On the Road of Time – Chapter 6
By Petre Nakovski
Translated and edited by Risto Stefov
[email protected]
August 5, 2012
On our way to the village Ieropigi (Macedonian Kosinets, Ieropigi in Greek means “Sacred Spring”. This name was given to the village because water flows from under the church foundation) just outside of Mesopotamia (Macedonian Chetirok. Mesopotamia in Greek means “between rivers.”) we met an old man sitting at the side of the road. Should I stop, I wondered. Earlier we were warned that there might be thugs out there who might force you, at gunpoint, to drive them south to one of the major Greek cities. But looking at the sad expression in the old stranger’s eyes made me stop. The old man greeted us in Greek and wondered if we were going to Ieropigi and if we could give him a ride.
“Get in,” I said and, driving slowly, we struck up a conversation. To begin I asked him, “Where are you from, who are you and what are you doing?…” He said he lived in Ieropigi. I then asked him if the village was always called “Ieropigi”.
“No,” he said. “Earlier the village was called Kosinets and “endopii” (indigenous people) used to live there, but they are gone. There is only one family of endopii left and they are old people…”
“Where did the endopii go?” I asked.
“I don’t know. They are dispersed all over the world,” he said.
“And do you like the place, the village?” I asked.
The old man shook his hand and with a confirming voice said: “No. I don’t like it. Who wants something that does not belong to them? We have no roots here. The young leave for the cities or for Europe and every day there are less and less of us. We die on foreign soil. We like the places where they uprooted us from, from where we emigrated. Every day we slowly wilt without the meadows, the mountains, the peaks and the waters of Pindus… we die without them. Without them, without the peaks of Pindus we feel short. We were eagles there and here we are not even jackdaws (small kind of crow). They took Pindus from us and stripped us naked. Eagles need heights and peaks and we, the Sarakachani (Vlachs), need the endless pastures and the cold waters of Pindus. We are unhappy, very unhappy because we can’t do without our mountains on Pindus. There are mountains here as well, but they are not like our mountains… Now we only go there to visit the graves of our ancestors…”
“And where are the graves of the endopii?” I asked.
“They were moved to another place. Now there is a garden there in their place…” answered the old man.
“There once used to be houses there, right? What happened to the stones from the houses?” I asked.
“They were used to build the new houses… The village is more or less new, built below the old one…” he answered.
There was a café at the entrance of the village. It was time for coffee. There were many white-haired old men sitting at the tables, leaning their arms on a shepherd’s staff, waiting for their cup of coffee to arrive. We greeted them and they greeted us back.
“Down there, the building with the sheet metal roof, what is that?” I asked.
“We keep several hundred sheep and goats there during the winter,” answered the old man.
“You have so many,” I praised the old man.
With a difficult sigh and a disappointing tone of voice, the old man said:
“When they relocated us here I brought with me fifteen thousand sheep, ten thousand goats and three thousand horses. These mountains are too small and narrow for that many animals. At the end of the nineteen-fifties we were almost left without sheep and goats. There was not enough land for them to graze on and we had no money to purchase more. That’s when the government forced us to farm the land and plant wheat, barley, rye and potatoes. We had no idea how to work the land but were forced to learn quickly. We used tractors and other farming equipment which helped a lot…”
The old man stopped talking and after a moment of silence, asked:
“Where in Greece have you seen a Vlach, a Sarakachan reduced to plowing? The Vlachs, meaning us who came here, more correctly, us who they brought here from Epirus, only know how to look after sheep and goats and make all kinds of cheese. In Epirus we despised the farmers and villagers. In Epirus we were the aristocracy, the first people in Larissa and Athens. The Vlachs were the cream of Greece. In old times the Vlachs fed all of Europe with their various cheeses. Our caravans went to Belgrade, Budapest, Bucharest and even as far as Vienna. We brought back riches and built Greece with them. The Vlachs built schools, churches, the first public buildings, the first palaces and theaters in Greece. You want a Greek doctor, judge, lawyer, professor, historian, rebel, advocate, diplomat, look to the Vlachs. Don’t look for them among the Greeks. The Vlachs were and still are the cream of Greece. There at Pindus, in the Vlach villages, our houses were palaces. Everyone had a house built in the village with chiselled stone and everyone in Ioannina, Metsovo, Samarina and other places had palaces. And I mean palaces. Do we like this place? No! They made villagers and plowmen out of us, the proud Sarakachani from Epirus. We have become a mockery of people… they disgraced us… Come… Please, come to our house for coffee…”
The old Vlach, Sarakachan woman greeted us with open arms and with a wide smile behind which flashed several gold teeth. She sat us down on a wide sofa covered with a wide red, woolen blanket. And while placing a sweet made of figs on the table in front of us, I saw a cross carved on her forehead covering her wide wrinkles. The old man noticed me looking with surprise and hastened to explain.
“It is an old tradition that our women have a cross between their eyebrows, which originated back in the time of the Ioannina Pasha (Ottoman general). A cross was carved between the eyebrows on the forehead of our women to remind the Turks (Moslems) and Turk converts to keep their hands off them. We marked them with a Christian cross and as such no Turk or Turk convert dared take them…”
While we drank our coffee the old Vlach told us that here, in the desolate Kostur Region villages of Dmbeni, Kosinets, Lobanitsa and Smrdesh, as in Prespa, a Greek politician and statesman, the richest Vlach among the Vlachs in Greece, promised them a paradise. He did not mention his name. But a paradise he did not find. He became poor in doing this. So I gathered his real motive was to change the character of the desolate region.
We thanked our hosts for their hospitality and got up to go.
“Where are you going?” asked the old Vlach.
“To Lobanitsa,” I answered.
“Ah, it’s called that by its old name,” confirmed the old man.
“What is its new name?” I asked.
