill of Greek nationalism.

Not that all Greeks from Bayindir, Smyrna and the towns of the ancient Ionia were bourgeois, that is, educated civil servants, teachers, lawyers, doctors, etc. There were also shopkeepers and traders, even farmers, factory workers and day labourers. In fact, it was a Greek worker-unionist named Gabriel who spearheaded the strikes of 1908, in the railways of primarily British interests, which ended peacefully thanks to the mediation of the government, albeit ingloriously. Despite the ups and downs and setbacks of the "bourgeois-democratic" revolution instigated by the Young Turks movement and later led by Kemal Ataturk, and the violent transformations in the new post-war Turkish state, as it emerged from obscurantism and backwardness, and in the face of the reactionary forces of an anachronistic and crumbling empire, small workshops and factories, as well as some larger scale manufacturing, a substantial export trade of mainly farming goods, ensured sustainable livelihoods for most Greek families and a relative economic vigour in the region.

Ancestry 25 - Yiannis & Vasiliki: The End of Yiannis

 During the last years of his life, grandfather contracted the disease of old age, quite often attributed to a helplessness towards more creative goals and the omnipresent innate fear of death. Although frugality and even avarice as a remedy for this fear appears as a contradiction of terms, the hoarding of money in savings from a meagre pension, especially from those who managed to escape the net of deep poverty, can be seen as a denial, as an illusion rather that the end is still far away: we need not concern ourselves and occupy our minds with this End, as much as the everyday trivialities of life which goes on as usual. I have observed a similar attitude in Father, and a growing one in myself and others aging around and along with me. For a reason and a purpose that I still find largely inexplicable and is probably non-existent, as man ages, as the candle of life burns low, material insecurity grows. Along with it, the concern to protect and increase the wealth he has accumulated flares up within him, the impulse and will to stash more money is reinforced. At the same time, he is fully aware that nothing is taken along with in what he believes follows death and whatever he once owned and left behind will be dissipated by future generations. Its creator will have no say on all this and he will not be witness to what will have become of his name, possessions and legacy.

The last conversation with grandfather took place in the courtyard of the family house in the village, at the unforgettable Easter family feast of 1986; unforgettable partly because of the Chernobyl disaster, but mainly because it was one of the last family gatherings where representatives of three generations converged in the village home. Grandfather and I sat next to each other at the corner of the empty table, under the shade of the lilac at the edge of the paved courtyard. The lamb which uncle Alekos was spit-roasting since dawn was consumed, Father and uncle Alekos retired to the small bedrooms for the inevitable afternoon siesta, and the women gathered in the shade of the kitchen for coffee and an endless chat. They were joined by grandmother Eudoxia, on one of her last outings from her city flat, half lost into herself, having already gone past the first stages of senile dementia. Grandfather, with a glass of retsina in his hand, with cheerful eyes shining from the table wine, but with the clarity of thought and speech intact, said to me: "L, I would like you to know that I have set aside some ten million drachmas for my daughters and grandchildren. But I feel I there are many years left in me, a lot of bread still to eat and wine to drink. I have a long way to go..." And by saying that, he winked at me. What he implied that afternoon, a couple of months before my departure overseas and a farewell that proved final, I realised many years later. Until then, from grandfather Yiannis, whom either out of an intimate respect, which his family environment and the village community and the stories about him cultivated in me, or because of my inherent shyness, or because of a chronic physical and emotional distance I never called "grandpa"  (as I believe he would have been pleased to hear), nor did I ever ask the naive inquisitive questions that delight grown-ups to hear, from that man I never asked any favours. Even for the petty pocket money he handed to me, he had to be reminded and urged by his two resident daughters. Nevertheless, I was for him, I was told, as the oldest and "academically distinguished (in his eyes)" grandson the rightful heir of most of his millions of drachmas.

He died in the couch of the living room, where after retirement and in old age he read the newspapers or listened to the radio, with his arms crossed over his chest, staring at the ceiling under the yellow, melancholy light of a naked light bulb. The old radio was still standing unused on a table tucked away in a corner; a black-and-white TV was brought and placed on the heavy mahogany bureau. In his last days, his diminutive body had shrunk to its bare bones, as I was told by my aunts who cared for him along with a frequently visiting Mother. I was abroad when the local doctor pronounced that a latent prostate cancer, which had been left to grow untreated for years and decades, had metastasized to the bones, and became incurable. None of us, not even ourselves, imagined that the night creaking of the kitchen door to the toilet outside, in a corner of the terrace, which woke us up along with the voices of drunkards from the café of Grammenos in the mysterious nights of Magnesia of my childhood, portended the painful and abrupt end that would come. Grandfather used to proudly proclaim that he never visited or called a doctor in his whole life, but for some inexplicable fatigue and heaviness he felt in the legs, they were forced to call him. His health record book was indeed a tabula rasa. And it remained as such: the first visit of a doctor in his lifetime simply prognosed the inevitable end. The medications prescribed simply alleviated his suffering from the unbearable pains of his bone cancer. His terminal condition and the end, which was approaching with the mathematical brutality that characterises death in human fate, was kept secret from him, so much so that until the last weeks of his life he expected a recovery and a return to his daily routine.

