What happens to a family already on the brink of disaster when the world around them crumbles? Dandelions for Dinner presents a memoir set in the sleepy town of Gargaliani, Greece, spanning the last quarter of the nineteenth century through the Greek Civil War of the 1940s. Told through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old boy, it is an epic tale of youth, family, poverty, war, and unjust loss. It is also an uplifting story of how in the midst of calamity, survival is possible by using your head, taking your hits, and maintaining an undying faith. Though it is the tale of a family that is by all standards poor, Dandelions for Dinner demonstrates just how rich the poor can be when they have hope, faith, and love for one another-when they maintain the lessons of their parents and forefathers, nurture a love of education, and never let up on their hope for freedom. This memoir is, above all, a story about the importance of America-not only for those who live there, but also for all those who reside in the dark corners of faraway lands and dream of a better life. Over the course of their life together, any family will most assuredly experience both want and plenty, suffering and joy. Dandelions for Dinner is the surprising story of what remains when everything else is lost.
dandelions for DINNER
Greece at War and a Family's Dreams of AmericaBy Sam P. Stamatis Peter S. StamatisiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2011 Sam P. Stamatis and Peter S. Stamatis
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4620-5674-3Contents
Preface................................................................ixAcknowledgments........................................................xiIntroduction...........................................................xiiiChapter 1. Death Is in the Air.........................................3Chapter 2. Escape to Gargaliani........................................6Chapter 3. Will Someone Please Marry My Daughters?.....................21Chapter 4. The Rise of Nitsa...........................................35Chapter 5. Chicago.....................................................50Chapter 6. Good Times..................................................58Chapter 7. Hard Times..................................................79Chapter 8. Patras......................................................94Chapter 9. School......................................................111Chapter 10. New Neighborhood...........................................136Chapter 11. Italians!..................................................153Chapter 12. In Business................................................167Chapter 13. Mouzaki....................................................180Chapter 14. The Mati...................................................195Chapter 15. Life Goes On...............................................221Chapter 16. The Oracle.................................................236Chapter 17. Kanella....................................................248Chapter 18. Arrivederci, Roma..........................................259Chapter 19. The Day After..............................................272Chapter 20. Stoupas....................................................288Chapter 21. Surviving a War............................................300Chapter 22. Divesting Assets...........................................312Chapter 23. Return to Mani.............................................322Chapter 24. The Battle of Gargaliani...................................333Chapter 25. Nothing But Hope...........................................350Chapter 26. Lying Low..................................................360Chapter 27. Getting Ready..............................................373Chapter 28. Good-Bye...................................................388Chapter 29. Athens.....................................................395Chapter 30. America....................................................408Bibliography...........................................................417Glossary...............................................................419
Chapter One
DEATH IS IN THE AIR
The battle had begun quicker than I expected, and the chaos was a surprise. We knew our lives might be at an end as soon as haphazard cannon shots fired by members of the Andartes—Greek Communist guerilla fighters—began to rain down near our home in the early morning's darkness on September 22, 1944.
Though I was only eleven years old, I was well aware that others, certainly many more worthy, wealthy, and able than us, had not made it. I also knew that whether we would survive this dark day was no sure thing. In fact, the odds were heavily against us.
When a shell, luckily a dud, crashed through our neighbors' home and slammed into its kitchen, Mother grabbed my younger brother Stathi.
"We are leaving," Father said and directed the four of us through a maze of narrow streets to my uncle's home several blocks away.
There, along with a number of other traumatized, war-weary people, we huddled in a storage room, temporarily safe from the random and sloppily aimed explosions.
From that bunker, we trusted that our side—the Royalists and their "Protective Forces"—was winning, that the invaders would not take our town, and that we would be able to continue our lives in the same rhythms that we had always lived them. But these notions were promptly dashed when we saw a soldier, one of ours and dressed in his street clothes, walking away from the fight. Father asked him how we were doing and if Gargaliani had been able to defend itself against the Communist attack. The man scoffed at us and declared that the battle had ended and the invaders had prevailed.
