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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Escape from Kalymnos and the Lost Caïque

(Chapter 2)

Maria's father kept her close on the day the groom came to call. The house had the kitchen and the shop on the ground floor, with the rest of the rooms upstairs. Maria was asked to wait in the kitchen, which was separated from the shop by a wooden partition, not a wall. At a certain point, her father knocked on the partition with his hand and called out: "Maria, bring two sweets" — the customary thing to do when a customer came in — "and come through this way." In those days the only sweets were spoon sweets. Maria spooned the preserve onto two small plates, set out two glasses of water alongside them, and came in through one door and out through the other.

As Maria entered carrying the tray, her father said: "Maria, this gentleman here" — and gestured toward Giorgos — "is going to be your husband." Maria very nearly fainted. The tray very nearly fell from her hands. But she kept her head down and didn't turn to look. A moment later, in a fraction of a second, her father slapped his hand on the table and said: "Are we going to wait all day for you to say yes?" And Maria nodded.

It was a Tuesday. The wedding was on Sunday, because Giorgos had to leave. If the Italians caught him, they'd put him in prison for being Greek, so he had to go back the same way he'd come — in secret. In the space of one week, from Tuesday to Saturday, all the wedding preparations were made.

The wedding was magnificent, because Antonakis was a man of considerable standing in Kalymnian society at the time. He invited the whole of the island's aristocracy — his clients from the shop. After the splendid ceremony and the great celebration in the village square, a ferocious rain began. It was the 10th of February, 1929. The rain didn't stop for an entire week — relentless, torrential. The couple retreated upstairs and waited for it to pass, so that Giorgos could take the boat back to Greece alone, since Maria had no papers yet that would allow her to travel and start a new life. For the whole of that time they didn't leave the house once. Eight days after the wedding, one day after Giorgos had slipped off the island, the Italian commandant came to the village with an interpreter, asking for him. He knocked on the door looking for Giorgos, intending to arrest him. Maria's family explained that he had already gone. The commandant looked at Maria — the Greek's wife. "Then you'll be going too," he told her through the interpreter. "Come to the administrative office tomorrow and we'll prepare your papers."

Maria's family celebrated the news and began preparing their daughter's official passage to Greece. Forty days after the wedding, Maria boarded a ship for Greece — properly, legally, with everything in order. She even managed to have her mother-in-law, kyra-Eleni, travel with her as a guardian. Giorgos had told her: "Don't bring anything with you — no clothes, no silverware, no glassware. I'll get you everything new in Athens." Maria was an only daughter, nearly thirty years old, so the dowry she left behind was substantial, in both quantity and quality. Clothing and glassware, all of it first-rate, because like everything on the island, it had come from Italy. Fine porcelain, Bohemian crystal — all of it left behind.

When Giorgos returned to Athens a married man, his brother Stefanos moved out of their shared room. He put a bed in the shoe shop and began living there. He lived like a man of the world who had taken monastic vows — all he was missing was the cassock. He kept the fasts, never missed church, read religious texts, attended spiritual gatherings. He was a remarkable and cultivated soul.

The women and Giorgos all lived together in one room. Maria cooked the midday meal for everyone, the men worked together in the shop, and in the evenings they separated to sleep. Giorgos's mother only went back to her island after Maria had given birth and baptized their first child, a girl. The mother-in-law had helped so much that Maria's own mother made an unusual request: she asked that the first child not be given her name, but the name of the mother-in-law — Eleni. But this was unheard of. The custom on the island was that the first girl's name belonged to the mother's family, especially because that name "had not yet been heard" — meaning none of Maria's siblings had yet given the name to their own children. If there was one thing that kept Greeks on the straight and narrow, it was doing their duty and honoring tradition. And so the first daughter was named Sevasti, after Maria's mother. A tradition that held, even though every party involved would have been perfectly happy to break it.

Little Sevasti didn't meet her grandmother until she was fifteen. It was after the Second World War, when Maria decided she wanted to go back to her island — to find out who had survived and who had died. She hadn't seen her parents or her family since the day she'd been expelled from the island, even if she had left celebrating. She couldn't read or write, and neither could her parents. Occasionally a fellow islander would track them down to pass on news, but there was no direct contact.

Maria never let out so much as a sigh in front of her children. Nobody knows whether this woman ever felt joy, love, or grief. She never spoke about her family or her past. The house was always clean, the meals always cooked and ready, and she lived her life entirely for her three children. Sevasti, the oldest; Eleni, the second daughter, a year younger; and Nikolas, the last-born, ten years behind his sisters.

When the Second World War ended, Kalymnos passed into British hands. Maria reckoned that if the British found her out, it wouldn't be too serious a problem — she was Greek, an ally, expelled by the Italians. Still, she would be careful. She didn't talk much about her desires or her plans; she didn't see much point in expressing herself, or even, really, in having feelings. One day she intended to take her little boy, along with her eldest daughter who carried her mother's name, and go find them. She would leave the second daughter behind in Athens to look after the men.

