If I close my eyes, I can summon many childhood memories of that magical place. Foremost among them are the olive trees that blanketed our fields. There is no more enduring symbol of Crete than these trees with their dark and silvery green shimmering leaves. For the Athens 2004 Summer Games, I chose to revive a custom to honor both my country’s ancient Olympic traditions and the flowering beauty of Crete: a wreath made of olive leaves from the island’s oldest tree in Chania was bestowed upon each of the medal winners.
I also remember the gentle burble of the streams where I would collect stones and catch crabs. I remember my sister and I in our garden trampling grapes in a vat (patitiri as we call it in Greek) to make the must that would ferment and become delicious wine. I remember the men climbing the walnut trees and beating the branches so that the nuts showered down for us to gather. (And I remember that a falling walnut can leave quite a lump on your head!) I remember a rainbow of plantings: tomatoes, eggplants, zucchinis, melons, and watermelons. I remember the orange and lemon trees too. And best of all, I remember the sweetest, most flavorful honey produced anywhere in the world.
A klimataria (an arbor) full of clusters of light and dark grapes and broad leaves extended from one side of the house, and we would gather for lunch in the cool shade of the perfect shadows it cast. In season, my father would pay my sister and me a half drachma—probably the equivalent of an American penny—for each basket of grapes we picked. I remember spreading grapes out in the sun to dry into sultana raisins. My aunt and grandmother taught us how to properly pick tomatoes and cucumbers in the garden. Eleni and I marveled at their ability to find in the abundant fields suitable wild leafy greens that they would later boil and dress with olive oil and lemon in a favorite dish called horta vrasta. Lemons and olive oil, salt and honey—our food was fresh, wholesome, and loved.
In the summer, we always cooked outside over an open fire. I recall the aromatic casseroles, stews, and lightly fried vegetables that my grandmother prepared not only for us but also for the people who worked our family’s fields. My absolute favorite was the smell and, even better, the taste of the fried potatoes. My grandmother would use a flat knife to open the middle of each piece so that the potatoes simply bubbled over, almost as if they were filled with a thick soup. And long before the French made escargots an international delicacy, snails were a Cretan favorite, baked in the ashes of the fire and eaten with hard sea salt sprinkled over them. In Greece we have an expression that means, “Love comes through the stomach.” That was true for my family then, just as it is today.
The men in our family would brew “raki,” or tsikoudia, a powerful alcoholic beverage that was made from the leftover skins of the grapes after all the juice had been squeezed out. At night the adults would sit around the fireplace smoking, talking, laughing, and sipping raki. My grandmother insisted that if you mixed raki with a little honey and some dried figs it would cure any cough. It was also regarded as an excellent digestif.
I was told that as long as you ate potatoes and walnuts while you drank the raki you would never get drunk. I cannot testify to the truth of that prescription, however, because there was much raki yet to be consumed when Eleni and I were sent away to bed at nine o’clock each night. We never minded leaving because we were allowed first to go up to the roof, where we would try to count the stars. Because there was very little light from the village, the stars shone with extraordinary brilliance. We would quickly give up the count, of course, for there seemed to be billions of them shining down on us.
Beyond the comforts his home and family provided, my father believed that we belonged to a bigger family, the village. Each village in Crete celebrates its special saint’s day with a large festive party, the panigiri. Relatives, friends, and acquaintances visit from other villages, lambs are cooked in the open, and raki and local wine flow freely. The music of the Cretan lyra is heard all over the village, and dancing—everyone from the very young to the very old joins in—goes on until the early morning hours.
Funerals, weddings, and, instead of birthdays, the celebration of our name days brought the whole village together. Years later I had the opportunity to meet Hillary Clinton, whose book It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us was a celebration of an ethos I had lived. Later still I would be tasked with building a village of an entirely different kind, but possessed with a similar spirit—an Olympic village.
My father encouraged us to play with the children from Embaros, many of whom didn’t have the same opportunities that we did in Heraklion, he explained. He also drummed into Eleni and me what was proper etiquette in the village. I can hear his voice to this day: “When you meet somebody, you greet them first, and when asked who you are, you reply, ‘I am Gianna, the daughter of Frixos.’”
The daughters of Frixos were never to forget that, in Embaros, our every word and deed reflected on him and his good family name.
* * *
* Note that the addition of the suffix “s” in Greek surnames such as the author’s maiden name does not signify the English plural form. Rather, the “s” at the end of Daskalakis is the masculine form of the family name.
ACCORDING TO GREEK MYTHOLOGY, Prometheus shaped man out of mud and Athena breathed the fire of life into his clay figure millennia ago. My personal “mythology” begins around the turn of the twentieth century with the courtship of my paternal grandparents (whom you just met in chapter 1).
Manolis Fazakis was the proverbial poor but honest man who scratched out a living from the rocky fields of Crete. His ambitions, it seems, were matched by his capacity for hard work. He chose to court the beautiful blond-haired, blue-eyed Parthenia Daskalaki—in appearance more Swedish than Greek—one of three daughters of a landowner in central Crete. My great-grandfather wasn’t wealthy, but he was quite comfortable, which put him in an entirely different economic class from his would-be son-in-law. As they were in so many other places at that time, lines of class were drawn in Crete between farmers and merchants, the educated and the uneducated, city dwellers and country dwellers. So it is not entirely clear why this well-established landowner consented to his daughter’s marriage to a hardworking laborer. It is likely that the two were so head-over-heels in love he feared they would defy him and elope.
