Ancestry 4 - From Melnik: Socrates

In his youth, great-uncle Socrates worked as a worker in a tobacco factory. Nevertheless, he used to reflect, during the long hours of factory work, on the scanty education he received in primary school, and endeavored to self-educate through personal study and active participation in the political and social struggles of his era. He managed remarkably well with his self-teaching struggles, despite his daily job in the factory; despite the demands of the long hours of manual labor in a tobacco factory of the pre-war Thessaloniki that could barely be comprehended by the populus petite-bourgeoisie strata of civil servants, shop-keepers, and the like, in his city; despite, most importantly, the consumption that tormented him since early adulthood and the lengthy convalescing spells in the sanatorium his illness required. A consumptive tobacco worker can be scorned and dismissed as an insignificant human being, an unnoteworthy existence amongst the lots of good hard-working people who disappear without a trace. Perhaps through his work in the factory, perhaps through his social interactions in cafés, tavernas, working-men unions and clubs, places fermented by socialist ideals, or, perhaps, enlightened by his older sisters, Calliope and Magdalene both married to progressive individuals, his eyes opened to the radical social movements developing in the city and maturing in the working-class neighborhoods and refugee slums. Movements, which eventually culminated in the resistance against the fascist occupation. In short, his mind opened-up to the worldview of the communist dogma, that is, to a future society, which hitherto seemed brighter and more just: a step up in the ladder of social evolution. So said the theorists and pioneers of the workers' revolution. Somehow as in Mayakovsky's verses:

“We opened
               each volume
                                 of Marx
as we would open
                          the shutters
                                           in our own house;
but we did not have to read
                                         to make up our minds
which side to join,
                          which side to fight on.English translation. 

Therefore, Socrates became a communist and, at the same time, a member of what Gramsci called "organic intelligentsia", the cohesive fabric of the class into which he belonged de facto from the onset, a class numerous and rather well-entrenched in Thessaloniki of the time. He became an element of an intellectual and organizational core, duty bound to instill in his class the social awareness and consciousness that he himself acquired step by step in life, in the factories, in the unions, in life.

The family of his first wife, Anna née Papachristou, were owners of one of the oldest non-Jewish owned bookstores of pre-war Thessaloniki, on the corner of Egnatia and Konstantinou Palaiologou streets. His marriage to a daughter of a bookseller must have contributed into his intellectual advancements beyond the six years of his unnoteworthy formal education. A sign "BOOKSTORE Christos Papachristou - Established 1922", hidden under the balcony of the first floor of an apartment building, above roller -shutters covered with dozens of layers of posters caught my eye in my student years. There, in his father-in-law's bookstore, a small hive of ideas and knowledge, I imagined Socrates, the primary school graduate, flipping through pages of magazines and books. (Later in life, in January 2017, when I walked by the same corner, the site of the bookstore, once upon a time my great-uncle’s secret private library, was housing one of the snack-bars that somehow sprang up everywhere in Greece of the debt-crisis and the bail-out memoranda. A sign of modern times and the evolution of trends and tastes, or the lack of business creativity and imagination in modern Thessalonian society?)

Apart from an open and lively mind and the thirst for embracing new ideas, Socrates was an exceptionally handsome man: tall, with large light-colored eyes, an intense gaze, a wide, proud, and intelligent forehead. Always clean-shaven, that is without the narrow trapezoidal mustache under the nose, which his brothers and brother-in-law permanently featured (as a symbol of status and maturity or of the dividing line between social classes, who knows?) His demeanor and presence did not suggest any of the stereotypes of factory workers of that era we tend to harbor. ln any case, he would have had no difficulty in attracting the attention and even raising the desires of women during his hours outside the suffocating environment of the tobacco factory. Women from good families, too, with sizeable dowries, for that matter, despite his humble roots in the lower social strata. Thessaloniki was a rather unique, dynamically changing amalgam of nationalities, shaped by centuries of wars and mass migration. The Greek contingent itself was dominated by the refugee element, a mixture of bourgeois and proletarians, of intellectuals and illiterate laborers, who shared the same beaches and piazzas, and often inhabited the same or adjacent neighborhoods. His youthful beauty and elegance, his imperious and arrogant gaze, his open mind ingrained with progressive ideas, even his manners and associations, counterweighted by far his working-class background and poor health.

