A Courageous Sister Dies

A Courageous Sister Dies

Lillia, aged 16 in 1949, points to the mountaintop 

battleground where she had just escaped from the  Communist

guerrillas during the Greek Civil War

Last Monday, October 8, Glykeria (Lillia) Economou, 79,  the sister of my husband Nicholas Gage, died of Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma.  She was, as our priest Father Dean Paleologos said on Thursday at her funeral at St. Spyridon Cathedral in Worcester, MA, a true “profile in courage”.

Lillia was third in line of four sisters and a young brother born to Christos and Eleni Gatzoyiannis in the Greek mountaintop village of Lia, Greece.  In her childhood, from 1940 on their village was invaded by Italian soldiers, then Germans who burned down her grandfather’s house along with an old woman relative  who refused to leave her goats. Next, in 1948, their village was occupied by the Communists guerrilla army during the Greek Civil war.  By then Lillia was 15 years old.

The children’s father, Christos, worked in Worcester, MA as a chef, and after his last visit in 1939, he was unable to return to help his family because of the war.  When Eleni Gatzoyiannis learned that the guerrillas were planning to collect the children of her village and send them behind the Iron Curtain to train them as future Communist soldiers (as they ultimately did in many villages),  she began to plan her children’s escape, so that they could eventually join their father in America.

At the last moment—as Nick has recounted in the book and film “Eleni” and the subsequent book “A Place for Us”—the guerrillas demanded two women from their household to go to a distant village to harvest wheat.  Their mother Eleni chose herself and, when she asked who else might go with her, Lillia, although third oldest and only 15, volunteered: “Let me go.  I’m stronger and I’ll be all right.”

While her brother and three sisters fled down the mountain on foot under cover of darkness and reached Greek government forces the next morning, their mother was imprisoned, tortured and executed for planning the escape. Afterwards, Lillia was taken, with the surviving villagers behind the Iron Curtain into Albania.  On the overcrowded boat filled with 250 women and children, violently seasick and crammed together, Lillia reached out and grabbed the clothing of a girl, her 11-year-old cousin Niki, who nearly fell into the sea as she was vomiting over the side.  Niki had lost her own mother to the firing squad that killed Eleni Gatzoyiannis and 12 others. Their bodies were thrown into a ravine and left unburied.

After sleeping in a stable and scrounging for dandelions and other weeds to supplement their ration of one hard roll a day, Lillia was forcibly conscripted into the guerrilla army and sent at 16 to the battlefront back in Greece.  Because she refused to carry a rifle, she was given a field radio.  In a brutal battle in the mountains of Vitsi in Macedonia, as the guerrillas retreated, Lillia hid among dead bodies in a ravine until the Nationlist soldiers arrived and she surrendered.

A colonel in the Nationalist army who knew her grandfather recognized the girl.  After being interviewed about the positions and fortifications of the guerrillas, she was sent to a detention center in Kastoria, Greece. The black and white photo above shows her, aged 16, pointing to the mountaintop battleground where she had just escaped from the guerrillas.

On August 24, 1949, a telegram sent by a relative in Kastoria reached her father and siblings in Worcester, saying that Lillia had been found alive.  On Feb. 10 1950, she arrived in New York harbor on the steamship LaGuardia, and was met by her father.  Her escape and arrival were covered in the Worcester newspapers.

Like her two older sisters, Lillia, by then 17, worked at Greek-owned Table Talk Bakeries, where  she didn’t need to know English.  In 1956 she married a fellow immigrant, Prokopi (Paul) Economou.  With her husband, she operated the Westboro House of Pizza in a two-decker on East Main Street in Westborough, MA.  After Prokopi’s death in 1993, their two sons took over, expanding it into the present Westboro House Restaurant and Lounge.

Lillia was the glue that held Worcester’s large Greek community together, and  she was also the telegraph operator who spread and commented on all the news within that community.

At Lillia’s funeral last Thursday, our daughter Eleni, who carries the name of her grandmother, who died because she saved four of her five children, gave a brief eulogy to her “Thitsa Lillia”.  In it she said:

 Lillia holding our granddaughter Amalía, Eleni's daughter, last year.

The baby's father, Emilio Baltodano, is behind her

“Thitsa Lillia was a celebrated chef and a beloved local businessperson running the Westboro House of Pizza with Theio Prokopi. And she was a mother, grandmother, aunt, sister, and friend whose love was all-encompassing. She was so warm, even her customers called her Mom."