“It’s called Agios Dimitrios now, but the village no longer exists… There is nothing there, except for a small church built by the people of Lobanitsa who now live in Australia,” answered the old man.
* * *
We headed to the western part of the village along the old upper road, now widened and paved with asphalt (there is also a lower and wider road, built after the Vlachs were brought here). At the exit, at the end of the asphalt there was an old road, a pre-war road. This road was built by the villagers from the surrounding villages in the thirties by unpaid labour. This is the place where an older road used to exist and was travelled by the Romans. This is the link between Kostur – Bilishta and Korcha and from there to Durres. The hill and the flat area on top of the road and below the road are fenced with rusty barbed wire, on which a rusty sign hangs with the writing “Mine Field!”
No one to this day has made the effort to remove the mines. The mines have been hibernating here since they were put in by the Democratic Army of Greece demolition crews in August 1949. There was an intersection twenty or so metres from here. There was also a church in the middle and to the right there was a wide winding road leading to Kristalopigi (Smrdesh in Macedonian). It said so on the traffic sign. (Kristalopigi, meaning “crystal spring” the new Greek name given to the village because of the natural spring of water running near the village church, Sveti Giorgi.) To the left, in front of us, a little down the hill was a cobblestone road.
“This is the road,” I said to my wife, “the road that leads to Lobanitsa.”
The cobblestone road was covered in moss and overgrown with thorn bushes on both sides. Growing on the sides were scruffy, short elms. It looked like the road was not used at all. We came out of the car and turned our attention to the south. In front of us lay the Kosinsko valley, further over were the Boulders (Faltsa) and beyond that was Mount Odre. Left of Odre was Mount Orle and to the right, on the west side, lined up were the mountains Krusha, Gorusha, Bel Kamen, Petre, Peleni, Sveti Ilia, Amuda, Nikoler and Aliabitsa and behind them was Gramos. Behind us, on a gentle rise, were the hills of Kosinets and Lobanitsa, overgrown with thinned out dwarf oak trees languishing in silence and quiet. Continuing beyond them, up high, all covered in broken stones and becoming steeper as they went further, were more hills that tied to the hills of Mali-Madi.
The warm air moved in gentle waves as the ghostly silence caused a restlessness in us. From what I have been told, I know that it was from here that the government army wanted to enter behind the DAG (Democratic Army of Greece) Partisan lines and thus open the door for the tanks to enter Smrdesh and close the escape route to Albania. It was here on these hills, from August 10th to 11th, 1949, that the DAG Brigade 105 strongly opposed the government army. It was here at the bases of these hills that Division IX of the government army became disabled, saving the lives of many Partisans. About those days, General Zafiropoulos wrote the following on page 619 of his book “Anti-Bandit War 1945-1949”.
“Ουτω ο ελιγμος της IX Μεραρχιας απετυχεν ολοσχερος μετα μεγαλων απωλειων, 354 εκτος μαχης μονον της 41-της Ταξιαρχιας....” (And as such the manoeuvre of Division IX completely failed, leaving 354 dead on the battlefield from the 41st Brigade alone…”
I drove very slowly over the aging cobblestone road and when I came out of the shade of the tall and wide-branched oak tree, a wide space lay in front of me all covered in broken rock. I recognized the place from the surrounding bare hills and from the large rock. The village Lobanitsa was located here. I remember the place from the three tall poplar trees that grew near the river on whose bank the church, Sveti Dimitria, was built. And near it was the boulder from whose veins flowed a spring of water. The poplar trees and the church are now gone and water no longer flows from the spring under the big rock. I remember the two-story houses built from chiselled stone, covered with Turkish ceramic tiles and window frames painted with blue paint. These houses were built after the Ilinden Uprising (1903) but now are gone and so are the stones and Turkish tiles. All gone!
I remember the tall white house, built high up, at the edge of the village from whose balcony one could see the entire surroundings. That was my aunt Zoia’s house and she and her daughter-in-law and two year old grandson were imprisoned for two and a half years in the village Drenovo in Prespa Region. She was accused of being an “enemy of the people” because her son crossed over to the other side of the border. We moved to that house in the fall of 1947 because they burned our house. The tall white house is now gone.
I remember the school very well. In the late fall of 1947, after sundown, the school would open its doors and during the night under the dim light of kerosene lamps, for the first time, we would open our Macedonian primers and the teacher, Konstandina Todorova all nicely dressed in her military uniform, would teach us the Cyrillic alphabet. The school is gone now and so is the teacher with the nice Partisan hat and long braided hair, she too is gone; she died in Skopje after moving there from Poland.
I remember many of the faces of the people of Lobanitsa. They too are gone. I remember Partisans arriving in the village very early in the morning, exhausted from a long night’s march. They would rest here during the day and would be gone after sunset. I remember the nights when long columns of loaded horses and mules, guided by women wearing white robes, passed through Lobanitsa. The women were from Prespa and would whisper that they were carrying ammunition.
I remember seeing a yellow airplane fly in circles over Lobanitsa and the surrounding countryside and because of that the days were dead and the nights came to life. I remember late in the night women from AFZH (Women’s Anti-Fascist Front) came to the houses and had long talks with the mothers. The fathers then were mobilized and digging trenches and cutting oak, beech and pine trees to build bunkers. And what did the women from the AFZH, in their long conversations, have to say to my mother to persuade her?
I remember that day well. It was March 24th in the afternoon when the gathering began and lasted until sunset. Crowds of children were gathering in long queues, exhausted from their long journey. There were small, big and bigger children. The mothers carried the little children in their arms and on their shoulders and the bigger children hung on to them by their dress. They were all exhausted making the trip on foot to Lobanitsa from Breshteni, Galishta, Ezerets and Novoseleni. They spent the night sleeping in the school, church and houses in Lobanitsa. The next day they spent their daylight hours hiding in the forest just outside of the village. The day after, more children were arriving the entire day from the villages Dolno Papratsko, Krchishta and Kosinets.
