Yiayia

                           She was an enduring presence in my life that hovered over me like a protecting angel. Evdoxia, which means Grace in Greek, was my maternal grandmother and the only one of my grandparents whom I knew personally.  I was her first born grandchild and she came to live with us when I was born. She helped raise me until I was five and then went on to help raise two more of her six grandchildren. Constantinople was my birthplace; otherwise known as Istanbul to everyone but the Greeks who still refer to her simply as "the city."  They consider the Tuesday in 1453 when she fell to the Turks as one of the darkest in our long and turbulent history.  My family was among the city's "Greek minority" that numbered over 100,000 at the time of my birth and was supposedly protected by the treaty that ended the Greek-Turkish War of 1921-22. That minority was the last vestige of a mighty Hellenic presence that had spanned thousands of years. "Never start anything important on Tuesday, my boy," yiayia once told me.  "It's an unlucky day for us." 

Yiayia had grown up in a remote mountain village named Politsani in Northern Epirus, married the son of a well-to-do merchant, eventually giving birth to three children.  The family moved to the "city" where my grandfather inherited his father's successful and thriving business.  Yiayia was beautiful, uneducated and had an independent streak that chafed under my grandfather's attempts to tame her spirit.  It was not a happy marriage, strained further by yiayia being suddenly thrust into the unfamiliar requirements of a  bourgeoisie life.  Despite all the comfortable trappings, the short, well coiffed hair and the stylish clothes, my grandmother would always be the product of her village upbringing.    She preferred the simple pleasures of working in her garden, spending endless hours in her aromatic kitchen or reading someone's fortune from the sediment at the bottom of their coffee cup.  I would ask Yiayia what her coffee cup told her.  She would smile and look carefully at it proclaiming that I would be lucky and happy in my life, even though I sensed that she had not been lucky or happy in hers.  I used to love watching her meticulously rolling dough into paper thin sheets with which she fashioned meat filled braids of pastry while she regaled me with stories of her childhood.  She always seemed busy with something at hand, digging up dandelion leaves with a knife, baking bread in an outdoor brick oven, planting flowers, tending her vegetable garden, cooking balls of fried dough which she would dip in honey and offer her guests or brewing another strong cup of Turkish coffee in her copper pot with the long handle.  To me she was soft and smelled of lemon cologne, on the inside however, she was as hard as a walnut, very much in the mold of the Epirotan women who carried ammunition boxes on their backs up narrow mountain trails to resupply the Greek soldiers fighting the Italian invaders in 1940.  

In her later years yiayia always wore her hair like the women of her village, pulled back, braided and coiled in a bun which she would loosen at night to comb while we talked. "Tell the Panagia about what bothers you, agoraki mou and she will always listen and pray for you," pointing to the icon on her dresser lit by a small oil lamp. When we lived in Turkey, she would often take me for a walk on sunny days down to Taksim square where the statute of a stern Kemal Ataturk looked down on us from his lofty perch. She  would invariably buy me a sweet roll sprinkled with sesame which I shared with the pigeons that congregated there, then she would swear me to secrecy, lest I divulge the fact to my mother.  And, of course, it was the first thing I blurted out when I came home running up the stairs. It was a game we played. 

Yiayia possessed her share of human frailties to which I was always totally oblivious.  To me she embodied all that one could want in another human being because she loved me unconditionally. Nothing else mattered, and I returned her love in kind. She was larger than life. An eagle who could swoop down and save me from harm.  Events later in my life would only confirm this image I had of her. Yiayia lived out her days in a small Maine town with my Aunt and her family after we emigrated from Turkey.  In what was one of the saddest days of my life, we had to leave yiayia with my aunt and uncle.  My father was unable to find work in Maine so we had to move on to New York City while she stayed behind. One less mouth to feed.  Luckily we were frequent visitors to Maine, taking the train north to spend holidays with our relatives there.  I was to share many happy days in her huge garden and the adjoining apple orchard.  Maine agreed with her and she took great pride in watching her grandchildren playing in her garden. Once a long slithering garter snake emerged from a woodpile to our horror and screams. Yiayia bounded out of her kitchen picked up a rock and with one throw crushed the poor things head. It was a harmless serpent though in my child's mind she had saved me once again from certain death as she has previously done on that fateful night of September 6, 1955.  

