Return to the Motherland

(Chapter 1)

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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A Sunday in Eleni's Room

(Chapter 12)

Previously: Telemachos arranged the engagement and wedding of his sister Eleni, because he could not marry until she was settled.

A Sunday in the Courtyard and the First Date 

"When he came to visit his sister, he would sit with my father and they would talk. I believe that even then he had already decided to marry me. But he didn't know how to bring it up or say it, because his sister was still unmarried. Of course I was young too, and he had no way of knowing how I would feel about such a proposal — but the main problem was how he could possibly start conversations, make approaches to my father or my mother, while his sister was still a single woman living under our roof.

The rule was absolute: until he married her off, he couldn't marry either.

And don't imagine that his older brother having married earlier was the normal order of things — that simply had to happen because there was both an opportunity and money involved, since nobody had money in those days. Word spread through all the villages of the Peloponnese that Telemachos's brother had received a dowry of forty thousand drachmas. At the time, that was a significant sum, and it made him both rich and talked about. It came about because Aristi's uncle had sent the money from America for his nieces, so they could marry young and quickly.

Aristi was a very sought-after bride with a dowry like that, but she had one thing working against her for marriage — she had been born with an enormous purple birthmark covering half her face. She always arranged her hair from the left side to cover it, but it was hard not to look, and so it wasn't easy for anyone to marry her. But this family accepted her and Pagousos married her. Perhaps in those days something could have been done about her skin, but who thought about such things? Children grew up the way they were born — people didn't even deal with health problems, let alone anything cosmetic. She was still the same when she died. We never once discussed it.

Now, back to our story. After Eleni's engagement, she and her fiancé took to each other well, she was happy with the arrangement, and one day she simply got up and left. She locked the room where she had been living and went to stay with her fiancé at his mother's house, since the house being built on her dowry plot in Galatsi wasn't ready yet. Telemachos had taken full responsibility for both the wedding and the house — he built two rooms, put up a wall around the property, looked after everything for her. But beyond all these arrangements, Eleni had a deep bond with Telemachos and loved him very much. He was her rock, and she would have given her life for him. And he had a soft spot for her too — he was genuinely fond of her.

Now, both Aristi and I stayed well out of their family affairs and property matters. Whatever my father-in-law decided to do, he did, and no one said a word. When my husband said he was giving up his inheritance to take Aristi's dowry and marry off Eleni, it didn't concern me — I never even asked what he would have gotten. Those were men's business. Which is why I tell you that both women who married into that family were sensible, decent, and kept the peace. In other families, it goes the other way.

The upshot was that when Eleni left and vacated the room, Telemachos didn't clear it out. He left it furnished, and whenever he wasn't on duty he would come there to change out of his uniform into his civilian clothes. He slept at the station and could have stayed there in civilian clothes too if he'd wanted, but he kept paying rent on the room. This raised no suspicions in me or my father — if he was paying rent, why should my father care? But later I understood why he kept that room.

I understood on a Sunday in 1949. Ever since the Dodecanese had become Greek, my mother would take one daughter or the other — always with my little brother, because he was the youngest and she didn't trust leaving him behind — to visit Kalymnos. That summer it was my sister's turn, and she left me with my father and my uncle to look after them.

Every Sunday my father and uncle would go to a café in Plaka — a Kalymnian café, where they would meet fellow islanders and talk. It was summer and the courtyard was completely empty: one neighbor had gone to Markopoulo, and the other took her children to the sea every weekend. I was left alone in the yard with no one around, not a soul, nowhere to go and nothing to do.

My father had left me a little money, so I went and bought a popsicle. I sat outside, in front of the courtyard gate, and ate it slowly and enjoyed it. When it was finished, I had nothing to do, so I said to myself, I'll go and see Eleni, who lived a little way down the street where she was now with her fiancé. I set off. They were in their courtyard and when they saw me their faces lit up. Telemachos was there too, in uniform, having come to have Sunday lunch with them.

They asked me: 'What brings you here?' I said: 'I was on my own and didn't know what to do with myself, so I thought I'd come see what Eleni was up to.' Everyone was very glad to see me, and I think they even made me a coffee. When we'd finished, Telemachos said: 'Shall we go for a walk?' — meaning the three of us, me and Eleni, since Eleni's fiancé had to go work the taxi. And Eleni said: 'Take us somewhere!' Telemachos wanted to take us to a movie, in the center of Athens. As an officer he wouldn't need to pay for his own ticket, but he would pay for ours.

