Ancestry 15 - Yiannis & Vasiliki: Rehabilitation

He made the correct decision; he did the right thing. He returned home, where his wife and children were fervently waiting. His in-laws, Kotis and Dominique, had passed away within a few days between each other shortly after his banishment, and, God only knows, how Vasiliki coped alone with the three underaged girls and sustained themselves with the meagre savings Yiannis left behind, and the produce of their garden. But after that enlightened decision, the lives of all concerned would gradually change for the better and, ultimately, be restored to a normality akin to that of the pre-war years.

Less than a year after his return, in 1950, their last child, Dominique, known to everybody as Domna, was born. The elder of her sisters, Aliki, had left for Athens not long after Domna’s birth to study and become a nurse and only occasionally visited her home village ever since. The long distance from the family home, then half-a-day’s coach journey, and her rather despotic nature somehow checked the growth of closeness and a sense of familiarity. In phone conversations and during her visits, I used to call her ‘Aunt’ Aliki and listen quietly to the pedantic lectures she was giving to family assemblies in a strict tone of voice. On the other hand, Domna & Litsa, feeble characters as they were, were simply called by their nicknames, as we do with close friends. The rather atypical in old Greece names of Yiannis’ and Vasiliki’s four daughters, Aliki, Stella, Dominique, even that of Mother Theodora, after generations of families naming their children after a grandparent, as it was and still is a common practice in Greece, suggests a long ago forgotten and time-worn connection with the Frankish and Catholic element of the population of Constantinople of old, a faded trace from the depths of the history of Byzantium and its glorious capital.

The path to the daily round, the way back to the teacher's career and what we call everyday life, the desirable state of equilibrium, peace and security, which was abruptly disrupted by the political forces that emerged and prevailed after the conclusion of the Civil War, in that gloomy night of Yiannis’ arrest and, afterwards, during the months of incarceration and exile, forces acting fiercely and paying no heed to the impact on human lives (the discontinuities major historical events cause to human life can be profound), that path Mr. Yiannis and his family strived to walk again on his return was not paved with rose petals. As a humble aspiration as the reappointment to his teacher’s position in a public school might have been, it required, first and foremost, the notorious "Certificate of Healthy Social Convictions". Schools are workshops where young souls are engineered, consciences shaped and formed, young human beings “prepared for life ahead” –as they say. The political class, having asserted itself on the ruins of post-war Greece, sought to establish a new order, aiming primarily at serving the interests of the national ruling class, its wealth largely unscathed by the war (as it is often the case with the richest strata of society in periods of disasters and depression), and, of course, its foreign sponsors. Therefore, it contrived that these young souls are educated with respect to a set of preconceived notions and standards, selectively drawn from a biased, distorted view of history, adapted to the country’s new position in the new world order. The demands exerted on the educational system were aiming, amongst others, at the formation of a concrete national consciousness, unsmeared by communist or radical ideas, whilst maintaining the illusion of a “special people,” direct descendants of a glorious past.

The issue of a such ‘to whom it may concern’ certificate (essentially “certifying” one’s alignment with the dominant ideology) had first to be authoritatively approved by the higher echelons of State Security after an exhaustive search of someone’s past, then checked, stamped and counter-signed by several layers of the state hierarchy, which comprise the notoriously cumbersome Greek bureaucracy, and, finally, sent back to the point where the applicant formally requested it, typically the local police station, for a countersignature, before it was handed to the successful applicant. It was the sine qua non for public sector employment, amongst several other declarations and certificates that government agencies regularly demand as necessary supporting documentation to proceed with any kind of application, sometimes at periodic intervals, often from other government agencies, but with the applicant as the hapless intermediary; in an endless exchange of papers and stamps, seals and signatures, too many stamps and signatures from too many bureaucrats. All this by and large pointless individual effort was often a necessary condition for getting on with life for many modern Greeks between their birth and death. But, Mr. Yiannis, a citizen also of this "Kafkaesque" state, was further burdened by a dubious past, which forced him to oscillate between nonchalant public servants, seemingly with no end in sight, thus exacerbating an already difficult family and financial situation.

In the months that followed his exile, with the cogs of bureaucracy spinning at a familiar desperately slow pace, Mr. Yiannis, the ex-headmaster, still without a job and a regular income, was forced to sell pomegranates from his trees in the public markets of the western outskirts of Thessaloniki. Eventually, the desirable certificate with a ministerial seal of approval was dispatched, thanks mainly to a decisive intervention by a certain Petros Garoufalias, MP and minister of the "centrist" governments of that time; a peer, a fellow countryman and former classmate of Mr. Yiannis’ father from Arta. He was reinstated and reappointed as teacher, and resumed his teaching at the Bosphorus school in the working-class district of Ampelokipi, in the industrial west of Thessaloniki. His place in the local community, the respect by the people of his village and by the pupils of his school and their parents, a respect he valued highly throughout his life, was regained effortlessly. In the field of fundamental everyday human interactions and the essential in education parent-student-teacher relationship, there was no room for bias and prejudices. No further political obstacles were erected by the State Security in his career, no grievances from members of public were raised. His prestige in the local and teacher’s communities and his privileges as a teacher and headmaster were fully restored to the pre-war levels.

Ancestry 14 - Yiannis & Vasiliki: In Exile

What happened during the days of his detention in the Security “dungeons” of Olympus Street until his banishment was lost in the mist of time and family oblivion. That he was tried by one of the ad hoc military courts set up by a government, gripped by an anti-communist frenzy, to persecute and occasionally sentence to death communists and the like, as enemies of the state and order, remains unknown. In the throes of the Civil War, unrepentant communists were executed summarily, even without any due judicial process at all. Therefore, it could only be hypothesized that a trial was set up for the primary school teacher, the supposedly "enlightener", in the minds of a few extremists, however, an instructor-propagandist and agitator, who spread pro-communist propaganda and, consequently, anti-national ideas, and possibly participated in clandestine conspiracies to overthrow the established order, no matter how incomprehensible to the mostly illiterate folk of the village his speeches were and, hence, inconsequential. One would have assumed that if such a trial took place, some kind of suspension, a reprimand or even an acquittal would have been most likely be granted, a verdict that would have accounted for his honorable past, his family circumstances, his contribution to the community, etc. Nevertheless, such a judicial venture and outcome would be an oxymoron; such a refined process unimaginable under the circumstances. An indictment, which for the authorities had the advantage of serving as a deterrent, would be more plausible given the prevailing situation.