This was the first time I had ever seen so many children and mothers. I remember that afternoon our yard smelling of roasted chicken and freshly baked bread. I also remember my mother taking out our clothes from the chest and dressing us the same way as she dressed us when we went to church… I remember it was a warm spring day, the almond trees were flowering and the nightingales were singing.
As I continued to drive towards the broken stones I felt chills run down my spine. The closer I came to the piles of rocks and soil where the houses used to be, the more chills I felt coming over me. At the end of the rubble, to the right where the road bends slightly, I stopped the car. This is where we stopped on March 25th, 1948 to say goodbye…
…In front of us, far away, the sun was setting on top of Mount Morava. The early evening light was dimming before our teary eyes. In the early evening the children cried loudly with tears welling up in their eyes. The sun set behind Mount Morova and the darkness was filled with weeping. And behind us, up there on the steepness of the hill, stood our mothers watering the soil beneath them with tears, shaking the rocks around them with their sickly loud cries and sobs and waving their black handkerchiefs at us, saying goodbye…
We walked in the dark not knowing where it would lead us. We walked, stumbled, fell, got up again and dragged our steps in a long column... Somewhere in the middle of the column several people started to sing, but no one joined in, no one sang the song that would give us courage and joyfulness. The voices of those singing slowly died out. They dried up. They got lost in the sea of crying and sobbing... Before stepping over onto foreign soil, the column stopped for a short time. Someone, one of the people escorting us, took my bag with the roasted chicken and still warm bread...
Years afterwards, when I was an adult, long after we were separated and under a different climate, I heard from my mother. She told me the following:
“They told us that after the bad had passed our children would be returned to us, which should not have taken more than twenty days. This is what they told us and that’s how they convinced us to voluntarily take you by the hand and escort you to the border. There, at the corner when they told us that we could only go this far with you, we waited on the hillside. This is where they held us. This is where we begged them and prayed for your return to us as soon as possible… Was there a single woman that did not cry? We cried my dear, we pulled our hairs out crying, we screamed and wailed mournfully like we would when someone died. After you were gone when we returned home, that’s when we realized our mistake and the wrong we had done.
Things went from bad to worse. The house was empty and desolate, the yard was empty, the village was empty and every lane was desolate. We waited and listened, hoping the door would open, someone would call out, someone would cry, would laugh. Nothing! Emptiness! Not a single child’s voice, no matter how much we wished to hear one. Not a voice, not a cry, not a laugh was heard…
There were no children, no voices, no laughing, no happiness and no joy. Life becomes difficult when someone takes away your happiness. They took our happiness and gave us a wound, a sore, a cut, an open gash… a wound in the heart, a wound in our soul, a wound that does not heal, a wound that hurts with every mention of birth, a wound that opens, that bleeds, that burns. No one’s heart could help reduce the hurt because the pain was buried deep in the heart and soul…
Right here,” she tapped her chest, “like a mistletoe, it is stuck, pressing and scratching and whispering, I listen but there is no voice, no noise, only silence, there is nothing, it is desolate… and that desolation hurts, it never stops. After a while we began to blame ourselves, to curse ourselves, how could we do this? Why did we do this, send our children away and turn our lives upside down? Why did we put our children in strange hands? Why did we put the fate of our children in someone else’s hands?
Our separation became a permanent wound. An open wound that constantly bled and burnt. The wounds from a bullet, a knife, a dagger, would heal, but the wounds from this kind of pain, anguish and sorrow would not heal. Every day, with each passing day, the wounds became wider. There were as many wounds as there were missing children. Open wounds. They were constantly open. Our chests were torn apart from the heavy sighs. You go out to the yard, it’s desolate; you go out on the balcony, the street is desolate; you look out of the window, the neighbourhood is desolate; it is desolate at the spring, in the streets, everywhere it is desolate, empty, devoid of children. Emptiness and desolation existed everywhere.
Every mother missing her child was wounded. It seemed like even the birds flew away and abandoned us. Their voice and song too we could not hear. And what were my thoughts? What else could a mother think, if not first of her children? About what else can a mother think, whose children they took away, an act with which they muddied and poisoned her happiness?
Silence and great sadness befell the village; silence in the home, in the yard. Restlessness circled, scratched and dug, but only in the mind, it did not allow the heart to calm, to settle and find peace. There was no day with hope or night with sleep without pain… The days were hard and the nights were even harder. Was it fate? A great weight, a great weight was placed upon us. Do you remember? First they collected the older children. They collected them during the night and took them somewhere in the forest, in the mountains… They told them and us that they would be fighting for freedom, for Macedonia. Then after, they collected you the younger children. They told us that you would remain over there, in the countries (Eastern European countries) for only several days, until they kicked out the enemy… We believed them and we gave you to them… Then we were left all alone…
After that, one by one, they took our sheep, goats, chickens, horses, oxen and told us that they were for the struggle and gave us a piece of paper with writing on it that said the “People’s Government” would return them to you. Then they collected our bed covers, woolen blankets, pillows, winter coats, gloves, socks, sweaters, hats, wool, pots, plates, spoons, forks. They told us they were for the hospitals, for the wounded. No one asked if we had anything left for ourselves…
Something was left for us, my dear child, something was left. Our naked life, pain, suffering, torment, wounded soul, and the beleaguered hope of waiting was left for us… Left for us were these arms and shoulders ... with which we became part of the flood, the rising storm which became more frightening with each passing day...