That is, until the German Occupation, which turned life in the city upside down. The two-storey building in the Fleming area that the Ibrişimci family took possession of, in exchange and in lieu of reparations for their lost home in Melnik, housed along with great-Uncle Socrates the family of grandfather Leonidas and grandmother Evdoxia and their two children, my father and his newborn brother. Old great-grandmother Katina had passed away before the start of the war, and Magdalene, the youngest daughter, had married and left. When Socrates was overcome by his illness, my grandfather, incorruptible and of high moral standards, consistent with the family tradition of unconditional support to his siblings and any broader family member, true, that is, to the strong bonds of a family who stood together for better or for worse since their exodus from Melnik, in 1942, a year when hunger and poverty reigned over the city, sold the house to a rapacious black-marketer, a scoundrel called Demokas (every war breeds corrupt and avaricious individuals), in order to afford the medical care his young brother needed. In a year of universal misery, Socrates left for the sanatorium in Asvestochori, to restore his health and save his life. It was rather a one-way journey this for tuberculosis patients. Leonidas and the family of four moved to a tiny flat in Toumba, with barely one and a half rooms. Hearts had bled, anxiety levels had risen, but what else could be done?

Since then, Socrates’ presence on the earth was slowly immersing into the shadows of Father's, his dearest nephew’s, memory. I always sensed that Socrates: the brave, masculine figure of a worker with rudimentary education but handsome looks, like those in Soviet May Day posters or socialist realist paintings, who also effortlessly displayed an elegance, style and nobility normally attributed to the bourgeoisie, who embraced and defended with zeal views and ideas (for the materialistic advancement of his class or simply carried by an emotional drive for freedom and social justice), who broke through beyond the narrow intellectual boundaries of the Ibrişimci family, his place of work, even the city and life within it, left a long lasting impression on Father and the broader family. No doubt Socrates’ personality largely influenced, even more than grandfather Leonidas, even more than the other highly-esteemed family pillar, Elias, the political views, attitude, and dare say philosophy of Father. "Every man is a philosopher", and Socrates showed him a way, among the many others he could potentially pursue: the books he would select as a young man to read, the political points of view and way of thinking, where he should cast his vote in the highly politicized times the followed the German Occupation and the Civil War, during the years of the corrupt and ruthless reconstruction of a country shaped up by the heavy hand of Cold War politics. By extension, it influenced my own philosophy and ideology and my various political associations, where, admittedly, the emotional (subjective) element often blurs the (objective) reality, and frequently misleads us into a chaos of contradicting opinions diverging from a logical and dispassionate analysis, it entangles us in ideological rigidity and dogmas and dead-ends, it renders us unable to understand and assimilate the social process.

Socrates, having recuperated from his illness in the sanatorium of Asvestochori, however weak and sickly, took refuge in hidden corners of Thessaloniki’s neighborhoods, in the Communist Party’s secret hideouts. He had several, but unverifiable connections with the Greek People’s Liberation Army during the Occupation, and the Democratic Army of Greece in the Civil War years. All contacts and meetings were clandestine. He surfaced on the civil war stage of Thessaloniki rather forcibly, during the investigation of the murder case of the American journalist George Polk, who in May 1948 in the aftermath of mass executions of communists and the international condemnation that followed, had come to Thessaloniki to find a link that would lead him to Markos Vafiades and the leadership of the Democratic Army in the mountains of Macedonia: to witness first-hand what was happening and interview one of the main actors from the other side of the conflict and the fence, which shortly after would be known as the Iron Curtain. He was murdered, however, before embarking to his mission and his body was washed up in the city's port. In later years, an investigative journalist pointed to the Intelligence Service agent stationed in Thessaloniki, who disappeared inexplicably shortly after the murder, as the possible instigator to a murder, apparently motivated by post-war inter-imperialist frictions with the Americans in the Levante region. This rather credible evidence was ignored by the involved parties, that is the Greek government and its American sponsors. On the contrary, the Civil War government, under external pressure manufactured both motives and potential assassins amongst the communists and collaborators, concealed evidence, and, rather flimsily and desperately, accused them of the murder of journalist Polk. Adam Mouzenidis, a member of the Communist Party, was somehow charged in absentia as the main perpetrator, although the Party announced in its press that he had been killed before Polk’s arrival at Thessaloniki. Great-uncle Socrates, at the time a retired tobacco worker, was branded a "Bulgarian in soul and body" by the chief inspector who interrogated him, and, along with his sisters, Magdalene and Calliope, who had presumably offered hideouts to communists, was named among the liaisons of Mouzenidis and other communist party officials and complicit to the murder. The accusations led to Socrates’ arrest and incarceration, in an open-air prison fenced with barbed wire, where teenage Father brought him food. He was interrogated, he might have been tortured, but stood his ground: "Socrates was a rock in his testimony", according to investigative journalist Hadjiargyris, who studied the Polk case in depth.

