From the Back Cover
In 1948, as civil war ravaged Greece, children were abducted and sent to communist "camps" inside the Iron Curtain. Eleni Gatzoyiannis, forty-one, defied the traditions of her small village and the terror of the communist insurgents to arrange for the escape of her three daughters and her son, Nicola. For that act, she was imprisoned, tortured, and executed in cold blood.
Nicholas Gage joined his father in Massachusetts at the age of nine and grew up to become a top New York Times investigative reporter, honing his skills with one thought in mind: to return to Greece and uncover the one story he cared about most: the story of his mother.
Eleni takes you into the heart a village destroyed in the name of ideals and into the soul of a truly heroic woman.
About the Author
Nicholas Gage is the author of several books, including the award-winning Eleni. He lives in North Grafton, Massachusetts.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
In the mountain villages of northern Greece, life moves to the slow rhythm of the seasons, punctuated now and then by the feast days of the saints. October culminates in the feast of St. Demetrios, which marks the end of summer, when the fattened goats and sheep are brought down from the mountain pastures and shut up in the basements under the stone houses for the winter.
But sometimes the saint comes clothed in a brief reprise of fine weather, the “little summer of St. Demetrios”: a last blaze of gold before winter locks the villagers into their huts. October of 1940 brought such a respite to the hamlets of the Mourgana mountain range, along the northwestern border of Greece, and the villagers took advantage of it to store the autumn harvest: children gathered walnuts, men sorted over the amber and amethyst grapes for the wine making, women strung garlands of dried beans, peppers, onions and garlic to hang from the rafters. The sunshine splashed the mountainside with butter-yellow autumn crocuses, gilded beech trees rustled with ghosts, and everywhere, pomegranates, squashes and pumpkins glowed like miniature suns.
In Athens the social season was in full swing and the Italian ambassador there, Count Emilio Grazzi, was planning an elegant midnight reception at the legation after a special performance of Madame Butterfly to honor the visiting son of Giacomo Puccini. The Greek royal family and the prime minister, Ioannis Metaxas, were expected to attend the opera.
In Rome, Benito Mussolini was sulking. The dictator complained to his son-in-law, who was also his foreign minister, that Hitler was humiliating him by the conquests he was making in Europe without even consulting him. It was not until three days after the seizure of Rumania that Hitler got around to writing his ally about it. “Hitler keeps confronting me with faits accomplis,” Mussolini ranted to his son-in-law. “This time I shall pay him back in his own coin; he shall learn from the newspapers that I have occupied Greece!”
As the social elite of Athens moved among tables decorated with intertwined Greek and Italian flags and banners reading “Long Live Greece,” a coded telegram from Rome began to arrive at the legation. The Italian staff members deciphering it stopped now and then, their faces pale, to mingle with the Greek guests so that nothing would seem amiss. The message was an ultimatum which the horrified Grazzi was to deliver to Metaxas, demanding that Italian troops be allowed to occupy his country.
At three o’clock on the morning of October 28 Grazzi woke up Metaxas, who received him in dressing gown and slippers, and handed him the ultimatum. Mussolini had given the Greek prime minister three hours to reply. The two men spoke in French. Metaxas’ hands trembled as he looked up from the paper and rejected the ultimatum with the words “Alors, c’est la guerre!”
Popular legend has condensed Metaxas’ refusal into the single word “Ochi!” (“No!”), which has become a Greek battle cry that blooms defiantly every October 28 on walls throughout Greece. It is permanently emblazoned in ten-foot-high letters of white stone on a peak of the Mourgana range above a small village called Lia in the northwestern corner of Greece, just below the Albanian border.
But Mussolini didn’t wait for Metaxas’ reply. Before the ultimatum had expired, five heavily armed divisions of Italian soldiers began moving from Albania over the border into Greece.
“The Amerikana”
IT WAS DURING the little summer of St. Demetrios in 1940 that Eleni Gatzoyiannis attended the disinterment of the bones of her mother-in-law, Fotini Gatzoyiannis, in the village of Lia.
Eleni had lived with Fotini for almost ten years, from the day she was brought to the woman’s home as a nineteen-year-old bride by Fotini’s fifth son, Christos. She had held her mother-in-law’s hand when she died, worn out by eighty-four years of life and the birth of nine children. Five years had passed since Fotini’s death and it would not be easy to watch the bones taken from the earth, washed and stored in the church ossuary, but in Greece, even in a mountain village of 787 people, grave plots were few and could be occupied only temporarily.
