7. Xanthoula - family roots.

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Xanthoula

At this point it is time to start a new chapter, the life and portrait of Bert’s future wife.  It is a different thread that will eventually lead us back to him.  Having seen him through the war experience in his youth and back home alive, I will now move to the other person in this story, my sister Xanthoula Papadopoulou.

Family roots.

She was born in the village of Ritini, Greece, in 1926, the second child of Ioannis Papadopoulos and Glykeria Dimopoulou.  There were four of us: Eleni born in 1923, Xanthippi (Xanthoula) born in 1926, Stefanos born in 1929, and Valentini (myself) born in 1936.  Here follows a brief history of our parents, how they met and lived together, in order to establish the atmosphere and the background in which Xanthoula was born and raised.  I believe they form the foundations on which her character and her future actions will rest.

Ioannis Papadopoulos, or Yannis in Greek every-day speech, was the eldest son of a family of five, three girls, Rachel, Lisa, and Barbara, and two boys, Ioannis and Elias.  They were of Greek origin, speaking Greek and living in the area of Caucasus near the Black Sea generally referred to as Pontos by the Greeks.  This was an area that originally belonged to Turkey.  When hostilities began against the Greeks, the family moved for more safety into Russian territory.  WWI found them there when Czar Nicholas II drafted about eleven million people to fight the Germans.  The Russians were being decimated.  There was widespread resentment against the Czar and the Bolshevik revolution started in 1917.  Ioannis had been drafted to serve as an officer in the army so when the revolution against the Czar broke out he had to hide and eventually flee the country.  Many of the army officers were killed but Yannis was protected by his own soldiers who hid him and later facilitated his escape.  The whole family then decided to go to Greece as refugees.  They didn’t all leave together. One of the sisters, Rachel, already married, arrived in Greece first.  Then the two brothers travelled separately and went through quite an odyssey before they reached Thessaloniki by boat through Istanbul. The rest of the family followed and they all finally settled in the northern part of Greece in the vicinity of the town of Katerini in the years of 1920-21.  An interesting coincidence is that Xanthoula’s father and his family of origin arrived as refugees in Greece at almost exactly the same time as Bert’s family arrived in Australia as immigrants.

After spending a certain time in a refugee camp in the outskirts of Thessaloniki, the Papadopoulos family was sent to a small village on the Macedonian plains called Sfendami, and given some land to cultivate.  Later, Yannis’ father, who had also been a teacher at some point and didn’t particularly like a farmer’s life, became a priest and served the people of that village until he died.  He left behind him a reputation of a spirited and rather rebellious priest who didn’t always follow the rigid rules of the Greek Orthodox Church.  For example, he accepted to marry young couples who didn’t have the 500 drachmas -- a substantial sum in the days before WWII -- necessary to obtain a marriage permit from the local “Despotis”, the head of the Greek Church in Katerini, roughly equivalent to a Bishop.  Father Stefanos used to say that he hadn’t read anywhere in the New Testament or even on an official Orthodox Church document that such a permit was required by God!   Breaking the Church’s again unwritten rules, he would marry young people who had eloped against the wishes of their parents, and who wanted to have their relationship accepted by their respective families and by society at large.  He was known to disagree openly on many other issues with the local Despotis, who tolerated his insubordination because he knew that Papa-Stefanos was a good man and really cared about his people.  He mixed with the villagers, frequenting the local “taverna”, playing “tavli”, a local game of checkers, drinking ouzo with them and chatting freely about politics and other such topics in which priests were not supposed to be involved.  He was remembered long after he passed away, and people had all kinds of funny stories and anecdotes to tell about him.

In the years that followed, Yannis’ sisters and his brother Elias married at various intervals and settled in Katerini and in the village of Sfendami.  Throughout their life, they remained a closely-knit family, much like the Wrigley family in Australia.  Here is a story that I heard more than once, which illustrates this closeness within the family:  upon arrival in Greece, Yannis had fallen ill with typhoid fever in the refugee camp in the outskirts of the city of Thessaloniki.  He would have surely died there, like many others, for lack of medical care, but one night he was smuggled out of the camp just in time.  Carried in the arms of his brother Elias and the oldest of the sisters, Rachel, he was taken to the only clinic available in Thessaloniki.  It seems that Rachel was pregnant when she helped with her elder brother’s clandestine removal from the refugee camp.  When someone said that it was dangerous for her to carry such a weight, she replied: “I can make another child, I can’t make a brother.”  Yannis survived thanks to his siblings’ timely intervention.  When he recovered, still weak from his near-fatal illness, he had to look for work.  He was the only person formally educated in the family, with a Russian teacher’s diploma in his hands authorizing him to teach both in Russian and in Greek.  The certificate is a large and impressive document in Russian which I found among the family papers which my brother had organized chronologically, like the good historian he was.  Yannis had his Teacher’s certificated translated and submitted to the Department of Education in Thessaloniki. As soon as his qualifications were recognized by the Greek government, he presented himself for a teaching position expressing the unusual wish to be sent not to a city but to a village with a good climate, preferably a mountain village.  Nothing was easier than to grant his request: many villages in Greece at that time, especially in the mountains, had no teachers, and most teachers wanted a city job. 

