Ancestry 2 - From Melnik: To Salonika

Great-grandparents Panayiotis and Katina gave life to six children. Maybe more, but six survived to adulthood under conditions which can rather be described as adverse, despite the relative economic prosperity of the Greek community of Melnik. Elias was the privileged firstborn and the pillar of the family during the arduous years of the Balkan wars and in what would follow afterwards. He was a grown-up man, a newly married family man, when the uprooting of 1913 happened. He would eventually mature into a well-educated and highly respected citizen. Then Giannis was born, followed by grandfather Leonidas, Calliope, Magdalene, and the much loved last-born, sickly, and handsome Socrates. With the sole exception of great-uncle Elias, who managed to attain a higher education, graduated from the private School of Commerce of Mr. Noukas in Thessaloniki –rather prestigious among the few schools of higher education of that time, in an otherwise transactional city and who, together with great-grandmother Katina, took over the reins of the family after the death of the patriarch, the other children of Panayiotis did not progress beyond the elementary education of primary or the first years of secondary education. That is, they had not been taught and acquired more than the basic skills of reading, writing, and some arithmetic, along with what was patched up by personal initiative, self-study and, of course, whatever could have been learned in the so-called "university of life". The natural plight affecting any refugees with shattered livelihoods and the further historical upheavals that ensued and affected the lives of the city and the country that accepted them (their very own country as one might say), played the main role in the inadequate education of all but Elias. Inevitably, in the absence of any significant inheritance or revenue from property, that is with whatever valuables the family had managed to bring along from Melnik, and some meager reparations from the Greek state in the aftermath of the Balkan War and before the onset of WWI, it is easy to understand that social ascend from the strata of manual labor and low-level unskilled employment did not materialize for most of Panayiotis’ and Katina’s children.

Elias equipped with the skills he gained from his higher education and the natural gift of intelligence quickly took on a role of the manager in the business of tobacco processing and trading, owned by a virtually illiterate and, according to rumors, utterly incompetent and vulgar man, established himself and his family in the city center, became self-sufficient and prospered. Now undisputedly middle to higher middle class, they moved into a fashionable flat in Mackenzie King Street, in an elegant apartment building still standing in Thessaloniki city center. It was one of the first few buildings in the pre-war city which featured an elevator. Uncle Elias had suffered from niggling heart problems from early middle age, and climbing several flights of stairs daily would have been a struggle that could potentially put his life at risk. Yet, he escaped narrowly from the clutches of death in several occasions, and despite three and, perhaps, more heart attacks, he died in an old age.

Yiannis was the outsider of the family. He met a grass widow in the Upper Town, the old suburb below Thessaloniki’s Acropolis, primarily occupied by Turks before the “liberation” of Thessaloniki by the Greek Army in 1912, and cut himself off from the core of the family. Father remembers visiting him a couple of times in a small house where he and his partner lived as outcasts rarely venturing downtown or visiting mother and siblings. It was mentioned that the family disowned him. Most likely, Yiannis had fallen in love with that widow of the Upper Town, he had been enveloped by an unconventional, albeit deep and lasting love, and having thus rejected family and social conventions of the era, had alienated himself on his own initiative from the rest of the family. His traces and those of his children, if he had any and they still exist, disappeared after the war.

Grandfather Leonidas, after a few years as a manual worker in a tobacco processing plant, as he was approaching retirement with growing health problems, he was assigned a rather soft job of minimum responsibility, albeit low paid, as a concierge in the building that housed the association of tobacco merchants of Thessaloniki. Perhaps, older brother Elias offered a hand through some of his connections in the business in rather difficult circumstances for the working folk of the city. That would be the main employment in his unillustrious life before retirement, notwithstanding the couple of odd jobs during the years of the German Occupation and the Civil Ware: a peddler with a tray slung around his neck roaming the streets of the town selling candies and cigarettes or, more ambitiously, as a partner in the greengrocery he opened with his brother-in-law, which however was shut down after a few months of incurring losses. Nevertheless, Great-grandmother Katina with the help of Leonidas, who was third in order in seniority, if not lower in intelligence or ability amongst the family members (after the self-sufficient and established bourgeois Elias, and the defection or the alleged ostracization of Yiannis), with some gold sovereigns that the family had in their possession and the government compensation from the surrender of Melnik to the Bulgarians, purchased and settled in a house vacated by its Turkish owners, after the mass population exchanges that took place in the aftermath of the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922.   

