Photo Tribute to a Dad and two Grandpa’s

I posted this for father's day four years ago, but now, while traveling in Greece with daughter Eleni, her husband Emilio and our two beautiful grandchildren--Amalia 3 1/2 and Nicolas, only 11 weeks old, my husband Nick Gage has proved himself a super Papou (grandfather.) Although he still doesn't change diapers.  But he's great at telling stories to Amalia until she falls asleep.

                                                                  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.

Spring Break South Beach, Amalia Style

Since the 1950’s, Florida has been the traditional destination for kids taking a break from school, as immortalized in the film “Where the Boys Are”.  In South Beach, the week leading up to Memorial Day is a hip-hop festival known as “Urban Beach Week” which, according to Wikipedia, “has become known for its over-the-top parties and fashions, as well as incidents of bad behavior.”

Amalia took her spring break from pre-school in South Beach this year during the week leading up to Memorial Day, but her partying was a lot tamer than the Memorial Weekend antics of the hip-hop fans.  Here’s her story of

What I did on Spring Break 2015

The night before we left New York I made a really tall block tower.  It fell down by itself in the night.  I’m wearing my Big Sis top because my baby brother Nicolas was born on April 2, making me a big sister.

As soon as I got to our apartment in South Beach I checked out the mosaics in the courtyard.  The fountains aren’t running but they say they’re going to fix them.

This mermaid mosaic is near our door.

I rode my bike on Lincoln Road, which is a pedestrian mall.

And I took Papou to the alligator store (Lacoste) and bought him this shirt for Father’s Day.  He says it’s his favorite.

Here I am enjoying Happy Hour with Mommy and Yiayia Joanie on Lincoln Road. I usually order hummus.

I ordered a pink heart balloon from the Balloon Man and Lady on Lincoln Road.

He gave me an extra balloon free because I talked to him in Spanish.

I went to the water park in Flamingo Park near our apartment twice.

Papou took me in the water first.

I loved going down the slide into the water and did it a whole lot of times.

Then my Mommy took me in the water.  I'm wearing my green bikini from last year.

Another day I put on a new bathing suit.  It has hearts on it.

We took my baby brother Nicolas to put his feet in the ocean for the first time.

Here he is in a onesie with a monkey eating a banana.  I have a pink romper that's  covered with yellow bananas.

On Thursday Mommy talked about her new novel “The Ladies of Managua” at Books and Books in Coral Gables.  Here she is signing books for some friends and relatives from Nicaragua.  I’m helping.

In Florida I ate a lot of strawberry ice cream—the only flavor I like.  Here I am at the  gelateria on Espanola Way. 

Here I am eating strawberry ice cream at Dylan’s Candy Bar on Lincoln Road.

And here I am with a cone from Hagen Daz.  But it melted before I could eat it.  Yiayia said next time I have to order my ice cream in a bowl—no more cones!

The Last Surviving Grouchy Grammar Nut

So far I've published 421 posts on "A Rolling Crone" since November of 2008. (Some have, I admit, been re-posts.)  In the past few years a number of my posts have been published on The Huffington Post as well.    If I get as many as 10 comments on a post, I'm surprised and pleased.  But the post below, published on The Huffington Post on 04/04/2013, evoked 243 shares, 28 tweets and 728 comments!  It even got me  elected to some "save our language"  internet group which sends me Facebook messages now and then.  Evidently there are a lot more grouchy grammar nuts out there than I thought!

