The home as a transport hub

Population movement does not start at the port, the train station, or the airport; it starts at the home of every migrant. Since Crete is a large island, migrants from mainland Crete, who lived far from the coastal areas, had to make long journeys to reach the port. They had to start their journey much earlier than their actual time of departure and usually had to find some sort of accommodation in the meantime. People travelling from villages in the mountains or the highlands would often have to make a stop and spend the night, or at least wait a few hours until they could board their ship. Besides, a journey like this, especially a migration journey, required following a series of procedures, preparing documents, handling bureaucracy, getting provisions etc., which meant migrants had to stay in the city, usually Heraklion or Chania, for at least a few days. As booking a hotel was not common practice among the local population at the time, they mobilised their social networks and the houses of the people living in the cities were open to friends, relatives and compatriots who arrived at these transportation hubs.

Chrysi Spyridaki grew up in Heraklion during the 1960s and ‘70s, when people arriving and departing crowded the city’s port. Her parents were from Meronas, a village in the mainland  of the Rethymno area. Her home was a stop-off point for the people leaving the island for various reasons: They were parents of internal migrants, they were migrating abroad, they were students, they were travelling to the capital to settle bureaucratic affairs or be admitted to some Athens hospital.  In her interview, she vividly describes the practice of happily hosting their friends and relatives who were on the move. ‘Every time someone from the village came to Heraklion for business or to take the ship to Athens, we would get a call that so-and-so is coming down to Heraklion […] If they were coming for business, we would prepare lunch for them or even put them up overnight if they couldn’t make the bus back to Rethymno. If they were leaving for Athens, we would give them a place to stay until the evening, when the ship departed. Then we’d do the same for their return trip. […] Often in the summer I remember sleeping on blankets outside. We were hosting so many people that we didn’t have enough rooms or beds, but we would spread blankets on the floor and they could sleep there. I remember it was common for my parents and my siblings to sleep on blankets on the ground out in the yard with the doors open.’

She also recalls the migration stories of some loved ones who passed through their house, painting a picture of the entire era: ‘Back then, my aunt decided that life in the village was no life for them and that they had to migrate to Germany. My uncle didn’t want to, but she took her eldest daughter, Elpida, and went to Athens, where they were examined by a committee. There was a committee that checked them for health issues and they had to take some tests to prove they’re healthy […] my aunt left, but Elpida was not allowed to follow, they found something the matter with her… so Elpida returned to Heraklion and stayed with us for a while. Later, my aunt invited her whole family and they left for Germany.’

‘My father had a brother, too, his name was Zacharias Spyridakis. He used to live in the village with his wife and his two daughters. At the end of the 1960s, they left too. They moved to Athens. He was looking for a job to feed his family and through another compatriot, he found a job in Athens, at Colgate. […] When he retired, he moved back to the village’.

‘My mother’s brother left the village at a very young age, around 12 or something. He went to Athens and worked at the shop of some acquaintances. At some point, he joined the police force and worked as a policeman in the Peloponnese. That’s where he got married and spent his whole life until he retired […] When he was discharged from the police, his son entered university […] But his pension was not enough to take care of his family […] So, he decided, as a pensioner now, to migrate abroad. He had connections with Latsis, the shipping magnate, who was hiring a lot of people to go to Saudi Arabia where they extract oil and he has ships to carry it. He went and talked to him and he said, “Fine, I’ll hire you to do the same thing you do in Greece, work security”’. And he went and stayed there for about a decade. From what he told us, he was living on a moored ship’.

‘This was a family from the village […] I remember that the father had left for Australia first and it had been a while, one and a half or two years, before he invited his family and for some reason they couldn’t join him. So, his wife, who had three children, had to leave the village to see how they could get the necessary papers. At the same time, when the woman was in Heraklion to see what paperwork needed to be done, she also had to co-ordinate with people in Athens. That summer, I don’t remember her as much as I remember that she had left her children with us, because she had to go to some government agencies in Heraklion, some in Athens, go back to the village to get some documents issued… Bureaucratic processes were hard back then… I remember a period of time, about a month or two, that the children were staying at our home. It was three kids, two boys and a girl […] they stayed for a while, until everything was handled, and then they left for Australia’. From that summer, there is a photograph in Chrysi’s photo album, taken on the eve of the family’s departure for Australia. It shows Chrysi and her sister, Mairi Spyridaki, with the three children of the Vamiedakis family which later migrated. The eldest son in the centre of the picture was called Ilias. In the next photograph, we can see Chrysi in the garden of her family home which hosted so many travellers and their stories.