I consider him a remarkable man, at least within the narrow confines of the broader family and his village community. And from his life I tried to string together some of the memories that survived in the consciousness of my own and his daughters, along with some of the traces his existence left behind in the house he built in the rural outskirts of Thessaloniki, where fate landed him as a young teacher. The memories of the living will fade with the passage of time, any records like this of such insignificant lives are overlooked by the world, and will eventually be lost along with my generation. The house he built in Nova Magnesia still stands and is inhabited, but the end of this too is foreordained. Time as always will do its cruel job unimpeded. Then, the very last traces of the Economou family who once upon time existed, will perish in the loneliness and dullness of the village.

Ancestry 24 - Yiannis & Vasiliki: The Death of Vasiliki

Vasiliki died before Yiannis. Shortly after the great earthquake of Thessaloniki in the summer of 1978, a severe stroke rendered her paralyzed and bedridden, her speech became slurred. Mother blamed all on an attempted surgery on her hip. "A quack doctor caused it!" she used to say, but without evidence. Since then, Mother had been using the incident of grandmother's ‘botched’ surgery, and the stroke as the necessary result of the former, countless of times: as a self-evident point of reference and indication of the quality of medical care and surgeons in Greece, and, also, as a valid excuse to avoid at all costs any consultation by doctors or visits to clinics. The blank health-report book was a document of pride until her demise by dementia. Mother’s opinions on the matter are, however, "someone else’s priest gospel", as we say in Greece.

The last time I saw Grandma alive was a few months before her death. She was lying on the kitchen divan, unable to stand up. She was mumbling incoherently, with the gravely ill's pale, gaunt face and hollow cheeks, and a sad, languorous smile. I bent down and kissed her at both cheeks, as I always used to do when I visited, often at Mother’s urging -lest I forgot to salute. (Even at the ripe ages of fifteen and twenty years, she could not help but give instructions on when and how to thank grandparents and relatives and friends.) I felt the subtle movement of grandmother's lips on my own cheeks. She barely managed to turn her head and meet my eyes, and with great effort raised her two trembling arms in a failed attempt to embrace me. She was still conscious and sensed and felt, I thought. I felt her lover and tenderness: I was still her pasha.

Her funeral was the first and only one I attended until Mother’s death more than four decades later. In that period, several relatives and friends departed the worldly, but only of the place and time of their deaths and funerals I let known in the aftermath of their passing, usually over the telephone. Grandmother's funeral was, therefore, until much later in life, the nearest I came to the spectre of death; an event of the same magnitude as birth, but in our years of youth still incomprehensible and fleeting, as it is philosophically unexplored and shrouded in an opaque veil of mystery. Naturally, event of the funeral became an intense, educative experience and the impressions from that day on my adolescent mind and feelings remained indelible over the years. It seems that, as a fifteen-year-old schoolboy at the time, my parents, who still had the first and last word on such matters, deemed me immature to face up to the occasion and deal with the emotional storm, even trauma, which the sight of a dead beloved person on its deathbed or in its coffin might cause. My opinion was not solicited, nor would it have been considered should it have been.

Mother had come to her family home the night before for the customary, in rural Greece at least, overnight quiet lamentation next to the dead person; a lamentation often diffused with gossip, storytelling, even tales and jokes. Father had brought me in his car within an hour of the scheduled time of the funeral -typically, and dropped me off in front of the house in Magnesia. It was Sunday. A hearse was stationed at the front gate. After parking a little further, Father disappeared. I was left standing outside the fenced flower bed with the rose bushes, under the branched of the old mulberry tree, , both, tree and myself, forsaken at the street corner opposite Vasilis’ bakery. Winter was approaching, and its fallen leaves had begun to cover the footprints from rotten and crumpled berries on the road. The bakery had its blinds shut down, and so did Petros’ grocery store across.