         You know how, in World War II, the Marines employed Navajo code talkers to transmit radio messages because no one but another Navajo could understand the language? Now there is fear that some of these obscure Native American languages will disappear when the last of the elderly code speakers passes on.
         Well I'm 72 and I suspect that I'm the last person on earth who knows the proper usage of "lie" and "lay." Not that I would dream of correcting anyone, such as my fabulously flexible and toned Pilates teachers who say about a dozen times an hour, "Now everyone lay down on your mat with your head facing the mirror."
          I've also given up on "its" and "it's." And of course there's "two, to and too," all of which are texted as "2." In fact, now that texting is ubiquitous, I suspect that all language will soon be written phonetically using numbers, symbols, emoticons and perhaps bar codes.
          It's always an error in The New York Times that sends me off on a grammar rant -- and there was another one today (Thursday, March 28). In the Style Section, in a large, bold pull-quote from an article about photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith taken in the 1960s, I read: "After laying dormant for decades, a second life for photographs taken of a pair of artists on the cusp of fame." Of course, it's supposed to be: "after lying dormant..."
         This "laying" was the last straw after last week, when I saw in The Times a large headline about the economic troubles of Cypress(!) even though, throughout the text of the piece, the economic troubles were ascribed to the island of Cyprus, rather than a species of tree.
          In the olden days, when I was being trained in New York Times style at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, these errors would have been caught by people called copy editors, but I can only imagine that, in this very difficult period for all print media, The Times has been forced to fire all its copy editors for economic reasons.
          That thumping noise you hear is the late, lamented Times editor Ted Bernstein spinning in his grave. Once upon a time, Theodore M. Bernstein was the watchman of the venerable Great Gray Lady as well as a professor at Columbia J School. After he died in 1979, Time Magazine noted, "Theodore M. Bernstein, 74... served as the paper's prose polisher and syntax surgeon for almost five decades, authoring seven popular texts on English usage and journalism... In a witty Times house organ called 'Winners and Sinners,' the shirtsleeves vigilante caught solecists in the act."
         At Columbia J School we often saw Bernstein's "Winners and Sinners" newsletter. Somewhat like the judges on American Idol, Ted Bernstein would periodically praise a brilliant headline or turn of phrase in the NYT and chide and make fun of grammatical and syntactical lapses. The "Cypress" debacle would probably have sent him into overdrive.
            Three years ago, on April 14, 2010, in a post called "Michelle Obama, the Grammar Police and a Cranky Crone," I gently chided the First Lady for a lapse in grammar. Although I think I did it in a friendly way, it almost got me expelled from a women's group I belonged to, as one particularly vehement member insisted it was heartless and morally wrong to criticize her for anything except her political actions. (That blog post was also reprinted in a book called "Grammar Rants" -- and they did not mean that in a good way.)
             The funny thing is, I am a huge admirer of Michelle Obama. Her photograph stands on the top of my desk. And the same day I published that post, I emailed it to her office. Evidently no one there who read it was offended, because ever since, nearly every week, I get an email from the office of the First Lady, or from the President himself asking my opinion of something, or sometimes it's just from "The White House." If the White House had been as offended as my fellow club members by my post, certainly they wouldn't have put me on their mailing list?
              Anyway, I'll reprint below some of what I said about the First Lady and grammar and let you decide whether I was being "heartless." And thanks for sticking with me through this current grammar rant. I feel a lot better now.

     Today [April 14, 2010] I read in all the news media about Michelle Obama's surprise visit to Haiti during her first official solo trip abroad.
     I applaud her for her compassion and for bringing public attention to the devastating needs that still have to be met, especially for the Haitian children.
I'm a huge fan of Michelle's and admire her more than any first lady since, say, Eleanor Roosevelt. But I did wince when I read the statement that she made to the press about her trip. Her insight was perfect but her grammar was not.
     "I think it was important for Jill and I to come now because we're at the point where the relief efforts are under way but the attention of the world starts to wane a bit, " she said.
     What's wrong with that? Take out Jill and you have "I think it's important for I to come now." It's supposed to be: "It was important for Jill and ME." ....
...You don't expect perfect grammar from a baseball player (or from Bob Dylan... writer of "Lay, Lady, Lay"), but maybe you do from a First Lady who's a lawyer, educated at Princeton and Harvard.
      Kids acquire an ear for correct grammar by hearing it spoken by the adults around them; their parents and their role models. But now that young people mainly communicate by texting in a phonetic code, both spelling and grammar are becoming as antiquated as the Model T.
        It's great that Michelle Obama is encouraging kids to eat smart and get out there and exercise, but let's encourage them to mind their P's and Q's and their prepositions, nouns, verbs and grammar as well.

Could Lost Bird’s Tragedy Inspire a Triumph for Native Americans?

