A Final Family Reunion
Going Back Again
by Theodore Modis
Last
time I visited my hometown, Florina, ten years ago, I decided it was the last time.
Florina had changed too much and there was no one left from the people I had
known as a child. It was nothing like the first time we had visited with my
mother and Carole thirty-five years ago. Then it was my homecoming, I was
freshly married, and had just completed my long studies in the US. The three of
us had paraded the town’s main street stopping every few meters to greet
acquaintances.
“How are you, Mistress Theodosia,
welcome back,” was a frequent greeting. Having spent thirty years as a teacher
in Florina my mother was known to many as Mistress Theodosia.
“This is my son and his wife,” …
“Yes, she is American.”
“Son of George Modis! Why don’t you
come back and we’ll vote for you,” was another typical remark as we moved from
one encounter to the next. Carole had been stunned by such celebrity treatment,
which had left neither my mother nor me indifferent.
By the time we had reached the town
center – George Modis Square – the sequence of encounters culminated with an
embarrassment.
“Oh, Theodoraki, do you remember
me?” Asked a lady of my mother’s age looking at me pointedly.
There was no chance I would remember
her and the sorry event she was about to unearth from the depths of my Freudian
forgetfulness.
I must have been less than ten years old when
inspired by cowboy movies I wanted to improve my aim. I made myself a dart out
of a cylindrical piece of wood at the end of which I inserted a nail backwards
– not a trivial task for a young kid. Then I attached some chicken feathers at
the other end and was ready to show off to the other kids.
My first throw was across the street aiming at the
trunk of a tree. There was a breeze, however, which made the dart drift and get
implanted on the leg of one of the kids sitting on the sidewalk nearby. I was
shocked and so was the kid. I pulled out the dart whose nail had deeply
penetrated. The hole was tiny and seemed innocuous. But we were both in shock
so we walked into the café in front of which all this was happening and showed
the bleeding hole to the café owner.
“That’s nothing,” he decided “here, let’s put some
ouzo on it.”
Over lunch at home I was brooding.
“What is the matter?” asked my mother.
“Nothing,” I refused to say.
But she knew me better and insisted. I broke down and
told her everything. She was alarmed. A death of a friend’s kid from tetanus
had been indelibly written in her memory. She grabbed my hand and we went out
looking for the kid’s residence. With some effort we located the boy and took
him to a first-aid station for proper treatment, which included a tetanus shot.
Still a week later, the kid’s mother showed up at our
house saying that his leg had been infected and there had been doctor’s and
pharmacy bills. My mother reimbursed her for everything with apologies. I had
never seen that kid or his mother again until now.
But going back ten years ago was
different. We did not have my mother with us. She had just celebrated her 90th
birthday and was less mobile. This plus the changes Florina had undergone in
twenty-five years resulted in zero flamboyant encounters for us as we strolled
down Florina’s main street. Many new people from the surrounding villages had
moved into the town and most of the locals had moved on to Thessaloniki or
Athens. I was frustrated at not recognizing anyone so at some point I walked
into the town’s largest hardware store still under the last name of a childhood
friend and asked to speak with Christos. “Oh, Christos has become a doctor and
now lives in Thessaloniki; and who are you?”
So our visit to Florina ten years ago was less than a
memorable experience and I had concluded that after a certain time one should
no longer seek to go back. There was also something else. Without our mother
and wanting to squeeze in a daily excursion to the beautiful Prespa-lake
region, neither Agla nor I hesitated in skipping the traditional visit to my
father’s grave at the scenic cemetery of St. George in Florina’s outskirts. And
yet, it had been many years that anyone had paid respects to our father’s grave
in which my grandmother had also been buried eight years after her son died. My
mother had been disappointed at us for not passing by the cemetery to see how
the tomb was doing.
