LENEA AND CRETE -2-

-II-

I am walking to the rental car facility, feeling the breeze mixed with the warmth of the sun rays caressing my face. Greek words jflying in every direction in my head to compose my first sentences to be ready to talk to the receptionist. What an exciting anticipation I have been carrying with me for almost a month as I tried to brush up my minimal Greek. Until adolescence, when I became too busy with my own life and friends, I used to see my grandmother, my father's mother, the favorite grandmother of mine, whom I called babaanne, several times a month. My grandfather was somewhat of a hermit, he wouldn't socialize that much, and my grandmother would fill in the entire gap! She was THE family in that small wooden two story townhouse. I loved going there, the wood-burning stove in the big living room upstairs, the ‘divans’ covering two walls of the room, colorful ‘divan’ coverings and rugs, the windows looking down on the meadow and the olive orchard beyond are all still before my eyes as if I had just been there. I loved washing the dishes in her tiny kitchen since her dish basin was on a countertop so low (because she was so short), my little body didn't have any trouble reaching it as long as I remember. Dusk in the summer time was my favorite time. Everybody in the neighborhood would have fixed their dinners and as they were waiting for dark to set in, they would get out and sit on their stoops and patios after pouring a bucket or two of water to cool the cement. Pots of geranium, carnations and even roses would ornament the sides of the steps and patios. As the adults chatted away, my cousins and I, who lived in the next lot, played all kinds of games on the cement paved patio, breathing the deadly scent of the roses my grandmother's sister had in her yard next to my grandmother's, overpowering everything else around.  

I was named after my grandmother to the resentment of my 16 year-old mother: she wanted a modern name for me not an old-fashioned one, the name of the person she didn’t necessarily like that much. Hence, I hated my name all my life. People in the USA commenting "what a pretty name" changed all that and made me like my name all over again! I have a feeling we instill pre-programmed expectations through the names we give to our children. Is that why my daughter is a combination of tradition and adventurous rebelliousness just as her names indicate, at least to me? Or did I raise her such, consistent with my choice of names for her? Always having wanted to preserve what was good regarding my traditions or my culture of origin as I also looked for new ways of thinking, living, and being as long as my core principles were not violated? Is it why I do have my grandmother's spirit, her independence, her zest for life, her energy, her unconventional existence? I denied that for a long time, but the more I freed myself from my mother’s purely traditional expectations, the more I started realizing that I did indeed have lots inherited from my babaanne Resmiye, not only her name. I loved spending time with her, I knew she loved me in a special way. Even at that age I could sense she saw me as her continuation to eternity, at least to last longer than her. Who knows she probably hoped my child's child would be named after me, too. 

Resmiye the first didn't speak any Turkish when she came to Turkey like all her Cretan family members, like all Cretans who were forced to move to Turkey to replace the Greek Anatolians, who were forced to move to Crete or elsewhere in Greece, in turn. I was told during my early years by all my grandparents "we are Ottomans, our sons married their (Greeks) daughters and converted them to Islam, but we never allowed Greek men marry our daughters, we never mixed Greek blood in ours" !? Although well educated for their time, apparently they didn't know about Mendelian genetics and the role of X chromosome. I believed them, I thought we were 100% Turkish for a long time. I figured out, it couldn’t be true toward the end of elementary school when I was secretly reading about reproduction and reproductive systems of women and men from the “Hayat” encyclopedia. I must have figured nobody would enlighten me on these issues. I still thought, though, even if there was a bit of mixture Greek blood in us, we were still mostly Turkish.

One thing remained a mistery to me all those years though, which became even more confusing as I started learning about imperialism and colonialism: What I was taught in school was that colonizers, certainly not the Ottomans but the British, the Spanish, and Portuguese, Dutch (!) went to distant lands, imposed their language, culture and ways of life upon the natives and destroyed the native cultures. Ottoman colonization, then, seemed to be different: they conquered Crete, but somehow, instead of acting like ‘proper’ colonizers, they not only learned the native language at the expense of forgetting their own language, but also adopted all the cultural features of the natives from cooking to gender relations to dances to music, and dropped their own!? That was quite a curiosity in my mind all my life. A little bit of reading from independent resources made things clear: Ottomans oppressed the natives as any other colonizer did but their focus was religion, it was before the nationalistic movements of industrial era, of course. Once natives converted to Islam they had reduced tax incentives and they were welcomed to government posts, which was the major employer of the time. Incentives worked for some and those traitors and collaborators became known as "Turkos" by the loyal natives. Generation after generation, the “Turkos” did start feeling Turkish reinforced by the “othering” justly imposed upon them by the non-converting local Greeks. It was disturbing to discover that my people probably were collaborators to the imperialists of the time! But somehow a warm feeling went through my heart to discover despite and after all that brainwashing that they were Greek in origin.

