By Michalis Sovolos
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“1922 – 2022” 100 Years of National Remembrance |
As a tribute to the 100 years since the Asia Minor catastrophe, Michalis Sovolos recounts the traumatic heartrending life story and sad demise of an impoverished refugee who made Karitsa his second home
Triantafyllos Arvanitis was born in the village of Neochori in the Dardanelles in Eastern Thrace in 1896. He was one of four children of Stamatis and Eleftheria (nee Fragkos). His siblings were Tryfon, Efterpi, and Dimitrios.
Their standard of living during his childhood and teenage years promised him a good and sound future. The family had tilling fields, they were also producers of silk, as well as involved in the production of the famous "katiki" cheese. Sadly, however, in 1914, Stamatis, Eleftheria, and their four children, persecuted by the Turks, were forced to flee their birthplace. At first, in May 1914 they sought refuge in Thesaloniki where they stayed for three months and then moved on to Leonidio in Arkadia.
We do not know if it was because of his impending marriage, but very soon 19-year-old Triantafyllos, taking the goat tracks through Parnonas found himself on our side of the mountain, in Karitsa of Lakonia. There, in 1915, he married Panagiota, 11 years his senior, daughter of Giannis Malavazos.
The couple began married life with little means. Their home, a one-room hut, was once used as a haybarn. Triantafyllos worked as a hired shepherd tending sheep and goat herds of other Karitsiotes. At the same time, together with Panagiota, they would cultivate her dowry, a few “solo” olive trees dotted here and there in the tilling fields of other Karitsiotes.
And so, Triantafyllos had settled as a refugee in Karitsa; a stranger among strangers who very quickly won the sympathy and love of the locals. He was a cheerful, good-natured man, with a calm temperament. He spoke "somewhat strangely", preserving the linguistic idiom of his homeland, while on festive days he’d be seen at the church and village feasts always wearing a scarf tied sideways, and when he'd get up to dance moved ever so spectacularly...
His contact with the rest of his family was basically non-existent. In any case, in 1920 they returned to Neochori in the Dardanelles. They were not to know, of course, of the great calamity that would befall two years later. Indeed, due to the Asia Minor Catastrophe, the family of Stamatis and Eleftheria Arvanitis was uprooted a second time. In 1922, they fled their home together with hundreds of thousands of other Greeks. This time they went out to Piraeus.
They went through many hardships. Through these, their father Stamatis would die in 1922, and their mother Eleftheria with her three children, Tryfon, Dimitrios, and Efterpi, would struggle to survive living in rough makeshift tents in a neighbourhood of Piraeus.
Later on, Tryfon did what was needed for a state-provided refugee house to be allotted to them on Kanari Street in the Refugee Settlement of Karavas in Piraeus. Most of the family were destined to live there to the end of their days: Tryphon met a widowed refugee in the Settlement, with whom he had a daughter. His wife also had two daughters from her first marriage. Dimitrios also had a family, who also lived in the same house. Only Efterpi, after marrying a refugee Athanasios Manolidis, left the home and moved to the neighbourhood of Korydallos. During the difficult occupation years, the home was plunged into mourning: In 1942, mother Eleftheria and son Tryfon both died within a few months of each other.
Meanwhile back in Karitsa, the life of Triantafyllos and Panagiota had not changed in any real sense since the first years of their marriage. Most apparent and deeply worrying, they hadn’t had any children. One day, however, when Panagiota had gone to the village of Anavryti in Lakonia to buy a pair of tsarouchia, she returned with a small child. His name was Panagiotis I. Chalkias and was presented to Triantafyllos as their foster child for them to raise. Later she bequeathed her worldly possessions to this child. In the will drawn up, she stipulated "part of the proceeds should also be received by Triantafyllos if she were to die before him". As it happened, Panagiota did die first in 1951.
Following the death of his wife, Triantafyllos did not remain in Karitsa for many years. In 1954 he settled in Magoula in Sparti. In the meantime, their haybarn home had been sold to Michalis Malavazos.
In Magoula, he lived in a rented house for which he paid 200 drachmas a month. The earnings from his work as a hired shepherd for Athanasios X. Machairas amounted to 400 drachmas a month. Though his finances were so paltry, this did not stop him from entering into a second marriage: In 1959, aged 63, he married Giannoula Evangelakou from Sparti.
At that time, and ever since settling in Magoula, he had become interested in getting a home of his own. After all, since 1957 the Greek government had been inviting refugees in Lakonia to submit the paperwork in order to be granted refugee plots in Sparti and then be given loans to build their own homes. All that was needed was proof of refugee status and landlessness from 1922 until then. Triantafyllos, destitute as he was, fulfilled all conditions. But the Greek government was also asking something more of him; whether he had lived at any time with the rest of his kin in the refugee home granted to the family on Kanari Street in Piraeus.
Triantafyllos endured a ten-year struggle to achieve his goal. In order to prove his refugee status, in 1960 he turned to the president of the Karitsa Community Council to verify in writing that "refugee Triantafyllos Arvanitis, persecuted by the Turks, came to Karitsa in 1915". In addition, "his housing needs were never even partially met, and he was in no way fully integrated, instead living in a makeshift haybarn". Furthermore, in 1962 he called on his brother Dimitrios to corroborate he had never stayed in Kanari Street. Dimitrios confirmed that "in the refugee home on Kanari Street, he lived to that day with his 7-member family, with his brother's (Tryfona’s) daughter and her family of 5, as well as with the other two daughters of Tryfona's wife and their families, and that Triantafyllos never lived in that house".
And so, in 1967, the Greek government granted Triantafyllos half a plot of land in the Dagréika Refugee Settlement in Sparti. At the same time, he was invited to take out a loan to build a house. However, his advancing years and paltry earnings did not make any of this at all feasible.
It is not known when Triantafyllos died, but quite definitely after 1975, having so deeply and profoundly endured the impact that the refugee experience has on human life; most of all the loss of relatives and friends and the struggle in life to deal with everyday challenges. For Triantafyllos Arvanitis, that struggle had been lifelong.
First published in Greek in the istológio tou Politistikoú Syllógou Geronthrón (blog of the Cultural Association of the Geronthres), Thursday, June 23, 2022
Translated into English by Dimitris E Katsampis
Sources
1. Geniká Archeía Krátous (General State Archives of Greece), Directorate of Health and Welfare of the Prefecture of Lakonia.
2. Oral Testimony of Vasiliki Malavazos
Find Triantafyllos Arvanitis in Family Trees of Southern Parnon at:
https://www.tribalpages.com/tribe/browse?userid=karitsa&view=0&pid=1455&randi=324110556
Family Trees of Southern Parnon are sponsored by the Pan-Laconian Society of South Australia, and the Karitsa Community of South Australia.
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