ALI PASHA & THE BLOODY HISTORY of IOANNINA

This is a week when we should be remembering and mourning the genocide committed by the Turks on the Armenians, which began a hundred years ago today (and  took the lives of many Anatolian Greeks as well.).  But I am reprinting here an essay I first posted in August of 2009, because some friends are visiting Greece soon and asked me about the tragic history of Ioannina, the provincial capitol of Epiros, Greece, where we stay every summer before heading up the mountains to Nick's native village of Lia on the Albanian border. 

 

Ali Pasha on the Lake of Ioannina

On our first evening back in Greece, last week, a stroll down the main street of Ioannina took us past reminders of the cataclysms that have racked this area for the past 200 years. The entire population of the city seemed to be outside, enjoying the perfect weather. Ioannina (also spelled Yannina) is the provincial capital of Epiros and the stepping-off place for my husband Nick’s village—about an hour’s drive farther north on a mountain just below the Albanian border.

I often remind myself, when I’m in Greece, that any Greek my age—old enough to remember World War II—is a survivor of the Italian and Nazi occupations, the terrible starvation that followed, and the bloody Civil War that rent the country after that. The Civil War still splits the populace along political lines when you bring up stories like that of my mother-in-law Eleni Gatzoyiannis, who was imprisoned, tortured and killed in 1948 for engineering her children’s’ escape from their occupied village. She began planning the escape when the Communist guerrillas started collecting children to send to re-education camps behind the Iron Curtain. (This was called the pedomasoma, and while many claim it never happened—like Holocaust deniers— in fact 28,000 children were taken from their parents and reared in communist countries.)

In Ioannina, as elsewhere, Greeks traditionally take an evening stroll—the peripato-- families walking together, pushing baby strollers, the youth checking each other’s fashion statements. Everyone eventually sits at an outdoor cafe to enjoy an iced coffee or a glass of wine or ouzo and watch the passing parade. (Dinner doesn’t start until ten p.m.). The peripato is especially popular in towns on the sea or on a lakeside harbor like Ioannina.

Outdoor restaurants, hammered metalwork, memorial to the Jews taken from Ioannina, the gate to the walled Turkish city

Tourists have not yet discovered this city, which is little changed from the days when Lord Byron visited the notorious tyrant Ali Pasha in the walled Turkish Kastro which still stands—its walls intact, its minarets and palaces now turned into museums.

In Ioannina we stayed in the new Grand Serai hotel, ornately decorated with marble, crystal chandeliers and copies of paintings showing Lord Byron and Ali Pasha—the Albanian vizier who tried to seize control of the area from the Turkish Sultan in Constantinople.

Ali Pasha had 300 women in his harem and 300 boys in his seraglio, so they say in Ioannina. Most of them were kidnapped from the neighboring Greek villages—pretty girls for the harem, promising boys to be trained as soldiers in the Janissary corps. Turkish rule ended in Northern Greece in 1913, but even after that, village women like Nick’s mother Eleni, warned their daughters to cover their faces with their kerchiefs to avoid being kidnapped for their beauty. Nick’s father, who was born in 1891, wasn’t sure of his exact birth date because his mother, like everyone else, lied about the age of the boys, making them younger so they wouldn’t be taken as Turkish soldiers.

Melodramatic painting of the killing of Kyria Frosini, one of Ali Pasha's most famous victims

Ali Pasha had a habit of drowning individuals who displeased him by sealing them in sacks weighted with stones and dropping them into the bottomless Lake Pamvotis below the walls of the Turkish Kastro. They say that in the morning mists over the lake you can see the ghosts of the women who died there, including Kyria Efrosini, the lover of one of Ali Pasha’s sons, who tried to sell her expensive ring in the marketplace. A famous painting portrays her and her maids, who were drowned with her, being rowed to their death by grinning evil Turks.