The detention, interrogation and testimony, Socrates’ correspondence with Mouzenidis’ brother with secret notes to coordinate a rather desperate defense, delivered to the prison by young Father, were some of the last traces that Socrates left in post-war Thessaloniki. Anna, his first wife, had in the meantime died. Socrates left for Athens, driven by health issues or political reasons or both. He was classified ever since, in police records and archives, as an unrepented communist, but persevered with what life he had left. He was remarried, with a widowed architect, Xeni, and became the adoptive father of her architect-author daughter Lisa. He appeared with Xeni in a photograph in Moscow, against the snowy background of a Russian winter, a photograph from the early 1960s, amid the freezing and thawing of the relations between the Cold Ware superpowers. In an ushanka and a black overcoat, the handsomest of Ibrişimci family, held the hand of Xeni. The same tall stature, the same imperious gaze, a fragile smile, the characteristic slight tilt of the head towards Xeni to his right. Xeni, wearing also an ushanka and a similar overcoat, was standing between Socrates and a Soviet official –as far as one could tell from red star emblem pinned on the latter's ushanka and the overcoat with the two columns of silver buttons. It was said that they visited Moscow for the health issues that had plagued him throughout his life, and for Lisa's daughter studies. Socrates died in Athens in 1974, before I had any chance to meet him in person.

Apart from few scattered memories in Father’s mind from his childhood and youth, Socrates did not leave much behind. What he left, however, a rather colorful life story, an insignificant but distinct legacy, it acquired, as it happened, a special gravity in the life of Father and by extension mine, his existence became a kind of family myth in the otherwise prosaic family chronicles. Those few memories his presence on this earth left behind were imprinted in Father’s and my very own mind. I carried them along and enhanced them with some primitive intellectual and spiritual concerns of my own and a dilettante’s interest in philosophy, politics, and student activism.

A dozen, dusty volumes of the “Art Review” issues of the magazine Socrates collected continuously from 1955 to 1963 bound together by a gray hard cover, were one of his gifts to his beloved nephew. They remain in the same order that I last had sorted them as a student in Thessaloniki, under a thick layer of dust, on the very bottom-corner shelf of my student room bookcase, along with several black, thick tomes of a Soviet encyclopedia. English translation. (This bookcase still stands, two and a half meters tall, albeit almost crumbling, above Father's cheap IKEA armchair. It was built on demand more than half a century ago, with no much passion, we have to say, but hastily with poor workmanship by a sloppy carpenter of our neighborhood, a certain Traitsis. He was contracted by Father to assemble most of our furniture in the apartment that was granted in exchange, after the home of the Ibrişimci family was demolished and its plot was handed to a builder in order to erect another one the ugly blocks of flats that define Thessaloniki’s skyline. "He glued the veneer to the wood with his saliva", mother used to say at the sight of the protrusions of the veneers, as they were unfiled or at best poorly filed around the edges. After the delivery of the furniture, several Traitsis' visits ensued, whereby he stood in front of his creations, with a disarming and innocent smile revealing one or two golden teeth, a folding ruler in his back pocket and the pencil on the temple behind his ear. Subsequent interventions and corrections he attempted, however, with proper glue and filing were no more effective.)

Rather miraculously, the main body of Traitsis’ bookcase overloaded with books survived the passage of time, a removal, an earthquake, and two generations, along with the forgotten and scarcely used Soviet encyclopedia on its highest shelves, hidden from the eyes of visitors, and the bound issues of the "Art Review". In early childhood, Mother would not allow me to open any volumes of the latter and flip through their pages, as "these books were given to dad by an uncle who was consumptive." In fact, she was calling for their disposal, calls that Father would not even consider and discuss: the books were part of a precious family legacy. As I was growing up and rejecting that and others of Mother’s foolish cautions, I discovered, printed in these volumes, treasures from the golden age of Greek literature, creations of a predominantly left leaning intelligentsia. They could not have been the works of others in the post-civil-war period, in a broken, poor country, desperately trying to stand on its own two feet, claim her being and rediscover its identity in a world of sharp contrasts. A country, which Socrates, the consumptive tobacco worker, strived to change against grossly unfavorable odds.

