Ancestry 30 - Eudoxia & Leonidas: Under the Family Auspices

Grandmother Eudoxia was not in possession of a special beauty, but her face and mien had a few distinct attractive features -in view of the norms of her milieu, and her coquettish nature added some extra charm. As we would expect from a seamstress, she paid due attention to her appearance and developed a good taste in clothes despite the scarce financial resources. In old photographs from her youth, she showed a thick dark wavy hair cut short at shoulder length. Because of its unforgiving thickness, it was cumbersome to straighten with natural means, tidy it up around her small face or tuck it behind the ears. It turned gray early in life and virtually into white by the time she was around sixty-years-old or since the age I started to retain memories as a child. Her eyes were deep and rather small in an also small facial outline, suppressed down by a narrow forehead, but they were iridescent and bright, even when the cataract blurred the color of her iris, which faded toward the greyish-blue hue I remember. The line of her thick eyebrows fell on the eyelids, somehow enlarged the eyes in their sockets, and gave her gaze a rare and attractive depth and penetration. To the outside world, her face, worn out by time and hardships and mainly the eyes -the “window of the soul” as they say, radiated a determination and a strong-will, an immediacy and straightforwardness in her behaviour, along with kindness and sincerity, certainly a dignity; one could perhaps add that it even projected a fleeting sense of magnificence despite the humblest of roots and lack of formal education. She was rather self-aware of those eyes of hers, which she passed down almost unchanged in shape and depth to her eldest son, Father. How many times did she proudly mention in conversations the whispers she eavesdropped from two heart-throbbed girls passing in front of the gate of their house in Toumpa in Father’s late teenage years: "Here lives, the one with the big, beautiful eyes, Maria!"

Eudoxia was a petite woman, but by no means stunted despite the periods of malnutrition in her life as a child. Most of the Kampakis’ family members were rather short in stature having taken after their father's side, whilst their mother, the ‘Stork,’ stood out with her tall stature well above the family average. Grandmother was also a sickly woman, the result of the vicissitudes in her life, the years of hardships the refugees endured in the shantytown of Toumpa, followed, a couple of decades later, by the general privation the German Occupation brought about. She contracted tuberculosis sometime before the war and the discovery of streptomycin, when the disease was treated with pneumonectomies and artificial pneumothorax and spells in a sanatorium. Yet, the means available at the place and time proved effective in healing the consumptive grandmother, thankfully for her children and grandchildren. She survived the disease, which led many, including her youngest brother, to a premature end, but without half of the lung her God endowed her with. As expected, given the experiences that affected her childhood, she did not acquire any sort of elementary education. Whatever basic reading skills she managed to attain were patchy and incremental - admirably, through autodidacticism from newspaper and magazine headlines, from signs and picture captions. We have not found out how (perhaps from newspapers that Leonidas brought home, perhaps from her church diaries or the pocket Bible she kept at home, perhaps from the telephone directory or the very few printed documents one could find in their flat, perhaps from occasional assistance she received by her two sons), but to everyone’s astonishment she had managed to compile a handwritten phone book, complete with names, numbers, and sometimes addresses of family members, relatives and friends. In short, the rudimentary reading and writing skills, which proved sufficient to keep her afloat in the world, she owed it exclusively to self-learning.

A childhood friend from the years of their resettlement in Salonica, Dimitra, who escaped from the misery of the slum ahead of grandmother and settled a little further down, in the Fleming area where I grew up, endeavoured to make the matchmaking of a young neighbour, Leonidas, with her old childhood friend Eudoxia, the seamstress from Toumpa. (Such friendships could only have been broken by death and grandmother’s yelling from her balcony every time she saw Dimitra passing from our street below: "Dimitra, come up, καλέ, for coffee!" still resonate in my ears.)  Although one or two layers down in the social stratification of the city, the nearly lumpen Eudoxia, the refugee girl from a town in Asia Minor, with no dowry, no education, but a poorly paid job as a part-time seamstress, was accepted by great-grandmother Katina, the de facto head of the slightly more affluent, if not bourgeois, Melnikian Ibrişimci family, and the two younger siblings of Leonidas still living under the same roof. Katina was convinced, after meeting Eudoxia, that a marriage of Leonidas to the quiet and humble refugee girl would somehow calm grandfather down. Leonidas was clearly a difficult person to be with; frequently edgy and irritable and with a neurotic disposition, that later in life developed into some form of neurasthenia. Dimitra’s matchmaking was set up in the old family home of Deligiorgi Street (Eudoxia’s dwelling in Toumpa was not fit for purpose), with coffee and vanilla “submarine” and spoon sweets, and proved successful -at least, against the simple criteria that lower strata of Salonica’s society judged at that time the success of a marriage between two strangers from different walks of life and of different personality, which an unlikely concurrence of events brought together. Eudoxia tamed Leonidas’ nerves for the best part of their lives and made him a reasonable person. Katina’s instincts were vindicated.