Within the same year of his arrest after an indefinite period of incarceration, in contrast with any notional, if not constitutional, human rights, he was exiled, along with a batch of other politically like-minded fellows, to the practically inaccessible island of Lemnos, a few days journey by car and then ship from a northern Greece port. There, Mr. Yiannis and a handful of hitherto unacquainted “comrades” spent nearly two years in an ad hoc, squalid camping site under wretched conditions, savaged by lice. It was like a second or, rather, third military service he had to grapple with, away from wife and children, out of work and with no money; in a dark alley with no end in sight and the future ahead a vacuum. It was a predicament that could bring pain and despair in every human being, no matter how strong and stoic. From those days of his exile, a black-and-white, weather-worn photograph of him survived. He was standing next to a professor, as short in stature and bald as Mr. Yiannis, at a pebble sun-drenched beach possibly taken after they had enjoyed swimming in the sea. "They sent us on summer vacation, really!" he would later joke. The short and bald professor became one of his closest friends. Indeed, in places like the camp that was hosting the exiled intellectuals, close friendships are established on the rugged grounds of mutual plight, of mental and physical suffering. English translation. 

After several months of a pointless temporal deadlock in exile, inconsequential for the welfare of the country, but detrimental to the lives of those banished to a god forsaken corner of Greece: in a camp where the days were frittered away with unnecessary military drills and hazing by the guards, marches, endless weeding, and other pointless daily chores, considered by the absurd and uncouth NCO’s in charge as having educational value for the enemies of Greece, who were supposedly threatening the welfare of the nation with their deleterious dogmas, the purveyors of the red communist menace, of course. With Mr. Yiannis' egoism wounded, himself physically and mentally shattered, an existentialist choice was presented to him at a time the Civil War was reaching a painful denouement for the communist rebels; a choice that would decide the future of his life and that of his family. The ideas he embraced at some stage, perhaps, in the heat of an enthusiasm brought about by liberation, embraced, nevertheless, with reservation even doubt, without ever these ideas constituting in his mind a concrete worldview or a rigid unshakeable doctrine, those ideas he had to renounce: verbally and in writing, in front of officials. He was called upon to erase any remnants of such ideas and visions and ideological sentimentalities from his consciousness, as much as such a mental metamorphosis is possible in human beings. He signed the notorious “Declaration of Repentance” that would result into his immediate discharge from exile, and furnish him with an official certificate of purified and ‘healthy’ social views.

"Wash your sins and transgressions! Resuscitate Yourself!" It cost nothing materially, it was nothing more than a signature and an oath of allegiance to the (equally vague, one must say) national ideals. Perhaps, the denouncement of a vision and the ideas for a socialist and just future (after all unclear and hypothetical especially for an underdeveloped country) and the rejection and erasing of a past of perilous activism and militancy towards a noble goal, might have been spiritually humiliating for a few conscientious minds. But gaining back of one’s life by far outweighed a spiritually ambivalent loss. The gain, lest we forget, of a unique life with an expiry date, was glorious and priceless. A good chunk of the rest of his life would be brought back into his arms and will.

I do not believe  English translation. grandfather Yiannis subscribed verbatim to the contents of “Declaration of Repentance” he signed wholeheartedly, from as far as I have got to know him. Who could have read, in those hours of veiled remorse and repentance, the thoughts of the humiliated and persecuted. The feelings and longing for a return home and family would have prevailed over anyone’s emotional state and reasoning. A stubborn association to a cause, as loose as grandad’s, with ambiguous goals, already questionable by several quarters, even by former ardent and devoted supporters of that cause, a fruitless intransigence for the sake of a political struggle that no one knew where it would be leading, was deemed meaningless and it would not help him or anyone concerned, under the established status quo. In the view of most there was not a shred of shame in his action, but it was absolutely justified. He merely did something great-aunt Magdalene did not or was not given the opportunity to do, and she ended facing the firing squad. Mr. Yiannis signed up to save his life from exile, rescue his family from poverty and the continuing persecution. So did most of his comrades in the prisoner’s camp of Lemnos, and so did his short and bald professor friend, who upon his return later opened a school in Thessaloniki. Where, thanks to that profound friendship founded on the hardships of their exile, he offered Mother her first job in teaching after graduation from the Pedagogical Academy.