I did not see Father entering the house. Maybe he went over to the house of uncle Leonidas and Mother’s relatives next door, he might have returned to Thessaloniki -an obnoxious, yet quite possible reaction. I cannot recall his presence at the ceremony or what followed. From a young age, he showed an obvious disdain for religious ceremonials of the Orthodox Greek tradition, i.e. christenings, weddings, funerals, memorial services, etc., unless the circumstances absolutely necessitated his presence. And his reluctance to attend those was often manifested by an analogous discomfort and irritation, and, occasionally, by characteristically dismissive and ironic comments. Anyway, he discharged me helpless at the street corner and was never to be seen again that day. He might have judged or been advised by Mother as not to encourage me to see the dead grandmother and keep me away from the corpse. Of course, that had deprived me of a rare and rather useful experience towards a philosophical and emotional coming-of-age for an adolescent. From a different point of view merely confronting the dead corpse of grandmother would be in-itself insufficient; it would amount to a rather skewed impression of death. Far more consequential would be to witness its process, to become an intimate witness of the sequence of moments leading to the singular event itself. Only such an experience would demystify him, illuminate its potency, rather than a "made-up" corpse lying in a coffin, am expressionless face and a body alien to the person who not so long ago had been revealed to the world through a living soul and spirit, to the person who existed.

It was a cold, sunny Sunday morning in early winter. The sun, which was looking down at us from a cloudless sky, felt as usual heavy and indifferent, its glow unable to lighten the sorrow that engulfed the house of grandmother, whose soul and spirit had now abandoned it. Resting on either side of the arched vestibule and the open front door, resting on their two wooden legs there were a series of wreaths of laurel leaves, white flowers and satin ribbons with gold-embroidered messages of condolences with words and names hidden in their folds. Some scattered, disconnected words like "mother", "adored", "beloved"... I had been able to discern. I was riding a storm of sorrow and tormented by the ignorance as to what was to follow, a plight aggravated by the short distance from the front door that separated me from the deceased. The door was gaping wide open emitting a black void filled now and then with gray shadows coming and going in the background. I imagined grandmother lying in a coffin illuminated by candlelight behind the locked shutters, in the middle of the living room that grandfather used as his bedroom, a few yards from the mulberry tree. The piercing smell of frankincense reached me as far as under the tree I was standing. The few words I could read on the wreaths, the shadowy figures going in and out of the dead woman's room brought about an irrepressible feeling of sorrow. I cried a loud cry covering with my face buried in my hands. The street in front of the house was deserted of people or cars and no one could see or hear me: it was the solemn and solitary outburst of my grief.

After the few seconds of an uncontrollable lamentation, moments when all rational thought is set aside by a heavy and formless volume of emotions, like dark clouds gathering before a storm, the lanky figure of Apostolis, the village kiosk owner, grandmother's stepbrother, emerged from the front door of the house and the darkness of the interior. He was leaving behind a step-sister and a piece of his own life. He walked down the stairs with his long stiff legs, stood under the old acacia tree outside the fence gate without acknowledging me, lit a cigarette, and with the slow and heavy movements of his disability from the frostbites on the mountains of Albania, walked away hunched, over to the intersection kiosk. He had drunk quite a bit that morning I was told, before paying his last respects to his dead step-sister. I did not gather the courage to labour on my own accord indoors, nor much courage left in me at that unripe age. Even if I by some divine intervention I had been able to summon its remnants, only after a command by an adult would I pass through that open door into the dark chasm behind it. Instead, I went around the house along the side street and entered through the gate into the backyard and garden. There I swirled back and forth, aimlessly, among the few naked trees and what remained of bare trunks of the staked tomatoes. I ended up under the vine in front of the old poor dwelling of my great-grandparents, devastated and immersed in a tearful grief. Then, Spyros appeared from the back porch into the balcony and came down towards me. With a condescending and sympathetic look behind his thick glasses, he stretched out his arm around my shoulders and guided me around in the front of the house where the hearse was stationed: "Come on, L, my boy. Don't worry... Come on, let's go together..."

The covered coffin had already been placed in the hearse (perhaps, that’s what they had been waiting for before inviting me by proxy to join) and the funeral procession of black-clad people, from family, neighbours and fellow villagers, followed on foot, in a slow and venerable pace behind the vehicle on the way to the chapel of Agios Athanasios in the outskirts, and the adjoining graveyard, where the village buried its dead. Grandfather, upright, with a grim look in a black worn suit from yonder years, but with eyes and face dry of tears, and Mother and aunts in their black dresses, with bowed heads beside him, led the procession, hidden by a few tall bodies that followed. I was left behind, in the tail of the procession, with my cheeks still wet from the crying that preceded, next to Spyros and among other known or unknown fellow villagers. Walking on the dirt road that led out of the village in the dry and cold air of the winter noon, helped me to somehow overcome the paroxysm of sadness that had overwhelmed me in the backyard. Apostolis had stayed even further behind, dragging his awkward legs, tired and drunk.