The house, where the Ibrişimci family barring Elias, Yiannis and Calliope resided for the best part of the interbellum years was built in the days of the Ottoman rule of the city, in a neighborhood which remained vivid amongst my childhood memories: the stream that was brimming from the Upper Town in the rainy days, dry otherwise, through vacant dusty lots and the small back streets of childhood games and adventurous wanderings. The local urban landscape was still dominated by two-storey houses that belonged to Greeks, previously and large owned Turks and handed over to or bought by Greeks after the ordered population exchanges and migration waves in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars and the Asia Minor Catastrophe. Many of those houses before the War, indeed the most impressive ones with views on the bay and the Olympus Mountain across, mainly belonged to wealthy Jewish families, some of them to Turkish beys or Bulgarian landowners. Scattered amongst them there were smaller dwellings, even shanties, for the poorest classes of each ethnic group.

The family house stood in an anonymous alley between the Deligiorgi and Gambetta Streets, close to the more prominent Fleming Street and the Hippocratic Hospital (the gift of Baroness Hirsch to the Jewish community), east of the city center. Much later, the Municipality named our alley by the more glorious ‘Hekabe Street’. Even later it laid asphalt on its dusty and muddy soil, uneven by the gullies from the water of rain or the house drains. In 1935, the year Father was born, in the two-storey family house lived grandfather Leonidas along with his young wife Eudoxia, the refugee girl from Bayidir of Izmir, the mysterious Magdalene and the handsome Socrates, the youngest of the Ibrişimci family, Father’s favourite uncle. In the same house, somewhere between 1936 and 1937, great-grandmother Katina breathed her last breath away from the place where she was born and brought up, but content with the knowledge that most of her children had settled and were rebuilding their lives in a welcoming environment with opportunities that a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural new homeland had to offer. They became, we all became Thessalonians. The war, the German occupation, the tragedies, big or small, national or family, that followed, the limp national restoration after the Civil War, the fate of her children and grandchildren, for better or for worse, Katina did not live to see. But she endured in life her share of calamities with the perseverance and strength and the will that her determined countenance in the family photo amongst her children and their young families betrayed.

All the houses of the neighborhood, of the Thessalonian roots where I sprang up from: of Victoria and Mary the Jewesses who survived the concentration camps; of Isaac, also amongst the few who survived the holocaust and the even fewer who returned to their birthplace; of the Tsiotas’ family of my childhood friend Christakis; of the Kazineris’ family, with their enclosed yard; of the mansion of Tsapatsarena, the legendary amongst the town-folk tavern owner, and of her partner, across the street from her tavern, itself a shanty; the more imposing house of the misanthropic theologian at the other side of the stream, with views from its balconies, on the vacant lot where we played football. Most of the two-storey mansions and more common dwellings and hovels, with a few exceptions of families who resisted the temptation of some flats in lieu of their plots to erect ugly multi-storey buildings, were swept away by the bulldozers in the frenzy of urban construction that followed the war, along with the stories and livelihoods of generations, of Greeks and Turks and Jews, who inhabited the neighborhoods of the city.