No wonder my grandmother was most at home speaking Greek with Cretan dialect even after decades of learning a broken Turkish. I hated her insisting on speaking with me in Greek, I was Turkish and I wanted to hear Turkish. She hated this in turn, her position was "you are a Cretan girl, our language is Cretan, you must learn it!” How wise, I know now, "How I wish babaanne’cim, I had been wiser and had become fluent in Cretan learning from you, how I wish, my parents had been wiser to promote bilingualism in our house.” They didn't, instead they kept Greek as the language of secrecy for the kids-shouldn't-hear-this times. I didn't, either, but, my grandmother didn't give up. She would speak in Greek with everybody who understood Greek, so I heard Greek all around me throughout my childhood is one. And two, she never gave up speaking in Greek with me, either. Until I got the point she was trying to make, she would repeat and repeat what she wanted to relay in Greek despite all my protests. Did she do it on purpose, I don't know. It must have worked since the older I got the more she was speaking in Greek with me. And without ever disclosing this, I was enjoying to be able to understand what she was relaying to me in a different language.

I appreciated you more than ever my dear babaanne during the last month or so as I was trying to relearn the little Greek I had learned as a child. I lived with CDs from the public library teaching conversational Greek the month before leaving for Crete. I was amazed to discover how much I knew and had buried into the depths of my memory all these years. The words that I had heard from you during my childhood would come back to me instantaneously with a perfect pronunciation, thanks to you, whereas the words I had never heard, I had to repeat multiple times before I could incorporate them into my aging brain and vocabulary. Thank you babaanne’cim, thank you.

This lady from rural Crete could easily pass as my grandmother

I was in my 20s when my grandmother died. It felt very lonely, like having lost my soul mate. She was always there even if I didn't visit her too much. I missed her for a long time. It was heartbreaking to see her little townhouse being first sold then demolished only to be replaced by a high-rise occupying the adjacent lovely meadow as well. Little did I know at age 52, I’d come to Crete and miss her even more. Wouldn’t she enjoy coming to Crete with me, explore where her house was, chat with the natives much better than I can ever imagine being able to do myself. Wouldn’t I enjoy and take pride in helping her around, carrying her wrinkled hand on my arm. I would babanne’cim, I would, very much so.

LENEA AND CRETE -1-

- I -

I am finally in Iraklion on Crete, November 21^st, 2011.  It's been years in planning; what a dream, visiting Crete-the land of my people; where my great grandparents lived in a small village at the outskirts of Xania, where my grandparents were born. They were forced to leave their homeland at the turn of their second decades to find a new home across “The Water”. That’s what Turks and Greeks call the Aegean; The Water, over the ownership of which they constantly fight. I should say the Turkish and Greek governments, not the people. I am yet to learn in a few days that the only son of my hostess (who invited me to come to Crete to teach) claims "Aegean belongs only to its fish!" I will smile with a big smile thinking "if he is after my own heart, his parents probably are, too". This will become the first step to our political camaraderie that will sprinkle warmth and ease into my heart. I hope and want to believe that these people probably are not buying the artificially generated Turkish/Greek conflict, which only serves the political agenda of the rulers of both countries, who don’t necessarily serve their people’s best interest. 

I am dying to discover this island, the land of my people, which I always had a subtle feeling of ownership, just romantically but persistently, all my life. The bright sun blinds my eyes for a moment as I walk out of the terminal, just as I had read about, just as I had expected: "There is nowhere on earth that sun is brighter than on Crete." I smile. I walk amid the gay colors and bright Cretan sun wondering if that was the reason why my grandmother's skin was all too wrinkled as long as I had known her. Little did I know I would see many a women just like my grandmother during the week to follow. And many more things will make me think "No wonder my grandmother didn't look like anybody in Turkey, but looks like many women on Crete". I may, genetically, be anywhere from 50-100% Cretan Greek after all!

Both sets of my grandparents came from Crete at the turn of the 20th century. The story goes, their Orthodox Greek neighbors had warned them, the Muslim "Turkos", of the upcoming planned massacre by the Greek nationalists, in the year 1913. Later, during my young adulthood after developing my own interpretation of the world, I would come to appreciate that they had all the right to rise up to the centuries-long invasion of their land by the Ottomans, which never had been the position of my grandparents, of course. The Greek neighbors didn't want their Turko friends get killed. Good people. And the Turkos did leave their land, their home, their olive orchards, and part of themselves behind and got on the boats, went to Anatolia; my mother's side to northern Aegean coast, and father's side to Izmir or Smyrna, for some reason I find the latter much more poetic. 1913 was the year, one of the first waves of Cretans coming to Turkey led the way to many more. Later, this immigration wave was formalized by the governments of the two sides of The Water, which continued in the form of population exchange until mid 1920s.

