Every once in a while, someone will ask me “Where are you from,” and the simplest answer I will be able to give would be “From Greece.” But that is only part of the truth. Our ancestors have roots buried in the folds of the earth, in the eastern corner of the Mediterranean Sea, moving from country to country, village to village, race to race, in order to survive and to call a place their home.
I don’t know many details about my ancestors, and the little I know from my father’s father, can be verified in dark pages of Hellenic history. Or is it even Hellenic? My knowledge is based on anecdotal stories that grandpa loved telling when we, his grand children, were visiting him at his house just to keep him some company. What a shame I had no brains to put them all in paper then…
My grandparents were part of the Greeks that lived between the southeast coast of the Black Sea, where today is northeast Turkey, and the borders of Georgia and Armenia. Pontos was the name and it meant The Sea. My grand father Kostas, was born in 1898, which means that he was a young man when all the atrocities took place in the area. He always said that he survived through two wars before coming to Greece and he survived two more after that. I though it was poetic freedom but the history books prove him right.
The first war was when he was 16, and although most of the bullets were fired in Europe, the victims were right in front of him. Right after the end of the Balkan Wars and when World War I started, and since Turkey was aligned with Germany, people living under the Ottoman flag had to survive the consequences that came with that territory. All provisions were being taken from the people and they were being gathered for the Ottoman army, the farmers were being deprived of their crops and their livelihood, in order to provide for the fighting forces. Poverty and hunger and fear were daily concerns.
The Ottoman Empire was being kicked out of Europe and in the interior of the empire they were feeling insecure under the threat of Russia. The Armenian population was considered friends of Russia and were viewed as traitors to the empire, so they were slaughtered. In 1917, millions of innocent people were killed, exiled, or simply disappeared because of their heritage.
As the war in Europe was being won by the English and the French, the Russians made their move and invaded the Ottoman Empire from the north. The Greek community viewed this act as a step closer to the liberation of Pontos and its union with Greece or the formation of a completely independent state. That was two years later when Kostas was 18 and he lived through his second war. The Russians started burning the Ottoman houses in the cities, and they pillaged their villages. Theft, rape, killing, fire and fear. All brought by the Cossacks,
who were mercenaries wearing masks of liberators, looking for loot with no consideration for human life. The Russians after bombing and burning the cities, were leaving Pontos and the Greeks were now being left vulnerable to Turkish retaliation. Terrified for their lives they boarded the Russian ships or they packed their livelihood on mules and became refugees, aiming to reach Greece.
The long journey to a new homeland was not easy. Families with children and elders gathered the very few that they could find and loaded them on animals or on themselves and walked away from the danger they knew and into the arms of a new one. Hunger, cold, sickness, and robbers were just some of the problems that needed to be surpassed every day, and the people survived with patience, singing, dancing, prayer, even hate. Whatever anyone could find in their souls.
The rain during this journey was a common phenomenon, and my Grandpa got sick from the
cold and wet clothes that he constantly wore. The fever was high and they had no medicines to help it drop. The very few that were available, needed money but our family was not rich. He was going to die, if not from the illness itself, he would have to be left behind.
Some of his friends gathered to find a solution and one of them sold his “kementze”, his traditional lyra, and they managed to buy medicine and save his life.
Eventually, they reached Greece. They were gathered in big cities, in concentration camps where they were registered and they were allowed to visit certain areas, find a suitable place and rebuild their villages. Grandpa was in one of those committees that were touring the countryside to find a new homeland.
They were looking for a place that would be like or feel like the place that they came from. The initial proposal was in a valley where they would be able to cultivate the land, but my people came from mountains, with big trees and lots of running waters. They rejected that offer and started looking for a new place. They found it on the side of a mountain, right at the northern border of Greece. Big plane trees, springs with fresh water, and creeks with running water everywhere. There was only one problem: the land was full of stones, rocks and boulders. Not easy to cultivate, but plenty of raw materials to build the village. And they did. They build the village, their church, their school and they started burying their dead, making roots that will connect them to that place forever.
My grandpa’s father was a priest, father Michael, and I believe he was blind. Being the son of the priest gave to my family a lot of weight and that is why grandpa was involved in the creation of the village. He married my grandma as his second wife, I guess once they were living in the village, and although I don’t know the whole story very well, I know that his first wife died after falling into the river and catching pneumonia. Having children was also a dangerous situation back then. My grandparents were unlucky as they lost a couple of their first children, so when my aunt was born they named her “Elpida”, which means Hope, symbolising their hope for her to live, and when my father was born they named him “Athanasios” which comes from the Greek word meaning Immortal, symbolising their wish for him to become immortal and not die.
The third war they survived was World War II. Living in a remote small village had its benefits then. The Germans that were occupying Greece had no interest in that small village as long as everything was under their control, so they were being left alone most of the time. In addition, they didn’t have the big problems of famine like it was in the big cities, because they had their own gardens and animals and they could make their own food for their families. Don’t get me wrong, it was still difficult to survive and living in poverty was the expectation, but they survived without going to extremes, like the city people had to do.
Right after the end of World War II, the fourth war emerged. It was the civil war in 1945, and oddly enough, the impact for my family was much greater that the big war. The rebels were hiding in the mountains and they often had to come to the nearby villages and steal food or cause other kinds of trouble. Having rebels in the village, caused the army to come and chase them or try to ambush them. The village was converted into battlefield and it was not providing the feeling of security that it did the years before. Grandpa, or Zeus as it was his nickname, decided to move the family to the city, to Thessaloniki.
By that time his parents were dead, and being the older child of the family he was responsible for the well being of his two brothers and two sisters. He found an area in Toumba, a place that only refugees like them would go and live, and they build their houses, and they build their community, and they made roads, and businesses and they gave life to a place that nobody cared for.
My grand father was a leader in his community. He guided his peers through fire and rain and enemies foreign and domestic. He made a family and he cared for everyone in it. He was not emotional, I would say he was tough. He worked in the fields until his nineties, and he smoked non-filtered cigarettes past his eighties, until his doctor scared him. He was a family man, hard worker, and hard headed. He loved his children and their children but he never learnt how to let them know. I guess it would be impossible in a life filled with wars, pain, suffering, and displacement . He never learnt to express his feelings to us, but we could see in his eyes how happy and proud he was every time he saw us.
He loved reading and he had a habit of choosing some of our school books to read for his entertainment. He preferred history and geography which are books about people and places. He was part of those history books but he didn’t have the chance to learn the history of others. We walked thousands of miles but he never had the chance to learn about the world that he lived in. Books did that for him.
I am trying to guess who my grandpa was. I never knew who his friends were, or what they did for fun, or what kind of a person he was socially. I met him when he was old, retired from work, and spending his time alone with grandma. He rarely went to the village “kafeneio”, the coffee house, and I don’t remember him playing backgammon, which is a tradition amongst the Greek elders. On the contrary, he liked to play cards. Uncle Elias would visit him during the winter and they wound play cards, games that I don’t know, but they would always fight accusing one another of cheating. Uncle Elias would afterwards confide in me that he would let him win because Grandpa hated losing. He would also say that whenever he saw us, his grandchildren from the window, he would boast like the proud grandparent that he was.
I think my dad and his dad are a lot alike, just like am a lot alike my dad. Every generation is an improved version of the previous one, as long as society allows us to live peacefully, without the turbulence and horror of war. Similarly, I see pieces of me in my young son and I consider him being an improved version of me. It goes without saying that and I boast with pride watching my girls and boy grow up. Grow up in peace.
My grandfather Kostas died early January of 1991, at the age of 93, peacefully at his home, surrounded by his family.