Several years ago, I first posted about the Native American baby girl who was found alive under the frozen body of her mother on the blood-soaked fields of Wounded Knee, SD, four days after the massacre on December 29, 1890, that killed  more than 300 Lakota men, women and  children.  I had purchased a  vintage photograph showing the infant in the arms of Leonard Colby, the brigadier general who adopted Zintkala Nuni or “Lost Bird” as the surviving -Lakota called her.  I learned that her life was one of unremitting tragedy.  She suffered every kind of injury the White Man has imposed on Native Americans—including sexual abuse from her adoptive father. She was exploited in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and in early silent films, forced to play stereotypical Indians (which is still happening-- witness the Native Americans who walked off the set of Adam Sandler’s comedy “Ridiculous Six” last week). 

As an adult, Lost Bird saw one child die and gave away another because she couldn’t raise him. She died of syphilis and the Spanish flu on Valentine’s Day, 1920, aged 29, and was buried in a pauper’s grave in California   But 71 years later, her people, the Lakota, found her grave and brought her remains back to Wounded Knee.

I wrote about Lost Bird’s story on my blog “A Rolling Crone” in 2012.  Then, early this year, I received an e-mail from Brian George, a Native American who works at the St. Joseph’s Indian School In Chamberlain, SD, which houses over 200 Native American children whose parents cannot care for them (and there are 100 more on the waiting list.)  Brian told me an intriguing story of how he has taken Lost Bird as his “guiding spirit” and visits her grave every year on the day she died.  While he says he is cynical, he has encountered many unexplainable signs that her spirit is with him. 

Brian emailed me a photograph of a tattoo of the baby Lost Bird on his shoulder, with the word “Wakanyeja” which means “children are a sacred.”  “Every morning I look at the tattoo and vow that our 212 young Lakota students don’t endure the same,” he wrote.  “I have tried to turn her tragedy into an inspiration.  I believe Zintka knows that I am all about helping the Lakota children and she is my guide.  I see endless cycles of poverty, addiction, suicide and abuse…However, the people are resilient, strong and have that special Native sense of humor. I call the reservations in our country “The forgotten America.”

(Today, Monday, May 4, The New York Times published on its front page an article about the epidemic of suicides among the young people on the reservations of South Dakota—especially Pine Ridge, which is on the ground of Wounded Knee.  Since December, nine between the ages of 12 and 24 have committed suicide and 103 more have tried.)

Brian wrote that he is the Major Gift Officer for St. Joseph’s and often travels East on business, so on April 15, I met him in Philadelphia to learn more about his connection to Lost Bird.

 Brian George with photographs of Lost Bird's grave stone

Brian describes himself as a member of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma, but he’s one- third Irish and one-third Scottish.   He grew up in the suburbs of Dallas and never thought of himself as Native American until, at the age of 30, in 1993, he attended the funeral of his full-blooded grandmother. “As I walked in, all these elderly Native ladies ran up saying ‘You look just like your great grandfather’ --a man named  Winchester Colbert.  I looked him up and our likeness is stunning. He was a governor of the Chickasaw Nation and served in that capacity during the Civil War.”

After a divorce in 2007, Brian was working for the Chickasaw Nation outside Oklahoma City as a host at a casino by day and a bouncer by night, but he felt a “hole in my heart.” A number of coincidences drew his attention on Easter Sunday, 2010 to an ad in the newspaper saying, “Want to make the world a better place?  St. Joseph Indian School.”

Brian started at St. Joseph’s as a houseparent. “That hole in my heart has become whole again with the unconditional love I give and receive from the Lakota children I raised and continue to mentor. No more breaking up fights in bars.  Now I help put together lives once shattered by the tragedies of reservation life.  Then a person named Zintkala Nuni, Lost Bird of Wounded Knee came into my life.”

Brian first discovered the story of Lost Bird when he was substitute teaching in St. Joseph’s  “Native American Studies” class. The class watched a 30-minute DVD titled “Lost Bird of Wounded Knee: Spirit of the Lakota.” Then he purchased a book  with the same title, written by Renee Sansom, who was a social worker in South Dakota when a co-worker showed her an old photograph she had found in an attic.  It was the self-same photograph that I bought some years later. Sansom spent the next five years researching and writing Zintka’s story.  In the book, Brian discovered that Lost Bird had spent two years—1905 to ‘06—attending a school named Chamberlain Indian Industrial Boarding School on the same ground where St. Joseph’s is today.