The hearse stopped in the churchyard and the gravediggers carried the coffin through the gate in the white wall that enclosed the cemetery towards a grave dug open from the evening before the coffin with grandmother lying enclosed. The crowd followed silently. Spyros, who was walking until then next to me, joined the crowd. I was left behind. For some unspecified reason, either because, having given up to an instinctive fear and the scruples of the moment, I vacillated and hesitated. None from the greater family condescended to invite me, possibly because there were explicit instructions, likely by Mother, not to attend what would have been a painful sight for many. I paused, I stood forgotten, under a tall cypress tree. I could not summon again the will or courage to walk on my own accord through the gate to witness the spectacle of the burial. The coffin and the people disappeared through the gate and behind the wall of the cemetery, which enclosed graves of decades old dead souls. I moved away at a distance, a soul floating, towards the ceremony hall behind the small church. I could not get closer to the dead body of my grandmother than those few meters I had been standing away from the cemetery wall and the gate. I did not dare to peek through out of both shame and fear and heard none of the priest's ‘absolution of the dead’ prayers, nor the heartbreaking cries of grief that accompanied the lowering of the coffin into the grave.

At the end of the burial, the priest, followed by the people who "accompanied grandmother to her final resting place", flanked by grandfather and the master of the ceremony, gathered in the funeral hall, a room whose bare walls echoed every human whisper, for koliva, coffee and brandy. The hall, despite the presence of the cypress tree in front of the door of a small building that looked like a side-chapel, was brightly illuminated by the rays of the incongruous and brazen sun of the day through the windows of the façade and a small window of its side. By noon its brightness peaked and the white walls of the church and the cemetery fence turned from a light grey color to dazzlingly white. I sat silently next to Mother and grandfather. Many words about the deceased were not spoken; story telling about her life might have been exhausted during the nightly lamentation. Just some idle chat and the typical condolence wishes to the close family member. Something like "we will always remember her", "may you live to remember her" or the supernatural "eternal will be the memory of her" were caught by my ears, in a peaceful atmosphere where the sobs had subsided. The people who accompanied grandmother to her ultimate resting place, after coffee and brandy and a handful of koliva in a napkin, began to leave one by one. Some formally shook grandfather's hand, a few tapped his shoulder as evidence of emotional support. At the end, it seemed to me, in an atmosphere from which sadness had long abated, I must have been the only one among the funeral crowd who cried so much and shed so many tears for grandmother, however in solitude. Yet, I was overcome by doubts and guilt as to whether I paid a sufficient tribute to a woman who –I knew and felt this deeply– had genuinely loved me, and showed her love, with her pitas and patties, pasties and cookies, with little things that overflowed with kindness and love, with the few means at her disposal and even less strength from a weakened body and a crawling leg.

The closest relatives gathered at home for a humble post-funeral meal, in the kitchen with the large table and the divan where grandmother was lying when I saw her last alive. There again, many words were not spoken. Most remained silent and melancholy, hunched over their soup and deep in their thoughts, some in low tones were chatting about anything but the deceased. Grandmother had not been forgotten by the living world yet, yet none was seeing any benefit in expansive references to an inglorious life that had come and gone unnoticeable from the world. Understandably, it does not make much sense for the living to prolong their suffering indefinitely by being recounting the loss of a life that is irreversibly gone.

The small cosy room with the wood stove, the divan and the flokati on its wooden floor became, after lunch, the final refuge of the remaining household, including myself, to contemplate the loss and the emptiness death brought to the home, to reflect on the portentous themes of life and death, which always transcend the human mind and existence. We were sitting on a circle, myself crouching on the divan, with my elbows placed on my knees, Mother and one or two of her sisters, grandfather on a chair against the balcony door. The sun of that winter afternoon began to set. The heat from wood stove drugged us and drove everyone, already mentally and physically exhausted, close to one of the limits of human endurance. No one wept as the cycle of heavy grief was closed. Domna said something: "I don't know, but I feel calm. I couldn't feel the need to cry today. Maybe I'm still under the influence of the sedatives I took in the morning.... I don't know...", and she sighed.