I am yet to learn that whenever a Cretan hears this brief story of mine, they will utter, in a mixture of whisper and scream with hands lightly slapping both cheeks "ah, Catastrophie!" with the accent on the last syllable. And their faces will get clouded with sadness and feelings of misery, and a bit of guilt, perhaps… I wonder.  Is it the kind of guilt I feel, when Zolton, my 75 year-old Hungarian neighbor tells me “Ottoman Empire invaded Hungary for 2 centuries, you know.” We laugh with my “Zolton, I so apologize for that, but you know, had I lived in those days, I would’ve definitely taken you guys’ side.” He continues chuckling “But, you know, Ottomans treated us much better than Austrians, and they brought culture to Hungary and taught us how to drink Turkish coffee.” This ritual between Zolton and I makes me wonder if Cretans feel responsible for what humanity did to humanity just as i feel ashamed of what the Ottomans did to the peoples of the lands they invaded for centuries. I haven't seen these, yet, those are going to be the experiences of the coming days.

Catastrophy indeed, and not only for those who were shamefully displaced from their motherland, but also for those natives who remained. America helped me understand better what a curtain of shame must have cloaked Izmir, perhaps without the awareness of most of Izmirites with its desolate churches, minority families forced to be isolated from the rest of their communities, my friend Aaron telling me how discriminated against he felt as an Izmirite Jew even in the best school of town, with poor Jews being forced to emigrate to Israel after World War II, on and on... Crete is no different. It doesn't have a functioning mosque any more, nor a Jewish temple. The first 50 years of the last century unfortunately brought such ethnic cleansing and purification to all territories around The Water, it is heartbreaking. I am, yet to discover after this trip, through reading a book about this population exchange that Greeks as far into the east of Ankara were pulled out of their villages and shipped to Greece. My heart will freeze realizing one more time, how the land was totally turned upside down in less than 20 years with Armenians being forced into an eastward march and Greeks to a westward one. I am sure, had I been able to experience the era when Greeks and Turks and Armenians and Georgians and Arabs and Jews and many more ethnicities intermingled in the cities of Anatolia, Greece, Balkans, Middle East, I would have found today's societies in the same lands very blend, boring, and sterile just as I think of the rest of Iowa. Thank goodness, Iowa City is an oasis in the middle of corn fields where one can hear multiple languages around and savor multiple cultures, every day.

Discrimination has been something I heard from my grandparents’ generation over and over again. That was probably at least, one of the reasons why my parents’ generation continued intermarrying with other Cretans staying away from the native Turks. Even I, experienced an event as a young child that had the seeds of potential discrimination: I remember using "kupa" instead of "bardak" to refer to "glass" in school. Well, the kids did not know that word and made fun of me really bad. I would learn later, that was a Cretan word used in my home instead of the Turkish “bardak”. I remember vividly the thought "I need to pay attention to what is Turkish and what is Cretan that I learn at home, otherwise these kids will make me miserable." shaking with fear. Of course that was nothing compared to my grandfather being slapped on his face before his friends by his lieutenant during his military duty due to his broken Turkish. It was nothing compared to Anatolian Greeks being called "The seed of Turkos" in a derogatory manner and the same happening for Cretan Turks on Anatolia. The physical and emotional pain they must have endured…

Introduction

FromAegean is an academic whose roots are in the lands on both sides of The Water, as the Aegean is called in those parts of the globe. She has expressed her joy during fun times and dealt with sorrow during difficult times through journaling, since early adolescence. She believes writing opens internal space to new experiences by externalizing what is inside. This externalization allows us to know the truth about what is internal. Narrating experiences beyond thinking, she discovered throughout her life, helped her “metabolize” emotions in an omega-3 rich, healthy way… Considering, the ability to communicate with people being the bare minimum to make life worth living, she likes writing all the more. The material posted on this blog started accumulating in the fall of 2011 following a significant loss in her life. With recent experiences and exposures she felt comfortable enough to share these experiences with a public audience, a first in her life. Initially, she was planning to write on her international travels only to share with her readership how exposure to other cultures influenced, amazed, and pleasantly surprised her. However, certain domestic exposures in 2013 and political uprise in Turkey rose to such level of importance for her, she decided to include anything with a profound significance for her on this blog. She is looking forward to the challenges (English being her second language is a big one) and the rewards of sharing human experience with other fellow world citizens.