FOREIGNERS IN OUR COUNTRY

FOREIGNERS IN OUR COUNTRY

He took his faded hat in his hand and sympathetically turned towards me as if wanting to say: “Look at me man and follow my thoughts, I want you to see the suffering of my compatriots, to reassure yourself when you hear the sound of suffering. We will go through what has breathed in the pits of life to test if there is a measure of suffering... Because this secret I will take to my grave. This will now torment me for the rest of the year...”

He waited a while; waited for me to say more and then asked:

“What did you see mister, on your journey?” He then blinked his faded blue eyes several times and continued talking without waiting for an answer.

“Did you notice that this country is tired, burned out and has picked up and gone? That the people have picked up and gone all over the world? And in the end when they all went away even the birds flew away? The only things that remained from man here are the naked rocks of the ages...

What is left is silence and wild space… Only the tough and robust have remained to guard their country, they who have all the dignity and are unworthy of Hellenic feelings and consciousness...

And now, when I see this I crumble into the depths of eternity, feeling a sharp pain dealt by a skilful hand. When I say skilful hand, I mean the type of hand that haunts mankind. In general you don’t need to kill a man to destroy him. All you have to do is cast him out of his home, his country and he will begin to slowly die.

After some time, as if being eaten by something, his family too will start to die. And if a person thinks a little and reflects on it he will feel a craving in this persecution, not appreciable but very cruel.

This is certainly much harder than killing a man with a verdict. That’s being sentenced to death. But this, this is a kind of slow suffocation… It is being convicted to a longer and more painful nostalgia...

This is why I want to start a conversation with you… about these people… about this country...” he concluded.

I extended my hand out to him and said: “My name is Jim.”

He then bowed his head down and said:

“Okay Jim, if you wish to peek through the cracks of our life then… you may discover that life is lost for all of them... Because no matter what the historians tell you about us, about our country, their stories are under represented, there is nothing they can say to me about our people who had been banished that can be undone… or that can ease my mind…”

I could feel his pain and I knew from my own father, that these people were swept by some fierce storm and, seemingly, were pushed like stones by flood water which now lie along the banks of a river, and every day some force pushes them aside where they remain powerless and unable to reenter their life.

This is who the Macedonians are, who some call “Slavo-Macedonians” who did not want to become Turks, who now received new names and a completely new toponymia, a completely new language… who served in the thousands for the exchange of a single stray Greek in that Pondia and Black seacoasts of theirs, and look what that Greek did later to prove his existence in this country...

And now, according to the logic of the law “this country can only remain Hellenic if and only if it is ethnically pure”. Many of those who did not want to be “Hellenized” fled and took the road to suffering in the world. They took a path where nothing in life is recorded.

And if you look closely, every one of them has their own life story woven from their suffering… shabby, transparent, tattered...

They search for life like Tsar Samoil’s blind soldiers and some, who have yet to begin that life, will ask why?

The law that pushed them to leave their country was strict. Strict enough to push them to become wanderers… a people separate from themselves where life, at every moment, can judge them as it wants...

Here is their life, far away from their country, from their roots, which are now running deep and wide, and here they are like old exhausted birds, returning here to die in their own country.

Mr. Chris Korin told me the same thing: “I came here to die in my own country.” He told me this in English.

I wanted to ask him something but he turned away from me towards the counter to listen to another conversation.

“It is true, he liked his village but then he was gone!” said the man from the police in Lerin, in front of all of us who were waiting there to receive information.

“What will you be doing there? There is nothing there to be found except ruins and desolation! And besides, there is no such place!” the man from the police continued.

“No, no, you are wrong. There is… and it still exists!” insisted old Mr. Chris Korin.

“The village is called V’mbel. And it does exist! If it doesn’t then it is because you changed its name. It had a Macedonian name like me…” piped up Mr. Chris Korin with a shaky tone in his voice. The man from the police continued to search through the reddish lines on the map.

Mr. Chris Korin’s head was swarming with thoughts:

“Oh God, finally I am going to be in my own fatherland. I waited a long time for this… to find myself under these roofs… I remember a long time ago when I was a small child, we were outside and it began to pour rain… and lightning flashed bright like a thousand candles… and thunder beat very loud… we ran inside and my

mother put us to sleep on a thick straw mattress made of long and thick braids of interlaced strands of straw.

Oh, how much I, once more, want to go inside my yard… to see my birthplace… to see the old house… the old outdoor oven from which my mother pulled out blessed warm bread which fed us all.

Oh, how I want to sit on the old summer veranda and watch the branches of the old apple tree loaded with flowers, looking like they are covered with snow, spread all over the yard.

Oh, how nice it would be to wallow in those flowers and, even for a moment, to be able to deeply breathe their aroma, in my own yard, knowing that it’s truly your own yard…”

I watched Mr. Chris Korin lose himself in his own thoughts and, from the expression on his face, I could tell that he was taking all this pretty hard; his arrival here was not easy.

He has spent his entire life waiting for the moment when he would be allowed to return, in anticipation, having all kinds of expectations, both positive and negative, and this has taken its toll on this poor man. He is the eagle with broken wings who wants to greet the sun again; he lives with the hope that one day soon he will be allowed to return home again.

Then, suddenly, the man from the desk called out: “No! Mr. Korin, there is no such place here, I looked everywhere. Are you sure it’s not in Yugoslavia or Bulgaria or in Albania somewhere? There is no such place here! Why are you looking for it in Greece?”

“YES THERE IS!” old Mr. Chris Korin replied angrily.

