Narratives, memories, visions: the family history of Sofia Katsanevaki

Sofia Katsanevaki, née Karagiannidi, was born in Chania in 1923. She was the daughter of refugees from Nikomideia. Her mother and father were 45 and 55 years old respectively in 1923 and had both left everything behind in Asia Minor.

Her father had been married before and had had four children. According to his own accounts, when he saw that the situation in Asia Minor was deteriorating, he suggested to his wife that they should leave. She refused and he left for Greece alone, settling in Chios.

Her mother, Aikaterini Kyrlidou, was a widow and probably also had four children. It seems that she lost two of her children, but Sofia does not know how. Her third child, a son, left Nikomideia when the unrest started. He had also asked his mother to move the family but she refused to leave her house, so her son left alone. Sofia’s mother and the last child that had stayed with her, a daughter, were finally forced to leave Nikomideia, probably after the Asia Minor Catastrophe. She lost her daughter along the way and ended up in Chios where, somehow, she managed to reunite with her son.

Sofia’s father and mother met in Chios and agreed to marry in order to improve their living conditions and re-establish a sense of normalcy. Aikaterini’s son stayed with them. They also decided to leave Chios in search of better prospects. They had heard that Crete produces a lot of olive oil and there were always jobs in the olive oil industry. They took a boat to Chania and settled outside the city on the Metochi Barbou, an agricultural estate, along with 13 other refugee families. That’s where Sofia was born a few months later.

Sofia describes the family’s everyday life as she remembers it from her childhood. Her father became a greengrocer and set up a greengrocery in the city centre. Her mother was a housewife and it was mostly her who passed her stories of Asia Minor down to Sofia.

Her brother also lived in the city, but Sofia grew up as an only child due to their age difference. She remembers essentially spending her childhood on the metochi estate with her mother and singing with her. She remembers that the son of the bey who used to live on the estate before the exchange had visited them and told them how his family used to live: the basements were used for storage, their house was on the ground floor, the women’s quarters were upstairs, and there were flower gardens and a round open water reservoir. She remembers going to school, but not doing very well. Then she remembers getting a job at a silk factory owned by the refugee I. Athanasiadis, along with other young refugee women. She also remembers that the locals disliked the refugees because they had also laid claim on the land left behind by the exchangeable Muslims.

What is special about Sofia’s account is the mythology her mother had weaved around the Asia Minor Catastrophe. Sofia begins her narrative with a captivating account of the Catastrophe and the persecution through a series of visions experienced by her mother and brother. This is the way her mother transmitted to Sofia everything that had happened before her arrival in Greece. In her narrative, the informant reproduces these stories, but has now taken on the role of the one who experienced these visions and events. ‘I was sitting with my mother, she would tell me about all she’d been through and cry and I would cry with her. She said “calm down, my child, come on, let’s chant”. And we would chant. My mother had a beautiful voice’. Sofia listened to her mother relate stories from the Catastrophe over and over, learned to empathise and hurt with her, to grieve for everything that had happened to her mother and pray for her. So, in her own way, she did actually experience the events that her mother was narrating.

The visions recounted by Sofia’s mother are indicative of her religiosity. ‘[…] Kemal gathered the women and children, took them to the coast, had then kneel and when he raised his sword from the back of his horse, Agios Georgios appeared. He scared the animal. Kemal did not see him, but he scared the horse. It bucked, hit him with its tail, neighed, bucked again and again, trying to throw him off the saddle. The horse turned round and round, he held on tight and when he saw that he couldn’t get the horse to behave, he told the people “get up, leave, go home”. And the people went home […]’.

Sofia held on tight to her mother’s narratives. She absorbed them to the point where she cries when she reproduces them and switches easily between first and third person when she tells these stories during the interview. She also tried to provide an interpretation for her mother’s actions during those difficult days when she was carrying her injured daughter trying to get to the coast to find some way out while being injured herself. She explains why things happened as they did, why the injured daughter was left behind and the mother went on: ‘I don’t know, life is sweet. [The mother] could see that there was not much life left [in the daughter]. She didn’t feel her own pain. She went into a cornfield. She said the bullets were raining down on her! I became a mouse. She went from corn stalk to corn stalk, I went from one to the other. She went in one way, came out the other! At night! She wanted to walk from one side to the other, escape the bullets… She ended up somewhere else! She doesn’t remember what happened to her girl, what she did with her, where she left her. She just got out of there’.

The interview was conducted in March 2014 as part of a school project by the 1^st Vocational High School of Chania. The project supervisor was Chrysi Spyridaki, who also conducted Sofia’s interview. Part of the material produced by the project is presented here, courtesy of Chrysi Spyridaki.