Taxi-boats to the island, entrance to the walled city

Today the lakefront is the scene of excellent restaurants and nightclubs which are filled to overflowing with the youth of the city, partying late into the night. Even at midnight, families are out, dining al fresco as children enjoy a Lunar Park of carnival rides and outdoor shows of traditional Greek shadow puppets. There are the gypsies, selling everything from mixed nuts to cheap Chinese electronics, and the little ferryboats, chugging to and from the island in the middle of the lake. Day or night the lakeside is a happening scene,

Ali Pasha was assassinated in 1822 in his summer home on the large island in the middle of the lake (which has many tavernas featuring freshwater fish like trout, plus eels and frogs legs.)

Ali Pasha nd his wife Kyra Vassiliki, who  facilitated his murder

Ali’s wife was Kyria Vassiliki, who was kidnapped (if I remember correctly) from her village of Plessio at the age of 15. The old man trusted the lovely Vassiliki, but she learned of his plan to torch Greek villages and she abetted assassins sent by the Sultan in Constantinople—giving a signal which allowed the killers entrance to Ali Pasha’s island home, where they shot him from the floor below.

The Turks cut off Ali Pasha’s head and carted it to the Sultan in Constantinople, along with Vassilki as a witness—to prove that the tyrant was dead. His headless body was buried under an elaborate wrought- iron cage in Ioannina, still standing near the mosque that is now a museum.

In gratitude for saving her fellow Greeks, Kyria Vassiliki was returned to her village and became the first Greek woman to receive social security.

As we walked down the main street--Averoff— toward the lake front, we passed the entrance to the Turkish Kastro, and a shrine to two local Greek warriors who were hanged by the Turks from a nearby plane tree. They are now saints.

Then we passed a monument to the Jews of Ioannina, who lived mostly within the Kastro—near the ancient synagogue which still survives (although there are rarely enough men to make a minion.) A sign says in both Greek and English, “In memory of our 1,850 Jewish cohabitants who were arrested on March 25th, 1944, and executed in the Nazi concentration camps”. That is another story in Ioannina’s bloody history and one that is still being written about.

As we approached the lake, we passed a warren of shops featuring wares of hammered copper and brass as well as silver filigree: traditional handicrafts of Ioannina. Some of the objects are made from mortar shells left from the war.

Then we reached the lakeside, where the music was blaring and the populace was eating and drinking and admiring the view. Aside from some lakeside statues of veiled women, representing the victims of Ali Pasha, there was no sign of the city’s tragic history, only merriment and music on a balmy summer night.

No, I Don’t Want to Die at 75!

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I imagine by now you’ve heard about the kerfuffle over the article in the October  Atlantic by Ezekiel J. Emanuel titled “Why I Hope to Die at 75”.

Ezekiel Emanuel is a very distinguished scientist.  He is director of the Clinical Bioethics Department at the U.S. National Institutes of Health and heads the Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania.  He was a primary architect of Obamacare.  And he is 57 years old.

Needless to say, his 5,000-word piece evoked a lot of debate, although everyone agreed he makes some important and startling points.  They are his reasons for saying that he hopes to die at 75 and that after he turns 65, he plans to discontinue all his health care—no flu shots, colonoscopies, surgery, pacemakers or heart bypasses. No cancer treatments or antibiotics.  He quotes  Sir William Osler, who said in a classic turn-of-the-century medical textbook, “Pneumonia may well be called the friend of the aged,”  because it kills you quickly and relatively painlessly.

Emanuel cites, scornfully, what he calls the “American immortal”, who is “obsessed with exercising, doing mental puzzles, consuming various juice and protein concoctions, sticking to strict diets and popping vitamins and supplements, all in a valiant effort to cheat death and prolong life as long as possible.” He thinks this “manic desperation to endlessly extend life is misguided and potentially destructive.”

He also includes a graph to show that creativity “peaks about 20 years into the career, at about age 40 or 45, and then enters a slow, age-related decline.”   He writes, “The fact is that by age 75, creativity, originality and productivity are pretty much gone for the vast, vast majority of us.”

