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.


Go to 8. "Four Siblings Together" Blog.

8. Four siblings together

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Four Siblings Together.

In 1986, when I first conceived the project of writing about our family, I was in Greece teaching as a visiting professor at the Aristotle University in Thessaloniki.  The summer of that year was a very special one: for the first time since we could remember, probably since 1950 before Xanthoula left Greece, all four of us siblings were together.  I decided to interview and tape all of them together as well as each one separately.  The information I have from those tapes is now an invaluable help in writing this story, and eventually in the writing up of the whole family history.  I could give here a summary from these tapes, to include memories from all three of my siblings, but for the purpose of this story it seems more relevant to focus on Xanthoula.  Because it is her story I want to tell.  It is her experience of the family life and her perception of relationships within the family that formed her character.  So at this point, I would like to share some of Xanthoula’s memories of early family life -- memories that I couldn’t have myself, being ten years younger. 

Her own eloquent voice will speak directly to us about her memories of what her childhood was like, what our father was like -- the father we so tragically lost in 1944 and of whom, no matter how hard I’ve tried, I have no memory at all.  At the beginning of that particular interview in 1986, I asked Xanthoula to describe our father and tell me what she could remember of him in her early years.

“Father was handsome, with beautiful black eyes, distinctive eyebrows, classical Greek nose.  He used to wear summer hats. Very impressive but not someone you couldn’t reach.  As a child I felt close to him. Very understanding, warm, very democratic in his handling of family affairs.

Not a typical Greek man, didn’t come in from work and put his feet up and ask his wife to bring his slippers and his newspaper.  He would help, would work alongside mother, they worked together and did things as they needed to be done.  He tried to involve us kids in decisions concerning the family.  We all got involved. 

I remember he used to go to Athens for school matters.  Always made a point of bringing something.  He probably brought presents for the others too, but I always felt that my present was better than the others’ presents.  He would say: “Never mind Xanthoula, I know everyone makes a fuss about Eleni, she is the eldest, but you are just as good as the others. I brought this specially for you”.  Once, when he came back from Athens he brought me a striped jacket, a cream jacket with red stripes. I will never forget it, it was so beautiful.  I was probably six or seven years old, I believe I was going to school already.  I have a photo wearing that jacket.  I felt sometimes I had no position in the family, but father made me feel I was important”.

Then I asked Xanthoula to tell me how she remembered our elder sister Eleni and our brother Stefanos, how she felt about them when they were growing up.  What she says is quite revealing about what she was like as a young girl.

“Mother didn’t pay special attention to Eleni or Stefanos, but friends and colleagues praised Eleni, how good she was at school.  I always felt Eleni was brighter than I but I was never jealous of her.  Eleni and I grew very close.  When I grew up enough to do things with Eleni, we did do things together.  I used to follow her around, I admired her.  I suppose I wanted to learn from her. I don’t have bad memories from Eleni, she paid attention to me.  I admired her because she wasn’t afraid to try things.  I was afraid to climb tree.  She always did.  She was the one to go up on the roof of the kitchen to lay the figs to dry.  She climbed up the mulberry tree to shake the branches while we held the sheet to collect them.  She was steady and brave.  She was serious.  She didn’t play with dolls.  We never had dolls anyway. 

Father treated Eleni as someone much older than she was.  Everyone treated Eleni as an adult.  Somehow she grew up before her time. I was closer to mother than Eleni was.  Eleni wasn’t interested much in cooking or sewing.

Stefanos was very bright, he could read the paper before he went to school, friends and relatives praised him.  He was very active, teasing everyone, very mischievous, climbing trees, a little crazy, didn’t fear anything. We all had to watch him  He loved sweets, he used to go to the big cupboard downstairs where mother kept all the sweets, loukoumia (Greek for Turkish delight), etc.  He used to eat the second row of loukoumia lifting the paper to eat from underneath.  Father never shouted, but he tried to reason with him, explaining why he shouldn’t do certain things. Mother spent a lot of her time with Stefanos, he needed watching, you never knew where he was, he was always climbing somewhere and falling and scratching himself.  He always tried to be in the middle of things, probably to attract attention.

Grandfather admired Eleni a lot, she was good at school. Eleni made a name for herself. From childhood, I was the “vain” one, I liked pretty things.  I might have been better-looking than Eleni and perhaps I was taking advantage of that to make people notice me.