I had been to the cinema once before in my life — with this exact same group, as it happened. The previous Carnival, before Eleni got engaged, my mother had said to my father: 'Shouldn't we invite the children to come and eat with us?' She had a soft spot for Eleni and wanted to look out for her, and by 'the children' she meant both Telemachos and Eleni. My father had also come to respect Telemachos for the way he treated his sister, so he said: 'We should invite them.' The affection my parents showed those two was genuine — not calculating — because I was still so young that even they didn't know what might come of it. After the Carnival meal, Telemachos had taken us to the cinema as a way of showing his gratitude.

Now Telemachos said: 'I'll go for a moment and change, get out of my uniform and into something for the cinema.' And I said: 'If we're going out, I'll go and change too — I'm wearing an old skirt and an old blouse. I'll put on my good dress!' He left first, and I followed maybe ten or fifteen minutes later. When I came outside, a little way down the street, there he was, sitting and waiting, and I realized he had been waiting the whole time.

'You still haven't left?' I asked him.

'I ran into someone I know and got held up,' he said. In the end, we found ourselves walking together down the same street toward the same house.

On the way he said: 'What would you say to the two of us going for a walk — just us?'

'But what about Eleni?' I asked. 'Eleni is expecting us.'

'Leave Eleni to me,' he said. 'That's my business.'

'I don't know,' I told him. 'It's not that I don't trust us to go for a walk together. But it seems wrong — we said we'd all go together and now you're suggesting just the two of us. I don't know.'

'Please,' he said. 'I couldn't arrange it any other way. I want it to be just the two of us,' he said, with feeling.

'I'm thinking of your sister,' I told him.

'I told you I'll handle my sister,' he said.

'Well, if that's what you want,' I said, 'let's go.' Because I had begun to understand his interest, and the invitation had started to intrigue me.

Telemachos was a very handsome man — a man whose whole bearing announced his strength. These were qualities that were missing in my family. My father was a good man, but he lacked both that commanding presence and the tenderness toward his children. In those days people had children without really knowing why they were having them. So this man was not indifferent to me.

I wrestled with myself inside, because I kept thinking about his sister, but it wasn't that I didn't want to go. I also didn't want to offend him. I was a spirited girl — I had proved that since childhood — and I wasn't afraid, because I knew he was a decent man. So what would happen if I went out with him? Would he eat me alive? We would simply find somewhere to sit. I told him: 'Since you're taking responsibility for your sister, all right.'"

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The New Year's Lottery

(Chapter 14)

The New Year's Lottery and the House in Menidi

The first years of our marriage were very hard — life was very hard. When we married, we weren't starving, but we had no money. We lived on his salary alone, and he was still in debt from his sister's wedding and from the cost of building the extra room for her. Money only came into Telemachos's hands when he managed to sell the apartment that had been his winnings from the lottery — a lottery he had won with two friends, the three of them splitting the prize equally.

The group that won the lottery were colleagues and friends from work. It happened at a taverna on New Year's Eve, where they had gone to eat. A lottery seller came in — the lottery of the Union of Journalists, which is now called the State Lottery. This lottery offered apartments as first prizes.

One evening when they went into a taverna, which had a festive atmosphere, in came a lottery seller — an old man, no one knew anything else about him. They looked for him afterward to thank him, wanting to give him something out of gratitude, but they never found him.

This old man was holding out his tickets and telling them: 'Come on, boys, take it — this is the last one and it's the lucky one.' They didn't want it, but he pressed them, telling them again that the last ticket was always the lucky one. They took it. The ticket cost twenty drachmas. The other two put in six and a half drachmas each, and Telemachos put in seven. He didn't say anything about putting in seven to get a larger share — they divided the winnings three ways. One of his friends kept the ticket and they simply wrote all their names on it. They wrote 'Dimitris' — I can't remember the other name — and 'Telemachos.'

