Ancestry 33 - Existential Queries: Our Lives

The life of every human being deserves more than sporadic appeals to fate or the unwilling or passive submission to the chances presenting themselves along the way, and which, as pointed out, amounts to a renunciation of all resistance to forces exerted from one direction or another, a suppression of creative thinking, and a depletion of the will and spirit. Despite its relative insignificance within the wider human landscape the individual life is unique. One can argue that nothingness in a sense contradicts uniqueness. This contradiction is indeed latent in our existential concerns, especially when evaluating life and querying its meaning. With the exceptions of the geniuses and the great personalities of history, who, in their lifetimes, acquired fame or accumulated power or wealth or both, because either of inherent talents or inherited privileges, and whose paths left a notable trace in history and their theories and praxis contributed into universal knowledge and the progress of civilisation, on the other hand, the uniqueness and value of the lives of common people will bear no ecumenical witnesses and recognition in posterity. However, this does not necessarily contradict our individuality and uniqueness, even when the only witness of these attributes is our own conscience.    

Here are some more truisms: the existence and consciousness of any human being appears fleetingly on our earth, for a few instances of historical time, a drop in the vast ocean of living and dying souls. It traces trajectories parallel or intersecting with other beings and their minds through an inconceivably complex web of interpersonal and social relations. The unique being, whose body and mind is bearer of the legacy of previous generations, that is, the knowledge they accrued and the material things they created and left behind, perceives and captures moments of his existence through consciousness, enriches it and moulds it into a life. Beside the fact, as one can maintain, that individual life is at large hetero-determined and shaped through relations and interactions with other beings, influenced in its behaviour and actions by the social environment and milieu.

Answering the who am I, striving to obtain a sense of my being and existence –for as long as I am in the here and now, immersed in the world, as they say, should begin by chronicling and examining the lives of people I was related with in a way or another, probing into their minds and conscience, and, further, recounting the experiences of the places and societies where I grew up, was educated, fell in love, worked, lived. My very being in its nowness and place in society is determined by events that occurred in the deep past, well before birth, and until the present moment. This existence can be discerned, dare say justified, and acquire a recognizable meaning -exclusively within and for me (often sufficient for all intents and purposes), by simply recollecting the experiences of the past I had in the societies of contemporary fellow human beings. This recounting of individual experiences, along with the attempt via conscious reflection for an elementary understanding of the wider social environment hosting my existence and the parallel historical process, both prerequisites for the understanding life, add value to my own life and those who left or those I will leave behind when my turn comes; little value, the truth is, but nonetheless finite and for the eye of the beholder. If anything, while I write and whatever I write cleanses the soul of the taints of everyday life and grind the unconscious over long spans immersion in the world with many trivialities and vulgarities.

Ancestry 32 - Existential Queries: Chance

Yet, many a time our intelligence, in its attempt to seek logic and order, seems overwhelmed by a perceivable chaos in the world and frustrated by its incapacity to rationally explain phenomena or projecting with an acceptable degree of clarity their evolution in the future. The question of the effect chances (or ‘fortune’ in its positive acceptation) have in our lives remains a valid one and lingers throughout life, despite the law of causality and the historical determinism many of us adhere to; and that regardless of the strength and efficaciousness of our will, that is our potential to punch above our weight in our struggles, and influence, if not the course of history, at least somehow that of our lives and those of the people close to us. Acknowledging and assigning a cardinal importance to chance, that is resigning ourselves to the perceived randomness of circumstances and events and phenomena on our paths in an apparently chaotic world, suppresses the innate thirst for knowledge and explanation and is not conducive to bring balance and harmony to minds and souls. Onto a personal level, using the intellect to reduce this randomness of much of what happens around us and affects as a result our thinking and feelings, our behaviour, contact and actions, that is to rationalise the apparent chaos, brings along not just an element of order in our thinking process and perception of the world, but it moderates and effectually manages various emotions inherent in human nature: regret, remorse, the joy in success, the feeling of fulfilment, etc.

Nevertheless, many of us who wonder: “why things happen this way and not another” are often tempted to take a short cut and effortlessly answer without much thought: “Oh, it happened by chance!” or with the proverbial: “Because of bad (or good) luck!” But what does chance and luck mean, in a world that to the human intellect is rudimentarily connected and elementarily coherent, but inherently always causal and deterministic, in which behind each effect often lurks complex and virtually infinite sequence of causes, and each phenomenon is the result of several conflicting forces, often unidentifiable by the most intensive and thorough human analysis? However, despite the randomness that seemingly characterizes small or large events or clusters of events into phenomena that make up short or long human stories of personal or social nature, such stories can potentially be analysed, delineated and described by observable and sometimes the measurable result of forces, whether obvious or inconspicuous, whether invisible at first sight or latent.

Reduction of the occurrence of an event to chance, then, stems from nothing more than the inability for explanation or the unwillingness to seek one; from a rather unconditional surrender to the power of these forces, a disclaimer of knowledge and responsibility, an aversion to reality, a fear of the consequences and of what will come next. Chance seems, after all, a word devoid of content, either concrete or abstract, whose invocation is of no practical benefit. At worst, it becomes synonymous with the evasion of an exegesis and betrays weakness or ignorance or simply indolence. At best, it suggests an inadequate degree of understanding of phenomena in social and human relations. It is a white flag raised by the perplexed and resigned individual, when confronted by the question of the meaning and reason of his presence on this world, of his ancestors and descendants, no matter how insignificant and brief. In effect, it nulls past and present life, on the pretext of this limited capacity to provide an adequate rational explanation of what is happening around us and, indeed, within us, normally as an effect of the former. Admittedly, we are constrained by the amount of the knowledge humanity has thus far accumulated, the even less of the most knowledgeable individuals and machines possess, that is, on the conquests of the intellect of previous generations in the short history of the human kind. And, thus, for what appears sublime and incomprehensible in history and by ourselves, our mind and soul, we summon up chance for an effortless escape, as a relief from the mental torture that search for answers entails.

