Because We Are Greeks
Wartime And Peacetime Tales From The Days And Deeds Of The Denizens Of An Ancient City
Basil Tsotsis
Copyright © 2007 by The Estate of Basil Tsotsis
All rights reserved. This is a work of historical fiction based on events in Greece in the 1930s and 1940s. Except for the portrayals of actual historical personages, the names and characters are a product of the author’s imagination.
Cover photograph of the White Tower in Thessaloniki, Greece by Thomas K. Tsotsis.
This book honors the memory of its author, Basil Tsotsis: husband, father, Papous, and great storyteller.
Published by:
Goblin Fern Press
2625 South Greeley Street, Suite 201
Milwaukee, WI 53207
www.goblinfernpress.com
ISBN: 978-1-59598-008-3
Smashwords Edition
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Table of Contents
Greek Terms Used in Because We Are Greeks
Greek Guerilla Organizations during World War II
Alphabetical List of Characters
Chapter 6: The Grocer’s Scales
Chapter 12: A Father’s Survival
Chapter 14: The Neighborhood Council
Chapter 15: The Council’s Members
Chapter 16: The Neighborhood Gang
Chapter 17: The Political Parties
Chapter 18: The General Strike
Chapter 19: The General’s Coup d’État
Chapter 20: The Restoration of the Monarchy
Chapter 22: The Council’s Adjournment
Chapter 23: Of Ice and Castor Oil
Chapter 24: Santa Augusta the Fourth
Chapter 26: A Meeting of Private Citizens
Chapter 30: The Tax Collector’s Conversion
Chapter 31: The Resurrection of the Council
Chapter 32: The Gluttonous Goats
Chapter 36: The Piebald Billy Goat
Chapter 42: The Albanian Safety Valve
Chapter 43: The Wisdom of Elders
Chapter 44: The Reality of War
Chapter 45: The Torpedoing of the Elli
Chapter 47: May They Be Swatted Out of the Sky
Chapter 48: “You Sucker, Mussolini.”
Chapter 51: Growing Up Among the Bombs
Chapter 53: Remembering Metaxas
Chapter 54: “Sightseers” and “Tourists.”
Chapter 55: Unwelcome Neighbors
Chapter 58: War Reaches Thessaly
Chapter 60: The Occupation Begins
Chapter 61: Only God Knows What They Will Do to Us
Chapter 62: Fantasies and Speculations
Chapter 64: The Goddess of Freedom
Chapter 65: The Laws of Occupation
Chapter 66: Drachmas and Marks
Chapter 67: They Sing While They Work
Chapter 69: Occupied Thessaloniki
Chapter 71: Sticking It to the Germans
Chapter 72: Helping the British
Chapter 73: A Different Summer
Chapter 78: Before They Shoot Us Dead
Chapter 80: Dying in Public View
Chapter 81: The Streets of Vardar
Chapter 83: Dark Forces in Greece
Chapter 85: The Spies’ Success
Chapter 87: The Conquerors’ Oasis
Chapter 99: Manipulating Alkis
Chapter 100: Going Separate Ways
Chapter 101: Looking for Soul Mates
Chapter 102: The Struggle Against “Exclusive Truths”
Chapter 103: The Bulgarians’ “Victory” Parade
Chapter 104: A Silent Greek Victory
Chapter 105: Jason Joins the Resistance
Chapter 106: The Arrival of the “Rosenbergs”
Chapter 107: Cemeteries With a View
Chapter 111: Death Visits the Vardas Family
Chapter 112: Preparing for the Trip to Poland
Chapter 113: Going to the Mountains
Chapter 114: The Allied Air Raids and Their Aftermath
Chapter 115: So Many Empty Places
Chapter 117: The Other Side of the Fence
Chapter 118: On Opposite Sides
Chapter 119: Boys of the Resistance
Chapter 120: Wars Are Not Won by Fools!
Chapter 121: Unlikely Partnerships
Chapter 122: A Fourth Occupation Army
Chapter 123: More Alphabet Soup
Chapter 125: The Pinecone Test
Chapter 126: Down With the Bulgarians! Long Live Greece!
Chapter 127: Come to Me, My Love!
Chapter 129: The Springs of Asproneri
Chapter 130: How Can These Beasts Do This to Us?
Chapter 133: Fratricidal Revenge
Chapter 134: Don’t Tell Anybody!
Chapter 135: The Atlantic Charter
Chapter 136: That Man Has Balls!
Chapter 137: The Old Turk’s Balance
Chapter 138: Droplets of a Cloud
Chapter 139: A Lot of Growing Up to Do
Chapter 140: Fratricide in the Neighborhood
Chapter 141: A Patriot Returns
Chapter 142: Liberated Parachutes
Chapter 143: Port Destroyed, Waterfront Saved
Chapter 144: Black German Boots
Chapter 145: Jubilant People Praising the Lord
Chapter 146: From Glory to Glory
Chapter 149: We Need No Light.
Chapter 150: “Official Liberation”
Chapter 151: Belonging to “The People”
Chapter 153: The Liberation Parade
Chapter 154: The People’s Police
Chapter 155: The Largesse of the British
Chapter 156: Because We Are Greeks
Chapter 157: Bayiatis’ Resurrection
Chapter 158: What to “Believe”?
Chapter 159: The Greeks’ Specialty
Chapter 160: The People’s Struggle
Chapter 162: Preparing for Post-War Elections
Chapter 163: A Model of Democracy
Chapter 164: Oases in the Wilderness
Chapter 165: The Post-War Council
Chapter 166: Irrelevant Forces
Chapter 167: Another Friend’s Return
Chapter 168: A Windmill Turning in the Wind
Chapter 169: Comings and Goings
Chapter 170: Onward to Palestine
Chapter 171: Bayiatis’ Resurrection II
Chapter 172: One-Hundred-and-Four Percent
Chapter 173: The Fruits of the Minefields
Chapter 177: A New War of Our Own
Chapter 178: His Son’s Keeper?