Before long, we began to see more and more of our fighters abandon Gargaliani's defense—an even more troubling, foreboding sight. In minutes, bearded Communists filled our street. The conquerors ordered us, along with everyone else, to move through the town, and they herded us past its plateia, the main square and center of community life; Father and I moved together while Mother kept a grip on Stathi, who was only five years old.
We were funneled into Gargaliani's high school, where the victors undertook to sift their supporters from the crowds. The Communists spoke of reconciliation, but it quickly became clear they were in no forgiving mood at all. We watched for hours as they separated their sheep from the goats, and they mercilessly eliminated problem people who failed their makeshift loyalty tests. It was only through a gift of fate that we were passed when, as supporters of the Royalists, we should have been failed. They set us free onto the streets.
Unsure what to do, we stood before the house of the leader of the Protective Forces. If to the victor belong the spoils; to the vanquished belongs woe—the heroic warrior was on the run, his residence in flames. Communist guerilla fighters moved quickly through the streets and crisscrossed the plateia. Whatever rules had previously governed our civilized town had disintegrated. We were on our own, and there was no one to turn to—anarchy had triumphed. For us to survive, Father knew we had to get off the streets and to the safety of our home. But that wouldn't be easy. Before us, we could see that Andartes intoxicated by bloodlust filled the plateia. They moved everywhere throughout the square as each of their unmerciful deeds fueled other, more incomprehensible and unconscionable ones.
Father led us quickly and quietly through the streets of our town as the bone-jolting cracks of all-too-close firearms serenaded us. The streets were littered with the discarded dead, our neighbors frozen in random poses of horror. When we were only twenty or so meters from our home, we recoiled at the sudden appearance, directly in front of us, of a teenager we knew named Takis. Two barely pubescent Andartes, armed with pistols and holding rifles, stood beside him.
Mother never cared much for Takis or his family. Over the years, our relationship with him had been perfunctory and inconsequential; he wasn't part of our world, and we weren't part of his. Prior to that moment, Takis's existence had never mattered to us one way or another.
But when Takis saw Father, the young man's eyes darted back and forth and, as if he had finally located his prey, he pointed at Father.
"There's one. There's one right there. He is one of them."
Father froze.
"Shoot him; shoot him now," Takis ordered.
The obedient Andartes raised their rifles and took aim at Father.
* * *
Who could have imagined we would have arrived at this brink, to such an unceremonious end to year after year of struggle and suffering? How was it that we, Greeks who had spent the previous decade surviving famine, war, and foreign occupation, suddenly stood face to face with our executioners, other Greeks no less, people who like us had struggled through those same years of suffering?
To understand how my family, not to mention Greece itself, had descended to this mindless place, we must start at the beginning.
Chapter Two
ESCAPE TO GARGALIANI
Around 1860, my maternal great-grandfather, Spyro Petropouleas, then in his mid-twenties, arrived in Gargaliani after fleeing from the only home he had ever known, an area called Boliana in the Mani region of Peloponnesus. Mani, about a hundred kilometers to the east of Gargaliani, is a rugged mountainous area replete with free-spirited Greeks, famous for never being subjugated during the four-hundred-year Ottoman occupation. Even well after the rest of Greece had been taken over, the Maniates, as Mani's citizens are known, successfully repelled the advancing Turks so many times that the invaders decided that conquering them wasn't worth the effort and moved on. The rugged Mani terrain, combined with the fact that the Maniates were loud, obnoxious, and stubborn, made the Turks realize that even if they conquered Mani, maintaining control over it would have required too much manpower. So, other than the occasional incursion, the Turks left Mani alone.
Great-grandfather Spyro left Mani because it was his only alternative to death. Vendettas amongst Maniates were common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To a Maniate, a family's pride and reputation were paramount, and feuds amongst them could last for generations. One action would lead to a reaction, which would demand a retaliation, and so on, which caused the participants to live in a state of perpetual conflict. Violence begot violence, and while vengeance often came hard and fast, retribution could also be delayed for years. It wasn't unusual for someone to be shot as payback for something his father had done a decade before.