Indeed, Eudoxia proved to be a distinctively stoic and patient character. A good housewife and, more importantly for a male family, a capable housekeeper and excellent cook -without the aid offered nowadays from recipe books or the internet or the technology and accessories of the modern house. The traditional recipes with their elaborate secrets were stored in her mind as they were passed down from the past generations that inhabited the Byzantine and Ottoman ruled Anatolia and Izmir. They were refined and enhanced by the mingling with the different cultures coexisting in Salonica’s cauldron, the Sephardic, the Slavic, as well as the omnipresent European influence, and culminated in a sublime fusion cooking: stuffed vine or cabbage leaves, giant beans, Smyrna meatballs, giouvetsi and braised meat (in later periods of relative prosperity which bringing meat to the table became affordable), and deserts, like revani cake and melomakarona, were recorded by her daughters-in-law and survived into my generation, along with the sumptuous flavours I enjoyed as a child -having been fortunate to be raised close to grandmother.

Therefore, Eudoxia and Leonidas complemented each other well, coexisted, and lived the rest of their relatively poor and unsung lives in an ostensible harmony; with the nervous disposition and disorders of the latter being accepted with patience and stoic sighs or resignation, but not with confrontations, from the former. With Leonidas struggling to earn a living from poorly paid jobs, Eudoxia took up the occasional sewing jobs for wealthier neighbours. They managed to raise and their two sons commendably and have them educated, under unfavourable conditions and with the several stumbles along the way through years of privation and wars. Notwithstanding my existence on this earth, I owe Eudoxia the solace and comfort she offered selflessly and passionately on occasions of trepidation and tumult naturally associated with growing up. She did as well, before me, with her two sons, although without the due appreciation

Ancestry 29 - Eudoxia & Leonidas: The Kampakis' in Salonica

The young refugees of my grandparents’ generation from Bayindir and Melnik, of Eudoxia’s and Leonidas’ families, came together in Salonica and left their traces in the town and the memories of the handful of still living descendants. A few amongst them, perhaps the most gifted, perhaps the most fortunate, managed to break the shackles of their low social class bound by in their youth from powerful historical and social forces. Even those, only a few rungs of the social ladder did they succeed to climb. The opportunities were few, sporadic and uneven at the time, the blows of history and war merciless and the obstacles life threw in their ways sometimes insurmountable. The pace of progress with the inevitable advances in productivity, dictated by the imperceptible laws of capitalist production (the “invisible hands of the markets”, some say) that reduce the toil required to obtain the necessities of livelihood and increase mobility between social strata, that is the entropy of society, all these fruits of technological advance taken for granted in contemporary life were hardly at hand for those generations who struggled to keep up in uneven societies of an uneven world and under adverse conditions.

Vasilis, the oldest of Eudoxia’s brothers, set up a tavern, which he managed until his death; that is, the basics he had learned in his youth in a café in Bayindir were those that he applied in the new homeland. Stelios, the short and slender uncle with the always rosy cheeks I remember, worked during the mid-war years as a hand in a textile factory whose ruins still exist by the stream of Toumpa in the parish of Agios Fanourios. Yiannis, the youngest of the Kampakis’ also opened a small tavern in the Fleming area, but died young of consumption shortly after the end of the war. The site his tavern was taken over by Stelios and his brother-in-law, grandfather Leonidas, who turned into a greengrocer’s store. They worked as partners for two or three miserable post-war years. Father assisted their enterprise as much he could, he said with the willingness of a ten-year-old child on his school vacations. The small business did not do perform as expected and folded. Leonidas took up initially a low-paid job as a worker in a tobacco factory before being assigned due to poor health, and with the intervention of the influential uncle Elias, to an usher’s job in the Association of Tobacco Merchants, a job that kept until his retirement. Stelios returned to the factory until he gathered enough work credits to retire with a meagre state pension. Once a retiree, he used to walk down the streets of Toumpa to visit his sister in our old neighbourhood in the Fleming area before he grew old and died an unnoticed by the broader family death. From what I was hearing grandmother was his favourite sister. During his visits to Eudoxia’s flat, she invariably treated him with a cup of Turkish coffee, and if she had prepared food he would have been asked to stay over for lunch. That offer Stelios always declined despite grandmother’s protestations. After their small talk by the door of the kitchenette on his way out whilst observing me with a gentle smile eating my food, after a wink and a few teasing words towards me, he departed before Leonidas returned from his morning rounds of grocery shopping, his club or café. If that little shop business of Stelios and Leonidas had not dried up and the vegetable and fruit trade in the old neighbourhood had turned a profit and had made a living for the two families, perhaps their fate would have been different, outside the miserable factories of the post-war city, just as the fate of many of their descendants might have changed. A different turn, an infinitesimal deviation of life along its way, a minute differentiation in the choices presented to man to choose with that ostensible "free will" can sometimes have a dramatic impact on the microcosm of the lives of common people, like the Kampakis’ family, although it does not affect in the least the course of history.

