Meetings With Remarkable Women: Thea Halo & Her Mother

“And yet, heartbreaking though Sano Themia Halo’s story, Not Even My Name, could have been, it is not all black or bleak, for she saw much goodness in people and beauty in life.”—Diana Farr Louis

Eating Well Is The Best Revenge

By Diana Farr Louis

ATHENS Greece—(Weekly Hubris)—4/25/2016—How often do you really get to heroes, or heroines? You can watch them perform on stage, glimpse them across a crowded room, or listen to them give a lecture. I was a speck in the audience when favorite writers of mine such as Mark Mazower, Margaret Atwood, Derek Walcott, and A. B. Yehoshua graced Athens with a visit. But to actually sit in someone’s living room with an author you admire, ask her questions, and look into her eyes with only another 15 or so people present is a rare and precious gift.

Well over a decade has gone by since I first read Thea Halo’s Not Even My Name, a memoir of her mother’s tragic childhood in Turkey, marriage to an Assyrian man three times her age, and subsequent life in New York, where she gave birth to ten children. But the tale stayed with me, because it was so well written, and because it was more than a story of abuse and cruelty suffered by one little girl. It was a history of barbarous behavior, massacres, and persecution that took place a hundred years ago and affected a population I knew little about, the Pontic Greeks from the Black Sea and the Assyrians, whom most people think of as having been extinct for millennia like the Babylonians or Carthaginians.

It’s a story about genocide—the attempt to wipe out a whole people—and that seems especially timely today as we watch the daily slaughter by Daesh in Syria and Iraq of Christians, Yazidis, and Shiites, while tens of thousands of refugees—some potentially their victims—wash up on Greek shores desperate to escape war and make a new start in Europe. And yet, heartbreaking though Sano Themia Halo’s story could have been, it is not all black or bleak, for she saw much goodness in people and beauty in life.

As the eighth of Sano’s children, Thea, who looks as though she could have modeled for Pheidias, grew up knowing their family were just a little different from the standard Americans, mostly Irish, she and her siblings went to school with in Manhattan. Her parents came from Turkey but they were not Turks. Her mother said the Turks had called her people “Rum,” not Greek, and with no kin to speak with she had forgotten their Doric Greek dialect which is so different from Modern Greek. Instead, she spoke mostly unaccented American, cooked American apple pies, sang pop tunes with a lovely voice, and only occasionally made stuffed vine leaves or rolls sprinkled with black seeds that would fill the air with exotic scents.

But even as little girl, Thea viewed her mother as innocent and vowed to protect her and take her back to Turkey one day. Children’s promises are so rarely remembered but, in 1989, when Sano was 79, Thea and she flew to Ankara where they would start their search for her village in the mountains above the Black Sea, the Euxinos Pontos, where Pontic Greeks had settled in the 9^th century BC. They could not even find Iondone on the map.

Iondone (pronounced Ay-on-dony) would have been recognizable as a colloquial rendition of Ay Antoni, or Aghios Antonios, if Thea and Sano had known Greek, which they did not. Still, after long bus rides closer to the Black Sea and a series of coincidences, they found another Pontic Greek-American looking for his roots who instantly made the connection and pointed the place out on a map: a cross symbolizing a Greek settlement. The welcoming, kind people they met on their search made Thea question “the strange dichotomy [between] Turkey’s atrocious history . . . and its warm, receptive people.”

Her mother answered, “It was never the people . . . it was the government. Mustafa Kemal. Ataturk. He was the one. Not the only one, but he was the one.”

At this point in the story, before they reach the village, we read in Sano’s voice a description of the happiness and hardships of her family’s life between 1910 and 1920, when they lived in a farming community where her father and grandfather had a smithery, where Turks and Greeks helped each other, and where the house was always full of cooking smells, new babies, and love.

Her tale is full of detail, conversations, pranks and scandals (as when a too-young couple elope), and warm memories of a mother’s touch or a grandfather’s garland of chestnuts for his favorite grandchild. The memories belong to Sano’s first ten years, and Thea transcribes them with unerring skill, bringing readers right into every scene. She also slips in the rumors of troubles and killings in other Greek communities and the increasingly sinister presence of strangers who frighten Sano as they lurk closer and closer to home.

The lively language and ability to hold our attention is all the more remarkable because, as Thea tells us, she had been an artist until that trip, a painter not a writer. But her mother’s story, which up to then she had not fully revealed even to her children, had to be told, so Thea resolved to do it. How would be another matter. The words would not come. How to start?

One day, she stopped to examine a pile of books abandoned on the sidewalk and they all happened to be creative writing manuals. Thea carried them back to her apartment and opened one. It contained exercises and commentary. A girl was asked to write a story about her parents’ divorce. Her first attempt was a maudlin collection of overwrought feelings and murky conjectures. The instructor’s comment was clear and direct: “Just tell the story.” The girl’s second version was just fine. And Thea learned the lesson, too, perfectly.

