Tag Archives: Xirokampi

When We “Empty” Our Ancestral Homes …

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by Panagiota G. Kalkani
Published in The Faris Newsletter, 2026 July no. 84, pages 12-13  

There are many houses in our villages, but also in the cities, that “have to be emptied” after the loss of their last inhabitants as well (…). It is a painful process, especially when it is done by their children and grandchildren. And it is even more painful when the houses are left empty, fall into ruin and collapse…

We had, years ago, such an experience as a family, when over successive visits we emptied “our” house in Goranoi. It was our “pro-paternal” (or “ancestral”) house, that of my great-grandfather and great-grandmother. It was a house built in 1875 (according to the carved lintel) on top of older buildings. It was there that, a few years before the fall of the City [Constantinople], a part of our family, who lived on the Bosphorus and later settled in our area, had taken refuge.

This house was stripped bare year after year, after the death on the Albanian front of our grandfather’s last brother. It fell into ruin, choked with weeds, its foundations undermined (also) by a tragic community failure (in the early 1960s).

Photograph of a house on the square of Xirokambi (from 1810) that remains standing, but empty of people and of the household goods of the families who once lived in it.
(photograph from “Eikones” [Images] by G. Giaxoglou)

I hope, and I will try, that this note in our newspaper will not end up as a tearful description, nor as a simple factual report of a case. This process can be draining but also relieving. It is perhaps a duty to our people who once lived there, but also an opportunity for us who live. It is an opportunity to remember or to look back fondly on moments and events of the family. These are moments and events of everyday life then, difficulties and troubles with sorrows and deaths, but also moments of joy with celebrations, songs and dances.

During the last visit to our ancestral house, our first thoughts and intense memories of the older ones came to us on the ground floor. There was the manger of the mule, used for the visits of my great-grandfather, the doctor, to the patients of the surrounding villages. There were the clay jars for the year’s oil, the barrel for the wine, and the remains of the loom, where the girls’ dowries were woven, along with the woven clothes, bedspread and household ornaments.

In the ruins of the house, a coffee pot was found forgotten in the hearth, pitch-black from the fire that was lit with dry twigs that the boys of the house gathered. Also found, thrown among charcoal and ashes, was a coffee spoon, its lip worn away by the stirring of so many coffees, of so many people, over so many years.

From these objects and tools of the past we also have the possibility to remember reliving the occupations and the living conditions of the elders. I also remember the enthusiasm that was caused by a wooden cane that was found hanging from a nail on the wall of a room. The enthusiasm that it caused resembled the enthusiasm of a researcher-archaeologist authenticating the user of the staff, which, because of its height, could not have belonged to anyone but my great-grandfather, who was very tall…

Out of the ruins we also set aside a few notebooks with the names of the children (now our grandfathers) who wrote (or also drew) in them, and with the signatures and names of their local teachers, who once corrected or graded them. We also found a half-destroyed, improvised Karagiozis figure (without discovering which generation of children it came from…). Finally, in the courtyard of the house, with its high enclosure wall, the masonry oven (which was always burning) and a view as far as the sea, the older members of the family remembered the afternoon gatherings of our whole patriarchal family, with its many branches, around the great-grandfather.

The objects that were found and rescued are perhaps few and without material value, but they remind us “experientially” of the way of life of our loved ones many decades earlier. Just as they remind us of unpleasant moments and events, they also remind us of moments and events of joy that still move us deeply. They have incalculable sentimental value for us, for some (!)

We consciously omitted from this note another—perhaps equally interesting—perspective (or characterization) that views such a process as “museum-like” and the findings as “museum” exhibits. Except for exceptional finds that require safekeeping or display in museums, our approach and recommendation is to preserve, safeguard, and display—in our own homes, whatever keepsakes belong to our own (and only our own) loved ones. In a small museum of our own (…)

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I (Carol Kostakos Petranek) am honored to receive permission from the Katsoulakos family to translate and share articles from The Faris. Translation verification and corrections have been made by GreekAncestry.net. This is the twenty-sixth article of the ongoing series. Previous articles can be viewed here.