Despite  all the challenges fate threw at Lillia, from the murder of her mother to her conscription at 16 into the guerrilla army to the early death of her beloved husband, she somehow managed to remain, as Father Dean said at her funeral, the kind of person who saw her lot as a glass half full instead of a glass half empty.   Throughout her life, Lillia managed to enjoy her family, her grandchildren, her occasional visits back to the village of Lia where she was born.  

She longed to return to Lia one more time at the paneyiri--the three-day celebration that happens every August to mark the village's saint's day--the festival of the Prophet Elias.   She never made it back, but next year, as we, God willing, join the throng who climb to the top of the mountain to ring the bell of the small Chapel of St. Elias and then descend to the waterfall to eat and dance, we know that Lillia will be there  with us in spirit, observing all the village and family news and gossip and passing it on to the heavenly host.

Photo Tribute to a Dad and two Grandpa’s

(I posted this last year on Father's Day and got such good comments that I thought I'd post it again, with the addition of a brand new father who has proved over the last nine months to be a world-class Daddy.) 

                                                                  Nick & Christos 1972

When our three children were born in the 1970’s, my husband Nick was not the kind of dad who'd change diapers, take a kid to the park or coach them in sports. But as these photos  suggest, he was always an important presence in their lives, ready to offer support, advice and unconditional love when they needed it.

                                                               Nick & Eleni circa 1976

This past week, President Obama launched the “Year of Strong Families” to do something about father absence, which he experienced growing up without a father.  Nick experienced it too, because, as he wrote in “A Place for Us”, he never knew his father, a short-order cook in Worcester, MA, until he and his sisters arrived in the U.S. as refugees in 1949 after their mother was executed during the Greek civil war.  Nick was nine years old.  His father, Christos, was 58.

                                                         Nick & Marina, circa  1979

My father, Robert O. Paulson, was born in 1906 and died in 1986.  Because my parents lived far away, he was not a real presence in our children’s lives, but when we visited California in 1973 I took these photos of him showing our son, Christos, his first view of the ocean, and reading to him at bedtime.

I only met my paternal grandfather, Par Paulson, once.  He was stern and completely deaf and the only way to communicate with him was by writing on a blackboard in chalk. But my step-grandfather, John Erickson, my grandmother’s second husband, had a special relationship with me during the years I lived near their small town of Monticello, Minnesota. 

 I still have a small garnet ring that once belonged to his mother. I remember vividly how he taught me to shoot his rifle across the wide Mississippi river, and in the spring, when it was time to get new baby chicks for the chicken yard, he would take me down to the hatchery, pull open drawers of chirping chicks and let me pick out the ones I liked.

                                                              Ida & John Erickson circa1952

 In the current "People" magazine President Obama wrote, “I grew up without a father around. I have certain memories of him taking me to my first jazz concert and giving me my first basketball as a Christmas present, But he left when I was two years old.”

 As he knows, even a one-time memory—choosing chicks at a hatchery, showing a grandson the ocean, reading a bedtime story or unwrapping a first basketball can be a gift that a child will cherish for a lifetime.

And here's Emilio Baltodano, the Papi of our nine-month-old granddaughter Amalía.  He's a full-time dad. He changes diapers, gets up in the middle of the night, takes her to the park, and can hardly wait to teach her to wind-surf--all the things that fathers did not do back in the olden days when my generation was having babies.  And he e-mails us videos, so we can share in her milestone moments.  We're expecting her first steps any day now, since she cruises everywhere hanging on to things, like her Daddy's pants legs.

Happy Father's Day Emilio!

Photo Tribute to a Dad and two Grandpa’s

                                                                  Nick & Christos 1972

When our three children were born in the 1970’s, my husband Nick was not the kind of dad who'd change diapers, take a kid to the park or coach them in sports. But as these photos  suggest, he was always an important presence in their lives, ready to offer support, advice and unconditional love when they needed it.

                                                               Nick & Eleni circa 1976

This past week, President Obama launched the “Year of Strong Families” to do something about father absence, which he experienced growing up without a father.  Nick experienced it too, because, as he wrote in “A Place for Us”, he never knew his father, a short-order cook in Worcester, MA, until he and his sisters arrived in the U.S. as refugees in 1949 after their mother was executed during the Greek civil war.  Nick was nine years old.  His father, Christos, was 58.

                                                         Nick & Marina, circa  1979

My father, Robert O. Paulson, was born in 1906 and died in 1986.  Because my parents lived far away, he was not a real presence in our children’s lives, but when we visited California in 1973 I took these photos of him showing our son, Christos, his first view of the ocean, and reading to him at bedtime.