Now a new trip to Florina was
imposed on Agla and myself. My mother who died five years ago was buried at the
cemetery of Thessaloniki with the understanding that some day her remains would
be transported to Florina to be placed in the same grave as my father. The
progressively increasing rent for a grave at the busy cemetery of Thessaloniki
now reached 1000 Euro for one more year so we decided that it was time to
undertake the painful operation of finally putting our mother together with our
father. An added source of worry was the fact that the small St. George
cemetery in Florina had long been closed to public because a larger new one had
opened in the other side of town. We had heard stories of people being rejected
when they tried to do similar operations.
Agla wondered whether we should
first call to find out. But I was adamant, “I’ll talk to the bishop,” I said.
“If need be, I’ll go to see the mayor. There should be a weak spot somewhere
for the name of Modis in Florina,” and I quietly stashed away a copy of my
mother’s autobiographical novel in my suitcase. It is a book I convinced her to
write when she was ninety. My idea had been that an autobiography spanning a
century would make interesting reading; I had even suggested a title One
Century, One Life. But when the book was finally written, I realized that
my mother had described mostly the ten idyllic years she spent with my father
before I was born, so the book’s final title became One Love, One Life.
It would now constitute my ultimate card when arguing with the mayor about her
rights to join her husband in their final resting place.
But if nothing worked, I was determined to pay an
Albanian to dig the grave under cover of darkness and secretly put my mother’s
remains where they belonged. “Wouldn’t I love to be there,” responded Carole
when I told her of my intentions.
Agla was alone at the gruesome
process of unearthing our mother’s remains. Agla has often been the one who gets
the snake out of the hole as one Greek proverb goes. Two days later I was
present for receiving the varnished box with the officially disinfected bones.
The man did not let us touch the box. He put it himself in the trunk of Agla’s
37-year old VW beetle. The box would fit under the curved hood only on its
side! Fortunately, it had a locking mechanism. We put no other luggage around
it. We immediately set route for Florina.
We took the
new Egnatia superhighway bypassing the town of Edessa with its picturesque
waterfalls. We were too preoccupied to indulge in touristy sightseeing. While
driving, Agla kept verbalizing her worries. How there were no friends or relatives
of ours left in Florina, whom we could possibly contact for help. And then she
thought of Eleni.
“Eleni may still be there,” she exclaimed.
“Do you know where she lives? Do you
remember her last name?” I asked doubting.
“I can probably locate her house,”
she said, “but in any case, I’m sure people around there will still remember
Socratis.”
Eleni was Fotini’s daughter. Fotini
had been my mother’s helper from the day my mother had children and throughout
our childhood in Florina. She was hard working but very poor, uneducated, and
thankful to my mother for providing work for her. She had three children of her
own (no husband) and they lived in a one-room house at the town’s gypsy-like
quarter with rugs hanging instead of doors. Eleni was a teenager when Agla was
born. The hard years in Florina with long cold winters had resulted in a
bonding between Fotini and my mother, two otherwise incongruent women.
Fotini came to my mother asking for
advice and help with every serious problem she had. One of her early problems
was when Socratis began courting Eleni, eventually seducing her, but refusing
to marry her. My mother’s interventions played a decisive role in Eleni and
Socratis finally getting married. In the decades that followed Eleni had her
own share of hard life: four children, money problems, and an unfaithful
husband who beat her. Finally they all moved to Canada seeking better fortunes,
which they found.
Fotini did not like Canada and frequently returned to
Florina for prolonged vacations. In one such trip, she came to see my mother,
now living in Thessaloniki, with another serious problem. Eleni’s young
daughter in Canada had met a young man who wanted to marry her but there was a
snag. In the tightly-nit immigrant community of Greeks there were rumors that
Eleni’s daughter was not a virgin. The young man refused to believe them
arguing that they were motivated by jealousy. Eleni and Fotini, however, had
good reasons to be worried. When the plans for the wedding began, Fotini came
to my mother for help.
My mother told Fotini that the girl should come to
Thessaloniki as soon as possible. Within a couple of weeks Eleni brought her
daughter to my mother and the three of them went to see a gynecologist in
Thessaloniki. There is nothing illegal about this type of operation and the
gynecologist proved understanding once my mother explained the situation to
him.
