Grandpa and grandma had the best house in the village. They were given it during the population exchange between Greece and Turkey, when all that remained of their own village in Fountoukli, on the Sangareios River, since they had been forcibly relocated to Melissia, Kozani, had to somehow find a way to stand, to live, to grow.
The two-story house, with a veranda upstairs and the kitchen and living room downstairs. And in front and beside it, οpen land, with fruit trees and acres of fertile soil. And on the other side, everything my grandfather later built: the grain storage shed and a space to stable his horses.
The house and its estate, set upon a raised fold of the land, overlook the village’s most significant landmarks. The church, with all the icons and symbols saved from Turkey, lies in a straight line with it, and the stone-built fountain with its three-chambered cistern stands in front, where the road ends and slightly to the left of the house’s courtyard. A few meters beyond the fountain lies the school, which has now become the village’s cultural center. They use it for anniversary events, dances, and festivals. And even further on, the most peaceful cemetery.
A place where we don’t disturb the dead after three years, but leave them there, so their souls, and especially above all their bones, may rest. And once again, grandpa made sure to find an amazing spot for his parents, my great-grandparents, in the back, and planted just as his father and my great-grandfather had requested, a large cypress tree above them, so that the path of their souls upward would not be lost. And so their bodies rest peacefully, assimilating every life experience they gained on the land that embraced them, nourished them, and endowed them after their displacement; and their spirit unites through a clear passage with the higher realms of Light and Universal Wisdom.
I have loved nothing more than this sense of home that bears witness to my family’s history, even though no one ever wanted to talk about it. With its ideal location in the village, the farm’s animals living freely and its trees filling the kitchen table with colour and sugar, winter and summer alike. But most of all, the sight of its vibrant green grass, rising in waves along the estate, striving to meet the village’s main road, as if to greet face-to-face the passing footsteps that come and go. And with just a couple of strides, I find myself in sacred spaces.
A church that, even in the years we didn’t have priests to lead the Resurrection service, we made do with our own Easter Service at 9 p.m. instead of midnight, because we wanted to keep the thread of life and memory alive.
And a-fountain-gathering-place, built like a shrine on a sacred triptych of rock, with its cistern and basins forming a triangular embrace that is still there. It hosted not only my childhood, and my reckless climbing all along its length and breadth, but also countless so-called innocent trips for water that served as an excuse for flirtation among so many, souls who, full of vitality and zest for life, bet on the power of that meeting point to quench their longing. Many parts of its basin have turned green with moss, forming a thick green film on the surface of the water, which even that cannot always prevent it from overflowing at times. All these years later, half a century on, this fountain has never stopped quenching the thirst of people and animals, soothing their weariness, and make more water.
A meeting point of many and different needs and desires; for me, the very flow of life itself, unwavering, uncomplaining, uninterrupted. A tangible symbol of trust in the unfolding of things, and in the dynamic phenomenon of the elements of the earth that continuously regenerate their essence, giving life to everything around them. Or simply a fountain whose sides I have been climbing since I was born until today, still flirting with the idea that my body can withstand the straddling of climbing it, for the sake of old times, in the echo of a vitality now transforming into restraint and memory.
The house with the field and the barns, a source of life, a refuge, a gathering place, a place to store the harvest, the sacred space where the family, in safety, tended to its affairs. A space whose openness surpasses any property I have ever had the joy of defining. And although I am not a person of ownership, least of all of land, the only corner of the earth I wish I could have kept.
But now, it no longer belongs to us, at least not formally. Just as in the time of refugee displacement, so now again, greater forces of pressure and change have led my mother to legally disassociate herself from this part of her family’s history.
We went to see it one last time, and then I wanted to see my grandfather’s fields, to step on them and see about them.
With the sun outside and emotion within, I walked through my grandfather’s well-tended and beautifully plowed fields, the ones he bequeathed to his daughter and my mother.
The Earth, the great Mother of all things, that we step on, eat, breathe, and live through, belongs to none of us. She is a Higher Principle that manifests itself in the material world so that we may have an earthly experience. The fact that she takes on form, colour, and dimension in no way negates her nature or her essence. She gives her body that we may grow, yet remains always that force that transcends the phenomena of Life and Death. Just as the embryo within the amniotic sac, so too do we fold ourselves to fit within this experience of embodiment. We live within and upon her for as long as we can endure this dimension. And both she and we have a Soul and a Spirit. And these are always eternal, and free from any form of appropriation.
Speaking, therefore, solely from an earthly point of reference, it is a great joy to own two pieces of land. To have done what was necessary so you can define yourself in relation to the Earth. For a while, for as long as it is allowed, to manage the passing of the seasons and the multitude of living beings that will connect with that land. What seeds you will sow within it, what animals you will invite it to host, what expressions of life you will allow to flourish through its power.
My grandfather’s fields lived, nourished and literally raised his family. My mother showed me the field that enabled the family to rise beyond basic standard of living, when it took on the difficult task of growing tobacco. And it was the government that halted this production; the land never said no; the land supported, faithfully, for as long as needed, even to this day, the entire family.