There was, of course, no regular boat connecting Athens to Kalymnos at that time. Her goddaughter's godfather, however — Sevasti's godfather — was a man of means who had also come to Athens. He owned a caïque —a traditional wooden fishing boat— which in those days was no small thing. To own a caïque was to be a shipowner. He was a captain, and he ran what were known as "shadow routes." He also had a large house, a proper standalone villa with many rooms. He was a man of a different order. One day the godfather proposed to his goddaughter's family that he take the child — little Sevasti — under his protection on one of his runs and deliver her to the island. Maria and the boy would follow on a separate fishing boat. This was a mistake. Because his caïque took seventeen days to reach Kalymnos. Sevasti was on that boat with the godfather and his wife all those days, lost at sea. They kept putting in at various islands but couldn't go directly to Kalymnos. The engine would break down, and they'd scramble for the nearest island to fix it. They'd fix the engine, then wait for a wind to sail by. They drifted so far off course that even the sponge-diving boats — the official lifeline connecting the Aegean islands — couldn't locate them.

Maria would go down to Vouliagmeni and ask the fishermen on the boats whether they'd seen Karabetsos's caïque. No one had. After two weeks, everyone believed that Sevasti and the godfather had drowned. On the seventeenth day, after enormous hardship, they found their way and got word back to Athens. Maria immediately boarded another fishing boat to reach the island and find her daughter. It took her only nine days. Seventeen days and nine days — the school holidays were nearly over, and they barely had time to get back to Greece before anyone could suspect that these first dangerous, forbidden holidays on the island had ever happened.

Maria's father they did not find. He had died. Her younger brother was now married and had an only child. Old Sevasti, the grandmother, was still alive, and was able to lay eyes on the granddaughter who carried her name.

Little Sevasti was in a wretched state. Seventeen days of seasickness. Even though she was the youngest on board, the godmother had looked after her so carefully that she'd given her the only bed — the captain's bunk — and refused to let her sleep on the deck or on beaches the way the others did. Even so, she had managed to catch lice, lose weight, and fall ill enough that she felt she needed a hospital. But when they finally reached the island it was night, and the godmother took her straight to her own house to wait for the family to come and collect her. She spent the night there with another girl from the boat, a little older, also waiting for relatives.

The next morning, the godfather went out to let the rest of the family know she was there. As her godfather, he knew where the family lived — in those days there were no street names — and went directly. The fewer people who knew, the better. Because the British were no improvement on the Italians; in some ways they were worse. They followed their manuals to the letter, and if those manuals said prison, they wouldn't even entertain the argument that Maria had been expelled by the Italians. Once the news reached the right ears, Maria's younger brother — Sevasti's uncle — came to the godmother's house to collect his young relative.

It was early morning and Sevasti had only just woken up. When the uncle walked in, he found two girls. "Which one is my niece?" he asked. The godfather said: "Ha! You'll find her yourself — I'm not going to point her out." Sevasti was disheveled and sick, but she had taken her mother's features. The uncle took his time and looked more carefully. "That one," he said, and chose correctly. Sevasti was beautiful, like her mother.

Her mother never took off her headscarf except to wash her hair, but everyone could see her beauty through it. She was a woman who always wore her gold jewelry over her modest clothes, and a remarkable gold cross at her throat.

Sevasti had come home for the first time. A home she knew, like so many Greeks in the stories of their own lives, only from something close to legend. Though she felt deeply welcomed — this was the place where everything had begun — she understood that it was a place destined to send its people away and keep only their memory.

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The Road to School

 

(Part 3)

There is only one photograph of all three of Maria's children. Sevasti, the oldest, is around eleven; Eleni a year younger; and Nikolas, a baby, ten years behind them both. The photograph was taken at the Kalligeris studio on Stadiou Street, made specifically to send back to Kalymnos so that grandmother Sevasti could see all her grandchildren. They never needed another photograph, and they never took one.

You would expect all of Maria's children to have survived, born as they were in Athens hospitals, not like the old days when medicine was something that happened to other people. But Maria lost a baby — the most beautiful of all of them. A girl, third in line, named Katerina. The godmother had liked the name and had said: "Since you've already given your first two daughters the names of their grandmothers, let me choose the name for your third girl."

Godparents carried real weight in those days, because they gave the Christmas gifts and, more importantly, the Easter candle — along with shoes and dresses for school and presents for special occasions. There was no reason for parents to hurt their feelings. If godparents wanted to choose a name, their wish had to be honored. The godmother baptized the baby Katerina at six months old. She dressed her beautifully, took her to church, and gave her Holy Communion as tradition demands in Greece. But when the baby came home that same night, she died.

People said the baby had been struck by the evil eye — the influence of Satan, working through envious people, capable of bringing every misfortune down on a person. The Greek Orthodox Church even has a specific prayer to dispel it. Katerina had been a particularly beautiful baby, with an angelic little face that everyone admired. It would be no surprise if envy had killed her. No other reason was given for her death. Only the evil eye of jealousy could bring about such a tragic end. The baby was simply small and defenseless. Even the blue eye charm on her white dress hadn't been able to save her — she had been destined to die. At least she died after her baptism, and had therefore secured her place in heaven.