Ancestry 3 - From Melnik: The Family of Elias

Aunt Anna died in 2016. The exact date I do not remember, nor does it matter. It did not register in the mind when it was mentioned on Skype, amongst several conversations with Father about unconnected everyday matters and other rather trivial events, and I was not paying the due attention. Two generations of my family passed away and buried in the shadows of time from the days of the flight from Melnik, and Aunt Anna, the unmarried daughter of Elias, a first cousin of Father, was the last remnant of her generation from the branch of Elias in the grand family tree. Father was her closest relative and, by law, responsible for the procedural issues that needed to be sorted out after his cousin’s death. Anna had lived more years than most of us humans are entitled to, and her death, one might say, took none of the few involved by surprise. (I seem to be counting many deaths lately, of friends, relatives, and personalities whose lives were connected and, for short or long periods of time, concurrent with mine, partly, of course, due to the advanced age of mine, too. As the years go by and my turn gets closer, the more frequently and intensively death plays games with consciousness and thoughts and emotions, the closer He will be breathing to the necks of Father and Mother, that is, not far away from me.)

Aunt Anna was a rather forgotten existence living at the fringes of what had remained of that great family. The Immediate concerns following her death came temporarily to the fore and confronted what one would call the "close family circle", mainly Father, unexpectedly, whilst her carer and neighbors were counting the last days of her life. I mean posthumous concerns with regards to settling unfinished business, inheritance, etc., of anyone who leaves the worldly, so they are concluded in the best possible way and in the interest of the remaining relatives. Until her death aunt Anna featured in the margins of my own book of life and memory banks, a leaf of a distant, almost obscure branch of my family tree, which was not long ago before her death I had begun to explore. Naturally, her death affected me only imperceptibly, hardly at all, from either an emotional or material point of view. It did not bring any emotions of sorrow, as had been the case with my grandparents and uncle Marios. I would not be endowed with any inheritance.

That was not a matter of indifference or stone-heartedness on my part. After all, she was a member of the broader family, that much I could not ignore. On the contrary, I was moved by the way Father, as by default her closest relative, squeezed the last remnants of his strength and energy from the depleted reservoirs of old age, and settled the formalities of Anna’s death, and protected her meagre possessions, her tiny apartment and a few thousand euros, from some shady characters of her environment who coveted them. From a pragmatic point of view, she was a second-degree relative of mine, a first cousin of Father’s, and the surname we shared was the obvious thing that linked us: two consecutive lines in the white-pages, in addition to several obscure genes, a common DNA -as they say. But when a leaf turns yellow and falls under the generation tree, when a branch of that tree dies, as it happened with aunt Anne's family, we tend to look a little further down the tree: its trunk, its roots, its history.

And so it happened. As if her death were a milestone in my own life journey, made me pause and turn my head back: into the past, as deep in it as possible, as deep as the memories and testimonies of the still living allowed. I am fully aware that most of the road I have, myself, left behind. It is well-known and logical and commonplace: as the years go by, as the future ahead shrinks, as memory and recollections from the past outweigh ambitions and expectations and dreams for the future, the more the mind is inclined to stare back and delve into the realms of the past, sometimes gratefully, other times with regrets, poignancy or nostalgia, the more it strives to hold on to the accumulated past, retain it in the memory banks of his brain, tooth and nail, perhaps to nurture and keep it alive in his mind until the end. We observe this tendency in conversations with the elderly -and ourselves, as we grow older. Plans for a contracted future are limited to the food we will have for lunch or what the weather will be like, today or maybe tomorrow, what necessities we need to purchase, or whether will hear news from children and grandchildren soon, maybe a walk in the park or a brief and low-key holiday. Some say all this weighing and re-weighing of the past is a subconscious effort to relive parts of our past lives during the remainder of our days, as many times as possible, through memories and experiences, under the light of the knowledge we acquired.