Several weeks later a thanking letter from Canada
told about a great wedding that took place, which was coronated the next day by
the display of the wedding sheets stained with blood according to the
custom.
The VW beetle with its odd cargo pulled in Florina
around noon. I was in no mood to go searching for Eleni so we went straight to
the cemetery. It wouldn’t be hard to locate my father’s grave because it is
next to my uncle’s and his mother’s both of which have been decorated with
large marble statues. And yet we couldn’t see my father’s grave! Not only was
it entirely covered by wild bushes growing all over but also there was no
longer a cross with the names on it. We were heartbroken. Moving the bushes I
saw that the cross had broken into several pieces that were scattered around
and the heavy marble plate was darkened with mold stains.
We looked around for help but on Saturday noon the
church was closed. We walked out on the street hoping to find someone connected
with the church. There was an Albanian cutting the grass that grew wild on the
sides of the road.
“Is there anyone from the church around here?” Agla
asked him.
“I don’t no. Church closed,” he said.
“Is there anyone who can help us clean a grave?” Agla
insisted.
“I do it,” he said and immediately stopped what he
was doing, picked up his heavy equipment (chain saw and wire grass cutter, both
gasoline powered) and followed us to the grave.
He worked for half an hour. I gave him ten Euro. He
said nothing and walked away. I gathered all the pieces of the broken cross and
placed them on the marble plate. It looked pathetic.
We went back to town in search of a marble mason.
Minos the marble cutter was a young
man who was obviously taking over his father’s business. He drove with us to
the cemetery, took measurements and jotted down the names to be carved on the
new, heavy-duty cross. He agreed to bring and install the new cross and even to
bring the necessary machinery to clean the marble plate. The only question was
when would the new cross be ready. Tuesday afternoon would be the earliest he
could do it by. We had to agree.
“Actually, we also want to put in
our mothers remains,” I ventured timidly, when I saw him test-lifting the heavy
marble plate.
“That would be no problem,” he
replied, “we can do it Tuesday when I bring the cross.”
“But until then do we drive around
with the bones in the trunk of our car?” Agla objected.
“Oh, you have them here?” He seemed
surprised. “Why don’t you bring them over and we can put them in right now,” he
continued.
That would suit us just fine, I
thought to myself as I rushed to the car.
The
varnished box was actually quite light. As I carried it up the stairs toward
the grave, it crossed my mind that we had not seen what was inside. It would
have been trivial to do it right there because there was no lock on the box’s
locking mechanism, but I had a good excuse: Agla and Minos were waiting for me
to do what we feared would be so problematic, so there was no time to waste.
Minos and
Agla raised the marble plate high enough for me to place the box inside, but
the space underneath was littered with rocks and concrete and I was forced to
lean forward getting my head and shoulders practically inside the grave. As I
struggled to wedge the box in the space available I heard Minos and Agla
talking unable to make out what they were saying. Eventually, I surfaced to
find Minos bursting into laughter as Agla began screaming. In a split second I
realized that Agla’s finger had been caught under the marble plate. “RAISE THE
PLATE,” I shouted at the guy, “don’t you see her finger is caught?”
He complied
embarrassed. Agla’s finger was promising to soon become blue. “I thought she
was laughing at my joke,” he said awkwardly. Apparently when I was half inside
the grave he had winked at Agla making a wisecrack of the sort, “what if we
closed your husband inside!” They also took us for husband and wife with
Grigori our son later at the hotel, even after I specified a room with three
separate beds.
But despite
the mishaps, we felt euphoric. There were no more obstacles in our trip’s
mission and we had three days until Tuesday afternoon to tour the region. Agla
pointed out that we had visited Prespa more than once whereas had never visited
nearby Monastiri our father’s hometown.
Monastiri,
today called Bitola, is the first town across the border from Florina into
FYROM (the Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia). Despite the fact that my
grandfather owned land and boasted the biggest house in Monastiri in early
twentieth century, my grandmother quit the region after her husband’s
assassination. Over the decades the crossing of the border between Florina and
Monastiri saw days of tranquility but also days of high drama and terror. Under
communist Yugoslavia escape stories from Monastiri rivaled those of eastern
Germans striding the Berlin Wall.