So Yannis Papadopoulos was sent to the primary school of Ritini, a remote, fairly poor and relatively primitive village about 23 kilometers from Katerini.  It could be reached in about six hours on foot going up towards the mountains – or in four hours if you had a horse or a mule.  Yannis would still be in the general area where the rest of his family had settled, and that was a comforting thought for the family.  The eldest son was loved and looked up to by everyone, including the father. Yannis often found himself giving advice to him to be careful and “behave himself”. There was no means of transportation available to go up to Ritini, and the young refugee didn’t have a horse, mule, or donkey.  He actually had to make his way on foot carrying a package with his few possessions.   It was on his way there, in September 1921, that he met on the road to the village a man called Athanasios Dimopoulos, or “Dimonatsos” as he was called in Ritini.  The young teacher was fortunate as Dimonatsos was the most “progressive” man in the village.  He had been to America twice for work some fifteen years earlier, stayed there four years at a time, and had returned to Greece with liberal ideas and a habit of speaking his mind.  Having left a royalist, because he said he knew no better, he returned a fervent supporter of democracy, impressed and influenced by American ideas.  His was one of the only two votes in the area cast against having a king and in favor of having a democracy in Greece in the public referendum that took place later in 1935 – a vote that cost him a savage beating which nearly left him for dead.  This experience was repeated again in 1946, after WWII had ended and the civil war hostilities had started.  Dimonatsos was preaching “love your neighbor” to the extreme right-wingers in Ritini, saying that it wasn’t right to persecute those who fought for the liberation of our country.  For those ideas he was given a good second beating.  His elder daughter Panagio was told to go and collect him from the village police station, all black and blue, like a sack of old potatoes.  It took our grandfather longer to recover this second time as he was much older -- about 76 years old.  But he was still a strong man and he recovered.

I see that I am ahead of myself again.  Let’s go back to the first meeting between Yannis, who was to be our father, and Dimonatsos, who was to be our grandfather.  A powerful six-foot tall man with blue eyes and fair hair, not at all the typical Greek of this region, Dimonatsos was happy to meet the new teacher.  Self-taught in reading and writing, he held education and educated people in high regard.  There was no school in the village when he was growing up under Turkish rule.

Dimonatsos saw immediately that the young man was frail.  He partly unloaded his horse, threw one of the bags over his shoulder and insisted that the teacher ride the rest of the way.  Knowing that there was no hostel for strangers or visitors in the village, he invited him to stay in his house, which he had built and shared with his brother’s family.  He had a small family: just four of them with his wife Maria and his two daughters, Panagio and Glykeria.  He had two rooms downstairs each with its own fireplace, and one large room upstairs. There was a spare room if Panagio and Glykeria shared one, and he felt honored to be able to give hospitality to the new teacher.  He also knew that most villagers wouldn’t have the room to take in a guest, or even if they had they wouldn’t be inclined to let a stranger come in to stay.  And so the young teacher gratefully accepted Dimonatsos’ hospitality for a while.  He was given the room upstairs, where a wood fired stove provided heating in the winter months, and the family gathered downstairs.

