CHAPTER ONE

Roots

This place is not big enough for me anymore; I am big now, I’ve outgrown it. I have to get out of here! I try to listen in closely, I keep turning around, pushing myself up. Total darkness all around me. I splash around in the warm, familiar waters and yet I feel as though it is closing in on me. I bring my legs up to my chin and then kick them out with all my might trying to escape from the sinking environment. There is no way out. I coil myself; for a short while, I calm down, I start to hear voices, crying, short breaths, all this commotion! I get more frightened, hug myself tighter, I calm down, the noises outside die down, as well.

This long night lasted 76 hours! I can’t anymore, I give up. I feel like something is grabbing my neck, strangling me. There is so much pain, I start kicking my legs out again and then something grabs my left heel and starts to pull violently. Hurried voices can be heard. Someone is asking for them to cut me up. I get mad and do everything in my power to get away; I give a kick and then another, to a red flood and along with excruciating screams of horror, I slide into two hands who hold me gently by the chest. The forceps around my neck and ankles are gone and I let out a loud scream, scaring everyone, myself included. I am born!

I am born into this confusion, this darkness, this grueling moaning and this unbearable sense of guilt. And immediately afterwards, I regretted having been born.

They cut something from my belly and in this semi darkness they wrap me in a white cloth and place me gently on this pile of sacs, all the while I’m silent, exhausted and frightened. I do everything I can to distract any attention to my being; the screams and the cries carry on. A few people are hovering over my mother who is bleeding heavily. My father, obviously shaken, is holding the oil lamp providing the little light there is, to the doctor that arrived at the last minute to save both her and me. My grandmother, clearly out of control, is pacing in the small room uttering her own silly gibberish. The midwife seems to be lost and keeps on muttering to herself as she’s helping the doctor sew up my mother with this big needle: “Three days and three nights. I’ve never seen a labor like this before; she almost killed her mother, almost killed her…”     

It is a little after 3:00am, Tuesday morning on June 4^th 1946, Neapoli, Voiou Kozanis. These are hard times and a dangerous place for someone to come into this world.

It’s a small, brick home, one room, all in all; it has a narrow door that cannot close tightly, and a small, low window without curtains. There’s an iron bed in the corner where my mother is still panting, and various heaps of belongings (whatever could be salvaged from the war fires), all covered with a white sheet that is finished with a hand-made lace.

My father, Anastasios Pasvantidis, was born in Mega Spileo in Ikonio of Mikra Asia. He was only three years old when he encountered devastation and exchange of population. Large clan, big extended Greek family that started from the depths of Mikra Asia with everything they managed to salvage and could carry. Some with animals, others with carriages and the rest on foot. Barefoot, hungry and exhausted he arrived in his new homeland; with his mother, his stepfather, his sister and the rest of the Pasvantidis, the Kotaididis and the Xanthopouleos clan. It was a memory he never forgot.

The Xanthopouleos and the Pasvantidis families stayed in Drama. My father with his new family, under the guidance of his stepfather Ypsilanti went as far as Voio, and there, in a location that reminded them of their lost country, they build their new village. They named it Moloha. Very close to the monastery of Soumela, the Virgin Mary of Pontios.

My real grandfather, Vasilios Pasvantidis was a caretaker by profession, (pasvan in Turkish means guard), had been burned alive by the Turks, along with other Greeks, inside the sealed mines of Megalo Spileo. There, where sixty years earlier they had emigrated from Trapezounta, hoping for a better life.

His first few years in his new country, my father went to a few classes of elementary school, helped his mother and older sister and took care of his younger stepbrother. When his sister got married and left the village for Neapoli, Kozani, he followed her. He worked any job he could find and contributed to the expenses of her ever-growing family. He grew up to be a handsome, tall, healthy young man, full of pride and love for everybody.

But Neapoli was too small for him. And so he went to Veria to learn a trade and find his destiny; truck driver and auto mechanic.

When World War II was declared, he left for the war front against the Italians in Albania. He fought in the town of Himara and during the German occupation, took part in the underground war against the Nazis. A man by now, he returned to Neapoli and started making his living as a traveling salesman from village to village. He even went as far as Albania selling various embroidery materials. At the same time, he continued to have a true love for engines. He had found some thick English automobile books and he would study the pictures of the engines for hours, not understanding a word of it.

When it came time for him to marry, his sister tried to find him a bride with a big enough dowry for the town they lived in. She found her in my mother’s face, Martha, nee Vidali. She was only fourteen years old, the only daughter in her family, had an older brother, Costa, born in Neapoli from a Greek-Cypriot father and a mother from Mikra Asia. My grandfather, Xenofon, who was much older than my grandmother, was a dark, handsome man, relatively short, with a turned-up moustache, smoked a hookah, laughed a lot and had a very carefree attitude towards life. He adored his daughter and spoiled her accordingly. He had been born in Lapitho under the British occupation and went before 1922 to Messina of Mikra Asia. From there he came to Greece and enlisted in the Greek police force. When the exchange of population between Turkey and Greece took place, he was transferred to Northern Greece but still worked as a policeman. The caravans of exhausted, barefoot and hungry Greeks that were coming from the depths of Mikra Asia would pass through him for a health inspection. “They make them jump through hoops”, my mother used to tell me. The young women would beg him not to cut their hair in exchange for whatever valuable they had to offer. My grandfather, with a clear conscience, would let many a braid go by, while he gathered a small fortune for himself. With all this precious jewelry and gold coins, he bought some land where tobacco was grown and quite a few shops in the village square, one of which he made into a coffee shop, which he ran himself.