SHE SACRIFICED HER MARRIAGE TO RAISE OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN

SHE SACRIFICED HER MARRIAGE TO RAISE OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN

When Mihali asked his wife Leta Delianova to come and live with him in Australia, she asked him if she could bring three other children in addition to their own daughters

Long after the Greek Civil War ended the people from the Aegean part of Macedonia in Greece, who were exiled, separated and spread out all over the world, began to look for their families. One of those people was Mihali Delianov who found himself in Australia after the war. Mihali had a wife named Leta and two daughters named Dosta and Lozana who at the time were living in Skopje. Unbeknownst to Mihali, his wife Leta at the time was also looking after Mihali’s brother’s children. When Mihali asked Leta and his daughters to come to Australia to live with him she wrote and asked him if she could also bring his brother’s two daughters and his sister’s daughter with her. There was no one else she could find who would look after them. His answer was a flat “no” but he did have a counter offer. He wrote, “…you can stay there, if you want to…” Everything ended with that. Leta remained in Skopje. Mihali led his own life in Australia, remarried and ended his connection with his first wife and daughters. He never told his children from his second marriage that they had two sisters in Macedonia.

But as destiny would have it, in the end things did not go the way they were planned. Two years ago the telephone rang in Dosta Donevska’s house. Dosta Donevska was Mihali’s older daughter who was also a singer in the famous group “Bapchorki”. A woman called and was speaking English. Dosta understood only two words, her name and the name of her sister Lozana. This is what Dosta said, “I told her that I do not speak English. She asked me if I spoke Russian or Greek. I said no and asked her if she spoke Macedonian, but after she said no I went and got my daughter Snezhana, who was then living next door to me, and put her on the phone. She spoke English. From the conversation my daughter had with the woman I had a strong feeling that this was my sister Sarina from my father’s second marriage…”

This is what Snezhana said, “A little later I called the woman back and, as it later turned out, she was my aunt, Sarina. She was born in 1957 and was one year younger than me. Two years ago Sarina began looking for Dosta and Lozana. After her father died she read his will and found two names she did not recognize. They were Dosta and Lozana Delianov. They had the same surnames as Sarina and he had left 5,000 dollars for each. Sarina immediately began to look for them so that she could give them their money. She figured that they must be distant relatives. While she was looking for them, someone told her that one of the women sang in the group “Bapchorki”. Sarina tried searching for her on the internet and ran into Dimitri Buzharovski’s website where she found Dosta and Lozana’s telephone numbers…”

Snezhana continued, “During our first conversation on the telephone we agreed to communicate by e-mail. Later, after my mother mentioned that Sarina could be her sister, I realized that Sarina didn’t know that my mother and my aunt were her sisters. Sarina probably figured they were distant cousins. I decided to write her and let her know. This is what I wrote, ‘…What I am about to tell you may shock you… it maybe difficult to accept… but you should know the truth that Dosta and Lozana are your sisters. It is not important what happened in the past, the money is not important… what is most important is that, after so many years, you have found your sisters…’ I also told her how her father had left to work in Australia, leaving his wife and two daughters behind …”

A couple of weeks later, Sarina wrote Snezhana and told her that she had been deeply affected by the news and needed some time to process it. But in general she was very pleased that she had two sisters. In her next e-mail Snezhana invited Sarina to come to Macedonia to visit with them. Not long after that, Sarina arrived in Skopje and was very happy to see Dosta and Lozana. They took her to all of their relatives. This is what Snezhana said, “Sarina was shocked when she found out that she not only had two sisters in

Macedonia but many cousins and all kinds of other relatives. I remember her saying, ‘Snezhana, when my father died, I said to my brother that after our mother dies we will be all alone in this world because we don’t have any relatives…’ She then mentioned the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding and said, ‘This is my big Macedonian family’. It was very difficult for her. She couldn’t understand why her father had never told her that she had two sisters. She said that many times. When she returned to Australia she immediately went on vacation in Bali, but instead of enjoying herself she cried the entire time not knowing why her father had kept her sisters a secret from her…”

This is what Dosta said, “Last year Sarina came back to Macedonia and started to tear down the wall of alienation that her father Mihali had erected between his daughters, which lasted for half a century. Sarina wanted to see Bapchor, her father’s birthplace. All three of us went together. While Sarina was there she kept saying, ‘It’s very difficult for me to accept that you grew up without a father. I feel guilty, I feel like I stole your father from you’…”

Dosta continued, “Our father Mihali went to Australia in 1937 to work as a migrant worker. I was only 2 years old and my mother was pregnant with Lozana when he left. He was in Australia all during the Greek Civil War and only started looking for us after it ended. He found us in the 1950s. He wrote telling us that he wanted to bring us to Melbourne… But, in addition to us, my mother was raising three more girls, two from Mihali’s brother. Their mother, Mihali’s brother’s wife, had died during the war and their father, who was a Partisan, left for Russia, remarried and never asked to take his daughters with him. The other girl belonged to Mihali’s sister. I don’t know why my father didn’t agree to bring us all to Australia. The three girls were more his family than mine. They were his brother’s and sister’s children…”

Soon after he abandoned his wife, Mihali married an Italian woman. He never told his son and daughter who were born in Australia that they had sisters in Macedonia. When his daughter Lozana went to visit him in Australia for three months, he introduced her as a cousin, and told her not to tell his children that she was their sister.

He told her that if she did tell them, people would find out and would not respect him.

So Leta Delianova had to raise five children on her own. She had them educated and married. They all called her “mother”. Mihali ignored his family in Macedonia all that time and only remembered his daughters Dosta and Lozana when they got married. He wrote to them and sent them some money after they were married. He wrote, “I will never forget you,” but he did not behave that way.

This is what Mihali’s daughter Dosta Donevska said, “I was on tour in Australia with the group “Bapchorki” in which my mother sang. When we got there I asked our organizers to contact Mihali and tell him that I wanted to see him. One of our organizers called him and told him that his daughter was here and wanted to see him. When I met him he showed no emotion, not like a father should when he sees his grown up daughter for the first time since she was a baby. He stood there in front of me like I was a stranger. He didn’t ask how my mother or my sister Lozana were, or if I was married or not. The same day we met he decided to come to the concert in the evening. During the break one of the organizers told me that there was a man looking for me who wanted to see me. It was my father. I went and met with him again. This time he started crying like a child. He hugged and kissed me. I think it was the Macedonian national dress the women singers were wearing and the songs they were singing that must have reminded him of the days when he was young and living in Bapchor…”

The wall that Mihali had erected between himself and his daughters also affected his granddaughter Snezhana, especially when she went to visit other relatives in Australia. This is what Snezhana said, “I wanted to see him. I had this impression that he had built a high barrier between his life in Bapchor and his life in Australia. It seemed like he simply wanted to forget his previous life. He even avoided contact with the Macedonian communities there. It felt like he was hiding from everyone, even from me. It was especially hard for me because my grandmother, his first wife, had recently died. I asked him if he knew that she had died. He didn’t react at all…”

This is what Dosta said, “My mother didn’t blame him for anything. She never said a single bad word about him. She blamed the war and the bad times for what had happened. She was only married to him for two years when he left. She didn’t remarry. She sacrificed herself not only for her own children but for the children of his brother and sister…”