Furthermore, “A third of people 85 and older  [have] Alzheimer’s.”

Selfish people who insist on living beyond 75 are burdening their children with the “wrong kind of memories.”  [If we live too long] “We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.”

Mr. Emanuel points out that more than half of us oldsters have functional limitations. (The test of whether you’re functioning properly is this: you can walk a quarter of a mile, climb 10 stairs, stand or sit for two hours; and stand up, bend, or kneel without using special equipment.)

He points out that his own father, now in his eighties, had a heart attack and bypass “just shy of his 77^th birthday” and has been slowing down ever since. “Today he can swim, read the newspaper, needle his kids on the phone and still live with my mother in their own house, But everything seems sluggish….no one would say he is living a vibrant life.”

Well, Mr Emanuel, I’m about to turn 74, and I want to tell you that I do not hope to die at 75.  I submit that my quality of life in my late sixties and early seventies is better than at any previous time in my life.  During high school I was miserable.  In college and grad school I was exhausted, overworked and sleep-deprived.  During my thirties and forties I was juggling pregnancies, raising three kids, trying to make a career in journalism, housekeeping—the usual multitasking monster.

Today, every morning, I get up, get myself a cup of coffee and as I settle in to read three newspapers, I breathe a silent prayer of thanks that I don’t have to get up at six a.m., prepare lunches, don office-worthy clothes, push into an over-crowded subway and arrive at the office at 8 a.m.

Here are some of the things I’ve done since turning 65 (most of them since turning 70):

--I went back to my original love, painting, signed up for classes at the local museum, have exhibited and sold art in several shows, and decorated three restaurants with my paintings or photographs.

--I started a blog, “A Rolling Crone” and have written 390 posts in the past six years.

--I’ve traveled to India for a three-day Hindu wedding, visited the Taj Mahal and, in Varanasi, drifted at dawn in a small boat on the Ganges, watching the laughing yogis doing their morning exercises and the cremation ghats burning bodies on shore.

---I’ve visited the El Rosario Butterfly Sanctuary in Michoachan, Mexico, where millions of monarch butterflies spend the winter clustered in the fir trees. This involved climbing a mountainside at such high altitude that I had to stop every 20 yards or so to get my breath, but it was well worth it.

---I’ve visited a beach in Nicaragua at night, lantern in hand, watching hundreds of sea turtle babies emerge from the sand, and helped them in their journey toward the ocean, where they would swim to Africa, then return to this beach one day to lay their eggs.

--and I’ve celebrated Day of the Dead in Oaxaca, Mexico (twice)

--In 2009 I participated in my 50^th high school reunion in Edina, Minnesota, helped gather everyone’s biography for the Reunion Book,  and since then have explored Manhattan with high-school friends during several “mini-reunions”—most recently three weeks ago when we walked north from the bottom of Central Park, stopped for lunch by the boat pond, then visited exhibits in the Metropolitan Museum of Art , and wound up eating dinner in the Great Hall Balcony Bar accompanied by live classical music.

---The most life-enhancing thing I’ve done in my 70’s is to meet my newborn first grandchild in August of 2011.  Since then, I’ve traveled with her and her parents to Nicaragua, Greece, Miami and Manhattan, watching her grow into her own person and sharing with her the places, songs, games and books I loved 70 years ago , when I was her age. (As every grandparent knows, rearing your own kids is wonderful, but you never have time or energy to watch and wonder at their development; you’re just too tired and worried about doing things right.  That’s why being a grandparent is so much more fun.)

My mother died at the age of 74 of cardiomyopathy after a long, slow decline to the point where she was too weak to open the door to her bedroom and weighed about 85 pounds.  But she didn’t want to die at that time.

My father died at 80 after about six years of suffering from Parkinson’s Disease and dementia—perhaps Alzheimer’s.  He spent the last year or two unable to communicate, curled in a fetal position.   That’s why I say that-- if and when I’m diagnosed with Alzheimer’s-- I intend to investigate and schedule an illegal physician-assisted death.