Three Old Stories of Barter Economy

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Author: Theofanis G. Kalkanis
published in The Faris Newsletter, Issue 78, July 2023, page 32

Barter economy (or labor) was a common practice in the past in our region and elsewhere. More common was the exchange of labor in olive picking and other agricultural and livestock tasks among families. Usually, barter labor occurred between families, but also between professionals, involving building houses or other activities or even household production of cheese, soap, pasta, etc. However, there were also notable and characteristic cases and stories of barter economy between communities or even between ecclesiastical authorities and the residents or professionals of the villages.

A first case/story is the one that has come down to us and concerns the painting of some of the icons of the altarpiece (iconostasis) of the Holy Trinity of Xirokambi. These are the 14 small icons in a row at the top of the iconostasis. As the old resident of the village, Dim. Men. Xanthakos, narrated before his death, an iconographer, Pan. Lazaris, lived in our area during the time of the Italian-German occupation. He painted icons for churches in exchange for olive oil. Each icon of the iconostasis that he painted (in one day, as remembered by D. M. X.) was “exchanged” for a can of oil!

Holy Trinity Church, Xirokampi showing the 14 icons across the iconostasis
Photo by Carol Kostakos Petranek, June 2023

Another story that is characteristic of barter labor (and on a large scale) is the following: In Xirokambi until the early 1960s, long queues of residents lined up in front of the communal faucets at a few points in the village. Everyone waited to fill containers or pitchers, wooden barrels, or metal jugs with drinking water for all uses. At that time, the community council with presidents Georgios and Nikolaos Koumoustiotis successively, commissioned contractors for a large project for the village and its residents. Water was to be supplied to all houses with underground metal pipes from the tank that had been built in Anakolo. The “contract” with all the residents entailed their mandatory personal labor, “exchanging it” for the provision of water to each house. Instead of personal labor, some residents exchanged with the community a worker or an animal for transportation or a skilled craftsman with money or oil. The project was completed in the early 1970s and changed life in our village and elsewhere.

Woman at communal water faucet in the plateia (village square), Xirokampi, July 2018
Photo by Carol Kostakos Petranek

The third case concerns the operation (in the mid-1960s) in Xirokambi of a Branch of the Gymnasium [high school] of Sparta for the students of our area until an independent Gymnasium was established. At that time, many students used to stop their studies after Primary School or continue their studies in Sparta by renting rooms and receiving baskets of food every day… With the initiative of some residents, pharmacist Theof. G. Kalkanis and merchants Elias Chr. Kapetanakos and Ilias N. Liakakos, the establishment and operation of the branch became possible (after persistent efforts). The original and remarkable thing is that the teachers who were transferred from the Gymnasium of Sparta were “bartered” with the oil collected by the parents from the committee (…)

I (Carol Kostakos Petranek) am honored to receive permission from the Katsoulakos family to translate and share articles from The Faris. Translation verification and corrections have been made by GreekAncestry.net. This is the fourteenth article of the ongoing series. Previous articles can be viewed here.

The Smells of Parcels from America

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written and translated by Stratis A. Solomos
published in The Faris Newsletter, Issue 77, December 2022, page 6

During the 1950s and early 1960s, immigrants to America and Canada wanted to help Greece, which was poor at the time. They sent, especially to their relatives, parcels containing various useful items, generally clothes. It is not certain whether this aid was essential to the then rapidly economically developing petty-bourgeois society, but it was certainly welcomed by the poorest. These parcels mainly contained clothes and objects that had new and rather pleasant smells.

The strongest smell was that of clothes. The explanation for most was that they had been disinfected, which reassured those who feared germs. But the reality was that this smell was due to the synthetic fragrance of modern detergent powders, which had been used to wash them. They were still unknown in Greece. They did not arrive until the end of the 1950s. The first and most widespread was the American Tide. Along with this powdered “soap” also came the American “soap-opera,” a long-running sentimental radio and later TV series. The first such Greek soap opera was “Πικρή μικρή μου αγάπη” (My Bitter Little Love), the endless sentimental story of Alexis and Vana, played by Stefanos Linaios and Elli Fotiou.

