Anatolia

This story originally appeared in “(Everything Is) Cells and Bodies: Ohio Migration Anthology, Volume 2”, which is still available as a free digital download at the Ohio Immigrant Alliance website.

While researching my family’s Greek heritage, I became interested in the story of how my great-grandmother, at the age of eighteen, joined the exodus of Greek refugees fleeing Asia Minor en masse during World War I. The details of her story, like most of the approximately two million Greeks in Anatolia at the end of the Ottoman Empire, have been lost to history.

This fictional story is dedicated to Kaparisia Dinoudis, who left Bursa, Turkey for Youngstown, Ohio, as well as all Greeks, Turks, Armenians, and Jews who were caught in the war.

Ανατολία (Anatolia)

I

A long, long time ago in faraway Anatolia in a small town in the Marmara Region outside of the larger polis of Prusa, which itself was near enough to the City (or Constantinople, as it is formally called), a young Greek girl spends her days in a mud hut making clay pots for her father to sell.

She wraps her skinny legs around the wooden kick-wheel in front of the blackened fire with her supplies, clay and wire and dyes, spread around her. She slopes forward in dim light, back bent by the repetitive task, her nimble fingers shaping the pots in various sizes for various uses. Large amphora to carry water or store olive oil. Small vases for the women to keep their various herbs: dill, marjoram, mint, oregano, parsley or cumin. And smallest yet, the tiny urns for young girls like herself for coins, or beads, or to place their wishes.

Her skill is honed by practice to a mastery. Today, she is removing her pots from the fire at the end of the day and arranging them for her father to take to the market. As she removes the last small pot from the fire, her finger finds a deep indentation on the side.

“That one is güzel,” her father says as he enters the hut, using the Turkish word for beautiful. Despite its imperfection, the pot glistens in a captivating mix of green, orange and brown. It’s tiny lid fits perfectly onto the top.

“But Papa, I dented it. It’s ruined. Look.”

Her father takes the pot in his rough hands and studies it. His face is hidden behind bushy brown eyebrows and a long mustache that covers his lips and dips towards the floor. Despite his stern face, the girl can see the twinkle in his eye, and he looks lovingly at her imperfect creation.

“Take it home and put it with your collection. And take today’s money to Mama.”

She stuffs the drachmae and the tiny pot into her skirts and bounds around mud puddles in the street, dodging donkeys and camels and the men that drive them.

After dinner of stew and fresh bread, the pot is tucked into the corner of the family bedroom where she sleeps at night, tucked into her bedding next to her sister, brothers, mother and father. She sets it next to others of various forms of imperfection; this one with a hairline crack down the side, that one with a lid that doesn’t quite fit.

II

In this same small town, in the same small house a generation later, another young girl pretends to sleep but strains to overhear her mother talking in the grass just outside of the front door. She hears work-camps and looting, exodus and evacuation. Whatever that means. And blood.

As the sun rises over the mountains to the east and the family cooks breakfast on the fire, the rhythmic sound of boots marching can be heard long before the soldiers march into town. The townsfolk have gathered in front of their homes and peer through windows at the young Turkish troops in their smart uniforms: bandoliers slung across their chests, daggers on their hips, and short cylindrical hats with no peak and a black tassel called a fez.

The captain stands in front of his troops. The town is quiet enough and small enough that he can shout and be heard by every villager.

“Infidels! You are to leave Gâvur Bursa. You will walk with only what you can carry. We will escort you to the sea, where you will return to your homeland. You are no longer welcome in Anatolia. No questions and no exceptions. We will be back one week from today.”

With a bark in Turkish, the troops resume their march to the next town. 18-year-old Kassandra and 14-year-old Alexandra look to their mother. 

“How do we pack up a whole house, Mama?” asks Alexandra.

“When can we come back?” asks Kassandra.

“We’ve survived worse,” she tells them.

“Where is our homeland?” Alexandra asks.

Homeland thinks her mother. If not here in Prusa, then where? Her father hunted these lands with his father and his father before him. The Vaskania, prayer for deliverance from the Evil Eye, shared here between mothers and daughters going back to the time before memory. The time before Christianity had reached this land; a time of Phoenicians and Romans, Persians and Greeks, Ottomans, Kurds, Turks and Jews lived, loved, fought and died on this soil.