On New Year's Eve the winning number was announced and, as every year, the draw took place at the Philological Society of Parnassos. Telemachos was somewhere else that evening, but the other two seemed to have a feeling about it and stood outside the Parnassos building, listening to the numbers come over the loudspeakers. When the winning numbers were called out, they announced that a particular number in a particular series had won an apartment in Omonia — a penthouse at 42 or 52 Didotou Street, I can't remember which. They went out of their minds with joy, looked at each other and said: 'Did you hear that right? Did you really hear that right? Let's find Telemachos! Let's find Telemachos!'

They searched everywhere and finally found him at his sister's house in Galatsi. It was New Year's Eve and he had finished his shift and dropped by there because it was on his way. His sister had a daybed in the second room and whenever he visited he would sit and rest there. The next day, on top of everything, was his name day — Saint Telemachos is celebrated on New Year's Day — and he had brought a small feast to his sister's house so they could celebrate together. He was very generous about things like that. Back in his family home in the village, both he and his mother Vasoula would celebrate on the same day, New Year's, and they would have a proper party. Even if there weren't enough chairs for everyone to sit down, everyone had to know it was his name day and there had to be a proper spread. After his sister married and had her own home, the celebration moved there and he would bring everything. They found him and said: 'What are you sitting here for? We won the lottery, we won the lottery!'

When they found him it was already Saturday evening and everything was closed. The next day, which was New Year's Day and his name day, was a Sunday, so everything was closed then too. They would have to wait until Monday. But they took him along right then and all three of them went to look at the building from the outside. It was a recently built apartment block — the Union of Journalists always took apartments in newly built buildings. They looked it over and waited for Monday to come so they could collect their winnings.

I didn't hear about it right away, which is the strange thing. The last time we had seen each other we had arranged to meet on New Year's morning, outside the Library on Akademias Street, to go to church together for his name day. I had left home early because the meeting was at eight in the morning. I took the bus into the center, we met with 'Happy New Year' and 'Many Years,' and yet he hadn't mentioned where we were going, which church. But he had noticed that the apartment building would fall under the parish of Zoodochos Pigi, and said: 'Let's go to Zoodochos Pigi — it's nearby.' On the way, he said: 'I have something good to tell you.' I asked: 'What?'

And he said: 'We won the lottery — me and two friends, Lambros and Dimitris.' Lambros was the other one's name; I knew them from when they used to come to the courtyard for his name day celebrations. 'We won an apartment on Didotou Street, number 52, and after church we'll go and see it.' And I said: 'All right.' He was thrilled, but I wasn't happy. I thought: 'Now his stock has gone up. He's a wealthy man with an apartment and a salary, while I... it's been nice knowing him.' He saw my face fall, and at some point said: 'You don't seem happy about it.'

And I answered: 'I am and I'm not. Now that you're the rich catch, will you still want me? You'll find other brides who have money too.' 'You're being foolish,' he said. 'You're being foolish. If I wanted money, before I ever met you there were plenty of very wealthy brides who were after me, with properties and money and everything you could imagine. If I'd wanted that, I could have chosen from any of them, couldn't I? Come on, pull yourself together — nothing has changed.' And we went and looked up at the building together.

The next day, when Monday finally came, all three of them went together to present the ticket to the Union. Their first request was that the Union buy it from them and give them cash. At that time, the Union valued the prize at one thousand English pounds. Everything was priced in pounds back then — but a pound was cheap, a pound was a hundred and twenty-five drachmas.

They said they couldn't give them money, because it would undermine public trust. 'No cash — we offer apartments. What you do with it is up to you, whether you rent it or sell it.' And so, having taken the keys and signed the contract with the Union, they initially decided to rent it out. But after a year, they sold it.

Telemachos had grown up in a village and loved the countryside deeply. His village in the Peloponnese had one of the finest natural landscapes around. One day, during a work posting, he passed through Menidi. He went along a road where poplars grew on both sides, meeting overhead like a cathedral arch, and he was completely captivated. It happened to be just when he had sold the apartment from the lottery winnings.

After he had married off his sister, he had made himself a promise: if he couldn't manage to build at least one room, he wouldn't marry. He didn't want to start life in rented rooms. At around the same time, a classmate and friend of mine had gotten engaged and we used to go out together as two couples — we had been out a few times, to the patisserie. She had rented a room for her married life, which Telemachos thoroughly disapproved of. He wanted the room to be his own. He said it and he meant it.