Chapter 179: The Council’s Adjournment II
Chapter 181: Building on the Past
I am writing this as I fly across the Atlantic Ocean at over 30,000 feet above sea level, the same ocean my father, Basil Tsotsis, crossed fifty-three years ago by boat to come to the United States as a Fulbright Scholar. There, he intended to study for a few years and then return to his homeland of Greece. Clearly, his plans changed after he arrived. He entered the U.S. with little more than a suitcase and twenty dollars to his name. He did bring, however, a keen and open mind that allowed him to succeed beyond the “Balkan Boy” (as he often referred to himself) dreams he had in his hometown of Thessaloniki.
As a Fulbright Scholar, my father attended a foreign-student orientation in Madison, Wisconsin, where he met my mother, Ruth. They were in the same alphabetical group, she an “S” for Scheuer, and he a “T” for Tsotsis. They married four years after they first met. They eventually settled in DeKalb, Illinois, where I grew up. One time in DeKalb, after over forty years of marriage, my mother brought out the orientation book from Madison, entitled “We Met in Madison.” In this book, there is a series of essays, one from each member of the Fulbright Scholar class of 1954. In reading my father’s essay, it is easy to see, even then, his love of Greece and his storytelling ability.
I never appreciated how much work this work of my father’s was until I saw all of the boxes of drafts—handwritten!, typed, and printed-out papers—that were produced over a period of approximately twenty years. In amongst all of these documents, my father had written out sketches of the various characters and settings. The protagonist, Jason Vardas, my father’s alter-ego, had several last names before my father settled on “Vardas.” It is a credit to my father’s innate storytelling ability that he was so organized and had such a clear vision of such a large undertaking without any formal training in writing other than the basic classes he took as a youth. Even more amazing: the patience and dedication he had to first write hundreds of pages by hand, edit these, graduate to a typewriter without knowing how to type, rewrite the stories, and finally, transcribing and finalizing the story on a Macintosh computer. When I had to transfer the Mac-formatted writings to PC-compatible form after my father died, I felt like I was handling sacred documents, because to me, they are.
The book you hold in your hands is only part of a much larger work my father embarked on in addition to the various short stories he wrote. This is the only part of the larger work he finished, always referring to it as his Magnum Opus. The other parts, concerning my father’s later years in Greece, coming to America, and integration into American society, have been written, but never completed. So far, no one other than my father has read them, as he kept all of his writings close to the vest until he felt comfortable giving them to family members for comments.
The book as you now have it is exactly what my father wrote, with a few exceptions. Grammatical and spelling errors were corrected, mostly by a good friend of the family, Susan Kniebes, whose family and ours have been close friends for fifty years or so. My mother and I also reviewed what Susan had done and corresponded with her regularly over the two years or so it took to make all of the corrections. Additionally, references to historical figures were changed to the actual names where my father had fictionalized them. I had discussed this with my father and he agreed that such a change should be made. We also changed the fictional “alphabet soup” acronyms of the various groups in Greece that eventually evolved into the groups that fought in the Civil War to the actual acronyms. Some of my father’s schoolboy friends were consulted for a better understanding of some of the events regarding religious groups in Thessaloniki, which clarified some sections. The new title, the chapter titles, and the footnotes in the text are from a combination of Susan Kniebes, my mother, and myself, with some inputs from my sister, Helena, as well. We hope that these only add to and do not detract from the narrative.
I spoke to my father about many of the stories contained herein and he told me that they were, with some literary license taken here and there, actual accounts of what he saw and experienced while growing up in 1930s Greece under various dictatorships and then in the 1940s, during World War II and the Nazi occupation, and the Greek Civil War. I recognized many of the names of Jason’s boyhood friends as the names of my father’s friends he told us about, although in the book, most of these are actually composites of several characters that my father knew. Many of the place names, especially of some of the smaller villages, were also composites.
The most fantastical stories in the book are taken from actual events. The horrific, the absurd, and the comical events, all took place in and around Thessaloniki during my father’s youth. It is impossible to read these and not be affected by them, and to realize what an indelible impression such events could make on a young Greek boy. It is to the credit of my father, his family, and all of the other Greeks who survived these events as they remained optimistic throughout it all and were able to lead productive lives in many capacities. I often think of how lucky—and ignorant—most Americans are to live in a peaceful, prosperous country and how we almost always take this for granted. My father never took these things for granted, and, I’d like to think, that I don’t either, but that’s probably not completely true, unfortunately.
My father’s love of Greece is in this book and in the stories he would tell about his growing up there. He would tell us about his boyhood exploits and list the names of various friends with (to me as a non-Greek-speaking youth) funny-sounding names. Some of these remained friends with my father throughout his life, with many also settling in America. We always referred to them as the “Greek Mafia,” as news about anyone would seemingly travel throughout this network of friends faster than physics says it could. I especially loved hearing about his favorite grandmother, “Madame” Chrysanthe, as he always called her. She appears in this book and in a short story my father wrote about her and completed the day before he died. My father had me plant a pomegranate tree in my back yard in her honor.
During the writing—and re-writing—of this book, my father would often discuss various parts of the story with us as though he were talking about close relatives, which, in some sense, he was. Sometimes we did not want to discuss the book with him, and this upset him quite a bit, as the book was not just a story to be told, but his gift to his family. It was not only the gift of his story, but the gift of himself in written form. I am glad that he was able to complete this gift before passing and even more glad that each one of us was able to read his book before he died; he knew that and truly left us a happy man. He was as happy as he had been in years just before he died—even more so after Greece won the European soccer championship and spending his seventy-sixth birthday with his two granddaughters, Natalie and Erica.
My father produced this book as a gift to us. It is now our pleasure to offer it as a gift to you. Enjoy!
Thomas K. Tsotsis
March 27, 2007
Greek Terms Used In Because We Are Greeks
Karaghiozis: The name of both a type of Greek puppet show and one of the puppets used in those shows.
Kollyva: The boiled, hard wheat sweetened with raisins prepared for friends and neighbors to eat after the church services in honor of a deceased individual.
Kyria: Mrs.
Kyrios: Mr.
Loukoumas (singular), loukoumades (plural): Balls of yeast dough that have been fried in oil and doused with honey.
Papous: Grandfather.