I only met my paternal grandfather, Par Paulson, once.  He was stern and completely deaf and the only way to communicate with him was by writing on a blackboard in chalk. But my step-grandfather, John Erickson, my grandmother’s second husband, had a special relationship with me during the years I lived near their small town of Monticello, Minnesota. 

 I still have a small garnet ring that once belonged to his mother. I remember vividly how he taught me to shoot his rifle across the wide Mississippi river, and in the spring, when it was time to get new baby chicks for the chicken yard, he would take me down to the hatchery, pull open drawers of chirping chicks and let me pick out the ones I liked.

                                                              Ida & John Erickson circa1952

 In the current "People" magazine President Obama wrote, “I grew up without a father around. I have certain memories of him taking me to my first jazz concert and giving me my first basketball as a Christmas present, But he left when I was two years old.”

 As he knows, even a one-time memory—choosing chicks at a hatchery, showing a grandson the ocean, reading a bedtime story or unwrapping a first basketball can be a gift that a child will cherish for a lifetime.

Last word on the Wedding—The Nuptial Bed

     Thanksgiving pie-baking chores sidetracked me, but now I have to share the last word (I promise) on Eleni and Emilio’s 10-10-10 wedding in Corfu Greece. 

     Because Eleni majored in folklore and mythology, she loves every tradition and honored the Greek pre-wedding ritual of having the ladies prepare the wedding bed two days before the ceremony.  This happened on Friday in a suite at the Corfu Palace Hotel where the women (especially the single ladies) gathered in one room to sing, drink and prepare the connubial bed, while in the other room and on the balcony, champagne and cocktails were enjoyed by those who aren’t into bed-making (although by tradition the first single lady who gets a pillowcase on the bed with be the next to marry).

Emilio threw himself into the groom’s role of storming into the room three times and tearing the bed apart, saying the preparations were unsatisfactory.

Then, satisfied with the fourth effort, he approved.

Next came the bouncing of children on the bed—if a boy is desired first, toss on a boy baby…you get the idea…but in Eleni’s case it was five children, both boys and girls, who happily bounced.

The ladies began throwing flower petals, rice, Jordan almonds (because they are both sweet and bitter, like life) and money, including some gold sovereigns from the bride’s family  (part of her dowry) onto the prepared bed.  Here’s Emilio’s mother, Carmen, throwing rice.

  

Finally Eleni and Emilio posed on the bed among their newly acquired wealth as everyone snapped photos.The bed remained decorated until their wedding night when they managed to spill everything onto the floor (not the money)  leaving the hotel maids a big mess to clean up.

The next night, Saturday, was the most “Mama Mia” moment, when Emilio and his family hosted a Welcome Dinner for everyone on the tiny island of Vidos, just a ten-minute boat ride from Corfu Town’s old harbor.

Everyone  boarded the couple’s  “Love Boat” which scuttled back and forth throughout the night, piloted by Captain Onoufrios.

Vidos Island was once  an army base for 200,000 Serbian soldiers, then a juvenile reform facility and is now a government-owned camping grounds which includes lovely beaches, one uninhabited mansion and a seaside  taverna named for its eccentric owner, Mr. Menios.

     One of the surreal things about the island is that rabbits and pheasants have proliferated  until they come by the hundreds to welcome visitors, because Menios feeds them at sunset every night.

 Three-year-old Sophia was entranced with feeding the rabbits. 

All of us loved the Greek musicians and singers supplied by Menios. 

After plenty of Menios's Pastitsada and Sofrito and homemade wine, dancing broke out of the taverna and extended down to the seashore until the group of 100 re-boarded the Love Boat and sailed back to the mainland to prepare for the big day: Sunday—and the two wedding ceremonies (Catholic and Greek Orthodox) to be followed by the reception at the Corfu Sailing Club.

The Wedding Prequel Part 1. Ali Pasha and Pomegranates

(Please click on the photos to make them larger.)

Daughter Eleni studied folklore and mythology in college and she has always loved ritual, tradition and folklore, so she inevitably included them in her plans for her wedding to Emilio on October 10. (After all, it was an Indian astrologer who led her to the decision—before she even met Emilio—that she would be married on 10/10/10.)

Last month I wrote in detail about the wedding day itself, with its two wedding ceremonies (Catholic and Greek Orthodox) and such traditional details as the throwing of the wedding bread, the singing of wedding songs as the bride dresses, parading through Corfu town accompanied by musicians and dancers in local costume.

