A DISTANT, UNKNOWN PAST AND AN UNEASY PRESENT

ART AND EMOTIONAL WELLBEING

THE FEZ

There comes a moment in our lives, when we start to not only think of who we are.  We begin to ask questions about our past, about the people that helped us and the people that lived long before we came into existence.  It is not a linear process.  We meander and seek, we find out, or not.  Sometimes our search takes us down dead ends. 

In my case, there are major issues in trying to find simple facts about my family tree.  I can no longer find out anything about the family from any living member, and prior to my grandparents on both sides, there simply is nothing. It is sometimes hard to explain to people that most of our records and my grandparents' lives were lost or profoundly changed in the case of the latter.

The sad part is ( maybe this resonates with others reading this) that when my father was alive, I did not take full advantage of his knowledge and his memories.  He spoke softly of his childhood in Istanbul, the changes that happened when he as a young boy became orphaned and the pain of having to be deported from Istanbul in the 1920's. What I do not have are the many elusive little details, that now, 34 years after his passing and much effort on my part, are still stubbornly, glaringly and painfully missing.

I have a little more information about my mother's family, as both grandparents made it to Greece after the  Greco-Turkish war and the exchange of populations. They arrived in Crete, with their alien ways, from the old Ionian settlement of Smyrna  (Ismir). I have   a vague memory of my grandmother, but my grandfather had already passed away by the time I was old enough to retain information. One of my earlier memories of the simple house is of  a black and white picture that hang in the kitchen. In it, a couple, a man with a fez and a woman with her head covered looked down on me expressionless.  It stayed etched in my memory, together with the simple furnishings of the house, the brass coal burner in the kitchen and the deep water barrel that my auntie kept in her small kitchen. As I write, further details, colours and smells are resurfacing.  I am almost flooded with them.  This is a strange sensation after 50 years of 'neglecting' these memories. 

The family house, situated within a designated resettlement area for   Asia Minor refugees,  was, and still is a rather shabby enclave of modest houses built in what we might euphemistically call quaint little streets. Lacking the amenities and the investment of the surrounding areas, it retains to this day a melancholy and tired air.  One entered the house through a metal gate in the front garden wall, all somehow  disproportionately  tall (or so I remember) and covered in greenery. The front of the house seemed narrow; the double window and iron gates gave no clue as to what lay beyond. I was always filled with unease when I entered. It was a place of silence. 

As you entered, a door to the left could be used to access the parlour. This was a room which was closed most of the year and was really in existence for the sole purpose of entertaining guests. I never saw any. My only two memories of the room are of once being in there with my auntie and being slightly in awe of this funny smelling room; (naphthalene was commonly used everywhere to keep moths away). The second  memory of this room was when my grandmother had passed away and everything was covered in purple sheets, as was the tradition of the day. This room was connected via an internal door to the only bedroom of the house, where tall heavy furniture and rugs surrounded a double bed.  I recall my grandmother on this bed, but nothing of what she said or did.  My brother who is nine years older recalls with great clarity lots of things about her. She has shaped his world view with her quick temper and  straight talking.

Past the bedroom, another door led you into the kitchen, where I spent most of the time when visiting.  This room was oppressively dark and covered with a  tin roof.  The sounds of the rain and the elements, in general, were amplified inside the airless little room. The floor was made of red clay and it amazed me how anyone could live like that still. It contrasted sharply with our resplendent tiled floors and seemingly modern gas cooker. A little window looked out into the tiny little garden, and the separate kitchen of a tiny flat that my parents had shared when newly married, just after WWII. 

Beyond the side wall, another house was home to my uncle and his family.  Those were the days when people had little expectation other than that of a roof over their heads and  some food. The family had got away with their lives and now this was a haven to be appreciated, not scorned.  I am not sure when I became conscious of that fact, but somehow it seems that I have always known.

I was six or so when my grandmother died and my memories of that little house shift to an even darker place.  My auntie became increasingly ill, and her emotional and mental health slowly deteriorated. She had been the main carer of her mother during a long and distressing illness.  A very late marriage followed to a man that had a small bus company, and then... she had to nurse him too. When he passed away  she became increasingly ill and passed away in her little kitchen, watched by the black and white photograph of her parents.

I visited the old neighbourhood in 2012 .  The house had been demolished and rebuilt, but there next door stood my uncle's house, identical in every respect to the way it was almost 50 years ago. Imagine my surprise, when on the wall in their living room hang the same picture! Except for one thing. The fez on the man's head had been retouched by someone and it was now a  trilby hat. A European hat. No one believed me when I pointed this out, but equally no one seemed phased. But I knew...I knew that the fez was a symbol of their providence, their 'shameful' Turkish roots. When they arrived, scared and smelling of death, millions of them pouring out from the coastal areas of modern Turkey, they were not wanted in Greece either. The same old strap lines of 'they will burden the state' and they will take our jobs' were heard; the same xenophobia, the same age-old fear. Yet the Asia Minor Greeks proved themselves to be a real asset to Greece, bringing knowledge and intellectual wealth from such places as Smyrna, which were cosmopolitan centres of commerce, and where the Greeks alongside other Europeans had flourished economically and culturally for centuries. 

I had to paint this man, this unknown Greek man, a symbol of all this and more...much more that I have been told; he is a metaphor for all that I can now deduce and which I discovered subsequently. The painting looks like an illustration for a children's' book because my memories of it are those of a young child. There is nothing real about it, apart from the fact that I saw it...and then it was no longer the same. In my adult eyes I saw a black and white image with an awkwardly painted hat over the fez. My grandfather must have been oblivious to the stares that his fez would have elicited.  At first he would have worn it as ever to work his newly allocated vineyards in lieu of the ones he lost in Smyrna when the family were forced to leave. I can see him now, taking it off one day and replacing it with something like a straw hat, just so that he could fit in.  Elia Kazan the Greek-American director wrote on this subject.  He spoke of the fez being a symbol of the subjugation of the Greeks in Asia Minor (where his family originated). It is hard for us now to understand all the pain and turmoil that my grandparents and parents lived through. We have new dilemmas: where to shop, what to wear this year, where to go on holiday.  Life and death sit separated by a health care system and mass entertainment.  Our appetite for distraction easily buys into anything that numbs us and lulls us into believing that possessions can fill the void of existential angst, and sweep history under the carpet, whenever convenient. Recent events have shaken our superficial ivory tower.  Will the shock cause a reassessment of our values, or will we return to our standard mind-numbing consumerism? I am writing this on 'Black Friday'.

Poor grandad. I gave him back his fez.  I was making a comment about me and my origins, but in the process I started to think about his life, his struggles and the way that history repeats itself.  We now live in a period where the same sad rhetoric of xenophobia and alienation prevail. Millions are being displaced from Syria, as we helplessly watch their plight. Many people have forgotten my parents' generation and their struggles. I don't for a moment think that my painting will jolt anyone's memory, or rekindle an interest in Greece's displaced and hurt generations. It can however help me say a  prayer for my grandfather's soul and for all the other displaced refugees, uprooted from all they knew by war and human cruelty.  Perhaps, it will kindle similar thoughts in you.