He decided to make the three-hour drive from St. Joseph’s to Wounded Knee to pay his respects to Lost Bird and the other victims of the massacre.  The visit was unremarkable until he was leaving the burial site, when “Something happened. Something touched my back like I had never felt before.  I literally left the ground. I had chills. I knew immediately it was Lost Bird’s spirit coming with me.” 

Brian visits Lost Bird’s grave every  Valentine’s day—the anniversary of her death. “I lay flowers and ceremonial tobacco prayer ties on her grave.  In  2013 I rubbed my left hand across the word ‘Lost’ on her headstone. A few days later, my watch began to malfunction. A jeweler told me that my battery was ‘burnt up’.  I realized it was on the arm that was touching the headstone. I had always heard that spirits use electrical energy to communicate.”

On subsequent visits to the grave in 2014 and 2015, Brian again noticed electrical phenomena. In 2014, “I went to Lost Bird’s grave and took out my iPhone 5 that was fully charged. From YouTube I pulled up the Lakota Healing Song, which is 5 minutes long.  I placed the phone on the grave.  At the end of the song, I picked up my phone and noticed it was completely drained. I showed my girl friend. As we got in the car, she saw a strange kind of bird circling overhead. Then that bird flew about nine feet above, as if it was escorting us.  I told her it was a Scissor-Tail Flycatcher—the state bird of my state of Oklahoma.  Later I found there had only been 12 reported sightings in the history of South Dakota. This time of year it should be in Central America.  Was this, I wondered, a lost bird or Lost Bird?”

On Valentine’s Day 2015, Brian again played the Lakota Healing Song on a fully charged phone, The phone was drained again. This time, in the photographs taken by his girlfriend, there seemed to be a mysterious mist surrounding Brian, despite no visible fog.

He also experienced signs of an electrical nature back at St Joseph’s in the area where Lost Bird had gone to school. “I had left my car in a parking lot close to the Missouri River,” he told me. “It was dark and I looked up at this storage building that was used as a chicken coop in the early 1900’s. The flood light was not on. What I did next is unexplainable.  I asked ‘Zintka, Zintkala Nuni, were you here?’  Immediately the light came on.  I got in my car and drove off.  The next day I asked the maintenance guys if that light was on a timer or sensor and they said no.” 

About a year later, Brian was on the school’s playground sitting on a bench and he noticed the light on the old bulding was out again.  He asked the same question “Zintka, were you here?” and immediately it came on. When other adults asked what had happened, Brian repeated the question three more times, each time with the same result, to the wonder of the onlookers.   “Each time I received an answer exactly after I asked, with no delay.”

“All my experiences with Lost Bird are comforting to me and unexplainable,” he told me. “ I believe she is my  guiding spirit and knows that I was brought to South Dakota to help her people.  She knows that my passion in life is helping the most forgotten and underserved people of a land that was originally theirs.”

Like Martin Luther King, Brian George has a dream--to unify, lead and be a vocal advocate for a better quality of life for all Native Americans.  “Reservation life has many of the same challenges as our inner cities and other third-world countries,” he said, "the difference being the lack of attention by mainstream America.  I embrace becoming the leader who will bring this to light. I want to launch the revival of the Native cultures.  Our commonalities are closer than our differences. This is a time for forgiveness.  I want to create this foundation, to help Native Americans in the areas of education, housing and rehabilitation."

The centerpiece of Brian’s plan is to bring back the 40 acres of land that surrounds the graves of Wounded Knee.  “I want to bring that land back to the Lakota people—and not as a tourist occasion.”

Brian has even written the speech he would give on the sacred ground to mark that moment. “Let us not dwell on yesterday’s injustices and broken treaties,” he would say, “so we can reap the rewards of tomorrow’s dreams and blessings from the Creator.  We must replace bitterness with forgiveness. Forgiveness of the past is the pathway to the future.  Let today mark the beginning of a new era in our stormy and storied relations…As Native people, we must join together and honor all that is right.  The return of these lands is honorable and right.”

No doubt Lost Bird, who spent her short life trying to get back to Wounded Knee, but returned only after her death, would agree.