But the wedding traditions and rituals began long before October 10. On October third, 14 of us—family and friends who were immediately dubbed “Team Odyssey”-—met in Athens, toured the city and then flew on the fifth to Ioannina, the provincial capital of Epiros—my husband Nick’s native province.


Ioannina, a beautifully unspoiled city on the shore of an enormous lake, still has its walled Turkish city, little changed since the days when Lord Byron visited the local tyrant Ali Pasha, who housed his harem of 300 women and his vast army of Janissary soldiers inside the city walls. (If a woman in his harem displeased him, he would have her tied in a bag weighted with stones and thrown into the deep lake. It’s said that the mists rising from the lake in the morning are the ghosts of the drowned maidens.)

The plan was to drive the next day up the mountains on the winding road to Nick’s village of Lia where we would have a pre-wedding party in the Village Inn (The Xenona).

Eleni spent ten months of 2002 living in the village by herself, rebuilding the family house which lay in ruins ever since the murder of her grandmother by a firing squad of Communist guerrillas during the Greek civil war. She used that year of research and building for her travel memoir “North of Ithaka”, published by St. Martin’s Press in 2005. By the time she left, she had become so beloved by the villagers --most of whom are now elderly-- that she wanted to introduce Emilio and his family to the village and share the celebration with them all.

In Ioannina it rained, poured and thundered non-stop but we went anyway to visit the mosques in the Turkish city—now turned into museums since the Turkish occupiers were driven out in 1913. The wrought-iron cage you see above is the tomb where Ali Pasha’s headless body is buried. He was assassinated by men sent by the Sultan because the despot was getting too powerful and rebellious. His head --and his (Greek) favorite wife, who connived to let the assassins in-- were sent to the Sultan in Constantinople as proof that the tyrant was really dead.

We got ready to drive up the mountain to the village of Lia when we learned that the heavy rains had made the road impassable, but after some hours of waiting, bulldozers cleared the way and we began the twisty, vertiginous journey.


The Innkeeper, Elias Daflos, and his wife, Litsa, had prepared a feast for 85 people—everyone in the village plus Team Odyssey. Local musicians played the wailing Epirotic melodies and the foreigners among us got their first intensive lesson in Greek dancing. Above you see Team Odyssey at the table, and the dancing led by the village priest, Father Prokopi.

The next day, the weather had improved and we led a tour of the village landmarks, including the house of Eleni’s grandmother (Eleni Gatzoyiannis), which had been rebuilt and furnished to look exactly as it did when her grandmother lived there. Below are some of our group, sitting in the more modern Haidis house, which was originally built by Nick's grandfather, Kitso Haidis—and then rebuilt after the Germans burned it in 1944. On the wall over daughter Marina’s head are some of the Karagiosis shadow puppets—another ancient Greek tradition.


After our tour, we set about harvesting pomegranates from the trees of a generous villager, Lefteris Bollis and his wife Ourania—and in the process we all got soaked by the rain-laden branches. Eleni wanted to use pomegranates-- a traditional symbol of good luck and prosperity—as part of the table decorations at the wedding, and we had promised the florist in Corfu that we would bring more than a hundred fresh-picked pomegranates with us when we arrived.


Even though it was still morning, Lefteris and his wife insisted that we all come into their home to toast the wedding with their home-brewed tsipouro—the local moonshine with a staggering alcohol content.


Loading our cars with the pomegranates, we bid goodbye to the villagers and set out for the harbor of Igoumenitsa and the ferryboat that would carry us to the island of Corfu, where we would celebrate the approaching nuptials with more traditions and rituals, including the preparation of the wedding bed. But I’ll tell you about that in my next blog post.

(I put that photo of me and Eleni, just before the wedding, at the beginning of this post because so many friends asked for it.)

Wedding 10-10-10 Part II—Fires, Fireworks, Fancy Footwork & Food

(Because my own camera’s battery died shortly into the reception I have compiled the story below using photos generously shared by others. Please click on the photos to make them bigger.)

I just read that an estimated 40,000 other couples got married on 10/10/10, but none of them, I’m convinced, had as much fun as Eleni and Emilio, celebrating with 144 friends at the Corfu Sailing Club at the base of the Venetian Fortress on the island of Corfu, Greece.

After the two wedding ceremonies—first Catholic and then Greek Orthodox—and after a little Greek line dancing, the throwing of the decorated wedding bread, and posing for family photos with the fort in the background, everyone walked across the bridge over the moat and into the Fortress itself, treading carefully over cobblestoned paths and down uneven staircases to the waterside where luminarias lighted the way in the twilight to the Restaurant/Club bordered by small vessels tied up at anchor.