I was interested in what mother was doing, but I didn’t feel very close to mother.  Neither of us felt very close to mother, we felt closer to father than to mother”.

That surprised me, because I couldn’t compare my two parents.  I have no memories of father, I only remember what it was like growing up with mother and of course grandfather.  When I asked Xanthoula why she didn’t feel as close to mother, she replied:

“Perhaps because mother herself didn’t have much confidence in herself.  She wasn’t grown up enough, mature enough, perhaps she felt she didn’t have enough to give us.  She was a lovely mother, she always made our clothes, made sure we were clean and well dressed.  We didn’t have enough money to be always buying new clothes, so I remember mother cutting father’s shirts to make blouses for us.  I remember mother putting a lot of care and love to make our school uniforms.  Mother was never very demonstrative, never got angry for example. I don’t remember ever being told off by her. She never raised her voice to tell off anyone”.

I knew that Xanthoula went to school in Katerini when father was the headmaster of the school.  So I asked what memories she had of him as a little school girl.

“I attended the school in which our father was a headmaster, but at school all kids were equal, and we never had any preferential treatment.  We couldn’t just go to talk to him at school. He was a busy man, he did a lot of voluntary work, he was well-loved by everyone.  We were very proud of our school, even the high-school teachers came to borrow some things from our school.

I can’t remember father doing anything wrong.  If there was a perfect man, he was that. Eleni could go out by herself, she was older, but father used to take me and Stefanos out for an ice cream on Sundays.  It was a very special time when he did that.

When I was fourteen years old, it wasn’t mother who prepared me for the pains of period.  Father was the one to explain to me what was going on.  Mother felt that he was the most suitable person to take care of those things.  But mother was firm in her own way.  She never referred to him for discipline.  She didn’t say “wait till your father comes home”.  If there was need for discipline and he wasn’t there, she could take care of that”.

I asked Xanthoula to tell me anything she could remember about the relationship between mother and father.  Here is what she said:

“I never heard them argue about anything, except once – at the beginning of the war, when he sold all the furniture in Thessaloniki and bought provisions to see us through the war.  Mother was upset about that.

We had a very peaceful life at home.  I remember him busy around her, I don’t remember them fighting about anything.  He used to show her: “Glykeria, this has to be done this way”, and she would do it.  Mother was a very shy, not a talkative person.  For ever she seemed to have sad blue eyes.  She was brighter in the village in the summer.  She probably felt more at home, more people came through the house, she looked happier up there”.

I then asked her to give me her perception of the role of our grandfather.  In my experience, grandfather was the only man in the house when I was growing up in the village during the war years.  My brother Stefanos was still too young for me to see him as the man in the family, and he was away at school in Katerini during the German Occupation. 

“Our grandfather never took the place of the boss when father was around, he always took second place.  He was helpful with mother, he had his things to do, his routine.  There were no fights between mother and grandfather, but grandfather had strong ideas, if he wanted to do something he would go ahead and do it”.

As for the relationship between grandfather and father, she says:

“There was an admiration on both sides.  I remember father always asked the advice of grandfather, especially in the village, because it was his “territory” – the garden, the trees, etc.  Grandfather always left the city before us to go up to Ritini, to clean and whitewash the house, plant the vegetable garden, prepare everything for the family.  I don’t remember any problems or arguments between them.  It was a harmonious life...”

Xanthoula then reminisced about our grandfather and about the house in the village, where almost everything had been made by him.  I too have vivid memories of that house, its garden, the neighborhood, and our grandfather’s orchard where he and I spent many of our days, especially during the summers.  I lived through the war and the German Occupation years in Ritini, between 1940 and late 1944, when the Germans retreated from our area.  After that, even when we all moved into the city, first Katerini in 1944, and then Thessaloniki in 1946, I still spent many of my summers in the village with mother and grandfather until I left for Australia in 1955.  But for now, I will let Xanthoula speak, as it is her reality and her memories that are more relevant to her story.

“Grandfather made capes for shepherds, sitting cross-legged on the floor.  He also gave a lot of love and care to his garden in Agia Paraskevi.  He went everyday to work there, and he always came back with full baskets.

He had constructed a special wooden structure to support the vine with white grapes.  There was a lower part and a higher part, the latter was more like a reception area, where we had the gramophone.  The “paranga” (Greek for large shed) was an outside kitchen with big storage cupboards where flour was kept to make bread.  There was a big wooden table with benches, on the left side there was a “baoulo” (Greek for big chest) where the bread was kept.  Next to it was the big oven where bread was baked, and there was also a wash basin”.