So when he sold the apartment and saw the road lined with poplars in Menidi, he set his mind on building a house. 'Athens will grow and the area will gain in value,' he said. He went straight to the real estate agents in the center of Athens and because he was always in uniform, they took him seriously. 'Captain,' they called him — that's what they called men in uniform. 'Captain, the people in Menidi don't sell plots, they sell acreage. It's outside the city plan. You won't find building lots where you saw that road.' 'Find me an acre anyway,' he said — and they did.

But the land wasn't accessible from the paved road because there was another piece of land in between that had to be acquired to get access. The railway line that ran toward Thessaloniki or Chalkida also crossed the same road. This strip of land, the access corridor, cost fifty pounds. We were almost ready to marry by then. So my mother went to Kalymnos on her own and sold three small pasture fields — three exposed, uncultivated fields where shepherds would come and graze their animals. She went to Vathi, which you could only reach by small boat from Kalymnos because there is a mountain between, and it sits at the back of the island. She went alone and found some shepherds in the fields and sold the land to them, asking fifty pounds. With those fifty pounds she came back to prepare me for the wedding — she wanted to give me money to buy some clothes, a piece of furniture.

I was the one who told him, the fool that I am. At some point he asked me why my mother had gone to Kalymnos and I told him. He said: 'Why don't you tell your mother to give me the fifty pounds so I can buy a piece of land I've found in Menidi and build us a room so we can get married?' He kept saying it over and over — that if he didn't have his own house, we wouldn't marry. 'As for furniture and clothes, we'll take care of those ourselves.'

I told my mother, who was a very simple soul. Because without a second thought, my husband would take the money and I wouldn't have so much as a scrap of paper with my name on it. She said she would speak to my father and give me an answer. My father was also a good-natured man, without a scheming bone in his body. 'Tell him to come and take the money,' he said. 'Since it's for a good purpose,' my mother added.

Telemachos took the money and set things in motion. He probably settled some debts along the way, and before long hired the same contractor who had built his sister's house to build in Menidi. But what he built in Menidi was a solid room — all stone.

He now had two acres to build on. The small strip of land he had bought gave access to the road so that materials could be brought in and work could begin. He built a tall house, constructed a wide platform — imagine, four steps up to the entrance. On the platform he built a long hallway and two rooms, one on each side.

That was now our home.

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The Accidental Sale and the Mosaics

(Chapter 16)

Previously: The move to Menidi, far from her family in Athens, sends Sevasti into a depression. The depression worsens after the birth of her first child.

Do You Ask a Sick Man If He Wants to Get Better?

The first day my mother left our house in Menidi, I had that whole ordeal with the crying baby — not knowing what was wrong or what to do. Thankfully, a kind woman appeared, knocked on my door, and helped me. When Telemachos came home from work he found her there and heard about our day. The night passed, we slept, and the next morning he said: 'Pack your things — we're going to your mother's.' And we stayed with my mother until the baby was eight months old. Summer came and we had to baptize her, so we went back up to Menidi. Four more months passed and we celebrated her first birthday up there. But it seems that by that point he had already made up his mind.

My husband kept his cards close to his chest, never said anything, and always presented me with a done deal. But it seems he had been suffering too. During the months I spent in Athens while pregnant, and then after the birth, he had been going up and down constantly, back and forth for me, the baby, and the house. At some point he arrived at the idea that we needed to move to a new house, in the city. When it was just the two of us, it didn't bother me not to have electricity or running water — we managed, either with an oil lamp or I would go and fetch water in a small jug. As for the clothes, my mother would take them, wash them, iron them, and bring them back. But now, with a child, electricity and water had become urgent necessities, and the laundry was an enormous problem.

When we celebrated the baby's first birthday, he had already taken a house — on his own, without telling me a word — right next to my mother's house, at Agios Panteleimonas in Ilissos, at the Steps. He hadn't said a thing. After the birthday celebration was over, he said: 'Do you want to go to Athens?'

'What would we do there?' I said. 'Just walk around?'

'No — to stay!' he said.

'You know,' I told him, 'what kind of question is that? Do you ask a blind man if he wants to see? What are you asking me? You've seen for yourself how hard life is up here.'