When Eleni led her children to the burial ground behind the Church of St. Demetrios, in the shade of the giant cypress trees, the professional mourners were already there, clucking sociably like a flock of crows. Soon they would be ripping the bosoms of their dresses, throwing dirt on their heads and weaving the story-songs of Fotini’s life into dirges that could raise the hair on a heathen’s scalp.
Father Zisis, in his black robes and flat-topped hat, joined the mourners, making the sign of the cross. Eleni picked up a shovel, for it was the duty of the closest relatives to dig up the corpse. Her brother-in-law Foto Gatzoyiannis did the same. He was the only one of Fotini’s children who was not dead or too far away to return.
Eleni handed the baby boy, Nikola, to her eldest daughter, Olga, twelve, who balanced him on one hip, clearly bored with the ceremony. Alexandra, eight, called by the village nickname “Kanta,” had refused to come at all. Kanta was a nervous, superstitious child who hid in the outhouse, hands pressed over her ears, at the first death knell of the church bells. The sight of a corpse would leave her screaming in her sleep for weeks.
Fat, flaxen-haired Glykeria, six, was the opposite, pushing to the front, eager for the first glimpse of her grandmother’s skeleton. Whether it was a wedding, a funeral, a traveling shadow-puppet show or the mating of the family ram to a neighbor’s ewe, Glykeria, with her impish eyes and angel hair, was always in the front row. In her excitement, Glykeria had forgotten to look after her little sister, Fotini, two, who now sat deserted on a grave nearby where she was screwing up her face for a wail of misery.
The survivors began to dig and the mourners lifted their keening voices, inspiring one another to ever greater displays of poetry and grief:
Where are you, Kyria Fotini,
where did the worms lead you?
Leaving your sons and their brides
to weep black tears of sorrow.
The silver has lost its shine,
the flute has forgotten its melody.
Eleni took her turn at the shovel and soon the black shroud wrapped around Fotini’s body became visible. They cleared away the last of the dirt with their hands.
The mourners held their breath. Sometimes the corpse would not be fully decomposed, which meant that the soul was not at peace, but rather a wandering vampire, a vrykolakas. This would require an exorcism by the priest while the remains were carried three times around the church and then reburied for another few years.
But all was well with Fotini. There was a pungent, mossy odor of decay as the black shroud was lifted off. As so often happened, the collapsed features lay exposed, complete as in life, for one last instant before they crumbled into dust. The priest’s voice rose in the trisagion—the thrice-holy hymn: “Holy God, Holy Almighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us.” The skeleton lay face up, its arms crossed over the icon, the gold cross lying on the breastbone, the coins to pay the journey to Hades long ago fallen into the eye sockets. Then the women lifted the bones into a copper ewer, where they were washed and sprinkled with red wine, in preparation for reinterment in the small wooden box less than two feet square with crude lettering on the side: “Fotini Nik. Gatzoyiannis, 1851–1935.”
After the bones were washed clean of dirt and bits of clinging flesh, then piled into the box, the skull was turned upside down like a chalice and red wine poured into the cranium. This cup was passed from hand to hand so that whoever wished could drink from it to erase any curse that Fotini might have spoken against him in life.
Foto, fiercely mustached and bold as always, held his mother’s skull for a moment, then drank deeply. He had been her sorrow, jailed for murder, a poor provider for his ten children, a notorious adventurer and braggart, and he had good reason to drink, for fear that she might have died with some uncanceled curse against him. Alexo, Foto’s tall, open-faced second wife, dutifully took a swallow after him. The skull passed farther around the circle, and the wails of the mourners rose in pitch.
Eleni scarcely heard them. She was thinking of the round, smile-creased face of her mother-in-law, an illiterate, wide-hipped village woman who never complained despite the gall life had served her: four of her nine children dead before adulthood, plundering and burnings by the Turks, nagging hunger and deaths that came swiftly as a summer storm. The evil eye had carried away her beautiful daughter Vasiliki when she was sixteen. Her fourth son, Constantine, was a deaf-mute. Her tinker husband Nikola was felled by an attack of pneumonia and left her a widow, pregnant with a little girl who died before they could baptize her.
But Fotini had managed to rear five sons who helped support the family after her husband’s death. Her favorite, Christos, walked out of the village at seventeen, wearing the fez of the Turkish occupiers, to find the golden land of America. He returned fourteen years later, a bald, prosperous foreigner in a straw hat and pin-striped suit, so changed that Fotini didn’t recognize him until she bent down his head and found the scar from the time he fell out of the walnut tree.