Agla’s
suggestion found me cold. I had not been excited to come back to Florina in the
first place, much less to visit a town I had known only through my
grandmother’s stories, many of them in the form of a moiroloï
(dirge). In the local
tradition, at moments of intense self-pity, my grandmother would embark on an
improvised descriptive lamenting recounting all her misfortunes with a fair
amount of detail. How much of this would I be able to crosscheck with a visit
to FYROM’s Bitola today?
Grigori too
had an effective objection. “They’ll stamp my passport with ‘Has been in
Macedonia,’” he complained, “me who has lived in Macedonia all his life.”
Grigori and I would rather go to
Prespa again.
The hotel we stayed at – King
Alexander – was up some way on one of the two mountains that flank Florina. It
commanded a panoramic view of the town and the opposite mountain. It was also
close to the part of town where Eleni’s house used to be.
Following
the afternoon siesta and Greek coffee on the balcony we began asking around for
the house of Eleni and Socratis. A man in his forties who did not entirely
conform to the image of a local volunteered to bring us to where Eleni was. He
brought us to the large two-house complex. The estate was a cross between a spacious summer residence and a farm.
A couple of dogs accompanied us across the yard barking but not menacing. There
were more animals (chicken and geese) at the far end of the long yard. The
young man shouted, “Mom, you have visitors.”
Eleni came
out and looked at the three of us with suspicion.
“It’s me,
Agla, the daughter of Mistress Theodosia,” Agla rushed to clarify.
“My God,”
Eleni exclaimed, “is it really you and Theodorakis?”
I hadn’t
seen Eleni since I was a small child. The woman in front of me bared faint
resemblance to what I had retained in my memory; she also bared the marks of
the passage of difficult times. Despite her eighty years her hair was dyed
black and she maintained a straight posture, but she obviously had false teeth
that moved disconcertingly as she spoke. Her chin trembled intermittently but
not the way it does with old people. My mother had told us that she had had a
nervous breakdown of some sort.
She shouted
at her other son, Giorgos, to come out of the nearby shack. He was in his
undershirt, fat, unshaven, and with a pain on his neck. He looked old. We
pulled some chairs and we all set in a shady part of the yard. They offered us
refreshments.
“When I was
fourteen you were a baby and I was carrying you in my arms,” Eleni told Agla.
“Now I have four children, eight grandchildren, and one great-grandchild,” she
continued contemplatively.
Giorgos
explained to us that with the money he made in Canada he built these two houses
here to reunite the family even though some family, like the younger son Petros
who brought us to Eleni, lived permanently in Canada and came only visiting for
the summer.
We sat
there chatting calmly for a while. There was an atmosphere of harmonious
contradiction. They felt like friends but we hardly knew them; they felt like
relatives but we had nothing in common. What was there to talk about?
Agla made a
remark about the dogs and mentioned her experiences with dogs.
“I had a big
dog once,” picked up Giorgos, “no pure race or anything, which got along
extremely well with the three little kittens of the house. All three of them
slept on him regularly savoring his body warmth. He never complained. One day,
however, the dog must have perceived something suspicious, he suddenly jumped
and ran toward the gate. The three kittens instinctively clawed themselves on
his back. And the dog kept galloping for a long time with the three kittens
wobbling around attached on him. It was hilarious!”
I had my
camera with me and thought of taking pictures but I was afraid it would
embarrass them; or, rather, it would embarrass me. Adjectives like picturesque,
photogenic, or touristy seemed out of place here.
A young
lady and her boyfriend all dressed up came by to meet us as they went out for
an evening ride to Prespa. She was one of Eleni’s granddaughters. I wondered
whether her mother was the one who my mother had fixed up.
We heard a
rooster crow, which prompted Giorgos to tell us another story. “In Canada where
we live peopled complained about the crowing of too many roosters disturbing
their sleep. A law was passed and all henneries were equipped with very low
ceilings. It appears that if a rooster cannot cock himself up, he wont crow!”