Being a shrewd businessman, he decided it was preferable to marry off a daughter while he could exact a price for his blessing, and because Manolis Fazakis was poor and had little of material value, Parthenia’s father demanded of her suitor a rather unusual one. Since my great-grandfather had no sons, he was distressed that his name would die out. He informed my grandfather that he would consent to the marriage only if Manolis would take the extraordinary step of adopting his wife’s family name, Daskalakis, as his own.
This was truly a dramatic request. Greece has long been a male-dominated society in which a man’s name is his most valuable asset. While the government has long discouraged dowries, it was customary at the time of my grandparents’ courtship for a woman to leave her own family and become part of her husband’s family, even transferring her wealth to her husband. In many parts of Greece today, there remains a strong custom that a woman’s place is in the home. Although I would later serve in my nation’s Parliament, when I was born, Greek women were still two years away from winning the right to vote.
In a bold decision, my grandfather accepted the proposition, pledging to adopt the name for himself and, more important, for his future children. His extremely radical decision may have signaled a subsequent disregard of conventionality that has run through our family ever since. The marriage agreement was not left to the vagaries of honor or chance, however. The two men traveled to the closest town with government offices and executed a contract to guarantee the pledge with the force of law.
And so, with the scrawl of a pen, my grandfather became Manolis Daskalakis-Fazakis and, very shortly thereafter, a husband. He would pass that name on to his children, including my father, who would, in turn, honor the pledge by passing
it on to his daughters.
When I was eighteen years old, I decided to change my name, shortening it to Daskalaki by lopping off the Fazaki. That decision perplexed my father. I told him that, given the likelihood I would marry and eventually add my husband’s name to my maiden name, Daskalaki-Fazakis seemed unnecessarily unwieldy. I wasn’t sure how he would react, but he was sophisticated and, in certain matters, quite reasonable. He told me: “Okay, Gianna, I understand. It is too much.” So, almost three-quarters of a century after my grandfather’s name change, I too went down to the administrative office (though in another town) and changed my name.
Manolis Fazakis made one other pledge before he took Parthenia’s hand in marriage. Confident that he would achieve financial success—“just you wait and see” are the words that have been passed down—he assured his father-in-law that he and his family would never be a financial burden. My great-grandfather no doubt was happy to hear this. After the wedding, he told the young couple, “Now you two are on your own.”
My grandfather acquired some farmland and dedicated himself to building a life for his bride. But the land wasn’t very fertile, and he soon found himself saddled with debts. The young couple’s financial struggles only got worse, for they had three children in quick succession. After my father was born, my grandfather made the second most dramatic decision in his married life. He was certain that no matter how hard he worked his hardscrabble soil he wouldn’t be able to provide for the many mouths he had promised to feed. His only hope was to go to America, where he could earn enough money to pay off his debt and, eventually, purchase more promising land.
He was not alone. Many Greek men of his generation faced the same choice—and sought the same opportunities on American soil. Like my grandfather, these young men left Greece with plans to return home one day. For those who stayed despite the unfamiliar places, language, and customs, America proved to be a land not of obstacles, but of opportunities. Today, the Greek-American community is a large and thriving part of American society. There are now an estimated 1.3 million Greek-Americans living in the United States.
No doubt my grandfather was drawn by the exaggerated stories of life in America, where there was lots of work and the salaries were high.
The reality was much different. Most of the Greek immigrants in America in the early 1900s were unskilled workers who wound up shouldering the hard labor that built the American industrial colossus. In 1907, for instance, approximately forty thousand Greeks were laboring on the railroads, on construction teams, or in factories.
My grandfather wound up in Indiana, where he worked long, physically demanding hours in the steel mills. Wages were good, but life was not easy. Nevertheless, America gave him what it had promised from across the Atlantic: success. He came to America in order to secure a better life for his family in Greece. And that is exactly what he did.
Once, when I was a little girl, I marveled at how smooth his skin was compared to my grandmother’s wrinkled hands. He told me that his skin had been burned smooth by the searing heat of the steelworks. (In a strange twist of fate, my husband would one day inherit a steel mill in Indiana, not too far from where my grandfather once labored.) During my grandfather’s American sojourn, he spent virtually nothing on himself, sending home enough money to feed his family and saving the rest for their future. He indulged only one passion: books. He would come home from work and spend the hours before exhaustion sank him into sleep reading everything he could get his hands on: history, mythology, geography, and religion. He certainly never thought of it as such, but he probably got the equivalent of a liberal arts college education at night in his tiny rented room.