Perhaps Maria asked the godmother why she had chosen the name Katerina, perhaps she didn't. For parents, once the ancestors' names had been honored, any name after that was simply a name dedicated to a saint who would be the person's protector for the rest of their life. Many people, even those without the money to spare for an extra baby's gifts, wanted to become godparents for their own reasons — perhaps to honor an old man who had no descendants to carry his name, or to honor a brother or friend who had died young and childless. So many wars in this country had left so many names floating without bodies that these questions were sometimes beside the point.

Saint Catherine — wise and beautiful — had faced her torturers with courage and died in glory, betrothed to Jesus. Pure and redeemed. Exactly as one might wish a baby to die. Or even as a mother might wish her baby to die, if fate gave her no other choice. In the end, Katerina's death brought, by an unexpected turn, a certain relief to the family — a break from raising girls one after another, and a chance to try again. For a boy this time.

No family was ashamed of its daughters, but no family felt complete without a son. An heir to the father's name, a successor to the family business, someone who could go on making decisions for the people around him.

"Your first child should be a girl, so she can help you with the housework," the wise grandmothers of the island would advise. "She'll help you raise the ones that come after." The ones that came after could be boys or girls. But since older sisters had to be married off before their brothers, it wasn't wise for a family to have too many girls. A son had the duty to defend the honor and fate of his sisters, to find each of them a good husband, and to ensure their well-being in a new household. But what if one of them wasn't quite presentable enough, or was simply a little odd?

Poor little Katerina would no longer have to live in fear of not being beautiful enough, but her death by the evil eye breathed a different fear into the older sisters. Sevasti, at least — who had inherited her mother's beauty — decided to become sufficiently devout and to go to church often. With enough prayer, no evil eye would touch her. She wanted to befriend the priests, to become so pious that she might witness miracles herself.

The church mattered enormously to Sevasti. There was no rational argument against being faithful. The church allowed Sevasti to read books, to have a rich social life, to reassure herself that she was following the rules of society, and to have plenty of people on her side. Which relative would ever reproach her for leaving the house to attend the Sunday girls' catechism? Sevasti wanted to be saved, and she was not about to give up that salvation.

Sevasti had become devout in the first place because of her uncle. Uncle Stefanos — the enlightened brother of her father, who had spent his life praying for his nieces and nephews — was her mentor, her model in all things spiritual. "She could have been born from your uncle," Maria would often say to her firstborn daughter. "She's the spitting image," she'd add, noting the absence of anything in common between them. The other two children, Eleni and Nikolas, took more after their mother — not in looks, but in temperament. Maria wasn't particularly troubled by divine rules, as long as they left her in peace. She would follow them up to a point, but without personal conviction. Maria had never really known what personal desire meant. She was satisfied to have paid her human debt — to raise children.

"When I die, all of this is for you," Uncle Stefanos would tell little Sevasti. "All of this" meant books of saints' lives, sacred texts, leaflets from local churches filled with prayers and blessings. Most were written in katharevousa — the archaizing form of modern Greek, a language that had shaped the minds of all those who believed salvation would come through the values of the Greek Orthodox tradition. And so Sevasti, though she never had the chance to go as far as she wanted in formal education, always spoke in the manner of ecclesiastical texts, reaching for ornate words and sayings from ancient philosophers and saints.

When Uncle Stefanos died, Sevasti took all of it — and among his things she found a notebook of his personal reflections. His thoughts as he read the Bible. "My uncle was a holy man," she would say often, and she never shared his secrets. But she was determined to be more educated than he had been. After elementary school, she would go to high school.

Her first cousin, Andreas Kalymnios, was a philologist. A high school teacher of language and literature. He had gone to university, studied both ancient and modern Greek, and become an expert in grammar and all the major texts from antiquity to the present. Andreas taught at an all-boys high school near Sevasti's home for as long as the Dodecanese remained under Italian rule. When it became clear that Greece was preparing to bring the islands back in, he went quickly home — to his family and his beloved Kalymnos.

Sevasti's plan was to use the church and cousin Andreas to educate herself. It was her plan and her hope. Because as the first daughter of the family, she was expected to help with the housework, raise the younger children, and marry as soon as possible. She refused none of this. But her parents refused her request to go to high school. Elementary school was more than enough for a homemaker and mother.

Elementary school ran for six years, but children who intended to continue to high school could sit entrance exams at the end of fourth grade and go straight to first-year high school instead of fifth grade. Sevasti was only nine years old when she begged to sit the exams, but her father, thinking her still too young, told her he would allow her to finish through sixth grade, and that was his final concession.

The summer after she finished sixth grade, Maria took Sevasti by the hand and led her to a dressmaker — a Mrs Thalia. Thalia was a childhood friend of Maria's from Kalymnos, and an exceptional seamstress. She had studied in Paris. She had lived in France and learned her trade there. A true scientist of the needle, one might say.

"Thalia, I've brought you my daughter to teach her the craft," Maria asked as a favor. Thalia had no room for apprentices. "Maria, I don't have room for apprentices in my place — but for you, I can make an exception." Maria had told Sevasti that kyria Thalia was a smart, educated woman. The reason she had gone to Paris was that her brother was studying there to become a lawyer. The siblings had shared a small apartment, and her dressmaking had been what paid for his studies. Now this man was a lawyer in Athens, and the devoted siblings still shared a room.