(Mr. Emanuel writes, “Since the 1990s I have actively opposed legalizing euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide.”),

But for the moment, as I prepare for my 74^th birthday, I still take Pilates classes, wear my “Fitbit” to measure my daily activity, and manage to rack up more than 10,000 steps a day.  I still can sprawl on the floor to play with my granddaughter or lift her into her stroller. I still can drive the 180 miles between our Massachusetts farmhouse and her Manhattan apartment, while listening to CDs in an effort to learn Spanish—which she speaks to her other grandma.  I can still do the crossword in the Times or read a menu without wearing glasses.

But I‘ll probably need them 18 years from now, Mr. Emanuel, when I’m scanning The New York Times for your obituary.

Living to 104—A New Kind of Old Age

The most respected medical journal in the world, The Lancet, published a paper earlier this month that predicted that at least half of all babies born in America in 2007 will live to the age of 104. Researchers at the Danish Aging Research Center said that most babies born since 2000 in rich countries like the US, the UK, Japan, etc., will celebrate their 100th birthdays—and that there is no limit on human longevity!

Here’s another nugget from the Lancet article: Since the 20th century, people in developed countries are living about three decades longer than in the past. Surprisingly, the trend shows little sign of slowing down.

This is very good news for our grandchildren, but what does it mean for those of us who have already entered cronehood?

Well, the same report predicted that in 1950, the likelihood of survival from age 80 to 90 was 15 percent to 16 percent for women and 12 percent for men, compared with 37 per cent for women and 25 per cent for men in 2002.

That means that today, chances are very good that we over-sixty women will live to celebrate our 90th birthday.

(Two weeks ago, as I reported in this blog, I traveled back to Minnesota for my high school class’s 50th reunion. During the weekend, I was absolutely astonished to find out how many of my 68-year-old classmates still had living parents in their late nineties! My own mother died at 75 and my father at 80.)

Reacting to the article in The Lancet, The New York Times devoted most of its op-ed page on Oct. 19 to discussing previous ideas about the stages of a man’s life and a woman’s life.

Reporter Ben Schott wrote: “Researchers at the Danish Aging Research Center at the University of Southern Demark suggested that those born in developed countries could now be considered to have four stages of life – CHILD, ADULT, YOUNG OLD AGE and OLD OLD AGE.”

There followed charts and lists recording “some of the many other divisions of mankind’s lifespan, proposed by a variety of writers.”

They cited Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage….one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages….” etc.

And Hippocrates: “Infant (0-7), Child (8-14) Boy (15-21) Youth (22-28), Man (29-49), Elderly (50-56), and Old (57+)“

And the Times cited the traditional division of a woman’s life into “Maiden, Mother and Crone” which I discussed in a previous post titled “What is a Crone, anyway?”

I love learning that the Danes decided there were two stages of old age. Since 50 is clearly now “middle-aged”, I suspect they consider 60-80 as “Young old age” and 81-100 to be “Old old age”. Maybe after we turn 81 we can refer to ourselves as “Uber Crones” or “Supercrones”!

You’ll notice that Hippocrates, four centuries B. C., considered anything over 57 to be living on borrowed time.

You’ll also notice that every study of longevity gives women a longer life span than men. Why, I don’t know, but I suspect one reason that women live longer is that women are able to share their ailments and concerns and problems with each other and to derive comfort from their women friends and relatives, and men are not so good at this—they tend to be “manly” and bottle it all up inside.

The Lancet study suggested that shortening the work week and extending people’s working lives would further increase life expectancy and health. Another thing I learned from my classmates and their bios in the Reunion Book is that many men and a few women wrote that they “tried and failed” at retirement around the age of sixty-five and have now at 68, gone back to work—often in a different field or as a volunteer.