The newlyweds soon followed to a thundering rendition of “Today a Wedding is Happening “ (Semara Yamos Yeinete) as everyone rose to their feet, applauding.

The tables had been set by the restaurant staff and the florist, Rammos, with decorations featuring ripe pomegranates (collected by us from the trees in Nick’s northern Greek village of Lia) along with ivy, red berries and roses and tulips in the red-orangey colors of Eleni’s calla lily bouquet. On each plate was the menu that her sister Marina had designed and printed, incorporating the restaurant’s sailboat logo and the wedding’s double E logo (for Eleni and Emilio) also designed by Marina.


Despite her full-time job in California, Marina also managed to find people to embroider the logo in two colors of blue onto lace-edged handkerchiefs which were then filled with 11 Jordan Almonds each, tied with blue ribbons and decorated with a small silver sailboat to create the homemade boubounieres (favors) --a requisite part of a Greek wedding. (The “Big Eleni” put together nearly 400 of these favors—for the wedding and the engagement party-- with a little help from me. Now she’s thinking of going into the boubouniere business professionally.)


The florist had also put votive candles on each table, and before the evening was over, impromptu bonfires flared up at intervals as two handkerchiefs and one bread basket caught fire, adding another level of excitement to a generally riotous evening.

The newlyweds set things off with their first dance, carefully choreographed and much rehearsed, to Frankie Valli’s’s version of “You’re Just too Good to be True.” The more athletic lifts and spins, which some compared to the film “Dirty Dancing”, drew cheers from the crowd.


Then Emilio danced with his mother, Carmen, and Nick with Eleni, to the music Nick had chosen—the father-daughter duet by Nat King Cole and Natalie Cole, “Unforgettable”.


The mezedakia courses began to arrive—Greek-style appetizers that followed one after another until everyone groaned at the sight of the main course—sirloin and pork medallions-- but we all tried valiantly to do it justice. The wines—four cases –were sent as a gift by Soteris Ioannou from the Averoff Winery in Metsovo, in Nick’s native province of Epiros—but after those ran out, the crowd drank another 37 bottles of the restaurant’s stock—to the amazement of Niko, the manager.

Shortly after the eating began, the much-anticipated political star of Greece—Antonis Samaras, the head of the opposition New Democracy party—arrived to a standing ovation. He pronounced a gracious toast to the newlyweds and reminisced about getting to know Eleni and our other children when they were small and he was a frequent guest at our house in Massachusetts.


(Earlier in the day, his rival George Papandreou, the Greek Prime Minister, arrived to speak at our hotel and met Emilio. In a speech, the PM cited an upturn in Greek tourism, thanks to the film “Mama Mia”, and mentioned Eleni and Emilio’s wedding as an example.)

Nick spoke, Samaras spoke and the DJ ramped up the sound to a throbbing mixture of Greek popular music of the “Zorba” nature and such non-Greek hits as Taio Cruz’s “Dyn-o-mite” and “Daddy Cool.” Everyone (but me) discovered a previously unrealized gift for Greek dancing, and quite a few people over fifty and under five began to act like people in their twenties.



There was a pause for the cutting of the cake and then the staff brought out small individual cakes for everyone, each one topped—you guessed it—with the double E logo.



There were more toasts, most notably from Emilio, who praised the three important women in his life—his grandmother and his mother, Carmen, who brought him up, and now Eleni. At this point, many guests were using their embroidered handkerchiefs to dry their eyes.

Just before midnight, everyone was given a sparkler to light, filling the restaurant and the dock with fireworks as the newlyweds walked to a waiting boat— labeled “Eleni & Emilio’s Love Boat”—to sail away into the sea of matrimony.


As everyone waved good-bye, a rambunctious eleven-year-old named Andronikos jumped on board to sail away with the couple, waving regally to the crowd—after all, it was his father’s boat.


I learned the next day that most of the guests went on to an after- party at a Corfu bar, but the rest of us wended our way back through the fortress to sleep at the Corfu Palace Hotel, serene in the knowledge that the twice-wed-in-one-day Emilio and Eleni sailed into married life buoyed by the love of everyone around them and the luck of a wedding date they’ll never be able to forget—no matter how old they become.

They have even composed a mathematical formula to express it all:

“E squared plus ten cubed equals double happiness.”

Next: Wedding 10-10-10, the Prequel: Pomegranates, Preparing the Wedding Bed and the Island Populated by Rabbits, Pheasants and Menios.