OUT OF THE (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

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 . 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 , 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 ; 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 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 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. Reference books in both fields provided bibliographies. These led to the purchase of a growing library of Greek literature and Greek, Balkan, and Byzantine histories, starting at the beginning with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and The Histories of Herodotus. Barnes & Noble, and secondhand bookstores in the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Germany, France, New Zealand, and Australia were my sources.

It is clearly beyond the scope of this effort to address millennia of Balkan history. I hope that the condensed historical background provided here is sufficient to give the

xi reader an appreciation of the forces that worked on the people of Mavrovo and Sozopolis.

Eleni, Evangelia, and Dimitraki came out of the Balkan Peninsula, a region known for centuries by Western Europeans as “ in Europe.”1 Illustrated with geopolitical and occasionally fanciful detail on maps published in the sixteenth through twentieth centuries, it was the topic of romantic eighteenth and nineteenth century books written by French and British travelers who toured the Balkans, Greece, the Levant,2 and .

The people of the Balkans described themselves in anything but romantic terms. For almost five hundred years, they had lived under the rule of the Ottoman Empire or, as they described it: “under the Turkish Yoke.”

Turkish hegemony in the Balkans followed the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 A.D.; though the Ottomans had conquered most of the Balkans, even as far as the Danube, before the . They established a system of governance that led to inevitable conflicts motivated by the determination of each ethnic and religious group to break its shackles, regain the glories of its real or imagined past, improve its economic circumstances, win its political and religious independence, and be sovereign in its territory. Pressures from these upheavals propelled Eleni, Evangelia and Dimitraki out of Thrace, the Black Sea, and Macedonia, across an ocean and on to the shores of America.

The Greek Orthodox memorial service for the dead ends with the phrase: “May his/her memory be eternal.” Without a record of the story of my parents and grandparents, the memory of earlier generations of Zissis and Mavrovitis would be lost with my peers. My children, my sister’s children, and their children’s children would have no knowledge of their Balkan ancestors or of how Eleni, Evangelia, and Dimitraki came to America, and with faith, courage, and perseverance3 became established in a new land.

Finally, as I approached this effort, I came to understand that when young, my disinterest in the past came out of my preoccupation with the seemingly endless possibilities of my future and that as I entered my sixty-fifth year, realization that my future was limited turned my attention to discovering how I came to be who I am. Perhaps those for whom this is written will reach the same point in their lives.

The second part of this book contains remembrances of my childhood in the house on Ovington Avenue in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and of the years that followed - to the day that I returned from military service at the age of twenty-one. Cultural experiences

1 Map 1 2 The “Levant” refers to all countries bordering the Eastern Mediterranean. 3 Later in his life, Dimitraki often advised: “have faith and courage, and persevere.”

xii influenced me during these years to an extent that I realized only later in life. I include these in the accounts of my boyhood and teenage years.

Acknowledgements Bette, my bride from the Peloponnesos (née Panayiota Gianopoulos), was enthusiastic and encouraging as I researched my family, studied history, and wrote these pages. And, she was patient and understanding when I buried myself for hours on end in books about Greece, Byzantium, and the Balkans. Many evenings while at my desk I enjoyed listening to her play the piano and sing as I wrote. Finally, she was my constant and discerning critic and editor.

My thanks go to my cousins Ralis Pierides, of Alexandria, Virginia, who provided extensive oral and written information about Sozopolis, the Zissis and Capidaglis families, and his grandfather and my great uncle, Constantinos Capidaglis; and to Nick Mavrovitis, who in long telephone conversations shared his knowledge about the Mavrovitis family and its origins, and told me of his experiences as a child and young man in Mavrovo and Kastoria.

I am indebted to Stavri Nikolov, Ph.D. A graduate student at the Technical Institute in Vienna in 1995, he took a trip to Sozopol and Burgas, Bulgaria, for a holiday and to explore my family history for me. The information he uncovered and sent to me, including copies of documents with translations, maps, and photographs, was invaluable. A native of Sofia, Bulgaria, Dr. Nikolov now conducts research in medical image analysis at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom.

About Spelling and Pronunciation Ancient place names and transliterations from Greek, except for given and surnames, are italicized throughout this text.

Transliterations from Greek are challenging. For example, Anglicized, the Greek “K” most often becomes a “C”; thus Kapidaglis becomes Capidaglis. The Greek “X” (chi) is pronounced as the “h” in hoary or Harry: Hariclea. The Greek “?” (iota) is pronounced as the French “i” ; the “i” in Dimitraki is pronounced as in oui. The name Dimitrios was often spelled Demetrios by immigrants or by those who first documented the name.

In modern scholarly works and novels the spelling of Greek words in translation and transliteration is inconsistent and idiosyncratic. Variations in spelling of names and places in this text appear both in quotations from books and in my writing.

I accept responsibility for both the conscious and unconscious biases that the reader may find, and apologize to those living and past for any misinterpretations of intent or action, and misstatements of fact. J.C.M. Sonoma, California August 18, 2002

xiii INTRODUCTION

The Balkan Peninsula 1 was frequently in the news in the 1990s - news of war and ethnic cleansing, of genocide. With their independence newly gained after Soviet Russia’s collapse, latent antagonisms of the people of Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro, and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia 2 erupted into conflict rooted in five hundred years of captivity, degradation, ignorance, and absence of social, political, and economic development. Political tyrants used legends of past glories, very often more myth than history, to gain popular support for renewed national and ethnic struggles. Slogans like “A Greater Albania”3 or “Macedonia for ” awakened and promoted dormant hatreds. Finally, religious hostilities surfaced: Muslim against Orthodox Christian, and Catholic guarding against both. Perhaps deep in the hearts of Orthodox Christians, fighting Albanians was and is a proxy for war against the Turks, whose religion many of the people of Albania and Kosovo embraced, thus gaining privilege in the Ottoman world.4

In 1806, Nicholas Biddle, a graduate of Princeton College who became a noted nineteenth century politician and financier, took leave from his position as secretary to the American minister to France and sailed to Greece. Biddle was a child of the American Revolution, raised with enthusiasm for his newly established country and full of confidence in the future of its free society. He traveled to the Balkans, to the soil of the enslaved Greeks before creation of an independent Greek state. He, like other travelers of the time, brought with him and doubtless shared with his hosts and new acquaintances the philosophy of the eighteenth century’s Enlightenment, the story of the American and French revolutions, and an intimate knowledge of their political institutions. He unwittingly fed fuel to the fire of the imminent Greek rising against the Turks.

Biddle was a young man of clearly great potential. He kept a journal, and just before he left Greece, he wrote the following in a letter to his brother:

“The situation of that country is afflicting beyond description. The descendants of a free nation … who may one day rival the brightest glory of their ancestors

1 Map 2 2 The awkward name, “Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia,” is employed because of the existence of the Greek Province or Deme of Macedonia. The Greek government opposes the new state taking the name Macedonia. In 2002, the two governments were negotiating to settle the dispute. 3 There is no historical basis for a Greater Albania, a geographic area containing Albanian and other populations, whose borders merely reflected the territory in the Ottoman Vilâyet governed from Ioannina by the Pashas. 4 In accordance with Islamic Law, conversion to Islam brought full civil rights and equality with Turks.

xiv

Map 2 The Balkans

Courtesy of the International Center for Balkan Studies (CIBAL) ©1999, CIBAL All rights reserved. Retrieved from: htpp://balcanica.org/cibal/images/balkans.gif 3 October 2002

xv now live under the most frightful despotism which … penetrates the feelings (&) the hearts of these wretched slaves. The soil is covered by a host of little tyrants, who openly purchasing their power, repay themselves by the most unlimited extortions … . I thought I had seen as much as nature could bear under the despotism of civilization; but it has since been my melancholy good fortune to witness the proverbial terrors of eastern tyranny. Independently on any of the acts of cruelty to which they are every day liable the general relation between the Greeks and Turks is that of master and slave. The Turks pay no taxes; the whole burden falls upon the Greeks-all the offices are in the hands of Turks. The Turks always go armed; all kinds of weapons are forbidden to the Greeks. A Turk takes without restraint from the peasants whatever he may want, & occasionally as a favor pays for it. Such in short is the alarm which their very name inspires, that it is the practice of the country to pacify children in the cradle by saying there is a Turk coming.

The higher classes are more alive to these misfortunes from the sad remembrance of what Greece once was; & even the meanest among them who has forgotten that he is a Grecian, feels that he is a man. Within some years past their hopes of deliverance have become more strong; & the few Turks who now govern them tread on the treacherous ashes, the smothered embers of sedition & revenge. But divided among themselves, jealous of each other without arms & without a leader, they dare not express their indignation but wait for foreign assistance.”1

When foreign assistance came to the Greeks from the British and French it came begrudgingly, not out of noble decisions to free, finally, the land from which sprang democracy and western civilization. It came because the British and the French were fearful of Russian designs in the Balkans. It came out of a wish to prevent the collapse of the Ottoman Empire which provided political and economic advantage to the British and the French and served as a bulwark against Russian expansion.

In the six centuries that preceded formation of the , western and central Europe proved to be friend neither to the Byzantines, nor to the Greeks, nor to any of the Eastern Orthodox of the Balkans. Witness:

¨ The rape of Byzantium’s capital Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204 A.D., occasioned by the avarice of the Venetians and led by their Doge, Enrico Dandalo, whose knights “. . . set out with the laudable objective of freeing the Holy Sepulchre from the Infidel, . . . they turned aside to the easier and more lucrative task of overturning the oldest empire in the world . . .”2

1 Nicholas Biddle and Richard A. McNeal, Nicholas Biddle in Greece : The Journals and Letters of 1806 (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 225. 2 William Miller, The Latins in the Levant; a History of Frankish Greece (1204-1566) (London: J. Murray, 1908).

xvi ¨ Theft of the Byzantine Empire and pillage of Constantinople at the conclusion of the hostilities in 1204 when, “. . . they placed on the throne of all the Caesars Count Baldwin of Flanders as first Latin Emperor of Constantinople.”1 The Eastern Empire was, for a time, restored to the Greeks later in the thirteenth century. ¨ Failure of the west to assist Greek Byzantine Constantinople as it fell to the Turks in 1453. “Western Europe, with ancestral memories of jealousy of Byzantine civilization, with its spiritual advisers denouncing the Orthodox as sinful schismatics, and with a haunting sense of guilt that it had failed the city at the end, chose to forget about Byzantium.”2 ¨ The West’s enjoyment of a territorial buffer that held as slaves their Orthodox Christian brothers in the Balkans and protected western and central Europe from further Ottoman incursions. ¨ A nineteenth-century alliance with the Turks that gained the French economic advantage. ¨ The Crimean War of 1854-1856 between France, England and the Ottoman Empire on one side, and Russia on the other. The Ottoman Empire was saved from almost certain destruction, and the aspiration of the Balkan people for freedom was frustrated. ¨ Negation by the great European powers of the Treaty of San Stefano which ended the Turko-Russian War of 1878. The Treaty would have delivered the Balkan people, albeit with a Russian bear in their house.

Enmity between the people of the Balkans grew late in the eighteenth century as the Ottomans sought to save their failing empire. They played one ethnic group off against the other and followed policies designed to maintain control over them, and to prevent any from slipping out from under the Turkish Yoke.

¨ The Turks abolished the Bulgarian and Serbian churches in 1765 and 1767, respectively. The Patriarch3 at the Phanar4 in Constantinople issued the decrees that made the Christians of the Balkans “one people” under his religious and civil authority. ¨ The Greek Bishops in the Balkans, owing allegiance to the Patriarch in Constantinople who appointed them, were more interested in maintaining the Greek Patriarch, the Greek elite at the Phanar, and Greeks as the Princes of

1 Ibid., 1. 2 Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople, 1453 (Cambridge,: University Press, 1965), 190. 3 (Gr. “in charge of the family”) Patriarch is the title of the highest prelate in the Orthodox Church. Today there are eight Orthodox prelates called patriarchs. 4 The Greek Orthodox Patriarch lived in Constantinople in a district called the Phanar (also Fanar), meaning “lighthouse.”

xvii and , than in the ambitions of the Bulgarians and Serbians. ¨ Serbians and Bulgarians neither forgot nor forgave the loss of their ethnic churches to the Greek-speaking clergy. ¨ Two revolts brought pressure on the Turks to allow Serbia to become an autonomous Ottoman principality; autonomy was restored to the Serbian Church in 1831. ¨ The Turks authorized Bulgarian schools in the nineteenth century to counterbalance Greek , and finally authorized an Exarch, 1 thus restoring the Bulgarian church. ¨ Greeks, Serbians, and Bulgarians populated the ill-defined region called Macedonia, and each claimed it.

Guerrilla warfare in Macedonia during the first decade of the twentieth century pitted Greek, Bulgar, and Serb, each against the others, as they fought to establish territorial rights. Greek successes in Macedonia provoked Bulgarian pogroms against Greek communities in Bulgaria. The cities of Anchialos, Burgas, Sozopolis, and Varna suffered arson, murder, and expulsion of their Greek populations.

Guerrilla warfare was followed by two Balkan Wars: the first to rid the Balkans of the Turk, and the second, to settle the division of the spoils, specifically, the disposition of the region known as Macedonia.

Eleni, Evangelia, and Dimitraki were there, in the Balkans, in the early years of the twentieth century.

1 (Gr. “representative with full authority”) An Exarch is usually an Archbishop who leads the administration of a national Church as representative of the head of the Church, the Patriarch in Constantinople.

xviii PART ONE Out of the Balkans

CHAPTER ONE

Eleni and Evangelia Out of Thrace and the Black Sea

Bulgaria On the night of 30 July 1906, Anchialos burned. Bulgarian militia and mobs conducted a pogrom that resulted in the slaughter of thousands of its six thousand Greek inhabitants.

Awakened by Sozopolis’ church bells, Hristodul and Vasiliki Zissis wondered at the glow in the sky to the north, across the bay. In the days that followed their world disintegrated about them. They heard stories of the holocaust in Anchialos, of arson whose flames consumed homes and shops, and of murder and looting that had visited friends and family in the city of Pyrgos.

In Pyrgos, Hristodul and Vasiliki’s daughter, Eleni, and her husband, Stefan, were victims of the terror and violence of that night. Clinging to their baby, Evangelia, and carrying what few belongings they could, they joined Greek families who ran through the streets toward the docks and small boats that held hope of escape. Stefan stumbled and fell. The press of humanity trampled him to death and pushed Eleni and her child into the sea. Greek fishermen picked them out of the water and for several days carried them south through the Bosphorus, then west past Constantinople, across the Propontis, through the Hellespont and, finally, into the Aegean Sea.

With dread, and tears, and despair, Eleni retraced the route of her ancient ancestors. She was at sea with the crew of a fishing boat. A destitute widow with an infant and an unknowable future she had one purpose - to survive.

******* Eleni Zissis was born in the late nineteenth century in Sozopolis [See Photos 1 & 2], a small city projecting from the shore of the Black Sea in an region then known as , a part of Turkey’s holdings in the Balkans [See Maps 3, 4, & 5].1

1 Eastern Rumelia, identified the lower region of Bulgaria labeled “After 1885” in Map 3, was an autonomous province with a Christian governor chosen by and vassal to the Ottoman Empire. Rumelia is also found spelled Roumelia and Romania.

1

Photo 1 Sozopol from the South 1930 The arrow points to the Kapidaglis home. The inscription reads: “ Sozopolis of the Anatolian Romans (Bulgaria 1930) Birthplace of Kapidaglis (Tsvetko)” From Ralis Pierides

Photo 2 Photo 3 Sozopol 2001 The Kapidaglis Home 1995

2

Map 3 The Balkans 1878 - 1914 Eastern Rumelia is the section in Bulgaria labeled “After 1885”. In 1880 it was an autonomous province, but still subject to the Ottoman Empire. Rumelia has variant spellings including Roumelia and Romania.

Courtesy of the International Center for Balkan Studies (CIBAL) ©1999, CIBAL All rights reserved. Retrieved from: htpp://balcanica.org/history/maps.html 3 October 2002

3

Map 4 Bulgaria

( Burgas on the Coast of the Black Sea) Retrieved from: htpp://bfu.bg/about/maps_e.htm 3 October 2002

Map 5 Bay of Bourgas

Sozopol (Sozopolis); Bourgas (Pirgos); and Pomorie (Anchialos) Retrieved from: htpp://bfu.bg/about/maps_e.htm. Edited for this use. 3 October 2002

4

Founded during the seventh century B.C. by Greeks1 from the Ionian city-state of 2 Miletos , the original settlement was named Apollonia Pontika after the god Apollo. In classical times, citizens of Apollonia venerated a great statue of Apollo, perhaps forty feet tall, attributed to the mid-fifth century B.C. Athenian sculptor Kalamis.3 Apollonia’s patron was identified with his lifesaving attribution, Iatros, or healer.4 One thousand years later, when its people converted to Christianity, Apollonia became Sozopolis - the city of salvation.

Sozopolis was the first safe harbor merchant vessels reached as they plied north from the Straits of the Bosphorus to trade at cities on the western coast of the Black Sea. In modern Bulgaria these included5 - Sozopol (Apollonia Pontika), Pomerie (Anchialos), Nesebar (Mesembria), and Varna (Odessus); in modern Romania - Constanta (Tomis); and many cities of the Danube River’s delta (Istros). On the northern shore were the cities of the Ukraine - Odessa (Odessos) close to the mouths of the Dniester, Bug, and Dniepr Rivers, modern (Taurus) - Sevastopol (Chersonesos) and Kerc (Pantikapion), which offered easy passage to the Don River. The rivers opened access to the grain of the rich agricultural lands of what is now south-central Russia, the Ukraine (Skythia).6 When threatened by sudden winds and heavy seas vessels found safe haven at Sozopolis. Often the city’s men set out in their small fishing boats to save foundering ships and crews.

Eleni and her family took great pride in being Greeks in the Black Sea, members of a community that for two and one-half thousand years had populated the littoral of what was known as the Pontos Euxeinos, the hospitable sea of late antiquity.

1 Until the mid nineteenth century, there was no country or geopolitical entity known as Greece. In 1833, Greek-speaking people of the new Kingdom called themselves Ellines (Hellenes) and their country, Ellas (Hellas). The name “Greek” originated with an obscure tribe from . 2 Miletos (also spelled Melitus), today’s Balat in Turkey, during ancient times was the most important and perhaps the largest of the Ionian cities of Asia Minor. See: Michael Grant, A Guide to the Ancient World : A Dictionary of Classical Place Names (Bronx, NY: H.W. Wilson, 1986), 396. 3 John Boardman, The Greeks Overseas : Their Early Colonies and Trade, New and enl. ed. (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1980), 247. 4 Iatros (IatroV) in Greek means “one who heals,” a medical doctor in Modern Greek. The Ionian Apollo represented in most Black Sea cities was Apollo the Healer. See: Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth, The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed. (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 122. 5 The cities’ ancient names are within parentheses and in italics. See: Richard J. A. Talbert, Atlas of Classical History (London: Croom Helm, 1985). 6 Skythia is also spelled Scythia. Thus Skythian is often spelled Scythian.

5 Centuries before colonization of its coasts Greeks named the great body of water Pontos Axeinos, “the inhospitable sea.” Early Greek explorers were fearful of the water route from the Aegean through the Dardanelles (Hellespont), the Sea of Marmara (Propontis), and the final gauntlet, the Bosphorus.1 Its narrow, twisting course and treacherous currents that run from the Pontos2 to the Aegean, made passage of oar-powered vessels through it to the vast Pontos seem impossible.3 [See Map 6]

The mythological story of Jason’s epic search for the Golden Fleece celebrates early Greek penetrations into the Axeinos Pontos. The adventurers sought to open civilizations that surrounded the sea to commerce with the Mycenaean4 kingdoms. In search of the Golden Fleece,5 Jason and his Argonauts entered the Black Sea and crossed to its easternmost shore, to the legendary and wealthy land of Colchis.6

Accustomed to the Aegean with its myriad sheltering islands and coves, Greeks found the vast Pontos full of natural terrors. “For at that time the sea was called Axine because of its wintry storms and the ferocity of the tribes that lived around it, and particularly the Scythians . . . but later it was called Euxine, when the Ionians founded cities on the seaboard . . . ,” wrote the ancient geographer Strabo (about 64 B.C. to after 24 A.D.).

1 Bosphorus has the meaning “ox-ford” and signifies the place that the mythological Io crossed the strait during the period of her wandering. See: M. C. Howatson and Paul Harvey, The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, 2nd / ed. (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1989) 298. Variant spellings include Bosphouros and Bosphoros. 2 The word Pontos refers to the Black Sea, while Pontic refers to a particular region and people on the coast of the Black Sea. See page 17, note 1. 3 The Bosphorus is approximately 12.3 miles long. It has an average width of less than 1 mile and is only 0.435 miles wide at its narrowest point, where the surface current can reach 7-8 knots. In 490 B.C. the Persian King Darius crossed here over a pontoon bridge to begin his European conquests. The Bosphorus remains a treacherous route for ships. 4 (1575-1000 B.C.) Best known are the kingdoms whose palaces were located at Thebes (northwest of Athens), Mycenae and Tiryns (located between Nauplion and Corinth), and (located just north of the southwest finger of the Peloponnesus). 5 The “Golden Fleece” may have represented sheepskins laid at the bottom of mountain streams by the people of Colchis to capture flecks of alluvial gold as it washed downstream; a technique that is still used in the region. 6 For a recreation of Jason’s voyage see: Timothy Severin, The Jason Voyage : The Quest for the Golden Fleece (London: Hutchinson, 1985).

6

Map 6 1 The Hellespont, Propontis and Bosphorus

On entering the Pontos, sailors found no islands to assist them in navigation. Increasing their anxiety was the fact that the closest protected landing for their sail and oar-manned ships was more than one day’s passage from the Bosphorous Strait. Native peoples, the Thracians and Skythians, were fearsome. They used enemy prisoners and shipwrecked sailors as human sacrifices in ways described in gory detail by Herodotus in his Histories:

“What they do is first consecrate the victim, and then they hit him on the head with a club. Some say that they then push the body off the cliff at the top of which their shrine is located, but impale the head on a stake…”2

For the sailors of the Aegean, the Pontos was a huge, hazardous expanse that challenged them with winds, fog, storms, snow, and ice-flows, and with shores populated by savage barbarians.

1 Marianna Koromila and A. D. Aleksidze, The Greeks in the Black Sea : From the Bronze Age to the Early Twentieth Century (Athens: "Panorama", 1991). 2 Herodotus, Robin Waterfield, and Carolyn Dewald, The Histories (Oxford [England] ; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 269, 4:103.

7 The war between the ancient Greek kingdoms and Troy reported to us by Homer in his Iliad was a Mycenaean conflict that took place around 1300 B.C.1 The Trojan War may have been about control of the trade route through the Hellespont, which Troy and her allies dominated, and from which they gained great wealth.

Not until the late eighth century B.C. were colonies established along the coast of the Black Sea. These provided the exploding populations of the city-states of ancient Greece with grain (corn, i.e., barleycorn), oak lumber, metals, slaves, fish, hides, and furs. Early Greek settlers mixed their blood with the indigenous Thracians and Skythians yet retained their and their identity as Hellenes.

In the late sixth century B.C. the army of Persia’s King Darius crossed the Bosphorus on pontoon bridges, marched north passing Apollonia Pontika, bridged the Danube (Istros), and entered the land of the Skythians 2 in a futile attempt to conquer them.3 He did subjugate the Thracians on the western shores of the Black Sea thus securing the region north of the great Greek city-states before he invaded them. Darius’ campaign of conquest ended in defeat in 490 B.C. on the plain of Marathon, northeast of Athens.