Putses: The slang term that the young boys in the Vardases’ neighborhood used to describe the young Greek women who became the “girlfriends” of the German soldiers during the occupation of Thessaloniki during World War II.
Souvlaki: Pieces of skewered meat.
Yiayia: Grandmother.
Greek Guerrilla Organizations During World War II
EDES (Εθνικός Δημοκραηικός Ελληνικός Σύνδεζμος or Ethnikos Dimokratikos Ellinikos Syndesmos) The National Republican Greek League; also translated as the National Democratic Greek Union. This anti-communist/pro-republican guerrilla group was eventually supported by King George II, who was in exile in Egypt at the time of World War II.
EKKA (Εθνική και Κοινωνική Απελεσθέρωζις or Ethniki Kai Koinoniki Apeleftherosis) The National Socialist Liberation Group. This anti-communist/pro-republican guerrilla group was smaller than EDES and strongly opposed the Greek monarchy.
ELAS (Εθνικός Λαϊκός Απελεσθερωηικός Σηραηός or Ethnikos Laikos Apelevtherotikos Stratos) The National Popular Liberation Army, the military arm of EAM (Εθνικό Απελεσθερωηικό Μέηωπο or Ethnikon Apelevtherotikon Metopon), the National Liberation Front. Both ELAS and EAM were part of the KKE (Kommounistikon Komma Ellados), the Greek Communist Party.
EPON (Ενιαία Πανελλαδική Οργάνωζη Νέων or Eniaia Panelladiki Organosi Neon) The Unified Panhellenic Youth Organization. Founded in February 1943, it was the youth section of ELAS, which was the military arm of KKE, the Greek Communist Party. (See “ELAS” above.)
PAO The Panhellenic Liberation Organization. It was a guerrilla group that operated primarily in the Macedonian province of Greece.
X: A right-wing guerrilla group that operated primarily in the Athens area. (X is the 22nd letter of the Greek alphabet, pronounced “khi”).
Alphabetical List Of Characters
Chaim Abastado: The nephew of Felix Abastado who joined a guerrilla group during World War II.
Felix Abastado: A Jewish industrialist, the father of Sam Abastado, and a member of the first iteration of the neighborhood Council.
Sam Abastado: Son of Felix Abastado, friend of Jason Vardas, and member of Chinaman’s gang.
Father Andreas: The priest in charge of the neighborhood’s Greek Orthodox Church, which was dedicated to St. John the Chrysostome.
Kyrios Andronicos: One of Greece’s leading legal scholars and, along with his sons, a neighbor of the Vardases.
Angela: The live-in lady friend of Jordan Keseoglou.
Yiannikos Bataras: A member of Chinaman’s gang who was also known as “Buttons, the Enforcer.”
Alkis Bayiatis: Begins as a strong supporter of the Greek republic and the Assistant Regional Tax Inspector and becomes a member of the first iteration of the neighborhood Council. He had a different job, and a different political persuasion, with each regime change.
Buttons: See “Yiannikos Bataras.”
Colonel Pavlos Callas: A retired military man who was a member of the first iteration of the neighborhood Council.
Elpiniki Callas: The wife of Colonel Pavlos Callas.
Manos Capnopoulos: A youth in the neighborhood whose father was a police captain. He was not invited to join Chinaman’s gang.
Cassandrus*: The Macedonian king who founded Thessaloniki.
Chinaman: See “Stylian Sideris.”
Collias: A sheep herder in the village of Neraida in Thessaly, a region of Greece south of Thessaloniki.
Nikephorus Comnenus: The neighborhood’s family doctor who delivered Jason Vardas and took care of most of the medical needs in the Thessaloniki neighborhood where the Vardas family lived.
Philippe Condos: Joined Chinaman’s gang about the same time as Jason Vardas.
Savas Condos: The father of Philippe Condos, he owned a lumber yard and textile mill in the Vardar section of Thessaloniki.
Cleon Deltas: One of two sons of Panos Deltas and a member of EDES. (See “List of Greek Guerrilla Organizations During World War II.”)
Demos Deltas: One of two sons of Panos Deltas and a member of ELAS. (See “List of Greek Guerrilla Organizations During World War II.”)
Panos Deltas: A retired merchant, the father of Cleon and Demos Deltas, and a royalist who was a member of both iterations of the neighborhood Council.
Kyrios Diogenes: The owner of the neighborhood shop that sold such things as school supplies, bubble gum, and paper to make kites.
Kyria Evanthia: A female neighbor of the Vardases who was a refugee from Ionia.
Kyrios Evgenidis: An “eminent theologian” from “The Right Path,” a Christian religious organization.
Giovanni: One of the three Italian soldiers (the other two being Rodolfo and Roberto) who befriended Jason Vardas during the occupation of Thessaloniki.
Alexios Kappas: The student representative to “The Right Path,” a Christian religious organization.
Nondas Karras: A member of Chinaman’s gang, who was also known as the “Spearmaker.”
Jordan Keseoglou: The neighborhood cobbler and a member of both iterations of the neighborhood Council.
Kyrios Kimon: A neighbor of the Vardas family who taught German to Mikis Kriezis so that he could work at (and spy on) the German air base in Thessaloniki during World War II.
“The King” or King George* (July 20, 1890-April 1, 1947): King George II, the member of the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg who was the King of Greece before, during, and after World War II (ruled from September 27, 1922 to March 25, 1924 and from November 3, 1935 to April 1, 1947).
“Kitchenhead”: Nickname of the man who ran the soup kitchen at the high school attended by the boys in Jason Vardas’ neighborhood; in addition, he was the real head of the high school’s chapter of “The Right Path,” a Christian religious organization.
General George Kondylis* (1879-1936): The dictator/self-appointed viceroy of Greece who briefly ruled right before King George II was reinstated.
Mikis Kriezis: A member of Chinaman’s gang who was also know as the “Mechanic.”
George Liakos: The owner of the neighborhood grocery store, “The Horn of Amaltheia,” and a member of both iterations of the neighborhood Council.
Katina Liakos: The wife of George Liakos.
Manolis: The male half of a vaudeville team who rented the ground floor of Elpiniki Callas’ home while her husband was working with the Greek resistance. A member of the resistance himself. Xeni was the female half of the team.