But despite their apparent inability to forgive and forget, the Maniates were unsurpassed in filotimo, the Hellenic notion of hospitality that is deep seated in Greece's psyche and predates Homer, who wrote about it at length in The Iliad and The Odyssey. Those who welcomed and helped Odysseus on his journey back to Ithaca after years of war in Troy exhibited filotimo. Filotimo is the foundation of a Greek's character and leads him to treat a stranger like a long-lost brother, often embracing him at the first meeting. Most Greeks have filotimo to a degree, and the Maniates seemed to have been given several extra doses.
For reasons that have been forgotten over the years, young Spyro was set to become the latest victim of a Maniate family vendetta when he thought better of it and chose to leave Mani instead. As the story was told, Spyro and his new bride Maria took a few personal belongings and set out onto the Aegean in a boat on a nocturnal escape, moving their way westward along the Peloponnesian coastline. They passed a number of coastal towns and sailed past Pylos, the famous port town and the site of many great naval battles of antiquity. Fatigued, Spyro and Maria were eventually seduced into exiting their craft by the plush vegetation and vineyards of the coastal village of Marathos. They came ashore and continued moving a few kilometers due east toward Gargaliani.
Despite Spyro's and Maria's sincere attempts to remain incognito, word of their arrival spread quickly through the area. It was an unusual event when a stranger came to town, and because he was from Mani, all assumed Spyro was a fierce warrior. The town fathers assembled and determined it was best to avoid a fight and offered Spyro a job instead. He accepted and became a deputy police officer. They charged Spyro with capturing guerilla fighters who roamed the nearby mountains and countryside terrorizing the area's villages. They were the descendants of the fighters of the Greek War of Independence who never returned to docile civilian life. Spyro lived up to the Maniate reputation and used his wits, practicality, valor, and filotimo to bring many wanted men to justice. His success helped him make a name for himself, giving him fame and respectability.
As years passed, young Spyro and his bride accumulated a considerable amount of wealth that included vineyards, olive groves, and wheat fields, not to mention a spacious house with a plush garden not far from the Gargaliani market. They were blessed with six children – three daughters (Poulia, Tasia, and Eleni) and three sons (Antonis, Dimitri, and Sarantis). Sarantis, born around 1865, was my grandfather. Three of these children died during childhood and another married and left Gargaliani, leaving behind only Spyro and his two remaining sons Sarantis and Dimitri to care for the family's agricultural holdings. This was a formidable task considering the family's properties were substantial and scattered throughout the area.
Spyro's sons grew into upright and thoughtful men and helped their father greatly in the handling of the family's affairs. Indeed, locals began to call on Sarantis and Dimitri when they needed their help to perform various law-enforcement tasks. One such request came in around 1885 when the local police needed assistance capturing a criminal in the town of Pirgaki, six kilometers due east of Gargaliani. When the wanted man was captured, all in Pirgaki rejoiced. One whose rejoicing was especially ebullient was Pirgaki's retired schoolmaster, a man named Michael Stavropoulos. This vocal law-and-order advocate was so elated with the capture that he invited the posse and various Pirgaki dignitaries to his house for a celebration.
It was at the Stavropoulos celebration, on an airy star-filled night with the whistling sounds of the Peloponnesian breezes whirling through the vineyards and the scents of roasting skewered lamb, jasmine, and the sweetness of the summer breeze in the air, that Sarantis saw, for the first time, the retired schoolmaster's daughter. Naturally, her name was Eleni. Throughout history, Greeks have idolized women named Eleni, which is rendered in English as "Helen," and young Sarantis was no exception. It was an Eleni whose face "launched a thousand ships" and who was to blame for the decade-long bloodbath known as the Trojan War.