In 342 B.C. Philip II of Macedonia, father of , led forces north, through Thrace and over the Haemus (Balkan) mountain range to the shore of the Istros (Danube) to subjugate barbarian tribes. He settled military colonies and established trade routes in Thrace, making alliances with two of the important coastal emporia of the Black Sea: Odessus (Varna) and Apollonia Pontika (Sozopolis).4

Roman armies began their conquest of the peninsula in the third century and dominated the region by the middle of the first century B.C. After Roman armies under Marcus Lucullus pillaged the area in 71 B.C., the Legions built extensive road systems including one to Apollonia Pontika, which served as a minor port.

1 Hornblower and Spawforth, The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 719. 2 Now the Ukraine. 3 Herodotus, Waterfield, and Dewald, The Histories 263, 4:83-135. 4 N. G. L. Hammond, A History of Greece to 322 B.C (Oxford,: Clarendon Press, 1959), 563., and N. G. L. Hammond, A History of Macedonia (Oxford,: Clarendon Press, 1972), 557.

8 According to Pliny the Elder,1 the Romans shipped Apollonia Pontika’s great bronze statue of Apollo to Rome where it adorned the Capitoline.2

Anchialos (Pomorie), a colony founded by Apollonia Pontika on the northern coast of what is now the Bay of Burgas, was located in a fertile region and protected northern access to the bay. The town harvested salt from the sea and featured hot mineral springs that attracted many who believed in the water’s curative powers.3

In the fourth century A.D., the Roman emperor Constantine the Great established Christianity as the state religion of Rome and founded Constantinople on the ancient site of Byzantion. Apollonia Pontika was reborn as the Christian Sozopolis, and the Hellenes of the Black Sea became Byzantine Orthodox Christian Greeks tied by history, language, religion, and the sea to the center of their universe, Constantinople.

For one thousand years Constantinople was the city from which emperors and patriarchs ruled a vast empire and led the political and religious lives of its people. The city withstood onslaughts from east and west - Huns in the fifth century, and later, Slavs, Avars, Moslem hoards and Christian Crusader armies. It nurtured a society:

“…in which one Emperor after another was renowned for his scholarship; a society which alone had preserved much of the heritage of Greek and Latin antiquity, during these dark centuries in the West when the lights of

learning were almost extinguished . . .”4

The army of the Fourth Crusade led by the Venetian Doge Enrico Dandolo sacked Constantinople in the early thirteenth century. The Venetians and their Latin

1 Pliny the Elder, 23/4 to 79 A.D. was a prolific writer, best known for an encyclopedia of all contemporary knowledge. He lived a full and active political and military life and died at the great eruption of Vesuvius. See: Hornblower and Spawforth, The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 1197. 2 The Capitoline was the center of the political, social and religious life of Rome. See: R. F. Hoddinott, Bulgaria in Antiquity : An Archaeological Introduction (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975), 41. 3 Benjamin H. Isaac, The Greek Settlements in Thrace until the Macedonian Conquest (Leiden: Brill, 1986), 247,48. 4 John Julius Norwich, A Short History of Byzantium, 1st American ed. (New York: Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1997), 382,3.

9 brethren ruled the remains of the Byzantine Empire parceling among themselves its lands in the Morea,1 Athens, Achaea, , and the Aegean Islands.

Later in the same century [in 1261] the Greeks regained Constantinople with the assistance of Venice’s archrival, Genoa.

“ But the dark legacy that it left behind affected all Christendom - perhaps all the world. For the Greek Empire never recovered from the damage, spiritual as well as material, of those fateful years. Nor, with its loveliest buildings reduced to rubble and its finest works of art looted or destroyed, did it ever succeed in recovering its morale. Before the Latin conquest the Empire had been one and indivisible, under a single basileus, Equal of the Apostles. Now that unity was gone. There were the Emperors of Trebizond, still stubbornly independent on the Black Sea shore. There were the Despots of , always ready to welcome the enemies of Constantinople. How, fragmented as it was, could the Greek Empire continue as the last great eastern bulwark of Christendom against the Islamic tide?”2

In 1453, severely weakened by internal struggles, encroachment of Bulgars from the north and west, and Turks from the south and east, and lacking assistance from Christian Europe and the Pope, Constantinople was lost to the Ottomans. The outcome for the Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbians, Bosnians, Croatians, Albanians and Vlachs 3 of the Balkans was centuries of humiliation under the “Turkish Yoke.”

Many Byzantine intellectuals and artists fled west to Rome, Florence, Bologna and especially to the Venetian University of Padua where outside of Papal control Orthodox scholars were welcome. They gave impetus to the Renaissance of Western Europe and later provided teachers who staffed the Ottoman Empire’s educational institutions. Out of these came the learned sixteenth through

1 From approximately the twelfth century on, its Latin rulers named the Peloponnesos “Morea.” The name refers to the Mulberry tree common to the Peloponnesos, and to the shape of the peninsula, that resembles a Mulberry leaf. 2 Norwich, A Short History of Byzantium, 317. 3 Also known as Arumanians, these people are likely descendants of Roman soldier- colonists of Dacia, located in the Transylvanian region of Romania. They migrated and settled throughout the Balkans. The mountainous regions of Greece - Epirus and Macedonia - know them as transhumant shepherds.

10 eighteenth century administrators for the Patriarchate1 of Constantinople and the Ottoman Porte.2

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Orthodox population of the Balkans and those Greek Orthodox living in what is modern day Turkey, the Middle East and , believed their eventual freedom depended on support from the Russian Tsars and the Russian Orthodox Church. This conviction was based in the early eighteenth century victories of Peter the Great, who, triumphant over the Ottomans in 1696, captured the fortress at Azov, on the Sea of the same name that empties into the Black Sea.3

The terms of Peter’s treaty with the Ottomans in 1710 provided for a Russian ambassador to be resident in Constantinople. The ambassador reported that his presence in Constantinople worried the Turks that Tsar Peter was using the position to encourage the Greeks to rise against the Mohammedans. The vision of a Russian armada sailing south across the Black Sea to the walls of Constantinople in support of a Christian rising in the Balkans haunted the Ottoman Porte.

In 1711 Peter decided to enter the Balkans, cross the Danube, conquer the Turks, and seize Adrianople - perhaps even Constantinople. He made an appeal to the Orthodox people of Moldavia and Wallachia to rise with him against their oppressor and to join his war against the descendants of the heathen Mohammed.

Tsar Peter failed, surrendering his forces when surrounded by a Turkish-Crimean army on the banks of the Pruth River. With his failure he lost Azov, the better part of an army and almost his life. But, his failure ended like a spent forest fire; it left behind, buried in its ashes, kernels that waited for the right conditions to germinate. These were the seeds of rebellion whose fruit almost two hundred years later would be freedom.

1 An ecclesiastical jurisdiction governed by a patriarch. There are eight such in the Orthodox Church, the four ancient patriarchates of the East, and the four Slavic patriarchates. 2 Douglas Dakin, The Unification of Greece, 1770-1923 (London,: Benn, 1972), 6. “Porte” (also known as the “Sublime Porte”) is a reference to the high gate that led to the buildings housing the offices of the Ottoman government in Constantinople and is therefore a reference to the government. 3 Map 7 shows the geopolitical changes in the Balkans between 1606 and 1878. The reader may find two historical atlases in soft bound editions of particular interest: Dennis P. Hupchick and Harold E. Cox, A Concise Historical Atlas of Eastern Europe, First ed. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996). Dennis P. Hupchick and Harold E. Cox, The Palgrave Concise Historical Atlas of the Balkans (New York: Palgrave, 2001).

11 , Bulgarians, and Serbians had strong bonds. They shared a common Slavic identity and had the same religion, overwhelmingly Eastern Orthodox. From the time of the fall of Constantinople, the Russian Orthodox Church considered itself the stronghold of Eastern Orthodoxy, protector of the faith and of the flock. Tsars and Empresses asserted that they were successors to the Byzantine Emperors. By virtue of this claim, the Russian Tsars and Patriarchs posed the possibility of a conflicted outcome for the Greeks of the Balkans. The Greeks welcomed the Russians as liberators and hoped for re-creation of a Byzantine Greek Empire, not for incorporation into the .

In the mid-eighteenth, century , Empress of Russia, pursued the expansionist policies of her predecessor, Tsar Peter. Taking advantage of a border incident with the Turks in 1768 to initiate hostilities, she achieved one military victory after another, on land and at sea. The Treaty of Kuchuk-Kaynarja1 ended the Ottoman-Russian war of 1768-1774.

Russia gained both access to the Black Sea which for 400 years had been an “Ottoman lake” and unrestricted passage for its merchant ships through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. The terms of the treaty fostered a new age for the Greeks, for Greek ships which already had held a dominant position in the trade of the Ottoman Empire were permitted to register and sail under the Russian flag as well. The Tsar’s encouragement of Greek immigration to the Russian Empire resulted in large Greek communities in Sevastopol and Odessa.

Russia asserted itself as the protector of all Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire and secured the right to install consulates throughout Greek speaking lands. Following her great military and political successes against the Turks Catherine the Great conceived of the “Greek Project:” an aspiration to reestablish the Greek Byzantine Empire.

Catherine’s dream was to see her second grandson, Konstantin, on the throne first held by his namesake, Constantine the Great, in the fourth century. 2 Catherine’s successes continued, and after a second Russian-Turkish war in 1791, Russia annexed the Crimea. However, her death in 1796 ended both her life and the “Greek Project.”

Greeks of the Pontos and Constantinople, especially the educated merchant class and leaders of the many guilds, were active participants in the early revolutionary struggle against the Ottomans. Their ships transported more than grain, lumber, dried fish and other cargo to the southern coast of the Mediterranean and to Britain, France and the Low Countries. They carried young men from the Balkans

1 Kaynardzha, North East Bulgaria, near the Danube and South East of Silistra 2 Catherine even retained Greek speaking servants to properly train Konstantin for his future role.

12 and the littoral of the Black Sea to the commercial centers and universities of the west.

When they returned to their communities in the Balkans the men did so with knowledge of the Enlightenment. The ships of those who were bound for the Black Sea fought the surface current of the Bosphorus, and like the subsurface counter-current that unseen carries the salt water of the Mediterranean north and east into the Black Sea, they carried young men inspired by new dreams. They also brought Freemasonry, which was to spread from the to all of the Balkans’ major Greek intellectual centers.

One consequence of the new ideas from the west was the creation in 1814 of the Philike Hetaireia, or Friendly Society, a secret organization committed to freedom for the Hellenes. It was founded by Greek expatriates in Odessa in the Ukraine. Membership in the society grew throughout the Balkan cities of the Black Sea, and it became a driving force for revolution and independence.

The Philike Hetaireia had among its members and leaders a Greek expatriate, Prince Alexander Ypsilanti, who had risen to become aide-de-camp and an intimate of the Russian Tsar Alexander. Ypsilanti, who knew that Tsar Alexander was sympathetic to the cause of the Greeks and confident that Russia would aid the effort, led a rebellion against the Ottomans in Moldavia and Wallachia in 1821, at the same time as the rising in Greece. Tsar Alexander, though pro-Greek and Orthodox, was in opposition to revolution against kings who he deemed appointed by God. The Tsar could not go against his conscience to assist Ypsilanti.

Moldavia and Wallachia’s rising was crushed. The Sultan Mahmoud responded ferociously to the armed revolutionary actions. On Easter Sunday, 1821, Ottoman authorities seized Patriarch Gregory V as he descended the steps from the iconostasion1 of his church in Constantinople, dragged him to his quarters and hanged him at its gate.2 The Porte sanctioned wholesale slaughter of bishops, priests, and prominent Greeks. Communities from Constantinople to the coast of Ionia and from the islands of the Aegean to the mainland of the Morea, were put

1 The iconostasion is a multi-paneled screen, adorned with icons, that separates the sanctuary or altar from the nave in the Greek Orthodox Church. At its center is a door (the Royal Door) that controls access to, and the view of the sanctuary. 2 The Porte held the Patriarch and the Bishops accountable for civil disorder among the Orthodox people (the millet), thus brutally punished them for their failure to prevent insurrection. The gate leading to a side entrance of the Patriarch’s residence still exists, though welded shut in memory of the Patriarch who was martyred there.

13 to the sword. Executioners spared young women and boys to sell them later at the slave markets in Constantinople, Smyrna, and Alexandria.1

Many Greeks in Thrace were members of the Philike Hetaireia. In 1821, the Greek Metropolitan Bishop of Sozopolis and his brother, both active in the Society, led a revolutionary movement in their city that ended in a bloodbath and defeat.

Early disorganization and failure of the Greek struggle for independence in the 1820s did not diminish mounting support for the Greek cause from the western European giants of literature and poetry: Shelley, Byron, Goethe, Schiller, and . Public support grew as news of Ottoman atrocities, especially in the Morea, reached the West.

The Philhellenic2 movement in eighteenth and nineteenth century western Europe had grown out of sixteenth- and seventeenth- century scholarship centered on classical Greece. fostered a romantic view of modern Greeks as direct descendants of the people of Athens and Sparta, the heroes of Marathon and Thermopylae.3 In time, sympathy grew for Greek Christians who were subject to Ottoman Moslems. Philhellenism swelled in spite of pejorative characterizations of nineteenth century Greek peasants written and published in journals by British and French travelers.

Eventually, both the British and French, concerned about loss of trade, the inability of the Ottomans to stabilize the region, and the threat of Russian intervention and a possible Turko-Russian war, took action. The Greek’s long and bloody fight for independence celebrated as having started on March 25, 1821, was finally won in 1828 after the British, French, and Russian combined naval fleet destroyed the Turko-Egyptian fleet in the Bay. 4 The

1 The institution of slavery was widespread in the Ottoman world. Slaves were captured from Eastern Europe to the Caucasus to meet the Sultan’s demands. They served in every capacity: household servants, soldiers, concubines, and even in high positions in government as civil servants. 2 Friendly to Greece or Greeks in relation to national independence, or an admirer of Hellenic civilization 3 The Battles of Marathon and Thermopylae were fought and won by the Greek city- states in the fifth century B.C. against the Persian armies of Darius and Xerxes, respectively. For a fascinating, almost novel-like historical read see: Peter Green, The Greco-Persian Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 4 Navarino Bay is on the west coast of the Peloponnesos close to the ancient Mycenean city of Pylos. Navarino Bay was always a staging post between the Middle East and the Mediterranean, and between the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. See: C. M. Woodhouse, The Battle of Navarino ([London]: Hoddler and Stoughton, 1965).

14 British and French governments, hoping that a show of force and intent would be sufficient to compel reconciliation between the Greeks and Turks, determined that, at most, a blockade of Turkish men and arms would be necessary and did not anticipate a battle. Instructions issued by their governments to the three of the combined fleet were: “You are aware that you ought to be most particularly careful that the measures which you may adopt against the Ottoman navy do not degenerate into hostilities.”1

As the two opposing armadas met in the bay, confusion, tension, and preparation for naval action set the stage for disaster. A gun fired, a man killed, and the engagement began. The Turko-Egyptian fleet was annihilated. The King of Britain’s speech, made as the actions of victorious British Codrington were called into question, sought to maintain Britain’s alignment with Turkey:

"In the course of the measures adopted with a view to carry into effect the object of the Treaty, a collision, wholly unexpected by His Majesty, took place in the port of Navarin, between the fleets of the Contracting Powers and that of the Ottoman Porte. Notwithstanding the valour displayed by the combined fleet, His Majesty laments that this conflict should have occurred with the naval force of an ancient ally: but he still entertains a confident hope, that this untoward event will not be followed by further hostilities, and will not impede that amicable adjustment of the existing differences between the Porte and the Greeks, to which it is so manifestly their common interest to accede."2

In the end, the western powers of Britain and France, with the cooperation of Russia, forced the Ottomans to consent to the creation of the Kingdom of Greece. The great powers’ primary objective was to stabilize the political climate of the eastern Mediterranean. Russia was mollified by outright territorial gains won from Turkey and by increased influence in the Balkans, evidenced by Turkey ceding to Russia the safeguarding of Serbia. Finally, and very importantly, the Ottomans agreed to the status of the Bosphorous and Dardanelles as international waterways.

Through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Greek-speaking people dominated the cities and coastline of the Black Sea from the Bosphorous north to Odessa. Those who lived in what is now Bulgaria referred to their region as

Anatolian Roumelia (Anatolikh Rwmhlia) or the Anatolian Rome.3

1 Ibid., 46. 2 Ibid., 163. 3 In the sense that Constantinople’s Greeks had a Greek/Byzantine legacy as citizens of the New Rome.

15 The Bulgars who had been people of the inland mountains and valleys started to migrate to the coastal regions. There they found Greek landowners, merchants, shipowners and fishing fleets, and Greek-speaking Orthodox clergy. Antagonism grew. It was nurtured by jealousy and anger over petty slights. The Greeks were dismissive of the Bulgars calling them tsiri (dried ). The groundwork for ethnic strife developed with each real or imagined affront.

In the early nineteenth century, as more of the Bulgarian population became literate and educated, they published books and journals in their own language. Bulgarian students studied in Western Europe and Russia on scholarships and with the support of prosperous Bulgarian merchants. There was a ground swell of nationalism and a vision of a resurrected, free Bulgarian state equal to that which had existed in medieval times. Pride of language and ethnicity sparked fervor to wrest control of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church from the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople. For the Bulgars, there were memories of historic defeats at the hands of the Byzantine Emperors and of terrible punishments meted out to defeated Bulgarian armies.1

Fueling anti-Bulgarian sentiments on the part of Greeks was the memory of an early thirteenth century Bulgar, Tsar John, also called Johannitsa [little John] and Kaloian [handsome John], whose cognomen was “Slayer of Greeks.”2

A combination of the slow dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, establishment of the Kingdom of Greece, and the geopolitical aspirations of Russia emboldened the ethnic and nationalist aspirations of the people of Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Thrace. Their dreams found both creative and destructive expression in the conflicts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These were the Crimean, Turko-Russian, and Turko-Greek wars; guerrilla warfare over Macedonia;3 the first and second Balkan Wars; the First World War; and finally, in 1922, defeat of a Greek expeditionary force on the Ionian coast by the Turks, and the total destruction of Smyrna and its Greek community. This final catastrophe resulted

1 All participants in ancient warfare committed horrid atrocities. In 1014 A.D., the Byzantine Emperor completed his conquest of Bulgaria with the capture of 15,000 Bulgars. To punish his enemies, Basil, remembered in history as Basil the Bulgar-Slayer, had ninety-nine of every one hundred prisoners blinded. The remaining prisoner was blinded in only one eye so that he might lead his comrades back to the King of the Bulgars as examples of Byzantine wrath. See: Norwich, A Short History of Byzantium, 215. 2 Schevill, The History of the Balkan Peninsula, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day 148, 149. 3 The warfare involved Macedonia Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians, Vlachs, and Albanians, Turks, and volunteer forces from Crete and Greece.

16 from the collapse of the Great Idea (Megali Idhea), the vision of a recreated Empire, of a synthesis of Hellenism and Orthodoxy in the Byzantine capital of Constantinople. The vision became a nightmare and resulted in the expulsion of one million Pontic1 and Ionian Greeks whose ancestors had been located on the southern shore of the Black Sea and the Ionian coast of Turkey for more than 2,500 years.2

The Balkan peoples have yet to resolve the ethnic and religious differences they have among themselves and with Turkey, and continue to suffer the ravages of war. *******

Eleni Zissis was born between 1880 and 18863 to a family whose knowledge of history was limited. They knew little or nothing of the world beyond their experience of Sozopolis, the Black Sea, and its shores. Western Europe was a topic for romantic stories and America, but a dream. They had a deeply ingrained awareness of themselves that included ethnic pride and attachment to the land and sea that surrounded their small city and its way of life. They lived their Greek Orthodox faith with reverence for the Patriarchate and in awe of Constantinople. They were wary of the Turks and Bulgars that surrounded them. They expected a future in the land they had always known. In the end, the culmination of centuries of ebb and flow of populations and power would like thunderous storm waves overwhelm and cast them from the shores of the Black Sea.

Many young men, especially those first-born of Greek families on the Black Sea, attended the schools of Constantinople. Those from families that were more prosperous might even matriculate at one of the universities of Western Europe. There, gradually and in increasing numbers, they were exposed to and brought

1 A “Pontic Greek” is from the Black Sea region known as the “.” On the southeastern coastline of the Black Sea, the region extends roughly from Sinope on the west to Batum on the border of modern-day Republic of Georgia, ancient Colchis. This coastline is isolated from the inland areas of Turkey by the Pontic Mountains, which reach a height of almost 13,000 feet. Xenophon led his Greek mercenaries over these mountains to reach the Pontos in the early fourth century B.C. to escape from Persian forces. 2 See: Michael Llewellyn Smith, Ionian Vision : Greece in Asia Minor, 1919-1922 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998). 3 Eleni’s Death Certificate gives her age as 47 on May 26, 1933. The manifest of the S.S. Macedonia, the ship that brought Eleni and her daughter to America, shows her age to be 32 on July 31, 1912, which would have made her 53 at the time of her death. Her photographs lend credence to her having been born in 1880. She may have hidden her age because of her marriage to a much younger man in Chicago in 1916.

17 home to their Balkan communities the philosophies and political conceptions of the Enlightenment, the ideals of classical Greece and Rome, and knowledge of their own history. The American Revolution, the , and the goals stated in early Napoleonic doctrine gave them heart to raise their hopes and to envision a new, free society.

The common people gained what little knowledge they had from their church and the work of their daily lives. Western European thought influenced them little until the nineteenth century when sufficient contact had been made with the west to nurture dreams of a new era, even in the humblest of peasants.

Greek families prized sons. A Greek woman did not perceive herself as fulfilled until she had provided a male offspring to whom would fall the economic responsibilities of the family: care of his parents in old age and of sisters until they married or, if unmarried, for all of their lives. Daughters were economic burdens until they married, and once married, lived their lives in the limited sphere of the home. The home was their domain and within its confines they made decisions that affected the family and its well-being, raised its children, and led its religious life.

Eleni’s mother, Vasiliki Hristodul Zisu1, gave birth to four daughters: Eleni and her three sisters, Smaragda, Sultana, and Sofia. There was no son to care for his parents in old age, or his sisters until they married, or if they did not marry, for all their lives. Eleni’s personality developed without the limitations imposed by the presence of a brother, who would have been the focus of the family’s attention.

While her mother, Vasiliki, was literate in Greek and Bulgarian, and may even have been a teacher, Eleni’s formal schooling was non-existent; she never learned to read or to write.

All four young women and their mother, Vasiliki, were destined to leave Sozopolis. Eleni and Sofia were to remain close, and they would care for their mother in her later years. Of the two, Eleni had the dominant personality.

Their father Hristodul’s death certificate is informative.

“On April 20th 1908 at 3 p.m. this death certificate was written testifying to the death of Hristodul Zisu, Orthodox Christian of Greek nationality, Bulgarian citizen, worker by occupation, at the age of seventy, born in the town of Sozopol, the same municipality …

By family status the deceased was married to Vasiliki Hrist. Zisu, Orthodox Christian of Greek nationality, Bulgarian citizen, housewife by

1 Variants of the name include: Zissis, Ziso, Zisu, Zisou, Zison, Zisova, etc.

18 occupation, at the age of sixty, born in the town of Sozopol, … This marriage had lasted forty-five years.”

Since he was known as a “worker by occupation,” it is not likely that Hristodul owned land. Neither is there any indication that he was a commercial fisherman or a boatman. His was a poor, working family. He probably labored for landed gentry who had need of men to cultivate their vineyards, orchards, and grain and pulse fields. He may have served as a crewmember on fishing boats or worked in the shipyard. Neither he nor his wife, Vasiliki, left any information that would distinguish them from the landless peasant class.

They lived in a typical, two-story wooden house with views of the bay and harbor to the north and east, and the sea and beach to the south and west. The first floor was for storage. In its dark space were farming implements, fishing equipment and nets, wine barrels, and crocks of salted fish and pickled vegetables. The second floor consisted of bedrooms, a reception room, a dining room, and a kitchen.