Madam Marika: The madam of the Bara, one of the biggest brothels in the Vardar district of Thessaloniki.
Nike Mavrakis: A young girl whose family arrived in the Vardases’ neighborhood during the German occupation from a Bulgarian-controlled section of Greece.
Mechanic: See “Mikis Kriezis.”
Michalis Meliganos: Right before World War II started, this naturalized American citizen returned to Thessaloniki to manage several buildings he owned there. After the war, he was an interpreter at the U.S. Consulate and a member of the post-war neighborhood Council.
General Ioannis Metaxas* (April 12, 1871-January 29, 1941): The staunch monarchist who headed the Greek government after General George Kondylis. He was the prime minister of Greece from 1936 until his death and effectively became a dictator on August 4, 1936, when he indefinitely suspended Parliament and various articles of the Greek constitution.
Kyrios Mitsos: A political hack who was involved in campaigning for royalists.
Giuseppe Molini: A carpenter friend of Elias Pandelos’ and a member of one of Thessaloniki’s old Italian families.
Naum: The owner of a milk shop in the Vardas’ neighborhood who originally said he was a Serbian but who later declared himself to be a Bulgarian.
Vespers Pagoulatos: The owner of the neighborhood tavern.
Elias Pandelos: A mechanic who worked in Thomas Vardas’ machine shop, was the nephew of Jordan Keseoglou, and was a member of the first iteration of the neighborhood Council.
Mitros Pappas: A retired farmer who was a member of the first iteration of the
neighborhood Council.
Pelka: An ice cream vendor in the Vardas’ neighborhood who originally said he was a Serbian but who later declared himself to be a Bulgarian.
Markos Petridis: The owner of the fur-dyeing business next to Jordan Keseoglou’s shoe store, a Communist, and the cousin of Sotiris Skipis.
Phaedon: A university student and an ELAS recruiter. (See “List of Greek Guerrilla Organizations During World War II.”)
Father Polycarpos: The founder of “The Right Path,” a Christian religious organization.
Ares Poulos: The physical-education teacher and coach at the high school attended by the boys in Jason Vardas’ neighborhood and a member of the first iteration of the neighborhood Council.
Pozzelis family: An Italian family for whom Jordan Keseoglou made shoes.
Roberto: One of the three Italian soldiers (the other two being Rodolfo and Giovanni) who befriended Jason Vardas during the occupation of Thessaloniki.
Rodolfo: One of the three Italian soldiers (the other two being Roberto and Giovanni) who befriended Jason Vardas during the occupation of Thessaloniki.
Alegra Saporta: A young Jewish girl who gave Nike Mavrakis her photo album to keep until she returned from Poland.
Kyrios Serap: The neighborhood’s Armenian tobacconist. In the spring, he also sold the makings of Easter fireworks.
Serpui Serap: The daughter of Kyrios Serap.
Stavros Sideris: A professor of French, Chinaman’s father, and a member of the first iteration of the neighborhood Council.
Stylian Sideris: Known as “Chinaman,” Stylian was the leader of the neighborhood gang.
Sotiris Skipis: A theoretician of the Greek Communist Party, a resistance fighter, and the cousin of Markos Petridis.
Sotiris: A young boy who was a refugee. Not related to Sotiris Skipis.
Petros Spandonas: The principal of the high school attended by the boys in Jason Vardas’ neighborhood and the president of the neighborhood Council.
Cleovoulos Spanos: The brother of Thrasyvoulos Spanos, Cleovoulos also lived in the village of Neraida in Thessaly, a region of Greece south of Thessaloniki.
Aunt Ismene Spanos: The aunt of Jason Vardas (the sister of Jason’s mother), who lived in the village of Neraida in Thessaly, a region of Greece south of Thessaloniki.
Uncle Thrasyvoulos Spanos: The uncle of Jason Vardas (the husband of Jason’s mother’s sister Ismene), who lived in the village of Neraida in Thessaly, a region of Greece south of Thessaloniki.
Spearmaker: See “Nondas Karras.”
Alexandros Tobros: The father of Toles Tobros.
Euphrosyne Tobros: The mother of Toles Tobros.
Toles Tobros: A relatively well-to-do child from the Vardases’ neighborhood.
Agatha Vardas: Jason Vardas’ mother. Her maiden name was Zoumbos.
Chrysanthe Vardas: The paternal grandmother (Yiayia) of Jason Vardas.
Jason Vardas: The young man from Thessaloniki, Greece, who grows to manhood in Because We Are Greeks. A member of Chinaman’s gang.
Pericles Vardas: The paternal uncle of Thomas Vardas; i.e., the brother of Vassilis Vardas.
Thomas Vardas: Jason Vardas’ father and the owner of the machine shop “Hephaestos” in the Vardar section of Thessaloniki.
Vassilis Vardas: The paternal grandfather (Papous) of Jason Vardas.
Kyrios Vassiliadis: The theology teacher at the school attended by Jason Vardas and the faculty chairman of “The Right Path,” a Christian religious organization.
Ptolemy Vazdekis: A Russian refugee who was the professor of philosophy at the high school attended by Jason Vardas when it reopened after Greece’s participation in World War II came to an end. He was also a member of the post-war neighborhood Council.
Evan Vellis: The best friend of Jason Vardas and a member of Chinaman’s gang.
Yiannis Vellis: The father of Jason Vardas’ best friend, Evan Vellis, and an employee of Thessaloniki’s Department of Streets and Sanitation.
Xeni: The female half of a vaudeville team who rented the ground floor of Elpiniki Callas’ home while her husband was working with the Greek resistance. A member of the resistance herself. Manolis was the male half of the team.
Captain Spyros Zamboulas: A retired military man who was a member of the first iteration of the neighborhood Council.
Zenkos: A refugee from the area of Greece taken over by the Bulgarians during World War II.
Agatha Zoumbos: The maiden name of Agatha Vardas.
* Actual historical personages.