About those who were engaged in the war we were always burdened with the worst thoughts, with the greatest of fear and for those young ones, who were collected, our thoughts were that at least there were no wars, no shooting, no killing where they took them and that they would be alive and well. We had the same wish and prayer for both the young and old; to be alive and well, even if they were far away, our prayers for them were always to be alive and well. Nothing we did we could hold with our own hands. Everything we held fell out of our hands. No sooner were our crops and gardens ready to be harvested than they were there to collect them just as they had collected our older and younger children. They said there would be great battles and for them to win, to achieve victory, we too needed to give, to go, if not to battle then to harvest, to deliver and to transport.
We dug at night and delivered and transported at night. The day was reserved for the airplanes and cannons. They beat on us during the day. So we turned things upside down and made the day into night and the night into day. The pain in our backs, shoulders, arms and legs, from carrying logs and ammunition persisted, ever increasing with each passing day. But there was no time to think of our personal pain, when the war effort was at stake, so they kept telling us...
The entire crop from the fields, meadows and gardens, the sheep, goats and oxen were left for the old people to look after. It was all left to those who could hardly stand or walk, to those who could hardly lift or carry a bushel, swing a scythe or a sickle, to those who could hardly carry a deceased in a coffin or a wounded on a stretcher… And you tell yourself, please God protect us and cross yourself with your thoughts, with your thoughts because your hands were full carrying a stretcher, a log, a coffin, a shovel, an axe, a pickaxe, a stone. You made a cross with your thoughts, because you couldn’t make it with your hands. And when you were carrying a wounded person, you said to yourself, “Is there another mother like me carrying my children like this?” That’s when you began to be afraid, to experience numbing fear, to feel your legs collapsing under you. Fear had you in its grip and you couldn’t think of anything else. You dedicated your entire thoughts to the drowning fear which had you burdened and locked in its grip. And that’s how we faced each cruel day being beaten again and again with horror that had no end…
There were only two or three children left in the village. Very young children that did not leave, that were not separated, that were not torn from their mother’s embrace. When these children cried we all wept with them, we all rejoiced. When they laughed, we all laughed and cried. Their laughter, their ga-ga-ing and crying was a light in darkness. It was like the sun shining after the passing of a dark storm… Unfortunately the happiness was short lived and after a bit of sunshine, the dark clouds would return. There was light and then darkness, a short burst of sunlight followed by a long episode of darkness and the tears never dried up. We had tears for both the dead and the living…
It was a bad time, a very bad time. There were many children at home and then, suddenly there were no children, the home was empty. The silence was deafening, sickening. What did we do? We mostly cursed. We cursed those who brought us no good, those who came to our homes and took our happiness, our light and left us in darkness. We prayed at home, we lit pine sticks in front of the icon of the Virgin Mary and prayed some more. We felt a bit better but not for long. We went to church and prayed there too. During the night and when we were carrying wounded, if we passed by a church we stopped and prayed, we prayed for our children, we prayed for all those who were in stretchers. We prayed for them to be safe and remain alive… Our days and nights became moments of prayer. I don’t think God ever heard so many prayers. And the miracle is that in God we believed the most…
In the night we knelt in front of a lit pine stick, we had no candles, and while looking at the icon of the Virgin Mary, we prayed for everyone. For those who were at war and for those who were in the countries. And after that we waited… we did not leave the pine stick to completely burn. We needed it for its light the next day and if any were still left we needed it for the next night; that is if we were not at work carrying logs and stones for the bunkers, or carrying wounded from the battlefield to the hospitals. We would all gather together in one room, that is all of us who were still left in the village, take our black handkerchiefs off, light the pine stick and, in its light, look at the pictures of our children. We whispered to them but all they did was look back at us and we, with our whispers, spoke to them and lightly touched and caressed their faces and kissed their eyes with our slightly moist lips. And they, they just looked at us in silence. And quietly, pleadingly, we asked them to please say something, smile… We talked to them but they kept quiet, silent and only looked at us and looked at us. So then, for the longest part, we looked at each other in silence…”
x x x
My wife and I remained on the hillside for a long time. We were quiet for most of the time. Then we closed our eyes and for a moment, behind our eyelids, we witnessed the large crowds of women and old people, all around us, standing on this very hillside and weeping in silence and waving goodbye... and in our ears they whispered their wishes and prayers and in the silence we heard their muffled cries and whimpers… And all over again we were reminded of the day when they gathered here and when they brought us with them. We remembered it was a time when the almonds were flowering and the Nightingales sang. It was March. A warm and fragrant spring day…
They collected us and took us away and behind us remained the unfinished story in a grandfather and grandmother’s voice… And we thought and asked ourselves: “Will there be anyone, where they were sending us, who would caress us with a warm hand like the hand of our mothers, who would kiss us goodnight before sleep, like our mothers kiss us, who would gently look at us like our mothers looked at us, who would smile at us with our mother’s smile, who would tell us a story, sing us a song, wipe our tears? Would there be anything there from our home? Where are they taking us? When will we return to our homes?”
They took us away and left my mother and all the mothers of all the other children with an empty lap and with an empty embrace. They left our mothers with their eyes fixed, looking, always looking, down the road on which they took us. And forever and without stopping they allowed the mothers to think that we would be returning on the same road...
Despite the many things we desired, our greatest desire was not to forget the road that took us away from home… We needed to remember it like we remembered our mother’s eyes, our mother’s voice, words, smile… This is what we wanted the most!
In the desolate burning hot ruins, washed by the rain, naked and hidden stood that same hillside sinking in deep silence… We too stood there frozen - petrified and with our entire being we felt the pain of separation that never stopped and for which no one has found a cure. There are wounds which will never heal and cannot be cured. They hurt and they will always hurt…
We descended the hillside in silence and got back on the highway and passed by the road that once was the road of separation. But our journey on the road of time and in search of our memories does not end here.
We left.
We took the road away from here but before leaving we took one last look to better remember the place of our separation. We came to the intersection and took the wide asphalt road.