“Tomorrow
we are going to have a barbeque. There will be thirty people here. Please come
and join us,” continued Giorgos.
“Oh, yes,
please do,” repeated Eleni and proceeded to elaborate on the invitation and
insist Greek style.
“Mom,”
interrupted her Giorgos, who had obviously been more affected by Canada’s
Anglo-Saxon culture, “stop pestering them. They know we want them to come. They
will, if it suits their program.”
As we
prepared to leave, Petros, who had been very quiet up to then, approached me and
said.
“I live in Vancouver.
I am in the phone book. If you ever find yourself in Canadian soil, no matter
where, give me a ring and I will come pick you up and show you the country.”
We drove
back to the town center somewhat overwhelmed. We had expected to come across no
one we knew in Florina. Passing in front of our old house it now looked sad and
neglected but hanging in there.
We parked
downtown not far from Modis Square. The VW beetle certainly made an impression
in the midst of only modern cars. As I came out of the car in front of a group
of young men drinking summer coffee concoctions, one of them asked me: “would
you sell it?”
“No, it is
part of the family,” I said, “We’ve been growing old together.”
“Where are
you from?” he continued obviously alluding to us looking strangers.
“From right
here,” I responded, “We are from Florina.”
He looked
at us in disbelief. I volunteered a clarification, “The name is Modis.”
“Like the
Modis Square?” he wanted to better understand.
“Exactly,”
I replied.
“Hugh!” he
exclaimed surprised, if anything, at the coincidence of someone being named the
same as a square.
Dinnertime
was approaching and I reiterated my desire to taste once again the famous
soutzoukakia that we used to eat on summer nights in the many tavernas spread
around the central square (not named Modis at that time). The permeating smell
of those sausage-looking spicy meatballs grilled on charcoal is indelibly
imprinted on my sensory memory and is affectionately associated with my childhood
summers.
But now the central square was
surrounded with fancy coffee shops and bars crowded by young ladies exposing
their shoulders and thighs, none of which would be interested in a soutzoukaki.
I even tried sniffing my way toward the delicacy – always emulating how we did
it when I was a child – only to find myself in front of a hotdog-and-hamburger
stand. Disappointed and tired we sat at a rather chic restaurant off the main
street. The waiters, all young men, were untraditionally attentive, polite, and
soft-spoken.
“May I
suggest a local delicacy,” asked one of them as I was reading the menu. “It is
called soutzoukakia and consists of …
“I know
what it is,” I interrupted him. “I’ve been looking for it all over town.”
The next morning
it was Sunday and Agla proposed that we go to the St. George church – now that
we had nothing to fear – and ask a priest to do a trisagio (short
memorial service) on the grave. In preparation I wrote down the three names
George, Theodosia, and Paraskevi on a piece of paper confident that the priest
would not cross check them against the names barely readable on the
broken-cross pieces.
This time
the church was not only open but it was packed with people. We timed it so that
we wouldn’t have to wait long before the mass finishes and we can present the
priest with our request. Working our way toward the priest in the crowded
church Agla bumped on a well-dressed lady. They both burst out with
exclamations.
“Tasitsa!”
“Agla! What
are you doing here?”
“We came to
put our mother’s bones in the grave of our father. And you? I thought you had
moved to Thessaloniki?”
“Our
children live there, but Yorgos wants to finish his days in Florina. He has
retired, of course, but he likes it here.”
Tasitsa was a cousin of ours, whom again I hadn’t
seen for years. Her grandfather and my grandfather were brothers. Her husband
was a gynecologist and his sister had been a colleague and friend of my mother
who enters the picture once again (it must be this trip’s destiny). Back some
sixty years ago my mother had mediated for Tasitsa who lived in Kozani to meet
Yorgos who lived in Florina with the intention to get married; what they called
an arranged marriage. The union turned out successful and they lived happily
ever after in Florina.
Tasitsa was also very religious, knew all the
priests, and when we mentioned the trisagio, she took Agla by the hand and
walked over to the priest.