Calliope, for her part, was well and presumably happily married with an educated man, a compatriot of hers, Georgios Papazoglou, from a wealthy and renowned family of Melnik. Papazoglou's silk mill along with that of Tsopros is mentioned in books and narratives about the town, employed up to eighty workers. Georgios was educated at a vocational school for dyes and paints and other such chemicals in Paris. Of course, studies in Paris in those years could only be financially maintained by wealthy families. In Thessaloniki, he set-up his own business, a workshop dyeing furs and other fabrics. Father still remembers the fur garment, which Giorgios had presented grandmother Eudoxia, his sister-in-law, as a wedding present, and which survived decades in her wardrobe before she handed it to one of her daughters-in-law. It was not a big deal, Georgios then said, just a scarf. But any fur garment in such years of misery and poverty for the working classes were for the very few bourgeois of the city, a timeless symbol of wealth and status. How could this befit a refugee girl from the slums of Toumba?

A magnificent photograph of the surviving members of the family, one, two and three generations before mine, was taken around 1930. The late patriarch was absent. It shows Georgios and great-aunt Calliope as a couple in affectionate harmony, Calliope's hand resting, with an expression of marital trust and devotion on Georgios' left thigh, while Andreas -their one-year-old baby child- with a face full of wonder about what was happening, sitting on his dad's right thigh. Their eldest son of Georgios and Calliope, Takis, the first cousin of Father, with the sly smile and wearing, inevitably, for such occasions a blue naval uniform of official occasions, was looking at the photographer with his head bent and his eyes looking up. He became a close friend of Father’s and a frequent visitor to our house until his late years, often bringing with him a bottle of whiskey and a sack of photographs and books about Melnik: to discuss the past, the family, their common roots, the life evolving along the different branches of the big family tree. Great-uncle Takis in the books he left with Father, and I found in our bookcase, had highlighted with a bright yellow highlighter all passages pertaining to the Papazoglou silk mill, every single reference to his name. He recognized in these books with pride something more important than a common place of their origins as human beings, one that would transcend the narrow confines of his own and his ancestors' existence.

Ancestry - 1 From Melnik: Panayiotis the Ibrişimci

Great-grandfather Panayiotis Ibrişimci, Panayiotis the silker, worked during the prime of his life in the local silk industry, one of the leading and, perhaps, most lucrative activities, along with wine-making and tobacco, in the prosperous town of Melnik of that time: the late 19^th and early 20^th century. A manual worker for a best part, I imagine, in the sense that his hands were capable and skillful, he became an established and well-known artisan in the region, so much so that eventually his trade and skill, as pronounced in Turkish, became his surname. The production of silk threads for local workshops or as an exportable commodity to the advanced textile industry of the West, was founded on generations of experience and personal craftsmanship, developed with patience, perseverence and practical application over time. Then, it required only a few pieces of rather crude hardware and machinery. Panayiotis knew his craft well and his nickname, if one could call it so, was a testament to his skills, a kind of a title of recognition of his craftsmanship by merchants and the local community. Over the years it became the name by which he introduced himself and was identified in the streets of Melnik, addressed in guilds and associations, public gatherings, and business deals, even in written contracts. It was established as the de facto epithet of his family and male descendants’ Christian names, and eventually became the surname registered in register offices in Greece and, for those of us who emigrated, in a couple of countries of the world.

I picture him as a master supervising apprentices in his own workshop or more likely in Melnik’s one silk factory, with good relations of mutual understanding and respect, even of friendship with the wealthier factory owners and merchants, sharing in communal ownership the tradition and intricacies of the silk thread making and trade. Some third and fourth generation descendants of Panayiotis who visited Melnik some decades ago reported that the “mansion” of the Ibrişimci family of silk workers, masters, and tradesmen, built in a prominent position, still stands well preserved and inhabited, and the Ibrişimci name was still remembered among the older folk in the neighborhood. It seems as well that Panayiotis was recognized by the local community as an important factor in the silk trade, and his family must have prospered as a result. He married, possibly because of his worth and status in the community, a noble woman of the town, Ekaterina (Katina) Hadjivantsi, daughter of one of the wealthiest lords of Melnik.