“I was born there but you now call that place MOSHOHORI!” he angrily added.

“Okay old man! Why did you not tell me this before?” asked the man from the police.

I asked Mr. Chris Korin if I could accompany him. He left me with the impression that he had a happy childhood there. I wanted to know more about him because his whole posture reminded me of my father. When we arrived at the village V’mbel he said:

“I have deceased relatives here,” and then escorted me from the car to the cemetery where, after looking for a while, we found a grave and then placed a marble plate on it that read:

“Bozhin Korenov 1856 - 1952 Liuba Korenova 1860 – 1948”

“For a long time I wanted to pay my respects to my parents,” he said. He then turned to me and, while pointing his finger towards the sky, said:

“And tonight… tonight we are going to celebrate our arrival here… We will light a great big fire and let it burn all night… to take the darkness away… and as you know there are people where there are fires burning… if there is a fire people will come. We in this country have no flags to fly, no star to guide us, but we do have strong flames to replace all that...”

It is true; people in those days relished their fires. The flickering flames in the fireplace, flickering in the dark of night, brought people… brought families together. It was a joy for them, for the entire family… to sit together in front of a fire and to tell… or to listen to stories… And indeed these people felt joy being together… until tragedy struck and those with blond hair and velvet eyes were driven out… away to foreign shores to live in anguish. They are of a mature age now and what was done then weighs on them even more so now… on their souls…

We lit a big fire and stood by it watching the tall flames sway in the wind, sometimes left sometimes right. The fire penetrated the black night and in the dark people came, smiling and happy, watching the high flame scattering sparks across the dark, like a calling beacon. They all gathered around Mr. Chris Korin and were speaking to him,

calling him Risto Korenov. Dear old Mr. Chris Korin was a happy old man, especially deep down in his soul. He began to sing… He sang so beautifully he put us all under his spell...

When dawn broke we watched a couple of figures approaching from afar. It was the police chief Kirios Platanos Andonakis, followed by that anti-Macedonian Krles Petrou, looking all crooked and wearing a black moustache… bent forward with a recessed head, grinning. He looked at us maliciously and coldly. He thought that by being cold and malicious his great Greek patriotism would improve.

“You Slavophones, don’t you know that you have no rights in this country? You Mr. Chris Korin... and you Mr. Johnny, why did you get mixed up with these guys and with all these fires?” asked Kirios Andonakis in an angry and sarcastic tone of voice.

“You… with what you did here… did you want to raise the dead to again challenge this old Hellas? I see that, even in exile, you have not forgotten your Slav ways. But by law I am obliged to tell you to put the fire out, bury the ashes and then remove that headstone and replace it with one that reads:

“Theophilos Rizopoulou and Agapi Rizopoulou”

“You can rename your parents but I am not renaming mine! No!” Mr. Chris Korin snapped back.

“I am going to tell you one more time… In the name of the law!” replied Kirios Andonakis in an angry tone of voice

“In honour of my deceased parents… I am telling you… I will protest in front of the entire world...!” said Mr. Chris Korin with a determined tone of voice.

“You broke the law!!” yelled Kirios Andonakis and continued. “If you were not a foreigner you would be going to prison right now… so I am going to ask you again to remove the headstone and replace it with one that has Greek and English writing. Also Petros Botsaris, Georgios Minopoulos and all those others guys who left the village and who accompanied you last tonight are ordered to report to the

police; to be judged by the law. And I can tall you in advance that your sentences will be severe. The Leros island prison camps were especially made for your kind of people.”

After listening to all this Petre Bochvarovski (renamed Petros Botsaris by the Greeks) got all excited and said:

“Did you say Leros…? Kirie Andonakis? It is better to live in Leros that to live in our own country like foreigners… It is shameful the way you treat us!”

“Mister, hey mister! My name is Risto Korenov. I have been condemned to exile… I sing because of my own pain. It has not been easy for me, Kirie Andonakis, so I picked one night, last night, in the seventy years of my life to feel free. But in order to be free, Kirie Andonakis, I had to become a foreigner… I had to have a foreign citizenship…. I had to become a stranger in my own country... And you… you, yourself, know very well how much you have condemned us…” said Mr. Chris Korin while pointing at the desolation, ruins and emptiness, and then continued. “You know very well how much evil you have put us through… and the pain and suffering you have caused us… And who will judge you for that…?” said Mr. Chris Korin, paused for a moment and continued. “I don’t know… but at the same time you call yourselves a democracy where all people are equal… you pride yourselves for being great protectors of humanity... and what about us…? We, the people who actually belong in this country… we, who actually own this country…? Are we foreigners here… on our lands? This is one of the greatest mornings in my life, Kirie Andonakis… Last night I witnessed my destiny and how it flowed through your strict cesspool, along these roads made by our alienated people… who were living somewhere over there... and now I see, they are all gone. They fled screaming from their difficulties… in this new time...” concluded Mr. Chris Korin and looking exasperated went silent.

I passionately wanted to jump in on the argument with those so-called masters of our destiny, but my limited knowledge of the language prevented me.

“You Mr. Korin… don’t harp at me about your problems… That is your problem,” said Kirios Andonakis quietly.

“And you, Mr. Johnny? What have you to say?” asked Kirios Andonakis.

“I just came here to see the people and my father’s land...” I quietly replied.

He looked me straight in the eyes and said: “I will not allow you to do that...”

“Okay then, Kirie Andonakis, you have indeed become the masters of our lands!” I replied.