The death of aunt Anna was therefore expected and happened naturally. After 88 years of life, she had her fair share of life, as one may say rather inappropriately and with a dose of cynicism. Anyway, “let’s live to remember her” as we would like to wish after the death of someone in lieu of condolences. In the Ibrişimci family photograph taken around 1930, signed by a Jewish photographer, a certain E. Ahilla, Anna, a nearly three-year-old girl sitting at the feet of her dad great-uncle Elias, the latest offspring of a vibrant and thriving family from Melnik, looks with admirable seriousness at the lens – with the same big eyes that characterized the whole family from Father's side. Her hair was straight, short, well combed, dark, shiny from the brilliantine applied for the occasion, matching a dark dress and patent leather sandals. Her complexion was swarthy nearly of a chocolaty tone -perhaps from tanning under the summer sun, perhaps from the uneven lighting in the studio, or perhaps from not being enough photogenic. Little Anna's dark complexion were contrasted with her white socks, the light-gray suit of her father, and the white face of a male doll with a hat –a caricature of a dancer of the time, the kind of item photographers of the time gave to toddlers to keep them still and quiet. But Anna focused with discipline and seriousness on the lens, holding the drooping doll indifferently. She was to be the last of the family members in that 1930 photo to bid farewell to the worldly.

As a child, I met aunt Anna a couple of times that I can remember. The first, with a cousin who lived across the street from her apartment, was on a Sunday morning before, whilst we were both excited and could not wait to watch in a cinema called “DIMITRA”, next door to aunt Anna’s apartment block, the double and sometimes triple-film show –one of those that inevitably included an animated and or a Laurel and Hardy comedy short film, along with a Hollywood western or historical epic. Aunt Anna, I remember, offered us in her tiny kitchen, on a small table crammed next to the glazed kitchen door, a little breakfast comprising a cup of milk and biscuits to dunk in it. In truth, there had not been much give-and-take with Elias’ household, as the greater family grew and spread out in the suburbs, in tandem with the relentless construction and its merciless expansion, and the prolonged absences of Father and Mother in out-of-town employment assignments. Nor do I remember us talking, let alone what was said, when Father presented me, a shy and tacit teenager to Elias in his 28^th of October Street apartment where he was staying with his children in his late years, as a farewell visit shortly before his death, at his wish it must be said. At that time, I was one of the young and promising hopefuls to carry and honor the name of the Ibrişimci clan whose reins were held by Elias during the years of the uprooting and immigration.

English translation. Uncle Elias, as the eldest son, had emerged early on and, since the death of the patriarch great-grandfather Panayiotis de facto, as the central figure of the family. He was the rock in the chaotic days of the forced immigration from Melnik and the cohesive link of the family in the first difficult months, on their way to Sidirokastro and then Thessaloniki. He was the only one among the seven brothers who had proper education and managed to climb the social ladder, yet not reaching the maximum of his potential, given the aura of suspicion which envelopes refugees wherever they end up. He graduated from the Commercial School of Stefanos Noukas, of almost tertiary level education at the time, got a job in the processing and trade of tobacco, and became a manager in the business of an illiterate, but wealthy owner, who, clueless as he was, without Elias’ acumen would not have learned anything about commerce and his business would have collapsed. Elias held its reins almost on his own, turned it around and made it profitable, back then in the interwar years, when tobacco processing and trade in the area was a large and growing business.

Elias married Katina nee Tsoprou, "Tsoprouda" as grandfather Leonidas teasingly called her. She descended from the distinguished family of Konstantinos Tsopros of 19^th century Melnik and as an educated woman of a dynamic personality, suited the ambitious Elias. In the family photo, Katina, dignified, almost imperial, gazes away from the lens, with her right palm placed on her left in an almost reverential way, perhaps a reflection of the personality behind the pose. I found Katina's short biography, a typewritten page framed and hung for years on one of the walls of Anna's apartment, only remnant of Katina's existence in this world, in a plastic carrier bag with photograph albums that Father collected and brought home after her death. In the biography, in a purist and archaising from of modern Greek, it was written: "She was born in Melnik in 1895... With a scholarship from the Hellenic State, she attended the Gymnasium of Serres, from which she graduated with HONORS for her excellent performance in her studies, especially, in vocal music performance... Forthwith after graduation, she was appointed as a teacher at Melnik’s Girls' School until 1913, whence she resigned because she was married to Elias P. I., after whom she had seven (7) children, of which only two (2) survived. She passed away at the age of 78 in Thessaloniki."  Her life had a beginning, a middle and an end. She left her trace the world of her time. One could say, in retrospect, that almost everything in her life was somehow predetermined, and determined by the environment and zeitgeist. It happens with every life -more or less.