Nowadays it’s ridiculous to think of stopping work at 65 and preparing to die. If we believe in the four-stage system suggested by the Danes, we’re still in “young old age” and have nearly another twenty good years ahead of us when we can be useful and creative and donate our skills and energy to the common good.

It’s exciting to be a crone (over sixty) in this new age of increased life expectancy.

I belong to a woman’s group called “Salon” that meets about once a month to discuss various topics of interest, and tomorrow we are addressing the question “What are your plans for living a full life as our bodies and minds age?”

It’s a very timely topic, especially with our increased life expectancy, and I promise to pass along any pearls of wisdom I learn.

What do YOU do to live a full life as our bodies and minds age? Comments would be appreciated below or at joanpgage@yahoo.com.

(By the way, I wanted to discuss the new life expectancies in this weekend’s essay. Next weekend it will be “Do You Believe in Ghosts? Do I?”, drawing from the 100 letters I received from people who believed their houses were haunted. During the week there will be a Crone Complaint on Tuesday and some posts about art and the “Story behind the Photograph” on Thursday and Friday.)

MY 50TH HIGH SCHOOL REUNION!

(The design above, for the reunion invitation, was created by classmate Cary Carson.)


Tomorrow (Friday, Oct. 9) I get on a plane to fly from Boston to Minneapolis to attend the 50-year reunion of my class of 1959 at Edina Morningside High School. This is scary and exciting, nerve-wracking and exhilarating. It’s an event that many of us have been planning for more than a year. I was privileged to be one of the editors collecting bios and photos from 187 of our nearly 300 classmates for the Reunion Book. (Forty classmates are deceased and 22 of them have memorial pages in the book.)

High school was definitely NOT the happiest time of my life. I longed to get away from Edina, Minnesota, where we all seemed so homogeneous and competitive. Immediately after graduation, I traveled with a group of students to Europe for most of the summer and fell in love with travel—even though it was the ultra-budget variety. (The first hotel in Germany was a barely converted stable that still smelled like horses.)

At the reunion, I hope I’ll recognize my fellow classmates. The super-conscientious organizers of the event have created name tags for us—presumably with our high school yearbook photos—for ease of identification, but of course I’m too vain to wear my glasses so I probably won’t be able to read them! And I’m notoriously bad with names—can hardly remember those of my own children.

But I know from collecting the photos and bios that many of us have not changed that much in looks, despite the half century that’s gone by. What surprised and delighted me was how we’ve all traveled in different directions and survived a stunning variety of challenges.

As teenagers we all seemed pretty much alike. As 68-year-olds, there are plenty of classmates who describe lives filled with grandchildren, of course, and golf, tennis and going south for the winter. But who knew there would be so many senior citizens riding motorcycles, flying their own planes, women racing ATVs and jumping horses, painting portraits and writing books and deep-sea diving?

Some classmates described living on a boat or isolated in a lighthouse, raising their own grandchildren, writing movie scripts or poetry, serving in the CIA, surviving cancer, leading congregations, missions, Bible study groups and pilgrimages. One man who lost a leg as a youth founded a company making prosthetic limbs. A woman has spent years working with rescue dog rehabilitation in the treatment of veterans suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Another woman lived on a sailboat for 30 years, performs as a cabaret singer and has written books about a French poet and an Indian tribe in Panama.

Many of our classmates have suffered loss of a spouse through death or divorce and then found love late in life. And some are currently struggling with disability or disease, but still fighting to appear at this reunion.

In our adult lives, my generation has lived through the most momentous changes in history—the sexual revolution, the civil rights movement, political assassinations, Viet Nam, equal rights for women and the technological revolution. We basically invented teenagers and rock ‘n’ roll. Now we’re working out new ways to cope with old age.

I expect to learn a lot of fascinating and illuminating stories over this coming weekend, and when I get back from Minnesota, I’ll share what I’ve learned. This isn’t going to be our grandparents’ Fiftieth Reunion!