The Virgin of Vladimir |
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).
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.
* * *
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 |
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.
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.
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