Grandfather, who until then had been sitting quietly in one of the old black chairs of the cafes with the semicircular back, with his hands resting on his knees, said -with satisfaction- something about the large number of people grandmother’s funeral attracted, whom paid the due honours she deserved; and how everything had been masterfully organized by the funeral parlour. I thought that this had no significance whatsoever for the person who died, since, from the realm of death where she was transported, she could not have witnessed her funeral, neither sensually, nor spiritually. (How would we all wish for this posthumous impossibility, as it would help somehow evaluate our lives by the number and types of people who were affected, in one way or another, by our loss enough to accompany our dead bodies to the grave?) For the meticulous grandfather that everything was done in a perfect order and to the last letter of the protocol mattered. But at the end of his contemplation, he addressed me in the inexplicable plural of unfamiliarity, with a sad, as well as a cold and stern look from his small round eyes under the broad wrinkled forehead, with pauses of silence between questions, short as well as unbearable, as if in these pauses he expected immediate rational answers from an immature teenager: "L., when did you find out your beloved grandmother got sick? ... How many times did you come to see it since you found out? ... Were you aware how much grandmother loved you? Didn't you feel the need to visit her all this time? Not even to attend her funeral?"

I didn't know the answers to that bitter questioning, which looked more like a rudimental moral trial by a man who might have wanted to deflect his own deep sadness or dispel a personal guilt. I felt that I had committed an almost unforgivable moral misconduct and started to cry again. A guilt of similar nature to the one I had felt in the churchyard outside the cemetery resurfaced in my consciousness. An emotional turbulence reappeared came and overpowered me. I didn't say anything in response, only wept with my head lowered, staring at the flokati, incapable to meet grandfather's gaze. Someone intervened, auntie Litsa I think, dissuading grandfather to continue with more aphoristic phrases, nearly an anathema: "Leave the child alone, Dad. He loved his grandmother as much as anyone and cried for her."

After a while, when grandfather withdrew to his room to rest, my aunt tried to sooth my feelings with her own ambiguous interpretation -fabricated or genuine I could not tell, about what grandfather wanted to say and what he really meant behind his harsh words and corrosive tone. He never, I was told, intended to question my love or care for grandmother, neither to doubt how adequately I performed my moral and ceremonial duties to a grandmother who adored me. Such duties, as we know, do not constitute an obligation and bear no substance, but they are merely mandated for the sake of form and the eyes of the community and, maybe, the Lord. On that score, I was forgiven a priori: I was ignorant of such "moral duties", the formal aspects of them. (After all, the ethics of the Economou family that grandfather adhered to, nurtured and imposed to his wife and offspring were founded on a basis and had a structure different than mine, and separated by the chronological distance of two generations, even before they began to appear eccentric and anachronistic.) Grandfather had just felt – so my auntie told me – a deep sadness, after having seen me outside the gate of the cemetery, deserted, lost, forlorn. And he felt the urge to hold me by the hand, to bring me closer to grandmother who was disappearing into nothingness and whom we would never see again. In hindsight, it betrayed an own hidden guilt.    

Ancestry 23 - Yiannis & Vasiliki: Old Age Closure

Books he did not read and these were scarce in the house. He only read newspapers. He spent most of his afternoons and evenings in the spacious and bright living room, which he appropriated and made it his bedroom. Standing against the blind wall there was an antique heavy mahogany bureau, the most notable piece of furniture in the house, an oil stove heater between the two windows at the opposite corner, two arm-chairs, a small coffee table and a two-seater couch, however, big enough to serve as the main bed for his diminutive body that had shrank further by old age. There, lying in his red cotton pajamas, he read the daily press for hours -to the last word of the last article.

Which newspapers he chose to read during his retirement years reflected ephemeral political beliefs or, rather, fluctuating inclinations and sympathies, which could change swiftly and unpredictably in Greece's volatile political landscape. In choosing his daily broad sheets, he was also influenced by opinions formed by neighbors, fellow ouzo drinkers in the village café he frequented, former colleagues, as well the most eminent members of the “Association of Large Families” he encountered in its office in the city, and by whoever happened to comment on the headlines. The political orientation of the newspaper one read and its editor mattered in Greece, and what grandfather displayed and read in public places hinted as to his political stance and views. Given his cautious psyche and a tumultuous past on the “wrong side of the fence” -so to speak, which many villagers of similar age would certainly recall, he was fully aware of potential whispering and gossip around Mr. Yiannis present and past, amongst the café patrons and others in the community.