That night, under the cover of darkness, Kassandra helps her mother dig a space in the garden to bury the pots and pans. Kassandra’s mother’s jewels have been buried in the same space since her wedding day, three strides from the southeast corner of their small house.

The digging in the garden would have been a man’s job, but Kassandra’s father and brothers were taken by the army to help build bridges and fortifications around Anatolia. That was last summer, and the family hasn’t received word from them since they left.

A week later at dawn, the boots march up the hill again and Kassandra, her mother and her sister fall into line with dozens, maybe hundreds, more. From her village and beyond, Greeks of every age, all walking with their arms full and packs on their back to carry what they can to who knows where.

They walk down the caravan road, through their small town and through the larger town of Prusa, and finally to the banks of the Sea of Marmara where they are loaded onto ferry boats. Kassandra holds her sister’s hand and huddles close to their mother as they are jostled on the crowded boat.

It isn’t until the ship passes through the Dardanelles Straight into the Aegean Sea that Kassandra and her sister find themselves at the stern looking back at Anatolia. As she watches her homeland fade in the horizon, she realizes that she forgot to look back at her town as they marched down the road. Mother says that they will return, but watching her land disappear behind the boat, she begins to doubt.

She is right to doubt. None of the Greeks from her town, or the greater town of Prusa, or any of the many villages in Anatolia, will ever return to their homeland.

III

On a tree-lined suburban street exploding in fall color, a small boy wearing a Davy Crockett coonskin cap ambles toward Rockside Elementary School in Maple Heights, Ohio.  Like many boys in his class, he’s daydreaming of the World Series game to be played in Cleveland this afternoon between the Indians and the New York Giants.

On the first Friday of every month, Miss Washington’s fifth grade class has show-and-tell. JR, as he is called by his classmates, brought his father’s jackknife in September. On his way out the door this morning, remembering at the last moment that he had to bring something, he nabbed the tiny, clay pot from the bookshelf in the bedroom he shares with his younger sister.

Betty Holtzman was the first to present. She held up a brown carapace, almost a foot long, of what appeared to be an ancient creature straight out of Adventure magazine.

“This is a shell, actually a fossil, that my daddy keeps in his office. It’s very old. These were the eyes, these were the legs, and this was the stinger on the back,” she says, pointing to two brown spots near the front, serrated tips along the back side, and finally a long spear that took the place of a tail on this creature.

“Oh my, that’s almost frightening to look at,” Miss Washington says as she notes the brows formed over the eyes in what appears to be a perpetual scowl.

A hand shoots up in the front row and Susie Soforth speaks out as soon as the teacher looks her way.

“That’s not a fossil. That’s a horseshoe crab. My father took us to New Jersey this summer and you can find them all over the beaches. They’re usually dead or dying. If you poke them, they might wiggle their claws, but they don’t walk away.”

“Is that so?” Miss Washington says. “A horseshoe crab. How strange. Thank you, Susie.”

“And that’s not a stinger. It’s just a tail. They’re harmless to humans.”

“Thank you, Susie. Who’s next? JR?”

John Roosevelt, called JR to avoid confusion with his father, John Binghamton Einhorn, stands before the class with his little clay pot.

“This is a pot my mother gave to me. She’s Greek and she got it from her mother who lived in Turkey and it probably goes back centuries. Our family is from Turkey and my yaya came to the United States before my mama was born. She says that I can use it to hold wishes and coins.”

“I’m sorry, JR. You said your yaya came from Turkey? Wouldn’t that make your family Turkish, dear?” Miss Washington asks.

The classroom stifles a giggle, thinking of that bare-necked bird from Thanksgiving.

“Well, no. I don’t know. Yaya only speaks Greek, and we eat moussaka on Sundays,” JR replies, but suddenly he’s not sure. Susie’s hand shoots up.

“The Greeks at the gyro shop all have olive skin and black hair. You’re blonde with blue eyes and freckles, JR. How can you be Greek or Turkish?”

JR considers how his grandfather’s blond hair and light complexion matches his father’s as well as his own, and how they contrast with his mother’s dark, Mediterranean features. He thinks about how his father bristles when it’s time to go to the Greek Orthodox Church on Sunday with his in-laws but loves nuzzling up behind his mother while she does the dishes. But mostly he realizes that he hates standing in front of the class, so he looks to Miss Washington with a pleading look until she dismisses him to his seat.