Chryssa, the older sister of Eudoxia, with her husband and children remained in the shacks of Toumpa, until Karamanlis, the statesman of modern era Greece, razed them to the ground for the sake of what many saw as an ill-conceived and poorly planned and distorted modernization of the city. The imperative at that time was to provide affordable accommodation for the masses descending into the city from rural areas in search of jobs and a future. During Karamanlis’ tenure as a minister, Chryssa’s family was given to rent a simple and affordable, but for the standards of the time modern flat in an estate built in the suburb of Foinikas for housing working-class families. We visited their flat regularly; I was towed along, sometimes reluctantly, by grandmother, who always seemed to yearn those outings and the endless chats and gossip with Chryssa and her two daughters, Diamanto and Despoina, that those visits entailed. The women chatted for hours on end, and if Diamanto happened to bring along her boy, we played together in the openness of the outskirts of the city, away from the dense urbanisation and the proliferation of cars that began to choke the old neighbourhoods and open spaces of Salonika. The houses in the settlement of Foinikas were low, with few floors, sparsely scattered in blocks, with pine trees surrounding them and rest benches in their shades and ample area for a kick about. It featured nearby playgrounds and kiosks with refreshments and candies. An amusement park was operated in the summer by the busy road that crossed the district. The Avenue of National Resistance as it is called today brought (and still brings) to mind family excursions by coach to the beaches of Peraia, Bahçe Ciflik, Nea Mechaniona and Epanomi, seaside towns along the coast of Thermaikos Bay, destinations of cheap holidays or a Sunday day trip to the beach for city's plebs. When Father eventually obtained his car, which was another small step on the social ladder, our weekend summer trips took us further along the same road to the then less crowded and still unexplored sandy beaches of Chalkidiki.

Of Chryssa's two daughters, Diamanto was the youngest and most beautiful. One summer, in Nea Fokea of Chalkidiki, the fishing village where a branch of the broader Kampakis’ family settled, after the Asia Minor Catastrophe to become farmers and taverners, a place where grandmother always spent a few weeks’ summer vacations with Chryssa and relatives, in that village her niece fell in love and eventually married a remarkable merchant navy lad, named Xenos. I was told that Xenos was a bright individual, with a sharp mind and a special talent for valuations, to have it wasted in long sea voyages. He became a renowned expert in estimating damages to ships and their cargo and quickly ascended the ranks of his shipping company, so much so that, he, with Diamanto and their children, settled and prospered in glamorous London. Young Despoina’s life, on the other hand, turned out to be joyless and beyond mundane. She worked for decades in the same textile factory, whilst taking care of the aging Chryssa, until she retired with the petty pension of a factory worker. She died as a spinster and a virgin just a few months after the death of her mother, alone and single in the long-neglected by the council estate flat of Foinikas. Despoina stands out in my mind as one of those human beings whose life seemed to have been heedlessly wasted; barely noticeable, between rows of looms in the factory and the four walls of a poor working-class flat she shared all her life with her old mother. It looked like a solitary walk in the human wilderness, which, until its very end, barely caught anybody’s attention, in any shape or form; a life which did not deviate from the monotonous, straight path of the daily grind and repetitive sequences of infinitesimal actions. The unworthy event that was Despoina's journey through this world, more insignificant than a drop in the ocean, recalls some of the questions existential philosophy has posed and tried to answer: What can make someone happy in life? Is there real happiness after all that we should strive to pursue? Is life without happiness worth living?

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.