The colors of our eternal homeland

by Dimitri C. Michalakis

When I was a kid, I lived on Chios island until I was about seven, and then I returned again a few years later to visit, and I remember the green that flooded the windows of the old Chevy cab that whisked us to the suburb of Kofinas, from all olive trees spilling over on the road, and fig trees, and all the flowers and plants on everybody’s terrace and stoop.

And when the old cab, trailing dust, whisked us finally to my yiayia’s house, with its blue walls, and green door and shutters, and silver door knocker of an Egyptian pharaoh (I don’t know where that came from), I remember stepping onto my yiayia’s taratsa, and being smothered in all her flowers in their shiny-yellow oil tin cans with all that writing on them, next to the well that watered them, and whitewashed blue.

When I was a kid, I thought our neighbors had the most beautiful gardens in the world, and later in the day, when it got cool, and half their garden was shade, and the other half was sun, I would often wander over to play with the kids there who were my playmates. But mostly I was astonished by the veritable world of color that was their own yiayia’s garden, Kyria Oreanthi, who was aptly-named. When she would clack out in her slippers to water all her flowers and plants and the perfume filled the air, it was like smelling the perfumed air of Paradise itself.

And as a kid, when we took the bus to go up to the chorio, I remember the branches of the pine tree lining the road switching on the windows as we made hair-raising turns, and the smell they released like a thousand Christmas trees. A stop along the way was by the villages of Afrodisia and Haladra, where the shade of trees by the mountain spring along the road by Haladra was like losing yourself in a cave, and the water tasted like it was made of ice.

When we got to Kourounia, our village, I remember the grapes hanging from the trestle of her taratsa, and bumping your head, and the fig tree in front of my papou’s store, where the figs were as big as boxing glove and when you bit into them you tasted all the crystalline sugar in their seeds.

Unfortunately, from the reports of relatives, all these have been endangered by the runaway wildfires that consumed Chios recently and I don’t know what still stands. But I’m sure the color has faded from the summer flowers, and the green from the pine and olive and olive trees—who knows if my papou’s fig tree in the chorio or my yiayia’s in Kofinas (where I used to carve my name) are still there—or the eternally-beautiful gardens of Kyria Oreanthi.

To imagine them gone would be like losing a part of myself, and for others as well who have emigrated from there, but still consider Greece our eternal homeland. We only pray that the many churches of our homeland, with their blue domes like a Greek sky and their whitewashed walls like Aegean sea foam, will eternally protect them.