The two brothers were very young for such a long journey, from Kalymnos to Russia. The older one had only one year left to finish the six-year high school, but the younger had just graduated from elementary school. There was no other choice, though — their mother had been widowed and didn't have the means to feed them, so they had to reach their older brother abroad before the money ran out.
You can't really imagine what that journey cost them. Two minors, Greek by blood but carrying Italian passports because the Dodecanese were under Italian occupation, who traveled through the turbulent waters of Turkey and Greece, through hostile Bulgaria, all the way to the cold embrace of the port of Odessa. What kind of documents, what connections, what payments it took — nobody knows. What is known is that the journey succeeded, and the two brothers reached their older brother, who taught them the trade of shoemaking — the art of the slipper.
They made slippers, not the kind people wear around the house in Greece today, but the kind built for outdoor work and snow. Fur-lined slippers, like farm boots. The young ones worked, and whatever they earned they handed over to the older brother, who banked the money. This went on for as long as the Tsar lived.
When foreigners were expelled from Russia in 1918, after the Bolsheviks seized power and killed the Tsar, all three brothers came back. The younger two went to Athens — to Greece, as people said then, because the islands hadn't yet been united with Greece. They were hungry for it, this place they'd never actually known — a homesickness for somewhere they'd never lived.
The older brother, though, wanted to go back to Kalymnos, to see his wife and children. In those days, men left the island alone; they didn't take their families with them, they just sent money back. Still, in the decades that followed, the older brother's three children would not be able to resist Athens's pull either, since it was the city that gathered Greeks from everywhere and promised them education, work, and a future. Perhaps the older brother could already see this coming, which is why he used his earnings to buy a house in Athens — no small sum. He told his younger brothers to live in one room of the house, rent out the other room, and send the money back to him on the island.
They settled somewhere with a view of the Acropolis, in Neos Kosmos. It was close to Plaka, the neighborhood that drew in all the islanders, who built small whitewashed houses along wide stone-paved alleys that reminded them of the distant homes they'd left behind. In the center of Athens they could all do their business and make a living. They settled into the big city, into the heart of Greece — the longed-for homeland they'd been taught about in school and talked about around the family dinner table.
The younger brothers arrived in Athens with nearly empty pockets. They had a roof over their heads, but little else to show for their labor. Their money was rubles, which nobody would take anymore. After the revolution, the ruble had collapsed, the Russian currency reduced to worthless paper. But with what they had, they opened a shop and started working together, practicing their craft. They adapted it, though, refined it. They stripped the fur from the slippers, reworked the design, and transformed a farmhand's boot into something the Athenians could actually wear. The shop fed their family. It only closed after World War II, when illness and old age made it impossible to continue.
Their refined craft brought them customers from high society — the aristocracy that began taking shape in Athens in the twenties and thirties. And since few countries came out of the First World War as triumphant as Greece, the euphoria of the early victories and the new territorial gains was more than good for business for Giorgos and Stefanos.
By the time they arrived in Greece, Giorgos—the older of the two younger brothers—was already well past the age to be a bachelor, and he needed to find a wife. He was ready to make the long, hard journey back to the island, to choose a bride from his own place and to see his mother again. But fate had other plans: in 1922, Greece declared war on Turkey, hoping to annex Asia Minor — a hope that had been nursed for centuries and kept burning with fury and patriotic myth.
Giorgos was more than a patriot. He had seen the world by then. He had lived alongside Italian soldiers, visited Russian churches, and had come to believe with his whole chest that Greece was the place where everything had begun. The Greek language — his language — and his faith in the Orthodox God would protect him. It may also have been clear to him that only Greece would let him live as a free man. He took Greek citizenship immediately and volunteered for the war. They sent him to an unknown place to help people like himself. To help them feel they belonged to something larger, that they weren't immigrants or second-class citizens in the villages where they'd been born.
