From Ano Poli to Germany: the stories of Antonis Sourounis

Antonis Sourounis (1942-2016) was born to refugee parents and grew up in Ano Poli, Thessaloniki, in the area of Kule Kafe. In 1960, he migrated to Germany where his parents had already settled. He studied sociology and political science and went on to do a variety of jobs (sailor, bank employee, professional roulette player). He made his first appearance in literature in 1969 and, from 1987 onwards, writing became his main profession.

Sourounis was one of the few modern Greek writers to regularly write about the migration experience in Western Germany. He wrote short stories and novels, such as ‘Tram’, ‘Thessaloniki 1977’ and The Fellow Players. His works carry strong experiential elements and feature Gastarbeiter leading lives marginally acceptable by mainstream society, a far cry from the stereotypical image of the model southern European immigrant. In the video provided, Sourounis speaks briefly of his first journey to Germany on the Hellas Express.

In 2002, he wrote the short story ‘Laughter’, which draws a parallel between his lived experience as a Gastarbeiter and the experiences of the Albanian migrants in Greece. In the same story, he also writes in a succinct way about the ostensibly funny twists of history that resulted in his father, an orphan refugee from Smyrna and a veteran of the Greco-Italian war, working alongside Turks and Italians in Germany for twenty years.

In the mid-2000s, Sourounis returned to his childhood and adolescence through his work and wrote The Path to the Sea. In the novel, he composes an anthropogeography of postwar Ano Poli and the neighbourhood where he grew up that manages to be both expansive and richly textured.

There was no water tap anywhere, not inside the house nor outside in the courtyard. It wasn’t just our house, it wasn’t just the houses on Mouson Street, but all houses, from Kule Kafe to Yedi Kule and from Tsinari to Saranta Ekklisies. I had walked through all these streets, sometimes on a stroll, others to play football or war games, and I had come to know them by heart. I also knew all the water pumps by heart because, whatever we did, we had to stop eventually to wash ourselves and quench our thirst. The water pump in the next neighbourhood over was called Kokkini Vrisi and everyone knew it, young and old. It was a local landmark and when people wanted to give you directions, they would say ‘past Kokkini Vrisi’, ‘before Kokkini Vrisi’, and so on. (p.136)

It was a done deal, people were now divided into rich and poor. They didn’t do it themselves, they were divided by Egnatia Street. Before good God could separate the sheep from the goats, Miss Egnatia did it for Him. My grandfather would say such things without anger, but they made my dad’s blood boil. The sheep get the beach, the goats the crags. The more you climbed, the poorer you were, the more you descended, the richer. Once, on my name day, instead of giving me a present and some pocket money, Uncle Aris made a wish for me ‘to go up in the world’. My dad got angry and almost hit him. ‘Up? How much higher would you have the kid go? Up to Portara, to live with the gypsies, or should he go higher still and get sent to the prison of Yedi Kule to make you happy? You should be wishing for the kid to go down, not up; down where the people live on milk and honey, not on stale bread’. (p. 186)