Each morning the sisters saw their father leave their home. With other men who like him carried rakes, shovels or scythes, walked from the town to the vineyards and fields where he labored for the landowners. On another day, perhaps carrying nets and other implements, he would walk to the harbor and its waiting boats to hire out to boat owners for a day of fishing. Mackerel, tunny, 1 , and shrimp were abundant, and one-tenth of the catch was the share of the rowers and helpers on the boat.

From the town, the young women were able to see sailing ships as they beat north through whitecaps toward Varna and Nesebar, to Constanta in Romania and Odessa in the Ukraine, even to the Crimea and the Sea of Azov to trade goods from Constantinople at Kerc (ancient Pantikapion). How romantic these places must have seemed in the dreams of these sisters in Sozopolis. For them, a day trip to Burgas,2 the city just to the north on the bay of the same name, was an adventure. They may even have seen the yacht, Aphrodite, with King George I

1 Tunny are pelamyds, or young fish. Both the and a species identified as “little tunny” are found in the Mediterranean and Black Seas. 2 Burgas was known in medieval times, and even by 19th century Greeks, as Pirgos, which in ancient and Medieval Greek meant tower, or tower of defense. The Latin burgus meant a castle, fort, or fortress. According to the historians of the modern municipality of Bourgas: “For the first time the name of Bourgas appeared as early as 1306 in a poem by Manuel Phil, Bysantium poet, as Pirgos – the Greek equivalent to the Latin word Burgos, i.e., ‘the Tower’: a name preserved in local legends, and dating as back as the 1st or 2nd century AD, when a Roman travel station was functioning at the place of the present-day harbour.” Pirgos often is spelled Pirgos, and Burgas is often spelled Bourgas.

19 and Queen Olga of Greece on board as they traveled between Athens and Odessa in the Ukraine.

King George, born Prince William of Denmark, became king of the Hellenes1 in 1863. His children, by agreement when he accepted the crown, were to be raised in the Greek Orthodox faith. Where to find a Greek Orthodox princess? Russia. And, how could he better cement relations with the state that supported the Orthodox of the Balkans than to marry a Russian woman of nobility? And who better to help him find a bride than his sister, Princess Dagmar of Denmark, who had married the tsarevitch Alexander and would one day become Empress of Russia?

In 1867, King George visited his sister in Russia. He met, fell in love with and married the Romanov Grand Duchess, Olga Konstantinova, daughter of the Tsar’s brother. On their honeymoon and return to Greece the couple traveled south by rail to the Black Sea and then by yacht across the sea, through Propontis, and into the Aegean to Athens’ seaport, . This was the first of many Black Sea voyages that would be taken by members of the two royal families, Greek and Russian, for both personal visits and state business.

Queen Olga sailed to Russia in 1878 to visit her family and to seek support from the Tsar for Greece’s interests at the Berlin Conference called by the Powers to settle the Treaty of San Stefano [see page 21]. Queen Olga sailed to Odessa and crossed Russia in comfort on the Tsar’s personal train to attend the wedding of Grand Duke Alexander to her niece, Grand Duchess Xenia.

After he assumed the Bulgarian throne in 1887 Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg toured his new country visiting both inland and coastal cities. As his yacht passed Sozoupolis (as spelled by some in the late nineteenth century), he is alleged to have given it the coarse epithet, “Skatoupolis.” 2

While kings, queens, crown princes, and princesses cruised resplendent past Sozopolis on their elegant yachts, the women of the city spent their days at housework - cleaning and cooking, working at looms, sewing, crocheting, knitting, and caring for their children. There was neither electricity nor natural gas. They kneaded coarse, whole grain flour into dough by hand, and baked it into round loaves of bread in outdoor, wood-fired ovens. They washed laundry, beating it on rocks by the sea or scrubbing it in tubs containing water heated at

1 “…of the Hellenes,” not “of Greece.” The difference is significant. King George was brought to his throne as king of all the Hellenic people, whether in Greece or not. The title embodied the dream of a renewed Byzantium, with Constantinople as its capital. In anticipation of the dream’s realization, King George’s first son was named Constantine, in keeping with the names of the first and last emperors. 2 The Prince was evidently able to see and smell the contents of the slop buckets that had been emptied over the cliffs by the locals.

20 open fires. Women worked hard in their homes and frequently accompanied their husbands into the fields and vineyards to harvest grain and grapes.

Sozopolis’ social life centered about the Orthodox Church - its fasts, feast days and liturgical dramas, the seasonal activities of fishing; salting; curing; sowing; harvesting; crushing grapes and making wine; threshing the grain; preparing for winter; and the family’s joy (name days, weddings, births, and baptisms) and sadness (deaths, funerals, and memorials services). The people lived on the coast of the sea fearful of periodic military conscription of their young men to fight in faraway places and of armies that descended on them for reasons unknown.

The Pontic Greek whose name the sisters bore was that of their paternal grandfather Ziso Ortakioglis. Born in about 1800, he was one of the millions of Greeks whose unknown ancestors had populated , Thrace, and the cities of the Pontos. In the nineteenth century, Ziso left his namesake city of Ortaköy to settle in Sozopolis. Ortaköy was one of two towns, either modern Corum or Sivas,1 each located on an ancient northern trade route in Turkey that led from central Asia Minor to the Black Sea port of Amisos, today’s Samsun.

Ziso was not actually his given name. It derived from the surname Zissimos, which may have been a corruption of Zosimos, an early fourth century Christian saint of , a region in modern Turkey. When this young man arrived in Sozopolis from Ortaköy, people referred to him as Ziso, an abbreviation of his surname, and identified him as being from Ortaköy or “Ortakioglis.” He settled in Sozopolis, and in about 1835, married an eighteen-year-old woman named Sofia, who was of Greek parentage.

Conventions for given names and surnames varied in the Balkans. Bulgarians and Greeks had different traditions. When they intermarried, the form generally followed that of the husband’s nationality. Greek women took their husband’s first and second name. Thus, Sofia became Sofia Zisova Ortakioglis (the feminine Bulgarian form Zisova used to indicate “wife of Ziso”).

Use of masculine, feminine, and diminutive forms, the whim of administrative officials, and errors in spelling introduced variants of the family’s surname. By the early twentieth century, the original Zissimos evolved to include Zissis, Ziso, Zisu, Zisou, Zison, Zisova, and even Zysopoulos and Zissopoulos, the latter two forms created by late nineteenth century family members to elevate their social standing. The suffix, -poulos, implied upper class cosmopolitan Greek origin from Athens or Constantinople.

Ziso and Sofia Zisova lived in the early nineteenth century, when the Kingdom of Greece was born. Sozopolis was distant from the new Kingdom, but one can

1 See: The Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names website: http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabulary/tgn/index.html

21 imagine the excitement and anticipation that news of the liberation of Hellenes from the oppression of the Ottomans must have created for Balkan Christians of all ethnicities.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Russian Tsar Nicholas proclaimed himself protector of all Orthodox Christian citizens of the Turkish Empire, a status that greatly threatened Ottoman suzerainty. The Tsar warned the Turks that if they did not recognize his role as protector, he would occupy the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, the northernmost regions of Turkey in Europe. [See Map 7] Another Turko-Russian war threatened.

The British and French were constantly on guard against Russian intentions toward the Balkans and the Black Sea. Russia desperately wanted unfettered access to the Aegean, and had the strategic goal of taking Constantinople and turning the Balkans into a giant client state. Russia approached Britain with a secret plan to partition the Ottoman Empire. Britain remained convinced that it was in her best interest for the Ottoman Empire, described by Tsar Alexander as “the sick man of Europe,” to be preserved.

Between 1825 and 1852, Britain’s exports to Turkey grew to the point that “they exceeded those to Russia, Italy, France or Austria.” 1 In 1852, 1,741 British ships traded in the Black Sea, with great quantities of wheat and corn imported from Turkey’s provinces on the Danube. For Britain, the smallest chance that its access to the Black Sea through the Dardanelles and the Bosphorous, and its control of the eastern Mediterranean might be lost was an unacceptable economic risk. Political policy followed economic reality.

The immediate excuse for the Crimean War was a dispute between Russia and France over which Christian Church, Russian Orthodox or French Catholic, would hold the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Bethlehem. In fact, the national interests of England, France, Russia, and Turkey were at play. The Sultan ruled for the French Catholics. Britain and France sent warships to the Dardanelles on 8 June 1853 to support the Turks. On July 3, the Tsar ordered his troops to occupy Moldavia and Wallachia. Turkey declared war on Russia on 5 October.

The first great opportunity for the Greek Orthodox of the Black Sea coast to be free of Ottoman rule had come. Russia and its people supported the Orthodox Christians of the Balkans, and it was to Russia that they looked for deliverance from the Turks.

1 Leften Stavros Stavrianos, The Balkans since 1453 (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 320, 21.

22

Map 7 Balkans 1606 - 1878

23 News of Russian troop movements must have been cause for both celebration and alarm in Sozopolis. Immediately after the Ottoman declaration of war on Russia, the British and French fleets entered the Bosphorous to protect Constantinople. On 30 November Russian warships destroyed seven Turkish frigates, effectively the entire Turkish fleet, at Sinope on the southeastern coast of the Black Sea. Britain and France declared war on Russia in March of 1854 in support of Turkey. Their warships entered the Black Sea while French troops marched north from Gallipoli through Adrianopole toward Burgas and Varna.

In April of 1854, units of the British and French fleet anchored off Sozopolis. When boats approached Sozopolis’ beach, Sofia Zisova Ortakioglis took an ancient saber from the wall of her home and called Orthodox Greeks to arms in support of the Russian cause. Her action came to naught. British and French personnel landed without bloodshed to obtain water and establish a small military presence. However, Sofia’s passionate response was not forgotten. She became known in the city of Sozopolis and its environs and in the oral tradition of the family as Yia-Yia Mahera (Gia-Gia Macaira), “Grandma the Knife.”

The Anglo-French alliance proceeded north, establishing a headquarters at Varna from which they were the first in history to lay underwater telegraph cable. It provided communication from their headquarters to their base in the Crimea. For one year, the alliance besieged the Russian fortress at the Crimean naval base of Sevastopol. Each side in the struggle suffered great loss of life to hunger, cold, and disease. The alliance captured the burned-out ruins of Sevastopol a - pyrrhic victory. The result was, for Russia, a temporary loss of territory and, for the Ottoman Empire, a delay in its inevitable collapse.

*******

Ziso and Sofia Ortakioglis’ son, Hristodul (born c1838), took his father’s original surname, Zissis. Hristodul married a young woman named Vasiliki Vserkozov whose father, Dimitri, was Bulgarian and mother, Sultana Antoniou, Greek. In Hristodul’s death certificate, both he and Vasiliki are identified as Orthodox Christians, Greek nationals, and Bulgarian citizens living in Sozopolis. The detailed if inconsistent differentiations made in legal documents of the time reflected the ethnic, religious and nationalist awareness that was growing in the Balkans.

Hristodul witnessed his mother Sofia’s rage at the Anglo-French preparations to land at Sozopolis and was old enough to have followed the progress of the Crimean War. Russia’s defeat was certainly a disappointment for the Bulgarians and Greeks, who longed for freedom. The next generation would support new Russian thrusts toward the Bosphorus and the Aegean.

24 In 1899, Sofia, the youngest of four daughters born to Hristodul and Vasiliki Zissis, was barely fifteen when Konstantinos Kapidaglis,1 a dashing and adventuresome widower who was twenty-six years older than she, married her. Constantinos claimed to have been forty-one at the time. However he also maintained that he remembered the Anglo-French fleet anchored in the bay of Sozopolis, which would add approximately five years to his age.

Constantinos came to the marriage with three children from his first wife, Harliklea Zurmali Georgiu, who died in 1895 giving birth to a daughter, also named Hariklea. Constantinos’ eldest son Stavros, born in 1881, was older than his new stepmother; his second son Zenovios was about the same age.

The Kapidaglis family first appeared in Sozopolis in the eighteenth century. The surname derives from the place Kapi Dagi (door of the mountain in Turkish), an Island in the Sea of Marmara, Turkey, and site of the ancient Greek colony of Kyzikos, later known as Kapidagi, and now the modern city of Belkis. He, just as Ziso Ortakliogis, was an immigrant to Sozopolis, and named after his place of origin ‘Kapidaglis.’ There is no record of his given name. He married a woman of Sozopolis and with her had a daughter, Theofano.

When Theofano Kapidaglis married her husband, whose name was Stefanos Tsvetkov, he took her (his father-in-law’s) surname, thereby securing it. One can only wonder why. The name Tsvetkov was maintained as a middle name in the next generation by their son, Konstantinos Tsvetkov Kapidaglis.

*******

In the later half of the nineteenth century, Western European powers and the Ottoman Empire continued to be threatened by Russian intentions in the Balkans. Russia persisted in its effort to dominate the Balkan Peninsula. In 1875, Orthodox risings in Bosnia, Montenegro, and Serbia against their Turkish oppressor generated the sparks that ignited the next war between Russia and Turkey. After two years of diplomatic negotiations conducted to the cacophony of rifle fire and cannon, and failure of an international conference at Constantinople, the Russians declared war on Turkey.

Russian forces crossed the Danube and besieged the Ottoman-held fortress of Plevna on the Danubian Plain north of the Balkan range. A contingent of the Russian army bypassed the fortress and dashed south to join a large number of

1 The name Capidaglis has several variants in documents. Among them are: Kapidaghli, Kapidaglis, Kapidogli, and Capidagli. Konstantinos is transliterated as Constantinos.

25 Bulgarian volunteers to hold the Shipka Pass1 against great odds, thus preventing Turkish reinforcements from surging north to reinforce Plevna. The Battle of Shipka Pass was bloody. Bulgarian volunteers ran out of ammunition and resorted to throwing stones and body parts of their dead comrades at the Turks before stopping them with bayonets and knives.

When Plevna fell, Russians stormed south through the Balkan range achieving a rout of Turkish forces and the near capture of Constantinople. On 3 March 1878, within view of the minarets of the city, the belligerents signed the Treaty of San Stefano 2 which recreated “Big Bulgaria,” a Bulgarian state equal to which had existed in medieval times, reaching the Aegean and making impossible Ottoman control of Albania by land. Russia had finally positioned itself to dominate the Balkans. The people of Bulgaria still celebrate 3 March as the date of their liberation and formation of the modern Bulgarian state.

“Big Bulgaria,” created under the Treaty of San Stefano, was bordered by the Danube on the north and the Black Sea on the east, and incorporated all of historically identified Macedonia. “Big Bulgaria” would have extended south to include the city of Kastoria and the village of Mavrovo in Macedonia. [More in Chapter Two]

In 1879, wishing to strengthen an already dominant position in the Balkans, Russia’s Tsar Alexander II nominated a favorite nephew, German Prince Alexander of Battenberg, to the executive, princely position in the new Bulgarian state. The young Prince came to a strife-ridden government still trying to organize itself.

Jealous and concerned about possible Russian dominance in Eastern Europe, Britain and Austria reacted against the Tsar’s ambitions with the support of France, Italy, and Germany. They applied great diplomatic pressure on Russia. Isolated and fearful of another Crimean catastrophe, Russia relented. The result three years later (in 1881) at the Congress of Berlin were agreements that thwarted Russian plans, changed the borders and divided Bulgaria into three parts, one of which was a new, smaller Bulgarian state under Prince Alexander. Split off from “Big Bulgaria” was a region still subject to the Ottoman state and occupied by Turkish forces, but headed by a Christian governor - Eastern Roumelia.3 It was located south of the Bulgarian state between the Balkan and Rhodope Mountains

1 This is the same pass (located north of Kazanlak and south of Gabravo) that Alexander the Great crossed in his first great campaign as leader of the Macedonians against the Danubian Getae tribe. 2 San Stefano is now the Turkish city of Yesilköy, located approximately seven miles west of Istanbul on the Sea of Marmara. 3 Roumelia is also spelled Rumelia, Romylia and Rumylia. The region is sometimes referred to as Romania in historic documents and antique maps.

26 and extended to the Black Sea. The treaty also gave the Ottomans territory in European Thrace, Macedonia, and Albania.

The geopolitical interests of Russia and Britain reversed when Eastern Roumelia united with Bulgaria in 1885-86. Russia’s Tsar Alexander III, who became Tsar on Alexander II’s assassination, unlike his predecessor detested Bulgaria’s prince. The Tsar’s antipathy toward Prince Alexander was based in part on his refusal to make Bulgaria a vassal state of Russia. And, the Tsar had been against Roumelia joining with Bulgaria to create an even greater land barrier to any Russian drive toward the Bosphorus. The British, on the other hand, concerned that the Russians might still attempt an advance in the Balkans, were pleased that Roumelia joined Bulgaria. *******

Before 1878, in anticipation of the Turko-Russian, war Russian agents had been at work recruiting irregular militia as far south as Sozopolis. Konstantinos Kapidaglis was a man of action. He became commandant of the secret militia in Sozopolis and hoped to participate in an attack on Constantinople and the emancipation of Greek and Bulgarian Orthodox peoples. While his hope was unfulfilled, Konstantinos’ military experience and demeanor became the basis for his nickname, Generalis.1

Konstantinos’ anti-Turk fervor never waned. At the outbreak of the Turko-Greek war in April of 1897, he volunteered to serve in the Greek army. But, to his dismay, German-trained Turkish troops crushed the Greek people’s ill-timed attempt to win freedom in Crete, Thessaly, and Macedonia.

Crete was, however, brought closer to (union with Greece) largely because British, French, Russian, and other allied forces intervened to end the bloodshed. To contain the insurrection, their forces occupied the Cretan city of Chania and their naval fleet bombarded the insurgent Greeks on Akrotiri. The admirals who led the allied fleet are the same so poignantly remembered by Madame Hortense, the aged courtesan in Nikos Kazantzakis’ book Zorba the Greek.2 Because of her relationship with warships and admirals, Zorba called her Bouboulina.3

Konstantinos did not talk about his experiences in the Turko-Greek War. The Greek army collapsed at the first assault of the Turks and fled across Thrace. It

1 See Photo 4. 2 Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek (New York,: Simon and Schuster, 1969). 3 Laskarina Bouboulina was a naval hero in the war for Greek independence (1821- 1828). She is one of the great female businesswomen, leaders and warriors in history.

27

Photo 4 Photo 5 Konstantinos Kapidaglis Eleni Zissis “Generalis” c1878 Pyrgos (Burgas), Bulgaria c1898

Photo 6 Evangelia Athens, Greece c1910

28 was an ignoble end to an enthusiastic beginning forced by excited and irrational mobs of zealous and unrealistic patriots in Athens.1 Konstantinos returned to Sozopolis.

By 1905, Konstantinos and Sofia had added three children to their family: Hristos, Vasiliki, and Theano. Perhaps in anticipation of the bad times ahead, and to find work to sustain his family, Konstantinos immigrated from Sozopolis to a refugee camp in the area of and then to Athens, Greece. His Greek nationality and past service in the Greek army made him welcome. Konstantinos considered himself more Greek (more of a Hellene) than the mainlander Greeks; he called them savage Christians (agriocristiani - agriochristiani). He established himself and his family in a home in Kalithea, Athens, where he worked at his trade as a tailor. His home was to become first Eleni’s and Evangelia’s, and subsequently the entire family’s stepping-stone to America.

Sofia’s sisters, Sultana and Smaragda, both married Greek men of Sozopolis: Ioannis Thoma and Demetrios Parousis, respectively. Sultana’s children, Thomas and Ioanna, immigrated to the United States. The third, Eleni, lived in Chicago and likely brought her mother to Chicago to live with her after her father died. When last seen, Smaragda Parousis and her family lived in Athens. They may have changed their names and fled to Bulgaria or Romania in the late 1940s at the end of the Greek civil war. They were on the losing communist side.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the fourth sister, Eleni, lived in Burgas (Pyrgos), Bulgaria, with her cousin, Sofia Georgi Stateva. Eleni worked as a seamstress in this growing port city to the north of Sozopolis. There, in a time of 2 growing unrest, she met and married her husband, Stefan.

Eleni gave birth to her daughter on 26 October 1904,3 the Eastern Orthodox1 Feast Day of St. Demetrios. The baby was named Demetra in honor of the saint on whose feast day she began her life.

1 Ferdinand Schevill, The History of the Balkan Peninsula, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (New York,: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1922), 430. 2 Eleni’s marriage, the name of her husband, his profession, and the cause of his sudden death and disappearance are all open questions. The version of the story considered most plausible is related here. For the basis of this conclusion, see Appendix A. 3 At the time the Balkans observed the Julian calendar. In 1923, the replaced the Julian calendar with a form of the Gregorian in order to make consistent the calendar in the Balkans with that of Western Europe. Thirteen days were added to the dates of the Eastern Orthodox calendar, thus 26 October became 8 November. However Evangelia continued to celebrate her birthday on the feast day of Saint Demetrios, 26 October.

29

Little Demetra did not keep her original name. She contracted smallpox in her second year, and in their prayers her parents promised the Theotokos (the Mother of God - the Virgin Mary) that if she lived, they would baptize their daughter Evangelia, which translated from Greek means “good news.”2 She survived, was named Evangelia, and years later in 1916, at the edge of New York City’s “Hell’s Kitchen,”3 became known as Lily.

*******

In 1906, the position of Greeks in Bulgaria was becoming untenable. Bulgarians had for many years been envious of and angry with the Greek population whose education, success in commerce, and historical alignment with the Greek Orthodox Phanariotes4 in Constantinople gave them great economic and social advantage. The Bulgarians considered Greeks to be privileged, overbearing, and agents of their Ottoman overlords. Travel inland was dangerous for a Greek. Angry Bulgarian peasants and brigands roamed the forests and lonely roads demanding that Greeks acknowledge themselves as Greek-speaking Bulgarians.5

1 The term “Eastern Orthodox” encompasses the national Orthodox churches of Greece, Russia, Serbia, Bulgaria, etc. 2 In Orthodox Christian countries, individuals traditionally celebrate their name day, not their birthday. All those named after the Annunciation of the Virgin (i.e. Evangelos, Evangelia, etc., the good news of the coming of the Savior) celebrate their name day on 25 March. Orthodox parishes named after the Annunciation also celebrate this feast day. 3 In the late nineteenth century, the crime- and corruption-filled district of tenements and slaughterhouses between 14th and 52nd Streets, from west of Eighth Avenue to the Westside waterfront, was known as “Hell’s Kitchen.” The neighborhood, home to notorious gangs, was later defined as extending from 34th to 59th Streets and from Eighth Avenue to the Hudson River. 4 Phanariotes were members of the principal Greek families who lived in the Greek quarter of Constantinople, called the Phanar “lighthouse”, home to the Patriarch. Many served in senior administrative positions in the Ottoman civil bureaucracy, or were the wealthy merchant class of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. They had great influence at the Patriarchate of the Orthodox Church. 5 For an excellent accounts of Greeks of the Black Sea see: Koromila and Aleksidze, The Greeks in the Black Sea : From the Bronze Age to the Early Twentieth Century.;and Marianna Koromila, In the Trail of Odysseus (Norwich: Michael Russell, 1994).

30 Through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, one of the greatest abuses to Bulgarian ethnic pride was the Patriarch’s appointment of Greek- speaking bishops to serve the Bulgarian Orthodox population.

After the success of the 1821 revolution, both Bulgarians and Turks became apprehensive about the resurgence of Greek chauvinism. A Megali Idhea [Great Idea] fired the Greek imagination. It was a grandiose vision whose aim was to recapture Constantinople, recreate the Byzantine Empire, and free and unite all Hellenes in Turkish territory. This unification would have included coastal Anatolia, Thrace, Constantinople, and the Greek cities of the Black Sea.