'And where would you want to live?' he asked again.

'What do you want me to say?' I told him. 'We need to be close to my mother so we have some help.'

'Get ready,' he said, 'because that's where we're going.'

'Where?'

'At Agios Panteleimonas, at the Steps.'

But that was my own neighborhood. No further description needed — I knew exactly which house it was. 'And why didn't you say anything?' I asked him.

He said: 'I had things to sort out, a lot to get done before it could happen. I wanted it to be a surprise. Now we just need to find a day to move our things.'

And one day, a Sunday, we closed up the house in Menidi and brought everything — there wasn't much — to Neos Kosmos. We left the Menidi house behind to use as a summer retreat, somewhere to go with friends in the summer. And that's what we did, until we sold it once the children were a little older.

My three children were two years apart. We stayed four years in that house in Neos Kosmos and that's where my first son was born. But when I was pregnant with my second son, we realized the house was too small — it couldn't hold us all. It had a hallway and two rooms, that was it. There was no sitting room, only bedrooms. But I had gotten used to it and I loved being close to my family. I loved that my church, Agios Panteleimonas, was right across the street with nothing blocking the view from the window. I could walk outside and be immediately in the church square. Every evening, grandma Maria would come and take the children to play outside the church courtyard.

So when my husband said we would have to move again, to a larger house, I objected. I didn't want to go anywhere else because I had a comfortable life. I told him: 'Where would we go?' and he said: 'If you stay here, you'll be squeezed for the rest of your life, with no room. In such a small space, we can't even bring in furniture.' And I told him: 'What does it matter if we don't have furniture — don't we always celebrate your name day? Don't we always manage? I don't want to leave here.'

But one Monday I went to do my shopping at the street market that was held every Monday right in front of the house. There I ran into the sexton of Agios Panteleimonas, a man called kyrios Pantelis [Mr Pantelis] — named after the saint, like the church. I said: 'Hello, how are you?' I was smiling, and I had my older daughter by the hand because I always took her with me. My mother stayed home with the younger one, the little boy. And I had my belly rounded out because another baby was on the way.

I went to church in those days, but not as regularly as I'd have liked, because there were no diapers then. When I took my daughter, she would wet herself and soak the floor and I was mortified. I used to put small cloth squares on them but they didn't last long. There were those plastic pants that children wore over the cloth, of course, but they were uncomfortable for the poor little things. The children didn't like them — they got a rash. In the end — imagine — I couldn't keep up with my son anymore and I ended up letting him run around the house bare, even in winter. I told myself: he'll do what he does and I'll clean it up afterward.

So that day I see kyrios Pantelis and say: 'How are you?' He says: 'I'm trying to find a house to buy.' And on a whim, teasing, I said: 'I'm selling mine!' The house we were in had been built on his father's land — he had been born on that very plot. He, the sexton of the church across from our house, had been walking around our house looking for something to buy. I didn't know that — so I said it as a joke.

He took it seriously. 'Are you pulling my leg?' he said. 'Not at all,' I said. He told me: 'I want to buy it so I can come back to my father's land, back to where I was born, back to my own home.' I thought to myself: hold on a moment — this is a real opportunity, because whatever price I name, he'll pay it. So I told him: 'I mean it. We're selling for a hundred and fifty thousand drachmas.' I knew prices, knew what houses cost, and knew that for our standard of living, that was a lot of money.

'So much!' he said. 'Yes,' I told him, 'because the house is move-in ready — anyone can just walk in.' Which was true. But I told him to come at midday to speak with my husband. 'I'll come,' he said, 'I'll definitely come — I'm very interested.' And he did come, though Telemachos had come home earlier because I had left a gap. Kyrios Pantelis asked me: 'What time should I come?' and since I knew my husband came back around two in the afternoon, I told him to come at three.

When my husband arrived I said: 'Shall I give you the news? I sold the house!'

'You're impossible,' he said. 'Be quiet — what are you saying? You didn't want to leave the house and now you're telling me you sold it?'

'I went and sold the house and I sold it at a good price,' I told him. 'Don't say a word,' I told him.

'How much did you sell it for?'

'A hundred and fifty thousand.'