By Petre Nakovski
Translated and edited by Risto Stefov
[email protected]
August 5, 2012
On our way to the village Ieropigi (Macedonian Kosinets, Ieropigi in Greek means “Sacred Spring”. This name was given to the village because water flows from under the church foundation) just outside of Mesopotamia (Macedonian Chetirok. Mesopotamia in Greek means “between rivers.”) we met an old man sitting at the side of the road. Should I stop, I wondered. Earlier we were warned that there might be thugs out there who might force you, at gunpoint, to drive them south to one of the major Greek cities. But looking at the sad expression in the old stranger’s eyes made me stop. The old man greeted us in Greek and wondered if we were going to Ieropigi and if we could give him a ride.
“Get in,” I said and, driving slowly, we struck up a conversation. To begin I asked him, “Where are you from, who are you and what are you doing?…” He said he lived in Ieropigi. I then asked him if the village was always called “Ieropigi”.
“No,” he said. “Earlier the village was called Kosinets and “endopii” (indigenous people) used to live there, but they are gone. There is only one family of endopii left and they are old people…”
“Where did the endopii go?” I asked.
“I don’t know. They are dispersed all over the world,” he said.
“And do you like the place, the village?” I asked.
The old man shook his hand and with a confirming voice said: “No. I don’t like it. Who wants something that does not belong to them? We have no roots here. The young leave for the cities or for Europe and every day there are less and less of us. We die on foreign soil. We like the places where they uprooted us from, from where we emigrated. Every day we slowly wilt without the meadows, the mountains, the peaks and the waters of Pindus… we die without them. Without them, without the peaks of Pindus we feel short. We were eagles there and here we are not even jackdaws (small kind of crow). They took Pindus from us and stripped us naked. Eagles need heights and peaks and we, the Sarakachani (Vlachs), need the endless pastures and the cold waters of Pindus. We are unhappy, very unhappy because we can’t do without our mountains on Pindus. There are mountains here as well, but they are not like our mountains… Now we only go there to visit the graves of our ancestors…”
“And where are the graves of the endopii?” I asked.
“They were moved to another place. Now there is a garden there in their place…” answered the old man.
“There once used to be houses there, right? What happened to the stones from the houses?” I asked.
“They were used to build the new houses… The village is more or less new, built below the old one…” he answered.
There was a café at the entrance of the village. It was time for coffee. There were many white-haired old men sitting at the tables, leaning their arms on a shepherd’s staff, waiting for their cup of coffee to arrive. We greeted them and they greeted us back.
“Down there, the building with the sheet metal roof, what is that?” I asked.
“We keep several hundred sheep and goats there during the winter,” answered the old man.
“You have so many,” I praised the old man.
With a difficult sigh and a disappointing tone of voice, the old man said:
“When they relocated us here I brought with me fifteen thousand sheep, ten thousand goats and three thousand horses. These mountains are too small and narrow for that many animals. At the end of the nineteen-fifties we were almost left without sheep and goats. There was not enough land for them to graze on and we had no money to purchase more. That’s when the government forced us to farm the land and plant wheat, barley, rye and potatoes. We had no idea how to work the land but were forced to learn quickly. We used tractors and other farming equipment which helped a lot…”
The old man stopped talking and after a moment of silence, asked:
“Where in Greece have you seen a Vlach, a Sarakachan reduced to plowing? The Vlachs, meaning us who came here, more correctly, us who they brought here from Epirus, only know how to look after sheep and goats and make all kinds of cheese. In Epirus we despised the farmers and villagers. In Epirus we were the aristocracy, the first people in Larissa and Athens. The Vlachs were the cream of Greece. In old times the Vlachs fed all of Europe with their various cheeses. Our caravans went to Belgrade, Budapest, Bucharest and even as far as Vienna. We brought back riches and built Greece with them. The Vlachs built schools, churches, the first public buildings, the first palaces and theaters in Greece. You want a Greek doctor, judge, lawyer, professor, historian, rebel, advocate, diplomat, look to the Vlachs. Don’t look for them among the Greeks. The Vlachs were and still are the cream of Greece. There at Pindus, in the Vlach villages, our houses were palaces. Everyone had a house built in the village with chiselled stone and everyone in Ioannina, Metsovo, Samarina and other places had palaces. And I mean palaces. Do we like this place? No! They made villagers and plowmen out of us, the proud Sarakachani from Epirus. We have become a mockery of people… they disgraced us… Come… Please, come to our house for coffee…”
The old Vlach, Sarakachan woman greeted us with open arms and with a wide smile behind which flashed several gold teeth. She sat us down on a wide sofa covered with a wide red, woolen blanket. And while placing a sweet made of figs on the table in front of us, I saw a cross carved on her forehead covering her wide wrinkles. The old man noticed me looking with surprise and hastened to explain.
“It is an old tradition that our women have a cross between their eyebrows, which originated back in the time of the Ioannina Pasha (Ottoman general). A cross was carved between the eyebrows on the forehead of our women to remind the Turks (Moslems) and Turk converts to keep their hands off them. We marked them with a Christian cross and as such no Turk or Turk convert dared take them…”
While we drank our coffee the old Vlach told us that here, in the desolate Kostur Region villages of Dmbeni, Kosinets, Lobanitsa and Smrdesh, as in Prespa, a Greek politician and statesman, the richest Vlach among the Vlachs in Greece, promised them a paradise. He did not mention his name. But a paradise he did not find. He became poor in doing this. So I gathered his real motive was to change the character of the desolate region.
We thanked our hosts for their hospitality and got up to go.
“Where are you going?” asked the old Vlach.
“To Lobanitsa,” I answered.
“Ah, it’s called that by its old name,” confirmed the old man.
“What is its new name?” I asked.