JASON’S ARRIVAL
On a hot late-July afternoon in 1928, the physician Nikephorus Comnenus, having been summoned to perform a delivery, hurried to the expectant mother’s house and, upon entering, asked for its wooden shutters to be closed. He then scrubbed his hands and arms, arranged for his instruments to be boiled, and placed a piece of clean gauze on the little table next to the woman’s bed. This done, he concluded from his examination that the baby’s head was so big that its exit from the womb would be difficult if not impossible without his assistance. Thus, at the appropriate moment, while the mother moaned in pain and the baby’s grandmother quietly prayed to the family’s icons, he placed his forceps on the infant’s head and led Master Jason Vardas on his headlong plunge into the world.
In the narrow street where the house stood, several of the neighborhood’s women had assembled and were attentively listening to the sounds emanating from the mother’s bedroom, as they always did on such occasions—partially out of sympathy for the pain women are destined to bear but also, and mostly, out of a curiosity fed by the hope that, during their birth pains, mothers would become confessional and say things that are normally kept beyond the reach of even the most busy of the neighborhood’s busybodies. But when, on this occasion, Jason exited his mother’s body and burst into crying without her producing even a bit of new knowledge for the listeners, the women could only satisfy themselves with the knowledge that yet one more mother and her baby had survived the ordeal of childbirth. They then dispersed after offering absent-minded wishes for the welfare of mother and child.
Jason Vardas, who had certainly been present at both the time and place of his appearance on Earth, spent a good part of his early youth in an attempt to reconstruct the specifics of his birth. He was materially assisted in this effort by his neighborhood’s practice of having practically all babies born at home, for hospitals and maternity clinics were beyond the financial reach or the trust of their parents. Curious about life and its beginning, Jason had done his best, as soon as he could walk, to welcome the arrival of his new infant neighbors, first by observing the progress of the pregnancies of the women among whom he lived and then by positioning himself on the street where the house of the awaited baby stood as soon as he learned that Dr. Comnenus had been sent for and was on his way. Even though he could neither recall how many babies he had honored with his presence at the moments of their births nor tell whether his presence at those births had helped him in this endeavor to reconstruct his own birth, he was sure that none of them had been as informative about the conditions that had prevailed in his own birthday as had been the birth of Master Toles, the son of Euphrosyne and Alexandros Tobros.
But then one should have expected a Tobros baby to be more important than ordinary babies because its parents had done their utmost to set themselves apart from their neighborhood’s denizens—not only by flaunting their wealth, which, admittedly, was beyond the grasp of most of their neighbors, but also by suggesting that nobility, at an unspecified past, had been part of their lineage. Indeed, the Tobros family had been so successful in staking this claim that, when Euphrosyne Tobros became pregnant with her first and, as it turned out, her last child, rumor had it that, as a woman of nobility, she would be quieter and more efficient in her delivery than are ordinary birthing women and that, instead of moaning as they did, she would sing her birth pangs away.
Jason had been among the first to come and stand within hearing distance from Euphrosyne’s house on the hot July day of Master Toles’ birth. Surrounded by the biggest crowd of women he had seen at such events, Jason strained to catch even the faintest sound escaping from the lady’s bedroom, forgetting to even cross himself in veneration of the life of the soon-to-arrive child. When the first sounds reached the assembly’s ears, everybody had stopped breathing, expecting Euphrosyne to soon burst into song. However, their expectations were dashed because the lady did nothing of the kind; instead, she unleashed a storm of invective—all directed at her husband—that would have made even a seasoned sailor blush. Shouting at the top of her lungs, she was accusing her Alexandros of having caused the conception of the child during a fleeting moment of passion that had stripped him of whatever self-control he possessed and that her pleas could not restore in time. Now, in agony, as she visualized and described the ruination of her figure, she was rhetorically asking, to the assembly’s delight and horror, how could a man with a peanut of a prick have done this to her, when he had, over the years, been unable to give her any conjugal pleasure—even when she had begged him for it. And, as if this were not enough, how did he dare leave her alone at this moment, exposing herself to a doctor whom she hardly knew?
“Where is Alexandros to see what he has done to me?” Jason heard the lady ask as he felt a pinch on his ear. When he moved his hand to soothe his ear’s pain, it met the fingers of one of his neighborhood’s matrons, fingers that had closed on his ear like a vise with no intention of letting it go.
“What are you doing here?” the woman asked him. “Does your mother know where you are? She would give you the spanking of your lifetime if she found out! Get out of here before I do it for her! Look at him!” she shouted, managing to distract the rest of the women listeners from Euphrosyne’s revelations. “He has no shame listening to all those filthy words! Wait ‘til I tell his father about it!”
Jason ran away as fast as he could when his neighbor finally released him from her grip. He was unable to understand what she was scolding him for, but, whatever it was, it must be serious, he thought, because no adult in this neighborhood threatened to spank someone else’s child unless the child had committed a sin as big as one resulting from breaking one of the Ten Commandments.
“What happened to you? You are out of breath!” said his grandmother, or Yiayia, Chrysanthe Vardas, when he got home.
“I felt like running. I wanted to see how fast I could make it from the Tobros’ house to here,” he lied without conviction.
“You were listening to Kyria Euphrosyne, weren’t you? How many times must I tell you to stop listening to women giving birth? You are a big boy now—ready to start going to school! Only sissies do what you just did, and in our house we have no room for their kind! Should I again tell your father that you do not listen to advice?”
“No! I won’t do it again. Promise!” he pleaded.
“You are beginning to make sense. So, was it a boy or a girl?” Yiayia Chrysanthe asked.
“I don’t know. One of our neighbors made me leave because Kyria Euphrosyne was saying bad things about her husband. Did my mom also say bad things when I was born?” Jason replied.
“Certainly not! You were a love child. You still are. Why do you ask?” his Yiayia answered.
“Because the Tobros baby was born in July like I was. You told me it was hot then, and the doctor had to pull me out with forceps like he had to do with the Tobros baby, as the women listening to Kyria Euphrosyne said he did. Then, all mamas tell things when their babies are born, even though none that I listened to said the things that Kyria Euphrosyne said. But her baby is the only one that needed to be pulled out like I was, as you told me. Did my mom say anything when I was being pulled out? I want to know everything about the way I was born.”
