cheese was kept in salt water in large metal cans, wheels of hard aged cheeses she made from the goat’s milk, tomato products, dried and canned. It was a very extensive pantry.
From the rafters hung various dried teas (which were harvested and dried at perfect timing with their flowers intact) in paper bags to keep them dust free, along with braided and dried garlic, onion and hot peppers. The latter were used to flavor cooked foods but they also had medicinal values.
Her mother learned all about nutrition from her mother which had been passed along for generations. In addition to the family values, stories, prayers, names and nutritional recipes were all handed down as the greatest inheritance they could have given to each other. This was what nurtured families had to carry through their lives.
One of the big containers was cornstarch. I remember I liked the feel of it and the noise it made between my fingers. It was squeaky like new leather shoes.
She used this staple to make us a type of gelatin like Jell-O, but this was all natural, no synthetic colors and flavors, sweetened with honey and flavored with the citrus fruits, my dad raised in great big earthen pots.
In the winter when the teen age boys would carry these humongous pots into our living room, we would decorate the citrus trees for Christmas.
My father was an expert of raising fruits like figs, peaches, kaisi (an apricot with an almond like edible sweet seed). He also trained grapevines to the roof top taratsa (patio.)
He also raised fruit trees to produce a few kinds of fruit, all on the same tree by grafting. He was ahead of his time. Now, you see trees like that in catalogs, 60 years later.
I was born after the dreaded World War II, in 1948, in Thessaloniki. I am what you call, a baby boomer.
In 1940 my family had six children but the oldest one moved to Athens, to find work, so he was on his own, but he also sent money to my mother weekly.
My family then still lived at Serres.
The Germans were approaching Greece leaving death and destruction in their path. Even though my family had six children, my poor father was STILL drafted and he ended up as a Jeep driver in the war effort. Greece needed every available man to fight this war. That is why families were left without incomes without male protection.
My father kissed and hugged each child instructing them to listen to their mother carefully so they can survive this terrible war.
They would all be in his thoughts and prayers always and he would try to come back to them as soon as he could. Malama kissed Achillea and gave him a little bible for protection.
So now my mother was left all alone to fend for her family, and again like her mother before her, she was not a farmer, but she had a family vegetable and herb garden.
She also had a goat and a dozen chickens. This house that had been enlarged by my seventeen year old father Achillea had humongous stone foundations.
These foundations had newly created compartments and there my father had enclosed large containers of provisions. He had firsthand experience with hunger. It was the benefit of living thru three endless wars as an orphan little child by himself therefore he knew what hunger was.
He was building the compartments in the foundation remembering those hard times.
Salted meats and fish (they had no refrigeration), flour, sugar, cornstarch, cornmeal, olives, olive oil, wine, honey, even dry spaghetti noodles and trahana which my mother made by hand, were some of those provisions. He was being drafted and he did not wish his beloved family to know hunger.
After my father was drafted my mother witnessed war atrocities in front of their home and saw a couple, husband and wife, Jewish people, the parents to two little girls, were tortured and then killed by the Germans.
Malama with six children already also hid those two little girls first within her large brood and later in the foundation stones like the provisions and raised them during the war. Yes, this was much worse than the depression the Walton’s endured, in America.
The German soldiers were outside her door and were able to smell the wonderful home cooked meals my mother prepared for her family daily. They would barge in her home unannounced and search for groceries, provisions and almost always they would find nothing but the huge pot on her stove.
Oh! Poor Malama hoped and prayed they would not steal her dozen chickens and her milk goat. These animals provided a very high quality fresh protein for her growing family.
She desperately needed them daily along with her hidden dry goods to provide proper nourishing meals to her family. She also needed to keep her large family healthy. She always knew prevention was better than medication. Her mother taught her again.
So now my mother had eight children to keep clean and there was no money or super markets to buy soaps and detergents.
Not being a farmer she was told by a neighbor to buy herself a piglet for a little money, which will live on family scraps and wild vegetation and when it is of age she can use the meat, the hide to make shoes for her kids at a shoemaker, and the head and the pig’s fat to make a primitive, coarse, green soap.
She did exactly that. By necessity this woman learned to make a fragrant basil green soap, as she described it to me. The problem of cleanliness was solved.
Her daily challenges were immense but somehow, she managed her family well and they all survived till the war was over.
Once she mentioned her old fashioned doctor told her to smoke just three cigarettes per day, one after every meal to relax her. That is exactly what she did. For as long as I could remember she only had three cigarettes per day. Whenever I would travel to Greece I would bring her three cartons of cigarettes and she would have them for over six months. What a disciplined lady!
My mother was simply an awesome lady, she overcame so many challenges, and for a few years she was mother and father to her large family, during the war.
After the war my father came back, and my family moved to Thessaloniki where I was born.
My father claimed I was my mother’s daughter in looks and spirit. I know this lady called Malama is resting in Heaven now. If it was up to me, she would be a saint now.
Yiayia Zafiro (Malama’s mother) on the ship to America, 1930
CHAPTER 7
EFROSSINI
She was born in a taxi cab, on the way to the hospital. Efrossini was a ten pound, healthy, baby girl. It was a hot, August day in 1948, in Thessaloniki, Greece. This is the north part of Greece, the original Makedonia, which is Alexander the Great country.
Mother had seven living children, already. Her very first one was a baby girl who died after a few months. After five more successful births, she also had a set of twin boys, and one of them was born dead. Four years later another boy was born.
Efrossini was born four years after that and the family was elated. After three boys in the row she had a little girl. Her mother had another baby girl four years later. That completed the family of nine living children. Efrossini’s mother Malama
