Out of the Balkans (Part One)

OUT OF THE BALKANS (PART ONE) by Jason C. Mavrovitis ©2002 Jason C. Mavrovitis All Rights Reserved No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations. This is Part One of two parts available to the reader as a PDF file. A complete PDF file of the book, including Parts One and Two, Appendices A, B and C, and the Bibliography may be obtained from the author on a CD by contacting him at: http://www.pahh.com/mavrovitis/cd.html CONTENTS PREFACE ix Acknowledgment xiii About Spellings and Pronunciation xiii INTRODUCTION xiv PART ONE Out of the Balkans CHAPTER ONE Eleni and Evangelia … 1 Out of Thrace and the Black Sea CHAPTER TWO Dimitraki … 43 Out of Macedonia CHAPTER THREE Madame Helen, Louie and Lily … 65 New York, New York CHAPTER FOUR Jimmy … 82 I’ll Take Manhattan CHAPTER FIVE Jimmy & Lily … 91 Love, Marriage and Trial PREFACE I am a first generation American - a Greek-American. Ironically, neither my mother nor my father was born in Greece. My mother, my maternal grandmother, and their ancestors came from a Greek-speaking, Greek Orthodox community in Sozopolis, Bulgaria.1 They were Bulgarian citizens of Greek ethnicity. My stepgrandfather, in every way but blood my grandfather, was born a subject of Victor Emmanuel, the King of Italy. His family was from Avellino, Italy, which is located in the mountainous region east of Naples, the ancient, seventh century B.C. Greek colony of Neapolis. My father was the child of a Greek-speaking, Greek Orthodox family that lived in a mountainous Balkan region populated by Greeks, Bulgarians, Albanians, Serbians, Vlachs, Turks, and communities of Jews. Many villages were dominated by one or another of the ethnic groups. At the time of his birth in 1900, Macedonia was a province of the Ottoman Empire; so, my father was a Turkish citizen. When western European powers redrew the Balkan’s national borders in the early twentieth century his village, which might easily have been incorporated into today’s Bulgaria or Serbia, became part of Greece. In my youth I rebelled against the label “Greek-American” and disliked attending the Greek-speaking, Greek Orthodox Church. I, like my friends in school, considered myself an American. My father tolerated my rebellion and allowed me to find my own identity. Eventually, I came to celebrate the amalgam that is me: Greek, Hellene, Macedonian, Thracian, Bulgarian, and adopted Italian; Greek Orthodox, for a time an Episcopalian; an American, born in the United States, and veteran of its armed forces. Knowledge of my origins began with stories about the life of my family’s most powerful personality, my grandmother, Eleni, who was legend. Born ten months after her death, I never saw her face nor heard her voice. Yet, among my strongest childhood memories are anecdotes told about her by my aunts, uncles (by tradition I called my mother’s first cousins aunts and uncles), cousins, family friends, and especially my mother, Lily. Eleni, beloved matriarch of the family, was bigger than life. She was celebrated as beautiful, strong, gracious, smart, generous, courageous, and devoted to her daughter. Her portrait was on our mantel and photographs of her were in our family albums. She seemed to live on in our home even after her death in 1933. My impressions of my grandmother were so powerful that as a child I sensed her next to my bed as I drifted to sleep or sitting close by the piano as I practiced. Years later I felt that she was standing behind me late at night as I wrote term papers for my college classes. Her spirit was welcome and comforting, and I spoke to her, acknowledging her presence. 1 Modern day Sozopol, Bulgaria was named Sozopolis by the Byzantine Greeks. It is also found in maps and documents spelled as: Sozoupolis, Sisopoli, Sizeboli, Sissopoli, etc. ix Much of what I learned of Eleni came from my mother who spun romantic and stirring tales - not all accurate - of her early years in Bulgaria, Greece, and America. My mother had memories of surviving smallpox, seeing bodies carried off in handcarts to be burned at the edge of a city, escaping a Bulgarian pogrom against the Greeks, living in Greece, coming to America with her mother, and at the age of eight, being lonely when left alone in a log cabin in St. Paul, Minnesota while her mother worked. As a self-absorbed child and teenager I asked few questions about their lives or about my grandfather, Eleni’s first husband. I knew only that he did not come to America, but according to vague references, died in an accident in Bulgaria. My father, Demetrios Athanasios Mavrovitis, was born in a Greek village named Mavrovo in Macedonia. As we hunted