Growing Bulgarian national consciousness had as its primary goal deliverance from the “yoke” of Greek culture, not emancipation from Ottoman rule. Central to their ambitions was the establishment of a Bulgarian Orthodox Church, with its own language, bishops, and clergy. In frustration, the Bulgarians went so far as to enter into negotiations with the pope with the thought of possible conversion of the entire Orthodox population to Roman Catholicism.

Succumbing to pressure from Russia, which did not want to lose its Balkan Orthodox Slavic brothers to Rome, the Porte decreed establishment of the autocephalous Bulgarian church in 1870 and invested its first Exarch.1 Wealthy Bulgarians established schools and reading rooms. These institutions were the instruments used to strengthen Bulgarian identity and put pressure on the Greeks of Eastern Roumelia. In September of 1885 a revolution in Philippopolis (Plovdiv) proclaimed union with Bulgaria. The following April the union was accepted and ratified by the European powers and the Ottomans.

Prince Alexander failed to gain popular support in Bulgaria even after winning a short war against Serbian attempts to expand its territory at the expense of Bulgaria. Tsar Alexander III’s antagonism against the Prince never waned, and in 1886, Prince Alexander was forced to abdicate. In 1887, Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg was offered and accepted the throne of Bulgaria. Prince Ferdinand and his premier, Stephen Stambulov, led Bulgaria forward toward a rapprochement with Turkey engendering support from the Sultan, who appointed bishops of the Bulgarian Exarchist Church to important sees in the Ottoman’s multi-ethnic Macedonia.

At the turn of the twentieth century the Balkan states were in crisis. Bulgarians, Greeks, and Serbs contested for dominance and territory in geographically ill- defined Macedonia. The region also contained minorities of ethnic Turks, Vlachs, and Albanians who participated in the struggle. Guerrilla bands formed and fought each other in Macedonia, Thrace, and Bulgaria. Each savaged the others’

1 An Exarch is an Eastern Orthodox Bishop ranking below the Patriarch and above a Metropolitan, and is the head of a church independent of the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

31 populations, committing atrocities in the name of their nationalist and religious causes.

As Greek Macedonians gained military success, Bulgarians became more belligerent toward the Greeks in Thrace and in what had been Eastern Roumelia. Finally, in the summer of 1906, provoked in part by the Patriarch’s appointment of the Greek Bishop Neophytos to Varna, pogroms broke out against the Greek population on the coast of the Black Sea.1

The Greeks of Varna, Pyrgos, and Anchialos saw their homes, churches, schools, and shops destroyed by organized Bulgarian mobs led by guerrilla bands known as comitadjides.

*******

On the night of 30 July 1906, Anchialos burned. Bulgarian militia and mobs conducted a pogrom that resulted in the slaughter of thousands of its six thousand Greek inhabitants.2

Awakened by Sozopolis’ church bells, Hristodul and Vasiliki Zissis wondered at the glow in the sky to the north, across the bay. In the days that followed their world disintegrated about them. They heard stories of the holocaust in Anchialos, of arson whose flames consumed homes and shops, and of murder and looting that had visited friends and family in the city of Pyrgos.

In Pyrgos, Hristodul and Vasiliki’s daughter, Eleni, and her husband Stefan were victims of the terror and violence of that night. Clinging to their baby, Evangelia, and carrying what few belongings they could, they joined Greek families who ran through the streets toward the docks and small boats that held hope of escape. Stefan stumbled and fell. The press of humanity trampled him to death and pushed Eleni and her child into the sea. Greek fishermen picked them out of the water and for several days carried them south through the Bosphorus, then west past Constantinople, across the Propontis, through the Hellespont and, finally, into the Aegean Sea.

1 R. J. Crampton, Bulgaria 1878-1918, a History, East European Monographs ; No. 138. (Boulder, Colo. New York: East European Monographs; distributed by Columbia University Press, 1983). 2 There were allegations emanating from the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Athenian Press that as many as four thousand Greeks were killed during the pogrom. These are likely to be exaggerations stemming from excessive nationalism and antagonism that followed the Balkan wars, the First World War, and the catastrophe in Smyrna.

32 With dread, tears, and despair, Eleni retraced the route of her ancient ancestors. She was at sea with the crew of a fishing boat. A destitute widow with an infant and an unknowable future, she had one purpose - to survive.

Eleni and Evangelia never returned to the shores of Bulgaria. With thousands of other refugees, they found their way to Greece. The Greek government, though impoverished by the war with Turkey, established Nea Anchialos (New Anchialos), a community near Volos for refugees from Anchialos. Eleni and Evangelia went to another settlement named Euxeinoupolis, near Almyro, south of Volos. Eight hundred families from Eastern Roumelia settled in Nea Anchialos, and an additional nine hundred made their way to Euxeinoupolis.1

As an adult, Evangelia told of the plague she experienced as a child in Sozopolis, and of bodies carted out of the city to be burned. But, it was at the refugee settlement, an incubator of disease and death, not Sozopolis that she was at an age to remember such horrors.

Map 8

Efxinoupoli and Nea Anchialos Settlements for Refugees from the Burgas Region

Retrieved from: htpp://www.hit360.com/english/destinations/showcountry.asp?countyid=66 3 October 2002

1 Moses Capon et al., The Story of a Civilization, Magnesia (Athens, Greece: M. and R. Capon, 1982).

33 High-ranking military officers who governed Euxeinoupolis stole refugee food and relief supplies to sell for personal gain. Eleni organized the women to protest this corruption, led a march on the military’s headquarters, and, according to family members who proudly retold the story, she physically savaged the colonel in charge. Refugees in her camp had no further problem receiving aid.

Eleni and Evangelia spent several months in Euxeinoupolis. They eventually made contact with and joined Eleni’s sister and brother-in-law, Sofia and Constantine Capidaglis, who with their children lived in Kalithea, Athens, and welcomed the refugees to their home. [See Photos 5 and 6.]

Members of the family worked in Athens as tailors, seamstresses and milliners and used their talents to design, drape, cut, sew and finish dresses, gowns, suits and coats. They honed the skills that would provide for their economic futures. According to family oral history, Eleni was so accomplished that she came to design and make dresses for Greece’s Queen Olga and her daughters.

Eleni’s career in Athens was short-lived.

*******

Peace was unknown in the Balkans during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Each ethnicity’s claim to Macedonia and the zeal of all to rid themselves of their Turkish overlords made for a complex armed struggle. Guerrilla warfare was rampant in Macedonia, Epirus, and Thrace. In 1908, Albanian nationalism sparked a revolution that, by 1912, gained the Albanian people home-rule with the right to establish schools and publish newspapers. It also confirmed the 1878 boundary of Ottoman territory that held largely an Albanian population. It included the vilayets of Scutari, Janina, Monastir, and Kossovo.1 Neighboring states coveted all four vilayets: Scutari - by the Montenegrins; Janina - by the Greeks; and, Monastir and Kossovo - by Bulgars, Serbs, and Greeks.

A secret Balkan coalition of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Montenegro the “League”, had ambition to rid Macedonia of Turks and to divide the spoils. In the First Balkan War of 1912, the Turks lost. The result: Albania became a nation with less territory than it had coveted, and the Island of Crete united with Greece.

Dividing the spoils was more problematic than the League had foreseen. In 1913, Serbia, Greece, Romania, and Montenegro fought Bulgaria for territory in the Second Balkan War. In the end, Serbia and Greece shared Macedonia. [See Map 9.]

*******

1 Turkish administrative territory or unity, like a state or canton.

34 Sometime before April of 1912, Eleni married a man named Christos Stamatiou. But, family oral history and photographs indicate that Eleni and Evangelia were in Piraeus for one or two years before coming to America. Where was Christos during that time? Was Eleni’s marriage an arrangement so that she might immigrate to America? These questions go unanswered.

We know that Christos and Eleni witnessed increased tensions in the Balkans. He had few skills, and they were without land or financial resources. They saw the dispossessed, those without any hope of gainful employment to support their lives and families, board ships to emigrate, leaving the Balkans and Greece for Canada, Argentina, Australia, and America. He and Eleni made the decision to emigrate, to find a future in the new world that America offered.

According to entries on the S.S. Macedonia’s “List or Manifest of Alien Passengers for the United States,” Christos Stamatiou arrived at Ellis Island on 20 April 1912. He was alone, married, and 38 years of age. His destination was South St. Paul, Minnesota, where he was to join a friend. His last place of residence in Greece was “Efxinoupolis.” The document shows his place of birth as “Anhialos,” Greece. The entry either is a misspelling of Anchialos in Bulgaria, the city that suffered total destruction in the Bulgarian pogrom of 1906, or a reference to Nea Anchialos in Greece. The name of his wife, who remained in Greece, is decipherable on the manifest as “Eleni.” [See Figures 1-4.]

Christos made his way to St. Paul, Minnesota, to work for the railroad or in the stockyards and slaughterhouses that had become central to St. Paul’s economy.

On 31 July 1912, Eleni and Evangelia embarked on the S.S. Macedonia for a seventeen-day voyage to America. It was a long trip in steerage for young Evangelia.1 She never forgot the crowded, dirty conditions: slop buckets, foul air, and barely edible food. Eleni and Evangelia arrived at Ellis Island on 17 August 1912.2 The ship manifest shows that Eleni’s nearest relative in Athens, Greece, was her sister, Sofia, and that Eleni and Evangelia were en route to join Eleni’s husband in St. Paul where he lived at “211 East 7th Street”, just a mile or so north of the stockyards. On the manifest, their place of birth was identified as “Sozoupolis, Boulgaria.”

Among the many places of origin Eleni’s fellow immigrants listed on the S.S. Macedonia’s manifest were: Skyros, Chios, Mitylene, Gallipoli, Pirgami, Arakova, Fokis, Dervitsami, Athens, the Aegean and Ionian Islands, and Turkey.

1 See Appendix B. 2 Ellis Island received most of the nine million immigrants that entered the United States in the first decade of the twentieth century; southern Europeans made up seventy percent of that influx. Approximately 520,000 Greeks came to America between 1900 and 1924.

35 Destinations in the United States were nationwide, including Chicago, Minneapolis, Oakland, Boston, Morgantown, Detroit, Duluth, and Des Moines.

Map 9 Balkans 1914 - 1990

Courtesy of the International Center for Balkan Studies (CIBAL) ©1999, CIBAL All rights reserved. Retrieved from: htpp://balcanica.org/history/maps.html 3 October 2002

36 Ellis Island records show that after passing their physical examinations, Eleni and Evangelia were detained for three days while waiting for Christos to send money to them for their train tickets to St. Paul. When funds arrived, Eleni purchased their tickets, and at 3:00 P.M. on 20 August 1912, released from Ellis Island, they began their lives in America. [See photos 7 and 8.]

In St. Paul there were few Greek immigrants in 1912, perhaps one to two hundred souls. They attended the Greek Orthodox Church in Minneapolis, St. Mary’s on East Lake Street. [The parish is now located on Irving Street South.]

Figure 1 Christos Stamatiou Shown on Ship’s Manifest

Figure 2 Chistos Stamatiou’s Place of Origin

Figure 3 Christos Stamatiou’s Destination

37

Figure 4 Christos Stamatiou’s Wife

Eleni worked as a pig butcher until she and Christos saved enough to leave for Chicago. Evangelia remembered solitary days in a “log cabin” during long, cold, and snowy winter days, and her loneliness while her mother worked. She seemed terrified even in her forties when telling how neighbors saved her when she accidentally started a fire in her home.

In 2001, their 1912-1913 address in St. Paul was a construction site that had obliterated the past. Surrounding the area are brick buildings of two and three stories, likely built in the early twentieth century.

By the summer of 1913, Eleni, Christos and Evangelia had moved to Chicago, which then and for years after held the largest Greek population in America. They probably lived in Chicago’s 19th Ward, a section of tenements on the old West side. Italians, Greeks, and Bulgarians had large colonies bordering Halsted Street. The shops lining the area’s crowded sidewalks displayed signs in the languages of their immigrant customers. Chicago’s first Greek Orthodox Church, Holy Trinity, was at Halsted and Harrison Streets, in the neighborhood still called “Greek Town.”

A few blocks to the south on Halsted was the Maxwell Street Market where vendors sold potatoes, pots, pans, shoes, , and fresh fish. On their day free from work, the immigrants flocked to the market to participate in the Sunday trade.

The railroad seasonally employed many Greek men. Others earned their way as street peddlers. Christos probably worked in one of the factories, or at the Union Stock Yards, or at a meatpacking plant on the South Side. Working conditions were horrific. There was little regard for accident prevention, worker fatigue, or ill health. Men frequently were mangled and maimed at their worksites and suffered from tuberculosis and malnutrition.

*******

The Second Balkan War erupted during the summer of 1913, while Eleni was in Chicago. Bulgarian military units attacked Serbian forces, and the fight over territorial claims in Macedonia, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania began. On 9 July 1913 (26 June by the old Julian calendar), Eleni’s first cousin, Ortodokso Yanakev Zisov (Orthodoxos Iannou Zissis), who had been conscripted into the

38 Bulgarian army was killed in action. He was the son of her father’s brother, Ioanni, and only twenty-two years of age when he died in the battle of Kitka Peak in Serbia, perhaps on the slope shown in Photo 9.

Photo 7 Photo 8 Eye Examination Railroad Ticket Counter Ellis Island c1912 Ellis Island c1912

Photo 9 View from Kitka Peak 1999

39 One consequence of the extraordinarily long, complex, and tragic history of the people of Thrace and Macedonia was that this young Bulgarian citizen of Greek nationality marched from his home in Sozopolis to Serbia to die fighting for Bulgaria in what is now Macedonia. His commanding officer wrote:

“The deceased was killed in a battle near Kitka Peak on June 26, 1913, in the war against Serbia. He was hit by a bullet in the left part of the chest.”

*******

Jane Addams, daughter of a wealthy Illinois mill owner, used an old mansion called Hull House to provide social services to the poor immigrant population in Chicago. In an article published by the American Journal of Sociology, Grace Abbott, once a resident worker at Hull House and later Director of the League for the Protection of Immigrants, wrote:

“The largest settlement of Chicago Greeks is in the nineteenth ward, north and west of Hull House. Here is a Greek Orthodox Church; a school in which children are taught little English, some Greek, much of the achievements of Hellas and the obligation that rests on every Greek to rescue Macedonia from the Turks and Bulgarians;1 here, too, is the combination of Greek bank, steamship ticket office, notary public, and employment agency; and the coffee houses, where the men drink black coffee, play cards, speculate on the outcome of the next Greek lottery, and in the evening sing to the accompaniment of the Greek bag-pipes or - evidence of their Americanization - listen to the phonograph.”2

In the summer of 1915, Christos Stamatiou died during a record heat wave. Before the time of air conditioning, the hot days of summer caused many deaths. Sickly young, old, and infirmed people succumbed in great number. Heatstroke claimed 535 lives in Chicago in 1915. The temperature contributed to many more deaths as Chicago’s hospital facilities strained to meet the needs of the sick. That world without air conditioning offered less than rudimentary medical care by today’s standards.

Eleni found herself widowed for a second time. She was isolated in a strange city, larger, busier, and more threatening than any she had imagined in her life in Sozopolis. Clinging to each other, Evangelia and her mother became inseparable. The relationship that developed between them was not only of mother and

1 Emphasis added to underscore the passion of the Greek immigrant for his homeland. 2 Edith Abbott, Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge, and University of Chicago. Graduate School of Social Service Administration, The Social Service Review, vol. 1- Mar. 1927 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press ). Issue of November 10, 1909.

40 daughter but also of closest friends and intimates. With Christos gone, they again were alone and without any support.

Family never discussed Christos’ existence. Only one member even alluded to Eleni having had a husband when she came to America. That was Joyce (Toto) Capidaglis Tumola, who once blurted out that Eleni had divorced a man in Chicago. Whatever the truth about Christos Stamatiou, Eleni came to the United States to meet him, they moved from St. Paul to Chicago, and sometime in 1915, he went out of Eleni and Evangelia’s life. Neither Eleni nor Evangelia ever publicly acknowledged Christos Stamatiou.

In the 1930s, Evangelia [now Lily] became fearful of deportation. She attempted to obtain permanent residency in order to become a naturalized citizen but was not able to show proof of legal entry into the United States. Her status as an undocumented alien, which she kept secret, worried her.

In 1958, Lily decided again to try to obtain legal residency status. Under Section 249 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, she was permitted to file for permanent residency if she could produce two witnesses to verify that she had lived in the United States prior to 1922.1

Lily filed a petition for permanent residency supported by depositions that affirmed her entry into the United States before 1922. Just before the date for Lily’s hearing, government officials found Eleni and Evangelia’s names on the manifest of the S.S. Macedonia. Her legitimate entry into the United States in 1912 was established, and Lily became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

References in Lily’s naturalization file, obtained from the National Archives, led to court records including depositions and testimony, references to newspaper articles, property deeds, addresses in Manhattan, and indications of when other family members came to the United States. Without the immigration files that documented her application for permanent residency and naturalization, much of Evangelia’s life story would have been lost.

Lily told her children and friends a different version of her early years in the United States, part-truth and part-myth. Most likely created to erase the name and memory of Christos Stamatiou, her story was that she and her mother had emigrated from Greece by themselves. Officials at Ellis Island, she said, believed that there was a community of Greeks in St. Paul, Minnesota so they sent Evangelia and her mother there. Eleni found that the community was, in fact, Bulgarian. After the experience of her expulsion from Bulgaria, the last place her

1 It was information in Lily’s request for permanent residency that disclosed her mother’s marriage to Christos Stamatiou and Lily’s own first marriage. The documents showed that Christos, Eleni, and Evangelia moved to Chicago in the spring of 1913, just six months after they arrived in St. Paul.

41 mother wanted to live was in a community of Bulgarians. So, after two or more years in St. Paul they moved to Chicago where her mother worked in a dry- cleaning establishment.

In Chicago a new man entered their lives. Working with Eleni was a young Italian, Leonardo Perna. Born in Avellino, Italy1 he had emigrated from Monteleone di Calabria,2 Italy, arriving at Ellis Island on board The Sicilia3 on 13 June 1906.

Evangelia remembered watching Eleni and Leonardo beating carpets in the back of the dry cleaners. Eleni needed the protection and comfort a man could give to her and to her daughter. Somehow, in their mutual need Eleni and Leonardo overcame both an age difference and a language barrier, joined and looked to a future together, with Evangelia.

1 Avellino is a small city in the mountains to the east of Naples. 2 Monteleone di Calabria was renamed Vibo Valentia. It is the ancient Hipponium, a Greek colony on the Tyrrhenian Sea, itself founded by another colony, Locri, a city of Magna Graecia on the Tarantine Coast of the Ionian Sea. 3 The Sicilia carried 10 first-class and 620 third-class (steerage) passengers.

42 CHAPTER TWO

Dimitraki Out of Macedonia

Macedonia Dimitraki steadied his cocked, long-barreled pistol on the top of the garden wall and took aim. It was early spring in 1913, and this twelve-year-old, Macedonian boy from the village of Mavrovo lay in wait to assassinate the Kaimakam1 in Kastoria. Leader of a secret band of boy revolutionaries, Dimitraki longed to use the ancient firearm he carried hidden at his waist to kill the Turk who ruled the Greeks under the cursed Ottoman Yoke. The boys decided to act when sent to Kastoria to trade and buy goods for their parents. Today, they had stalked the lordly Kaimakam to his home, hidden behind the garden wall that bordered an unpaved, muddy wagon road on the lake’s shore, and like their heroes, the andartes,2 waited for an opportunity to strike.

As the late afternoon light faded, the Kaimakam appeared on his second floor balcony to enjoy the evening and his view of the lake. Dimitraki fired his muzzle-loaded pistol. He missed, the bullet striking the frame of the French door next to the Kaimakan’s head. Within minutes the would-be assassin was run down and caught. His comrades escaped.

There was no question about what would happen to Dimitraki. The next morning, Ottoman officials tried and sentenced him to immediate execution by hanging. However, his father’s long friendship with the Kaimakam, desperate promises to control the boy, and delivery of a purse filled with gold Turkish lira 3 saved Dimitraki’s life.

*******

Demetrios Athanasios Mavrovitis, known in his village as “Dimitraki,” and later in business and by friends and family as “Jimmy,” was born on 6 September

1 Ottoman government official. 2 Greek guerrilla fighters; andarte is singular. 3 A Turkish lira was a gold coin valued at about four dollars, a considerable sum in 1912.

43 1900, in the western Macedonia village of Mavrovo 1 on Lake Orestiada. Macedonia was still an ill-defined geographic region with villages populated by one of several ethnic groups: Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian, Vlach, Turk, or Albanian. 2 Not yet joined with Greece, the entire territory was held by the Ottoman Empire as an integral part of the area known from the sixteenth to beginning of the twentieth centuries as “Turkey in Europe.”3

The small city across the lake from Dimitraki’s village is Kastoria.4 Its name either honors Zeus’ son, Kastor, or is based on the many beaver found by early settlers in Lake Orestiada.5 It was identified by the Roman Historian, Titus Livy (59 B.C. to A.D. 17), as the ancient Keletron or Celetrum. [See Map 16, and photos 10 and 11.] Located on the west side of the lake, it occupied a defensible promontory protected on three sides by water. A narrow strip of land connected it to the shore.

1 Mavrovo, sometimes spelled Mavrobo in western maps, now has the names Mavrohori or Mavrohorion. The change in name may have been out of a desire not to have the village confused with the town of Mavrovo on Lake Mavrovo, just 80 to 100 miles north in what is now the Republic of Macedonia. 2 “In modern times Macedonia had never formed a racial, linguistic or political unit, and prior to 1902 it had not been thought of as an administrative area. Nor indeed was Macedonia a definite geographical term.” See: Douglas Dakin, The Greek Struggle in Macedonia, 1897-1913 (Thessaloniki, Greece: Institute for Balkan Studies, 1966), and Douglas Dakin and Mouseio Makedonikou Agona., The Greek Struggle in Macedonia, 1897-1913 (Thessaloniki: Institute for Balkan Studies, 1993), 3. 3 When asked where he was from, Jimmy [Dimitraki] invariably responded: “Mavrovo, Kastoria, Macedonia.” If asked where that was, he would hesitate, and then answer, “Greece.” Mavrovo and Kastoria did not become part of Greece until the end of the Second Balkan War. Before 1913, ship manifests of Greek- speaking people arriving at Ellis Island from Macedonia frequently listed their ethnicity as Greek and their nationality as Turkish. Jimmy and his friends from Kastoria referred to themselves as “Romni or Romoi” i.e., Romans. And, the language they spoke they did not describe as Greek, but Romaiko, or Roman. This identification reflects the heritage of Rome’s eastern empire, Byzantium. 4 Kastoria was also known and shown in maps and documents as: Celetrum, Celetron, Keletron, and Castoria; by the Romans as Justinianopolis; and, by the Turks as Kesrieh and Kesriyeh. See: Courtlandt Canby and Gorton Carruth, The Encyclopedia of Historic Places (New York, N.Y.: Facts on File Publications, 1984), I:467. 5 Kastwr - Castor, son of Zeus; KASTOR - Beaver (Herodotus).

44

Map 10 Detail of a map by Christoforis Cellarius 1701 Depicting Macedonia, Epirus and Thessaly in Antiquity

Celetrum, also spelled Keletron is the ancient name for Kastoria. It is geographically misplaced in the map. Celetrum is shown on the north of the lake. It is actually on the west side. The Romans named the city Justinianopolis after the fifth century Emperor Justinian whose capitol was Constantinople, the New Rome. Under the Ottomans the city was named Kesrieh.

Map 11 Section of Baldwin & Craddock Map of Greece 1830 Note Mavrobo to th e right of the lake above the word “Greenwich.” Kastoria is to the left of the lake.

