An Icon

On top of my dresser stands a postcard-sized gold-leaf icon of the Virgin and Child.  Greeks would immediately recognize it as the Virgin Glykophilousa, a stylized portrayal of the young mother tenderly pressing her cheek to her son's.  But my icon is Russian, and Cyrillic letters embossed on a tiny banner proclaim the image to be the "Virgin of Vladimir."


The Virgin of Vladimir

Russians have had a special affection for the Virgin Glykophilousa ever since the 12th century when a processional version, painted in egg tempera on wood and venerated in Constantinople by the Komnenoi, was brought to Kiev.  This Byzantine prototype was later removed to the Cathedral of the Dormition in Vladimir and as the "Virgin of Vladimir" became the palladium of the Russian church and state, saving Moscow from Tatar invasions, it is said, no less than three times.  The original, much copied, still exists and can be seen in Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery.

My little golden imitation entered my mother's family during the Russo-Turkish War (1877-1878).  It is said to have been left behind by Russian soldiers, possibly officers, who had commandeered the home of Dimitrios and Elisavet Cosolias, my maternal great-grandparents.  The Cosolias home was in Peristasi (ancient Teristasis), an ethnically Greek seaside village of Eastern Thrace, then a province of the Ottoman Empire (now part of Turkey) bordering the northern shore of the Sea of Marmara.  At the end of January 1878, an exhausted but victorious Russian army, having battered its way through the Balkan mountains in a legendary winter campaign, reached the Sea of Marmara and remained in the vicinity of Peristasi through mid-August.

The Cosolias family, merchants for many generations, were relatively well to do.   Their Peristasi home was probably requisitioned by the Russian solders because it was among the village's largest and finest -- the only one with a fanlight over the front door.

Like many other Ottoman territories beyond Greece's then-existing borders, Eastern Thrace had a sizeable Greek population that yearned for union with Greece.  But despite the Russian victory in 1878, Eastern Thrace remained firmly in the Ottoman grasp right through World War I.  Greeks there, including the Cosolias family, lived in increasingly tense political and social conditions brought about by the re-settlement of large numbers of Muslim refugees generated by Ottoman territorial losses elsewhere, especially in the First and Second Balkan Wars (1912-1913).

The final blow came in September 1922 when Mustafa Kemal's Turkish nationalist troops set fire to Smyrna on the Asia Minor coast, annihilating thousands of Greek and Armenian Christians in a ghastly seaside holocaust.  Foreseeing themselves as Kemal's next victims, the Greeks of Eastern Thrace immediately began fleeing their farms and villages in droves, most trekking westward in grim processions through early winter mud to the safety of the Greek frontier.  But despite the slaughter at Smyrna and the mass exodus from Eastern Thrace, large mixed populations of Christians and Muslims still remained in Greek and Turkish territories.  Such mixtures had become untenable, and they were separated by the compulsory exchange of populations mandated by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923).


Among the 1.3 million Greek Orthodox evacuees from Turkish territory was my maternal great-grandmother, Elisavet Daimitrou Cosolias, by then a widow in her seventies whose six children had already re-located to Greece and America.  When the time for evacuation came in 1923, she and the other remaining Greeks in Peristasi were loaded into boats launched directly from the beach.  These met transport ships waiting offshore, which would deliver the evacuees to refugee camps set up in Athens.

Either as Elisavet's boat left the beach or as she boarded the transport ship, Turkish authorities dumped her trunks overboard.  So she arrived in Athens with only what she had packed in her hand luggage.  This included the Virgin of Vladimir icon, which the Russian soldiers had left with her forty-five years earlier.

Elisavet Cosolias (seated) with her son Dimitrios
(my grandfather) and granddaughter Elizabeth (my mother),
together with my mother's infant first cousins
Nick and Helen Kazepis (Zoe's children) in Ann Arbor (1926)

In the Athenian refugee camp, Elisavet's home for most of a year was a shelter fashioned from olive oil tins.  In 1924 she immigrated to Utica, New York, to live with her son Dimitrios and his family.  She later moved to her daughter Zoe's home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she died in 1937.  In her long lifetime she witnessed the late-19th century clash of tottering empires (Russian and Ottoman) and was caught in an early-20th century war between toddler nations (Greece and Turkey).  Through it all she clung to the Virgin of Vladimir icon and until her last days could still speak some Russian.

*  *  *

During a summer trip to Greece and Turkey in 1969, my mother decided she would visit Peristasi (by then renamed Şarköy) to see the places she knew from descriptions heard as a young girl, perhaps even to gaze at the Cosolias house.  My father and I accompanied her there on a sunny August day, anxious for her sake about what she would find.

