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Δε στο ‘πα χαλασιά μου
στα ξένα να μην πας, χαλασιά μου
στα ξένα να μην πας
Φοβάμαι μη σε χάσω
στα ξένα κι εκεί που πας
και δεν ξαναγυρνάς, χαλασιά μου
και δεν ξαναγυρνάς

  • Χαλασιά μου, traditional Epirote folk song

Didn’t I tell you, my Chalasia
not to leave and go abroad, my Chalasia
not to leave and go abroad
I’m afraid of losing you
in the foreign lands that you go
and you won’t come back, my Chalasia
and you won’t come back

It’s dark. The ragtag band of elderly people, adults, and a handful of children separated from their mother quietly sneak past the small church. It’s no longer a church, no longer a place of safety. It’s now a thing to be avoided, a building that could bring death–a lookout station for the andartes, partisans who once fought against the Nazi occupiers of Greece but who were now waging war against their fellow Greeks. The group continues its descent down the mountain, wading through streams to avoid the heavily mined trails through the wilderness. Their goal is a distant mountain, where Greek government forces have their own lookout station.

As they move, they occasionally hear a rustling in the distance. Maybe it’s an animal, maybe they’re being tailed by a band of andartes. The youngest of the group of children complains that his feet hurt. The makeshift soles his mother placed in his socks have already disintegrated. The bushes behind them rustle again.

It’s 2023 and it’s a sweltering August day, even high up in the Mourgana mountains. The youngest child that escaped the village, now in his 80s, is standing in the entrance to the village museum he financed. He is telling us, a small group of relatives and close friends, the story of how he and most of his sisters (including my Yiayia, my grandmother) escaped the village, making it to the distant lookout station of the government forces.

Decades later, he learned that that rustling wasn’t any animal but man: the andartes were tracking them, and had the group in the sights of their guns. Luckily, the band of escapees was close enough to the Greek Army’s lookout station that the andartes decided shooting the fleeing civilians would only get themselves killed.

As our great uncle Nicholas Gage (Gatzoyiannis) was telling us this story, one originally recounted in his book Eleni, we took in the expansive vista ahead of us. Closest to us, a small valley. Beyond the valley, four mountain ridges of increasing height, covered in verdant green and dotted with super-tall cypress trees which typically marked a church’s graveyard. The cypress trees down and to the right? The andartes’ lookout station. That most-distant mountain ridge? The goal of the escaping villagers. The miles and steep elevation changes in between? Their treacherous route.

This breathtaking view was soaked in blood. The places I only read or heard vague whispers about are now spread out before me, in full gut-wrenching detail, and as I take in the view, I viscerally feel my great grandmother’s fear and courage in sending her children away, across the minefields without her. I feel the protectiveness my grandmother and her sisters felt for their baby brother. I feel their fear of the guerrillas who are desperately trying to hunt them down. Tears well up in my eyes.

Gunshots ring out. Bodies slump and are left to fall into a ravine. The executioners carried out their mission given to them by a “People’s court” that convinced itself that this middle-aged mother of 5 was some sort of spy, despite fruitless torture sessions in the basement of her own home.

Some time later, one of her daughters, the slightly built, brainy, and very superstitious Kanta, hears the news in the refugee camp with 2 of her 3 sisters and her baby brother. In her shock and grief, she finds herself at the edge of a nearby cliff. She closes her eyes and steels herself. She takes one step–

and is stopped. A heavy, strong hand clasps her shoulder, preventing her from falling to her own doom. She opens her eyes and looks at the hand, recognizing the uniform of a Greek army soldier. She steps back, turns to look her unwanted savior in the face, and sees nothing.

Nine days earlier, I stepped off a plane and onto Greek soil for the first time in my life. Like most of the Greek diaspora, me and my family (my wife, my daughter, my father, my stepmother, my baby brother and sister, my brother, and his wife) made the summer pilgrimage back to the patrida. Unlike the rest of the diaspora, this was the first visit for all of us except for my father, who last visited in the early 1980s.