Back home in Crete, his wife and three children subsisted on very little, and waited. Even as a very young boy, my father was acutely aware of their deprivation. When he ate lunch outside with his friends, for example, he knew that they all ate bread and cheese, but his mother could give him only bread. Aware of his embarrassment at his meager repast, Parthenia gave him two pieces and told him to pretend to himself that one was cheese. Instead, he boasted to his pals—with the food clenched in his fists—that he too had bread in one hand and cheese in the other. But he was humiliated when they pried open his hands, revealing only bread.
After working four years at the Indiana steel manufacturing plant, my grandfather decided that he had saved enough money to return home and rejoin his family. He paid off his debts and bought a modest home and a small parcel of land in Embaros. Eventually he made enough money from cultivating that land to afford a larger house with even more land. Today our family still owns that home and still farms the land.
Although my grandparents managed to make a living from their farm, life in Embaros didn’t solve all their problems. There was a one-room schoolhouse in the village and a teacher who offered a curriculum that covered little more than the basics of reading and writing. Manolis and Parthenia did not regard this as adequate schooling for their children—certainly not with his passion for learning that my grandfather had nurtured in America. Our family has shared this passion for education ever since, by the way. Years later, while serving in Parliament, I would lead an effort to overhaul Athens’s schools.
When Achilles, Ioanna, and Frixos were old enough, they were sent away to school in Heraklion. The three youngsters shared a single rented room, for their parents had little money to spare. Every few months my grandmother would load up a donkey and three mules with provisions—dried meat, potatoes, lentils, oil, vinegar, even firewood—for her children and make the long, slow trek to Heraklion. She probably traveled as fast walking as my mother did driving years later!
My Uncle Achilles inherited his father’s love of books and became a top scholar. He went on to become an eminent professor of literature before, sadly, dying young. My Aunt Ioanna returned home rather than attend university. In doing so, however, she may have sealed her fate. Attractive, with the fair looks of her mother, sophisticated, and dynamic, she was not able to find an appropriate match in the small village.
My aunt never complained about her life, though. She was devoted to her family and the other families that lived in Embaros. When she got older, she took annual trips to the thermal baths in Edipsos, whose healing powers are legendary. Hercules supposedly bathed in those waters to restore his strength before undertaking each of his labors. My aunt lived a long and healthy life, maybe because of the waters of Edipsos.
My father’s education fell somewhere between that of his older siblings. While he started out studying economics at the university in Athens, money was tight, and he interrupted his studies to return to Crete, where he took a job in Heraklion with the Union of Producers of Crete, an agricultural-marketing cooperative. He always intended to finish his studies and attain his degree after he saved up some money, but World War II disrupted his plans.
In October 1940, my father enlisted in the army and was sent to northern Greece and Albania to join the forces repelling Mussolini’s advancing soldiers. When Italy was repelled, Hitler’s Germany invaded Greece in April 1941. When mainland Greece fell, my father returned to Crete with the retreating troops to help with the defense of his home island.
On May 20, 1941, the Cretan sky was darkened with the thousands of German paratroopers who landed on the island and engaged the defending army in ten days of fighting. Out-trained and out-gunned, the Allied troops fought bravely, but German forces proved too strong. Many Allied soldiers hid throughout Crete after the battle, and many succeeded in escaping to rejoin the fight in other parts of Europe. That was my father’s plan as well. He hid in a cave but was found by German troops. Along with the seventeen thousand Allied soldiers who were taken prisoner, on June 2, 1941, my father became a prisoner of war as well.
For my father, the fighting was over, though the war was only beginning.
He was held briefly on the island before being transferred to one of the many POW camps in Breslau, Germany, which is now Wroclaw, Poland.
Because
he was educated, my father commanded the respect of the other Greeks being held in the German POW camp, and he became a leader among the prisoners. He organized some plantings—the land was not exactly the fertile soil of Crete, but white cabbage did okay—and tried to ensure that all prisoners got their fair share of rations. As Manolis Daskalakis-Fazakis had done throughout four lonely years of separation from his family, my father, during his long imprisonment, read every book he could get his hands on—many of them several times. He also tried to learn as much German, French, and English as possible, convinced that language skills would give him an advantage in business if he finally returned home.
My father wrote many letters from Germany but none reached Embaros. Nor was there any word about him from the Red Cross or other organizations. His family never heard a word about his fate, never knew that he had been taken prisoner.
Everybody in the village assumed Frixos was dead, everybody except my grandmother and aunt, that is. They defied convention by refusing to don traditional black mourning garb. People in the village thought they had lost their minds or that their minds were addled by grief. One Easter my aunt made herself a shawl decorated with red roses. When she wore it to church, she could hear the whispers: “The poor girl, she just cannot believe her brother is already dead.” But the two women refused to surrender hope, and their steadfast faith was ultimately rewarded.
Allied forces liberated the POW camp on May 2, 1945, almost four full years after my father’s capture, and it took him four months to make the long trek home to Crete. My father had endured an even harsher version of the life his father had experienced in America some three decades earlier and, in similar fashion, had seized opportunity amid extraordinary hardship. And like his father had done, Frixos Daskalakis-Fazakis would return to Crete and attain the success he had dreamed of as a younger man.
My Greek Drama: Life, Love, and One Woman's Olympic Effort to Bring Glory to Her Country Page 2