In any case, Melnik was a wealthy community in its historical and geographical context, with the Greek element dominant, economically, and culturally; autonomous and largely self-willed, as much as local and individual “wills” were conceded and freed from their shackles by the Ottoman Porte. Such links, however, with the central Ottoman administration were becoming increasingly loose. The welfare of an advanced community, thanks to its revenues from wines, tobacco, silk and the other goods it produced and exported here and there effected in reducing economic inequalities, regulating national disparities and mending conflicts between ethnicities and religions: Greeks, Slavs and Turks, from the many rulers and ruling nations that took their turn as occupiers and rulers, had lived for centuries in relative harmony, guaranteed by the mingling and civil interaction between diverse cultures in mutual tolerance and even respect and, inevitably, miscegenation; along with and despite of rigidly maintaining intra-cultural traditions and habits, notwithstanding the endogamies and heterogamies, the infidelities and the like, misdemeanours invariably committed by all ethnicities, in any community.

And they lived peaceful lives, for as long as the bandits and the various nationalist rebels or sectarist elements or even revolutionaries operating in the region allowed it. The Sultan and his Empire, despite an apparently increasing inability to keep up with the industrial revolution and industrialisation gathering pace elsewhere in Europe and having to deal with the expansionist moods of the countries where industrialization galvanised and expanded their economies, still offered, at that time, a relative political stability and security, especially from local bandits and Bulgarian nationalist rebels. Melnik, as a relatively affluent city in a sea of poverty and the renowned Balkan rural backwardness had a relatively privileged position in the region, thanks mainly to the taxes and land rents which supplied to the bureaucracy of the Porte, and despite its troublesome, albeit in some respects enviable, geographical location. It was faithfully subordinate to the Porte and, one could say, a small jewel in a still expansive empire. But the latter was now on a path of irrevocable decline, mired in debt and underdevelopment, with the technological gap between itself and Europe widening; feeling surrounded and, thus, its establishment threatened by the economic imperialism of the West, insatiable as ever for oil, raw materials, and markets for its industrial products, and the profits these enterprises would promise. Except of a handful of well-travelled merchants, few locals had a complete picture of what was going on in the rest of the world, or of the machinations and manoeuvring of the great powers in a period of intense political ferment and antagonism in Europe. Panayiotis and his family simply lived their everyday lives, that is, of hard work on the one hand, and of the few afforded material comforts and tranquillity on the other, in a wider world that unbeknownst to him, was changing rapidly, but with changes that historical evolution would eventually manifest in brutal ways, as it usually is the case. For many in the community which raised and established Panayiotis would mean doom and death. However, they were largely oblivious to what was coming.

The apparent calm and security under the ostensibly protective auspices of the Ottomans were to be perturbed in tandem with the decline and eventual collapse of the empire in which they had prospered. The various Balkan nationalisms, Bulgarian, Serbian, Greek, flared up on its ruins, underpinned and encouraged by external forces, namely, the interventionism of the great powers and empires of Europe, which wanted to expand their influence and interests in the region, like vultures anticipating the death the ‘Sick Man of Europe.’  Robberies and murders, attacks by gangs, terrorist acts in surrounding villages and within the town of Melnik itself, intensified to an unbearable degree the insecurity and anxiety of its inhabitants, especially the Greeks who, by and large, held the economic reins of the region. Aid and support from Greece at that multinational and contested corner of Europe, could only be marginal and piecemeal. On the outskirts and rural areas surrounding the town the population was predominantly Slavic. The influence of Bulgarian nationalists was anticipated. They were perfectly capable and with ample means, cultural and material, in transforming allegiances and persuasions and aligning the collective will of the predominantly Slavic rural majority to their objectives and vision -often by handing to the poorest a piece of land and the plundered riches of their alienated rulers thus disrupting the status quo.