“It’s called Agios Dimitrios now, but the village no longer exists… There is nothing there, except for a small church built by the people of Lobanitsa who now live in Australia,” answered the old man.
* * *
We headed to the western part of the village along the old upper road, now widened and paved with asphalt (there is also a lower and wider road, built after the Vlachs were brought here). At the exit, at the end of the asphalt there was an old road, a pre-war road. This road was built by the villagers from the surrounding villages in the thirties by unpaid labour. This is the place where an older road used to exist and was travelled by the Romans. This is the link between Kostur – Bilishta and Korcha and from there to Durres. The hill and the flat area on top of the road and below the road are fenced with rusty barbed wire, on which a rusty sign hangs with the writing “Mine Field!”
No one to this day has made the effort to remove the mines. The mines have been hibernating here since they were put in by the Democratic Army of Greece demolition crews in August 1949. There was an intersection twenty or so metres from here. There was also a church in the middle and to the right there was a wide winding road leading to Kristalopigi (Smrdesh in Macedonian). It said so on the traffic sign. (Kristalopigi, meaning “crystal spring” the new Greek name given to the village because of the natural spring of water running near the village church, Sveti Giorgi.) To the left, in front of us, a little down the hill was a cobblestone road.
“This is the road,” I said to my wife, “the road that leads to Lobanitsa.”
The cobblestone road was covered in moss and overgrown with thorn bushes on both sides. Growing on the sides were scruffy, short elms. It looked like the road was not used at all. We came out of the car and turned our attention to the south. In front of us lay the Kosinsko valley, further over were the Boulders (Faltsa) and beyond that was Mount Odre. Left of Odre was Mount Orle and to the right, on the west side, lined up were the mountains Krusha, Gorusha, Bel Kamen, Petre, Peleni, Sveti Ilia, Amuda, Nikoler and Aliabitsa and behind them was Gramos. Behind us, on a gentle rise, were the hills of Kosinets and Lobanitsa, overgrown with thinned out dwarf oak trees languishing in silence and quiet. Continuing beyond them, up high, all covered in broken stones and becoming steeper as they went further, were more hills that tied to the hills of Mali-Madi.
The warm air moved in gentle waves as the ghostly silence caused a restlessness in us. From what I have been told, I know that it was from here that the government army wanted to enter behind the DAG (Democratic Army of Greece) Partisan lines and thus open the door for the tanks to enter Smrdesh and close the escape route to Albania. It was here on these hills, from August 10th to 11th, 1949, that the DAG Brigade 105 strongly opposed the government army. It was here at the bases of these hills that Division IX of the government army became disabled, saving the lives of many Partisans. About those days, General Zafiropoulos wrote the following on page 619 of his book “Anti-Bandit War 1945-1949”.
“Ουτω ο ελιγμος της IX Μεραρχιας απετυχεν ολοσχερος μετα μεγαλων απωλειων, 354 εκτος μαχης μονον της 41-της Ταξιαρχιας....” (And as such the manoeuvre of Division IX completely failed, leaving 354 dead on the battlefield from the 41st Brigade alone…”
I drove very slowly over the aging cobblestone road and when I came out of the shade of the tall and wide-branched oak tree, a wide space lay in front of me all covered in broken rock. I recognized the place from the surrounding bare hills and from the large rock. The village Lobanitsa was located here. I remember the place from the three tall poplar trees that grew near the river on whose bank the church, Sveti Dimitria, was built. And near it was the boulder from whose veins flowed a spring of water. The poplar trees and the church are now gone and water no longer flows from the spring under the big rock. I remember the two-story houses built from chiselled stone, covered with Turkish ceramic tiles and window frames painted with blue paint. These houses were built after the Ilinden Uprising (1903) but now are gone and so are the stones and Turkish tiles. All gone!
I remember the tall white house, built high up, at the edge of the village from whose balcony one could see the entire surroundings. That was my aunt Zoia’s house and she and her daughter-in-law and two year old grandson were imprisoned for two and a half years in the village Drenovo in Prespa Region. She was accused of being an “enemy of the people” because her son crossed over to the other side of the border. We moved to that house in the fall of 1947 because they burned our house. The tall white house is now gone.
I remember the school very well. In the late fall of 1947, after sundown, the school would open its doors and during the night under the dim light of kerosene lamps, for the first time, we would open our Macedonian primers and the teacher, Konstandina Todorova all nicely dressed in her military uniform, would teach us the Cyrillic alphabet. The school is gone now and so is the teacher with the nice Partisan hat and long braided hair, she too is gone; she died in Skopje after moving there from Poland.
I remember many of the faces of the people of Lobanitsa. They too are gone. I remember Partisans arriving in the village very early in the morning, exhausted from a long night’s march. They would rest here during the day and would be gone after sunset. I remember the nights when long columns of loaded horses and mules, guided by women wearing white robes, passed through Lobanitsa. The women were from Prespa and would whisper that they were carrying ammunition.
I remember seeing a yellow airplane fly in circles over Lobanitsa and the surrounding countryside and because of that the days were dead and the nights came to life. I remember late in the night women from AFZH (Women’s Anti-Fascist Front) came to the houses and had long talks with the mothers. The fathers then were mobilized and digging trenches and cutting oak, beech and pine trees to build bunkers. And what did the women from the AFZH, in their long conversations, have to say to my mother to persuade her?
I remember that day well. It was March 24th in the afternoon when the gathering began and lasted until sunset. Crowds of children were gathering in long queues, exhausted from their long journey. There were small, big and bigger children. The mothers carried the little children in their arms and on their shoulders and the bigger children hung on to them by their dress. They were all exhausted making the trip on foot to Lobanitsa from Breshteni, Galishta, Ezerets and Novoseleni. They spent the night sleeping in the school, church and houses in Lobanitsa. The next day they spent their daylight hours hiding in the forest just outside of the village. The day after, more children were arriving the entire day from the villages Dolno Papratsko, Krchishta and Kosinets.