I was excited–we all were, we’ve been talking about making this trip for most of our lives–but part of me was nervous. Would it be like I imagined? Will I feel like I’ve found my place, or will I feel like just another foreigner? How many Sopranos in Italy moments will I have? Will I be brave enough to try speaking Greek?

We spent a few days in Athens before moving on to Corfu, which would be our base of operations for the trip. The people were warm, some gave me a little ribbing for my Greek while others were incredibly patient. My daughter was treated like a tiny queen, and even when she did something horrifying to her parents (like hurling a glass of water at the floor of a nice restaurant, shattering it), people around us (strangers, shopkeepers, waiters, etc.) were quick to reassure us with kind smiles, to help entertain her, and to remind us that she was a person who had every right to be where she was.

Around halfway through our time in Corfu, we planned to visit Lia, the tiny village on the border with Albania that my Yiayia and her siblings escaped over 70 years ago. This coincided with the Pita Festival, a panegyri that would feature whole lambs roasted on a spit, live traditional music, folk dancing, and, of course, pites, the sometimes sweet and sometimes savory snacks and meals wrapped in layers of thin phyllo dough.

The day finally came to visit the village. We took taxis to the port in Corfu’s Old Town and climbed aboard a ferry for the mainland port city of Igoumenitsa, where Nick Gage, a cousin, and a neighbor from the village were all waiting to drive us the up the mountains and into the village. We strapped in and headed off.

As soon as we left Igoumenitsa’s main strip, the Earth itself rose up before us and around us. To call the landscape dramatic would be doing it a grave disservice, but that was the word that bounced around in my head over the course of the 90 minute drive up ever-narrowing roads that would occasionally be blocked by one or two obstinate cows. As we entered the village, streetlamps appeared, a gift to the village from my great uncle. At each house we briefly stopped for a quick kalimera greeting to the locals sitting on their porches enjoying the weather, gossiping, and drinking.

We regrouped at the village inn, where several cousins (also from the US) had already arrived. In all, there were 17 of us: children, grandchildren, and one great-grandchild of the Gatzoyiannis kids who escaped their village thanks to the wit and sacrifice of their mother. Our awe at this fact, that Eleni’s sacrifice enabled all of us to live and make our way back home over half a century later, was the main topic of conversation during a massive meal prepared by the inn staff as well as the toast that Nick Gage gave, celebrating our reunion.

I learned then that my wife, my daughter, my brother, his wife, and I would all be staying in the Gatzoyiannis house. The one my Yiayia grew up in, the one with the same mulberry tree that the Gatzoyiannis children, in more peaceful times, played endless games under, the one my great grandmother was tortured in, along with other villagers, before being led to her death. The house had been mostly destroyed in the years since the war, but Eleni’s namesake, her granddaughter and Nick Gage’s daughter, rebuilt the home as it was in the 1930s and wrote about the experience in her own book North of Ithaka.

In the intervening years, it’s been both a museum and a place for our family to stay in. After drinking from the fountain that delivered fresh mountain water to us, we stepped into the house. My wife and I walked into our room, which was my great grandmother’s bedroom and held a recreation of her bed - the first in the village. It also had a guestbook, and again I felt tears welling up as I read the names and stories of all the people who had come to visit the home. People who were so moved by the book Eleni that they brought themselves to this remote village to see where the events of the book happened.

And I was sleeping there. With my wife, and with my daughter, herself named after her own great grandmother, Kanta, who was saved by a mysterious soldier or some protective spirit of the mountains all those years ago. Kanta, who read our fortunes in coffee grounds, who read our palms and told us our futures, and who allegedly put some effective curses on people. Kanta, who loved to Greek dance, who died a few months before meeting her first great grandchild, and who made her presence known on the day of her funeral with the first ever furious kicks of her great granddaughter.