The editions of the newspapers he was buying changed, therefore, in tandem with the party in power, the leader’s charisma and eloquence, and transformations incurring in his political consciousness. They started from few progressive publications, such as the Αυγή [The Dawn] of leftist orientation in the pre-dictatorship era, carefully bought by an anonymous kiosk in the busy Venizelou Street and camouflaged by mainstream "right-wing" or conservative newspapers, such as Μακεδονία [Macedonia]; they ended in conventionally right-wing and to “reactionary” or “far-right” editions– from the point of view of my communist youth. As the neophyte and radical and "revolutionary" leftist of my school and university years, "far-right" papers, such as Βραδυνή [The Nightly] or Ελληνικός Βορράς [The Hellenic North], even more moderate right-wing ones such as Μακεδονία, triggered an instinctive inner reaction, even repulsion, as much as any hardcore conservative standpoint would have caused. Seen grandfather reading such papers, derided and repudiated outright by my party, initially brought an unpleasant surprise and confusion, having heard so much about his past, gallant and ‘heroic’ in my eyes, and his treatment by advocates of political persuasions of whom he had as of late in his life became an ardent supporter and voter, before culminating into a permanent disappointment, even contempt. The post-civil war fears had long been abated, the dictatorship had been a nightmare of the past, and the mere fact that he had retired should have provided, in a sense, additional security in openly manifesting political beliefs, and more freedom to express his thoughts in public. What worse could happen in the remaining of his years? But of the wind of freedom of expression that blew after the dictatorship, good use he did not make. To the political fervor of his youth, he never returned, while his political thinking was gradually taken hold by the disease of old age: a sclerotic conservatism. Time always does its dirty job, in body and spirit.

Next to his couch-cum-bed there was a small table with the old radio that he had bought as soon as he returned from exile. When tired of reading the papers, before bedtime at night, during the seven years of the Junta of the Colonels before a TV was installed on the large bureau, he used to tune in broadcasts in Greek by stations such as Deutsche Welle or the BBC World Service, even in stations behind the "Iron Curtain" -from Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. Much he could not have made from the narrative of these broadcasts in some Slavonic language. But listening to them exerted an inexplicable attraction and fascination, and whenever I was present at these radio broadcasts he enjoyed translating Pan-Slavic words such as слобода (freedom) or работа (work) or леб (bread), keywords fitting the construction of socialism in Eastern Europe. The socialist ideals of his youth had not yet been completely corroded. “Blood hardly turns into water” -as they say, and the ideas and opinions that the mind forms and embraces in youth are brought back on the surface, sometimes instinctively, as a spontaneous reaction to a political situation or a historical phenomenon before us, sometimes as ossified prejudices and ideological dogmas, sometimes as merely established and tested ways we have accepted for analyzing and dealing with sociopolitical and historical events. For grandfather, it might have been a crude or oblique way to propagate to a young soul some of the "progressive" ideals that he embraced in his youth. Lest we forget, the first post-junta years was a time that the USSR and the "actually existing socialism" still fascinated many in Greece on either side of the political spectrum. If grandfather subconsciously had such an aim at instilling into my conscience such ideals, then he contributed into it -with just a few Slavic words.

With the transition to democracy concluded, he gradually abandoned the traditional left. For a period, he was enchanted by Panhellenic Socialist Movement, its leader Papandreou and his progressive demagogy. When Papandreou withdrew his support for the re-election of Karamanlis as a Head of State, that esteemed statesman par excellence of post-war Greece and political idol of many (including grandfather) since the collapse of the junta, he turned his voter’s back to PASOK and metamorphosed into a right-winger. His political transformation from pro-EAM, pro-communist after the German Occupation, to a reactionary version of the right (repugnant in my eyes) was complete. Incredulous and disappointing as it was for my youthful enthusiasm at the time, in a period of left-wing activism in my life, I later realized that such mutations, especially in post-regime Greece, even amongst educated and deeply politicized people, were reasonable and occurred naturally. They moved in trajectories and in dialectical contradictions with the transformations and vacillations of political power, the ever-greater chasms between words and praxis, leading to contradictions, regressions, U-turns, and so-on. Besides, the whole political scene was then – and in Greece, it almost permanently is – in a state of flux, and grandfather, as well many retirees like grandfather, let themselves being seduced by populism or mesmerized by a charismatic personality which led generally vague and shallow, devoid of vision and concrete objectives, ephemeral political currents. Or, they resigned themselves to passive observers of historical developments, as they were unfolding and presented skewed and distorted by compliant media, whilst their political causes were formulated and conducted by distant decision-making centres. At least they, the common folk, were aware of the negligible influence they exerted on these developments.

The principal method that prevailed in Greece's political scene, with its strong economic and technological dependence on foreign centers, was that of "wait-and-see" or “play-it-by-ear” that of forgetting and quickly disengaging from usually extravagant pre-election promises. A political class mired by cronyism, in an economy that offered little room for maneuvering and radical change, a class without vision and with their main post-election goal the distribution of power amongst its main actors, a class primarily serving its own interests and those of its backers. It would not take long to alienate or disorientate the thinking of many ordinary citizens, and to wrap them in illusions. Grandfather was amongst them, despite his background, knowledge and culture.

