A matter of smile

We climbed to the Upper Town from the steepest steps, through a children's playground whose existence I couldn't even imagine, hidden as it was behind the Austro-Hungarian façades. Short of breath, I was trying to reach her; it wasn't easy, even though we were both kids of fathers born at approximately the same time.

At the top level everything became more familiar and predictable. Or nearly so. The usual crowd was enjoying the sweet dusk, some seated at the benches and the diner and others walking as we were. The musical background, however, held a surprise in store. It was difficult for Nina, a third-generation Greek in Zagreb, to know Gadjo Dilo's remake, let alone the original; neither was I able at the time to explain to her the relation between the verbs "sfyrizo" [part of the song's title, "Sou Sfyrizo", I'm whistling to you] and SerboCroat svirati.

On coming home after the short walk, I remembered that Nina-Demetra's father had asked me to tell him about Greek crooners. The unexpected fan of [Greek singer] Costas Hatzis wanted to widen his repertoire. However, he hadn't heard anything about [crooner] Jimmy Makoulis - who had been my first answer - nor about Tonis Maroudas, who (as I found out through Google) had first sung the song, more than a half-century ago.

Music - played either from the rich collection in his mobile phone, or from satellite Greek TV shows with "music for get-togethers"- is what helps writer and veteran journalist Aris Angelis get a little closer to our country, in which his paternal ancestors, from Smyrna, had only lived shortly. The uprooting of the Angelidis family in 1922 [after the Greek-Turkish war and population exchange] was followed by the usual process: a wirefenced camp on the dry [Aegean] islet of St. George's, passage to an installation we would today call a hotspot at Ermioni [in S. Greece] ― and, in the end, a split of the extended family among Thessaloniki and Athens.

"In the end", I said, but I shouldn't have. The family's adventure had only just begun. In the coming years, the patient woman Eleni Angelidis moved to Yugoslavia, where she lost in turn, one by one, all her immediate family. He husband, a merchant with business reaching up to Belgrade, abandoned her; she had to raise her two kids on her own. Her eldest son Aris was killed in the German invasion of 1941; this is why a street in Bitola is called Angjelovski today, from the Slavicized Greek family name. Lastly, the younger Takis went to the mountains to join Tito's partizans near Banja Luka, together with his stepfather, a military man, descendant of a historical family with its own coat-of-arms, who also became a guerilla. Shortly after the war ended, he begot his only child - but didn't live to see him grow: he died one year later due to an unusual disease. 

Mr. Aris, who took his name from his heroic uncle (and not, as I initially thought, from the more famous and more controversial namesake), didn't have to talk to me about these events. He has written about them vividly in his book From Smyrna to Saigon, a series of interviews ― not only with his Smyrniot grandmother but also with several of his guests in radio shows he ran over the years on Radio Zagreb. Nor did he have anything to tell me about the war of 1991; when I asked him he answered, in perfect Greek, "ikha doulia" (I was busy). When he told me so, while we were sipping wine at his small seaside place near Šibenik, it sounded like evasiveness, similar to that of a Greek clergyman who had used his "studying" as an excuse [when asked about the dictatorship times]. Now, having read the incredible family story, I can better understand not only his unwillingness to speak about the war - despite having the name of its ancient Greek god - but especially the typically Balkan melancholy one often sees on him. 

Despite being relatively tacit, Aris Angelis manages to impress in his own way. Before meeting him in person, I had seen him on a Greek TV documentary of the Balkan Express series. The young reporter was asking him about political life in Croatia, which was then a candidate country for the EU. In a few minutes, the "old hand" took charge. A politician sat - supposedly unexpectedly - at the next table. Mr. Aris became a reporter again and interviewed himself Ivo Josipović, for whom he prophesied that he would become president - something that truly happened some time afterwards. Even during our personal chat, some years later, the retired journalist had his notebook nearby and was taking notes. 

Above all he is a teaser, often with a young child's enthusiasm. Just before we were to watch a football game on TV, he asked me to guess his favorite football team. After letting me struggle with Dinamo and Hajduk and Greek refugee clubs with twin-headed eagle emblems - choices that I considered more obvious due to his family background - he took me by surprise once more. "Aris [Thessaloniki], of course!" he laughed, and then played another Hatzis song, his favorite - and one I hadn't known until that moment: "I zoi ine ypothesis hamogelo" (Life is a matter of smile).

Translated from the original published on amagi.gr.

Gadjo Dilo's song is here.

Tonis Maroudas' original is here.

Costas Hatzis' song on smiling is here.