Anectry 13 - Yiannis & Vasiliki: The Arrest

Nazi collaborators and informers were rounded up and pilloried in the streets. Mr. Yiannis’ daughters, perched on the windowsills behind the shutter grilles, secured for better or worse by Vasiliki, witnessed a sad procession of “traitors” in front of their house on its way to the schoolyard, their dragging feet on the dry dirt of the streets raising a cloud of dust behind. Uncle Leonidas, the grocer, stood out tall and husky, leading a band of fellow villagers and guerrillas of the Liberation Army who had dragged those "traitors" from their homes. Some hearts of the former beat eagerly in anticipation of some justice and retribution, the hearts of the latter were nearly broken by anguish, in fear of the worst, their faces pale in horror under the winter morning sun. The guerrillas of the “People’s Liberation Army” would not be taking lightly any crime that would have cost lives in the hands of Germans –they knew that much; summary executions of informers and collaborators took place after a rudimental process from make-shift courts, sometimes on the flimsiest of evidence or on biased testimonies from vigilantes. Mr. Yiannis participated in these shaming and pillorying in a rather measured and restrained manner. In the People’s Courts that had taken place in the small village square, he might have been appointed chairman or moderator, he might have been summoned as a witness, or he might have been acting as a prosecutor -the least likely. Whatever happened to the most prominent of the German "collaborators", amongst those escorted under the eyes of Mother and her sisters and tried in the small square, I could not find out. Few knew, and even fewer witnessed their fate in the aftermath of these trials, and any attestations would have been buried under the anti-communist fear that gripped Greece in the aftermath of the liberation. Rarely would the punishment, in such cases, have been commensurate with the misdemeanors or even "crimes" committed, in an ambience of bias and anxiety, and a general lack of moderation and equanimity from the two extremes of the political spectrum, which ended up being belligerents in the ensuing Civil War. The tensions were high, strong emotions of anger and revenge prevailed and, like a black storm, they darkened reason. There were few in the small rural communities of Magnesia and the surrounding villages that their active collaboration with the Germans and snitching would have cost lives of fellow villagers, even fewer were directly involved in war crimes against civilians; and those would have been handed over to the rebels to be summarily executed. Others, with minor misdemeanors and extenuating circumstances, petty servile confidents or, simply, obsequious lackeys of the occupiers, who frequented their headquarters and camps for some business, had likely been allowed to return home after some reprimands, some wagging of the finger, as in naughty schoolchildren, or, at worst, some spitting and cuffing, that is the mildest possible forms of public lynching, supposedly cathartic for all parties involved.

The local authorities, police and security services of post-occupation Greece were made up of par excellence ideologically ignorant ignoramuses, vassals of an already subservient and dependent on foreign power political system; several among them were possessed fanatics and paranoid of a looming communist threat or simply paid agents, their job merely being spying on fellow citizens. Some, in this rather menacing to the common folk pack, discovered in the various "enlightening" lectures of Mr. Yiannis, which were no more than superficial school-level speeches addressed to a semi-illiterate audience, unmistaken communist propaganda elements, emanating by dark forces, with the Communist Party and the Democratic Army being their long arm. They were considered, therefore, threats to the socioeconomic system and the “way of life” imposed onto the general populace by the establishment, a servile government and its American sponsors.  The boundaries between truth and false propaganda were murky. Mr. Yiannis was branded as, at least, sympathetic towards the left movement after liberation, with the communists at its core threatening with social upheaval and revolution, although he himself had never been an active member or associate or even conspicuously supporting the Communist Party -the number one bogeyman for those striving to preserve, tooth and nail, the national and international status quo.

The "national unity" government had a few former National Liberation Front members progressive actors (“progressive” in the broadest sense of the term) alongside several liberal and open-minded ministers. One of those ministers, a family friend from the same hometown, appointed him superintendent of schools in the area at the end of the war, the onset of a national reconstruction effort. It was a promotion. He no doubt possessed the qualifications, while he was also recognized in that largely volatile political climate as "progressive", professionally, "enlightened", a charismatic teacher by his counterparts and the few educated people in his social circle. The tide of liberation and the progressive visions with socialist hues that accompanied it, thanks to the new political landscape that seemed to have started taking shape after the war, began to recede, and the socialist movement with nebulous or unrealistic aims in the post-war Greek society was disintegrating. The hitherto described as "reactionary" forces, by and large rooted in fascism, Nazism, and ultra-nationalism, were now finding their nerve and determination, further encouraged and funded by the well-known foreign factor. On the other hand, the "spheres of influence" in the post-war division of Europe had already been decided at the highest levels of the hierarchy of the planet between the great powers that won the war. They began, without necessarily a broader acceptability and credibility or moderation and even a democratic mandate, but with extreme zeal and determination and few scruples, to proceed with the plans of their own counterrevolution: to quickly regain the lost ground in the consciences of the common folk and mark victories in the struggle of ideas and the distribution of wealth. Their influence was expanding rapidly: on the lower and middle strata of society, the people of a country exhausted by war, on urban populations affected by unemployment, privation and hardship, the principal concerns being their survival amidst the rubble and the gradual rebuilding of their lives on what was left, instead of an ill-defined socialist future. Eyewitnesses of the grandfather's "enlightening" speeches, from that other side, which after the war started erecting embankments against the “communist tide” and went on the counterattack, existed, and lurked from many quarters of the local society. There were policemen in abundance, there were former and current informers, civilians frightened or greased by the authorities, vengeful former collaborators and black-marketeers, victims of pillorying and abuse by the guerrillas of the Democratic Army.

English translation. A spring evening of 1947, late, with the Civil War in full swing, national security agents knocked on the door of Yiannis’ home. Such heavy knocks late at night by “Security Guards” appeared in the family life of Yiannis and others like him, in a way as something inevitable at this historical conjuncture, as an anticipated consequence under the circumstances of one’s actions and political footprint until then. Mr. Yiannis had already been blacklisted, in the minds and files of vindictive or "loyal" characters, who, nevertheless, did not necessarily possess any firm political opinions or ideology or even traces of a political conscience. These are the apolitical shadows of every regime, either "useful idiots" or opportunistic individuals motivated by self-interest, and who tend to side with those in power and serve them for survival and profit. After all, political power, especially of the authoritative type, likes to anchor itself firmly on the pedestals it has erected and to eliminate any small or large, real or imaginary, threats that can potentially challenge it.

In this environment, few informers sprang around, known and marked in the consciences of ordinary people. Through the gossiping that followed the arrest of grandfather a few were named and exposed to no purpose: a certain H, a coach driver from a neighboring village, or J -another local bus driver, but, especially, G, a well-known scumbag and owner of the café-pool club at the intersection, where the coach from the city stopped; all were central figures in spying and snitching, thanks to a strategic business location and verbiage of drinkers in the café or from the daily murmuring of passengers in the coach, having established links and in cordial relations with the police and security officials, who, in turn, relied on such snitching to demonstrate effective policing and establish civil older. In short, these were the shady characters who muttered and "confirmed" to the willing and smug ears of the Security, the supposedly pro-communist, propagandistic activity of grandfather.English translation. 