Like her older cousin Nico and countless generations of children before her, my daughter climbed into the wooden cradle next to the bed and attempted to cozy up to sleep in it. After everyone left to their own homes for the night (and one epic toddler meltdown), we all napped to prepare for the night’s panegyri. We were picked up and brought down to the village square at the inn, where the population swelled to several hundred people.

The band played Epirote folk music into the early morning, pites were passed around, lambs were roasted, and we danced. The dances were full of joy: long-lost cousins reconnecting across oceans, those who stayed in Greece coming back home from their cities, all related in some way or another, all together to celebrate life, good food, and the temporary healing of xenitia, the deep yearning for one’s home that is built into the DNA of all Greeks, even (or especially) in the diaspora. Taking after her namesake, my daughter dragged me onto the dance floor where we joined hands with the other dancers and circled round and round, dancing to song after song until my body ached and she drifted off to sleep.

Reconnection#

This visit was one of reconnection. Reconnection to my since-passed grandparents, to the home I always felt an ache for but never actually saw, to the culture I grew up in but always felt outside of, to the generations before me who made a life in these hard mountains, and to the great grandmother who was responsible for all of us being alive by her incredible bravery and daring.

And that connection was made instantly. That vague feeling of loss, of a missing piece inside me, was filled by those bloody mountains and the ecstatic dancing that helped us forget the horrors that our elders faced here, it was filled by the reunion of distant relatives who spent time together as if there weren’t gulfs of it between us, it was filled by the food that tasted like home and the purifying mountain water.

Even in the diaspora, or maybe especially in it, the experience of xenitia is ever-present, and maybe that’s why generations of hyphenated Greeks make their way back summer after summer after summer, like some kind of migratory bird. It’s a major theme in the music of Epiros, something that overwhelmed one of its most famous maestros, Alexis Zoumbas.

Maybe it’s because we are all trying to reconnect. We hold our traditions at home, even as Greeks still in Greece move on. We are trapped between being the Amerikanaki and the Greek: too American (or Australian, or English, or German) to be Greek, too Greek to be fully American. And maybe it’s because that reconnection fades over time. We are drawn back because we need to maintain that connection to the homeland, to remember what we came from, and what shaped our families.

And we didn’t just reconnect to the land, or to living relatives, but to those who have left us. My daughter mimicked her own great grandmother without knowing it: she somehow knew the various steps for each of the traditional dances, intuitively dancing with the adults, she developed the same vaguely threatening chuckle, and every day reminded us more and more of this woman that she never met, at least on this plane.

And we reconnected with our family history. Seeing the exact route my great uncle, my Yiayia, and my great aunts took to freedom, visiting the church my grandparents were married in, learning that the patron saint of that church, St. Demetrios, was the saint depicted in the first icon my Yiayia ever gave me and the same saint whose name was a frontrunner should we have had a son.

And I reconnected with my culture as it is today, not the relic semi-frozen in time from when my grandparents were children. I spoke (broken) Greek to Greeks, getting over my fear of using it, began thinking in Greek because I was using it so much, and felt more natural than ever using the language.

I return “home” to Boston feeling an ease and a calm I don’t think I’ve ever felt before. I feel my ancestors watching over me and my family. I feel my grandparents especially - people who always talked about the beauty of their simple village with an eye to bringing their beloved grandchildren to it. I see my Yiayia in my daughter when she chuckles just like her, or when she hears the klarino and starts snapping her fingers and taking slow, circular steps.

I feel like I have a place. My Greek may be rough, I may never attempt to drive the narrow mountain roads and tempt whatever gods may be lurking, I may not be 100% Greek, but the land that those before me walked on, loved on, suffered on, and died on held me close as if I were one of her own native sons. The xenitia was - at least temporarily - patched over by parea, dancing, and a newly strengthened bond between me and those who came before me.

And like the Swallow, I will return again and again each year, pulled by a force beyond my understanding and as ancient as the land it draws me back to.