45

Photo 10 Kastoria 1930

Photo 11 Kastoria 2000

46 Just south of Keletron was Argos Orestikon, a mountain city founded by the Orestae, a Molossian tribe that in the Late Bronze Age moved from the north into the upper Haliakmon river valley. Some believe that the Orestae were the tribe from which the Argeadae Macedones sprang. 1 They became the leading tribe of Macedonia until displaced by the Temenidae, who formed the Macedonian royal house that reigned until the death of Alexander III (the Great).

Kastoria is south of the Via Egnatia, the ancient road that started at Dyrrhachium [modern day Durazzo on the Adriatic Sea] continued north of Lake Ohrid, southeast to Thessaloniki, and east along the shore of the north Aegean to Constantinople. Access from Kastoria to the Via Egnatia was through mountain passes west and north of the lake.2

Alexander the Great led his army through these passes in 335 B.C., past Keletron and Argos Orestikon, as they force-marched 250 miles south from his victory at Pelium to put down a revolt at Thebes. Arriving there he consolidated his position as leader of the Greek city-states and then crossed the Hellespont to begin his conquest of Persia.3

The Roman consul P. Sulpicius Galba captured Kastoria in 200 B.C. It existed without much note in Roman and Byzantine times, though in the sixth century A.D. it was named Justinianopolis after the Emperor Justinian. Five hundred years later [in 1083] the Norman adventurer Robert Guiscard took it from a small Anglo-Saxon4 garrison that held it for the Byzantine Empire. Robert’s son, Bohemund, controlled all of Macedonia and Thessaly, but lost it in war and retreated to the Adriatic. His father, Robert, returned to northern Greece to capture Corfu. As fate would have it, he died of plague before he attained the crown he sought, that of Byzantium.5

The 12th century Byzantine emperors of Nicaea6 contested Macedonia’s lands. After massive incursions southward, Serbian Tsars took and held Kastoria from 1331 to 1380. The Ottomans then conquered the region and held it from 1385 to 1912.

1 Hammond, A History of Macedonia , 1 and 27. 2 At the time of this writing, a modern Via Egnatia, a multi-lane highway, is under construction along the same route. 3 Peter Green, Alexander of Macedon, 356-323 B.C.: A Historical Biography, Hellenistic Culture and Society; 11 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 142. 4 Anglo-Saxon and Viking mercenaries served the emperors of Constantinople. 5 Norwich, A Short History of Byzantium, 252-54. 6 Nicaea was located inland, across the Bosphorus, and southeast of Constantinople, in the province of . It became an independent state in 1204, after the fall of Constantinople to the Fourth Crusade.

47 Over the centuries the lake, identified with the city, became known as Lake Kastoria. However, it still retains its formal name, Orestiada. Bands of Bulgarian, Vlach, and Albanian migrants entered the region and settled in small villages, especially in the mountains circling the lake to the west [toward Albania] and to the north. The dominant linguistic, cultural, and religious influences immediately surrounding the lake were then, and are now, Greek. There were Turks in the region and a large population of Jews in Kastoria proper. In the seventeenth century, Kastoria became a flourishing fur trading center.

The village of Mavrovo existed as early as 1380. The name Mavros appears along with that of Krepeni in a title deed executed by the Serbian Nicholas Bagas Baldovin.1 Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the patriarch of the Mavrovitis family brought his people from the nearby village of Krepeni to Mavrovo to save them from the plague. There was probably a frequent exchange of populations between these villages.

Remarkably, the small village of Mavrobo [a variant spelling] is identified on a British map of 1830, a section of which is shown as Map 11.

There are seventy-two churches and chapels in the area surrounding Lake Kastoria. Of them, the Monastery of the Virgin Mary of Mavriotissa is one of the earliest and finest examples. It is located on the remote eastern shore of the mountainous promontory that juts out into the lake, so is thus hidden from the city which is on its western slope. Mavriotissa lies directly across the lake from the village of Mavrovo. The monastery originally was named Mesonisiotissa.2 In the early seventeenth century, it changed its name to Krepenitissa, after the village of Krepeni. In the mid- to late seventeenth century, it changed its name again to Mavriotissa, after Mavrovo whose inhabitants had long been its patrons. [See photos 12 and 13.]

The monastery owned large tracts of land in the village of Krepeni on the opposite bank of the lake. It is clear that Krepeni and Mavrovo had an historical relationship with each other and with the monastery at Mavriotissa.

1 Nicholas K. Moutsopoulos, Kastoria, the Virgin of Mavriotissa (Athens: Friends of Byzantine and Ancient Monuments of Kastoria, 1967), 85. 2 Mesonisiotissa (Mesonhsiwtissa) translates “in the middle of the island.” In ancient times, the promontory of Kastoria was a virtual island. Thus, The Monastery of Virgin Mary in the Middle of the Island. Mavriotissa (Mauriwtissa) translates “of Mavrovo.” Thus, The Monastery of the Virgin Mary of Mavrovo.

48

Photo 12 The monastery Mavriotissa from a boat on the lake April 1955

Photo 13 Mavriotissa Entrance to the Chapel of St. John the Theologian

49 The site of the Mavriotissa is located at the point where in 1083, Byzantine troops under the command of George Paleologus landed to encircle from the rear and rout the Norman garrison left at Kastoria by Robert Guiscard. Byzantine Emperor Alexis I likely had the old main church built at the site in commemoration of the event.

At the time of Dimitraki’s birth, Kastoria and the many villages near the lake had been under Turkish rule for over five hundred years. Greek language and custom survived this long domination only because the Greek Orthodox Church kept Hellenism alive. The Orthodox Church was secure in Kastoria, the seat both of the civil government and of a metropolitan bishop.

The Turkish rulers at the Porte in Constantinople delegated to the church authority to govern and administer the Christians of the Balkans. Of the Patriarch and his hierarchy they expected obedience, payment of taxes, and submission to exploitation of their flock. The Ottoman overlords did indeed consider their Christian subjects as sheep, or rayahs, who constituted the flock, i.e., non- Moslems “…whom the sultan protected from wolves and fleeced.”1

Because of its far-reaching civil authority over all the millet-i-Rûm2 (the Eastern Orthodox people of the Balkans), the Patriarchate became more powerful than it had been in the Byzantine Empire.3 In 1776, the Patriarchs of the Bulgarians and the Serbs lost their positions, churches, and monasteries. The Patriarch in Constantinople absorbed their autocephalous jurisdictions.

The Patriarch, his immediate circle, and many of the leading administrators and men of commerce in Constantinople were Greek. They had authority, position, and wealth, and owed it all to their masters, the Ottomans, who preferred to have the details of administration and taxation of their subjects managed by the

Phanariotes.4 Though some clergy were corrupt, poorly educated, and lacking in knowledge of their religion and its history, against all odds, and in the absence of

1 Justin McCarthy, The Ottoman Turks: An Introductory History to 1923 (New York: Longman, 1997), 107. 2 A millet was a relatively autonomous “nation” whose members were of one religious community. The Turks organized the millet-i-Rûm to include all Eastern Orthodox regardless of ethnicity. The Turkish word Rûm derives from the Greeks being called Romioi (Romans). My father, when asking about a person, would often ask, “Enai Romios?” - “Is he a Roman (Greek)?” 3 McCarthy, The Ottoman Turks: An Introductory History to 1923, 127-29. 4 The Phanar was the district in Constantinople where lived the Patriarch, leaders of the Orthodox Church, and powerful Greek administrators of the Ottoman government. The Phanar district still exists but the Patriarchate is greatly diminished by the policies of the Turkish state..

50 any social or economic development, the church was able to preserve for Hellenes the Greek language, the Orthodox faith, and the spirit of Hellenism.

Unfortunately in its zeal to promote all things Orthodox, Greek, and Hellenic, the overbearing Patriarchate, through its archbishops, bishops, and clergy, imposed the Greek language and even Greek identity on the peasants of Serbia and Bulgaria. The Bulgarian people nearly lost their heritage; by the end of the eighteenth century, they identified themselves as Greek to foreign travelers.1

Consciously undertaken or not, the result of actions of the Greek Patriarch nearly eradicated the language, culture, and ethnicity of Serbians and Bulgarians in the Balkans and proved to be a source of hostility and violence.

The Patriarch appeared to be working hand-in-glove with revolutionaries like the intellectual and well-connected Greek, Rigas Velestinlis, who in the late nineteenth century advocated a Balkan-Asian State with a culture based on Hellenism, using Greek as its language.2 His early organizational efforts were rewarded when the Porte ordered his execution. Strangled to death, he and seven members of his group were thrown into the Savas River at Belgrade. Among them were two brothers from Kastoria: P. and J. Emmanuil.

In the nineteenth century, the Romanians of Moldavia, the Serbians and the Bulgarians regained their pride through study of their history and use of their language. The outcome was a rebirth of their national identities.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, Kastoria and the surrounding villages served by the Greek Orthodox Metropolitan Bishop of Kastoria were within the Vilâyet of Monastir and the Sanjak of Kastoria.3 Monastir,4 the present-day 5 in the Republic of Macedonia, is 34 miles north of Kastoria and was an important political center with numerous European consulates. American and British representatives of the press were frequently in residence there.

1 Schevill, The History of the Balkan Peninsula, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day, 385. 2 Dakin, The Unification of Greece, 1770-1923, 21-23. 3 The Ottoman military organization was the model or design on which its civil organization of conquered territory was based. The conquest in Europe, the Balkan region, was called Roumelia and governed by a beyrlebey (governor- general). By the nineteenth century, Roumelia was divided into provinces called vilâyets, which in turn were divided into sub-provinces called sanjaks. A sanjak might be governed by a mutasarrif or a kaimakam (kaymakam). 4 Also spelled Monastiri, Manastir, and Manastiri. 5 Also spelled Bitol and Bitoli.

51 Albanian-Turkish1 beys governed the entire region. This ruling class owned most of the land and served as “tax farmers” for the Ottoman Empire.2 The peasants suffered under the beys and other Turkish officials, and were plundered by brigand bands that stole from their villages. A village’s only defense to protect its people and property was to ally with or comitadjides.

In 1893, a subversive movement named the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (I.M.R.O.) sprang into existence in Resna, Macedonia, just north of Lake Ohrid. Its stated purpose was to represent all the peoples of Macedonia in their struggle against the abusive and intolerable conditions imposed by the Ottoman Empire. In practice it became an anti-Greek, anti-Turkish, exarchist guerrilla organization that enlisted Bulgarians and Bulgarian-dominated villages into its membership. In reaction, the patriarchist grecomanes3 organized, and in their attempt to protect the Greeks of Macedonia from the Slavs, cooperated with the Turkish authorities in discovering and destroying comatidjedes.

It is at the start of the nineteenth century that the Mavrovitis family story begins.

*******

The given name of the earliest Mavrovitis in Mavrovo is unknown. He had two sons, Nikolaos and Christodoulos, and two daughters, whose given names are unknown. Christodoulos left Mavrovo and Kastoria to establish himself elsewhere in Greece. His descendants lived in Thessaloniki and in the United States. One of the two daughters died shortly after marrying a man in Kastoria. After her death, her husband assumed her surname, just as Stefanos Tsvetkov in Sozopolis adopted his wife’s family name of Capidaglis. There are therefore some Mavrovitis who have no blood ties to the family from Mavrovo. Nothing is known of the second sister.

Nikolaos (1820-1895) remained in Mavrovo as a farmer, married, and had three sons, Athanasios (1848-1933), Theodore (1859-1930), and Michael (1869-1962). Theodore left Greece and immigrated to Egypt where he established a successful merchant family. Athanasios and Michael remained in Mavrovo.

1 Greeks who had converted to Islam were considered Albanians and therefore no longer treated as rayahs. They had full civil rights. 2 The Ottoman state sold tax farms to individuals or granted them in exchange for military or other service. The tax-farmer collected taxes from the peasants. The difference between what he collected and what he owed to the state was his to keep as profit. See: Bernard Lewis, The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years (New York, N.Y.: Scribner, 1995), 201-04. 3 Greeks who supported Patriarchal control of the church in Macedonia.

52 Athanasios, Dimitraki’s father, was a farmer whose land was fertile and productive. His first marriage ended at his wife’s death. With her, he had fathered one son, Nicolas, and three daughters, Polixeni, Theano, and Anastasia. His second marriage [in 1896] was to a widow, Kalliopi Papadiskos Papana. She brought George Papana, her son from her first marriage, to the new family. The marriage of Athanasios and Kalliopi produced four sons: Constantinos, Demetrios (Dimitraki), Aristede, and Thoma.

Athanasios was one of the few men in his village who was literate. He had a personal library and was well read. Villagers came to him as one of the three wise elders in their community for advice and counsel, and he frequently read documents for them and wrote their letters. Kalliopi was literate, too. Her excellent, clear, and logical letters show her to have had unusual skills for a woman in a village farming family.

Life on the shores of Lake Kastoria was simple. It was sustained with dried legumes, , oil, fresh and pickled vegetables, small game, lake fish, coarse bread baked of wheat from the family’s fields, and and cheese made from the milk of their goats and sheep. Orchards, like that shown in Photo 14, provided abundant crops of apples and pears.

On high Holy Days, the feast might include a spitted young goat or lamb roasted on an open fire. In winter, the family would butcher a pig. Its feet, hocks, and head provided the ingredients for a hearty winter soup called pichti, also known as patsa. and vinegar flavored the soup which when cold became a jellied head cheese. Dimitraki’s was not a life of luxury by any standard. In his world, it was enough to have shelter and food. He had those and the security of a large and loving family.

Dimitraki was an intelligent, adventuresome boy who was not very interested in formal schooling. He loved guns and hunting, and from an early age carried a muzzle-loaded pistol in his belt. Born with a good ear and voice his talent led him to be a student of Greek liturgical chant at the monastery in Mavriotissa. He remembered being disciplined when his gun fired in church during a service at which he was singing as the psalti [cantor].

Dimitraki frequently walked from his village to Kastoria to trade and purchase goods for his family. He rested at St. Katherine’s church along the way having his lunch of bread, cheese, and olives under the protection of a huge tree.

Photograph 15 is of Dimitraki at age 10, posed with his family. The family group is sober, almost grim, probably frightened by the camera and its powder flash.

In the years immediately surrounding the photograph, Macedonia was in conflict over the territorial designs of the Serbians, Bulgarians, Albanians, and Greeks.

53

Photo 14 Apple Orchard in Mavrovo – April 1955

Photo 15 Standing back, left to right: Dimitraki, older brother Constantinos (note book– he was called a scholar) and Polixeni Samaras, daughter of Theodota, seated left. Theodota was Athanasios Mavrovitis’ sister. Athanasios, Dimitraki’s father, seated middle; mother, Kalliope, right. Standing: brothers Aristede and Thomas. c1910

54 Vlachs had interests as well, but their influence was relatively minor in the events of the time.

*******

Kastoria was the center of the Macedonian-Greek nationalist movement in the region of southern Macedonian, from just south of Kastoria, north to Lake Ohrid, and immediately to the Lake’s east, the city of Monastir. From Monastir north, Serbian and Bulgarian centers of national movements organized their irregular forces against each other and against the Greeks and the Turks.

When people fight long and desperately enough, when they experience personal loss and cleanse blood from the bodies of fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters, and then bury them, when they stand and watch their homes, villages, and churches burn to the ground and the devastation of their fields and orchards, their capacity for reason, decency, compassion and mercy is lost. Vengeance becomes the reason to live.

Some stories of the atrocities are true; many are rumors embellished and made greater in number. Rumors of obscene cruelty on the part of the others become accepted fact, myths become history, and retribution in kind sanctioned. The unimaginable becomes reality. In Macedonia and Thrace, the unimaginable was then - and in recent times is - reality.

In his book Pictures from the Balkans, John Fraser wrote:

“The town of Monastir … lies just about half way between Bulgarian and Greek territory. North, the majority of MACEDONIANS are BULGAR, south the majority are HELLENES. . . …Monastir is an ordinary Turkish European town, even to the attempt at a garden where the richer Turks and Bulgars and Greeks come and sit at little tables and drink beer and listen to a string band composed of girls from Vienna. … Everybody is jolly. Murder is so commonplace that it arouses no shudder. In the night the little bark of a pistol, a shriek, a clatter of feet. “Hello! Somebody killed!’ That’s all. …”1

In Kazantzakis’ book, Zorba the Greek, Zorba, who was a Greek Macedonian, tells his young “boss”: “Then I picked up my rifle and off I went! I went to the mountains as a comitadji. One day, at dusk, I came to a Bulgarian village and hid in a stable. It was the very house of a priest, a ferocious, pitiless Bulgarian comatidji. At night he’d take off his cassock, put on shepherd’s clothes, pick up his rifle and go over into the neighboring Greek villages. He came

1 John Foster Fraser, Pictures from the Balkans, Popular ed. (London: Cassell and Company Ltd., 1912).

55 back before dawn, trickling with mud and blood, and hurried to church to conduct mass for the faithful. A few days before this, he had killed a Greek schoolmaster asleep in his bed. So I went to the priest’s stable and waited. Towards nightfall the priest came into the stable to feed the animals. I threw myself on him and cut his throat like a sheep. I lopped off his ears and stuck them in my pocket. I was making a collection of Bulgar ears, you see …”1

Leading and coordinating the Greek guerrilla groups known as andartes was the young metropolitan bishop of Kastoria, . [See Photo 16.] The Ottoman Kaimakam who governed the Sanjak of Kastoria was awed by and willing to accept policy direction from Karavangelis.2 The politically shrewd bishop influenced the Kaimakam to take actions that were helpful to the success of Greek andartes over their enemies, the Bulgarian and Serbian comitadjides.3

Many who joined the andartes were klephts, mountaineer bandits experienced in the hit, run, and hide tactics of guerrilla warfare.4 The andartes and comitadjides were equally savage in their attacks on villages. Murder, torture, rape, theft, and looting were committed by both sides, and by similar Serbian and Albanian bands that took part in the struggle.5

Karavangelis was a brilliant theologian who had studied at the Theological College at Chalki6 and earned a doctorate of philosophy in Germany. He was appointed metropolitan in the year of Dimitraki’s birth and served his metropolitanate carrying a Mannlicher rifle strung over one shoulder, a bandolier over the other, and a belt around his middle from which hung a large pistol and a

1 Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek , 224-25. Note that Zorba uses the Bulgarian term for guerrilla fighter, comitandji (alternate spelling). 2 Dakin, The Greek Struggle in Macedonia, 1897-1913. 3 Greek guerrilla fighters were called andartes, while Bulgarian and Serbian groups were called comitadjides. 4 The Klephts (from which: kleftis or thief) were Greeks who took to the mountains and a life of banditry in rejection of all things under Turkish occupation. For the most part, they raided Turkish villages and caravans. Romanticized in literature, poetry, and music, they became the foremost freedom fighters in the Revolution of 1821. Groups remained active under the Turkish rule in Epirus, Thrace, and Macedonia, surfacing as andartes during the uprisings of the early twentieth century. 5 Dakin, The Greek Struggle in Macedonia, 1897-1913. 6 Chalki [or Halki] is one of the Princes’ Islands located in the Sea of Marmara, about 18 miles from Constantinople (Istanbul). The island’s modern name is Heybeli, and the group of islands, Kizil Adar. The school, closed by the Turkish government, is located on a beautiful hilltop and houses a superb library.

56 knife. Riding beside him was an equally-armed bodyguard. Karavangelis frequently conducted the liturgy in small village churches with his pistol on the altar.

To survive in the hostile environment of Macedonia at the turn of the century, an Orthodox prelate had to be a political savant and an able civil administrator. The Orthodox Church was part of the Turkish civil administration and operated as a semi-autonomous theocracy within the Turkish Empire. Karavangelis played multiple, conflicting roles. He worked with the Kaimakam in Kastoria to govern the Orthodox populace and used his relationship to obstruct Bulgarian encroachments.1 He secretly led the Greek guerrilla movement that was at times in conflict with the Turks but also used the Turkish military to foster Greek Orthodox supremacy in the region. The Turkish government had an interest in maintaining a Greek community that was loyal to the Patriarchate and therefore subservient to the Turkish state.

On the 24 September 1905, when Dimitraki had just turned five, Bulgarian Exarchist2 comatidji killed two Greeks in Mavrovo.3 These killings were in retaliation for Patriarchist4 murders and massacres committed against Serbian and Bulgarian populations who had rebelled against the dominance of Hellenism and the Patriarchate. Religion was a tool of geopolitical and nationalist aims, and the religious used politics to serve their ends.

Greek andartes struggled through the years of 1905-08:

“… many remaining in Macedonia to face the severe winters, roamed the mountains and villages, inflicting heavy casualties on the I.M.R.O., exarchist bands, notables, and agents, and indeed sometimes on the Turks.”5

The winters were indeed cold; temperatures frequently dropped to below zero degrees Fahrenheit. The lake at Kastoria often froze solid. Horse-drawn sleds were able to transport goods across the ice from Kastoria to Mavrovo and the other lakeside villages.

1 Dakin, The Greek Struggle in Macedonia, 1897-1913. 2 Exarchists were those Bulgarians and Serbs who supported the Bulgarian Exarch as head of the Orthodox Church in all of Macedonia. If this position had prevailed, Kastoria and all southern Macedonia would have been merged into Bulgaria. 3 Dakin, The Greek Struggle in Macedonia, 1897-1913. 4 Patriarchists supported the church led by the Patriarch in Constantinople and therefore wished permanent association with the Greek state. 5 Dakin, The Unification of Greece, 1770-1923, 167.

57 Leading one of the bands of Greek andartes was a Greek Army officer named . [See Photos 17 and 18.] Dedicated to the union of Macedonia with Greece and supported by Crown Prince Constantine, Melas crossed the Aliakmon River into Macedonia for the first time in March of 1904. He recrossed the river several times gathering information and organizing armed bands to conduct clandestine operations. Melas was appointed commander-in-chief by the Greek Macedonian Committee in Athens. In October of 1904, after a summer campaign, he was shot and killed in the town of Statista [north of Kastoria].1 Melas’ death was mourned in Athens: “…church bells tolled the passing of a national hero.”2

Years later, Dimitraki remembered Cretan volunteers in the guerrilla bands that encamped close to the shore of the lake. Cretans were secretly recruited to fight in Macedonia. Eager to kill the Turks that held the Island of Crete in captivity, they came and fought with enthusiasm. However, the Macedonian Greeks were interested in defeating Bulgarian Exarchists, not in killing Turks, who Karavangelis used to fight Bulgarians. The goals of Macedonian Greeks were: first, to assure the dominance of their ethnicity in Macedonia, and second, to unify Macedonia with Greece.

Cretan young men borrowed pots and pans from Dimitraki’s mother to cook food on open fires, and they baked bread in her wood-fired outdoor oven. Dimitraki remembered that the Cretans taught the people of Mavrovo to eat wild dandelion greens, common to the dinner tables of more southern and island Greeks.

The First Balkan War started in 1912. In the year that followed, young Dimitraki and his friends in the village wanted in some way to fight the Bulgarians and the Turks. Many years later, when we were hunting in upstate New York, Dimitraki [now my Dad] and I rested under the shade of a giant tree by a fieldstone wall. He told me more stories of his youth, then quietly, of his near execution as a would- be assassin.

Dimitraki was a twelve-year-old boy when he plotted with his friends to assassinate the Ottoman Kaimakam in Kastoria. He was leader of a band of boy revolutionaries and wanted to kill the man who ruled the life of the Greeks under the Ottomans. The boys decided that they would act when sent by their parents to Kastoria to trade and buy goods. On that day, they stalked the lordly Kaimakam to his home, hid behind the garden wall that bordered an unpaved, muddy wagon

1 The town “Statista” was renamed “P. Melas.” 2 Dakin, The Greek Struggle in Macedonia, 1897-1913.

58

Photo 16 Metropolitan Germanos Karavangelis

Photo 17 Pavlos Melas Officer of the Kingdom of Greece Volunteer Leader of a Band of Andartes

59

Photo 18 Pavlos Melas Band of Andartes

Photo 19 The Kaimakan’s Balcony - April 1955

60 road on the lake’s shore, and like their heroes, the andartes, waited for an opportunity to strike.