English translation. Elias’ political conservatism was radically opposed to the views and political leanings of the other members of the family, at least the politicized ones. "He’s right-wing" was one of the phrases that the Father used regularly and emphatically, almost derogatively, in characterizing politically his uncle’s rigid political stance, when he himself for most of his life was a conscientious voter of the Left. Elias’ beliefs had their deep roots in history and his Melnikian heritage. On one hand, there was the instinctive conservatism and a reflexive, natural suspicion of the new in a society, by default deeply conservative, almost backward, however pushed from many quarters of society towards progress and development, that is the typical bourgeois anti-liberalism. On the other hand, and above all, it was founded and consolidated within the anti-Venizelist faction, in so far as Venizelos represented the progressive and extrovert part of the Greek political and national scene after the Balkan wars. Venizelos, one of the protagonists in the post-war negotiations and signatories of the Treaty of Bucharest, was stigmatized in Elias' mind, with some, one might say, anti-dialectical reasoning, as the chief responsible for handing over Melnik to Bulgaria, an arch-antagonist and enemy state of Greece when dividing the spoils of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, which led to the tragic end of the affluent community he had grown into, the uprooting of his family of which he was the de facto head. In a few words, Venizelos betrayed the dreams and ideals of himself and hundreds of his fellow compatriots, turned their lives upside down and brought about uncertainty and misery. Perhaps, his ascend to the managerial positions of a medium-sized enterprise in interwar Greece, that is, at the doorstep of the Thessaloniki’s upper middle-class, as the city was emerging from the set-backs of successive wars, despite the relatively small fortune he eventually managed to accumulate, contributed to the crystallization of his political ideas or, if not ideas, an unshakable political persuasion. He represented the extreme right in the political spectrum of the broader family, which although had no working-class traditions ingrained, it nevertheless found itself positioned closer to the considerable and militant working-class of the city. Elias followed his conservatism with extreme consistency and zeal until the end of his life. An avid reader of the conservative newspaper Βραδυνή, intertwined in life with the conservative politician Stefanos Stephanopoulos and other political actors of the same ilk, he detached himself from the rest of the family and built a very own autonomous circle in life. Any testimonies about paternalistic interventions or intra-family political conflicts and quarrels did not reach my ears. He must have respected the opposite political views and will of the others.

Katina and Elias raised Dimitris, the serene and composed teenager in that same family photo who stood smiling behind his mum and dad. He was their beloved ‘Takis’ who studied and became a lawyer, promising to climb one step higher than his father in the social ladder. I discovered his name, after an internet search, in a picture of a hand-written page with the “List of lawyers crossed off from the Register of the Bar Associations in year 1943”.  The word "deceased" was scribbled next to his name. His was amongst twenty-two other names: Yomtov Yakoel, Camhi Elias, Cohen Abraham, Cohen Alfredo, Cohen Elias, Cohen Lazarus, Cohen Simandov, Kisspi Isosif, Levis Abraham, Masarano Albert, Moses Saul, Nahmia Samuel, Ovadia Elijah, Revah Joseph, Shiaki Albert, Shiaki Isaac and Faratzi Menahem; the names of Jewish lawyers, threads in the fabric of the pre-war society of Thessaloniki, who were expelled from the bar on February 27, 1943, just two weeks after the arrival in the city of the Hauptsturmführer of the SS and Eichmen's henchmen Dieter Wisliceny and Alois Brunner, along with 100 men following an order from the Military Administration of Thessaloniki. And then, they were uprooted from the city. What preceded and followed in the tragic lives of the Jews, not just the lawyers amongst them, is well known and documented. History rarely dwells on the fate of ordinary mortals, who think, act, work, struggle, and fight in the background of the great historical events, while without these actors, constituents of what we call social classes and human mass, there is no historical movement. The early death of Takis is still recalled by Father· an eight-year-old child then, he remembers hearing of his death at the threshold of his Toumba's poor dwelling, and crying at the news.

Elias' and Katina’s two other children, Lakis and Anna, did not distinguish themselves in life as much as their parents or even their prematurely deceased brother. In the 1930 photo, Lakis' eyes did not have the spark and glow of those of his brother. However, his smile betrayed an inexhaustible childlike vivacity, sometimes associated with an innate intelligence. There are always exceptions to any rule or stereotype. The early death of Takis in 1943 and then of Katina in 1978, the steely and impassionate personality of Elias, brought the two siblings closer, but at the same time lowered their horizons. Perhaps, the individual personality and intelligence played its part, in addition to the conservative dogmatism and authoritarianism of Elias, which could have suppressed many of their ambitions, guided them to well-trodden paths of post-war Greece. Lakis became a civil servant, Anna took over the housewife duties from Katina, whilst attending Sunday schools, and assisting the local priest in her parish. Both lived under the same roof with their father, until the end of a life in January 1983 which spanned ninety-four years. Despite his weak heart and several heart attacks, the bourgeois tenant of Mackenzie King's “first apartment building with elevator”, during his late years bedridden in the lesser apartment of October 28^th Street, maintained until his very last day his clarity of mind, along with his stern political conservatism. Such was the testimony of Father, who had great respect and esteem for his uncle, and revered him even more than his own father.