Some of the fields are now part of a new mosaic; they are surrounded by industrial parks and petrol stations. It is estimated that, because they are in a prime commercial location, they could be sold as commercial lots. But before that, they remain receptive, fertile land. And as earth, as life force that multiplies whatever you sow into it, they still carry the energy of what can sustain not just the individual, but the whole. What can embody not only the natural change of seasons, but also the acceleration of evolution through cultivation. This field continues to guide us on how to look beyond mere survival towards a good life, a life that embraces other aspects and other dynamics, and allows not only the body, but also the spirit and the soul, to be carried, to be led where its need for Existence can be fulfilled.
I went to the other fields too, the ones that still lie among other fields or on the outskirts of the village. Each one of them still holds the history of the family within it. The vibrations of a life, with its joys and sorrows, imprinting the honest attempt of my ancestors to live as best they could, within their own system of values. And with the hope that they, too, might become somewhat better and honor the great sacrifices of those who came before them, those who were slaughtered, those whom life forced to abandon a more fertile land, also theirs, but in Turkey. These fields know what came before; it is all inscribed within their consciousness, and they offer, they continue to offer, their fruits. They remain in our service.
Their green clover brushed against my shoes. I traced their centre, walking in circles within them. I looked here, I looked there. I found the points of the horizon within them, I asked to listen to their symbols, to learn their language. All living beings, everything that comes from this Earth here, that is, everything we see, hear, smell, touch, all have their own voice and all speak to us.
It is difficult for me to explain to myself how it is possible to live well in my small concrete apartment on the fourth floor of a block of flats, where thanks to our “excellent” perception of public and private space, and our desire to make money, we build houses that do not touch the earth and soil that we pile onto foundations of concrete. Without soil, without the chance for our roots to go deep, none of the token trees and flowers we plant in the pseudo-gardens between monstrous masses of synthetic and lifeless materials will ever thrive. Without an organic connection to the Earth, nothing can evolve.
It is not easy to convince myself to once again estrange the sense of the real from the feigned. Life in the city, organised into cubes of matter that we have so deeply mistreated, is an imitation of life. Just as processed food that offers mainly instant gustatory deception but no nutritional substance, so too our organised urban living shapes a beautiful, refined despair that does not feed our soul.
In those few minutes treading on the green clover in the plowed fields that belong to my mother now, once to my farmer grandfather, I felt the Earth literally beneath my feet. I felt again the pulse of life that awakens the sense of Self, and reminds, without demanding, what is essential: that which makes each of us wake up in the morning, and everything that follows, whatever is written and whatever may yet be written of what is to come, have meaning, be worth the effort, justify even this ephemeral phenomenon of our incarnation.
Homes, bodies, family relations, all forms of every kind of manifestation, all of these require care and maintenance. They ask for our presence, and that entails work, time, energy, financial investment, priorities. We live under the constraints of matter. We will not live in this form forever, and as long as we are in this form, we cannot remain in a place if the organisation of society there cannot support our survival. Times are always changing. Families in my generation are shrinking, not growing. We are living in an era of material contraction.
I did not want, in any way, to give up this piece of land in the village, but its sacrifice is what protects my mother’s health and consequently, my own, today.
For it is not so much the house that I miss, I had not visited for years anyway. It is my grandfather and grandmother and the summers we spent together, the Easter Resurrection processes, and the village, and the Association of Asia Minor refugees, and the shared Fate that united us.
And more than this house, what truly hurts is a sense of community that no longer exists. We are not who we used to be.
People in the village no longer open their homes as they used to; this memory no longer matters as much. The fields are seen only as the next sales transaction. We ignore that they continue to teach us multiplication, not subtraction. Our gaze is short, and we remain relatively unaware of the great phenomena, those that transcend Life and Death.
I rejoice for the generation that passed, who honoured the land in a way I will never fully know. We are once again living through times of poverty in today’s Greece; the parallels of history still hold true. Our collective becoming suffers.
And yet, none of this prevented me, in the cemetery, from feeling joy for the lives of my ancestors. There, beside the tall cypress tree, I made my own offerings, honouring their light, watering the earth with water from the fountain. There, in the cemetery, after the loss of yet another piece of family land, another small defeat of present-day life in relation to the past life, holding now a broader understanding of the path which my own spermatic seed of life force took to reach me through the countless ancestors who survived on my mother’s side, my soul rejoiced.
They made it, they survived and they flourished. And if they managed to succeed, through all they endured, then they have already bequeathed to me the same, if not greater, potential for myself.
And if a new family needs to live in the house and on that land and estate, a family with children, with grandchildren, with life ahead of it, let it be so. Let the phenomenon of life and death continue as it must. Let the water keep flowing from the fountain. Let the clover continue to bloom each March. Let us meet again at the school’s celebrations, those of us who remain. Let us meet again above, when our time comes. Let us endure the ephemeral itself and let us hold its flow, even as a phenomenon and not essence, with the same sacredness with which the soil brings the clover back to life every March.