and fished together in the countryside near the Hudson River, northwest of New York City, he told me about his life as a young boy, his family and village, and the center of his childhood world, the small nearby city of Kastoria located on a promontory that jutted out into a mountain lake. While I was a child and teenager, my father’s mother, Kalliope Mavrovitis, and others of his family still lived in Macedonia. They were only names to me until I helped fill boxes with food and clothing to ship to them during the Second World War. In the early 1950s, after the end of Greece’s devastating Civil War, two of my first cousins, Nick (Nikolaos) and Thanasi (Athanasios), sons of my father’s brother Constantinos, immigrated to New York City. My father’s youngest living brother Aristede and his wife Filareti followed. With their arrival and participation in our family life my attachment to my Macedonian relatives grew. In 1955, while on leave from military duty in Germany, I visited Greece. There I met my grandmother, my uncle and aunt, and many family members who lived in Kastoria and Mavrovo. In 1977, ten years after my mother’s death, my daughter, Demetra, spent time with her cousins in New York City. On her return to California she told me that that she had heard rumors of secrets about my mother and father, and their marriage. When we were young my sister Helene and I asked our parents about their wedding. There were no photographs except for one taken on the boardwalk of Atlantic City. They told us that no one had elaborate weddings in those days, and that they had gone on a simple honeymoon. In 1981, while he enjoyed a drink with me in the garden of my home at Stanford University I asked my cousin Thanasi Mavrovitis if he knew anything about my parents’ early marriage. Stammering in embarrassment, he would not respond to the question. He told me that my father would never forgive him if he did. I respected his discretion and became even more curious. As I grew older and more mature, I thought more about my ethnic and family heritage. What were my father’s and mother’s origins in Macedonia and Bulgaria? Who were x their families? Why did they come to the United States? How did they come, and what did they do in their early years here? What was their secret? Who was my maternal grandfather, the man who relatives described in correspondence as “a successful Bulgarian Orthodox pharmacist?” What were the histories of Greece, Macedonia, Thrace and the Black Sea? My father’s death in 1989 gave me the freedom to ask my relatives questions and to make inquiries about my grandmother in Minnesota and New York. Old photographs and handwritten notes that I found among my father’s personal effects were clues. Using the little information that I had, I drew family trees by hand, but the process was cumbersome. A computer genealogy program made data entry and manipulation easier, and I was able to print charts and tables to send to relatives with questions and pleas for information. Responses came from Athens and Kastoria, in Greece, and New York, Virginia, and Florida. In 1995, I hired Stavri Nikolov, a Bulgarian graduate student at the Technical University in Vienna, to conduct several days of family research for me in Sozopol, Bulgaria, my grandmother’s birthplace. He sent copies of original documents and translations of them, along with photographs of the small seaside city, to me. The Freedom of Information Act provided the means by which to open my mother’s naturalization file and to locate the ship manifest that brought her and her mother to Ellis Island. The Island’s immigration records, available on the Internet, offered more information about my mother, father, grandmother, and other relatives. Every revelation raised questions. Answers came in the form of court proceedings, newspaper articles, death certificates, cemetery and real estate records, and from relatives and family friends. I began to write this book to preserve as much as I knew about my mother and father, and their immediate families, and to reflect on how I grew and matured in the environment they created for my sister and me in their new world. In time I realized that what happened in their lives made sense only in the larger context of the generation before them and of even earlier known ancestors and unknown ancients. Learning about the history of the Balkans and about the regions that held Sozopolis and Kastoria was another challenge. It was met after I started an ancient Greek coin collection (coins of small denomination and modest value) and a collection of antique maps of the area.

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