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| Dennis Livadas (1889-1979) |
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.
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| Sinoikesion of 1702 |
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.
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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.]
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| 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.
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| Panaghia Langadhiotissa - Angona |
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.
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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.
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