Just as she had been told, the village was set gem-like beside the sea, its main square opening directly onto a sandy beach -- no doubt the same one from which her grandmother and namesake, Elisavet Cosolias, had been evacuated in 1923.   But aside from the marine setting and the orientation of the main square, the Peristasi of my mother's childhood narratives eluded her completely.  None of the landmarks she had heard so much about and expected to see revealed themselves that day.  What we came upon was a thoroughly Turkish village of about 4,500 souls lacking any vestige of its Greek past.  No one spoke Greek, and no one remembered much about the Peristasi of old.

Our evident bewilderment must have inclined the town's young French-speaking veterinarian, Necdet Taki, to introduce himself and make us feel welcome.  At a café in the square he treated us to coffee.  But as obliging as he tried to be he was too young to answer my mother's questions about old Peristasi.  In particular, he did not know of a house with a distinguishing fanlight.  Then he struck on the idea of calling for Ahmet Hilmi Doğan.

Ahmet and Necdet

This brought forth a leathery Turk who looked to be in his eighties and could still remember a bit of Greek.  In response to my mother's questions Ahmet asked whether she was searching for the home of Dimitrios or Constantinos.  His question bespoke an accurate memory of two Cosolias brothers, one of whom -- Dimitrios (Elisavet's husband) -- owned the house with the fanlight.

Now, at last, my mother had evidence that Peristasi was not just a disquieting dream.  So we set off from the café to find the house, Ahmet and the kindly veterinarian leading us through the town's unpaved streets.  Our group swelled as we went, enlarged by a steady accretion of adults and children (and even some animals), all curious to know what these Americans had come to find.

At a modern one-story building just off the main street, Ahmet halted.  Here, he said, pointing to the non-descript structure, was where the house of Dimitrios Cosolias once stood, a large two-story building destroyed by an earthquake.  Around the corner had been the home of brother Constantinos, now also gone.  We snapped a photo, but my mother was still dazed by the confusion of seeing yet not seeing Peristasi, sadly realizing that this was as close as she would come to finding the ancestral home she felt she knew and had so acutely hoped to see.

As we stood in the street trying to reconcile ourselves to these disappointments, a tiny old man, older even than Ahmet, came forward through the throng proffering a tattered letter written in pre-Romanized Turkish and signed in Greek with the name "Timoleon Kalfas."  He spoke a few words in Turkish to the veterinarian, who then informed us that this old man was Timoleon Kalfas's brother.  My mother recognized the Kalfas name from childhood and deduced that the old-timer standing before her was a distant relative by marriage.  He was one of the very few Greeks who had not left Peristasi, but he could no longer speak his mother tongue.  His eyes moistened when the veterinarian explained to him who my mother was, for old Kalfas remembered playing as a young boy with her father.

So on a sunny afternoon in August 1969, the unsolicited kindness of a young Turk and the healthy memory of an old one brought my mother face to face in the dusty street of Şarköy with a teary old man -- perhaps the last Greek left there -- who remembered her father.  In the brief moment of their encounter, they shared a glimpse of all-but-forgotten Peristasi, where well more than a century ago a small Russian icon was left behind in a Greek house, the one with the fanlight over the front door.

This article appeared in Odyssey magazine as "A Glimpse of Peristasi" (Nov./Dec. 2007), pp. 94-95.  A longer version was circulated privately in 2001.

Vatselia

Dennis Livadas, my genteel great-uncle, lived most of his quiet life on Cephalonia, the largest of Greece's Ionian Islands.  During the cold rainy winters, he and his wife Eleutheria, a warm-hearted whirlwind, sheltered in the capital, Argostoli, where they had an apartment and could be close to doctors and pharmacies.  But as soon as the weather turned warm they decamped for the long sunny summers to their small house in my family's mountainside ancestral village, Angona.

Dennis Livadas (1889-1979)

In a tin box kept in the shed behind the Angona house, Dennis preserved a sheaf of old family papers.  Somehow they survived the 1953 earthquake that leveled most of the island.

One summer afternoon in 1976, Dennis brought the tin box out to us on the shady jasmine-scented terrace where we gathered nearly every day after our siestas and afternoon swims to sip coffee and watch the sun slip into the Ionian Sea beyond the Gulf of Myrtos and Cape Kakata.  For an hour or so, we marveled at the contents of Dennis's tin box:  fragile, yellowed, yet stubbornly tangible links to our family's remote past.  I distinctly remember looking at the papers that afternoon, but I have completely forgotten whatever Dennis told us about them.