“You are a smart boy, but sometimes you can drive me out of my mind. I’ve told you everything that happened on the day you were born, and that’s the truth. We don’t cuss each other in our family, as the Tobroses apparently do. We are not like them. We love each other. There was a time when we were richer than the Tobroses ever will be, and, with you as our future, who can say but that we won’t be rich again? You carry our name! Don’t you ever forget it!” Yiayia Chrysanthe reminded Jason.
“I will not,” said Jason, at last content to have the account of his birth completed.
THESSALONIKI
Save for the towering cypress tree that stood like a sentry next to the door of its garden, the house in which Jason Vardas was born and raised was indistinguishable from the other two-story stone and brick houses in his neighborhood. Remarkably, no one in his household—not even his grandmother, who had been a part of the Vardas household for the better part of a century—remembered that tree as a sapling because, when Yiayia Chrysanthe had first noticed the tree, it was as big as it was in Jason’s days. Were it not for Petros Spandonas, the neighborhood’s high-school principal and unofficial historian, the tree’s origin would have forever remained a mystery. Principal Spandonas maintained—and nobody dared contradict him on matters related to the past—that, until a century or so before Jason’s birth, the cypress grew in one of the vineyards that used to be where the neighborhood now stood and that those vineyards had produced table and wine grapes for the folks of Thessaloniki, the city founded by the Macedonian King Cassandrus centuries before the birth of Christ.
Spandonas claimed that countless generations of men and women had tended the vineyards from sunup to sundown before returning to sleep in the safety of homes protected by the city’s thick walls and bolted gates until a time came when the walls were no longer needed, or able, to protect them. Then the tenders spilled out of their confinement, uprooted the vineyards, and used their space for new home sites but left the cypress tree, now the landmark of Jason’s house, as an unwitting memento of their city’s past.
That a time would come when Thessaloniki would be too big for its walls was inevitable, Petros Spandonas averred, because King Cassandrus, who had married the half sister of Alexander the Great and had used her name for the city he built, had chosen its site so well that it would not only grow and prosper but would also secure a place for his memory in the crowded annals of the Macedonian dynasties. When, centuries after Thessaloniki’s founding, the Romans came to end the sway of the Macedonians, they greatly valued Thessaloniki for its port, which lay in the well-protected Gulf of Salonica, was flanked by soft hills watched over by no less than Mount Olympus, and straddled the Egnatian Highway, the road that connected the Roman provinces in the east with the imperial capital, Rome. The Romans ruled over Thessaloniki for as long as the Fates allowed them, busying themselves with the building of palaces, marketplaces, temples for their gods, at least one triumphal arch, and a hippodrome in which the gladiators could show their mettle—one and all of them protected by walls on which Legionnaires stood guard and checked the traffic passing through their gates.
After the birth of Christ, when St. Paul visited the city to preach the Gospel of the new, unknown, but True God, the prosperous burghers received him with a mixture of courtesy, curiosity, and suspicion. Almost two millennia after that momentous event, Jason could walk to the site where the Apostle was said to have stood to face questions about Jesus’ promise to redeem mankind from its past transgressions and lead it in a triumphal march to the gates of Eden. But, as Jason was to learn in Spandonas’ classes, despite the Saint’s epistles and the avidness with which the converts to the new faith read them, a very long time would pass before that faith could be safely practiced. During this time, the Christians were compelled to prove the strength of their faith by fighting wild beasts in the city’s hippodrome, whenever they were not busy escaping the emperor’s mercenaries, who on his orders went on rampages to try to prevent the Christians from transferring the loyalty due to their deified monarch of the day to the Son of the True God.
Even the martyrdom of the Centurion Demetrius, who eventually became Thessaloniki’s patron saint, could not keep the Christians hidden from the imperial eye. It was only when a general named Constantine became Rome’s emperor and adopted the new faith as the official religion of the realm that the True God was given his due. Constantine then moved his capital from the Eternal City to Byzantium, an old Greek colony on the Black Sea where Europe and Asia meet. He then changed the name of Byzantium to Constantinople in honor of himself. Although Constantine did not personally become a Christian until he was on his deathbed, his domain, originally known as the Eastern Roman Empire, remained the bastion of the new faith for more than a millennium. But first it was Hellenized and became known to history as the Byzantine Empire, which was ruled by an almost unending series of Christian emperors who considered themselves to be no less than the equals of the Savior’s Holy Apostles.
Thessaloniki continued to prosper under the Byzantines despite the incursions of Slavs, Saracens, Crusaders, Venetians, Catalans, and countless others. Eventually, it became second only to Constantinople, and, when the invaders were eventually beaten back, its Byzantine lords repaired the walls and rebuilt the burned and looted homes and palaces, never forgetting to erect yet more churches as tokens of thanksgiving to God for delivering them from their most recent ordeal. And, having done this, they then set out to seek new citizens to take the places of those who had perished defending their city or those who had been hauled away by the temporary conquerors to be auctioned in the thriving slave markets of the Levant.
Lured by decrees and rewards, new people flocked to the city to take the places of the dead and the missing. As they did, new versions of Thessaloniki arose from the debris of the ones that had preceded them, and the remains of its past existences piled on top of each other to record the passage of its many lives, much like the way the rings in the trunks of trees record and count the seasons during which the trees grew and bore fruit. But, unlike the trees that can grow tall and seek the sustenance of the sun by avoiding the shade of lesser plants, people whose lot is to live in a walled city cannot escape the remains of those who had dwelt in it in days past. Thus, as the Romans had been forced to live on the remains of the Macedonians, the Byzantines had no choice but to settle on the ruins of the Romans or earlier Byzantines despite their efforts to keep the space in the walled city for the exclusive use and enjoyment of the living and to relegate the dead to the burial grounds outside the walls that abutted the vineyards where the cypress tree now adorning Jason’s house had taken root.
When the Christian God inexplicably ended the tenure of the Byzantines in the year 1430 of the Modern Era by allowing the sword of Islam—the Ottoman Turks—to capture Thessaloniki, only the already buried were spared the conqueror’s wrath. The churches were converted to mosques once their frescos and mosaics were covered with plaster and the eyes of the images of God, his Son, the Virgin Mother, and the saints were chiseled out by devout Muslim masons, who then proceeded to build minarets in the former churchyards for Muezzins to climb and from which they called the faithful to pray to almighty Allah. With this change in official deities completed, the Turks took over the task of repairing the walls and rebuilding the city atop the ruins of the layers of the versions of the walled city that the Byzantines built and rebuilt in their day.