Therefore, things would dramatically change for Melnik, no matter how the unfolding historical events were perceived by its people: the impending economic decline in this mountainous region against the backdrop of a disintegrating empire had been visible on the horizon for a while, precipitated by the development of the railway, the emergence of mass production and industrial and commercial centers, and steep increases in productivity and capital accumulation elsewhere in Europe. Melnik was not close to any transport hub or any easily accessible trade routes. Its geographical isolation, at the margins of a crumbling empire, made it easy prey to local national unrest and quarrels. The relatively uneven accumulation of wealth that favored the Greek community had become another obvious target of hostile aspirations. Based on the precedent of conflicts and clashes in the Balkans and the uneasy situation at that point in time, some denouement, a settling and closing of accounts amongst the economic and national actors operating in the region, was something to be expected and were largely predictable. The Treaty of Bucharest of 1913, in the aftermath of the second Balkan Wars, dealt the final blow to the honest, hard-working, and prosperous Greek community of Melnik. Some parts of the broader Macedonia would be allocated to Bulgaria, in exchange – and Melnik was to be one of the rather well sought after towns to be handed over. The announcement by the Greek authorities was laconic, a categorical-imperative, and unequivocal: "Unfortunately, the town has been handed to the Bulgarians." Stomachs felt knotted, hearts pounded fast at the rumors. Despair reigned at the final news. On July 30, 1913, the Greek of Melnik gathered in the town square, deliberated, and decided to leave en masse and as quickly as possible, with as many as of their belongings they could salvage; besieged by Sandanski's Bulgarians, who were keen impose the terms of the Treaty before the agreed deadlines by the force of arms, if necessary. In an August dawn, with the few possessions they managed to pile on carts, they took the unhappy refugee route to Sidirokastron and, further, to Thessaloniki, and other hospitable parts of Macedonia under Greek jurisdiction. For many amongst them, it was the betrayal of their motherland and heritage by the political leadership in Greece, that is, Venizelos’ government. A few, like great-uncle Elias, the older son of Panayiotis and second-in-rank in the family, shifted the blame squarely to Venizelos and to the liberal and progressive sections in Greek politics he represented. The traumatic event of their uprooting pushed them further to the "right", to the more conservative and reactionary end of the political spectrum, and shaped their political views and stance in the turbulent years to come.

This inglorious end, the tragedy as many characterized it, of a remarkable historical community, and the ethnic cleansing and mass migration that ensued, predetermined my own and my generation’s fate in this world: the seconds of life in this infinitesimal dot of the Universe I have been entitled to, the here and the now -amongst the innumerable conjunctures of forces that led to it. For every event, for every statistical insignificance, such as the birth and the death of a mortal and his or her instantaneous presence on the planet, there are myriad causes, impossible for the mind to grasp. But it has become clear to me that if patriarch Panayiotis, the silker, and his children were not uprooted from Melnik at a historical junction into which myriad other causes and forces also led, with their marks, however, attenuated and disappeared over the epochs, I would not be in the world I am now temporarily residing.

Two photos of Panayiotis survived the passage of time. The first must have taken several years before the fin de siècle, in his maturity of more than thirty years of age. Handsome, elegant, and well-dressed –wearing a grey three-piece suit and a bow-tie, the gold chain of his watch appearing discreetly between buttons of his waistcoat, his hair neatly combed with brilliantine and sporting the inevitable mustache of his milieu, he was sitting on what appears to be a grey rock the side of which was covered by a climbing plant, a background thus set up in the studio (proper or makeshift) of the "Lionda Brothers" photographers. His light-colored eyes look devotedly at the lens; with dedication commensurate with the seriousness of the occasion. The index fingers of his hands stood out and pointed to his knees: a unique rather subconscious gesture that I also observed with Father’s hands several times. Great-grandmother Katina stood next to him with her right hand resting on his shoulder and palm casually thrown, a finger touching the white handkerchief in his jacket pocket, the left hand holding an umbrella; accessories likely furnished by the photo studio and created a background resembling that of a silent film setting. Katina’s physiognomy was plain, her features exhibiting no remarkable beauty but dignity. Her hair was tucked behind the head in a barely discernible braid and a rather masculine fringe covered most of the forehead. Her eyes were not looking at the lens but at an oblique direction away from it. (In fact, in most photos of married couples and families of the era the women, apparently at the behest of the photographer, and for unclear artistic or underlying social norms, did not look straight at the lens like the husbands or men dd.) In Katina's outfit, some kind of necklace made of flowers over the chest stood out, likely yet another one of the effects introduced by the photographer and made available to his clients depending on the occasion. The instantané must have been taken during a visit of Panayiotis and Katina to the city of Thessaloniki, the metropolis of broader Macedonia, for business or pleasure; or, perhaps, in one of the tours of the itinerant "Lionda Brothers" which brought them and their camera to Melnik. Who knows?