*  *  *

The old documents are with me now, and I dip into them when I can.  Most are hand-written in Greek, some in Italian.  Many -- bearing embossed official seals or colorful stamps -- show flowing clerical hands.  Others are tentative semi-literate scrawls.  The oldest, dated 1701, mentions something that happened in 1698.

Ever so slowly, their unfamiliar orthographies yield recognizable letters.  The letters meld into words, the words into phrases, the phrases into comprehensible sentences.  And from out of the sentences emerges life itself:  places, possessions, people -- my people. 

Save for the strange swirls and squiggles on these musty old pages, nothing of my distant ancestors' vibrant lives would be known today.  But here they are, in my hands, immortalized.  Dowries are arranged.  Couples marry.  Babies are baptized.  Olives are harvested and pressed.  Properties change hands.  Loans are made and repaid.  Disputes arise and are resolved.  You can almost hear their voices.


Sinoikesion of 1702

One of the oldest documents is a sinoikesion, a two-page dowry conveyance dated January 1702.  The conveyance is by Nikoletos (or Nikolos) and Maria Kokinatos to their daughter Andriana and her husband Panagioti Livada, son of Nikolo, probably my paternal ancestor.  Beneath the banner of "Christ Victor," Nikolos and Maria begin by piously invoking not merely the Holy Trinity but also Our Lady the All-Holy God-Bearer (Theotokos) and her Only-Begotten (Monogenes) Son.  Then they solemnly confer the land parcels at "Masato" (both the terrace and the slope) and "Plakes" (at the cape, near "Grizaki") and the vineyard at "Felikia," all possibly on nearby Ithaca.  Each parcel is measured in vatselia, an Ionian Islands land measure now long out of use (one vatselio = 120 square meters).

The dowry also includes:

• a gold ring and gold earrings (valued in Spanish reales)
•  40 Venetian ducats
• 1 olive tree
• 12 forks and small silver spoons
• 1 walnut chest
• 3 mattresses (two filled with hair, one empty)
• 1 bolster (makrinara)
• 10 bedsheets
• 3 printed quilts
• 12 shirts
• 8 aprons
• 8 face towels (three decorative)
• 2 ordinary tablecloths
• 2 dozen table napkins
• 1 jacket dress
• 1 used dress

The parents' largesse is recorded in rudimentary Greek by Elias, the bride's brother, at his father's direction.  Elias tells us so just after his father affirms the gift in his own hand.

*  *  *

At the time, Cephalonia, Ithaca, and the other Ionian Islands were Venetian colonies, the Isole del Levante.  They had been subject to the Serenissima's direct rule since 1500; her indirect over-lordship went back to 1386.  After Venice finally succumbed to Napoleon in 1797, the Ionian Islands passed through French, Russian, French (again), and finally British hands before being ceded to Greece in 1864.

By 1702, Venice was in decline.  The Ionian Islands, a few Adriatic ports, and the recently recovered Morea (as the Peloponnesus was then called) were all that remained of the Republic's storied overseas empire.

Still, when Nikolos and Maria gave the dowry to Andriana and Panagioti, Cephalonia and the other Ionian Islands were squarely within the Venetian world.  The islands were governed from Corfu by the Provveditore Generale del Levante, usually a Venetian aristocrat appointed for a three-year term directly by the Venetian Grand Council.  As his predecessors had done for centuries, he exercised the Republic's absolute authority through a Provveditore Ordinario acting as governor in each island.  Through this simple administrative structure, Venice efficiently exploited the Ionian Islands' natural wealth -- currants, olives, honey, wax, and wine.

Cephalonia had an additional resource, abundant timber, and the island's mountain forests were reserved for Venice's exclusive use.  This nearly decimated the island's native fir species (Abies cephalonica), prized for the masts, spars, and oars of Venetian galleys.  [Update (9/28/17):  According to an early director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, at the beginning of the 19th century Cephalonia's main peak (Mount Aenos) was covered with fir trees until "nearly half" were swept away by fire; "about one-third" of the remainder, he says, were similarly destroyed at the end of the 19th century.  See Rufus B. Richardson, Vacation Days in Greece (1903), at 15-16.]

Castle of St. George

From his seat in the now ruined Castle of St. George near Argostoli, the Cephalonian Provveditore Ordinario, aided by two councilors, oversaw the island's squabbling nobility, a local and imported amalgam effectively co-opted through enrollment in the Cephalonian Libro d'Oro, a cadet branch of its Venetian namesake.  These fractious successors to the six original Frankish barons could alone hold public office and bear arms.  Competing families kept the peasantry in perpetual serfdom and conducted bloody intrigues through squads of hired bravi.  There was a small class of artisans and merchants, but all real power, both political and commercial, was firmly in Venetian hands.