And then some final general comments:

“We had a lot of visitors, especially on father’s name day.  The house was always neat and tidy, with the traditional “glyko” waiting (sweet made of fruit, mostly cherries, and served with a small spoon on a special glass plate).  We always celebrated Easter, Mother made it a special occasion.  On Eleni’s name day, her friends, and sometimes their parents, would come to visit.  As teenagers we had the same friends, the same company”.

There is no need for me to comment.  During that whole interview Xanthoula spoke simply but eloquently: until the war came it was a “peaceful” and “harmonious” life that she lived with her parents, grandparents and siblings.  She was a happy young girl.

Cameras weren’t exactly commonplace in Greece at the time, but we have several photos even from those early years: some formal school photos, some with father on special occasions such as school celebrations, some with friends during excursions and picnics around the village in summertime.  Special school friends of both girls were welcome to come and spend holidays in our house in the village.  There are enough photos of such occasions and, as in the case of the Wrigley photos, they tell us quite a lot.  For example, it is obvious that Xanthoula was a pretty girl, with a smile that lit up her face, big brown eyes under well-defined eyebrows and soft waves of light brown hair.  Later, in the high school photographs, she wears her hair in two long plaits that come down on either side of her face according to the fashion then in Greece, reaching all the way down to her slender waistline.  Already those photos show the promise of a beautiful young woman.  That is even more clearly seen in the few photos taken after the war, when she was in her early twenties.  Unfortunately, after a happy and stable childhood in the village and later in Katerini and Thessaloniki, her life took a dramatic turn beginning in 1940.  From the age of 14 until the age of 24, that is between 1940 and 1950, she was to live through the fear and the horror of WWII, the German Occupation, our father’s arrest, imprisonment and execution, and finally the horror of the Greek civil war, when our sister Eleni barely escaped the firing squad.  These painful events will be described one by one and as accurately as possible, to give an idea of the kind of life Xanthoula lived during those ten years and what led her to the decision in 1950 to change her life so radically.

Xanthoula’s painful personal journey and that of our whole family began when the Italian dictator, Mussolini, attacked Greece in 1940. The clouds of a World War had been gathering during the late 1930s, threatening the freedom of many European countries.  Our father had been following all the ominous events that led to it: the rise of Hitler and his Nazi Party in Germany, his expansion into the Rhineland in 1936, the pact with Japan, the alliance Hitler struck with Mussolini in Italy creating the Berlin-Tokyo-Rome Axis.  The annexation of Austria in 1938, the occupation of the Sudetenland first and the march through to Prague in 1939, all of these moves left no doubt as to Hitler’s plans and intentions.  Here was someone who wanted to conquer the world.  As for Mussolini, after easily sweeping through Albania in his drive to conquer the Mediterranean countries, he was met with the refusal to surrender on the part of the Greek government. 

The resounding “OXI” (Greek for “NO”) was pronounced oddly enough by a dictator, Ioannis Metaxas, who had studied military science in the Prussian Military Academy in Berlin and was an admirer of German discipline!   When the monarchy was restored in 1935,  thanks to a suspicious plebiscite, he became Deputy Prime Minister of Greece and a year later he was appointed Premier by King George II.  Metaxas ran a quasi-Fascist government and admired Hitler, at least to begin with, but he never became his puppet or that of Mussolini.  When Mussolini demanded Italian bases on Greek territory, Metaxas refused and therefore Mussolini declared war against Greece on October 28^th 1940.  Europeans watched a small country raise its fist against the Italian army.  Metaxas took command of the Greek army himself and achieved an unexpected victory. The Italians were driven out of Greece by the end of the year.  Italian-dominated Albania started being invaded and the Greek army managed to control most of Northern Epirus, which was about a quarter of Albania.

Mussolini was defeated while Hitler had turned his attention to northern Europe.  But now it was obvious to those who were following the news that sooner or later German forces would strike at Greece’s door, which indeed happened soon after Mussolini’s failure.  Just as Hitler started readjusting his forces to do that, Ioannis Metaxas died in January 1941.  