“Father,
would please do a trisagio for us,” she said and continued on information she
shared with the priest “but you also need to go to that other thing.”
“We can do
the trisagio right here,” answered the priest, “it is the same as if we went to
the grave.”
He
immediately began reciting at a rate so rapid that it seemed miraculous he was
not getting tongue-tied. He suddenly stopped jolting me into reality. He needed
the names. I handed him the paper with the three names and as soon as he read
them Tasitsa added “and Nikolaos and Chrysavgi.” The priest repeated the two
names after her and off he went again continuing his frantic recitation. A few
minutes later there was another pause (obviously he could not read at that
speed) “and Nikolaos and Chrysavgi,” added Tasitsa again and the priest
repeated after her again.
When the
ceremony was over, Tasitsa wanted to go for coffee and I suggested that we
drive to the small coffee shop up the mountain. Driving up the steep mountain
road, five of us in the Volkswagen, we passed in front of a hotel perched on
that picturesque spot.
“This is
the Xenia Hotel,” I said having more memories come to the foreground again.
“No they
have renovated it and renamed it,” Tasitsa brought us up to date. But in my
head I was back in 1974 when Cyprus was invaded by the Turks and Greeks
mobilized for war. We had been vacationing in Greece and had Yorgo baptized.
But in the turmoil and preparations for war between Greece and Turkey my mother
and I came to Florina to seek advice from my uncle George Modis who was old,
retired from politics, and vacationing at this mountain hotel. With all border
crossings closed, one of our ideas was that he shows us the way out of Greece
secretly as he had done so often between Florina and Monastiri when he was
active as a Makedonomachos (Macedonian fighter).
When we met
with him, it was obvious that he was preoccupied with the events in Cyprus. “I
don’t understand,” he kept saying “why couldn’t Greece send some airplanes,
boats, or intervene in some way.”
We hesitated before revealing the
purpose of our trip.
“It is very
easy to cross the boarder,” he said. Then he added as an afterthought, “But for
a Modis to cross the border secretly wouldn’t be right.”
“Yes, of course, Yorgo, you are
right,” said my mother and we dropped the subject.
At the mountain café Tasitsa seemed
to know everyone and be highly respected. The lady café owner greeted her
joyfully and came out to personally wait on us.
“On hot summer days we used to drink
visinada,” I reminisced again. “Do you have it?”
It was a drink made out of black-cherry
syrup. In those days my mother used to make black-cherry blancmange to offer
guests in small quantities with a spoon and a glass of cold water. We children
drained the syrup from the jar and dilute it with water into a summer drink,
dangerously undermining our mother’s ability to play proper host to visitors.
“Of course we do,” said the lady and
brought three of them, one for Agla, one for Grigori, and one for myself.
Later
Tasitsa insisted to invite us for lunch with her husband at a nice new
restaurant they now frequent. She wouldn’t take no for an answer so we made an
appointment for 2:30 pm. She gave us instructions on how to go; we’d all meet
there.
On the way to
the restaurant we stopped by St. Nikolas, the church outside the town diametrically
opposed to St. George. It was a spot where we used to go for picnics with
family but also with the school when I was in elementary school. I distinctly
remembered lots of water even a small waterfall.
Despite
being prepared by now for disappointments, I was taken aback to see the dry
water channels sadly attesting to previous running waters.
My mother
(schoolteacher) 2nd from the right and I centered in primo piano.
I made Agla pose over the spot where
we used to have our picnics.
Agla 3rd
from the right, my mother 3rd from the left,
and I, as
always, centered in front.
The church has been extended with
new structures that hide the fountain, which we did not succeed to see running
anyway.
Agla is the
tall girl waiting to access the water.
The phrase “living color”
popularized when color photography first appeared may be more appropriate as a
euphemism here. The black-and-white pictures are the ones that are full of
life.
Tasitsa’s favorite restaurant consisted of a house
where the owners live and its large garden where the tables are set up in the
shade of the vine arbour. Her husband, Yorgos Lalagiannis, now 88, was the
first gynecologist in Florina where he practiced for many decades. Like most
short people he still sports a Yale chin (always upward).