Sevasti glanced around. It was a very small room, with no space for even an extra chair. She said nothing, of course. She respected the lawyer and understood that this compatriot might one day introduce her into some useful circle; and this woman was clearly refined and deserving of respect. She kept her head down.

But Thalia noticed that the girl had her head down and was making no eye contact at all. "But let's see — what does the girl herself want?" She came closer and asked an unexpected question: "Do you want to be a seamstress?"

Little Sevasti didn't raise her head. She didn't dare say no. But she didn't want to say yes either. She was ashamed to say no in front of her mother, but not so ashamed that she would let her education slip away from her that easily. She made a small sound instead — clicking her tongue against her teeth, the sound that means no.

Thalia turned to Maria. "This is where our arrangement falls apart. Even if she stayed with me a hundred years, she'd never learn the trade." Maria was mortified, deeply shamed by her daughter. Before the silence could settle, Thalia turned to Sevasti: "What is it you want, little one?"

"I want to go to school, but they won't let me."

"You want to go to school?" Now it was the seamstress's turn to be surprised. Perhaps she had expected the girl to want to be a singer, or to sell flowers. "No, kyria Maria — this is a crime. I can't take in someone who wants to go to school. If the child wants to learn, you mustn't stop her."

Maria could not change Thalia's mind. She was humiliated. She took Sevasti by the hand and they walked home in absolute silence.

When the father heard the whole story, his rage was volcanic — shouting and threats. Sevasti had been meant to become a seamstress, and it was not Thalia's place to decide the family's future. The daughter's defiance brought shame on the household. The mother was blamed too, for being incapable of controlling the girl. And so a beating followed, as was common enough in those days.

I don't believe Sevasti ever forgot that beating, however ordinary it was for the time. Nor do I believe it changed anything in her mind. Whatever happened in that room, her thoughts were fixed on September — because in September she would have a second chance to sit the high school entrance exams. The law gave her that.

Sevasti knew that her first cousin was a high school teacher. He was educated; he would understand. Cousin Andreas often stopped by her father's shop and drank ouzo with his uncle. But Sevasti didn't know where to find him — she had never been to his home. Still, Sevasti had always cultivated a wide circle of acquaintances, and she made a point of doing favors for them. So when she remembered that one of the girls from the neighborhood was related to Andreas's family, she asked her to take her to him, and the girl agreed.

"What a surprise!" Andreas hadn't expected to see his young cousin — alone, with only one friend, several neighborhoods from home. "Andreas, I need to talk to you. My father won't let me sit the exams for high school. He wants me to become a seamstress." She told him about the beating too. "Leave it with me," he said.

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The School Years

 (Chapter 4)

Author's Note

The text that follows is based on true accounts and memories, as experienced by a girl who grew up in a time full of contradictions. It expresses no political position, but captures the personal experience of a child who watched the world around her without fully understanding it.

My intention is to bring out the human dimension behind great events, and to illuminate one corner of women's experience in an era when the voices of girls and women were so often swallowed up by the demands of family, society, and history.

I hope the reader will recognize how grand ideological conflicts always intersect with small, daily battles for freedom, education, and dignity — the ones that quietly, in the end, shape civilization and History itself.

---

Sevasti knew that since her father wouldn't let her continue at school, she would have to find help somewhere else. Cousin Andreas, who taught literature at an all-boys high school nearby, understood when she came to tell him about the beating, and said: "Leave it with me."

The next day, Andreas stopped by Giorgos's shop. "Uncle, why won't you let Sevasti go to school?" Giorgos was angry, but his anger was difficult to let loose here. This was a conversation between men, and Andreas was a teacher. "That's enough, Andreas. You know she wants the moon right now, but in a few years she'll thank me for teaching her a skill that earns money. These days it matters that women contribute their share to the household finances. She needs some kind of work — not too much, though, because she'll have children."

"She can earn money even if she goes to high school. She can train in something and earn from that."

"My son will go on to study. I have three children. I can't send all of them. My son will have to make his way in the world, so he's the one who needs an education."

"Which son? The one who's two years old? You don't even know if he'll be able to study. It's Sevasti who has the gift. She's first in her class — all her teachers are impressed. If she goes to high school, it'll be nothing for her. As for your other girl, Eleni — she doesn't like studying. She didn't pass to sixth grade and left school because she wanted to become a seamstress. Don't compare them. It's easier to comply when someone tells you to do the thing you actually want to do."

"Sevasti needs to change her mind. Eleni is doing well as a seamstress, and as sisters they should help each other by doing the same thing. In time she'll come to enjoy the craft, just as she now enjoys school."

"Uncle, I respect your view, and this is your family. But I know Sevasti, and it breaks my heart to see what she could do and isn't being allowed to do. She can learn the seamstress's trade at any point — a few years' delay won't matter. But if you don't let her go to school, I'll take Sevasti into my home and teach her myself."