The girls were fast asleep that night when the door thundered, but the knocks and the kerfuffle that followed woke them up. Yiannis was in his pajamas, Vasiliki in her nightgown. It was shortly after a meagre evening meal -yoghurt and bread. Everything happened callously and hastily. A security guard with a rifle on his shoulder grabbed him from the shoulder, with no excuses or declarations of rights, just incoherent threats, and ushered him towards the “Jimmy” truck whose engine was rattling outside; in front of the acacia tree at the edge of the small front yard and the three concrete steps leading to the front door, while Yiannis’ girls watched in horror from the crack in the door of their room. Bewildered, with no idea what was going on, without daring to pop up to ask, Vasiliki remained silent, numb by surprise and fear. Feeling the cold night outside, she impulsively ran behind them, as they were lifting him onto the truck, and managed to throw on her husband's shoulders one of the woolen cardigans she had knitted for the winter.

She was strong enough for either hysterics or whining, while she knew that protesting would have been pointless and it could even have caused harm: you are not supposed to argue with the authorities in Civil War Greece, in any shape or form. She stood expressionless, firm as a rock, almost imperious, apparently undaunted by the uncertain and turbulent times ahead, next to her old parents, rushed out of their beds from their elder granddaughter instinctively reacting to the inexplicable commotion. No one in the family was aware of the precise “how and why” of all this, nor what was about to come, where they would take him, what they would do to him. Nor did anyone know what course their lives would follow from that moment on, and how long that course would last in the darkness. There was no compass no more: the old parents, the three daughters, the handicapped Giorgos, their household, without Mr. Yiannis' wages, was left high and dry.English translation. 

The American “Jimmy” disappeared in the darkness of the night, with only the very close neighbors having come to realize what that whole episode had been about. The Security gang led grandfather, along with a handful of other hapless souls from the same security black-lists they picked up on the way, to a detention center in Olympus Street, in the old Vegetable Market of Thessaloniki, near the Government House. He was imprisoned in an underground cell or ‘dungeon,’ a bodrum as Vasiliki described it. She paid frequent visits to Yiannis during the days of his detention there, carrying baskets with food. A small window of the underground cell facing upwards from an elevated corridor, opened to the visitor’s cell above for a few words of conversation with Vasiliki and the eldest daughter Alice. For the two younger girls and for their virginal psyches, the environment and conditions of detention, the brutal faces of uncompromising security guards, the pitiful spectacle of their teacher father who, they knew, left one night for “some business”, would not be becoming, but unwelcome features in their nightmares.

Ancestry 12 - Yiannis & Vasiliki: German Occupation

The misfortune that befell the family with Giorgos’ disability, and their shame, did not deter Yiannis and Vassiliki. In the peaceful interval before the war and the Occupation, they persevered to have more children: to perpetuate the family name and life. After Giorgos, Alice was born. She turned out to be the most dynamic and the, ultimately, domineering, and authoritative character in the family; three years later, in 1938, Mother and her half-twin sister who would grow to be rather meek and malleable personalities, certainly weaker and more insecure than their elder sister. Daily life in the village carried on as normal without many incidents, with Kotis and Dominique occupying the small old house built by the "Resettlement" Agency in the years of population exchanges, Mr. Yiannis, Vassiliki and their children in the more spacious, newly built house in one corner of the one-acre family plot. Yiannis’ main occupation was the teaching at local primary schools, but, as a side job, he was assisting the ageing Kotis with the bahçe and the wheat field, whilst maintaining and improving the two houses and the plots of land, as well supporting Vassiliki with the care of Giorgos, hidden from the prying eyes of fellow villagers.

The relatively serene and undisturbed family life was abruptly interrupted by the onset of war in the winter of 1940; a winter that was to mark a heroic epic in Greece’s modern history, endless accounts of which we were lectured at school. Grandfather Yiannis, along with Apostolis, Leonidas, and the other able-bodied young men from the village were conscripted and headed to the mountains of Albania to fight the invading Italians of Mussolini. They returned victorious after a few months, in their skanky fatigues, overwhelmed by lice, some disabled by severe frostbites, but most of them, thank God, safe and alive, into the peaceful realm of an everyday life in Magnesia. They had fulfilled their duty to their homeland and its people.English translation. 

The countryside of Thessaloniki was only scarcely affected by the war that got in full swing in Europe upon their return. In the villages, where the bulk of labor was committed to producing for own and family consumption, where the necessities for a man’s sustenance, milk, bread, vegetables, eggs, were rarely lacking from the dinner table, upheavals like the Greco-Italian war, and even the German Occupation that ensued, did not significantly affect lives, which, by and large, were immersed in the stillness of daily routine –at least from a materialistic point of view. The lifestyles were basic and elemental, the requirements and demands few, most households self-sufficient. They remained so: their lives were easily adapted to the circumstances that war and privation brought about. Yet, they fared better than the nearby city folk.   

Then, the Germans arrived. They emerged as grey figures amongst the hustle and dust of motorized battalions, the crackling of their boots on the streets dried and hardened by the summer sun behind securely locked shutters. Thessaloniki, its port and railway, its agricultural and industrial surroundings acquired some significance at that stage of the war, before the invasion of the USSR, although occupying Greece was probably a footnote in Hitler's "regional strategy" and grander domination plans. The house of Yiannis and Vasiliki, as well as the house next-door, where uncle Leonidas with his wife Fani and their children lived, was commandeered by the Germans, which, however, turned out to be not as ominous as it sounds. In practice, it meant that German officers from the local garrison would use one or two of their rooms for their sleep and toilette. The relations of those officers with Yiannis, Kotis, Leonidas, and other men of the village, with few exceptions, formed into something typical of the symbiotic, yet unwarlike relationship between the conquered, a fatalistically introvert community helplessly subjugated by force, and a foreign conqueror. An attitude was formed, that of tolerance or unwilling obedience by the powerless and unarmed, whose rhythm of life was somewhat unexpectedly upset, towards a powerful and conceited invader, who, fully aware of his power, commanded and imposed orders unchallenged. The occupier grabbed at will whatever they needed, in an explosive atmosphere of whispers and anxiety from the enslaved side and orders commanded by brutal foreign voices, with the sporadic non-compliance suppressed by force.