As the late afternoon light faded, the Kaimakam appeared on his second floor balcony to enjoy the view of the lake. Dimitraki took aim with his muzzle-loaded pistol and fired. [See Photo 19.] He missed, the bullet striking the frame of the door next to the Kaimakan’s head. Within minutes the would-be assassin was run down and caught. His comrades escaped.

There was no question of what would happen to Dimitraki. The next morning, Ottoman officials tried and sentenced him to immediate execution by hanging. However, his father’s long friendship with the Kaimakam, desperate promises to control the boy, and delivery of a purse filled with gold Turkish lira1 saved Dimitraki’s life.

A few months later, on 10 August 1913, the Kaimakan was humbled. The Treaty of Bucharest ended the Second Balkan War; the southern part of Macedonia and the Island of Crete were united with the Kingdom of Greece. Dimitraki, his family, Mavrovo, and Kastoria had the Turkish Yoke lifted from their shoulders.

King George I of Greece traveled north from Athens to the ancient Byzantine capital in Greece, Thessaloniki, at the end of the First Balkan War (December 1912). His son, Crown Prince Constantine, had distinguished himself by leading the victorious Greek army against the Turks and capturing Thessaloniki before the Bulgarians arrived. Tragically, in March of 1913, just as King George achieved much of what he had hoped for the Greek nation, he was shot and killed while on a walk in Thessaloniki.

The murderer, Alexander Schinas, was described as mentally deranged and perhaps an alcoholic. It was said that he shot the King because he was refused money. Rumors that he was a Bulgarian assassin were not corroborated. Still, he may have been a political operative for the Bulgarians or Young Turks.

*******

There were four sons and three daughters in Dimitraki’s family. For a landowner with modest holdings, there was neither enough land nor money for Athanasios to provide a future for all of his children. Just as in ancient times when excess populations left the Greek city-states to colonize the shores of the Mediterranean,

1 A Turkish lira was a gold coin valued at about four dollars, a considerable sum in 1912.

61 Aegean and Black Seas immigration to the shores of far-off places offered opportunity for the émigré. For the family left behind, there was the hope of financial aid from successful children. Kastoria’s environs contained a poor, war- ravaged, and agrarian society. Conditions did not remarkably improve until forty- five years later, after the end of the Second World War and the Greek civil war.

The son from Kalliopi’s first marriage, George Papana, left for the United States in 1912. In 1916, the family planned for Constantinos Mavrovitis, Dimitraki’s older brother, to emigrate from Greece to Alexandria, Egypt. Late in the nineteenth century, Dimitraki’s uncle, Theodore Mavrovitis, had settled in Egypt. He was a very successful member of the prosperous Greek merchant class that flourished in the eastern Mediterranean’s commercial centers, especially in Constantinople, Smyrna, and Alexandria. He owned cotton and tobacco interests, and in the early part of the twentieth century, invested successfully in the development of motion picture theaters.

Unfortunately for Constantinos, the Balkan Wars and First World War followed one upon the other. He was eligible for military conscription in the event that Greece chose to join either side in the First World War. King Constantine I, son of the assassinated King George I, and his premier, Venizelos, were in conflict. The King was married to the Kaiser’s sister and leaned toward neutrality, while Venizelos supported the British, French, and Italians with the expectation that Greece would gain territorially and politically from an alliance with them.

In the spring of 1916, Dimitraki pleaded to go to Alexandria in his brother’s place. His mother and father gave in to the pressure and to their desire to get him out of the country before he became eligible for military service.

In the course of several days, Dimitraki traveled by horse over the Pindus Mountains to Ioaninna,1 a major city south of Kastoria that had been ceded to Greece from Albania at the end of the Second Balkan War. It had been the seat of the Turkish Pasha, head of the Ottoman occupation government in Epirus and the Kastoria region of Macedonia. In Ioaninna, Dimitraki obtained the papers necessary for his emigration. Within a day or two after he returned to his village, he set off on his life adventure with other young men who were going to America.2 He was not to return to Macedonia for fifty-two years.

Dimitraki journeyed by mule to the railhead in Kosani, and from there by train to Athens and the port of Piraeus. With a ten dollar gold piece in his pocket,

1 Also spelled Jannina. 2 For immigrants, the vision of the new land and all of the hopes it held was contained in the word “America,” not “The United States.” “Where do you want to go?” one might have been asked. The answer, invariably, was: “To America!”

62 courage, and his village friends, he boarded a ship, the Vasilefs Constantinos [King Constantine], bound not for Egypt but for the United States.

The Vasilefs Constantinos was a new ship built for the National Greek Line in 1915 in Birkenhead, England.1 Four hundred and seventy feet long, it accommodated 2,310 passengers: 60 in first, 450 in second, and 1,800 in third (steerage) class. Although the ship was new, it was hardly a luxury liner, especially for the souls in third class.

Compare:

Length Width Gross # Passengers Tonnage Vasilefs Constantinos 470 feet 58 feet 9,272 tons 2,310 (1915) Crystal Harmony 790 feet 105 feet 49,400 tons 940 (1990)

Third class passengers disembarked at Ellis Island. Dimitraki was among these. His companions included twenty-seven men and women from the Kastoria region. Of these, five were from his village: Evaggelos Petsalnikos, Andreas Zanidis, Mihail Djadikas, Calliopi Rizou, and Pantelis Samaras.

A few months after Dimitraki emigrated in 1916, his brother Thomas died at the age of thirteen when he was kicked in the head by a mule. Village life was not without its dangers, and medical attention was unknown. One amazing village remedy was the application of a poultice made from moldy bread to infected wounds.

The Greek government did not allow Constantinos to leave Greece. He remained behind, and in 1921, married Ekaterini Badavia. She had been a classmate of Dimitraki’s. Years later, in 1985, as they sat in a kitchen in Kastoria, they sang a childhood school song for their grandchildren.

Constantinos and Ekaterini had five children: Eleni in 1924, Athanasios (Thanasi) in 1925, Zoë in 1928, Nicolaos (Nick) in 1930, and Kalliopi in 1931. All were destined to suffer the Nazi German occupation in World War II, and the Greek civil war, during which Thanasi served on the front lines.

1 The Vasilefs Constantinos was renamed Megali Hellas in 1919 (shades of the Megali Idhea). It was transferred to the British Byron Steamship Company in 1923 and renamed Byron. It reverted to the Greek flag in 1928 and was in service until scrapped in Italy in 1937.

63

In 2001, in a moment of reflection during a telephone conversation, my cousin Nick spoke of the ten agonizing years of war the people in Mavrovo and Kastoria endured between 1939 and 1949. Nick was too young to participate in the final attacks against the communists toward the end of the civil war on Grammos and Vitsi (near Kastoria). He was, however, required to serve in the militia’s reserve. In four slowly-articulated, simple, and profound words he expressed all: “…fear, hunger, poverty, despair.”

In the early 1950s, Thanasi and Nick immigrated to the United States under sponsorship of their Theo1 Dimitraki. Eleni and her husband Christos Psaltis immigrated soon after with their two young children, Aliki and Constantine. Kalliope followed them, the last to leave her father and mother, Constantinos and Ekaterina, in Kastoria.

Aristede, seven years junior to Dimitraki, remained behind in Kastoria for over thirty years. He suffered as a soldier in the Second World War and the Greek civil war. In the early 1950s, following his nephews and nieces, he immigrated to the United States with his wife, Filareti. For several years, they lived in an apartment across the street from Jimmy and Lily’s home on Ovington Avenue in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Never having had children of her own, and much to my pleasure, Thea2 Filareti became a doting aunt.

1 Pronounced “Theeo” 2 Pronounced “Theea”

64 CHAPTER THREE

Madame Helen, Louie & Lily New York, New York

Chicago – New York In the spring of 1916, Eleni, now claiming to be thirty-one years of age but more likely thirty-six, 1 married Leonardo Perna, who was twenty-six. The newlyweds moved with Evangelia to New York City in May. There, Eleni became “Madame Helen,” Leonardo – “Louie,” and Evangelia – “Lily.”

Eleni, (never called Helen by family), Louie, and Lily lived at several locations on Manhattan’s West Side. At various times they had flats on West Twenty-first, Thirty-eighth, and Fortieth Streets, at the edge of what was known as “Hell’s Kitchen.” Manhattan was teeming with immigrants who had brought its total population in 1910 to 2.3 million. It declined thereafter, numbering approximately 1.5 million in 1990.

Eleni’s last address in Manhattan was 250 West Thirty-eighth Street. By the early twentieth century, the district of multi-story coldwater flats between Seventh and Tenth Avenues housed thousands of immigrant families who worked at garment and fur manufacturers, in slaughterhouses and warehouses, and at the docks. Often Greeks, Irish, Italians, Germans, middle European Slavs, and Jews segregated themselves. Members of an ethnic group would locate close to each other on the same street.

Greeks who toiled in the garment industry clustered together close to their workplaces, seeking community and safety for their families. They lived in small two- or three-room flats heated by coal-fired kitchen ovens, and, if they could afford it, by portable kerosene heaters. Gaslight illuminated their rooms after dark. On hot, humid New York summer nights they gathered on rooftops, sleeping on mattresses in makeshift family groups. Only in the best of circumstances did a flat have its own flush toilet and a tub where a bath could be taken with water heated in the kitchen. Yet, compared to the refugee camps in Greece, this was luxury.

Soon after Eleni left Greece for America, her sister Sofia’s stepsons [Constantinos Capidaglis’ sons by his first marriage] Zenovios and Stavros made their way to Paris where they lived, worked, and married: Zenovios to a Belgian, Leonie Bergmann, and Stavros to a Parisian, Yvonne Girault.

In January 1916, Christos Capidaglis was in New York City living at 321 West Twenty-ninth Street. Zenovios and Leonie immigrated to the United States in

1 See page 17, note 3.

65 1915, then immigrated to Argentina, returning to the United States in 1919. Stavros arrived in the United States in January of 1921, and lived with his brother and sister-in-law at 520 West 144 Street in New York City. His wife, Yvonne, and young son Guy joined him in April of the same year. Their sister, Hariclea, arrived in August of 1916, at the age of twenty-one. In about 1921, she married Fotios Demas, whom she may have known in Greece. He came from Glyfáda, a coastal town near Athens.

Eleni’s sister, Sultana, married Ioannis Thoma in Sozopolis and lived in Piraeus after 1906. Their son Thomas arrived in New York in February of 1917, listing his destination address as his cousin Eleni’s flat on West Thirty-eighth Street. He was eighteen years old. His sister, Ioanna, immigrated in January of 1921, at the age of seventeen.

The garment district was the center of clothing design, manufacture, and sales in the United States. It occupied eighteen square blocks of buildings between Thirty- fourth and Fortieth Streets, and Sixth and Ninth Avenues, and included the millinery industry within its boundaries. The fur market was nearby, just to the south between Twenty-seventh and Thirty-third Streets. In lofts between Fourteenth and Twenty-sixth Streets, men’s clothing manufacturers prospered. To the west of Tenth Avenue were slaughterhouses that fouled the air of the city and the water of the Hudson River. Along the river wharves accommodated the coming and going of merchant and passenger ships.

Lining Eighth and Tenth Avenues were vegetable, meat, poultry, and fish markets that catered to the ethnic groups of the neighborhood. Delicatessens provided cured meats, salted fish, cheeses, herbs, and spices for the immigrants’ tables. For Greeks there were containers of their favorite cheeses - , , medsithra, manure, kefaloteri - and olives from Amfissa and Kalamata. Baskets filled with vourvi, a small, purple wild , might sit next to a pile of salt cod [baccalao] that looked like a cord of stacked wood. Salt and smoke-cured herring (renga) and mackerel [tsiri] hung from hooks above the counter next to bouquets of dried herbs - , bay leaves, , mint, and – [rigani, dafnofilia, anithos, thiosmos, thimari]. Below there were containers of spices - , cloves, coriander, and – [kanela, moskokarfi, koriandron, kimino]. Large open cans of sardines, anchovies [both identified as sardeles], and tunny [lakerda] were displayed behind glass in the cooler. A mountain of sesame seed-covered loaves of bread was piled high on a table or crowned a counter. Jars contained more herbs and spices, even the rare mahlepi1 that was used to flavor and scent traditional holiday breads.

1 Mahlepi is the kernel of the pit of the native Persian cherry tree. It is ground into a fine powder to flavor and make aromatic traditional holiday breads, especially .

66 Butcher shop windows displayed pyramids of fresh lamb heads ready to be split, bathed in and lemon juice, rubbed with salt, pepper, garlic and oregano and roasted with potatoes to a crispy brown. At Christmas huge pigs heads hung above pyramids of hocks and feet, inviting shoppers to prepare a traditional Balkan winter soup and headcheese (patsa or pichti). As late as the 1980’s there were still meat markets on Tenth Avenue that hung suckling pigs, whole lambs and goats in their windows.

Fish stores featured black , crustaceans of all kinds, fresh anchovies, sardines, bass, cod, and every other variety of fish available from the east coast of the United States. Unlike the modern marketplace, fish heads, livers, and roe were prized. The skilled hands of shoppers would transform heads and skeletal remains of fish into robust chowders. Livers and roes provided tasty appetizers [mezedes] to accompany chilled tumblers of raki or during conversation before dinner.

Green grocers offered fresh dandelion greens, okra, dill, oregano, and other vegetables and herbs common to the cuisine of the Balkans and the Middle East.

Even in Manhattan, immigrant women canned and jarred fresh tomatoes, apricots and peaches, and put up preserves that included black cherries, rinds of oranges and grapefruit, and rosepetals. They made and dried sausage, and pickled cucumbers, carrots, green tomatoes, celery, cauliflower,r and cabbage, filling their larders as they would have in their villages in anticipation of a long winter or in preparation for bad times.

Central to the immigrants’ social and spiritual life was St. Eleftherios Greek Orthodox Church at 359 West Twenty-fourth Street. It met the religious needs of many of the first flood of Orthodox immigrants who lived and labored on the West Side in New York City.

Church, language, culture, and food: Transplanted, these ingredients of home and life in the cities and villages of the eastern Mediterranean made an immigrant’s life bearable in Manhattan. They made possible celebration of religious holidays and family events, and gave the immigrant identity and pride in the Babel that was America.

Between 1916 and 1920, many photographs of the family, especially of Lily with her cousins, were taken at Central Studio on Eighth Avenue. It no longer exists. The formal photograph of Eleni and Louie [Photo 20] is the equivalent of a wedding portrait. Eleni, a formidable woman, is clothed in a black, fur-trimmed silk dress and a veiled velvet hat. Louie, smaller and younger than his bride, is in a vested suit and wearing a hat.

67

Photo 20 Photo 21 Eleni and Leonardo, NY c1916 Lily in center. Left-Thomas Thoma (son of Sultana Zisou). Right-Katina Marinos Granddaughter of Decimos Zissis- Christodul’s brother. c1917

Photo 22 Photo 23 Lily in Costume c1917 Lily with Cousins Zenovios and Hariclea c1920

68 Photos 21 and 22, taken in 1917-1921, are of Lily with two of her cousins, and of Lily prepared to attend a costume party, respectively. Photographs recorded the arrival of family members to America and were sent to family who remained behind in the Balkans. They disclose a growing prosperity and assimilation, and reveal immigrants striving to raise their economic and social status. For this family, fashion provided bread for the table, so it was natural for them to dress well. They struck the poses of those they sought to emulate.

Another photograph [Photo 23] shows Lily as a sophisticate, wearing a fur- trimmed jacket, a silk cloche hat, and carrying a black fur muff. With her are her cousins, Hariclea and Zenovios Capidaglis.

Members of the family all worked in the garment district. Lily was trained as a milliner. She made elegant hats, delivering them to the wealthy on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, being directed to the “tradesmen’s entrance.” Eleni was a fine seamstress and dressmaker, and Louie was a tailor, designer, and dressmaker.

Lily recalled many family members arriving from Europe and living with her, her mother, and Louie in their West Side flats. Eleni brought her relatives to America from France and Greece, and helped them to find work in the garment industry. Once they were employed and able to support themselves, she sent them off to lead their own lives. In 1920, Eleni made plans to bring her mother, Vasiliki, and sister, Sophia, to America, but not to a flat on the West Side of Manhattan.

In October of 1920, Eleni purchased a three-story brownstone house1 on Ovington Avenue in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, for $9,500.2 She had title to the property in her name alone, perhaps as a means to assert her independence and assure herself and her daughter security. Still, Eleni and Louis had a loving relationship and were devoted to each other. They are an affectionate couple in Photo 24.

Eleni decided to buy the house the day that she first saw it. She and Lily had taken the Brooklyn Rapid Transit System (the “BRT,” in later years to become the “BMT”) from Manhattan to the last stop. In 1920, the BRT ended service at Sixty-ninth Street and Fourth Avenue. It was a short walk to the house. Eleni examined it and strolled through the rustic 20’ x 50’ foot garden. When rosebush thorns snagged the sleeve of her dress, she decided it was a sign that the house wanted her.

*******

1 A type of sandstone quarried in Connecticut and New Jersey that was fashionable for the homes of the urban middle class from the 1830s to the end of the 19th century. See: Tracie Rozhon, “Brownstone (the Real Thing) Comes Back,” NY Times, July 4, 2000, p1. 2 In 2002, the brownstone’s value was approximately $450,000.

69 Greece was on war footing in 1919, as it sought to bring to realization the “Great Idea” of a reconstituted Greek empire. Premier Venizelos’ political rhetoric and Greek nationalist fervor led to a war against the Turks to restore a Byzantine empire to include Crete, Thessaly, Epirus, Macedonia, Thrace (to the coast of the Black Sea), the Aegean Islands, , the , the Ionian coastlands of Asia Minor, and the Pontus of the Black Sea. [See Figure 5.] By 1922, Greece lost all, and had to make room in its economically-ravaged society for one million refugees. Those unfortunates were part of the population exchange that expelled most Greeks from modern Turkey.

*******

On 8 January 1921, thirteen years after her husband Hristodul’s death, Eleni’s mother, Vasiliki Zissis, arrived in America on the S.S. Alexander accompanied by Fotios Demas’ mother, Sofia. Both Vasiliki and Sofia listed 250 West Thirty- eighth Street, New York City, as the address to which they were going; Vasiliki to her daughter, Eleni, and Sofia to her son, Fotios. Vasiliki had lived in Kalithea, Athens with her daughter, Sofia Capidaglis, for several years.

Many Greek immigrants remembered the S.S. Alexander as the ship on which they arrived in America, and the ship that brought Greek delicacies to them on its every return trip. Ralis Pierides, son of Sofia Capidaglis’ daughter, Theano, recalled his grandfather Constantinos talking about his expeditions to the S.S. Alexander when it came to port in New York City. There he would purchase tsiri, lakerda, and other specialties from the Black Sea for his family table.

Eleni, Louie, Lily, and Vasiliki moved into their new home in Brooklyn. It must have been a momentous event for Eleni, who, in fifteen years, had been married three times and twice widowed, given birth to a daughter, survived as a refugee, and immigrated to a foreign land. Daughter, mother, and grandmother are shown together in Photo 25.

The brownstone on Ovington Avenue [Seventieth Street] was at the very edge of housing development at the time. Eleni’s home was located between Third Avenue and Ridge Boulevard. Third Avenue provided the retail and food shopping establishments for the community of Italian, Irish, Greek, and Jewish immigrants that lived in what was then a suburb.

Concentrations of German, Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish families were on the other side of Third Avenue between Fiftieth and Seventy-fifth Streets. A bit further away were communities of Italian, Jewish, and Finnish immigrants. Brooklyn provided a richly diverse cultural and ethnic setting, with each group desperately clinging to its language, customs, and religion while at the same time

70

Photo 24 Eleni and Louie New York City c1920

Photo 25 Photo 26 Lily, Eleni and Vasiliki Lily and Eleni Three Generations c1921 Little Falls, New York c1923

71

FIGURE 5 MAP OF GREATER GREECE

THIS MAP WAS POPULAR IN 1920, WHEN ACHIEVEMENT OF THE GOALS OF THE ‘GREAT IDEA’ SEEMED POSSIBLE.

THE PORTRAIT AT THE UPPER LEFT IS OF THEN PREMIER VENIZELOS.

THE MONUMENT ON WHICH THE MAIDEN’S RIGHT HAND RESTS READS: “GREECE IS DESTINED TO LIVE, AND WILL LIVE.”

GREECE IS DEFINED BY THE CONTEXT OF THE MAP, WHICH SHOWS THE BOUNDARIES OF GREATER GREECE.

72 encouraging its children to excel at school and become part of the fabric of America. The children and children’s children of one group would meet and marry those of the other groups and, over time, lose their identities and become part of the ethnic alloy formed in America’s great melting pot.

Victorian homes, farms and open space occupied the land all the way from Ovington Avenue to Fort Hamilton, which guarded the entrance to lower-New York Bay at the Narrows between Brooklyn and Staten Island. Within a very few years, Bay Ridge developed new housing and greatly expanded its population. The city demolished the elevated section of the transit system1 and extended the subterranean railroad (the subway) from Sixty-ninth Street to Eighty-sixth Street and beyond. In those years, uniformed police escorted Lily home from the subway station in the evening. It was a service provided to all women who were without escort.

Remarkably, Eleni not only purchased a home just eight short years after arriving in the United States, but she furnished it and made it the center of the world for an extended immigrant family from Sozopolis.

On 1 September 1921, Eleni’s sister Sophia arrived in New York on the S.S. Alexander. She was accompanied by her husband, Constantinos Kapidaglis,2 her daughter, Kalypso,3 and Chrysoula Kapidaglis. Chrysoula was Constantinos’ niece by his brother, Menas. They were welcomed into Eleni’s home in Brooklyn, which on holidays was filled with old and young - grandparents, newly wedded, and their children.

Lily’s millinery career was short-lived. She disliked working outside of the home, preferring housekeeping and cooking to business. The bargain struck was that she would keep house and take care of her grandmother while Louie and Eleni worked and earned. Her attendance at school was not considered necessary and probably not considered at all. Lily stayed at home and did the cleaning, washing, shopping, and cooking.

Lily was proud of her mother’s work as a dress designer and manufacturer. Eleni, known as “Madame Helen” managed offices on Fifth Avenue in New York City and factories in Little Falls, New York. She was an effective manager, one of the few liberated women of her day. She certainly was unique among Greek immigrant women.

1 It ran from downtown Brooklyn along Fifth Avenue to Thirty-eighth Street, where it branched south to Third Avenue, then continued on to Sixty-fifth Street. 2 Readers who research Ellis Island records may find Constantinos Kapidaglis’ surname misspelled as “Kanadaglis.” The misspelling was reported to Ellis Island in the year 2001 in hope that it would be corrected. 3 Kalypso took the name “Joyce” in the United States. Her nickname name was “Toto.”

73 Eleni led the family as matriarch. She had a dominant personality that embraced family and friends. Both men and women spoke of her with reverence and love, and referred to her in Greek as Kryria [Lady] Eleni, a formal and respectful form of address. They submitted to her judgment and direction as they found their way in America.

Lily enjoyed telling how her mother concealed that she could neither read nor write except for her signature. These were skills considered unnecessary for most women in a small Balkan town. Eleni wore nonprescription glasses as a ruse, conveniently finding then misplaced when it was necessary to read a paper or sign a document. She also affected the air of a woman too busy to be bothered with reading menus, street signs, newspapers, and the like. She had others cater to her every need when traveling, ordering at a restaurant, or signing business papers. Her secretary learned the truth only at Eleni’s funeral.

At seventeen, Lily was eager to marry and make her own home. Her wish to marry may in part have been driven by a resentment of her stepfather, Louie Perna. Already having lost a father and a stepfather, she was probably reluctant to bond closely with this new man in her mother’s life. Perhaps she saw him as a rival for her mother’s affection. Nonetheless, Louie adored Lily, even if her relationship with him was sometimes cool and guarded.