Andreas couldn't enroll Sevasti in his school, since he taught at a boys' high school — his plan was to tutor her privately. Giorgos saw that Andreas meant it, and that if Sevasti wanted to leave home and go live with him, that was exactly what would happen. He knew he couldn't keep an eye on her there, and he knew the whisper it would send through the wider family.

The silence in the house was deafening. Sevasti had put herself above the family. Were six years of high school worth the shame it would bring and the financial strain it would cause? Books were expensive, school uniforms were an added cost, and the family would see no income from Sevasti. When Giorgos finally told her she would be registered for the high school entrance exams, Sevasti couldn't contain herself: "Thank you, thank you, Father! And thank God!" The rest of the family wasn't entirely sure what God had to do with the whole ordeal. Things between them would not be easy again.

Sevasti paid the registration fee, but she would only buy books if she sat the exam and was accepted. She hadn't prepared for it specifically, though Andreas had told her a few things about what to expect. He also told her what he'd said to her father, and Sevasti was grateful that he had fought for her. She never could have managed it alone, or on the strength of a seamstress's opinion. It had taken a philologist to open the door.

Sevasti sat the exam in September and placed directly into second-year high school — as if she had never lost a year in elementary school. Her score was eighteen and a half out of twenty, and from the very first year she was top of her class. A tremendous achievement. For some years after that, Andreas was able to help her with questions about her subjects. Sevasti loved him dearly, enjoyed her visits to his home, and went often to thank him. But soon enough, her protector cousin left suddenly to return to the island, and Sevasti carried on at school entirely on her own.

Sevasti was sociable and well-liked, with many friends, and she thrived in school life — which meant she gradually drifted from her family, who were all absorbed in work and business. She believed that if her family didn't understand this part of her, God did. Who knows what else she might have achieved, had the high school not been cut short so abruptly when war broke out in Greece.

Sevasti's earliest memories were of school, naturally. It was from that point that she began to feel the fact of her own existence — when she left home for first grade. In those days children didn't start school until they turned seven. They learned the Greek language at home and went to school to learn how to write it and to study the rules of grammar. Before school, she had only a few dim memories, since she hadn't yet felt herself to be separate from her family — her first experience of that came with her first day of school.

Elementary school lasted six years, as did high school. During the Occupation the laws had changed and high school ran for eight years, not six. If a child was going on to high school, they left elementary school at the end of fourth grade and went straight into first-year high school, to avoid wasting time on elementary-level subjects and to arrive fully prepared. Sevasti wasn't among the lucky ones who transferred early; she sat through all six years of elementary school before she managed to persuade her father.

In elementary school, Sevasti's experience of education was colored heavily by personal connections and favoritism. The same teacher instructed children from first through fourth grade, and preferential treatment based on acquaintances or family ties was common. Many parents worked their connections to secure better treatment for their children. Sevasti had no one to advocate for her or ask after her progress. This changed when she reached high school, where teachers were more numerous and specialized, and where recognition was based on merit — something that gave her both satisfaction and a sense of vindication.

Sevasti's mother, Maria, was illiterate and felt ashamed whenever she had to visit the school. She usually went only when Sevasti pleaded. When a teacher praised Sevasti, Maria felt uncomfortable — as if she were the one being scolded — and would lower her head. Her father, though he could read and write, worked and couldn't come.

Maria was an island woman, introverted by nature, and the move to Athens had made her more so. She gave herself over entirely to raising her children, with no friends and no social life. Any neighbor who had come from her part of the world was living the same quiet isolation. And yet Maria was an exceptional homemaker, devoted to the care of the house and the children. All of them — both parents, three children, and the uncle — lived in a one-room house with a kitchen. Maria managed to keep the space clean and orderly despite everything.

Sleep was a nightly negotiation. There was a double bed where the parents slept, and two singles: one for the uncle, and one that was the subject of ongoing dispute between the two girls. It was settled that the younger one would sleep in the bed, while Sevasti, as the older, had to give up her place. And so every evening Maria would make up the floor mattress for Sevasti and her little brother.

Maria set great store by cleanliness — as people say, cleanliness is half of dignity. Many people, even those who couldn't afford fine clothes, made sure they always appeared clean and presentable. Maria would make pretty dresses for each of her daughters and liked to put large bows in their hair. Once a week there was laundry day. Even if the children had changed clothes the day before and their things were still clean, they had to change again on laundry day, because the laundry needed to be done.

When Sevasti was in fourth grade, a circular arrived at the school: all children were to be enrolled in the EON, the youth organization of the dictator Metaxas. In theory parental consent was required, but since this was a dictatorship, refusal wasn't really on the table. Sevasti's father was a democrat and bristled when he saw the document, but there was nothing he could do. In the end he signed, and both his daughters were enrolled in the youth wing of the dictatorship.

Sevasti knew nothing of politics. She hadn't heard political conversations at home, and if there had been any, she hadn't paid attention. Her dream was to be the best student in her class. She wanted to go out with friends, to socialize at parties and on outings. So not only was she unbothered by being a "Phalangist," she saw it as a chance to get out of the house.