The parcels were usually sent by relatives. In addition to clothing, they also contained other items, often unknown in the villages. Chewing gum with new flavors and aromas. Toothpastes which it is said that some people, who did not know their use, tried to eat!

My father and teacher Alexander Solomos, who also did educational research, received beautifully bound American elementary school books. With these books, he taught me my first English lessons. These books also had a particular smell, which has since remained an indelible and pleasant memory. I don’t know what caused that smell, perhaps the binding glue used. I rediscovered this smell in my teenage years when I frequented the American Library of Athens and later read American science books.

Sometimes there were also more valuable items like watches, which after consultation were carefully hidden in certain pockets, but most of the contents were clothes of all kinds. Taffeta ball gowns and hats for women. Suits for men. Colorful Hawaiian shirts and plaid pants. Belts with large cowboy buckles. Jackets that featured monstrous comic book characters on the back. With the exception of a few young people from the big cities, American fashion had not yet reached the conservative Greek society of these times. Few dared to wear them, except perhaps during Carnival. T-shirts with visible inscriptions and brands were only seen in the cinema. So it was very funny to see a Greek peasant picking olives wearing a Harvard University t-shirt.

The skillful seamstresses and several equally competent housewives did wonders to transform the eccentric American gowns into dresses compatible with the European fashions of the time propagated by the women’s magazines Ρομάντζο (Romance), Θησαυρός (Treasure) and Γυναίκα (Woman) . The men’s suits, those whose fabric was not too colorful, were transformed by our local Xirokambi tailor Charalambos Arabatzidis. These clothes weren’t worn very much. They were often new. But they were still deliberately wrinkled and a few buttons were removed to make them look second-hand. It seems that there were special customs exemptions for these aid parcels with used clothes. Later, when American jeans, jackets and cowboy boots became fashionable, some shrewd traders devised the ploy of passing off imported goods as packages of “gifts from America’s uncle “.

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I (Carol Kostakos Petranek) am honored to receive permission from the Katsoulakos family to translate and share articles from The Faris. Translation verification and corrections have been made by GreekAncestry.net. This is the twelfth article of the ongoing series. Previous articles can be viewed here.

“Light-Water-Telephone” in Xirokampi (Part 3 – Telephone)

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by George Theoph. Kalkanis

published in The Faris Newsletter, Issue 62, July 2015, pages 3-6

(Note: this post, “Telephone” is the third of three parts describing the earliest modern developments in Xirokampi. Part 1: Light, can be read here; Part 2: Water, can be read here.)

The OTE telephone network entered the houses and shops of the village in the late 1960s and early 1970s. OTE, founded in 1949, succeeding the 3Ts (Post Office [“Tachidromio”] – Telephony – Telegraphy), then began to install telephones connected to automatic dialing systems. The systems for each rural area were operated in the, so-called, Rural Telephone Centers.

In Xirokampi the center was housed for a brief time in the post office that was installed on the ground floor of the house of Dimitris Xanthakos and was to serve the telephones of the inhabitants of the villages of the whole area. The first employee and supervisor was Georgios Evag. Karampelas, who took over all the operations related to telephone and telegraph communications. Then the center was relocated to the ground floor of Ilias Kapetanakos’ house. Panagiotis Il. Komninos and Vassilis Il. Christopoulos also worked at the center temporarily, before Efstratios Ioan. Kritikos was hired as a permanent employee.

In the past, telephones were operated by means of manual systems, whereby the selection of telephone connections was made by means of plugs that operators/answering staff inserted into holes in a panel. They measured with mechanical timers the duration of calls as well, while calls required the turning of a small ‘crank’.

Photo credit: Library of Congress. Kansas City, Missouri. Private branch exchange (PBX) operator at her switchboard in the freight depot, photographer: Jack Delano; created 1943. https://www.loc.gov/item/2017847312/; accessed March 16, 2023

The office of Xirokampi was connected through a telephone line to every neighboring village. Even earlier, communications were made from station to station by telegraph or teletype, which in Xirokampi were originally installed in the house of Sotiris Papadakos (or Kokkinos).