This was the first time I had ever seen so many children and mothers. I remember that afternoon our yard smelling of roasted chicken and freshly baked bread. I also remember my mother taking out our clothes from the chest and dressing us the same way as she dressed us when we went to church… I remember it was a warm spring day, the almond trees were flowering and the nightingales were singing.
As I continued to drive towards the broken stones I felt chills run down my spine. The closer I came to the piles of rocks and soil where the houses used to be, the more chills I felt coming over me. At the end of the rubble, to the right where the road bends slightly, I stopped the car. This is where we stopped on March 25th, 1948 to say goodbye…
…In front of us, far away, the sun was setting on top of Mount Morava. The early evening light was dimming before our teary eyes. In the early evening the children cried loudly with tears welling up in their eyes. The sun set behind Mount Morova and the darkness was filled with weeping. And behind us, up there on the steepness of the hill, stood our mothers watering the soil beneath them with tears, shaking the rocks around them with their sickly loud cries and sobs and waving their black handkerchiefs at us, saying goodbye…
We walked in the dark not knowing where it would lead us. We walked, stumbled, fell, got up again and dragged our steps in a long column... Somewhere in the middle of the column several people started to sing, but no one joined in, no one sang the song that would give us courage and joyfulness. The voices of those singing slowly died out. They dried up. They got lost in the sea of crying and sobbing... Before stepping over onto foreign soil, the column stopped for a short time. Someone, one of the people escorting us, took my bag with the roasted chicken and still warm bread...
Years afterwards, when I was an adult, long after we were separated and under a different climate, I heard from my mother. She told me the following:
“They told us that after the bad had passed our children would be returned to us, which should not have taken more than twenty days. This is what they told us and that’s how they convinced us to voluntarily take you by the hand and escort you to the border. There, at the corner when they told us that we could only go this far with you, we waited on the hillside. This is where they held us. This is where we begged them and prayed for your return to us as soon as possible… Was there a single woman that did not cry? We cried my dear, we pulled our hairs out crying, we screamed and wailed mournfully like we would when someone died. After you were gone when we returned home, that’s when we realized our mistake and the wrong we had done.
Things went from bad to worse. The house was empty and desolate, the yard was empty, the village was empty and every lane was desolate. We waited and listened, hoping the door would open, someone would call out, someone would cry, would laugh. Nothing! Emptiness! Not a single child’s voice, no matter how much we wished to hear one. Not a voice, not a cry, not a laugh was heard…
There were no children, no voices, no laughing, no happiness and no joy. Life becomes difficult when someone takes away your happiness. They took our happiness and gave us a wound, a sore, a cut, an open gash… a wound in the heart, a wound in our soul, a wound that does not heal, a wound that hurts with every mention of birth, a wound that opens, that bleeds, that burns. No one’s heart could help reduce the hurt because the pain was buried deep in the heart and soul…
Right here,” she tapped her chest, “like a mistletoe, it is stuck, pressing and scratching and whispering, I listen but there is no voice, no noise, only silence, there is nothing, it is desolate… and that desolation hurts, it never stops. After a while we began to blame ourselves, to curse ourselves, how could we do this? Why did we do this, send our children away and turn our lives upside down? Why did we put our children in strange hands? Why did we put the fate of our children in someone else’s hands?
Our separation became a permanent wound. An open wound that constantly bled and burnt. The wounds from a bullet, a knife, a dagger, would heal, but the wounds from this kind of pain, anguish and sorrow would not heal. Every day, with each passing day, the wounds became wider. There were as many wounds as there were missing children. Open wounds. They were constantly open. Our chests were torn apart from the heavy sighs. You go out to the yard, it’s desolate; you go out on the balcony, the street is desolate; you look out of the window, the neighbourhood is desolate; it is desolate at the spring, in the streets, everywhere it is desolate, empty, devoid of children. Emptiness and desolation existed everywhere.
Every mother missing her child was wounded. It seemed like even the birds flew away and abandoned us. Their voice and song too we could not hear. And what were my thoughts? What else could a mother think, if not first of her children? About what else can a mother think, whose children they took away, an act with which they muddied and poisoned her happiness?
Silence and great sadness befell the village; silence in the home, in the yard. Restlessness circled, scratched and dug, but only in the mind, it did not allow the heart to calm, to settle and find peace. There was no day with hope or night with sleep without pain… The days were hard and the nights were even harder. Was it fate? A great weight, a great weight was placed upon us. Do you remember? First they collected the older children. They collected them during the night and took them somewhere in the forest, in the mountains… They told them and us that they would be fighting for freedom, for Macedonia. Then after, they collected you the younger children. They told us that you would remain over there, in the countries (Eastern European countries) for only several days, until they kicked out the enemy… We believed them and we gave you to them… Then we were left all alone…
After that, one by one, they took our sheep, goats, chickens, horses, oxen and told us that they were for the struggle and gave us a piece of paper with writing on it that said the “People’s Government” would return them to you. Then they collected our bed covers, woolen blankets, pillows, winter coats, gloves, socks, sweaters, hats, wool, pots, plates, spoons, forks. They told us they were for the hospitals, for the wounded. No one asked if we had anything left for ourselves…
Something was left for us, my dear child, something was left. Our naked life, pain, suffering, torment, wounded soul, and the beleaguered hope of waiting was left for us… Left for us were these arms and shoulders ... with which we became part of the flood, the rising storm which became more frightening with each passing day...