Once enrolled, the officers took the groups of children to a location in Athens to collect their uniforms — a blue skirt, jacket, and a white tie — and the youngest were called "Little Pioneers." From time to time, the children of Athens put on their uniform caps with the double peak and went to various events around the city to receive what they already called "brainwashing." They heard about Metaxas and the necessity of his actions. Every morning they sang the national anthem, said prayers, and gave the fascist salute.

But Sevasti never felt like a Nazi. For Sevasti, the salute was something Greece had borrowed from abroad in its effort to become a modern state, but they had no love for Italy or Germany. Which was precisely why, when Italy one day gave Greece an ultimatum — surrender or fight, answer within three hours — the Greek people gave that historic "No."

Until then, Sevasti had seen no organized resistance to the regime, no strong political expression of any kind. Most people kept their opinions to themselves; there was no freedom of speech, and whatever was said was said in a whisper. Her father, like many then, had endured a great deal. He valued what he had without bitterness for what he lacked. Most people simply wanted to raise their children without persecution. Sevasti knew that only the communists expressed their ideology openly. There weren't many parties; citizens either accepted the dictatorship or they were on the Left.

In sharp contrast to the political silence, when the air raid sirens sounded and the church bells rang, when the few radio stations that existed called all military reserves to arms with martial music — the Greek people went with enthusiasm, as if heading to a village fair. The men left singing. The front had opened on the border between Greece and Albania, and it was waiting for them.

High school was suspended for a year when war was declared, and the following year students covered two years' worth of material in one. All three years of the German Occupation — 1941, 1942, and 1943 — life in Athens was very hard. Schools operated with constant interruptions, buildings were requisitioned, staff disappeared, and the students went hungry. It was only on October 12, 1944, when the Germans withdrew from Athens and the Nazi flag came down from the Acropolis, that Sevasti felt she might finally get to study in peace.

But barely six weeks later, on December 4th, the Civil War began — with gunfire coming from a checkpoint just two streets below her home. Only one year of actual schooling in all of that — with not a break in between. And so even once it was all over, Sevasti — who had fought against family expectations, hunger, and gunfire simply to go to school — could never quite understand certain things, and above all could never understand students who cut class or went on strike.

Sevasti was a child who grew up in the shadow of events she didn't understand and that no one ever explained to her in any coherent or honest way. In a country that had no shared historical narrative, the defining events of her era — the dictatorship, the war, the Occupation, the Civil War — marked her silently and permanently. She became what she had lived through; she was shaped by experiences she never had time to interpret. And if one desire stayed with her as a constant, it was the need for education — not just for knowledge, but for an understanding that never seemed to come. Her childhood eyes held many stories from that turbulent time: stories she had never told anyone, but that she would share with me.

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The Real Greek Language Question

(Chapter 5)

Giorgos was born in 1890 and left his island — Italian territory at the time — when he was sixteen. He spent just over ten years in Russia — Saint Petersburg, Kyiv, Odessa — until the Communist Revolution of 1917, when he came to Greece, to Athens. He used his Russian with his brother for business matters, so that nobody in the house could follow what they were saying.

When Giorgos took Sevasti out on errands, he would run into compatriots — people of various nationalities who had lived in Russia and found their way to Greece — and he would speak to them in Russian.

"Does she speak Russian?" they would ask, nodding toward Sevasti.

"No."

"You're not doing right by her, kyrie Giorgos. What a shame, not teaching the child the language."

Sevasti always felt the sting of this — that her father wouldn't share his second language with her, because she had the ability to learn languages. She had picked up a few words over the years and knew how to say "Christ is Risen" and the response "Trampling down death by death" in Russian. Her uncle had taught her the hymn, written it out for her in Greek characters, but she never had occasion to use it. Every religious service she attended was in Greek. Which was precisely what Giorgos thought — that Sevasti would never have any use for Russian. She would marry a Greek man, and as a woman she would have no need to conduct business in Russian.

"But a language is a culture," his friends would say.

"Exactly. Sevasti will be Greek. She will never be Russian, and I take full responsibility for that."

As fate would have it, Russia stayed Communist for almost the whole of Sevasti's life, and as we've said, her family had been driven out by the Communists — so she never had reason or desire to visit, whatever her complaints. And despite her father's concerns, Sevasti was never pulled in two directions between languages and cultures. She had only one allegiance: the language of Homer, which was also the sacred language of the clergy, the language that bound every speaker to Greek identity.

To master modern Greek in its literary form — to master the katharevousa — was her ultimate goal, and she understood it as her destiny. Every Sunday she went to church alone, without family or friends, and by repeating the liturgy she memorized all the archaic noun endings, refining her speech to bring it as close as possible to the language of the New Testament, to the divine words of Jesus.

And yet Giorgos couldn't account for every available path or where they might lead, because Sevasti became a passionate student of French. She loved the language so much that she managed to persuade her father to give her money to attend the French Academy in Athens for beginner classes.

English was never a language option — the British Council either didn't exist yet or, if it did, she didn't know about it. It would take decades for English to acquire the global reach it has today, for America to become a superpower, and for English lessons to become a trend in Athens.