After school he carefully places the pot on the bookshelf next to his cherished Bob Feller autographed ball and finds his mother in the kitchen. He asks her if yaya is Turkish because she came from Turkey.

“Oh JR, she is Greek. Don’t ever ask if she is Turkish. She doesn’t talk about such things, but she was forced to leave her homeland by Atatürk and that’s why she came to America.”

“Was her homeland in Turkey?” JR thinks of the children’s giggles from class.

JR doesn’t understand why his yaya lived in Turkey if she was Greek, or how she could be Greek if the family had always lived in Turkey. He decides he won’t ask his yaya either and he never does.

When yaya dies a few years later, she is buried in Youngstown, Ohio. She lies next to her younger sister who crossed the Aegean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean by her side, and who died shortly after arriving in Youngstown. At the funeral, JR learns that Yaya Kassandra lived for 18 years in a place called Anatolia, six months in Athens, Greece, three weeks aboard the SS Patras, and 39 years next to little Crab Creek by the steel mills in Youngstown.

And when she dies, all firsthand memories of Prusa and the kick-wheel and the pots buried in the garden die with her.

IV

Rain blankets the mouth of the Cuyahoga River and Cleveland’s bridges, lit from below, thrust through the winter mist like stalagmites. A lake freighter, cautiously working its way up the river, bellows a single blast from its foghorn into the night.

On the thirteenth floor of a condo on the west side of the river, a man stands on a balcony without a coat. Off to his right, the dark gray Berea sandstone of the Superior Viaduct absorbs light like a blackhole. He looks past the end of the amputated viaduct to the old powerhouse building, which has a limousine out front and a steady string of wedding guests in fancy dress dashing for the entrance. Though his building overlooks the powerhouse, he realizes he still hasn’t visited the aquarium that moved into the space several years ago.

In the small kitchen inside, his wife is busy preparing pasta and garlic bread for dinner. Her eyes are red, and she fiddles with her necklace as she stares at the oven, watching the timer tick down second by second. As the water reaches a boil, the man steps inside to take over at the stove and the woman goes to the bedroom to change and put on her makeup.

In the lobby downstairs, the man’s mother and father huddle outside of the elevator, talking quietly.

In the man’s coat pocket is a bright yellow envelope with a card inside congratulating the recipients on their wonderful good fortune. It goes on to say that they will be wonderful parents, and that everyone in the family is so very, very excited to help them on their impending journey.

In the woman’s large, black purse is a tiny, clay pot with an indentation on the side and a lid that fits perfectly into the top.

They hit the button to go up and face the elevator doors in unison as they stand in anticipation. At the door to their son’s apartment, they exchange a glance, and a hopeful smile escapes the woman’s mouth.

As their son opens the door and greets them quietly, they can see from their daughter-in-law’s eyes behind him that there will no need for the yellow card tonight. His mother’s eyes fill with tears, but she manages to not cry as she hugs her son at the threshold.

“I brought Phil wine,” the father says, handing the wine to his daughter-in-law, referring to the wine he helps make in his neighbor’s garage.

“Thanks, JR. Can you open this, Mark?” says the wife, handing the bottle to her husband.

That night at dinner, drinking Phil wine, they talk about Mark’s new job and the weather and the latest movies that they’ve seen and the movies that they hope to see. After dessert, his mother retrieves the clay pot from her purse and puts it on the table in front of her daughter-in-law.

“This is an old family heirloom. It came from Mark’s great-grandmother from Turkey. They say that if you have a wish, you write it down on a piece of paper and put it inside the pot and it comes true. Your grandmother had it and then your father and now we thought you might want it.”

The man and his wife thank them and put the pot in the kitchen by the window overlooking the crooked river. That night before bed they each write down a wish, which is the same wish, and put their scraps of paper next to each other in the little clay pot.

V

Many years later, a young man flies alone from Cleveland’s Hopkins Airport to Philadelphia and then overnight to Athens. He has been to the ancient Greek capital many times with his parents, so he immediately leaves the jostling city on a bus bound for Piraeus. At the huge port, he chokes on diesel fumes as he stands in a queue for a ferry to the islands.

