A HEAVY OBLIGATION: THE SHIPWRECK OF THE ORIA
A HEAVY OBLIGATION: THE SHIPWRECK OF THE ORIA
Description
In the days after the shipwreck of the ORIA, a hand-carved Italian icon washes up on the beach. It will weigh heavily in the family of Kalomira Georgakopoulou for decades.
Part of Collections
11 Podcasts
DOWN BY THE SEASIDE
Tags
Credits
Interviewee
- Kalomoira Gewrgakopoulou
Interview by
- Stayros Blaxos
Podcast Producer
- Stayros Blaxos
Sound Designer
- Iasonas THeofanou
Sound Editor
- Dhmhtrhs Papadakhs
Video Director
- Stefanos Mpertakhs
Voiceover
- Eva Kesserling
Kalomoira Georgakopoulou. I was born in Koropi in 1938. My father was a magistrate, my mother a teacher. They met in Koropi and got married. During my childhood, from when I was born to seven years old, I lived here, in Charakas: they bought the land from the council. My father must have liked sheep. He bought sheep, cultivated the land, planted lots of vines, cereal crops...
Meanwhile, the war had started, and we moved here for safety. There were no houses around! The houses were in Legrena—they were shacks then—and the other houses were in Anavyssos. In between was a jungle, mostly herds of sheep. Many boats would come to fish in the sea here: there were a lot of fish, whitebait and such. There was just us, we were kings of the desert, just...
There were Italians on the shore, and the Germans had set up camp a little further up. Every evening, the Italians would parade here and go to find the Germans. They warned us to stay inside, because if they found us outside, they would kill us. I can still hear the sound of their boots as they passed in front of our house. Suddenly, the Germans came and set up properly, the Italians were gone. And then there was the shipwreck...
Around 7 or 8—it was night, anyway—the wind was really strong. The dogs were barking wildly and aggressively. It was so dark, you couldn’t see anything. In those days, they left a... We called it a ‘skylight’, a part that was open, to let light into the room. We were round the fire my mother had lit... We had an oil lamp. That was all the light we had... And a vigil light.
Suddenly, the house was filled with light. A powerful light! We went outside, and my mother said: ‘A flare!’ After a short time, another flare. It was like daylight! Of course, I didn’t know what the word ‘flare’ meant, and my mother said: ‘There’s a ship in trouble, we have to do something!’ There was no light, no telephone, no car...
The same night, three men—from what my mother told us, I couldn’t tell if they were Italians, but anyway they were Germans—and they asked us to show them the way to Lavrio. My mother had an employee, and he knew a few words from here and there. She sent him with them, and he took them to a certain point, and they left.
By morning, the wind had fallen, the sun was shining, but the sea was not the sea we knew. It was covered... Even from a distance we could see something brown...
My aunt, one of my mother’s sisters, came for me and said: ‘Let’s go to the beach and see what’s happened’. As soon as we got there, the first thing I made out was an Italian, completely naked, like he was pleading, on his back, motionless: he had drowned.
As soon as she saw this, my aunt said to me:
‘Let’s get out of here. Let’s go home!’
‘No’, I said, ‘I’m going to see. To check if he’s alive or dead!’
I went and I spoke right in his face, ‘Please speak’. Psst-psst, I’m a little cat’, like we say to small children... Nothing. We were in shock. When we got back, my mother said to one of the employees we had: ‘Go and bury him’. And he went and did what he had to do.
The next day, my aunt said: ‘Let’s go and see if he buried him. Did he do what your mother told him?’ And so, we went. He was completely buried—now don’t imagine it was a proper grave; the man had taken sand and thrown it over him—but we saw that his hand was sticking out. Had we buried him alive? Was it some mouse? Did a jackal try and dig him up? I don’t know. That’s the hard part for me to get over. Because I had decided that he was dead. And I don’t know if he had died! OK, he didn’t speak. So what? He could have come out of the sea exhausted from everything he had gone through and fainted. How would I know?
My mother kept me away. She didn’t let me go back to the sea because there were bodies everywhere. Everywhere! Over the next few days, we found lots of skulls. There were a lot of jackals in the area back then. We could hear them, packs of them coming in the evening, howling. They found food there. And our dogs, too. I mean, the dogs went, dug, and found them. For the next few days, they were fresh: the men had just died. My mother would gather the skulls and give them to the employees we had here, and they took them to bury them. I mean to say... These people died twice. Once in the shipwreck when they drowned, and then, they suffered after death on the land.
There were many things that washed up, so many... My brother, who went after two or three days, behind my mother’s back, found an icon and brought it here. And he said to my mother:
‘Mum, I found this’. As soon as she saw it, my mother said: ‘That’s some soldier’s good-luck charm. From a mother’, she said, ‘a wife, or a sister... It’s from one of the Italians’. She was a teacher, so she knew. She saw that it was carved in the Italian style. She put it with our icons.
And every day, when she said her prayers, she said, ‘God forgive the Italians, too… In green pastures...’ and all that... She did this every evening, until the day she died, in ‘73.
After ‘73, when we inherited, we didn’t inherit just things, we inherited other habits. This habit was passed on to me. Deep inside, I wanted this thing to go. It wasn’t ours. It should go home, to someone it belonged to anyway. I said to my neighbours—here in Legrena—when I went to buy bread, ‘Guys,’ I said, if you see them, tell me, I’ve got something to give them’. They never said anything...
And then, one afternoon, it was a Sunday, I was alone all day here, and I said: ‘OK, I’m going to get everything together and go to Koropi’. When I got to the beach, I saw three flags: the Greek, Italian, and the European Union. I thought: ‘The Italians!’ I stopped and I said:
‘Who is in charge here?’ Mr Telis Zervoudis came over.
I said: ‘Come to my house, I have something to give you’.
They just looked at me... ‘Something from the wreck. Do you want me to bring it or do you want to come?’ Finally, there were convinced, and they all came in a coach, with all the Italians.
I... It was a very emotional moment for me. I gave them the icon. Some asked if they could hold the icon. They tried brushing it with their hands, to see if maybe there was a number, or some sign that it was theirs. They found something... Like they had been given something of one of their own. One of them took off the small badge of a flag that he had on his lapel and gave it to me. Another gave me a bigger flag, which I have there... And they left quietly. I will never forget it...
I was relieved! I said: ‘OK! The moment finally came, I am free of it, the icon can go where it belongs. According to our religious beliefs, we did what we should do. Now, it’s gone from me to go back to where it came from, to those it belongs to. It wasn’t ours. I didn’t want it...
And you know, every Christmas and Easter, we do a ‘forty liturgies’, isn’t that what it’s called? We give my family name to the priest, ‘For the Italians who drowned at Charakas’. And I say to myself, ‘If you don’t read the prayer, priest, at least I’ve done my part. Now, it’s your turn...’ That’s how my mother taught us; that’s what she did... We did what we could, morally, for those who drowned... What else could we feel? For us, they were invaders. How could we have imagined that, in a few days, we would be burying the Italians who frightened us and told us to, ‘Stay inside, because we will kill you if we see you outside!’ But our mother always told us: ‘Dead is dead. It’s finished. We move on’.
That Italian... That Italian... It was the first time in my life I had seen a dead person! I will never forget it... It makes you hard and independent. You get a little wild, without wanting to, because then, we didn’t have the toys that children have today. We would go to the beach, to play on the pebbles and, in the evening, we went fishing by lantern to catch octopus, sea urchins, and limpets, that sort of thing. And then it stopped; it was over. It wasn’t easy... Things were difficult.