'You're impossible!'

And I told him: 'Get ready — kyrios Pantelis is coming now to discuss it, and don't drop the price by a single thousand. If you drop the price, we won't sell. Hold firm to what I said.'

Kyrios Pantelis arrived and said: 'Your wife told me such-and-such... Is it true?' And my husband told him: 'Yes, it's for sale.' 'But for 150,000...' he said, with a grievance in his voice. 'That's what I'm selling it for. Take it or leave it.' We didn't tell him we were moving for the children's sake. Kyrios Pantelis wasn't worried about space anyway — he had three grown children himself and they would all fit. He wanted that house so badly that he accepted, even though Telemachos wouldn't budge on the price. They drew up a preliminary agreement then and there and he paid a deposit.

He was in a hurry to move in, since he was renting and wanted a home of his own. The only condition my husband set was that we be given two months to find another place and move out — July and August. They went to a notary, drew up the contract, and kyrios Pantelis handed over all the money. And so we began looking for a house.

In the end, though, we didn't come out ahead. We ended up paying more to move into the new place — for one reason or another we were constantly spending money.

The only thing we found at that point was a a ground-floor apartment in Koukaki for a hundred and eighty thousand, and it wasn't even finished — it had all sorts of things missing. It was just a roughed-in set of rooms, plastered but with no interior fittings, only external ones. So at least it was lockable and had a door. And the seller wouldn't come down from a hundred and eighty thousand, nor would he do any of the work himself.

Telemachos thought it over — he had seen how much I loved the light that poured in from all the windows when we looked at it, how much I loved the view over Faliro and the Acropolis — and in the end he agreed to take it. To agree, he had to take out a bank loan. Which is why for the rest of his life he never wanted to hear the word bank. Because the bank is the greatest loan shark and the most official thief there is. He took out a loan — sixty thousand, I think — and I don't even know how much it ended up being by the time he paid it off, because interest piles on interest and the money keeps growing. Not to mention that the bank puts a mortgage on your house, meaning that if you can't pay they take it.

We worked at tremendous speed because we were under pressure from our buyer to move out in less than two months. 'Kyrie Pantelis,' I told him, 'don't you understand that I have three small children, two of them infants, one still in my belly — and we found a house but we found it half-finished. Give us a little more time to get it ready so we can move in. Don't hold a knife to my throat as well. You have a house, for better or worse — you won't end up in the street. Do us this favor. I don't want to be out on the street; I want to have a place to live.' He was a good man and gave us one more month — but not a day more.

Going back to my husband, I told him: 'Before anything else, if you don't put floors in that house, I'm not going in — I don't care whether it's wood or mosaic.' In every house I had ever lived in, the floors were bare concrete. And I had seen what a nightmare it was to do floor work when you had a family, while other things you could at least manage.

And so it was done. Telemachos moved fast and found the mosaic tiles and had them laid. They are exceptional tiles because he knew a craftsman from Menidi who was famous in the trade — they called him 'the king of mosaics.' The craftsman came and asked if I wanted one room with a real wood floor. I told him: 'No, no — I have small children and they wet themselves and wood doesn't clean easily. Not to mention it warps and soaks up all the moisture. Put mosaic throughout so I can mop it.'

As for the patterns, he chose whatever he liked — didn't even ask me — but I trusted him because he had done extraordinary work in Menidi. He did it all himself, without any other workers, and very quickly. When the owner who lived on the first floor saw how beautiful it was, he was full of envy — he called the craftsman and had his own place done too. And the basement and the upper floor. The entire building now has mosaic. He even did the staircase, the shared areas, and the courtyard — right out to the sidewalk. We were the only building in the neighborhood with a mosaic sidewalk.

But then the electricity company came along and dug up the pavement, then the water company, then the telephone company — and they destroyed it. A little while after we moved into Koukaki, in November of '59, my youngest son was born there. By that time the house was furnished and I was at peace.

I knew this was where we would live our lives.