English translation. Then there were the few, the "collaborators" and profiteers of doom, who not only obsequiously bowed their heads, but actively supported and cooperated with the occupier: they sucked up to them, they extorted the populace, bought from the needy at humiliatingly low prices to resell with huge profits; they surrendered to the conqueror not just “land and water”, but also some unyielding human souls. At every sharp bend of history opportunism lurks, whether driven by cowardice and the instinct for self-preservation or motivated by greed.

Despite the oppressive atmosphere that spread over the village, Mr. Yiannis' daughters, especially the twin pretty sisters, Mother and Stella, became objects of sympathy from the Wehrmacht officers who dwelled in the family home. Apart from the petty teasing in a language incomprehensible to them and their parents, the officers regularly offered candies and chocolates, and these treats were greeted by the two children with the joy of those deprived of such luxuries. In the merciless and faceless souls of conquerors, barely mentioned in historical narratives that mostly overlook the individuality of characters of common people, there lurks somewhere hidden, genuine souls and manners of a timeless humanity.English translation. 

Eventually, the Germans, as they had arrived at the tranquil, peace-loving village, so they departed: without as much “fire and steel”, without mass executions and killings and atrocities witnessed elsewhere. What could they burn and destroy in such an unremarkable village, apart from the bridges of Gallikos and Axios rivers nearby, and the railway lines that passed by the outskirts of the village? Whose killings and what destruction would the Germans benefit from, in a village of vegetable farms, at a fair distance from the mountains from where the guerilla army commenced their forays? What point would there be in the senseless obliteration of livelihoods when most of its inhabitants bowed down to their orders without much ado and continued with their lives, whilst some of them, prominent or not, collaborated with the enemy -even with zest?English translation. 

Nevertheless, the retreat and eventual withdrawal of the occupiers did not bring peace and order "overnight", against the expectations of many of the villagers. The grumbling tolerance towards the Germans was transformed, through whispers and news that overflowed throughout the country from radio broadcasts, from newspapers that passed from hand to hand, from conversations and political fermentation in cafes, into a sympathy for the guerrillas-cum-liberators; for those hitherto invisible, otherworldly, legendary characters of the EAM-ELAS organizations who resisted and fought the Germans. The villagers did welcome them, perhaps instinctively, as sole legitimate representatives of the masses of peasants, workers, and intellectuals, along with few enlightened members of the petit-bourgeoisie -at least during those drunken times. In the towns and villages, the bliss of liberation carried them away, the morale and their hopes for the future were elevated. Kotis greeted them, grim and expressionless behind his gray mustache, with his left fist raised in front of the front door of the “Resettlement” house. He was a rather apolitical man, by no means influenced by socialist ideas or allured by a “People’s Republic” communist future. In fact, he was totally ignorant of such notions. On the other hand, his son-in-law, Mr. Yiannis, the teacher, the de facto intellectual figure of the village, gave solemn speeches at gatherings of peasants and guerrillas, fronting his village community in his school yard and the village square: in popular plenums pulsating with the joy of liberation. Yet, his political sermons had no significant impact to the illiterate or semi-literate consciences, neither did they inspire any detectable enthusiasm for the new, but rather nebulous future, he was advocating for.

Peppered were those exultant and jubilant speeches of Mr. Yiannis, with charming words, such as a “People’s Republic” or "Power to the People", as they were aligned with the slogans, but generally ill-defined, un-crystallized and opaque political objectives of EAM-ELAS and the Communist Party behind it. Rather foggy, nevertheless, for the mostly illiterate populace, even perhaps for himself. Their content was rather vague and idealistic. His speeches were as exultant as when celebrating with his pupils and their parents the Resurrection of Christ at the end of the Greek Easter, but devoid of agitational content. No matter, however, that these speeches acquired for the ears of many people a pro-communist tinge at a time of relentless propaganda and ideological war. The threat of a communist movement, or rather a revolution, that would shake up the established order in Greece had already been identified before the end of the war by the so-called reactionary powers and propagated accordingly. It was consolidated as a “real and present” danger in many souls and minds, at a turning point in history when everything was in flux, where everyone was trying to pick up themselves and whatever remained of their lives. A few intellectuals amongst them were striving to put political thoughts in order, grasp certain ideas and values and form a credible worldview, emerging on the ruins and the poverty the war left behind. Stalin's Soviet Union, whose Red Army had marched as far as Berlin, was envisaged by a handful of conscientiously progressive minds, as symbol of a possible, viable, real socialism, a beacon of a bright historical future for humanity. The most daring amongst them even tried to propagate such beliefs and ideas, at a time when a global ideological struggle were reaching a historical climax. Yet, at this historical junction, who could have foreseen the ensuing armed conflict and the bloody civil war that would bring a poor, devastated country further down to her knees?

Ancestry 11 - Yiannis & Vasiliki: An Unknown Uncle

It did not take long before Vasiliki became pregnant. And it did not take long for Mr. Yiannis’ household to endure their first misfortune; one of several that would follow and eventually disturb lives and affect matters: in the house and the village community, with Yiannis’ employment his primary school teaching -with life as whole. Vassiliki, two months pregnant, fell seriously ill with malaria. The still uncultivated lands further west from the village of Nea Magnesia, where the family put down roots, an area between Gallikos and Axios rivers, was covered by swamplands. Mosquitoes were then a scourge; a mosquito bite potentially fatal. Still a pesky pest nevertheless, a major nuisance for the village inhabitants, from the dusk to the dawn of long summers, although not as life threatening as it used to be. Neither the doctor who prescribed quinine in unregulated quantities, nor Vasiliki did have any idea of the side-effects of those drugs could have, if any, to her or of any harm they could cause to the baby she was carrying. Bedridden, suffering with sweats and high temperature, her life seemed in danger; and there was neither enough accumulated experience, nor time to weigh trade-offs, or assess the long-term risks of any medication and treatment. A few doses of quinine helped her recover. Whether it was the medication or the disease itself or something else that impaired the health of the new born could only be hypothesized, but it sadly happened.