"All languages are tools. All of them, except Greek — because Greek is who we are," her father would say.

But the money for French classes ran out, and before long, the swift currents of life intervened—an unforeseen marriage to a man many years her senior. Her youth gave way to womanhood. She made herself a promise: if any of the children from that marriage could learn French, she would make sure they did. And so she added this disappointment — that she had not learned other languages — to her long list of dreams that had come to nothing.

Greek became her identity, but she had none of the other tools to work with it that her father had. Giorgos loved the Greek language deeply — the language of his homeland, the language of the longed-for soil. And Sevasti loved Greek deeply too — the language of her ancestors' hunger for life, the language of her own faith and her people. She was glad to be Greek. But occasionally she would wonder what it might be like to become a bird and open her wings like all those people who came and went from Greece.

"Father, I want to become a flight attendant." She and her sister would collapse laughing just imagining how they might break the news to him. They never did break it. Not to him, not to her husband, not to anyone. She ought to be grateful for what she had managed to learn, she was told. Count your blessings. And when Sevasti's children were finally grown and she found a little time for herself, she learned Braille — the language of the blind. She translated the Odyssey for the Center for the Blind in Kallithea.

Sevasti had found her own language at last. Her fingers danced across the paper as she translated the Odyssey, each Braille dot a small act of defiance. Where her father had refused to teach her the languages of strangers, she was now building bridges in a language no one in her family could read. Every time her students read with their fingertips about Odysseus sailing the seas, Sevasti felt she was sailing with them.

But the only journey she ever made was with her eyes closed. She was acutely aware of her inability to see the things she wanted — the things she needed — and she held that awareness like an Oedipal curse she was fated never to escape.

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The Black Market and the Grave Greens: Athens 1941

 (Chapter 6)

Hunger and Hope: Childhood Memories of the Occupation

When the Germans occupied Athens, they installed a government and a mayor, as occupiers do. They weren't obliged to, but they seem to have wanted a semblance of normality, some appearance that daily life was continuing. This effort to maintain the appearance of order was reflected too in how they handled the black market that quickly sprang up. Despite their measures, though, daily life changed beyond recognition.

The black market started immediately. The opportunists and the predators began hoarding everything — hiding food because they wanted to sell it later at extortionate prices. You'd go to the market to buy half an oka — because in those days we still used the Turkish oka for measuring weight, not kilos — of beans, and you'd pay the price of a house. You'd go to buy olive oil and you'd pay the price of another house. Or your jewelry. Or whatever you had. Even whatever you didn't have.

Every time the Germans caught a black market oil trader, they gave him the death penalty. Do you know where they took them? They hanged them in Syntagma Square, on the gallows, as an example to the other black marketeers. The people who saw it were shocked and revolted. I saw it myself as a child. But on the other hand, I think some people also felt a sense of justice, because they had suffered so much at the hands of the black marketeers during the Occupation. My mother, for instance, sold every piece of jewelry she had. To scrape together a little oil, a few beans, a little flour, a handful of chickpeas. Whatever she could find — she gave every piece of jewelry we owned for it. Things were completely out of hand. The Germans couldn't track down all these people; we found out about them by word of mouth. My mother would hear that someone somewhere had beans and off would come all her rings.

And we, small children, went every day — every single day, and not only us, the whole population — to Brahámi. The area that's now called Agios Dimitrios, which has since become a whole suburb swallowed up by Athens, was then an open stretch of fields, and we went to cut wild greens. We lived on wild greens. It was me, my sister, and another girl from the building who used to go, because my brother was only four years old and we didn't take him. He couldn't understand any of it. He was just hungry and cried day and night.

We were older, we could understand, and we didn't cry — we could be patient. "I have nothing to give you, children," my mother would say in despair. "I have nothing." And we were patient. And if we came across an orange, we ate it with the peel to feel full, to feel like we had something inside us. We didn't throw away even the white pithy parts. And my mother had to find food for our brother somehow — she'd take a bite of something and pass it from her own mouth to his to stop the crying. Many times we'd take a bag and a knife and, with the girl who was our age and lived in our courtyard, go out to the fields with my sister.

But once we went the wrong way and got lost. We wandered for a long time, walking an hour or maybe two hours off course. We couldn't see anything familiar, no main road, no cars, nothing. Because in those days there was only one paved road we knew — Veikou Street in Koukaki. Everything else was dirt tracks. Imagine that the tram on Dimitrakopoulou Street ran on rails laid over a dirt road. It went past the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, past the theater, and down toward Thiseio. I learned that later, when I was older and in gymnasium and started walking in the other direction from our house, toward the center rather than toward the fields, and I saw all the tram rails.

When I was in elementary school I didn't walk far, because the school was very close to home. When the bell rang for break, we'd go outside — there was no danger then. In front of the school there was a man who sold sesame-coated rolls and a chestnut seller, if you happened to have ten drachmas to give him. But my father didn't have even those ten drachmas. So when school let out, I ran straight home and my mother would cut a piece of bread, sprinkle a little water on it to soften it, and scatter some sugar on top, and that was my snack. It was wonderful, that little bread. When the bell rang again for class, I'd hear it from the house and run back.