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Love and Degrees: An Invisible Dowry

(Chapter 18)

The Invisible Dowry and the High School Essay

My daughter was an easy child — she didn't wear me out at all. She was quiet at home and did well at school. Nothing bothered her, nothing weighed on her mind. Since she was such a good student, I enrolled her in French lessons too. I started her in fourth grade, because children weren't allowed to begin a foreign language any earlier. The French Academy branch was right downstairs from our front door. That was the one extracurricular she did, because children didn't take all sorts of activities the way they do now — multiple languages, karate, and everything else. Maybe those things existed back then too, but I didn't have the time.

For ten years, until my three children were grown, I didn't know who was sitting next to me. I didn't have time to so much as lean out the window and see what was happening in the street — I was locked inside, within four walls. Helping the children with their lessons on one side, doing the housework on the other, cooking on top of that; I couldn't even get out to do the shopping — my husband did all of it. Uncle Stefanos was still helping, of course, walking the children to school and bringing them back. Sometimes he'd ask: 'Can I bring you anything?' and depending on what we needed I'd send him to the grocer or the bakery for a few slices of bread to have something in the house.

My mother used to say a proverb: 'The load teaches the mule driver.' And that proverb was true through and through. When I got married I didn't know anything, because my mother never let me do a thing — everything passed through her hands, so I didn't even know how to boil an egg. But when I was on my own, I had to do everything, and I learned everything.

I'll tell you — right after we got married I once cooked a whole chicken with all its innards still inside. Because back then you didn't buy your chicken from the supermarket the way you do now, cleaned and ready to go. You bought them whole and had to prepare them yourself. At the market they were sold simply plucked — no feathers, but nothing else done to them. One day Telemachos brought home a chicken for me to cook, and since it had no feathers, I just dropped the whole thing in the pot. As it boiled, it opened up on its own, and everything that was inside — gizzard stones, corn kernels, gravel — came pouring out and filled the pot.

When I opened the lid and saw it — imagine how little I knew — I said, 'But honestly, I didn't put any of that in there! Where did all this come from?' I wasn't from the countryside, I didn't know what chickens do or that they have a stomach. And why would I? Do you think my mother ever bought a whole chicken? We ate meat once a week, and she would buy a little beef and feed it to us — a small piece each. The rest of the days we ate legumes, vegetables, that sort of thing. Meat every day only became normal later, when you could find it pre-packaged at the supermarket.

That gap—not knowing how to manage the practical world because I had been kept so sheltered—was exactly why I became so insistent about my daughter's independence. I didn't just want her to know how to run a house; I wanted her to have the education to stand on her own two feet in the world. So, years later, when she finished elementary school, Lili was ready for high school and it came easily to her. She graduated from the same girls' school I had graduated from, and she even had several of my old teachers. She did very well, except that at the end they gave her grades in language that were simply not fair to her ability — they left her at fifteen or sixteen out of twenty, which was not the grade she deserved. That was proven when she sat the university entrance exams. She did so well that she won a scholarship — meaning she received money. With some of that money she even bought her brothers a bicycle, something they had been longing for for years. From my daughter's school, only a few girls went on to university — very few — so it was remarkable that Lili got in on a scholarship.

I remember once Lili wrote an extraordinary essay on the role of the clergy in the War of Independence. Her teacher refused to believe that a girl could write that well and reprimanded her, accusing her of having it written by me. That was where the injustice showed itself plainly: if a girl stood out, the system moved swiftly to cut her down. I don't remember which grade she was in — third or fourth year of high school, probably — and the next morning I got up and went to find the teacher.

I told her: 'I am deeply sorry that as an educator you have wounded a child who worked hard on this essay. If you wanted the essays to be purely the children's own work, with no input from home, then you should have had them write it in class — you had no business sending the topic home for them to work on. Of course the child sought out information and found it somewhere. How else would a child have knowledge of the past, of the role the priests played in the Greek Revolution? I simply shared a few things with my daughter as her mother — a mother who lived through things, who studied, who gathered knowledge from the Church. Was I not supposed to pass something on to my own child? She found encyclopedias, she read on her own, and instead of praising her — because you surely recognized it as the best essay in the class — you hurt her. I am truly sorry for you.'

And I added: 'I would ask that this conversation not be used against my child — that it ends here. Because if I find out that my speaking up has been turned against her, I cannot tell you how far I will take this.' She didn't say a word. Not a single apology, nothing. She just sat there like a wet cat.