As soon as the war broke out, the teacher thought of moving his family (grandfather, his wife Glykeria and the four children) away from the city of Thessaloniki.  He thought that the village would provide more safety from bombardments and from hunger.  He could foresee what was to come, as he had already been through the havoc and destruction caused by war.  As a young officer in the Russian army during WWI, he had seen the devastation brought by the Germans. Wanting to protect his family from that experience as much as possible, he discussed it in his usual “democratic” way with grandfather, his wife, and the two older girls, who were by now participating in major decisions concerning the family.   Everyone but our mother thought that moving to the village seemed like the most sensible thing to do under the circumstances. We had a home ready and waiting for us in Ritini where we spent every summer, a couple of small fields and an orchard and vegetable garden that could feed the family.  Clean air and a dry mountain climate were also a plus.  The teacher knew that the city would be devastated by bombardments and very likely infested with illnesses.  (As it happened, mother had just recovered from a serious illness during which she spent quite a long time in hospital.  After which she was taken, with me as well, for convalescing in the care of father’s own family in the village of Sfendami.)  If we left for Ritini, mother would have relatives close-by and, as far as father’s position was concerned, he would ask for a transfer as soon as possible back to his very first job as a teacher in the village school.  He knew that school well.  He had worked hard there for eight years, six of them as Headmaster before he was promoted to Headmaster of the First Municipal School in Katerini. He had also been involved more personally with the people of the village: he helped with support and advice, with medicines and first-aid treatment when necessary, treating wounds, giving injections or dispensing quinine for malaria.  Apart from having been the only “doctor” most of the village people would ever see, he helped in many other ways.  Father submitted to the proper authorities the paperwork for widows’ pensions -- the widows and orphans of the men who had been killed in the disastrous war with Turkey.  Those women couldn’t even read and write let alone fill papers and apply for war pensions.  For several years he had been given by local authorities the responsibility of collecting the money in Katerini and distributing it to the soldiers’ families.  After all that, he felt he knew the people of the village.  Being pure of heart, he didn’t realize that there also were those who were envious of him.  While he was able to predict just about everything else, he could not foresee that the transfer back to Ritini would lead to his death.

Here is a good moment to add a little more information about our father and his life as a teacher.  Being proud of our father and trying to live up to his example and his principles have been major factors in shaping all of us, his children as well as some of his pupils, in our lives, in the professions we chose and in the decisions we made.  Xanthoula especially, who loved her father very deeply, was particularly affected.  All of this is connected to the story of Xanthoula and Bert, because if our father hadn’t believed in the things he believed and hadn’t lived the way he lived, he wouldn’t have died the way he did.  And all of our lives, including Xanthoula’s, would have been different...

Through sheer hard work, dedication, enthusiasm, a progressive vision of a profession he loved and a profound love for humanity -- a characteristic every true ‘teacher’ should have --, our father, Ioannis Papadopoulos, although he had come to Greece as a refugee with nothing but a teacher’s diploma in his hands, was recognized over the years by his superiors as an outstanding teacher and administrator.  He received praises and prizes, high evaluations still in my collection of family documents, and promotions he deserved.  He had created in the town of Katerini a model school when he was transferred there from the village of Ritini in 1929.  Within a year of his appointment as Principal, the First Municipal School of Katerini was unrecognizable. Its grounds were cleaned up for the children to run and play without fear of hurting themselves.  The piles of rubble and debris filling the basement were cleared away and previously unusable spaces were turned into functional rooms. A plan to serve the students milk and bread every morning in that very basement was soon established and implemented.  The poorest were given priority.  Xanthoula remembers that she, her elder sister Eleni and later their little brother Stefanos were not allowed to go down for that morning treat, or later for the meals served to the children from poor families through the goodwill of charitable people in the community.  The Headmaster considered that there were many children who needed it more, while his own children had already had breakfast at home and a meal would be waiting for them when they returned. All of my siblings remember that the only time they could have such meals was if everyone who was hungry had eaten, and if there was anything left over they could pay 2 drachmas to eat.  There were no exceptions.  

Within the nine years of his service at that school he completely transformed it.  The stairs to the entrance were rebuilt and widened, balconies with railings were added all around the classrooms and side exits with stairs were built as a safety measure.  New furniture was bought for the school, broken desks were replaced, encyclopedias and other educational materials were added to the library.  It was the only school in the area known to possess a life-size transparent copy of the human body brought from Germany, showing in detail all internal organs, systems of arteries, veins, and so on.  Even high school students were brought in to see this as a ‘field trip’, and the Headmaster was again praised in the annual evaluation by the District School Inspector.

