After having gotten lost once in the mountains and deciding, with some trepidation, to venture out onto those narrow, twisting, unpaved roads again, we found ourselves in front of a house we had driven past before. We remembered it because of its bird-shaped chimney vent. This time, however, there was a woman sitting on the porch at the side of the house. Before, there had been no one, as it had been earlier in the day, and everyone had been taking the customary afternoon nap.
It had taken several years, and many wrong turns, to get to this point. This was my third trip to Greece in search of Sarakini, the village where my grandfather, the man whose name I carry, was born. I had found the name of the village in the baptismal records of the Greek Orthodox church in America where I was baptized, as were my father, and his brothers and sisters. I found the certificate for one of my aunts, on which my grandparents had written the names of their home villages. Three years before this trip, on my second journey to Greece, I had, with a bit of difficulty, and some harrowing mountain driving, found a village named Sarakini, but it turned out to be the wrong one. I learned that there is more than one Sarakini in Greece, just as there is more than one Springfield in the United States.
This trip began more auspiciously. I had chanced upon a Michelin map of just the Peloponnese, and Sarakini, tiny Sarakini, was actually on the map. Once in Greece we followed the map to Karitena, where there was a sign indicating that Sarakini was a mere ten kilometers away. We set off in the direction the sign pointed, and wound up lost in the mountains, with no evidence of human habitation in sight, except for the occasional scrambling goat on the side of the road. I managed to find my way back to Karitena, where my wife and I struggled with the dilemma of whether to set off again and risk getting lost in the mountain wilderness in the dark, or to give up and go on, abandoning the search for the village that had been the primary reason for our journey of almost 6,000 miles. My wife and I went back and forth a bit before hope prevailed over fear, and once again we set out up the mountain.
It was later in the day, and there were people here and there. One kind young man managed to communicate to me that I should follow him to make sure I went the right way. He led me up to where there was a turn to the left, pointed down that way, and assured me that I could not miss Sarakini if I drove in that direction. I thanked him and proceeded to make the left turn, driving along exactly the same route I had pursued previously when we had gotten lost. Soon we came again to the cluster of houses that included one with a bird-shaped chimney vent we had noted before.
Soula, the woman sitting on the porch beside the house, got up from her chair and walked up the hill to our car. I asked her, as I had asked so many others recently, where I might find Sarakini. She pointed toward the ground and informed me that here, this was Sarakini. Soula spoke some English, and as we continued to converse, the combination of the sparse amount of Greek that I knew and the much greater amount of English that she knew made some real communication possible. After very little conversation, Soula invited us to walk down the slope to her house and have some coffee. I turned to my wife, Margie, and she told me that we should say “no”.
“You don’t understand,” I explained to her, looking at the mountains surrounding us and feeling strongly that we were deep in the heart of Greece, the real Greece, and remembering what my parents by their words and actions had instilled in me from my childhood, “hospitality is sacred here. We have to accept.”
So we left our ten-year-old son, John, asleep in the back seat of the car and walked down to the house. Once the coffee was in front of us on the table, I began to explain the little I knew about my grandfather’s background, such as when he had left Sarakini to come to America. Soula seemed to know who I was talking about, to be making connections. She also said that she had some zucchini cooking, and asked if we would like some. Once again, Margie said we should decline, and, once again, I reminded her of the sanctity of hospitality in Greece and accepted.
Yes, Soula had zucchini cooking. And lamb, and potatoes. She brought out plates full of delicious food and asked me what I wanted to drink, beer or wine. I said wine, and her husband led me around to the side of the house to show me the barrel of his wine from which he filled a metal pitcher. We returned to the table to eat, and to continue our conversation. Meanwhile, Soula’s husband had begun walking through the village, talking with people as he went along. There seemed to be a bit of a stir arising. People were now moving about near the house, gazing our way as they passed by.
Suddenly, there was an elderly couple approaching us. The woman seemed to have tears welling up in her eyes, and she was holding something in her hands. She walked up to me and handed me what she was holding, a photograph of three young men, and said to me, “Παπουλι σου.” “Your grandfather,” and there he was, standing, in the center of the photograph with two other men seated in front of him, my grandfather Panagiotis as a young man. I soon learned that my grandfather had left a sister, Sophia, behind when he had come to America. (I noted as I heard this that my father’s sister, the older of two daughters in the family, was named Sophia.) This man was Sophia’s son, Christos, my father’s first cousin, and the woman was Maria, his wife. Christos and Maria took us all (our son John was awake now) to see the house where my grandfather was born, to actually stand in the room where he was born, to look out from the house toward the mountains and try to imagine my grandfather standing there as a young man, marveling at how he managed to leave that tiny village and make his way to America.
Back at Soula’s porch, with the aid of Soula’s English, Christos and Maria told me that I had cousins here in Greece, living in Nemea, and that we should go see them. This posed a bit of a problem. In two days, we had to be in Zakynthos, and then we were returning to Athens to catch a plane back to America. It soon became clear to me that the only time we had open to drive to Nemea was now.
We arrived at about eleven that night, and where we met a group of cousins who were waiting for us. We hugged a lot, very excited to see each other. Words were limited, as none of my cousins spoke much English. There were three generations of us, my father‘s first cousins, their children and me, and our children. We had dinner together, and they put us up for the night. The next day we met still more cousins, and all of them implored us to stay longer. We managed, somehow, to get quite a bit communicated in spite of the immense language gap that existed between us.
Despite all the impassioned pleas for me to return and stay longer, it was eight years before I was able to do so. My Greek was still not very good, but it had improved, and this time, some of my cousins’ children were old enough to have learned English, and to serve as intermediaries in our conversations. I am forever grateful to those children, whom I refer to now as my nieces and nephews, for enabling me to have long conversations with my cousins and really begin to get to know them. It was the beginning of what has been an ongoing time of getting to know them better, of becoming a part of their families and their lives, and of all of them becoming a part of my life and of who I am.
For the past several years, I have been fortunate to be able to return every year, and it seems that each year I meet more people who are a part of my family, and each year I become closer to the ones I have known. I have also been privileged to experience Greece more and more as part of the family and not as a tourist. A couple of summers ago I attended an outdoor recital put on by the local schoolchildren in Nemea to watch my cousin Sophia’s grandson perform some traditional folk dances. The next day I attended a baptism at a mountaintop monastery in Arcadia. After the service, there were lambs roasting on spits in the village plateia, and music for dancing in the street. The most treasured memory for me from that event is when they brought the newly baptized baby into the plateia for the party, and I was the first person given the privilege of holding him in my arms.