Lakis with the early but small pension of the former tax collector, married a widow from the town of Sindos in the outskirts of Thessaloniki, left the family apartment in search of a last sparkle in love and maybe solace, before a rather premature death despite his not much advanced middle-age. Anna ended-up a spinster, rather predictably. Perhaps from personal disappointments in her life, perhaps from vanity and setting high standards to possible suitors due to an arrogance and complacency bred by her beauty as a young woman, or perhaps as a conscious choice to turn mind and body away from love and lust, dictated by her strict adherence to her religious dogma; that is, the fear of God and the hell that awaits sinners in after-life. Who knows? She was undoubtfully beautiful as a young girl and woman. In the plastic carrier bag Father brought home after her death, there was a photo-album and in it, amongst the photos of countless excursions to various parts of Greece with groups, mostly with friends from Sunday Schools and her parish, I found the portrait of a young man in the uniform of a merchant marine officer, and a love note written on the back: "To beloved Annoula to remember me with love". That seemed the only circumstantial evidence of an apparently short and frivolous love affair in Anna’s existence.

In short, the life of aunt Anna could be described as measured and sedate, if not outright dull, without distinctions, devoid of any drama and emotional peaks and troughs, deep sorrows, and exaltations. She eventually found certainty and solace in the church. Her life could by no means be described as full and colorful, even by her close friends, relatives, and neighbors. On the contrary, colorless, lukewarm, monastic, would be more apt adjectives. Like walking on an open plain without trees, under gloomy gray skies. That life of hers must have passed quickly, albeit without much stress, without worries about work or raising children, without the inevitable quarrels of a married couple or the frictions of a love relations: there had been no man in her life and, thus, no object to fight with. With the small joys of carefree group excursions to the country, to the mountains and the coast, to monasteries and the holy destinations Greece can offer, her daily occupation with the affairs of her parish and attending to the church, her devotion and saintly work was awarded with a certificate of praise, framed, and hung on a living-room wall next to her mother’s biography as a highlight of her uneventful life.  English translation. 

With the world of the Greek Orthodox Church I had no open accounts, apart from the mandatory, nearly coercive attendance of liturgies and services. Only prejudices have I formed, which daily life in Greece retrospectively justifies. Yet, I presume, apart from those unbearably lengthy liturgies and services, like weddings and funerals, outdated and kitsch church festivals with the main purpose of fundraising from church flock donations, and the like, the life of a religious person can follow other paths, more secular, cosmopolitan, colorful, even spiritual. But how should I know? In aunt Anna's case, a noose was tightening around her in tandem with the growing mental helplessness and senility and the deterioration of her eyesight until virtual blindness. There remained two or three shadowy characters from her parish, another devout Christian named Karapetsa, a certain Petros, apparently the chief candlelighter in her church, along with a few Albanian and Georgian paid carers who looked after her in the blindness and senility of her late years. It was rumored that some of these parishioners, purportedly genuine caring friends, preyed like crows on her micro-deposits and little apartment, until they were scattered by the intervention of Father, the closest remaining relative for all intents and purposes, including inheritance matters. Those characters were unseen in the funeral and memorial service of Anna, therefore, all previous talk of heartfelt friendships and compassion for the helpless woman rendered itself meaningless.

Eventually, as it is with most mortals, aunt Anna’s memory faded away, "defeated by time." The sun set, and her grey, unillustrious life was consigned to oblivion. The family branch of patriarch Elias, in the absence of any descendants fell from the tree of generations and was scattered by the winds of time. The plastic carrier bag with the photo album, the framed portrait of her brother's Takis, the sign with his name outside his law office, Katina's CV, the death certificate of Elias, a certificate from her church praising her philanthropic activities, those and only those, are buried amongst other odds and ends in a corner of a family basement storage room, until the future clears them. 

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.