He spends the new few weeks backpacking through the old capital at Nafplion, photographing donkeys in Hydra, and hiking the gorges in Crete. He revisits his favorite Cycladic islands and explores the Dodecanese for the first time. He eats so much souvlaki he could burst. From Rhodes he heads north to Lesbos and finally arrives at the Golden Horn of the City.

He wanders the wonders of Istanbul for two days, stopping at the history museum for as much information as he can gather before he boards a rickety old bus bounds for the hills southeast of the city.

In a dusty square in the outskirts of Bursa, which the Greeks had called Prusa, he walks farther east, away from the town, until the houses are sparse and are enveloped by pine trees. He looks again at his notes from his professor at college and traces the line from the mountain down the path and finally to the only house at the bottom of the hill. He walks up to the front door and knocks.

The door opens wide and a wrinkled old woman steps into the sun, frowning as she looks at the young American before her.

“Can I help you?” she asks in English.

“I’m sorry to bother you. My name is Christopher Einhorn from America and I’m on a journey to retrace my family history. I’ve traced my family to this area in Anatolia around the time of World War I. My family was Greek and I was hoping to see the area where they actually lived.”

The old woman looks at the ground as he talks. When he’s finished, she looks up and shakes her head.

He continues, “I was told they lived in the hills near Bursa in the shadow of the mountain. I can only trace my family back to my great-great-grandmother, Kassandra Yannakou, but before that it goes dark. I think that her parents grew up here and the family lived here long before.”

“When people come looking for Greeks, they yell and shout at Turks. No, no, sorry,” she replies.

“No, it’s not like that at all,” he says with a smile. “My grandfather used to quote from Zorba. You know, Zorba the Greek? He’d say ‘I look at a man, any man, and I say, ‘He is good. He is bad.’ What do I care if he’s Greek or Turk?’ I like that.”

“Zorba?”

“Wait, look at this,” he says as he unslings his backpack and reaches deep into a pocket. He unwraps a bundle and removes a small, clay pot with a lid on top.

“This came from someone in my family and was passed down to me. I was told by my father that it was made here in Anatolia and made the trip to America. My mother says that it grants wishes. Please.”

The old woman reaches for the pot, and he hands it over. She runs her fingers over the smooth, time-worn surface. She lifts the lid and finds the inside empty.

“You are Rum?” she asks. His smile freezes.

“I’m sorry. Room? I don’t understand.”

“Rum. Greek from Turkey. Not Greek from Greece. Yunan. You are Rum.”

“Yes, if that’s what it means. Yes. Greek from Turkey. From Anatolia. Rum.”

As she hands the pot back, she says “Follow the cow path behind the house up the hill. In a clearing is the old village. Find big stones in a straight line. This was building foundations. That is where they lived but village is gone.”

He breaks into a wide smile as she steps back into the doorway and closes the door. After weeks of travel, he reflexively says efharisto, Greek for “thank you”.

“Rica ederim,” she replies in Turkish as the door closes.

Christopher trudges up the path, bounding over puddles, which is tightly enclosed by trees on both sides. He tries to imagine caravans of camels, bells chiming on their harnesses coming down these paths. He has read in history books about how merchants carried their wares from the villages in the hills to the towns below, and of how the family would sometimes wear their finest clothes to go into the city to congratulate a wealthy, young couple on their wedding day. As brambles pull at his sleeves, he finds it hard to imagine anything so grand.

At a crest of the hill, he pulls off the path and examines the ground. Immediately he sees them: gray, worn stones poking through the underbrush. His feet push away branches and leaves and there it is. A line, as long as he is tall, of foundation stones.

“Nature abhors a straight line,” he thinks as he admires the line. He steps back and surveys the surrounding area. Keeping one eye on the uncovered stones, he walks larger and larger circles, but nothing else is revealed.

As he walks back to what must surely have been an old house or building, he steps over the rocks and drops his backpack to the ground. He removes a book and turns to lay on his back, head resting on the pack, and stares up into the pale blue Anatolian sky. A gust blows from the north, a meltemi, he remembers, from the Sea of Marmara to the mountains.  As he eyes the clearing, he tries to imagine the bustling little village that once did stand in this space.

Then he opens his book, Venezis’ “Land of Aeolia”, and reads once again of the mountains that talk to the waves, of the bandits and the jackals and the hunter with the yellow stars, the hawks and the salamanders, and of the ghosts that haunt these places.