Venice's long rule may have been indifferent, and the Republic's heavy and numerous indirect taxes must have been burdensome, but with Venetian dominion also came Venetian protection.  And there was good reason to be grateful for it.  Since the 15th century, steady westward Ottoman conquests had brought the nearby Greek mainland (less than two dozen sea miles away at the nearest point) firmly under Turkish control.  Twice, Cephalonia had been occupied (1479-1481 and 1485-1500); and in 1538 an Ottoman raid carried off 13,000 inhabitants into slavery.

In 1699, only three years before Nikolos and Maria conveyed their vatselia, Venice recovered the Morea.  The sinoikesion parties must have breathed a little easier for it.  But the possibility of Ottoman conquest was still a disquieting threat.  North of the Gulf of Corinth, the Greek mainland remained menacingly Ottoman.  And south of the Gulf, the Venetian hold on the Morea was tenuous (the Turks would re-conquer it in 1715).  In the Ionian Islands, therefore, Venetian protection meant relative safety. Ottoman control would have meant outright slavery or crushing exactions, particularly the annual head tax (the charatch) and the periodic blood tax (the paidomazoma, the abduction of Christian boys for conversion to Islam and service in the Ottoman military).

*  *  *

Venetian control had another important benefit.  Catholic Venice was generally tolerant of the Greek Orthodox majorities in her colonies.  Their priesthood was not banned, nor their allegiance to the Œcumenical Patriarch in Constantinople.  Churches of both rites abounded, and the two communities co-existed peacefully.  Venice's tolerance explains the sinoikesion's manifestly Greek Orthodox invocation.  When calling upon God, Nikolos and Maria were perfectly free to use the Greek Orthodox formulas their forebears had used from time immemorial.

Nevertheless, the Catholic Church had at least symbolic precedence in the Ionian Islands.  When the Provveditore Generale stepped ashore at each island for his annual visit, protocol decreed that he kiss, in order, first the cross and Gospels proferred by the Catholic bishop, then those presented by the Greek chief priest (protopapas).

The easy co-existence of Catholicism and Greek Orthodoxy during Venice's long sway is reflected in church architecture in the Ionian Islands.  Unusually for Greek-rite churches, most in the Ionian Islands are built western-style on the basilican plan:  no Greek-cross floor plan, no transepts.  The church of the All-Holy Lady of the Ravine (Panaghia Langadhiotissa) -- our family's neighborhood church in Angona -- is no exception.

Panaghia Langadhiotissa - Angona

Even the church's intricately carved and gilded altar screen owes its existence to Venice, or at least to Venice's misfortunes.  In the late 17th century (surely within Nikolos and Maria's memory), Venice's territorial losses -- particularly Crete (1669, after a 21-year siege) -- swelled Cephalonia's population with tens of thousands of Greek refugees.  Among the Cretans re-settled in Cephalonia were numerous skilled woodcarvers and the Couloumbis family, who made Angona their new home and became our cousins.  According to family lore, the Panaghia Langadhiotissa's Venetian baroque altar screen was donated by a thankful member of the Couloumbis family and was presumably fashioned by one or more of the émigré Cretan woodcarvers.

In Angona, the altar screen was the only structure that survived the 1953 earthquake.  The church collapsed around it and was reduced to rubble like the rest of the village, including my great-grandfather's house across the street.  A new Angona, built to anti-seismic specifications, was relocated a little farther downhill.  But the All-Holy Lady of the Ravine was resurrected around the hardy old altar screen.  Now, rather than simply stepping across the street to church as my great-grandfather did, you have to climb uphill to the ruins of the old village, just as you do to visit the cemetery.

*  *  *

The sinoikesion is proof that Nikolos and Maria held land in their own right and could transfer it as they pleased.  This suggests they were among the Isole del Levante's bourgeoisie.  And if like married like, then Panagioti, my Livadas ancestor, was probably of equal social rank with the donors.  In Angona, two thousand or so residents supported three or four churches as late as the first decades of the 20th century.  Assuming the village was similarly populous in 1702, it would have been large enough to support a number of merchants and artisans.  My Livadas ancestors were probably among them.

In 1702, written proof of a transfer of vatselia and other valuables still counted for something, and the sinoikesion is evidence of the continuity of literacy in the Ionian Islands.  The rudiments of Greek reading and writing were still known, and not merely by a professional scribe but by no less than the bride's brother.  And if Elias could write Greek, then presumably Panagioti (and perhaps even Andriana) could read it.

