By all rights Kostas should be known as Kostas, the Baker, having been denied his true profession through the actions of a few men who gathered one night to draw lines on a map. And thus change the trajectory of Kostas's life along with a few thousand others.
Back in the 1940s, when Kostas was a child, his family home was located in a place called Northern Epirus in Greece and the family bakery was in the port of Igoumenitsa. The house and the bakery were not terribly far from each other. Travel between them was somewhat like commuting from today's suburbs to a nearby city. The bakery was a successful business, one that would be passed down to Kostas as he came of age -- as was the Greek custom on the countryside and still is today in many cases.
However, in 1946 the winners of the second world war split their bounty and a line was drawn overnight, absconding a piece of Greek land that instantly became Albanian land under a communist government.
The borders were immediately sealed.
Kostas's father had decided to stay in the bakery to work a little extra that night, while his wife returned home with the children. In the morning she awoke to find she was a single parent living in the communist country of Albania. The quality of life in communist Albania was far from that which the family had been accustomed to, with their modest lifestyle in Greece. They suffered greatly.
And Kostas never saw his father again.
Forty-four years later, the Albanian border opened -- along with the fall of other communist countries in Eastern Europe. The "Albanians" mostly disregarded the legal avenues of immigrating to Greece and poured over the border looking for a better life. My mother-in-law, Chevi, was known to have harbored some of those transients as told in the blog post, The Rebel. Some of them had not known much of their heritage in Greece, while others had heard stories from parents and grandparents of days gone by. For Kostas, the ability to see Igoumenitsa again was a dream he'd hoped for since the day the borders were sealed.
"I'm going home," he told his wife. Now an older man with married children and grandchildren, he became part of that exodus. He settled in Igoumentitsa alone at first.
His children were Albanian. They were among those who only knew Greece from their father's stories. Kostas's plan was to work and send provisions or cash back to them as they were unable to make the trip legally, for only he had the required Greek citizenship papers.
Kostas is the roofer who worked on our Margariti house, and basically saved us from the devious Roofer of Senitsa. Kostas is the one with the straw hat in the photo.
Here is an excerpt from The Nifi featuring Kostas's role in our life:
. . . The circumstance was bearable only because we had expected The Roofer From Senitsa to begin construction soon and when it was done, we'd be able to move back into the rooms of the little house. But he didn't show up and time passed. Nick sought him out and talked to him again, and he promised to begin within a few days, but a few days turned to weeks and then we questioned whether The Roofer From Senitsa would ever begin.
"Don't worry," he reassured us, "I'll work on it when you've left and you'll have a perfect roof when you come back."
That's when Nick realized what was happening and with a few choice words, he told The Roofer From Senitsa what he could do to himself, and fired him. But I was baffled.
"What's going on?"
Nick explained. "This guy is waiting for us to leave so he can do the job when we go home—when no one’s here to see what he’s doing. He wants the money and then he’ll probably use fewer beams, probably not the quality I want. Without me or my brother here to watch how he's building it, he could pretty much do whatever he wants."
Eftihia told her brothers of a quality roofer she knew in Igoumenitsa, but he didn't drive. He would need a ride back and forth every day.
There were only eleven days left and although The Igoumenitsa Roofer had a son-in-law who worked with him, two single workers would not be able to finish in that time. Nick and Fotis would have to help. Eventually, we would all help by carrying the roof tiles up the ladder, handing the workers tools, and bringing them water.
The work was started early every morning. Chevi would cook a large midday meal which we all would stop to eat, but no one would take a siesta—including the neighbors, though they had no choice in the matter—and after ten days, the roof was finished, one day before our departure. Chevi, in keeping with the old traditions, insisted on affixing a wooden cross to the roof with a clean towel hanging from one end and some apples from the other. This was to show that the final step in making the structure a true home—the completion of the roof—had been accomplished. The cross, a symbol of a Christian home, was something of importance to a woman who rarely visited her church but was ingrained with memories of a time when one's religion determined survival. The towel was a message to all who viewed it that this was a family who respected its workers, thus providing a towel for their use, and the apples symbolized a fruitful future for the inhabitants of the home.
The work was started early every morning. Chevi would cook a large midday meal which we all would stop to eat, but no one would take a siesta—including the neighbors, though they had no choice in the matter—and after ten days, the roof was finished, one day before our departure. Chevi, in keeping with the old traditions, insisted on affixing a wooden cross to the roof with a clean towel hanging from one end and some apples from the other. This was to show that the final step in making the structure a true home—the completion of the roof—had been accomplished. The cross, a symbol of a Christian home, was something of importance to a woman who rarely visited her church but was ingrained with memories of a time when one's religion determined survival. The towel was a message to all who viewed it that this was a family who respected its workers, thus providing a towel for their use, and the apples symbolized a fruitful future for the inhabitants of the home.
The year of the roof left us exhausted, and it was time to go back to a schedule more grueling than any in the past. The bitter taste of that summer kept me away for several years, while Nick took some off-season visits to see his mother and to install windows and screens in the house.
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