Giorgos E was born a stunted, weak, and sickly and a mentally retarded child. They cared for him, and cared for him as much as they could manage, until he met a premature, yet expected and in a sense welcome death at the young age of seventeen. He had been the family’s secret sorrow until his death, hidden from the outside world, kept within the walls of their house or the fenced bahçe: his whole world during a short life. Severely disabled and retarded children, within the small, backward society of the village and beyond, in the cosmopolitan city not far away– was considered a stigma, a cause of unreasonable shame and distress, compounded by the negligible care and support from the virtually non-existent welfare state of prewar Greece. We knew from the margins of the unofficial ancient history deliberately excluded from school textbooks, that the ancient Spartans threw their sickly and crippled babies into the notorious Καιάδας, an underground cavern of death. In Greece of the 1930s and 1940s, families were merely ashamed to show them to the outside world: to take them by hand or on wheelchair to festivals, celebrations, public gatherings; in short, to enjoy as a family the little joys life in the community had to offer. There were the prejudices. There was the continual concern of what people would whisper behind their backs weighing heavily upon them, their gossiping about in houses and doorsteps when drinking coffee or ouzo with the neighbors; there were stern or pitiful looks or even stranger’s finger pointing at them. All this would cause deep feelings of self-pity and shame and resentment to two otherwise proud and honest parents who were normally treated with deference. Such social behavior is difficult to analyze with the cultural and social metrics of today, but apparently this incomprehensible feeling of shame in disability has been interwoven with Greek culture and its inherent prejudices for centuries. Possibly, due to, on one hand, an innate superiority complex against neighboring nations lacking in glorious history, on the other, an inferiority complex against the more advanced and affluent societies of Europe. Or, it could simply be explained by the unbearable weight of ancient history and heritage on a young nation’s shoulders and, since the founding of the modern Greek state after centuries of Ottoman rule, the contrived indoctrination of a collective conscience with national myths or a sanitized and glorified historical past.English translation. 

Neither Mother nor any of his sisters who lived along with Giorgos ever mentioned anything about his days and existence -to me and the other descendants of the family. Almost seventy years after his death, on a spontaneous visit with my aunts to Agios Athanasios’s Cemetery, where my grandparents had been buried, inside its dreary ossuary—a stuffy, half-dark warehouse with dusty planks for shelves around its walls, next to my grandparents' bones, another chest named Giorgos E. caught my attention and surprised me, as it was labelled with Mother’s maiden name. “There had been a brother of ours in this world,” my aunt admitted when asked, in a whispering voice betraying a secret guilt. I understood. Once upon a time, a man of the same blood as mine lived. An uncle I have never happened to know from photographs or family narratives. Nothing about his life was uttered in numerous family gatherings of endless assorted stories and confessions and anecdotes from the past -until that moment of revelation of a family guilt in the ossuary. Giorgos’ few dreary days in the bahçe and the house had been consigned in the dark depths of the family history.

Ancestry 10 - Yiannis & Vasiliki: To Nova Magnesia

Mr. Yiannis left the village of his ancestors and the town of Arta and emigrated: he ‘threw a black stone behind his back,’ as the Greek saying goes, never to return, and studied to become a teacher at the Pedagogical Academy of Athens. That would be a remarkable accomplishment at that junction of modern Greece’s history and under the circumstances, family and national. Even more commendably, he completed a postgraduate course in Pedagogy, offered to select few young and ambitious teachers, under the auspices of the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Athens. During his studies, he also allowed time to develop a dexterity in playing the violin; a violin that is still preserved amongst other family relics in his house in Magnesia, but which I never heard him play. In short, the light of knowledge and education illuminated an open mind and he undertook, as he was approaching the prime of his life, to propagate it to a whole generation of refugees.

How he ended up, a young teacher in the early 1920’s, from Athens, the power base of Greece’s over-centralized administration, to the region of Macedonia and, eventually, the relatively deprived western outskirts of Thessaloniki, a cauldron of multiculturalism with complex and colorful characteristics, albeit also heir of an unshakeable, and, for the enlightened few from the old Greece of the south, unbearable Balkan heritage, remains unknown. In a historical phase that was characterized, if anything else, by the uncertainty of what tomorrow would bring and social volatility, it is difficult to imagine the grandfather I met and conversed with as a child, a rational and measured, a prudent and shrewd personality, undertaking on his own impulse a venture with substantial risks, potentially injurious to his career and life; a career that was seemingly built honorably with tenacity and toil. He never came across as overambitious or romantic; he was level-headed and a pragmatist. One can only presume that it was a kind of a ministerial directive or decree of appointment that dispatched him from the safety, peace and quiet of the South to this volatile region of the new Greek dominions, in the admittedly portentous drive of the Greek State to improve the literacy of the refugees, instil a national conscience and assimilate the still sizeable ethnic minorities, rather than an inherent propensity in search of diversity and a professional challenge into the unknown. After all, waves of migrants from Epirus and the provinces of modern Greece converged in unison towards Athens. But Greece’s territorial expansion and population explosion that the influx of refugees effected, the imperative of reconstruction and economic development also gave rise to centrifugal forces from the capital to the relatively more affluent and dynamic towns in the country, particularly the greater metropolitan area of Thessaloniki in the north, which established itself as the Second City, euphemistically called the joint-capital. Thus, he was appointed teacher to the primary school of Magnesia and, shortly afterwards, he became the principal of a school in the locality of Bosphorus, in the refugee working class district of Menemeni. But in which new district of Thessaloniki back then was not the refugee element from Asia Minor and the Black Sea becoming dominant, even surpassing in numbers some of the ethnicities cohabiting in and around the city for centuries, like Slavs and Jews? The school to which he devoted his teaching energy and passion, and most of his life for that matter, became known to the locals as the "School of Mr. E…", an informal title of recognition and honor. The worlds of his and theirs were still small. A few years before his retirement and despite the detrimental post-war political exploits in which he was involved and eventually repented, he was promoted to a School Inspector of the broader areas of Goumenissa and Ampelokipi, thus reaching the peak of the national teacher grades, albeit in rather unillustrious regions away from the capital.