Turkey may have lost the First World War, but the question of Asia Minor was far from settled. The Turks had been calling that land home for generations too, enraged at watching their farmers slaughtered by an infidel mob. As the drama hurtled toward its familiar tragedy — the Asia Minor Catastrophe — it was at the Battle of the Sakarya that Giorgos was shot near the heart and had to be sent back. He found his brother still working in the shop, and the two of them renewed their oath to live for each other. The bond between younger and older in families like theirs was a blood oath — two lives stitched together, without so much as a whisper of personal concern or ambition.
The younger one, Stefanos, had no intention of finding a wife; the finances didn't stretch far enough for two households. Besides, Stefanos was a man devoted to his God. He prayed for his brother and took pleasure in the spiritual satisfactions that his education allowed him. In the end, his schooling had come from the church — he was close to religious texts, to the writings of the holy fathers of Orthodoxy.
So Giorgos watched Italy's weaknesses carefully, and in 1929, he managed to slip out of Greece quietly, taking a fishing boat from a coastal port in Athens, from Vouliagmeni. He was thirty-eight or thirty-nine by then. Too old to be an appealing groom. He left his brother alone and promised to return with a bride from their village. He found his mother alive, stayed in her house, and told her all the adventures her children had been through. They had a lot of catching up to do — sending letters wasn't easy in those days, and whole years could pass between messages. It was also clear that Greece was preparing to enter another war, this time against Italy, which still held the Dodecanese under occupation. And their mother couldn't read or write, so the news was sparse. Like all Greeks, they simply knew they shared the same sea, and it was the sight of the waves that brought back memories.
Giorgos had already reached out to a childhood friend who had known his father, and this friend said he'd be happy to arrange the introductions — a matchmaking on the island, on his behalf. This friend already had someone in mind: an unmarried girl, though she was already on the older side at twenty-nine. The girl's father, Antonakis, was a tailor — he made suits, which meant he had a refined trade for the time, and it brought him into contact with the better circles of the island. So he knew this friend too, the man with the connections to the mainland.
When Giorgos arrived on the island, his friend went to Antonakis and told him that a man from Greece had come looking for a bride to take back with him. "What do you say, Mast' Antoni? Your daughter isn't getting any younger and her best years are behind her. Think about this offer. Otherwise you might have to keep her at home. Right now she might help around the shop, but when you're gone, she'll become a burden to her brothers."
Maria had two brothers. A younger unmarried one who lived on the island, and an older one who had gone to Argentina, married there, and was never seen again. Argentina was farther away and it wasn't easy for her to go find her older brother the way Giorgos had done for his. As for the groom from Greece — even if he was weathered and worn down by the wars, he was presentable, he was only one sea away, and he could make her a Greek citizen.
Maria hadn't married yet because she was a beloved only daughter and her parents had wanted to match her with only the best. And so the years went by. But how could her parents know whether Giorgos was a good man, a safe bet? As they say, it was a pig in a poke. He'd come from Greece, so perhaps this was the stroke of luck they'd been waiting for for their daughter. They leaned heavily on the common friend's good word. Maybe it was an opportunity — though of course they'd have no way of knowing whether their daughter would be moving into a palace or a hovel in Athens.
Maria was beautiful too, but very introverted, a closed-off person. She couldn't read or write — women didn't learn such things then; it was considered unnecessary. She was an exceptional homemaker. She worked constantly, and like any island woman, every week she whitewashed the street in front of her house. She used lime to whitewash the house itself and carried on this habit in her new home in Athens, whitewashing the entire courtyard too. In those days there were no apartment blocks in Athens; families lived in rooms arranged around a shared courtyard. Five families lived in the rooms around the courtyard where Giorgos and Maria raised their family. Everyone had two or three children and the yard was like a nursery. The housewives would set out low tables — sofrásia, they called them — and stools in the courtyard, and whenever anyone roasted potatoes they'd call all the neighborhood children over to feed them.
Every Saturday, once Maria had a family of her own, she'd send her daughters to the hardware yard with two drachmas to buy a bucket of lime. That was the measure of her — there was nothing more complicated to say about her character. With this woman, Giorgos was content beyond measure. As for Maria, since her father was satisfied with the groom, no further reflection was required on her part.
But Maria's father kept her close by his side on the day the groom came to call on her.
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