Automation, the expansion of the telephone network and the proliferation of telephones caused (also) in our villages, for some time, an upsurge in pranks among the residents. In Xirokampi, coffee shop waiters would move around with trays throughout the market after telephone orders turned out to be pranks. Also, some people woke up one night after a call from the headquarters – supposedly – of OTE and cut the wires of their phones when they were warned of an imminent explosion of their device (!). However, at the same time they enabled family members who were away – especially abroad – to talk more often and more privately (since the privacy of telephone conversations was not guaranteed by the – very little – soundproofed ‘booths’ in call centers). But they also reduced the frequency of the letters they exchanged, as the postal employees of the time (Dimitris Georgountzos, Georgios Katsaros and Kleomenis Anastasakos) found and claimed.

I am honored to receive permission from the Katsoulakos family to translate and share articles from The Faris. Translation verification and corrections have been made by GreekAncestry.net. This is the tenth article of the ongoing series. Previous articles can be viewed here.

“Light-Water-Telephone” in Xirokampi; Part 2: Water

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by George Theoph. Kalkanis
published in The Faris Newsletter, Issue 62, July 2015, pages 3-6

(Note: this post, “Water” is the second of three parts describing the earliest modern developments in Xirokampi. Part 1: Light, can be read here.)

The construction of a complete network of drinking, running water with pipes in the village was attempted and completed in the 1960s or even the early years of the 1970s, during the presidency, initially of Georgios Koumoustiotis and then of Nikolaos Koumoustiotis. It was preceded by the construction of a small stone tank, under the presidency of Ioannis Karambelas and Efstratios Skouriotis, at the highest point of the village, at the exit of the Anakolo gorge. There, the water was collected with metal pipes from many small springs – such as Sotiritsa – that were expropriated by the state.

Initially – in 1953 or 1954 – “public” taps with brass spigots were installed in central points and in the large neighborhoods of the village. The network, made of metal pipes, did not supply these taps with water around the clock, due to its inadequacy. Thus, the sight of long lines of women with buckets, jugs  or pitchers and wooden water barrels (. . . ) was a daily occurrence, from dawn. It was there that the women informed each other about the news of the village. 

However, the public water fountains made the life of the villagers so much easier, that today’s children cannot imagine. Until then, the transport of drinking water was carried out by springs [“αμπουλάδες”] which gushed with a natural flow in the banks of the Rassina, from a small spring on the right bank of the Anakolo – at the height of the “Komnini” small lake; but also (after the middle of the 19th century) from wells dug in the village, at a depth of 4 or 5 meters, in various places: Iatrideika, Feggareika (of Kalamvokis or Magganiaris), Volteika, Poulakeika, Rassina (of Aivaliotis), Liakeika … All of the wells were communal. Of course, with the operation of the wells, the springs gradually dried up, since the underground water level went down due to constantly increased consumption, especially during the 1960s.

With the completion of the network and the replenishment of the reservoir, water reached every house in 1961 and 1962. But the process was long, arduous and costly. Trenches in the streets had to be opened with a pickax and a shovel. Pipes had to be bought, transported, placed and connected together. Then, the local handymen worked as plumbers in the public network and in the networks inside the houses:  Giannis Chatzigeorgiou, Stavros Argyropoulos, Michalis Tsapogas and Elias Christopoulos. To deal with the large expenditure, the community rulers resorted to the then common measure of compulsory (co-)contribution from the inhabitants – alternatively or additionally – of money or oil, personal labor or the labor of their animals for the transport of the pipes and materials. Each family was estimated to bear the cost of 10 meters of the network.

The consequences of the construction of the water supply network were, of course, crucial for the quality of life of the inhabitants, but they also had secondary, controversial results. Horticultural production increased, but it was also necessary to transport water even from Taraila, bypassing the route of centuries and reducing the underground water. Undoubtedly, however, the project was large and innovative for its time, it improved the life of the inhabitants and attracted new residents from the surrounding villages, being one of the strongest incentives for them.

Part 3 of this series, The Telephone, will be published next.

I am honored to receive permission from the Katsoulakos family to translate and share articles from The Faris. Translation verification and corrections have been made by GreekAncestry.net. This is the ninth article of the ongoing series. Previous articles can be viewed here.