So the day we got lost, we ended up at the Brahámi cemetery. Three young girls walking into a graveyard — and there on top of the graves we found enormous wild greens. In our childish innocence, and in the desperation of hunger, we saw something that looked like a solution. We didn't understand then why the grown-ups avoided picking greens from there. The plants were tall and lush, growing straight up out of the mounds of the graves. In those days graves weren't marble — they were just bare earth, raised up like small hills. Before we knew it, our bags were full. And we found our way back using the same road on which we'd gotten lost.

We were smart enough, though, to agree on one thing: we wouldn't tell our mothers where we'd found them, or they'd throw them out. When we got home, my mother and the other mother said: "Oh! What beautiful greens! Where did you find these?" "We lost our way and wandered a bit into some field off to the side, and Mama, you should have seen it..." I told her. "Nobody had found them, apparently... We filled up quickly and left." They believed it. We boiled the greens and everything was fine.

And now when I think about it, after all these years — what was wrong with those greens? Nothing, really. They were only so lush because nobody ever cut them there, so they kept growing and growing. As for the graves themselves — a grave is very deep, and there's nothing until the coffin has completely dissolved, and how far could a root possibly reach down to where the earth has settled like a small mountain? I was the one who urged the others on. I told them: "We're going to cut these greens. There's nothing wrong with them — what could be wrong? They're not growing out of the body itself. Don't say a word, just cut them and fill our bags and let's go." No one saw us because no one was there — all the older women were far too superstitious.

We only went that one time, because our mothers were frightened at how long we'd been gone and wouldn't let us take that road again. Sometimes we went for greens with our mothers too, to the same places everyone went, and after a while there was nothing left on the ground — because the grown-ups didn't want us straying from the fields where everyone always went.

But once, two mothers — mine and a neighbor — set out for greens, and as they were walking, they came across a paved road, because in every area there was one main paved road as a central avenue. From a distance they saw something black and shiny on the surface — the whole asphalt was black but it was gleaming in patches. They thought some kind of animals had passed and left their droppings or tracks, because there were shepherds in those parts who passed through with their flocks. But when they got closer — what did they find? Black currants. A cart must have passed and spilled them. Because carts in those days were open, and some sack must have split. They gathered them up, turned back, and came home with currants instead of greens. Their bags were full — there was a whole heap of them. That day the mothers came home happy.

I have images in my mind of people dying of hunger — I saw those images every day. We didn't die because of my mother, who was a hero in all of this. She ran to find us food, despite being illiterate, despite having been, her whole life, a closed and private person who made no friends and devoted herself only to her family. The necessity of the Occupation woke something up in her and made her resourceful.

To begin with — and even if it wasn't her own idea, another woman initiated her into it — she did something that saved us. In those days we had no identity cards or anything of the sort. The occupying forces issued a ration card for each family, and every day you could collect bread for however many people were in your household. Five people — five slices of bread; six people — six slices; two people — two slices. Every bakery was ordered to register the families it served, but there was no real oversight. My mother registered six people at the bakery under the name Kalymnios. But a neighbor told her: "You can go to the other bakery where they don't know you and register another six people under your own surname." So she went there too, under the name Xypolyta, and that way each of us got two slices of bread a day. Those slices kept us alive — because at one bakery, six slices made a loaf, and at the other bakery, another loaf, and so we had two loaves of bread a day. That way she had a little more bread to give to my little brother, and a bite for herself as well.

The rations were only for bread. There was nothing else in the shops. There were a few small grocery stores but all the shopkeepers had hidden their stock, so the black marketeers had made fortunes. Some of them may have been in league with the Germans, but most weren't powerful people — they operated in secret. The ones who actually collaborated with the Germans weren't mainly these small-time black marketeers; they were the people who collaborated politically, and they were called dosilogoi — collaborators — and their business was informing on their fellow citizens to the Germans.

The black marketeers were simply crooked traders; they let people starve but they didn't hand anyone over to the Germans, and the Germans had no particular fondness for them either. From the very first day of the Occupation — a catastrophic, cursed day — all goods became scarce and all food vanished. But the day the Germans left, the traders stopped hiding their stock. October 12th, 1944. That day it was as if everything had suddenly sprouted from the ground, and food appeared everywhere.

My mother had a cousin who lived in Kypseli, married to a man from Macedonia. He traveled to all the villages of Macedonia to gather food. Those people still had their land — they could sow and they could eat. The countryside didn't suffer the catastrophe that Athens did. We in the cities starved. Where were we going to sow? Where were we going to plant? On the pavement? So this man would go and bring back supplies. My mother would therefore walk on foot from Neos Kosmos all the way to Kypseli, and there she would leave her gold jewelry in exchange for a few beans, a few chickpeas.

My mother, God rest her soul, was a deeply tender-hearted woman. Whatever she received, she never ate alone — she shared it with the whole courtyard. She'd pour a little oil into a small Greek coffee cup, take it to the neighbor, and say: "Here, put even a drop in your food." Whatever she had, she divided. That is how our entire courtyard survived.

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