Like the Byzantines, the Turks set out to procure new people to take the place of those lost or displaced during the struggle for the city’s conquest. In this last task the Turks were assisted by the multitudes of Jews made available by the Christian God, who had inspired the King of Spain and his most Catholic Queen to expel from their realm those of the Tribe of Israel who were unwilling to convert to the faith of Jesus and to expel them at the very time when Thessaloniki had fallen to Islam and Columbus was setting foot in America.
In the more than 400 years of Turkish rule, the city’s walls stood unchallenged by invaders. Even though Thessaloniki’s gates were duly bolted at sunset during this period, their closing was not meant to stop enemies from coming in but to ensure that their reopening at dawn would allow the agents of the sultan to collect head and mercantile taxes from those who were coming to visit the city with the most peaceful of intents. As the years passed with no enemies daring to come and lay siege to it, the city’s fortresses were no longer needed for the housing of garrisons and could be used as prisons—places of torture and execution—as needed to allow the vast Ottoman Empire to maintain law and order for its rainbow of subjects.
But, eventually, the walls, incapable of protecting the city after the perfection of the cannon, were allowed to crumble while their gates became so warped that they could no longer be closed at nightfall, no matter how hard their keepers tried to bolt them. The city then began to spill out of its confines. By the time the Nineteenth Century ended and a new century was ushered in, parts of the city’s fortifications were torn down to ease the traffic needs of a citizenry who rode streetcars propelled by the marvel of electricity. At the same time, Thessaloniki’s main tower was cleansed and painted white to become the proud symbol of a new era. To accompany its new white color, the tower had ceased being a prison where the sultan’s enemies languished before having their heads chopped off.
Steamships sailed into the city’s port in numbers that greatly outdistanced the number of the sailing ships of yore, and the din of their whistles blended with the whistles of locomotives moving on tracks that stretched all the way to the heart of Europe. Amidst all this was an unceasing digging for streets and buildings, not merely in the places where the vineyards once grew but also in the walled part of the city to make the rising of its latest version possible. In the process, the remains of old dwellings and edifices came once more into view.
Among the newly uncovered remains appeared utensils, ornaments and jewelry, pottery, inscribed slabs of marble and stone, sculpted columns, cornices, and statues of idols, gods, and goddesses as well as the stubs and roots of trees that had once breathed the air during the city’s past lives and had given fruit and shade to people now forever gone. To whom these relics had once belonged could only be guessed, but, as Petros Spandonas emphasized in his classes, it was certain that, when those who had lived in the city’s temporary uppermost layers of the past had dug the foundations of the Thessaloniki of their lives, they must have also wondered about their predecessors, who were as anonymous as were the ones that the diggers in Jason’s days were trying to trace and understand from their recently unearthed artifacts.
As he grew older and could roam the city of his time on his own, Jason Vardas spent countless hours looking for evidence of those who had preceded him and about whom he had heard stories or had read in history books. But, much as he tried, he could find no mementos from the bloody excursions of the Slavs, the Avars, the Normans, the Saracens, or the Visigoths. The days of the Venetians, though, could be recalled to memory through their contributions to the city’s fortifications, particularly the White Tower that stood next to the sea. And there was no question but that the Byzantines would forever be remembered by the churches that they had built during their millennium and which, with their evolving architecture, described their ceaseless search for the proper way to venerate the Christian God.
Jason could enter these churches to contemplate in their confines the meaning of the “temporary” and the “eternal” by communing with mosaics and icons bespeaking piety and triumph as well as the tribulations of defeat. For these churches he was grateful to the Turks, which had been expelled from the city by a victorious Greek army a decade or so before he was born. Even though, as a Greek, he hated to admit it, even to himself, the Turks, who could have razed the churches and built their mosques on top of them, had not done so. Instead, after triumphing over those whom they considered to be “infidels,” they had satisfied themselves with the mere building of minarets in the yards of the churches that they converted to mosques by gouging out the eyes of the Christian God and his retinue.
As a result, the churches had remained sanctified, if that was the word, albeit for the worship of a god other than the True One. When the time came for the Christians to reclaim the mosques as places of worship for their deity, all they needed to do to expunge the memory of Islam was to tear down the minarets and restore the murals and the mosaics depicting their God, his immediate family, and his saints. A sole minaret, though, was left to stand—once the Islamic rising moon on its top was broken—probably because it sat in the yard of the Roman rotunda that had been built as a mausoleum for an emperor but was later used by the Byzantines as a church until the Turks had it converted into a mosque. That minaret had, after its defilation, come to serve as the marker of the area of Thessaloniki where the pagan Roman emperor’s palace, his triumphal arch, and the massive ruins of the Roman era stood as testaments to Rome’s engineering and building genius.
Scattered among the Byzantine churches, the Venetian towers, and the Roman monuments, Jason could discern the surviving houses of the Byzantines rubbing shoulders with the houses built by the Turks, the latter having scads of windows with wooden grills and shutters meant to give the women of their harems the chance to view the world while being protected from the lustful eyes of both infidels and believers alike. In addition to viewing these prized remnants of his city’s past, Jason could also look at block after charred block dating from the latest Big Fire, now almost two decades into history, that had consumed whatever the populace had been able to build in almost a century of tentative peace. This fire had been witnessed, or perhaps caused, by the enormous armies of the Entente Powers, which, in the First World War, had fought the Central Powers using Thessaloniki as their base, although no one, not even Petros Spandonas, knew for sure the exact cause of that fire.
As Jason looked at the fire’s remains, he tried to both guess what the edifices now gone must have looked like and imagine the final shape of the new structures rising to replace them to serve the needs of the city’s latest residents. These newcomers had flocked to Thessaloniki in large numbers in the 1920s from ancestral lands lost in one of their nation’s local wars and now forever denied them. Having left behind them everything that they had once possessed, they needed to seek new fortunes in what was to become their new home.