That injustice stung my daughter, but it hardened her resolve to prove herself in the university entrance exams. When the time came and she had finished school, her father didn't want her to sit them. I had to fight for her right to take those exams. 'Why does she need to go to university?' he would say. 'She's finished high school, she can read and write, her French is advanced. I can arrange a position for her in the public sector, I have property to give her as a dowry. What's the point of her spending all those years at university?'

But she was crying — she wanted to take the exams. I told him: 'The child is going to sit those exams and I will find the money.' Because in those days everything had to be paid for. I told him: 'I'll ask my relatives, I'll find a way, but that child is sitting those exams whether you provide the money or not. You ruined me — do you want to ruin your daughter too?'

He had told me before we married that he would never allow me to work. So later, when I asked for money to continue my own studies, he refused. He said it and he meant it. I had accepted the part about work, but he wouldn't even let me finish my education. He figured that studying would lead to a job, and he was afraid — afraid that if I went out into the world and mixed with educated people, I might meet someone else.

In the end, my husband accepted that his daughter had passed the university entrance exams and allowed her to attend. But the fear of women getting an education was most visible in what he did to me. He said it was a matter of principle that a wife shouldn't work, so as not to suggest that he couldn't provide for her — but I don't believe that was the real reason. Because even if I had needed to work out of necessity, I know he still wouldn't have let me study. He was jealous and he was afraid. Above all, perhaps, he was afraid of me. I think his reasoning went: 'If I let her start university, she might build a different life — I'll lose her.'

It wasn't that Telemachos forbade women from doing what men did — it's not as though he let the boys go out freely while keeping the girls locked in. Though I can't say for certain, because my children generally didn't go out on their own. Imagine — when they were older I used to push them out the door and say 'Go outside, make some friends.' But the two boys especially would always stay together, and since we had no balcony, they'd open the window, push up the shutters, settle themselves on the sill, and let their legs dangle out over the street. They'd sit there for hours on end. That was their way of being outside. They watched who walked by and had their own conversations.

The boys didn't have much of a social life, but my daughter did — especially through university, even though she studied constantly. When she started her first year she came to me and said: 'Mama, I want a favor. The small room next to the kitchen, the one you've turned into a storage room — I want it cleared out completely and given to me as my study. I want to go in there to read and I don't want the noise from the street or from the boys.' That room has a large window looking out onto our courtyard and a lot of light comes through it. We got a small chest of drawers, a little nightstand, a desk, and a chair. Her brother Tassos, who was good with his hands, built her a hanging bookshelf himself and started filling it with her books.

Through all her university years she lived in that little room. If friends came to visit she would take them somewhere else in the house. She never went through a rebellious phase, never did anything reckless the way young people do — she was a straightforward girl. And in those years, love wasn't the simple thing it is now. Lili had met her person, but their studies separated them for a while when he went to another city. When she finally confided in me about the relationship, I understood that if she was telling me, the decision was final — because back then, telling your parents about a relationship meant a lifelong commitment. Even though Telemachos was strict, and I was not exactly an easy mother myself, I decided to become her secret ally. I covered for her so she could write letters and stay in touch — just as my sister and my mother had once done for me. It was a chain of protection, passed down. I wanted my daughter to begin her new life not by running away from something, but with her own voice and her own degrees behind her.

I understood, though, that the world around us was changing. Up through my generation, education for a woman was considered a threat to the peace of the family. But watching Lili and the man she would marry, I grasped something deeper: for the educated men of the new generation, a woman with a university degree was no longer dangerous — she was a necessary partner. The diploma had become the new invisible dowry, perhaps more valuable than land or a government post.

Her father would tell her to go out and give her a little money to enjoy herself. But until she came home, he'd be sitting in the armchair by the front door, waiting. He would not go to bed until he'd seen his daughter walk through that door. She noticed. She saw that when she was out, her father didn't sleep — those were his principles. He stayed awake, and she didn't want to be the cause of that, so she didn't go out much either.

My husband was very proud of his daughter and he proved it by dividing his property while she was still unmarried. He had a soft spot for her and had already put land in her name as a dowry. The boys, too, were steady and never gave him trouble — they didn't bother him at all and he was content with them. It was me who was constantly exhausted, with a large family and endless work. Every last bit of the responsibility had landed on me.

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