Ancestry 22 - Yiannis & Vasiliki: Days in Retirement

Grandfather’s daily routine had several memorable, but, for an outsider, rather unremarkable features. It consisted of those everyday routine acts, which, despite a prima facie insignificance, obtain an untold importance in the microcosm of a family in a Greek village. This apparently inflated significance could be traced to his out of the ordinary personality, which dominated his immediate environment, the women of the household and those of the village community who dealt with him daily.

In the mornings, from early dawn, without exception, crouched in a sleeveless shirt, or sometimes without it, in summer or winter, in hot or cold weather, with a bar of soap and cold water from a tap under the acacia tree of the backyard, he used to wash his white bald head and face, which, in the process of rubbing, temporarily turned from white to pinkish. Spyros, the eldest son of Leonidas -Vasiliki’s firs cousin, who along with his brother managed the neighbouring grocery store their father established, he often watched in amazement from his terrace. One afternoon, while we were having coffee under the vine of the back yard with our relatives and neighbours, but with grandfather absent, Spyros commented: "I think the old man will suffer a sudden death one winter morning washing bare chested under this cold water…" His prophecy did not materialize; grandfather “departed” for the other world neither suddenly, nor indeed prematurely, nor did the least his death was precipitated by a cold morning wash in a frosty winter day. After the morning routine of washing and the regular shaving of his face and bald skull, Vasiliki would prepare and serve his breakfast: from milk, brought in a tin churn by the milkman of the village, and bread from Vasilis’ bakery across the street, chunks of which he used to dip into the milk bowl. A cup of Turkish coffee followed. Breakfast, as with all meals, he enjoyed sitting, serenely and quietly, at the head of the large kitchen table next to the divan by a wall decorated with a kilim. A woodburning stove was warming his being in the cold winter mornings.  

After retirement, once or twice a week, he would put on his old gray suit worn out from his years dressed in it as a headmaster and inspector of primary schools, and he would scurry to the school and the Church, where, after greeting the early morning patrons of the café opposite the Village Hall building, he would board the bus to Thessaloniki. Once retired, he put himself forward as the sole candidate for the vacant role of the president of the regional “Association of Large Families.” His own family was classified as ‘large’ by the letter of the Greek law, too, thanks to his four daughters and a prematurely lost son. Having devoted most of his working life as a teacher in the poor western suburbs of the city (of Ampelokipi, of Menemeni, Eleftheria, Kordelio, and Dendropotamos with its large Roma community -a muddy slum those days) and having made his name in the area as teacher and headmaster, he was naturally the most suitable candidate to process benefit claims for the poor multi-child families in a dire need of welfare support. He would certainly have sought the presidency himself, so that he continued with some sort of engagement in public affairs, as many retired civil servants, especially teachers and professors, do to remain active and anchor themselves for as long as possible in the chariot of public life. Clubs and associations are often one of the last strongholds of resistance against marginalization and exclusion from active society that old age inevitably brings about.

To this end, in the first years after retirement, he occupied a small office in the west of the city, near the Port and the Courts, whence he voluntarily served families with many children and handled their applications for welfare benefits. Greece's chronic demographic problem, due to the wars, several waves of post-war immigration, and low birth rates, meant that the few families with three or more children could benefit from meagre state benefits and perks, for they had several mouths to feed in general conditions of social poverty and an inadequate welfare system mired by bureaucracy. Family income in many countries is, perversely, in inverse correlation with family fertility. Nevertheless, a few bright minds of our sclerotic systems of governance saw (and still do) an incentive for young families to procreate in the pitiful cash-benefits they hand out. Unsurprisingly, such measures proved (and still do) ineffectual.

Therefore, most of Mr. Yiannis' clientele belonged to the lower, even lumpenproletariat strata of the city, and came from working class and deprived suburbs, including, of course, the populous Roma community. A poor and uneducated people, whose ruthlessness in stealing and other petty crimes, went hand in hand with their benevolence and naivety, and who, I was told, were treated with patience and dignity by their grandfather. His youthful idealism about social justice and equal opportunities, which did he, neither as a teacher nor as retiree, forsake, should have contributed to a vague personal contentment, even if, for the rest of his family, it seemed a thankless pastime and an old age peculiarity. For himself, after all, it broke the burdens of a retirement routine and the social marginalization and loneliness that accompanies it, a predicament aggravated at older age.