But, as Petros Spandonas had said many times in his classes and lectures, there was nothing unusual in this because it was the city’s noble destiny to forever receive new people. Spandonas would remind his students that this destiny went back all the way to King Cassandrus’ summoning people to populate the newly founded Thessaloniki and had continued, without interruptions, in the days of the Romans, the Byzantines, and the Turks. Now, once again, during the reinstated Greek rule, the city’s function was to offer a place in the sun to both the world’s ambitious and its destitute, as evidenced by the fact that nearly one out of two souls that breathed the city’s air in Jason’s youth belonged to Greek refugees from Ionia, Cappadokia, the Pontus Region on the Black Sea, and the Caucasus Mountains—one and all of these refugees made homeless after the war the Greeks had fought and lost against the Turks after the First World War had ended for the rest of Europe.
Spandonas told his classes that, with all those new citizens joining the ones already gracing Thessaloniki with their presence, in the decades that followed that disastrous war, their city was inexorably on its way to achieving and enjoying its most glorious versions yet. Jason had no difficulty accepting Spandonas’ vision as he set out to live his own life in this sea of humanity. In addition, he had resolved to do his best to understand the conditions and the forces that could and would shape the new versions of his city in the years ahead, just as he had come to understand the conditions that had prevailed on the day of his birth.
THE NEIGHBORHOOD
Standing on a narrow unpaved street, the house with the cypress tree was enclosed by a fence made of alternating brick and wrought-iron panels and accented by a grilled-iron gate through which passersby could look and admire the flowers of a garden and the grape pergola that covered the flagstone patio beyond it. The garden grew jasmine, honeysuckle, and gardenia bushes; climbing roses; and potted lemon trees. Its flowerbeds were in bloom most of the time, starting with violets and daffodils in the spring and ending with chrysanthemums in the fall after a succession of pansies, violas, dahlias, and zinnias. Before it ended at the patio, the garden made room for a lone apricot tree, identical to those that grew in practically all of the neighborhood’s yards.
These apricot trees had come to symbolize the city’s seeming indestructibility by enduring all manner of abuse by both humans and the elements and by managing to unfailingly produce, year after year, apricots the size of large olives. As these apricots ripened to a bright yellow color, they seduced young and old alike to steal and taste them from a neighbor’s tree before they consumed the fruit that their own trees bore. That practice—flying in the face of what Adam and Eve had suffered by consuming the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden—had been in place for as long as anybody could remember and was, in the opinion of Petros Spandonas, the primary reason for the ability of the neighborhood’s denizens to not only observe the moves of those approaching their yards at apricot-ripening time but to also decipher their intentions and to do so as adroitly as the guards of the Bank of Greece protected the nation’s meager supply of gold.
And if the protectors of the apricots were not any more successful in saving them from their neighbors than were the guards of the bank in keeping the gold away from the ever-covetous politicians, there was the consolation, as Spandonas was quick to note, that, thanks to the apricots, the neighborhood’s denizens had the chance to develop techniques and reflexes for tracking those of their fellow men who were intent on tricking them out of treasures more valuable than even the sweetest of apricots.
The garden, the pergola-covered patio where his family relaxed in the summer, and the apricot tree defined the first world that Jason knew as a child. This world was full of scents, buzzing insects, caterpillars, butterflies, and slimy snails, one and all supervised by the mourning doves that permanently nested in the cypress tree and that were, in turn, spied upon by the itinerant sparrows and swallows, which took turns using the nests that undercoated the balconies of the house across the street. As a toddler, Jason learned to recognize the outside world by its sounds, particularly the sounds made by other little boys like himself who were still learning how to speak and who were penned in their yards waiting for their vocabularies and their legs to grow strong enough for them to be allowed to seek the kinds of big-time adventures that could only happen in the streets, where bigger and wiser boys laid down the law and made sure that a neighborhood’s traditions and customs were not compromised by either the ignorance or the clumsiness of greenhorns.
The time for Jason’s entry to the world of his neighborhood’s streets came when he was almost six during the second crop of his apricot tree that he was big enough to personally help harvest. As if Providence had intervened on his behalf, Jason’s release from the confines of his yard had happened on a spring day blessed by a warm, heavy rain—the kind he had hoped for because, when such a rain fell, water cascaded from the denuded hills that girded the coastal plain where his city was built. As the water rushed to the sea, it merged with the streams born in all of his neighborhood’s streets and those that abutted it to form transitory rivers that, in their flow, tore up the unpaved earth and carried it together with whatever else they scavenged from the areas of their passage. After a heavy downpour, it was not uncommon for those temporary rivers to haul straw hats, pieces of furniture, and all manner of non-living flotsam—even a drowned cat or a chicken or other scary things—all of them on their way to the city’s gulf, which was itself full of monstrous but still-living creatures that boys like Jason could only imagine and had no desire to ever see or meet.
When the rain of his initiation to the streets stopped and the sun bent its rays to make them pass under a rainbow to again shine on the neighborhood, all of Jason’s fear of monsters was forgotten, and he dashed out of his yard to join the big boys, all of them paragons who seemed to have nicknames rather than ordinary names. The big boys knew how to build earthen dams to trap the rainwater and create lakes into which paper boats could be launched and sailed to destinations of each launcher’s choosing for as long as it took the trapped water to seep away and maroon the boats in gooey, soggy clay.
Abandoning the boats to their fate, while neophytes like Jason watched in awe, the big boys became busy molding images of humans and animals from a drained pond’s clay and held them up one by one to be inspected and critiqued by their peers. Like God’s creations, those images were not always pleasing, but unlike God’s work, which cannot be undone, the creations of the big boys that were condemned by the critics were undone and reshaped into shiny, wet mud balls that the failed creators hurled at the whitewashed walls of the neighborhood’s houses. And such was the quality of the city’s clay that the balls flattened on impact and stuck on the walls’ surfaces to form designs of random but haunting beauty. The flattened mud balls remained undisturbed after being dried in place by the beneficent sun because the hurlers had done their best to aim them as high as possible and place them beyond the reach of even the tallest of the neighborhood’s elders, who might have attempted to remove them, unaided by ladders.