This Eleni had a similar effect on Sarantis. She was young, still in her teens, but had already developed into a stunning specimen of feminine perfection—Venus on her shell. She was like one of those statues an ancient sculptor would carve out of white marble. All Eleni was missing was the urn, but that didn't matter. Sarantis loved her and wanted to marry her. He spent the rest of the evening contemplating things he would someday say to this Helen of Pirgaki, if ever given the opportunity. Sophoclean phrases entered his mind, and they all rhymed and their meter was perfect, until, of course, Eleni came near him and he was immediately dumbfounded.
Sarantis did not speak to Eleni that night or for the next two years. But he continued to answer the call of his elders and participated, more than he cared to, in various reconnaissance missions into the countryside. And the more he did it, the less he liked it. What bothered Sarantis was that the so-called law-enforcement missions served as the cover for his colleagues to satisfy some perverted personal desire to inflict pain on others. He wondered what it was in a person that caused him to derive corrupt pleasures from making others suffer. Of course, most people will justify their own barbaric behavior by focusing on some higher cause, say, law and order, the common good, or the supposed deterrent effect of their actions on others. But these justifications were never sufficient, and Sarantis knew that the worst actions of man bubbled forth from some fundamental condition of the human soul. Sarantis became a detached participant in the expeditions to capture criminals, and from his perch, the difference between the captors and their adversaries began to blur.
Sarantis never saw his religious conversion coming. To him, the mission was like every other—he and a team would head to the hills and capture some bandit. But, in the days leading up to a proposed mission, Sarantis decided he had enough. What bothered him was philosophical in nature—theological, actually—and arose from the thought that even though most men recognized that they were creations of the benevolent God, they failed to recognize that others were as well—whether posse member, bandit, farmer, or sheep herder. And out of this ubiquitous blind spot was born cruelty, the justification for a person's lack of compassion and mankind's never- ending capacity to inflict harm on others. Most disturbing to Sarantis was that the blind spot caused one's vanity to swell as he partook in the demise of another.
As the dozen-person posse moved, all these thoughts raced through Sarantis's mind, and he began to lag behind. His decreased pace was imperceptible at first until he realized he began to lose sight of the team. It was then that he noticed what the group must have ignored: that he was about to pass a chapel. And he saw that in front there was a monk tending to flowers.
There was certainly nothing special about passing a chapel, or a monk for that matter, as Sarantis passed them all the time. Churches were everywhere in Greece and being, like everyone else, a Greek Orthodox Christian, seeing one for Sarantis was a non-event. But for some reason, Sarantis started wondering about the monk and the world he lived in, a place that seemed so different from his own. He thought about how the monk must have once been like himself, in a worldly life, with a family, obligations, desires, ambitions, loves, and lusts. What was it that caused that monk and others like him to trade the world for the church? Thoughts spun wildly through his mind, and he contemplated the posse and what it was likely to do if its latest mission was a success. He wondered what he would do if his comrades again became brutal for the sake of brutality, whether he would remain silent as he had in the past. Suddenly, Sarantis could no longer justify being the detached observer and knew he had to act. So with dawn settling, the gang on the march now well ahead, and the monk absorbed in his gardening, Sarantis stopped and introduced himself. And just like that, he walked out of the only world he had ever known and into a new one.
Sarantis spent the next few days at the chapel talking with the monk and helping with various chores. When finally he returned home, was a changed person and casually announced to his parents that he had decided to become a priest.
There is a quirk in Greek culture that almost always surfaces when a young man tells his parents he has decided to enter the clergy. Usually, the parents, despite the fact that they have spent their lives giving priests honor, respect, and kisses on their hands, greet such proclamations with horror. Typical responses include, "Are you joking?" "Who told you to do that?" "The kid's lost it," and so on. The assumption is usually that someone has "gotten hold" of the young man or, in Sarantis's case, some charismatic monastic had brainwashed him.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from dandelions for DINNERby Sam P. Stamatis Peter S. Stamatis Copyright © 2011 by Sam P. Stamatis and Peter S. Stamatis. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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