It was the year before we left for America, although at the time, as far as my parents were concerned, America might just as well have been on the moon.  My grandmother, mother and I were spending the last weekend of the summer outside of Istanbul in a small town along the Bosporus. We were staying in an old country house that my parents had rented for the summer to escape the heat of the city. The two story structure was dated, without indoor plumbing but solidly built with bars on the ground floor windows and a heavy wooden oak door. Baba had returned to work earlier that week and was awaiting our return in a few days. I was only five years old at the time, the trauma of that day however was imprinted indelibly in my memory. 

It began after dark on a Tuesday night, at a time when howling wolves roam in their packs and evil flourishes unencumbered by the light of day. I remember playing with a toy car on the carpeted floor that night while my mother read and yiayia knitted. Suddenly we heard the sound of church bells in the distance. My grandmother stood up, she had sensed immediately that something was wrong but she had no idea what it was. Little did she realize that anti-Greek riots had erupted on signal from the Turkish government of Adnan Menderes. In the midst of the turmoil in Cyprus, with the Greeks there pushing for enosis (union) with Greece, the Turks decided to send a message. As the police and the army stood passively on the sidelines, hired thugs transported to the city from dirt poor Anatolian villages began attacking pre-arranged targets from the center of the city at Taksim Square, out to its suburbs. The destruction was systematic, thorough and would have made any barbarian horde proud. Nothing Greek was spared, not even the dead in the cemeteries. Our home, along with many others belonging to ethnic Greek Turkish citizens had been marked.  At that moment, those two Greek women had no idea what was in store for them.

Yiayia immediately barred the door with a heavy iron bar and told my mother and I to go upstairs. I still remember hearing shouting and the sound of breaking glass as cobblestones were dug up and hurled at our windows. My grandmother rushed upstairs and ordered my mother to hide herself and me in a closet. My mother balked at the idea of leaving yiayia to face her fate alone and grabbing me, shoved me under a bed and told me not to move or make a sound. An angry crowd of Turks was loitering outside, shouting epithets and throwing the occasional cobblestone at the house. Years later yiayia described it as the sound of a pack of wolves. Loud banging at that door began in earnest but the mob was unable to dislodge the wrought iron crossbar though it was bent in the process nor crack the heavy oak door despite splitting the brass door knob in half. I can only imagine what must of been going through the minds of those two lonely women at the time. It was yiayia who decided to sew. They grabbed a red blanket on the bed, cut a white star and crescent from a bedsheet and began sewing it onto the blanket. In what must have seemed an eternity to them, they were finally able to hang the makeshift Turkish flag from the window. The effect was dramatic, the angry, milling crowd soon dispersed into the night. We had survived a pogrom thanks to my grandmother's instincts and presence of mind. 

I have often wondered why that handmade flag had saved our lives. Others were not as lucky that night. It wasn't until recently that I gained an understanding of its power.  It was during a photo op after a meeting between the respective prime ministers of the various NATO nations. The spots where they would stand to pose for a group picture were marked by a flag of their respective countries. Constantine Karamanlis  of Greece, like others, unwittingly stood on the symbol of his country. The prime minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Edrogan however, reached down, picked up the flag and kissed it. The symbolism was unmistakable. For the rioters that day in 1955, it was unthinkable that they could continue to attack a building draped with that flag.  The next morning my my mother warily left the house to fetch water from a local fountain. A teenage boy strutted up to her and spoke in Turkish: "Yesterday you were lucky, next time we will cut your throats, giaour (infidel)." 

After the fall of the Constantinople in 1453, Sultan Mehmed allowed his forces to enter and plunder the city. For three terrible days its inhabitants were terrorized and the city's homes and churches were looted or destroyed. In 1955, the Turks finally finished the job started so long ago.

A year later my family left for America, a country where you didn't have to be afraid of church bells ringing in the night and where we now display the flag out of pride rather than necessity.

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Comments

[Iris]

You're doing such a great work with your blog... Thanks a lot, Stavros, for that.

[Stavros]

Iris,

Very kind of you to say so. I'm glad you like it.

[petroskar@att.net]

stavros,
thank you for sharing your yiayia with
us.may god bless you with long life.
petros

[Richard Rozakis]

Stavros:
Although your yiayia and my mother were years apart their life styles were the same . Brings back a lot of memories having to do with their lives in Asia Minor.

Thanks for the story

[Stavros]

Petro and Mr. Rozakis,

Best wishes to both of you.

Women like them were forged and shaped in an era very different from ours. We will not see their like again for a long time, if ever.

May their memories be eternal.

[www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawlExMaz4B9mZQOD93RFLS8e0AewGQoi54U]

A very fine blog.