 Auntie Litsa, with her talent of impersonating characters, recounted during one of my sleepover evenings at grandfather’s, an hilarious incident, one of several in her repertoire of anecdotes about grandfather:  The restless father of a Gypsy family, who had to wait a bit little longer outside the door of the office of the “Association of Large Families”, as soon as he saw grandfather emerging from the end of the dark corridor leading to his office, got up from the visitor’s bench outside, opened his arms in exasperation, and ill-naturedly said: "Where have been, Boss? We’ve been waiting for ages for your letter? You been out for a long shit?" Grandfather replied calmly, but frowning and in a customary pompous manner: "Too many words, I can do without..." The Gypsy father, unconscious of the coarseness and impudence in his behaviour, perhaps self-justifying by a genuine irritation for a long wait, perhaps said as the crude joke expected by an uneducated and rough person, followed Mr. Yiannis, leading his large family, in a sulking demeanour; simply because of the long wait or by grandfather not acknowledging his humorous disposition. They followed him as a flock follows its shepherd, lined themselves up in front of his small desk, the Gypsy father, arms folded with machismo in front of his chest over his pot-belly, a baby in the arms of his young wife, two small kids hanging from her lush flowery dress. Their case was handled in few minutes, without words exchanged, without thanks, without smiles -only a final: "There is your certificate, sir!" from grandfather, with the conscientiousness and meticulousness that has always characterised him –and the Economou family in general.

Housework involved the cleaning and tidying up of the two terraces, the flower bed at the front, and the concrete courtyard at the back of the house and the large garden beyond (then comprising improvised vegetable patches, a few scattered fruit trees -an apricot tree and a couple of fig trees, the vine with its inedible sour grapes in front of great-grandparents’ house and the chicken coop, the acacia tree above the fountain near the door of the fence), that is, meaningless and purposeless daily sweeping, the feeding of the poultry, the watering of flower beds and pots, all these innumerable chores of everyday life in the village, done unconsciously, and are neither listed nor recounted at the end of one’s life, although for the women of a backward village in Greece time spent on those chores occupied large parts of their existence. These chores were delegated and carried out uncomplainingly, but instead with zeal and meticulousness, by the two unmarried daughters. They bestowed to Mr Yiannis’ household, as is always the case with routine activities, an illusion of stability. Grandmother Vasiliki, for as long as her crooked limping legs (one lame with a hip worn out by arthritis, the other supporting much of the weight of a body ravaged by age) could carry her around the premises, although a rather mediocre cook, she was almost exclusively occupied by the cooking and cleaning of the kitchen at the end of the meals.

Grandfather's contribution to what we call "domestic chores” was the hoeing around the trees of bahçe, the apricot and the fig trees and the few rows of tomatoes he had planted. Towards the end of autumn, he would arrange for firewood to be delivered. A truck would unload and lay out in the back yard, the logs in a heap. During the winter months he would regularly chop them, a few at a time, before they fuelled the fires in the wood stoves in the kitchen and the small living room. In those activities, especially arranging the logs in rows on the wall under a shed, I participated with my childish enthusiasm and a natural eagerness for adult chores. Just as much as I helped chopping the logs with an axe: initially under the supervision of grandfather and his rudimentary guidance and, finally, as I was growing up autonomously, despite the deep worries of getting hurt by the women of the house. Upgrading of the house, its façade and terraces, and the bahçe, the fencing of the courtyard, the building of a new toilet next to the steps of the terrace from behind, a critical amendment so that grandfather would not have to walk a long distance for his night urination, he entrusted them to local builders under his discreet supervision and guidance.

His ate his late afternoon lunch in silence and solitude, sitting alone at the head of the table. Exceptions would have been some weekday afternoons when, before coming home on his way back from the “Association” or a street market, he would stop by the café on the turn for some ouzo with mezedes. If he was told I was visiting, he would bring pieces of roast chicken and other treats from a rotisserie next to his café. He would enter the house tipsy, wearing one of his rare smiles and his cheeks slightly flushed from excitement or the cold weather, the parchment paper in which they were wrapped emitted an unforgettable mouth-watering smell that stirred the senses and enhanced my afternoon appetite after hours of playing. Then, his inner being liberated by the earlier ouzo-drinking session, he would raise his voice and began to deliver instructions and orders around him: "Bring the bread, Litsa!" "Why is there no yoghurt in the fridge?” "You, Domna, should set about learning a few useful things, get some education, because I can’t see you making any progress whatsoever in life! Society demands educated people today and you’re ill-prepared to face it..." Or, he would tease Vasiliki and her lame right leg, the subtle limp in her youth whose arthritis worsened and made it in later years conspicuous: "I will take you to a hospital and I’ll ask the surgeon to cut chop my leg and transplant it to you..." Or, in the formal, plural form of the second-person pronoun: "When I first saw you in your youth, my dear lady, I thought you wanted to tease me with your walking!" Poor Vasiliki, I thought. For his daughter, nevertheless, he had a point.