“I have brought in the world 6,582 babies,” he
boasted.
Thea’s question immediately popped in my mind.
Avoiding the choice between addressing him as “Yorgo” or “Mr. Lalagiannis” I
simply said, “How did women deliver during the war years? Was there a hospital
in Florina?”
“Yes, there was a hospital but it had no maternity
ward. Women simply delivered at home with the help of a midwife.”
“But what about caesarians? You cannot do a caesarian
at home.”
I must have touched a sensitive chord.
“I was the one to perform the first caesarian
operation in Florina in 1956. The inconvenience was we had no anesthesiologists
and therefore performed the caesarians with ether,” he did not want to stop but
I interrupted him.
“But what did women who needed a caesarian do before
1956?”
He continued from where he had left ignoring my
question. “After 1956 we got proper anesthesia and I performed caesarians
routinely at the hospital.”
I came back to my question, “How about when we were
born during the war?”
Before 1956 women could give only natural birth.
Those who didn’t either lost their baby or died.
Lunch lasted for more than a couple of hours. We
talked about relatives and reminisced about old times. Nostalgia reigned in
this mid-summer garden spot. At some point Tasitsa noticed, “There goes Danny
Dosiou.”
I turned around and saw two old ladies slowly leaving
the restaurant holding each other. I grabbed my camera and ran to take a
picture. I gave no explanations but everyone at my table understood my
reaction. Florina is known for its strong cultural tradition. Many of its
inhabitants have excelled both in Greece and abroad as painters, sculptors,
musicians, and singers. Danny Dosiou was a violinist with a brilliant career in
Paris. I know a student violinist from Geneva who came all the way to Florina
just to take private lessons from her.
On the
right Danny Dosiou, an internationally renowned violinist.
When Agla later saw my picture she remarked, “Too bad
you did not take her picture facing you.”
“She is making an exit,” I verbalized my thoughts,
“and a heavier one at that than from the stage.”
In the late afternoon we walked around Florina taking
pictures. As with people, I was again interested only in old “stuff”, buildings
that I would recognize, often in ruins.
The
Peltekis house across the street from ours (Agla is looking at ours).
The two-story house across the street from our house
had an old-fashion coffee shop (Kafenion) on the ground floor frequented
by older men playing backgammon (tavli) all day. It is in there that we
turned for first aid – i.e. ouzo – when I nailed the poor kids leg with my
dart.
On the first floor lived Peltekis, a Greek-army
officer who was hard of hearing. One night during the Greek civil war – after
the Germans had already left – some drunken bandit came knocking on the front
door of our house. My mother and grandmother got really scared because they
lived alone in the house with two small children. My grandmother tried to talk
sense to the bandit from the first-floor window but all in vain. He was shaking
the door threatening to force it open. My mother came out to the balcony and
began crying for help to Peltekis across the street. But she was knocking on
a deaf’s door to quote another Greek proverb! Eventually Peltekis’ wife
woke up and shook her husband into alertness. It did not take him long to get
his pistol, shoot in the air from his balcony, and shout threats to the bandit
he could not see that if he didn’t go away immediately he would come down and
kill him. It was enough to resolve the situation. But my mother the next day
had an iron bar installed reinforcing our front door so that it wouldn’t be so
easy to force open.
Another house with a story was the Tegos’ house. Back
in the 1930s Tegos Sapountzis was the mayor of Florina. He had a beloved daughter Athina,
whom he wanted to give as wife to an aspiring young lawyer, Yorgo Modis, my
father. Athina was impressed by my father and even took the initiative to begin
a correspondence with him. But shy as she was she asked her literary
acquaintance – my mother – for help in writing the letters. My mother even
wrote the letters in her own handwriting, which was particularly artistic. This
made the two young women good friends. So when the big moment came for Athina
to meet Yorgo in the flesh, my mother was not simply invited at the banquet
thrown by the mayor for the occasion but she was also seated next to Yorgo on
the other side. That was it. During the dinner my father paid more attention to
my mother than to Athina.