About those who were engaged in the war we were always burdened with the worst thoughts, with the greatest of fear and for those young ones, who were collected, our thoughts were that at least there were no wars, no shooting, no killing where they took them and that they would be alive and well. We had the same wish and prayer for both the young and old; to be alive and well, even if they were far away, our prayers for them were always to be alive and well. Nothing we did we could hold with our own hands. Everything we held fell out of our hands. No sooner were our crops and gardens ready to be harvested than they were there to collect them just as they had collected our older and younger children. They said there would be great battles and for them to win, to achieve victory, we too needed to give, to go, if not to battle then to harvest, to deliver and to transport.
We dug at night and delivered and transported at night. The day was reserved for the airplanes and cannons. They beat on us during the day. So we turned things upside down and made the day into night and the night into day. The pain in our backs, shoulders, arms and legs, from carrying logs and ammunition persisted, ever increasing with each passing day. But there was no time to think of our personal pain, when the war effort was at stake, so they kept telling us...
The entire crop from the fields, meadows and gardens, the sheep, goats and oxen were left for the old people to look after. It was all left to those who could hardly stand or walk, to those who could hardly lift or carry a bushel, swing a scythe or a sickle, to those who could hardly carry a deceased in a coffin or a wounded on a stretcher… And you tell yourself, please God protect us and cross yourself with your thoughts, with your thoughts because your hands were full carrying a stretcher, a log, a coffin, a shovel, an axe, a pickaxe, a stone. You made a cross with your thoughts, because you couldn’t make it with your hands. And when you were carrying a wounded person, you said to yourself, “Is there another mother like me carrying my children like this?” That’s when you began to be afraid, to experience numbing fear, to feel your legs collapsing under you. Fear had you in its grip and you couldn’t think of anything else. You dedicated your entire thoughts to the drowning fear which had you burdened and locked in its grip. And that’s how we faced each cruel day being beaten again and again with horror that had no end…
There were only two or three children left in the village. Very young children that did not leave, that were not separated, that were not torn from their mother’s embrace. When these children cried we all wept with them, we all rejoiced. When they laughed, we all laughed and cried. Their laughter, their ga-ga-ing and crying was a light in darkness. It was like the sun shining after the passing of a dark storm… Unfortunately the happiness was short lived and after a bit of sunshine, the dark clouds would return. There was light and then darkness, a short burst of sunlight followed by a long episode of darkness and the tears never dried up. We had tears for both the dead and the living…
It was a bad time, a very bad time. There were many children at home and then, suddenly there were no children, the home was empty. The silence was deafening, sickening. What did we do? We mostly cursed. We cursed those who brought us no good, those who came to our homes and took our happiness, our light and left us in darkness. We prayed at home, we lit pine sticks in front of the icon of the Virgin Mary and prayed some more. We felt a bit better but not for long. We went to church and prayed there too. During the night and when we were carrying wounded, if we passed by a church we stopped and prayed, we prayed for our children, we prayed for all those who were in stretchers. We prayed for them to be safe and remain alive… Our days and nights became moments of prayer. I don’t think God ever heard so many prayers. And the miracle is that in God we believed the most…
In the night we knelt in front of a lit pine stick, we had no candles, and while looking at the icon of the Virgin Mary, we prayed for everyone. For those who were at war and for those who were in the countries. And after that we waited… we did not leave the pine stick to completely burn. We needed it for its light the next day and if any were still left we needed it for the next night; that is if we were not at work carrying logs and stones for the bunkers, or carrying wounded from the battlefield to the hospitals. We would all gather together in one room, that is all of us who were still left in the village, take our black handkerchiefs off, light the pine stick and, in its light, look at the pictures of our children. We whispered to them but all they did was look back at us and we, with our whispers, spoke to them and lightly touched and caressed their faces and kissed their eyes with our slightly moist lips. And they, they just looked at us in silence. And quietly, pleadingly, we asked them to please say something, smile… We talked to them but they kept quiet, silent and only looked at us and looked at us. So then, for the longest part, we looked at each other in silence…”
x x x
My wife and I remained on the hillside for a long time. We were quiet for most of the time. Then we closed our eyes and for a moment, behind our eyelids, we witnessed the large crowds of women and old people, all around us, standing on this very hillside and weeping in silence and waving goodbye... and in our ears they whispered their wishes and prayers and in the silence we heard their muffled cries and whimpers… And all over again we were reminded of the day when they gathered here and when they brought us with them. We remembered it was a time when the almonds were flowering and the Nightingales sang. It was March. A warm and fragrant spring day…
They collected us and took us away and behind us remained the unfinished story in a grandfather and grandmother’s voice… And we thought and asked ourselves: “Will there be anyone, where they were sending us, who would caress us with a warm hand like the hand of our mothers, who would kiss us goodnight before sleep, like our mothers kiss us, who would gently look at us like our mothers looked at us, who would smile at us with our mother’s smile, who would tell us a story, sing us a song, wipe our tears? Would there be anything there from our home? Where are they taking us? When will we return to our homes?”
They took us away and left my mother and all the mothers of all the other children with an empty lap and with an empty embrace. They left our mothers with their eyes fixed, looking, always looking, down the road on which they took us. And forever and without stopping they allowed the mothers to think that we would be returning on the same road...
Despite the many things we desired, our greatest desire was not to forget the road that took us away from home… We needed to remember it like we remembered our mother’s eyes, our mother’s voice, words, smile… This is what we wanted the most!
In the desolate burning hot ruins, washed by the rain, naked and hidden stood that same hillside sinking in deep silence… We too stood there frozen - petrified and with our entire being we felt the pain of separation that never stopped and for which no one has found a cure. There are wounds which will never heal and cannot be cured. They hurt and they will always hurt…
We descended the hillside in silence and got back on the highway and passed by the road that once was the road of separation. But our journey on the road of time and in search of our memories does not end here.
We left.
We took the road away from here but before leaving we took one last look to better remember the place of our separation. We came to the intersection and took the wide asphalt road.
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