The life history of Klearchos Gozanis

This entry documents the life of Klearchos Gozanis. Gozanis represents a typical case of an Asia Minor refugee who arrived in Greece as a child, grew up, built a career, made a family and established his own social networks as a refugee.

His story is narrated by his daughter, Stella Gozani – Charitakis, which begs the question: Is this Klearchos’ story or Stella’s? The narrative is definitely Stella’s. She is the one who chooses which world she will transport us back to, which information to share, which details she calls to mind. By telling her father’s life story, Stella reveals parts of herself. On the other hand, Klearchos is the protagonist in Stella’s narrative. His parents, his siblings, his wife, his children, his career, his character, even elements of Stella’s character, are all mentioned by Stella in relation to her father. All these people, all these events are presented as constellations that revolve in Klearchos’ orbit. Whatever that may say about Stella, she remains an important source for the life story of Klearchos.

Klearchos Go(u)zanis was born in Vourla around 1915. His parents had another four children. His father was a viticulturist. While Smyrna was being destroyed, the family was at the docks trying to board a ship. That’s where they got separated from the family’s second son, Mitsos.

Without young Mitsos, the family reached Greece and settled in Daratso, a village outside of Chania. They were beneficiaries of the agricultural rehabilitation scheme and returned to cultivating raisins. Shortly after they had settled down they decided to search for their lost son through the Red Cross and found him in Mytilini. He had been rescued by another refugee family.

Klearchos did not complete his primary education and instead entered the labour force. He became an apprentice for a local merchant and since ‘he was an honest and smart lad’, he eventually managed to build a career as a merchant himself. At 25, he was drafted in the army and fought in the Albanian front where he lost an eye.

He returned to Chania, found success, expanded his business and started traversing the villages to engage in trade. During one of these business trips to Kasteli, in Kissamos, he met Kostoula Papadaki and they fell in love. Because her father did not approve of her marrying a refugee, the couple eloped and fled to Athens at the end of the 1940s. For a few years they stayed in Kokkinia.

When Kostoula had their first child, the couple and Kostoula’s family reconciled and the family returned to Chania. According to Stella’s narrative, when the second child was born, Klearchos initially misunderstood and thought it was a boy. He celebrated the birth of the supposed boy by firing shots in the air. Despite the fact that the son turned out to be a daughter, Klearchos continued to treat Stella like a boy. Stella says that it was only when she became an adult that she felt ‘like a woman and a girl’.

Stella was lucky enough to get to meet her father’s entire family that had arrived from Asia Minor in 1922. After the war, some of them resettled in Athens until the end of their life, while the rest stayed in Crete.