The second photo, printed on the back of a postcard, like a souvenir, was de facto the last photo of the great-grandfather in his coffin on the way to everyone’s ultimate destination. Placed on a slope of the ground so that the deceased patriarch, lying on the white lining of his slanted coffin, he appears half-standing, looking peaceful. He wore a gray coat, his fedora hat placed next to the head of white hair and a well-groomed also white beard, his face displaying the expressionless countenance that is common to the dead, Beside the coffin stood Katina, now aged, her cheeks sunken, her hair covered by a black headscarf. Next to her, at the head of the coffin, their eldest son Elias, had his head and eyes bowed venerably towards the deceased. The younger offspring of Panayiotis along with a few women dressed in black, were scattered behind the coffin at some distance regarding the deceased with sorrowful faces. A young man amongst them, likely one of my great-uncles, was the only one staring at the lens. On the black coffin, a white cross and the initials Π.H. were inscribed. Παναγιώτης (son) of Ηλίας, perhaps? No visible lamentation, no hysteria, only dignity and emotion pervaded the whole scene despite the professionally discreet intrusion of the photographer, under a dull, perhaps, rainy weather (one of the attendees was holding an umbrella) in front of what looked like a shanty dwelling at some old and poor mahalla. In short, a Chekhovian scene where the repugnance we feel in the presence of death seems absent. In the general numbness, in the solemn countenances of Katina and Elias, there was something stoic that touched the heart: the subtle, fleeting beauty of human sorrow.

I have been unable to specify the date or the location of that second photo. Testimonies from Greeks of Melnik spoke of the “families of Panayiotis and his eldest son, Elias”, as two amongst the 352 families that fled Melnik in that damned day of August of 1913. The first stop for most of the refugees was the small town of Sidirokastron, but several families, after a brief pause, pushed on for Thessaloniki, where they would eventually settle. The city would be their new home for them and the future generations of the Panayiotis’ family. It must have been a refugee camp or a slum in the city, a harsh environment in which the immigrants from Melnik had to endure for a few months and survive, where Panayiotis, the Ibrişimci, the distinguished silker amongst Turks, Bulgarians and Greeks, my great-grandfather, uprooted against his will from his mansion and workshop and hometown, perished. Then and there, in the city I claim as my birthplace, a new, radically different life for better or worse started for his four sons and two daughters.

A Love Poem (translated from Bulgarian)

For you silent coming
that echoes like a thunder,
for all you gave 
but never took back,
for forgiving me being 
and not being with you,
for the words you saved me from,
for the caresses you didn't,
for the strength that flew inside
when you were weak,
for the bad and good times
in your little finger,
I won't place a ring
but my burning lips.
 
(Veselin Khanchev)

Autumn

I’ve never meant to be your Spring,

Neither your bright Summer.

Perhaps, I could be your Autumn,

Cool, sweet, and golden.

Without the storms of March,

Neither the dog days of July,

Perhaps, with the scent of apples

or the tender touch of a breeze. 

(by M)