The Tegos Sapountzis house
Passing by the river in front of my
school I saw a tree where there shouldn’t be one! So I began telling the story
of me coming out of school one day and seeing a bunch of people trying to cut
down an enormous tree. They had cut a wedge on the river side of the tree’s
trunk and were trying to pull the tree down with ropes into the river. The tree
eventually fell but on the other side landing on the roof of a small house. The
owner of the house came out screaming in despair for the damages in her house.
As I was talking in a loud voice, an
older lady close to the house I was pointing at asked, “when were all these
things happening?”
After a moment’s reflection I
answer, “about 55 years ago.”
“Where are you from,” the usual next
question.
“We are from here. Modis is my
name,” the usual answer.
The lady came closer. “Are you the
son of Yorgo and Theodosia Modis?” This time we were recognized!
“Yes, I am,” I answer.
“I had her as a teacher the good
lady,” she continued nostalgically. We chatted for some time and found out
about the whereabouts of many people we new in common.
The tree
(a replacement), the house, and the lady in the red blouse
behind the
car, who was my mother’s student.
One thing I did not want to miss seeing again was the
railroad station. I had fond memories of Florina’s railroad station. My mother
and I used to go there in cold winter evenings to wait for Agla’s coming home
for Christmas and other holidays from Anatolia where she had gone to school two
years ahead of me. Waiting for the invariably late train to arrive, I used to
put my ear on the tracks to detect the coming train ahead of time, as I had
read it was done in books.
It is a remote small-town railroad station whose
particularity is that unlike usual train stations where trains come in one way
and go out the other way, here the access is only on one side. The other side
ends in a mountain: the end of the line.
The tracks
stop here!
The next day, Monday, we began early for our trip to
the Prespa lakes. The region includes two lakes and a large national reserve
rich in bird and vegetation species. The Big Prespa lake is split among Greece,
Albania, and FYROM with the latter claiming the biggest part. Little Prespa is
almost entirely in Greece. The island of St. Achilios in Little Prespa has now
been connected to the shore with a 600-meter long floating bridge. When we
began crossing the bridge, a fisherman just pulled out his nets full with some
enormous fish. He threw them in the trunk of his car still alive in the nets.
“They are going to Kastoria,” he answered the concerned looks on our faces, as
he got in his car and drove away. His remark did not explain why Kastoria,
which has a lake of its own needed all this Grvadi fish from Prespa.
The most striking highlight from our Prespa excursion
was the visit of a remote little church up high in an enormous cave on an inaccessible
shore of Big Prespa. It is the most impressive one of several such shelters
Christian monks sought during the centuries of Ottoman occupation.
One of
several cave shelters.
We hired a boat to visit the caves. The most impressive
cave is not far from the three-border crossing point on the lake. A large
number of steep steps mostly inside the cave brought us to the little church at
the top, which is entirely covered with well-preserved Byzantine frescoes
dating from the middle ages. Coming out of the cave on the way down we were
facing the Albanian coast across the lake.
We came
back to Florina in the afternoon. It was our last evening in town and there
were still a few things we had not visited. Agla wanted to see the old market.
It was still there, right next to nicely renovated Loukas’ house.
Loukas was a pediatrician. He was
also a good friend of our father. He owned much land with chestnut trees. His
wife was stunningly beautiful but they had no children. He was present when
Agla was born, and then again when I was born. On each occasion he had one
large chestnut tree cut and offered as a present to the Modis family. One tree
became a built-in closet and the other one a built-in china cabinet. I remember
both of them distinctly for their dark-color wood.
Loukas’
house (our pediatrician)
As we
walked by his house I asked Agla, “Do you realize we are on another Modis
street?”
Agla knew about the square, of
course, but had forgotten about the street of Captain Modis. He was the brother
of my uncle and had died while fighting the Turks deep in Asia Minor in what
later became known as the Asia-Minor catastrophe of the Greek army.