In February of 1922, Lily met a young man named James (Demetrios) Tsavalas at a party give by a friend. He asked for her address and within the week came courting. He visited Lily at home four or five times, finally asking Eleni for permission to marry her daughter.

Lily wanted to marry and had a set of three suitors from which to select a husband: Demetrios Tsavalas, twenty-four, who was from Corinth claimed to be a well-to-do candy manufacturer in Detroit; Demetrios Mavrovitis, twenty-one, a young furrier from a village near Kastoria, Greece, working in New York; and another Greek man whose name and place of origin are unknown. Eleni inquired about Tsavalas’ business situation and on learning from him that he was a successful confectioner with several employees, she gave her permission for the marriage.

James Tsavalas and Lily had a civil marriage performed on 20 April 1922. However, they did not live together until after 25 June 1922, the date that Father Macaronis, the priest at St. Eleftherios Greek Orthodox Church on West Twenty- fourth Street, solemnized their union. One of her failed suitors, the young Kastorian furrier, attended the wedding. Lily’s cousin Toto Capidaglis remembered Demetrios Mavrovitis sitting at the back of the church in tears. He had met Lily at a dance in New York City in 1921 and fallen in love with her.

After the wedding ceremony, James left for Detroit leaving Lily behind to complete her trousseau and to prepare for her departure from Brooklyn. He came

74 for her in late July, and they left together for Detroit. To her surprise he took her to a modest, furnished, two-room, fourth floor apartment in a boarding house at 2304 Jean D’Arc Street. A woman named Mrs. Johnson ran it.

Lily was a virtual prisoner. Her husband left each morning, requiring her to remain in the flat until his return. She evidently made no friends and became despondent.

After three or four weeks her landlady began to make disparaging comments to Lily about her “grand” husband. Either in an act of revenge toward the man, or in sympathy for Lily, the landlady took her to a busy downtown Detroit street where Lily found her husband acting the role of a blind beggar. He was a panhandler.

Lily spent that night with Mrs. Johnson and telephoned her mother the next day, Friday, 1 September 1922. Eleni immediately boarded a train and arrived in Detroit mid-morning on Saturday. She accompanied Mrs. Johnson and Lily to the downtown district to find Lily’s husband dressed in a shabby Panama suit, wearing dark glasses, and begging. They confronted him. Satisfied that the beggar was indeed James Tsavalas, they left for Brooklyn at once.

Lily took up her life again living with her mother and stepfather. She managed the household, cooked and cared for her grandmother.

In the early twentieth century, the social life of a young Greek woman separated from her husband was very limited. Lily and Eleni’s primary concern was to avoid scandal in the Greek community. Lily had no hope of receiving a divorce decree from the paternalistic Greek Orthodox Church, and therefore held no hope for a married life.

In the years between 1922 and 1926, Eleni and Louie worked energetically and successfully in the garment industry. The economy was raging, and opportunity appeared limitless for talented and ambitious workers. America seemed to offer realization of all the dreams an immigrant might have had while huddled in the steerage of a ship crossing the Atlantic. In 1922, Eleni became an executive for Kurzrok & Company, a women’s clothing manufacturer.

Eleni’s growing responsibilities required her to live in Glens Falls, New York, from 21 February 1923 through 23 December 1925. Louie worked with her as a production foreman. Lily moved with them and was forelady of a “finishing department” where workers sewed linings and labels into garments. Their years in Glens Falls appear to have been happy. Photo 26 is one of many that capture the close relationship between mother and daughter.

In these three years Eleni, Louie, and Lily spent very few days at their home in Brooklyn. Eleni’s sister, Sofia Capidaglis, her husband Constantinos, and their

75 young daughter, Toto1, lived in Eleni’s home. Constantinos was already in his early sixties, so he and Sofia were largely dependent on their children for financial support. Sofia took care of her elderly mother, Vasiliki.

Louie welcomed his Italian family from Monteleone to Little Falls, where he was able to offer them immediate employment in the dress factory. Along with their children and grandchildren they prospered there.

The years Eleni spent in Glens Falls must have been very profitable. In late 1926, Eleni retained Nicholas Psaki, a Greek attorney with offices on West Forty- second Street in New York City. She required his services to retire the mortgage on her home and to prepare her Last Will and Testament. As he gathered personal information from Eleni, Mr. Psaki learned about Lily and her marriage to James Tsavalas. He advised Eleni that the facts presented to him supported an action for an annulment based on nonage and fraud. These were legal concepts outside of Eleni’s experience, but her quick mind grasped that in them was an opportunity for her daughter to reclaim her life.

On 3 January 1927, Lily filed an Action for Annulment of Marriage as plaintiff against her husband, James Tsavalas, as defendant. The Action asserted that: Lily, at seventeen years and six months, was underage at the time of her marriage; that she had not voluntarily or freely cohabited with Tsavalas from before the time she attained eighteen years of age; that there were no resulting children from the marriage; that Tsavalas had misrepresented himself as a successful businessman in order to entice Lily into marriage; that he was, in fact, a beggar; that Lily had not freely or voluntarily cohabited with him from the time she found out about his true nature; and, that she had resided with her parents from that time.

The court issued a summons to James Tsavalas ordering him to answer Lily’s complaint. On 1 March 1927 the court not having received a response from Tsavalas, ordered the summons published in newspapers in Brooklyn, New York, and Detroit, Michigan, and that the complaint be mailed to Tsavalas last known address. Tsavalas did not appear and could not be found.

Having complied with the court order, Eleni’s attorney filed the appropriate affidavit with the court on 8 August 1927. The Superior Court, Kings County, Brooklyn held an inquest on 10 August 1927. Lily and Eleni testified before

1 Lily’s cousin Toto (Calypso), Sofia Capidaglis’ youngest child, was a beautiful, blond woman when she married Panaiotis (Pete) Protopappas. She divorced soon after her marriage and lived an independent life in New York City until she married Louie Tumola, a prominent news photographer. Toto, a bubbly, gossipy woman who loved scandalous stories, was alive at the age of ninety in 2001. She lived widowed and alone in a decaying home at Far Pond in South Hampton, Long Island. Eccentric and rigid, she had alienated most friends and relatives.

76 Judge Charles J. Druhan, confirming the information they had provided in earlier depositions.

Immediately following the inquest, newspapers reported the details of the case for the world to see. On 11 August 1927, the New York American ran the byline:

Wife Says Blind Beggar Poses as “Manufacturer”

On the same day in a lengthier article, The New York Times recounted Lily’s entire testimony with the byline:

“CANDY MAN” A BEGGER, BROOKLYN BRIDE FINDS.

The most scandalous report was in the American Weekly, a tabloid newspaper with 21½ by 16½ inch pages. The byline of the full-page article read:

Her “Millionaire” Husband a “Blind Beggar” … Never Such a Shocking Disillusionment for a Bride of Well-Born, Well-to-Do Miss Perma When She Found Her Wealthy Bridegroom Made His Living by Asking Alms on the Streets.1

Figure 6 is an artist’s conceptions of James Tsavalas as a handsome and distinguished man in a top hat. Figure 7 is of the “Attractive Home” on Ovington Avenue. These were the least humiliating of the graphics published.

The American Weekly, true to the tabloid ethic, greatly exaggerated and distorted the facts. For example, it reported:

When Mrs. Ellen Perma, who comes of an aristocratic Greek family with considerable money, …

Nothing could have been further from the truth! However, this article and those in the New York American and The New York Times made Lily’s personal tragedy public to the entire Greek community.

Newspapers of the time made much of scandal stories, especially if they involved prominent members of New York’s society. The New York Times was no exception. “All the News That’s Fit To Print” included sensational accounts of people’s private lives as revealed in court proceedings. Lily and her family were hardly “society,” but Lily’s experience was sufficiently bizarre to attract attention and readership.

1 Perna was misspelled “Perma” in the article. In fact, Lily never used the name Perna. She used Athenas or Athanas as her maiden name.

77

Figure 6 An artist’s conception of James Tsavalas as a Dignified, wealthy man-about-town, published in The American Weekly, 11 August 1927.

Figure 7 Published in The American Weekly 11 August 1927

“The Attractive House Which Mrs. Perma, Lillies’s Mother, Owns In Brooklyn, and There Tsavalas Wooed Her Daughter”

78 The American Weekly full-page article made the most of the moment-of-truth when Eleni and Lily tore the smoked glasses from Tsavalas revealing him as a beggar on the streets. Dominating the page were an artist’s conception of that fateful event, Figure 8, and a beautifully-photographed portrait of Lily, Photo 27. Lily and her family would hardly have wanted to see their shame receive such attention. Who gave her photograph to the press?

Finally, with publication of her annulment proceedings in The National Herald, a Greek language newspaper with large circulation in New York and throughout the United States, Lily’s public humiliation was complete.

79

Figure 8 The American Weekly published the story on 11 August 1927. This artist’s conception of the moment that Lily and Eleni discovered Tsavalas as a beggar was prominent in the full page, sensational article. Lily’s family was so sensitive to her humiliation, and so caring about her, that they kept the story an unspoken secret for more than sixty years

80

Photo 27

Lily’s portrait was photographed in about 1925. It is dedicated to her husband, “Jimmy” .

81 CHAPTER FOUR Jimmy I’ll Take Manhattan

On 23 April 1916, Dimitraki arrived in America and was reunited with his half brother George Papana. He soon became known as “Jimmy.”1

For several months, Jimmy worked with George and lived with his family at 141 West Seventeenth Street in Manhattan. Photo 28 is a family portrait. The brothers apparently never got along well, and circumstances did not improve the relationship. George treated his wife and children badly. He was demanding, selfish, and arrogant.

Jimmy was uncomfortable in George’s unhappy home. He left it with the few dollars he had accumulated during the time he had been working with his brother and found a job. He was a Western Union delivery boy on a bicycle for one snowy New York day. He did not know his way around the territory, and got lost. His supervisor chastised him, telling him that he was too slow and a loafer. Jimmy’s pride was hurt, so he quit. He would not allow his integrity to be questioned and placed a high value on his reputation.

After his experience at Western Union, Jimmy worked for two years as a sewing machine operator for a doll manufacturer. When the opportunity presented itself, he entered the fur trade. Photo 29 shows Jimmy at work in February of 1919.

The manufacture of fashionable furs had become an industry in Kastoria in the eighteenth century. Generations who entered the fur trade learned their craft well there. Kastorian furriers were active in Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, Germany, France, and Canada. Some established themselves as far north as Denmark and Sweden. Many of these young men arrived in the United States either directly from Greece or from countries to which they had previously immigrated. They were ready to provide the fur fashions demanded by women in prosperous America.

Furriers in New York City had their businesses centered on Seventh Avenue, framed east to west by Sixth and Eighth Avenues, and north to south by Thirty- second and Twenty-sixth Streets. This was the fur market, known to its workers as “The Market.” Dingy, high-rise buildings housed its factories. By the late

1 Dimitraki’s age is stated as 16 on the ship’s manifest, which is not true if considered in American terms. In Greece, once having become 15, Dimitraki would be described as being in his 16th year. “Jimmy” and “Jim” were the English names often taken by men with the name Demetrios. They used the formal given name “James.”

82

Photo 28 Jimmy on the right next to his half brother, George Papana. Seated: George’s wife, Margaret, and their children Thomas and Helen. c1917

Photo 29 Photo 30 Jimmy as a beginning furrier. Jimmy, left, with his close friend Peter February 1919 Stamatis Long Branch, NJ 1925

83 1920s, the manufacturers’ showrooms were decorated in an art-deco style. They lost any semblance of elegance as they aged, worn and ill kept. Rarely did the proprietors even clean their showroom mirrors, whose patinas of dust softened the reflections of generations of women who adored themselves in mink, fox, ermine, and sable.

The factories, behind showrooms and bookkeepers’ office space, consisted of large open bays with unfinished wood floors and nine-foot windows. Along the windows were waist-high benches. Matchers and cutters worked there in the natural light that enabled them to judge fur color and hair height. Close by were rows of machines where operators under the watchful eye and supervision of a matcher and cutter sewed together long pieces of fur skins that had been carefully sliced by the cutter. When joined, these strips reformed the appearance of the fur and, when attached to adjoining skins, attained the shape and style of a designer’s conception.

There were tables where junior workers opened the bellies of tanned fur skins, removing heads, paws, and tails for use in manufacture of “plates,” or large rectangles of fur material that were cut into shapes to sew into “piece garments.” At other tables, men called “nailers” stretched and nailed semi-finished products to pattern boards to establish the final form of a garment. In larger factories, groups of women chattering in Greek or Yiddish sewed silk linings and monograms into stoles, jackets, capes, and coats. Cleaning equipment, patterns hanging from wall pegs, and bundles of furs filled the rest of the space.

There was heat in the winter but not a lot of it. During New York summers, the shops were hot, humid spaces relieved only a bit when the wind blew fresh from the north and west, finding its way through open windows to restore the workers. Ubiquitous loose hair clung to perspiring skin. Winter or summer, Jimmy wore a white shirt, a tie, and a white, cotton smock that reached his knees.

The market was, for the most part, composed of two ethnic groups. One-third consisted of Kastorian Greeks, including men from villages close by Lake Kastoria such as Jimmy’s Mavrovo. Jews from Eastern Europe and Russia were the two-thirds majority.

The Market boasted a degree of cooperation between two culturally, ethnically, and religiously disparate groups that was remarkable in a fiercely competitive business. They demonstrated the respect each had for the other in countless ways. Their business ethics and personal conduct reflected their identification with strong religious and cultural heritages. Written contracts were unknown. The Market worked on a system of honor and trust. A man’s word and handshake were irrevocable commitments. An dishonored commitment meant expulsion from the Market and permanent exile.

84 Greeks attended bar mitzvahs, and Jews gave baptismal gifts. Jews held Christmas parties, and Greeks sent greetings at Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Greeks honored the Passover, and Jews respected the Anástasi (Resurrection- Easter). And in the years following the Second World War, Jews contributed to Greek War Relief, and Greeks bought Israeli Bonds.

Both groups came late to the United States. Their low social and economic status derived from their east European origin, lack of education, and centuries of subjugation - the Greeks treated as cattle under the Ottomans, the Jews persecuted and segregated by European Christian communities. Their languages, religions, customs, and unfamiliarity with western European culture hampered them. They were below the bottom rung.

Yet, they had ownership of the religions and cultures on which western European civilization had been built: Judaic and Roman (Byzantine) law, monotheism and Christianity; the Old and New Testaments; and the art, literature, philosophy, and democratic ideals of classical Greece. They had great pride. They had a sense of themselves as inheritors of cultural legacies and held traditions that revered education and knowledge. Their ancestors had succeeded in the commerce of the world of the Levant, of the Black Sea, the Bosphorus, and the Mediterranean, and had survived invasions of Persians, Romans, Huns, Bulgars, Ottomans, Turks, and Christian Crusaders. A rich tapestry of ethnic and religious tradition that had passed from generation to generation nurtured their indomitable spirits. They worked together, Greek and Jew, to create the greatest fur design and manufacturing center in the world.

In this world, Jimmy learned his trade and developed as a young man. He was socially active among immigrant Greeks, and with his closest friend, Peter Stamatis, served on the Board of St. Constantine and Helen Greek Orthodox Church in Brooklyn. He also offered his talents as a psaltis, a skill he learned as a boy at the small monastery on a remote shore of Lake Kastoria.

Jimmy was eager to learn the language of his adopted country and enrolled in night school shortly after his arrival. The memory of his English teacher remained strong throughout his life. He diligently followed the guidance he received when his teacher recognized his intelligence and sensitivity: “Read The New York Times every day and carry a dictionary in your pocket.” For the next seventy-two years, Jimmy did just that. He rarely missed an edition. Some long articles he saved to read on a weekend or on vacation. He had the Times on his bed in the hospital and at home shortly before his death.

To paraphrase what an immigrant said about opportunity in America:

“They told me that the streets were paved with gold in America. I arrived to learn that they were not only unpaved, but that I would pave them.”

85 What were “paved with gold” were the unique paths of opportunity for education that New York City provided to immigrants and their children at the turn of the century. One of the foremost among these was the New York Public Library. Founded by former governor Samuel J. Tilden with a $2.4 million donation in 1886, the library grew when both the Astor and Lenox libraries merged into it in 1895. In 1901, Andrew Carnegie donated $5.2 million for the construction of 65 branch libraries throughout the city. The grand, main public library building at Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, with twin lion sculptures guarding its entrance, opened on 23 May 1911.

The main library was and still is an elegant, marble-floored structure with dark wood paneling and bookcases. It offered access to the world’s great books to anyone who entered its doors. Shabbily dressed, poor, working immigrants found their way to the reading rooms to study literature and find knowledge that had never before been available to them. Jimmy found this place and spent long evening hours with its books.

New York City opened the Free Academy in 1847 to educate the common people. The Academy became the City University of New York that included City College of New York [CCNY], Hunter College, Brooklyn College, and Queens College. Immigrant children became doctors, lawyers, professors, teachers, accountants, and scientists.

In 1917, sometime during his second year in the United States, on a snowy winter Saturday, Jimmy walked past New York’s “old” Metropolitan Opera House at Thirty-ninth Street and Broadway. Curious about the show and not having anything else to do, he purchased a standing room ticket. Inside he found a new world: one of music, drama, song, and dance. It captivated him. He became a regular patron in the standing room section and attended the opera frequently during each season until his marriage ten years later.

Jimmy saved playbills of many opera performances. In the Metropolitan Opera’s 1924-1925 season he attended performances of:

December 20th Cosi fan Tutte Frances Peralta, Lucrezia Bori1 December 27th L’Africana Beniamino Gigli and Rosa Ponselle January 17th Falstaff Antonio Scotti, Lawrence Tibbett and Gigil January 24th Lucia di Lammermoor Amelita Gallicurci and Gigli April 6th La Traviata Lucrezia Bori, Lauri-Volpi and Tibbett April 10th Samson et Dalila Karin Branzell and Giovanni de Luca

An appreciation of books and history grew out of his exposure to the Times, the Forty-second Street Library, and the Metropolitan Opera. His personal library

1 Listed are examples of the historically acclaimed members in the cast of each opera.

86 contained the works of Tolstoy, Dumas, De Maupassant, Shakespeare, and others. He treasured his set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and revered education and knowledge. Jimmy was a romantic. He found great pleasure in literature and poetry, and tried to write a bit himself.

In time, his attendance at the opera was limited by life events, but he heard Metropolitan Opera performances on the Texaco Metropolitan Opera Broadcasts on Saturday afternoons, enjoyed his collection of recordings, and listened to live radio broadcasts of operetta on the Chicago Theater of the Air.

Jimmy also discovered the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which he visited frequently. He was especially attracted to the representational art of the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. He held the arts as man’s crowning achievement and celebrated creative ability.

In 1921, Jimmy met seventeen-year-old Lily Athenas at a dance and fell in love. His courtship failed when Lily chose to marry James Tsavalas. It is not clear why Tsavalas was chosen over her other suitors. He may simply have been the first to express his intentions, and because of his declared financial success and Lily’s eagerness to marry, won her hand.

From 1921 through 1926, Jimmy learned the fur business and became an expert matcher and cutter. The first of these skills involves matching color, texture and hair height of fur pelts to assure that a finished garment has a uniform appearance. The second, cutting, is the process by which a skin is sliced into long pieces that are then sewn back together in a way that narrows and elongates the skin, and gives it proper shape for the garment’s design. These skills and designing are the highest paid in the industry.

On 22 June 1926, Jimmy became a citizen of the United States. He took his citizenship seriously. He stayed current with the political and economic events of the country and never missed voting in an election. He was one of the few Greek immigrants who identified himself as a Republican.

Jimmy was confident enough of his ability and experience to enter into partnership in 1926 with Vasili (Basil, William, ergo Bill) Rusuli, who was five years older than Jimmy. They had met and become friends in the Market.

When he was six years old, young Vasili, born in Kastoria, had been apprenticed to a Kastorian furrier in St. Petersburg. He lived in Russia until just before the outbreak of World War I. He found a way to board a ship at a Baltic port and made his way to New York City. Vasili was proud to have been in the United States Army in 1917-1918. Though he entered the military too late to be sent to war, he gained United States citizenship because of his service.

87 Bill Rusuli married Rose Dimitroff in the late 1920s. Jimmy remembered Rose as a beautiful young bookkeeper who worked for various firms in the Market. She and her brother, Louis J. Dimitroff, claimed Bulgarian and Greek ancestry (Bulgarian father, Greek mother). They arrived in the United States with their mother when Louis was six years old, having immigrated to the United States as refugees from Constantinople. They probably had been made refugees by the aftermath of the Turko-Greek War of 1898.

After his arrival in the United States at the age of seven (c1901), Louis was a dishwasher at a Hell’s Kitchen restaurant on Tenth Avenue. He grew, matured, attended night school, and eventually entered the insurance business. Louis developed into a smart, cosmopolitan gentleman who was at ease with the rich, Governors, and Senators, hunting Dove at a Maryland retreat, or hosting guests in private rooms at the Waldorf Astoria and Astor Hotels. When he died in 1952, he was a Vice President of The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Louis lived with Rose, and then with Rose and Bill all his life. From 1932 on, they shared an elegant twelfth floor, upper West Side apartment on Riverside Drive.

Jimmy and Bill’s business prospered in the economic boom of the 1920s. Along with their bachelor friends, they had an active social life. There are many photographs of them at the seashore and beach, hunting north of the city, in wooded surroundings turning a spitted lamb at celebrations, and relaxing in Manhattan’s Central Park. They worked hard and knew how to enjoy life.

The young men sent money to their families in Greece. Jimmy forwarded many Western Union money orders to his mother. And, he could be counted on to provide additional financial support to his family in difficult times.

These young, immigrant men from the mountains of Greece who, without shoes on their feet, had lived on village farms became impeccably well-groomed, New York men-about-town. Their appearance was remarkable. They turned out in the latest fashions with crisply-ironed suits, elegant cravats, highly-polished shoes, and straw or felt hats as the season required. Photos 30 and 31 are good examples of the importance the young men placed on their appearance.

Jimmy followed a path that elevated his social and cultural life beyond anything he might have imagined as a boy. He pursued knowledge as best he could independently and gained the respect of his peers and community. He was young, successful, and vain enough about his good looks to have had portrait photographs like Photos 32 and 33 taken almost every year. One cannot help but wonder to whom, other than his mother and family, these portraits were given.

Jimmy’s triumph was a Valentino look-a-like black-and-white portrait. In black tie, holding an ebony cigarette holder with smoke rising from its cigarette, in Photo 34 Jimmy strikes the pose of a Manhattan sophisticate.

88

Photo 31 Young men from Kastoria in Central Park. Jimmy on right. c1923

Photo 32 Photo 33 Jimmy 1917 Jimmy 1924

89

Photo 34

Jimmy had his portrait photograph taken almost every year between 1919 and 1925. These he sent to his family in Mavrovo and Kastoria, and gave to his friends.

This dramatic, formal portrait was taken in 1925-26 and dedicated to Lily.

90 CHAPTER FIVE

Lily & Jimmy Love, Marriage, and Trial

Lily and Jimmy’s honeymoon was short-lived.

On 1 March 1928, James Tsavalas filed suit in the Supreme Court of Kings County, New York, to have Lily’s Annulment Decree and Judgment set aside. His sworn deposition attacked the factual bases for Lily’s annulment. It made sweeping allegations about her character. His sudden appearance and legal action were a wrenching shock to the young couple, and to Eleni, Louie, and elderly Vasiliki. They faced a family disaster if Tsavalas prevailed in court.

In 1927, Jimmy must have learned either through newspaper articles or through gossip in the Greek community that Lily had filed for an annulment of her marriage to Tsavalas. Jimmy courted her again.