It was nearly mid-winter when the teacher felt he couldn’t stay much longer in Dimonatsos’ house.  Especially as he had caught himself looking more and more often at his host’s younger daughter, Glykeria, still not quite 16 years old.  In fact, he had to admit to himself that he was falling in love with the strikingly blond haired and blue-eyed girl.  She was gentle and shy, always busy around the house helping her mother with the house work, cleaning, cooking, making bread, sowing and weaving. The elder daughter, Panagio, stronger in build, engaged but not yet married, was helping her father, as a son would have, in the orchard and the small fields.  They cultivated wheat and corn for their own use and grew their own vegetables and fruits like all other villagers.  Glykeria also helped her father with his tailoring.  During the winter months, Dimonatsos worked at home with scissors and a big thick needle and thimble to match.  He was known as the best maker of winter capes for the shepherds not only in Ritini but in the neighboring villages as well.  “He was a perfectionist in everything he did”, our brother says in one of the tapes I have of him speaking about the family.  We were all in awe of him but we were not afraid of him.  He was like a benevolent giant to me.  All of us remember him sitting cross-legged for hours, cutting and sowing everything by hand. Sowing machines were a great luxury and, even if he had one, he wouldn’t be able to use it on the thick hand-woven material that was used for winter capes.

When the teacher left Dimonatsos’ house, his brother Elias came up to Ritini and the two of them moved to an old house which had been abandoned, located at the edge of the village.  They fixed it up as best they could to make it habitable.  Fortunately Elias was quite a handyman.  He is remembered as being able to fix just about everything in the house, and he could repair shoes as well.  The house used to belong to the Turkish Bey who was the governor of that general area at the time of the Turkish occupation.  But all that northern part of Greece had been liberated for several years, since 1912-13, so the house was uninhabited and didn’t belong to anyone.

It wasn’t long after they settled in that the teacher asked for Glykeria’s hand in marriage. Dimonatsos refused not because his daughter was too young -- girls were married off very early in the Greek villages in those days --, but because she was uneducated.  He felt that she wasn’t worthy of being the teacher’s wife.  She had only gone to school enough to be able to read and write, like her father. The young teacher was disappointed and surprised by the reason he was given.  But he didn’t take no for an answer.  A little later he asked again, this time convincing Dimonatsos that Glykeria would indeed make a fine wife for him.  Yannis was happy to live in the village and didn’t have any plans to leave.  He was about twenty-eight years-old, she was just over sixteen.  Twelve years was not an unusual difference in age for the local customs.  He was a teacher, so whatever she didn’t know he would be happy to teach her. 

The two families had to meet for the engagement.  The teacher’s family made the trip from the plains to the mountains to meet the bride-to-be and the in-laws.  Dimonatsos put on his good American clothes for the occasion, a white-collar shirt, grey striped trousers, a black jacket, and his black-leather American boots.  His house was the nicest in the village, and Glykeria was well-mannered for a village girl.  She presented herself well and was quite beautiful, with blue-eyes and blond hair in thick plaits.  Nevertheless, it became known that, although both Dimonatsos and Glykeria made a good impression, the Papadopoulos family, although refugees themselves, still felt that this was a backward village inhabited by backward people.  They weren’t too happy to see their best educated son settling for life in a mountain village and marrying a local girl rather than another teacher or at least someone from Katerini with a little more education.  At least they would have liked to see him move to the town of Katerini. 

But they also respected him, and he was old enough to make decisions about his life.  So the engagement took place and the wedding date was promptly set.  They were married in the spring of 1922.  Yannis moved back to Dimonatsos’s house and a first daughter, Eleni, was born at the end of February 1923.  Three years later, in April 1926, another little daughter arrived, and they named her Xanthippi – the name of Socrates’ wife, which was, strangely enough, a fairly common name given to girls in Ritini.  It seems that this little girl was particularly pretty, so the name soon became “Xanthoula”, a diminutive of Xanthippi, carrying quite a different meaning: the “little blond girl”, a name associated with the word “xanthos” which means blond in Greek.  In spite of her name, she ended up a light brunette! 

Xanthoula grew to admire her elder sister Eleni who did very well at school and was generally admired by her school friends.  She was loved in return by her elder sister for her good nature and gentleness.  Later, during the German occupation, when the family went through its darkest hour, they both relied heavily on each other to pull through the hard times. Neither of them remembers any sibling rivalry on either side at any time.  But in the earlier days, her father was aware of the fact that Xanthoula was the middle child.  Born between the highly intelligent Eleni and their younger brother, Stefanos, who came three years after her and was growing to be a very smart if rather mischievous boy, she could have felt a little left out.  This possibility didn’t escape her father’s mind. Xanthoula remembers even today with emotion her father’s special attention towards her.  She remembers that every time he returned from a professional trip to the big cities of Athens or Thessaloniki, he would take her aside and give her some special gift.  She gratefully remembers his efforts to make her feel special and loved on many occasions.


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