“Ioannis Papadopoulos: Instructor of exceptional character.  Nature created Papadopoulos to be a teacher. Indefatigable, he takes the lead in all matters. Work does not tire him, it is sustenance for him. Of incomparable zeal, and assiduity. He is studious and follows the new pedagogical methods which he successfully implements. He has outstanding administrative abilities, and he instills in the school an atmosphere of love, one in which disagreements are calmly and peacefully resolved without becoming known outside the school. He has a special genius in organizing schools. He succeeds in creating resources and thus his school is not deprived of anything. Papadopoulos is the pride of school teachers.  It has been said about him before that he is “Petros Anezis”.    

 G. Poullos

 Katerini, May 15, 1934.

Reference is made here to a Greek hero, Petros Anezis – a teacher who had transformed the life of a small village and took part, together with some of his own pupils, in the 1912-1913 war of independence when northern Greece was finally liberated from Turkish rule.  The teacher, an inspiration to his pupils, went to fight with them and died in that war of independence.  The District School Inspector who wrote the above evaluation had followed what Papadopoulos had done in the school and the village of Ritini, and could appreciate what he was doing in Katerini.  So the reference to this earlier outstanding teacher, Petros Anezis, seemed to fit well.  He couldn’t foresee that ten years later Papadopoulos would also die as a martyr in another struggle for freedom of the Greek people.

The other teachers too, some young and others older, were inspired anew and began putting forth their best efforts.  By now, when people said ‘O Daskalos’ (The Teacher), those who knew him understood that this was referring to Ioannis Papadopoulos.  He enjoyed the esteem of his colleagues as well as of the people in the town where he lived and worked, and his activities soon extended into other areas as well. He became an active member of the church board, organizing events not only for the benefit of the school but for wider charitable aims as well. He had a way of inspiring others and was able to mobilize an unprecedented number of ladies in Katerini, who not only opened their wallets but also gave of their time. They volunteered in order to help the teacher in his work, serving breakfast and working soup kitchens for poor school children and needy families.

How did the teacher find the resources he needed to manage all of this?  The inspector who wrote the individual report quoted above may have known more details but did not write about them in his brief but highly praising report.  Fortunately, some of the ways the teacher raised funds survived in the memory of his oldest daughter, Eleni.  She recalled that her father had created, among some of the more affluent residents of Katerini, a circle of donors whose contributions were honored in various ways. For example, at school fêtes, the first few rows of seats were reserved for these benefactors, and bore their names waiting for them to arrive. Even if deceased, the seats would continue to bear their names and remain empty out of respect, thus expressing the gratitude the school had for them.

His interest in promoting education was not limited to Katerini. The villages of the region had many needs.  Indeed some of them had no school at all.  To learn to read and write, many children had to walk through mud and fields to reach the nearest village with a school.  The village Rachi (meaning ‘Ridge’), only a few kilometers outside of Katerini, was one of them.   Although there is now a paved road all the way, one doesn’t reach it quickly even by car, situated as it is on the ridge of a high and prominent hill.  There is now a bus that goes up there at various times through the week, but at that time there were no means of transport other than horses, mules, donkeys, or most often walking.  Papadopoulos heard the plight of the people of Rahi and set out to establish a school there.  With his good name and fine reputation in the service of the District School Inspectorate, he succeeded in founding a public school in that village.  Ioannis Kourtis, one of the oldest living residents and a prominent man in the village, now 84 years old, still remembers the teacher who paved the way for the literacy of their children. He also remembers receiving private lessons from him, together with Xanthoula who was of the same age, to prepare for the entrance exam into high school.  He was the first boy from his village to be admitted to high school in Katerini and later made sure that Papadopoulos was honored and recognized as the founder of the village school.  A framed photograph of our father with the proper inscription still hangs on the new school’s wall.  As fate would have it, we are now related to the Kourtis family by marriage: his son, Nikos, married our brother’s daughter, and my sisters and I have, as a result, visited the village and discovered our father’s photo in the school.  Rachi is considered now as one of the most progressive villages in the area.  In the younger generations there are people who distinguished themselves in various fields, and every year the Council of the village hosts a cultural conference lasting three full days.  I attended one of these conferences and was surprised and moved to hear one of the guest speakers, a University professor, speak about my father and his contribution to education in the area.

A few pages cannot sum up such a man and his life and there is a lot more to be said about him,  but this brief outline of the figure of our father gives an idea of the kind of environment in which Xanthoula grew up.


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