Such literacy was remarkable considering that Venice did not promote education in the Ionian Islands.  A few teachers of Greek and Italian were allowed, but they were confined to the main towns.  Surely no town in Ithaca (where the vatselia may have been located) was large enough to merit a Greek teacher.  The same would have been true of Angona.

Isolation would also have contributed to the difficulty of acquiring literacy in 1702.  Angona, in the remote northwest of Cephalonia, would have been extremely difficult for a teacher to reach or for a student to leave.  Footpaths and mulepaths were the only connections between villages.  Cephalonia's first proper carriage roads  -- a network of stupendous military engineering that finally unified the island during Britain's protectorate -- were more than a century in the offing.

Still today, the main road passing through Angona follows the same twisting route hacked, dynamited, and scraped along the mountainside by the skillful British engineers in the first two decades of the 19th century.  It remained unpaved until 1971.

In Angona, literacy may have come by sea, the traditional escape route for generations of Cephalonian men.  The nearest harbor accessible from Angona is Aghia Kyriaki, nearly an hour's serpentine walk down the mountainside (the original mulepath was widened into a road, now paved).  The little fishing harbor is unfavorably exposed to the maistro, the prevailing northwest wind.  But despite the uncomfortable swell that usually rolls in, Aghia Kyriaki must have offered the easiest outlet to the wider world before the British built the roads.  If Andriana was an Ithacan bride, she probably brought her dowry to Angona by sea.  If so, Aghia Kyriaki was her most likely landing place.

Venice permitted Cephalonia's wealthier sons to study at the university in Padua, and they had a tradition of doing so.  Many never returned, but some did, often trained as doctors.  After the Venetians left, vatselia fell out of use, and Cephalonian (and Ithacan) land came more commonly to be measured in stremmata, square meters, and hectares.  But Cephalonians held to the tradition of Padovan medical study.  As late as the generation before World War II, Angona's resident physician, Nestor Livadas, acquired his medical degree from Padua.  My cousin Peter Couloumbis says that Nestor was renowned for his resourcefulness and skill.

Foreword

According to my dictionary, a totem is "an animal, plant, or other object serving as the emblem of a family or clan and often regarded as a reminder of its ancestry." 

 

My ancestry being Greek, this blog will be about Greek things, not necessarily animals or plants, but certainly the occasional object.  Over the years I've written various things related to Greece, and a blog seems just as good a place as any other to collect and share them with anyone who's interested.  Some of you may recognize a few recyclings, writings I earlier circulated privately.  There will be new material, too.

 

How frequently I post remains to be seen.  For now, I make no commitments.  I'm brand new to blogging, and I'll post when the spirit moves me.  My interests tend strongly toward the historical, and this blog will reflect that.

 

I've been curious about the Greek world ever since my first visit to Greece in the summer of 1962.  At eight years old, that long golden trip awakened interests in European travel, history, and art that continue to this day.  Especially captivating was Angona, the ruggedly beautiful Cephalonian village that was home to my family for centuries (see "Vatselia") before America beckoned to my paternal grandfather in 1907 (see "An American Dream Cut Short").

 

My youthful experience of Greece naturally led to curiosity about my family's origins.  Over time this produced an accumulation of notes, but a suitable format for organizing them didn't come to mind until I re-read Places of My Infancy, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's short memoir of his boyhood.

 

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
(1896-1957)

Tomasi was Prince of Lampedusa and Duke of Palma di Montechiaro, the last of his ancient line of Sicilian noblemen.  In 1955, two years before finishing his only novel, The Leopard, he composed Places of My Infancy to recall his beloved childhood homes -- a baroque palace in Palermo and four grand country houses, all of which by the time he wrote about them had either been reduced to rubble by Allied bombs, sold out of the family, or humbled by time and other encroachments.  In particular, it was his use of architecture and decoration to evoke memories of childhood and ancestry that stimulated me to use objects as focal points for recounting family lore.  And so I began in 2001 with "An Icon" about an heirloom from my mother's family.  A revised version will appear here later.

 

In this blog I will broaden the focus.  Family history will play a prominent role, of course, and objects too, but the entire Greek world, or oikoumene as the Greeks say, will be fair game.

 

I've set this up as a private blog.  If you've gotten this far you've figured out how to log in.

 

Read on, if you like, for the things that perplex, delight, and awe me about the world of Greece.  Perhaps they'll do the same for you.