In the context of the Greek Orthodox Church and the social customs of the Greek village, Lily was not a desirable mate for a young Greek man. The Church rarely granted a divorce (particularly if the action was brought by a woman) and treated a petitioner as a threat to the social order. Annulment was unknown, even conceptually by Lily’s contemporaries. A woman generally was regarded as the property of her father and then of her husband. Lily had not received an annulment or divorce from the Church, and it is virtually impossible that such would have been granted without the cooperation of her husband. It is unlikely that Eleni and Lily had any idea of how to go about obtaining dispensation from the Church and apparently did not pursue it.

The Church barely tolerated second marriages, even for widows and widowers. Until recent times, the traditionally joyous marriage ceremony was, for a second marriage, a ceremony of contrition. The focus became weakness of the flesh, not love and a need for companionship.

Cultural forces became even more powerful in the adopted land of the immigrant Greeks than they had been in their villages. They needed them for support and security. Their language, food, church, rituals, and customs sustained them and gave them an identity in the new world. They had entered the melting pot but resisted amalgamation.

When Jimmy courted Lily, he probably did so without the consent or support of his parents and family living in Greece. Moreover, he must have been subjected to some level of gossip and derision from the Greek community that had read all about the annulment proceedings in the newspapers. Eleni’s devotion to Jimmy as

91 her son-in-law may have stemmed from the fact that he disregarded public scandal, courted, and married her daughter.

When they married in the Office of the City Clerk at Brooklyn’s Borough Hall on 10 December 1927, Jimmy and Lily had no idea of the ordeal that lay before them. There was only one photograph [now lost] of the young couple on their honeymoon. It was taken on the boardwalk at Atlantic City, Lily wearing a silver fox jacket. Other photographs likely taken in 1927 and early 1928 show an affectionate, well-dressed couple enjoying their courtship and early marriage.

The honeymoon was short-lived.

On 1 March 1928, James Tsavalas filed suit in the Supreme Court of Kings County, New York, to have Lily’s Annulment Decree and Judgment set aside. His sworn deposition attacked the factual bases for Lily’s annulment and made sweeping allegations about her character. Tsavalas’ sudden appearance and legal action must have been a wrenching shock to the young couple and to Eleni, Louie, and elderly Vasiliki. They faced a family disaster if Tsavalas prevailed in court.

Tsavalas’ true reason for suing to quash the annulment of his marriage to Lily will never be known. Reasons given in the court records are difficult to accept. He claimed:

“…I am not interested, as I have stated before, of merely having the decree set aside so as to be left with a wife. And to be perfectly frank with this Court I would rather be single today, than married to one of her kind. But if to become single means that I must go through life with a blemish against my reputation, then I must of necessity remain married.”

Tsavalas asked for no specific remedy other than:

“… that this Court grant me an order vacating and setting aside the judgment and Decree heretofore obtained by this plaintiff against me, and dismissing the proceedings and the plaintiff’s complaint …”

In his sworn deposition, Tsavalas substantially corroborated Lily’s statements about his early meetings with her at parties and Greek dances. However, his version took a very different turn. Tsavalas asserted that Lily was aggressive in pursuing the early relationship, that she met him alone at a café, asked him for his picture, sent love letters to him, and gave him a farewell kiss when he left to start his new business in Detroit.

According to Tsavalas, he had warned Lily that he was just starting out in business and could not offer her any more than a basic life. He testified that she was willing to accept the condition. An engagement party was planned for 25

92 March, Lily’s name day. 1 It never took place because, according to Tsavalas, his family cautioned him about Lily’s questionable reputation.

He alleged that Lily, on hearing the accusations against her, tried to commit suicide by swallowing iodine. He said that later while in the hospital Lily telephoned him to tell him that if he did not marry her, she would kill him and then herself.

Tsavalas claimed that he had decided not to marry Lily, that when he told her this at her home she had become hysterical, tearing at her clothing, and that he left her home at two in the morning leaving her letters and picture behind. He went on that while he was waiting for a train at the elevated station on Sixty-fifth Street, she appeared and threatened to throw herself on the tracks if he would not commit to marrying her.2

In his testimony, Tsavalas asserted that he “quieted her and took her home again.” He went on: “… I promised, because of sympathy, and in order to avoid, my being the cause of committing some wreckless dead [sic] to herself, to marry her.” He asserted that Lily’s behavior after he returned to Detroit caused “grave concern to her mother,” and that her mother wanted an immediate religious ceremony, “…because people are talking.” Tsavalas stated that he told Eleni that he was not in a financial position to return to New York and marry. Eleni, he alleged, “… told me, that she would tide me over, but to come …” He also alleged that Eleni sent him two hundred dollars.

According to Tsavalas, “… the religious ceremony was held on June 25, 1922 at the St. Eleftherios Church at West 24th Street.” He claimed that they left immediately for Detroit, together found a furnished, two-room flat at Jean d’Arc Street, and lived there from early July through September 9, 1922. He also stated that Lily had worked in his store and had been instrumental in the arrest of a thief. He stated:

“My wife and I did not get on well together, because her conduct was not all to my liking. She was friendly with certain men, and was carrying on in this same manner which caused people to talk about her back in New York City.”

Tsavalas stated that Eleni had indeed come to Detroit and left with Lily in September of 1922, and that he had remained in Detroit until November of 1924, when he returned to New York. He claimed to have entered into a confectionery store and ice cream parlor business with his brothers at 26 Avenue B that failed after several months. He asserted that his wife’s uncle visited him at the store and told him that Lily wanted to see him. He claimed to have visited her, and that she

1 The name day for Evangelia is the feast day of the Annunciation of the Theotokos. 2 This was at Third Avenue. It has been subsequently demolished.

93 asked him for a divorce on the grounds of his adultery, which he refused to do. He stated that he subsequently went to Lynn, Massachusetts, where he opened a business and lived through March of 1927.

On 14 March 1928, Eleni’s attorney, Nicholas Psaki, submitted responding affidavits to the Court from himself, Eleni, and Lily. Psaki raised questions about Tsavalas’ motivations, and since Tsavalas admitted that he had learned of the annulment case at the end of 1927, wondered: “…why did he not come into this Court then, before the final decree was entered, or before the plaintiff was remarried?” Psaki defended the actions he took to locate Tsavalas and questioned the reasonableness of Tsavalas not having heard of the annulment proceedings much earlier, when the details were published in New York City newspapers and especially the widely-read Greek language newspaper.

Psaki stated, “…this case was based on two causes of action viz: Non-age and Fraud. The decree likewise enumerated both causes of action, but it is quite possible that the decree would have been granted … especially Non-age alone.”

Affidavits from Lily and her mother accompanied that of Psaki. Lily denied all of Tsavalas’ allegations. Regarding the iodine incident, Lily stated that when she and her mother visited Tsavalas’ sister, Sophie Drivas, in March of 1922, Mrs. Drivas’ daughters and Lily went for a short walk for an ice cream. Lily had complained of a toothache which became worse after the cold dessert. When they returned to their home, one of the sisters applied iodine to Lily’s tooth, enough iodine, according to Lily, to have caused her to swallow some. She went to a hospital overnight for observation and left the next day with her mother.

Lily presented three pieces of correspondence, the contents of which refuted Tsavalas’ state of mind and relationship with Lily just after she left him in September 1922. The first, a telegram from Tsavalas’ brother, Petros, to Lily’s stepfather, Louie Perna, stated: “James got killed.”

In a second letter to his brother, Tsavalas wrote:

“My brother Petro. Nothing else is left for me in the world but to give an end to my life. Goodbye forever. James Don’t inquire for me.”

And finally, on 4 October 1922, Tsavalas wrote to Lily:

“…But I ask you am I acceptable to return to live together with you? Even though I know that you will not consent to live anymore with your former tyrant but I deem it my duty to ask you.”

94 Psaki argued credibly that Tsavalas’ actions and correspondence were inconsistent with the allegations he made about Lily’s character, his marrying her out of pity, and her alleged suicide threats. At the time, Tsavalas said he was visited by Lily’s uncle (there was no uncle) and asked to see her in Brooklyn. At the time he claimed to have seen her next and been asked for a divorce, Lily was in Glens Falls, New York, with her mother and stepfather.

On 9 April 1928, the court denied Tsavalas’ motion to set aside the annulment, and the Appellate Division subsequently denied Tsavalas’ appeal. Jimmy and Lily survived the threat to their marriage. Jimmy, Lily, Eleni, and Louie must have suffered untold anguish during the months that the legal status of Lily’s marriage was in doubt. Any information about the matter leaked to the Greek community would have caused more unwanted notoriety and scandal.

What motivated Tsavalas to attempt to quash the annulment of his marriage? He had played the role of a blind beggar (it is hard to imagine Eleni and Lily creating such a story). It is not hard to imagine that he would try to gain advantage out of the situation. The community thought Eleni was financially well-off. Perhaps Tsavalas sought a financial settlement.

There was great mutual respect and dedication in the marriage between Jimmy and Lily. Jimmy was a stalwart, responsible husband who, in keeping with tradition, left the home and its management to his wife. Lily was a traditional Greek homemaker who cooked, cleaned house, entertained, and raised children with pride and dedication.

The joining of Lily, the extroverted, enthusiastic, fun-loving, dancing, leader of men and women, with Jimmy, a stoic, conservative, sober, unassuming, responsible gentleman, was a merger of opposites. Photographs 35 and 36 of their early years together are of a romantic, affectionate couple.

Life was good during the year that followed the end of their legal entanglements. Jimmy was successful at his business; Eleni and Louie were equally prosperous at their work in the garment industry. Lily kept house for them all and looked after her grandmother, Vasiliki.

On 10 December 1928, in celebration of their first anniversary, Jimmy and Lily attended a Metropolitan Opera performance of Puccini’s Turandot.

The first signs of economic stress that preceded the Great Depression1 appeared in the financial markets. The fur market felt the impact almost immediately, and Jimmy and Bill dissolved their partnership as friends.

1 The economic collapse known as the Great Depression began in October 1929, when the speculative bubble in the stock market burst and the “Roaring Twenties” came to an end. Recovery did not take hold until manufacture of

95 Life was good for the family on Ovington Avenue in 1929. There was still hope that the financial crisis would pass and life would go on as before. Photograph 37 is of the family at a picnic in the summer of 1929. They took every opportunity to be out of the city in environments that reminded them of their origins - by lakes, in forests, and at the sea. Always with them were good food and music from a bouzouki, mandolin, or clarinet.

armaments in anticipation of the Second World War stimulated the economy in 1939-40. During the Depression, people saw their life savings evaporate, unemployment reach record levels, and soup kitchen lines form in every city. One of the famous songs of the day was: “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” by Gorney and Hamburg. A hit in 1932, it was recorded by both Bing Crosby and Rudy Vallee. The lyrics, quoted here in part, provide an eloquent description of the time. The references to “khaki suits” and “half a million boots” are to veterans of the First World War who suffered in war and the Depression.

Last two lines of the First Verse: Why should I be standing in line Just waiting for bread? Chorus: Once I built a railroad I made it run Made it race against time. Once I built a railroad Now it's done Brother, can you spare a dime?

Once I built a tower up to the sun Brick and rivet and lime. Once I built a tower, Now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime? Second Verse: Once in khaki suits Gee, we looked swell Full of that yankee doodle dee dum. Half a million boots went sloggin' through hell And I was the kid with the drum! Final Chorus: Say don't you remember? They called me Al. It was Al all the time. Why don't you remember? I'm your pal. Say buddy, can you spare a dime?

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Photo 37

This photograph was taken at a picnic in the summer of 1929. On the far left is Louie Perna. Sitting next to him with a bandana covering her hair and her arm over Louie’s shoulder is Eleni (note her hand about Louie’s neck). Jimmy can be seen just above Eleni’s head. Seated, left to right, are Hariclea Capidaglis, Ioanna Thoma, Katerina Marinos (all Lily’s cousins), Chrysoula Stefas, Constantine Capidaglis’ niece, by his brother, Menas; and on the far right, Lily..

97 Lily hoped for a large family. In 1929, after suffering miscarriages, she became pregnant and did not lose the child. A son named after Jimmy’s father, Athanasios, was born on 20 February 1930. The joyful event of Athanasios’ birth was followed six months later by the tragedy of his death. He contracted pneumonia and died in September 1930.

Jimmy’s business failed in late 1930. Consistent with his ethics and the values he held throughout his life, he refused to go bankrupt or, in the language of the fur market, “go boom.” He signed notes for tens of thousands of dollars not knowing how or when he would be able to pay his creditors.

Lily’s mother and stepfather took a trip to Greece and Italy in the spring and summer of 1931. Eleni needed time to rest after years of hard work and to recover from the loss of her grandson. She must have been aware that she had a chronic cardiac valve disease. Loss of a large part of her wealth early in the depression added to her worry and distress.

Before leaving on her trip Eleni, arranged for Lily’s future. She visited her attorney to have the title to her house recorded as a joint tenancy with Lily. Witness to the document was Rose Dimitroff Rusuli, Bill Rusuli’s wife. Eleni’s husband, Louis Perna, did not have his name on any of the recorded documents for the property at 260 Ovington Avenue.

Louie was completely devoted to Eleni and to Lily. He was as good a stepfather and grandfather as anyone might be. Yet, Eleni remained financially independent. Louis was generous to his stepdaughter and grandchildren, and in his later years was able to afford a home of his own and a comfortable retirement.

Eleni and Louis returned from Europe to their home in Brooklyn in time for the birth of their granddaughter on 13 September 1931. The baby’s name was Eleni (Helene), after her grandmother.

The Great Depression intensified, and work was hard to find. Jimmy matched and cut skins two or three hours at a time for several fur manufacturers, barely making ends meet. Eleni and Louie were both in and out of work, and Eleni had lost a fortune in the mad craze of currency speculation that enticed novice investors in the twenties.

In the winter of 1932-33, Jimmy and Lily’s baby, Eleni, contracted pneumonia just as her deceased brother had. The family did not sleep for days as they nursed her and prayed. A new family doctor, Ettore J. De Tata, cared for Elenitsa.1 He prescribed among other remedies, open windows.

1 My sister Helene’s name in Greek was Eleni. Elenitsa, uses the diminutive suffix “itsa.” We called her “Nitsa,” even when she was adult.

98 So, in the middle of winter, the baby’s room had its windows wide open, while to keep the house warm, Jimmy and Louie shoveled coal into the jaws of the furnace in the basement. Three years later, a modern oil-burning unit replaced the coal furnace, and Leonardo converted the room that had held the coal storage bins into a space for wine barrels.

There were no antibiotics or sulfa drugs in the 1930s. Pneumonia was a common and frequently fatal disease for the weak, the very young, and the very old. Diphtheria, scarlet fever, poliomyelitis, tuberculosis, whooping cough, chicken pox, and measles were diseases that threatened early life. Tonsillitis, impetigo, pinkeye, ringworm, and even head lice were common afflictions among the poor, immigrant populations. None was easily treated; home remedies were often the only therapies available. Among eastern Europeans, typical treatments for lung congestion and pneumonia were ventoozes, or cupping, and mustard plasters.

Cupping involved application of several inverted glasses on the patient’s chest. A burning ball of cotton that had been soaked in alcohol or olive oil was held inside an inverted glass for several seconds. Each glass was quickly applied to the body establishing a seal, so the vacuum formed by the air cooling inside the glass pulled the patient’s flesh up into the vessel. The participants believed that disease was sucked out of the chest. In reality, the cups did no more than stimulate circulation, which may have been therapeutic. The care and fussing may have had a comforting psychological effect on the patient as well.

Mustard plasters were foul-smelling tortures. Women of the family were expert at grinding mustard seeds and mixing the resulting powder with vinegar and hot water to form a horrid paste. This they spread on cotton towels and applied to a congested chest which had been primed with a bath of olive oil to prevent the patient’s skin from burning and blistering. Once again, heat provided by the hot compress and generated by the irritating poultice probably increased circulation to the area.

Board of Health quarantine signs and warning ribbons were common at the front doors of homes and apartments. If disease spread through a neighborhood, it meant calamity for all.

Helene survived, and Dr. De Tata, called Eddie, and his wife, Anna, became lifelong friends to Jimmy and Lily.

Ettore J. De Tata was the son of a poor Italian immigrant family. They lived in the Italian neighborhood that surrounded Sixteenth Avenue between Sixty-fifth and Sixty-ninth Streets in Brooklyn. Young Ettore attended Kings County Medical School, supported by his mother who took in laundry to make the money needed for books and tuition. Friends and neighbors who gave her laundry could ill afford the luxury but hoped to have a young, Italian-speaking doctor of their own to take care of them. He did. Ettore went into practice at 1147 Sixty-fifth Street, in a

99 basement office of the home he purchased with the good credit a local bank instantly afforded to a young doctor.

Eddie worked tirelessly for his patients all his life. He made house calls, delivered babies, performed general surgery, and kept office hours from ten in the morning until noon, returning at three in the afternoon and continuing until his last patient was seen. There were no appointments and no bills. Two dollars for an office visit and three dollars for a home visit were his fees; pay if you can, when you can. Mostly, patients paid in cash. Sometimes they paid with homemade wine and preserves, home-grown vegetables, or other specialties. Every patient revered and blessed him.

Dr. De Tata volunteered to serve in the Second World War immediately after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He ran a field hospital on Guadalcanal, contracting malaria while there. Later, he trained as a plastic surgeon and stayed on in the army a year longer than required to be sure that he completed surgeries for all his patients. When he returned to his practice in Brooklyn, he had a bank account swollen by South Pacific poker winnings. He invested conservatively, becoming financially secure but never abandoning his patients in Brooklyn. Even years later after he retired, moved to New Jersey, and purchased homes next to his own for his mother and unmarried sisters, he drove to Brooklyn twice weekly to care for his elderly patients.

More hardships followed Elenitsa’s bout with pneumonia.

On 26 May 1933, Eleni died at the age of fifty-two after collapsing at home. The cause of death was “chronic cardiac valve disease” with “gastro-enteritis” as a contributing factor. She apparently had suffered problems with her heart for five or six years before her death. The anguish of the loss of her husband during her expulsion from Bulgaria and the problems she had to face and overcome in the years that followed had finally taken their toll. The family’s grief at their matriarch’s passing was profound. She was remembered at every gathering by endless stories of her life.

At the depth of the Great Depression, a second son was born to Jimmy and Lily. Dr. De Tata ushered the boy into the world on 14 March 1934, at Shore Road Hospital, a converted estate that overlooked New York Bay in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. The birth certificate shows Jason Dimitrios Mavrovitis arrived at 12:44 A.M.

Lily had a long and difficult labor, delivering Jason after some thirty hours. Jimmy, who read and enjoyed Greek mythology, decided to name his son Jason, pronounced Yiason in Greek. In Kastoria, a son often took his father’s name as a middle name. Jimmy’s was Athanasios. But, Bill and Rose Rusuli, godparents to Jason, chose Constantine as his Christian name, and the birth certificate was revised to reflect the change. Jason Constantine and Nitsa (Eleni) came to share

100 the same name day (21 May), dedicated to Saints Constantine and Eleni, the first Christian Emperor of Rome and his mother.

Eleni’s mother, Vasiliki, died twenty-one months later on 21 December 1935. Just a day before her death, Yia-Yia Vasiliki quietly announced that her time had come. She asked that her burial clothing be prepared and the next afternoon requested that Lily bath her in preparation for her burial. That evening, she seemed to drift into a coma. Lily revived her grandmother and telephoned Doctor DeTata to come at once. He came, examined Yia-Yia Vasiliki, and then told Lily not to interfere with her Yia-Yia’s death. She was ready to leave life. Lily did as Doctor DeTata told her, and within a few hours, Yia-Yia Vasiliki peacefully stopped breathing. At ninety-four years of age, Vasiliki had outlived her husband, Hristodul, by twenty-seven years.

Yia-Yia Vasiliki’s death was the kind that Orthodox Christians pray for each week at liturgy: “That the end of our lives may be Christian, without pain, blameless and peaceful, and for a good account at the fearful judgment-seat of Christ, Let us ask of the Lord.” The way of her passing was like that of countless others who, in old age, were prepared to leave this world and did so with grace, dignity and peaceful resignation.

Athanasios Mavrovitis, his grandmother, Eleni, and great-grandmother, Vasiliki, are buried in the same grave at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Maspeth, Long Island.1 Their gravesite, located in a vandalized section of the cemetery, had its plot marker and headstone missing or in fragments in 1992. The grave could not readily be located.

With her mother and grandmother both gone, Lily was now mistress in the house Eleni had left to her. She set about making it a home for her husband, two young children, and stepfather.

Life went on at 260 Ovington Avenue. Copies of Photograph 38 taken in 1936 of Jimmy, Lily, and their children were sent to Mavrovo and Kastoria. And, family celebrations like the 1936 Easter gathering shown in Photo 39, continued.

Lily was very busy in these years. Women worked hard to take care of their families. Conveniences taken for granted in the year 2001 did not exist in the 1930s.

§ Few homes had refrigerators, fewer still freezers. Iceboxes provided a cool environment in which to store food. These were generally made of wood with galvanized metal linings. One hundred pound blocks of ice, delivered every three or four days by horse-drawn wagon, filled

1 Plot: Elmwood, Grave #543

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Photo 38 Mavrovitis Family 1936

Photo 39 This photograph was taken at Easter 1936. The trellis does not yet have its new growth of vine leaves, and flowers are just beginning to bloom. Left to right, disregarding rows: Papou, Anesti Zelios, Moscanthi Helmis, Mitso, Thea Anastasia, Elenitsa, Costa Zelios, Domna Pantelas, Jimmy Zelios, Lily, Jason, Jimmy and Chris Capidaglis.

102 the upper half of the unit. Melt water ran down a tube to a catch basin beneath the lower, food storage box, and frequently had to be emptied.

§ The box at 260 Ovington Avenue was in a vestibule that led to the garden. In the winter, the little vestibule room was sealed off from the house by a door to the kitchen, so it was quite cold and provided extra storage space for food that was prepared for the holidays. On the day before Christmas, large pots of the pork soup, patsa, and pans of stuffed cabbage could be found on the floor and shelves.

§ There were no diaper services or disposable diapers, and there were few washing machines. Diapers were washed by hand in great wash tubs and hung to dry in the basement, if one were lucky, or on rooftops, on fire escapes, or outside windows. The rest of the family laundry was washed and dried the same way.

§ Coal furnaces provided hot water heating. The coal used was anthracite, which burned efficiently and minimized coal dust. No matter, there was still both black smoke and dust. Fueling the furnace and removing ash were constant chores.

§ Baby food was prepared at home. There were no jars filled with prepared baby food lining market shelves, ready to buy, take home, heat, and serve. Meat, for example, was chopped, boiled, and mashed for the young ones.

As the Depression, family deaths, and financial worries burdened Jimmy, he lost weight, weakened, developed ulcers, and contracted pneumonia, an illness that would revisit him in later years. Doctor De Tata ordered him to take a long vacation, whether he could afford to or not. So, Jimmy borrowed money from Louie Dimitroff and took a cruise to the warm Caribbean. Photographs of him in Jamaica are reminiscent of starved, gaunt refugees.

In the late 1930s fear of war began to worry the people of Europe while “America First” became the cry of isolationist politicians in the New World. Jimmy found permanent work in 1938, as shop foreman in the firm of Fierstein & Fierstein on Seventh Avenue He began to recover physically, emotionally, and financially. Little by little, he paid his debts, joyfully fulfilling his obligations when he received a handsome bonus at Christmas in 1943.

On 29 January 1941, Demetrios A. Mavrovitis changed his, his wife’s, and his children’s surname from Mavrovitis to Mavis, and his given name to James. The reason for the name change is unclear. It is likely that Jimmy wanted to Anglicize it to benefit his children. He claimed to be tired of spelling his name for people, its mispronunciation, and of the difficulty in fitting it into small boxes on forms.

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