Today is for May Baskets & May Wreaths

(I almost forgot to re-post my traditional May 1st post.  It's not too late to make a May basket--or better yet a May wreath!  Surprise someone who needs a forecast of Spring!) 

Some sixty years ago, when I was a little girl in (first) Milwaukee, Wisconsin and then in Edina, Minnesota, on the first of  May we would make May baskets out of construction paper and fill them with  whatever flowers we could find in the garden or growing wild. We would hang the baskets on the doorknobs of neighbors—especially old people—ring the door bell, then run away with great hilarity and peek out as the elderly person found the little bouquets on their door.

 Thirty-some years ago, when we moved  to Grafton, MA, I continued the same tradition with my three kids, but then they grew up and moved away.  Just today I looked out at all the flowers popping up in our yard and reflected that all the old people in our neighborhood had died.  In fact, I realized, the only old people left were my husband and myself, so I picked a small May Day bouquet for us out of what’s growing—white violets and purple violets, cherry blossoms, forsythia, wild grape hyacinth--  and here it is.

 In 1977, when the children were all small (the youngest was one month old) we moved from New York City to a suburb of Athens, Greece, courtesy of The New York Times, which had made my husband a foreign correspondent there.  In Greece, even today, whether in the country or the city, on May 1 you make a May wreath of the flowers in the garden.  Roses are in full bloom by then in Greece, along with all sorts of wild flowers. You hang the May wreath on your door.  It dies and dries and withers until, on June 24th, St. John the Baptist’s Birthday, the dried May wreath is thrown into a bonfire.  The boys of the town leap over the flames first. In the end everyone leaps over the fading fire saying things like  “I leave the bad year  behind in order to enter a better year.”

Here is daughter Eleni in 1980 wearing the wreath that was about to go on the door. Next to her is her sister Marina.

 In Greece, even today, you’ll find May wreaths hanging on the front doors of homes and businesses, although I don’t know if anyone still throws them into a St John’s fire.  In Massachusetts, the tulips and forsythia are out, the bleeding hearts are starting to bloom, and soon the lilacs will open, filling the air with their beauty and perfume.  But today I gathered a small bouquet of May flowers and remembered the years gone by.

Spring Has Sprung in Manhattan

  "April is the cruelest month," wrote T. S. Elliot, but for the Gage family, the current month of April, which we spent in New York, has been the best ever, as we greeted a new little grandson and watched the city burst into bloom after a winter of record snow.

On April 2, Nicolas José Baltodano Gage was born--our second grandchild and Amalia's little brother.  And in Central Park, the snow drops were blossoming among the snow drifts.

 On April 5 Baby Baltodano headed for home strapped to his Papi's chest, because home was only two blocks from the hospital.

On April 9, Amalia colored eggs for Greek Easter (on April 12 this year) while Tia Marina, visiting from San Francisco, talked on the phone.  Amalia made the chick and rabbit place cards for the Easter table as well...

...and Nicolas celebrated being one week old.

On April 12, there was an egg hunt at home, followed by church at Holy Trinity Cathedral...

...Nicolas chatted with Amalia from his basket...

...and Uncle Bob's egg beat all challengers at the egg cracking game.

The next day Nicolas enjoyed his first outing-- to Central Park near the boat pond-- but he's hidden under Eleni's breastfeeding shawl...

...while Amalia examined the fountain in her favorite playground, which will squirt water on hot summer days.

On April 18, the first really warm day, people gathered outside their favorite coffee shop in the sun  on Lexington Avenue next to masses of flowers...

...And two statues of the Virgin Mary had their own offerings of fresh flowers.

Tulips were blooming everywhere.

On April 18, because the baby's umbilical cord stub had come off, the family gathered on the balcony to plant it for strength and health in the dirt of one of the trees--a custom in Papi Emilio's native Nicaragua.

Amalia did the digging.

On Monday the 20th,  April showers began, but Amalia was ready, with her rain coat, rain boots and umbrella, for Papou to take her to preschool.

On our last day before returning to Massachusetts, Eleni took us to lunch at a restaurant on 81st Street called Antonucci's, and on the way, she snapped our picture in front of this great grafitti work of art by Nick Walker, an artist from Bristol, England  (not Banksy, who is from the same city.)  We really do love New York in the Spring, especially in April!

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.