In the interwar years, as a newly appointed teacher in the village, he met grandmother Vasiliki, Koti’s beautiful daughter. Some matchmaking must have been organized; that's how things were done then: with a coffee and a teaspoon of sweet preserve or vanilla as a treat to one’s guests. Where and when exactly this matchmaking process was initiated, the background behind it, the matchmaker and the parties involved in the ‘negotiations’ and arrangements, any signs of consent or disapproval by the bride or groom, or any details of the discussions would remain unknown.English translation.  They were married under a tree, with the matchmaker appointed by default as the best man, and the blessings of the local priest and, of course, Kotis and Dominique. The family of Mr. Yiannis was conspicuously absent. Both of his parents had long since died, and he himself had been declared on paper as an orphan. Prior to the wedding his brothers and cousins, however, had made the long journey from Arta for the engagement and to acquaint themselves with the prospective bride and her family. But they were insolent in their discontent: neither did they like Vasiliki and Koti's broader family, nor Mr. Yiannis’ new homeland, in which he endeavored to set-up home and raise a family. Many things did they resent, and they made their displeasure rather unashamedly clear with the boldness of uneducated mountain people. Their recalcitrance and conduct, which could only be induced by prejudices and notions from a culture entrenched in the mountains of Epirus, provoked the wrath of Mr. Yiannis. He sent them away in anger and he would never see his brothers and relatives from Epirus again until the very last days of his life.

Nevertheless, the matchmaking proved to be successful in retrospect. It led, if not to a life of bliss (that rarest outcome of anyone’s destiny), to a rather peaceful, satisfying and, one dare says, mildly happy marriage and a content family life, always with respect to the standards of their generation, milieu, and environs. Let us stress again that Vasiliki was a beautiful woman – this was what all her photographs of the time portrayed. Based on external appearances, she seemed too good looking next to an early balding and short in stature Mr. Yiannis. She was also fairly cultivated, thanks to the relative prosperity her family enjoyed during her early years in Istanbul, although she fell short of obtaining a formal education and degrees –extremely difficult for women at that time. She was barely inferior in mind and spirit compared with her husband. Yet, she got on and by in life in his shadow, having accepted his role as the sole breadwinner, the major decision-maker, and undisputed head of the family. "You! Little woman of the common people...,” was a phrase Mr. Yiannis frequently used mockingly to address Vassiliki in some of their domestic disputes. It was an unjust, no matter if, for the most part, was expressed light-heartedly.English translation. 

The evidence overall suggests that Mr. Yiannis and Vassiliki spent a reasonably good life in the village, given theirs and the village folk’s expectations and ambitions. They might have at some point loved each other – like most people who start a family and share a home and a life together, regardless of the small likelihood that this might have been “love from the first sight,” a personal experience of instantaneous and thunderous love at the matchmaker’s first rendezvous, or of the possibility of love of some durable intensity. More important in marriages thus arranged, was that the unwritten agreement between Kotis and his sister was adhered to: in Vassiliki’s dowry, on the piece of land in front of their little house that sheltered them after their arrival from Istanbul, and the vegetable garden, next to the plot where uncle Leonidas set-up his home and grocery store, the newlyweds built a new house, with personal work and the help of Kotis and two or three local builders. There they brought up their offsprings, Mother amongst them, and spent the rest of their lives.

Ancestry 9 - Yiannis & Vasiliki: Mr. Yiannis from Tzoumerka

Grandfather Yiannis descended from the western part of mainland Greece; from a village called The Springs of Arta, best known amongst the locals by its slavic name Vrestenitsa -the place of elms, before modern Greece’s state annexation of Epirus effected the hellenization of many toponyms. The village was built on a small bucolic plateau east of the main bulk of the vast Tzoumerka mountains, under the Kokkinolakka peak, overlooking the river Achelous valley of outstanding beauty. A place too cumbersome to access, on foot or by the other transport means of the era, that is, donkeys or mules, so that one wonders how on earth people gathered a collective strength and will, and found the courage and the resources to climb these mountains, and made this habitat, perched amongst gigantic mountain peaks, viable and lived lives for generations.

Of course, they might have fled up there at a crossroads of history, persecuted by ominous conquering hordes; or their ascend might have been forced by brutal monarchs or avaricious plutocrats, who seized by force the fertile plain that expands from the foothills to the Ionian Sea shores, for the appropriation of wealth and the accumulation of power -those eternal lusts of humans. Hundreds of the oppressed souls of the region perished heroically and marked the history of the place. Not far upslope from the village, brothers Kitsos and Notis of the Botsaris clan, along with the heroic inhabitants of the legendary Souli, besieged in the Monastery of Seltsos, bravely resisted for weeks the Arvanites of Ali Pasha of Ioannina, until they were eventually overwhelmed; only a handful amongst them managed to find escape routes and survive the onslaught. Their women and children, as the legend goes, danced their way to the edge of the cliff of Zalongo before throwing themselves off it into the gorge below to avoid capture.

