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.