Although life unfolds before and around ourselves as a sequence of unconnected and random events, it is in fact no more than pseudo-random, in the sense that every event and each turn individuals or societies take in one direction or another, are potentially explicable by multiple causes of different weights, over an enormous breadth and depth of time and space, so that their classification and evaluation as factors in the outcome appears practically impossible. Despite this, aiming at least at a rational explanation, even at a credible approximate interpretation, no matter how rudimentary, no matter if fruitless at the end, is worthy every bit of the intellectual strain that it demands. Hegel’s statement: “What is real is rational and what is rational is real” still holds strong. Let us try to explain our lives and get to know ourselves, before we perish, even if the odds appear overwhelmingly against the success of such an endeavour. We will get a bit closer to the meaning we are looking for, and that might be just worth the effort.

Ancestry 31 - Existential Queries: Fate

Once upon a time, in some obscure and poor neighborhoods of old Salonica, the seeds of Father's life and, by extension, those of mine were sown. Lives in their uniqueness, as much as their insignificance and infinitesimality, with the infinite and the inconceivable majesty of the universe in the background, beyond the grasp of our comprehension; ephemeral lives in confined geographies and of a time conceived and its days measured only whilst existing. Our minds, which barely and on occasions (during the scarce introspective reflections and “calls to conscience”) manage to perceive and touch upon our delimited existence, are often overwhelmed and thoughts and ideas are swept away by forces and events and phenomena, whether invisible and trivial or distinct and broader of social and historical proportions, occurring, and coalescing into the moments of our lives. In striving to make sense of our existence and lives and being in the world that we have thrown in some fundamental questions of existential nature always linger. Are the lives, like the ones I endeavored to write about, guided at every step and turn by an invisible hand of fate, as some say, by omnipotent forces stemming from nature and history or even a supernatural god? Do even the common and, in a grand scheme of things, insignificant people have a say in their aims and can they influence noticeably their directions and paths in life? Can and do they embrace or deflect situations, utilize or reject the so-called chances that are presented with along their routes in life, and depending on each incremental decisions, shape their lives and those of the next generations in different individual ways?  Can apparently trivial choices amongst alternatives at any stage and turn, when people are called or compelled to decide and exercise their will and act accordingly, produce distinctly divergent life states and forms?

In the fate, as something predetermined, as a course defined from something above or outside ourselves, transcendent and supernaturally regulated, I have never believed; naturally as a scientist whose methods of thinking adhere to the principle of causality, or even as an unaccomplished revolutionary. There are still a few usually religious or superstitious people who with backward thinking remark: "it was meant to be" or “it was pre-ordained by fate,” unable in their ignorance or insulation to explain the how’s and the why’s of their being, as it is crystallised into a “being-in-itself” during a lifetime by personal and social relationships, education, employment, marriage, child bearing, health, sickness and death; in short, the how’s and why’s they lived the life they eventually did. Most people, even when they fleetingly or inadvertently refer to fate because either of a momentary mental weakness or an incomplete or lack of understanding of the factors that led to an event or the inability to breakdown a phenomenon to its causes, do not adhere, in truth and deep down, to the notion that there is an invisible all-powerful guiding hand above all. But in moments of introspective reflection, of analysing and the recounting of the past, in every "call to consciousness", they seek and agonize about these how’s and why’s. They sometimes ponder about what is to come -originating from the present moment and situation, referring to past experiences and the acquired knowledge, and speculating or conjecturing about the future. These are scarce moments of individual freedom in a generally repressive world; not seeking answers, but succumbing to a pre-ordained fate, even acknowledging it as a notion, amounts to the absolute defeat of the human spirit and the imprisonment of thought.  

Admittedly, humans possess variable deposits of individual or collective will, small or large depending on their position and relative power in the class societies we are destined to grow up and live, a will that may somehow influence the course of own lives, with slighter or wider deviations from principal pathways, which are seemingly presented exogenously as choices, at life beginnings or its later stages; that is, pathways within the borders imposed by the historical era and the environment: materialistic and social, national and geographical. Of course, it goes without saying that the more wealth and power one possesses in a class society, the wider the scope and reach of the individual will; it is nonetheless innate to human intelligence. The argument that the history of societies and their economies follows a deterministic course, which is described, and perhaps even prescribed and preordained by distinct, long-term underlying historical tendencies and laws, falls beyond the reasonable scope of any dilettante philosopher’s essay. The phases and stages of an historical process, as they succeed one another, often with regressions and setbacks and discontinuities from revolutions and wars, cover a period of several generations, and transcend in time orders of magnitude the span of a lifetime. Only with a wide view through the lens of an historian from the distant future, they can possibly be perceived, analysed and verified from accumulated historical evidence. However, even with external, apparently insurmountable, forces exerted upon oneself by an all-powerful socioeconomic status quo, there is still an array of paths the so called ‘free’-will (rather erroneously) can opt to walk; even escape routes to different destinations or back to the origin can be explored and exploited along the way. If the laws of nature that determine the functions of our bodies are impossible to defy without the help and implementation of counteracting engineering based on the same natural laws, the established social forms and norms can be individually or collectively negated and, to an extent, the pressure from exogenous socioeconomic forces can be moderated, even deflected controlling an individual’s life. As far as myself and my existence are concerned, I would rather paraphrase Sartre's rebuke for the effect of historical process and determinism in shaping an individual’s life: "We must live without a veil or make-up this heartbreaking, unbearable condition called 'human fate'... A man's secret is the frontier of his freedom."

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.