Perhaps, it was the imposing mountains and their unreachable peaks, the forests and the streams, the mystical life above the clouds, the starry firmament of the pitch-black nights, the closeness to their gods, all those elements that exert an irresistible spiritual attraction. Or, for a few, it might have been the solitude one could find there in abundance, far away from the hustle and bustle of the town of Arta at the foothills of Tzoumerka. For myself and many of my contemporaries, the place had been a terra incognita, my unique link, rusty from the passage of time, being that it was the birthplace of my maternal grandfather, Mr. Yiannis, the primary school teacher.English translation. 

Only once, did I try to climb the slopes of the Tzoumerka mountains by car in search of my grandfather's village and for a glimpse at my family’s heritage. It was a late spring morning, when we began our journey from Arta the largest town in the foothills. The orange orchards in the plain were sleeping under a warm sunshine, dressed in the white of their blossoms; the slopes of the mountains dark green against of the gray ridges, and the bright blue skies beyond. The road was narrow, poorly constructed, asphalted before times immemorial, with endless u-shaped turns, under a dense vegetation of oaks, elms, and beeches. A few fir trees were sparsely scattered on the huge bare rocks that rose above us. The exhausting uphill drive under the canopy, through just a few glades in the luxuriant vegetation, was abruptly interrupted by steep descents down to small ravines warn by crystal-clear water. These were inevitably followed by virtually vertical ascents that seemed to end up at the top of cliffs above us, yet never reaching them. A rare sample of life on our way, a shepherd with his flock of sheep on a plateau, scrutinized in wonder the unexpected visitors. At the end, the seemingly endless ascent through the wilderness frustrated us and we abandoned our trip a few kilometres before reaching our intended destination. It was the nearest to my grandfather's birthplace, where a vital branch of my family was attached to the trunk of our genealogical tree. English translation. With my friend Anna next to me, we had other things in mind and not much time at our disposal. It was one of those micro-existentialist decisions, however, that I regretted in retrospect. 

Then again, I had been thinking… the people of that seemingly oneiric place might have had their the lucid sunny days, their limpid water springs, their cool and crispy air of the mountain tops, their trees and lucid sky, their pitch-black silent nights, broken only by the rustle of the leaves, the songs of birds, the cries of animals or aeolian sounds, the moon looming and the stars, through the starry firmament, twinkling bright like nowhere else in the grand cities of civilization; the place and the landscape belonged to them -absolutely. Yet, they lived difficult lives of daily struggles. The beauty of cosmos around them falls, through habit, into the background of the daily grind. Before the naturalists and the tourists, those specimens of human existence, which evolved through the emergence of the bourgeoisie and the explosion of urbanization, in a period when grandfather was still a small child, this daily struggle withered their lives. Eventually, the materialistic progress spilled over and as far as those remote geographical margins. Some of the shocks of the industrial revolution have been felt all the way up to the mountains of Epirus and its people. The sirens of a breathless progress approaching and spreading could hardly be resisted, especially by the younger generation. Whose young person defenses could resist the lure of a richer and more comfortable life, materially and spiritually? Would one rather ride the train of progress towards a better life, from a valid hypothesis based on ample evidence and hitherto experience, or miss it and left stranded in a withering world of constant and irrevocable decline?

When the clock of existence strikes midnight, as it always happens everywhere and for everyone (and it happens with mathematical brutality), the weight of sorrow, bitterness and repentance weighs heavily on the heart of the mortals who did not seize the one or two opportunities presented to them, and missed that train for another life, albeit on the very same earth. Escapism and eventually migration from an asymmetrical and desperate poverty, from the visibly intolerable chasm between life in grandfather’s village and the attractions of the civilisation at the foothills and beyond was inevitable, unpreventable and to an extent predestined by the laws of economic and social advance. And it occurred in a massive scale.  Grandfather’s village deprived of its youth and vigor, languished, deserted by its inhabitants, barring some of its old folk. Just as it happened with most of the villages on the mountains of Epirus: stripped of human beings and life, which scattered themselves in the metropoles of Greece, America, Germany, Australia.English translation. 

The fact that Mr. Yiannis' father was a seminarian in the Springs of Arta and the small parish of the surrounding villages and communities, which implied that he was one amongst the very few literate persons in a sea of illiteracy, must have helped decisively: this provided Yiannis with solid foundations, as they say, carved out a perspective, opened a few wider avenues, amongst others more mundane. It is also possibly that his priest-father supported him materially and morally, as well as other practical ways conceivable, to escape from that dead-end everyday life and the cultural isolation of the village. There were some relatives in Arta with connections: a bridge to more distant places of even wider horizons. All these factors must have coalesced, together with an equally significant personal impulse and will, and led him far away –with a handwoven bag on his shoulders and several kilometers of daily walking to the distant high school, to be educated: to build up a different life in a completely different world from that of the Epirus mountains.

A personal will and a right frame of mind must have proved critical in Mr Yiannis’ development, evidence of this had been that he abandoned, when still young, the god and the religion his father preached and served –genuinely and with reverent sincerity, I imagine, whilst indoctrinating his son and other local souls in his beliefs and dogma. We should point out, however, that, barring a few exceptions, an individual’s will and initiative, personal gifts, talent, and charismas, do not always prove sufficient conditions for major social leaps and life transformations. Even those personal, doubtlessly valuable, traits, are molded by the environment and reinforced by tailwinds (or, as it may happen, weakened, or diverted by headwinds): the priest father who knew how to read and write amidst an ocean of illiteracy around him and kept a small theological library at home, some more cultured relatives in the town below with political connections. At the same time, there are innumerable circumstances and infinitesimal forces, often acting imperceptibly or unconsciously in the background of our existence, unaccounted for, whose resultant may push a man in one direction at one stage or pull him in another at the next one. Always, as someone said, the customs and traditions of previous generations "weigh like a nightmare" on the consciousness of young people, along with numerous regressive or progressive factors along the way: sometimes insurmountable obstacles, sometimes wide, free avenues to follow, not at one’s behest or of one’s choice, and which might never have occurred to them that they would encounter. A few manage and overcome these obstacles and survive, better their lives, even prosper, the weakest may crumple under their weight.