Just tell the story. As Thea said, “The memories are my mother’s, but the sunsets are mine.” In other words, as an artist, she could fill in the gaps, providing the color, and amazingly the dialogue, that would bring the scene to life.

In her book, Thea Halo breaks off her mother’s account when the soldiers come to rout the villagers from their homes and herd them on the forced march across central Turkey to the Syrian border, during which hundreds of thousands of Pontic Greeks would starve to death or collapse from illness and exhaustion. But before she reverts to the five-year personal saga of hunger, pain, abandonment, and loss, she provides a 15-page history of the Young Turks’ plan to rid Asia Minor of Christians, after their accession to power in 1908.

And that was how she began her talk to us one Wednesday morning in March at the home of a friend in Glyfada, an Athens suburb. Ever since writing her mother’s memoir, Thea has been actively working towards achieving recognition of the Pontic and Assyrian genocides of the early 20^th century. Everyone has heard about the slaughter of the Armenians, but she discovered there’s a widespread reluctance to admit that any other peoples shared their fate, a desire for an “exclusivity of suffering . .  . and an example of the tribalism that is the cause of almost all the world’s misery.”

Thea compared the silence to the loss of her mother’s name. After eight months’ on the road across Turkey, having watched three daughters die, Sano’s mother “gave her away” to an Assyrian family near Diyarbakir who she hoped would look after her. The lady of the house, a particularly cruel woman, could not or would not pronounce the name Themia. Although nobody else had a problem with it, she assigned the girl a Kurdish name, Sano, and it stuck. Themia lost her language, too, with no one to speak Greek with, and picked up Arabic.

Although at the time the international press was filled with stories about the forced marches and massive loss of life among Pontic Greeks and Assyrians, the “Great Powers” quickly lost interest, placing business above human rights, not for the first or last time. These tragedies were forgotten, consigned to oblivion. Mention these words and most people will have no idea what you’re talking about. “Silence,” said Halo, “and there has been a hundred years of it, renders the genocide complete. The Turks keep denying the Armenian massacres but denial at least keeps memory alive.”

One may rightly question what constitutes genocide. The only true wiping out of a whole people occurred in Tasmania in the late 19^th century, when the British exterminated all the islanders. But I think we can agree that the slaughter in Asia Minor came close. In all, three million Christians were slaughtered in just ten years: 1.5 million Armenians, 750,000 Greeks from Ionia, the Pontus, and Cappadocia, and an estimated 750,000 Assyrians, “an astounding two-thirds of their total population.” Another 750,000 Greeks were driven into exile, “bringing to a brutal end their 3,000-year history in Asia Minor.”

Thea Halo is not demanding reparations. She is not even vindictive, but she does want the experts on genocide to include her mother’s and father’s people in their histories and calculations. Partly thanks to her efforts, in 2007 the International Association of Genocide Scholars finally acknowledged “the genocide of both Pontian and other Asia Minor Greeks and Assyrians in Ottoman Turkey from 1914-1923,” though many nations have yet to do so. And she would like the Turks to admit their past governments’ responsibility. Thea and her mother have forgiven, but not forgotten.

Sano Themia Halo died in 2014 at 105. “My mother refused to hate. She refused to surrender to depression and anger. When asked how she could go through so much pain and loss and still not hate, she said: ‘Why should I waste my life hating when there is still so much beauty in the world?’”

Her last words were, “I need only watch a flower tilt its lovely face to drink the rain, or hear my children laughing, to know that life is good. Breath is God’s gift. Life is our reward. The rest is up to us.”

And Thea, puzzling over what that final sentence meant, “understood what it was that was up to us. What we make of it. Not what we make of what we can’t control. But what we make of what we can control. . . . The innocence I had presumed to protect in my mother was not innocence at all . . . but rather a profound worldliness; a profound wisdom. My mother’s unconditional love and generosity were not based on not knowing the world, but knowing all too well the capriciousness of fate and the tentative hold we have on those we love.”

Thea Halo’s other mission during this visit to Greece was to explore the possibility of creating a living museum here of Pontic life in a Black Sea village a hundred years ago, something along the lines of Williamsburg, Virginia. A piece of land had been made available not too far from Athens and she had high hopes that the project would be realized.

But even if it does not, her mother’s story stands as a monument to the human spirit that can transcend almost any tragedy. We can only hope that the refugees trapped today in mud, tents, and with such dismal prospects will be able to emerge with an equally positive attitude to life.

Recipe

By sheer coincidence I happen to have a Pontic Greek cookbook. It’s called Nostimies tis Pontiakis Kouzinas (“Treats of Pontic Cuisine”), but the language is so different from Greek that the only names of dishes I can understand, apart from a few vegetables, are those that are in Turkish, like Imam baildi, kavourmas, yiachni, and toursi, and the dishes with potatoes which are called kartofa, derived from the German kartoffel. I cannot presume to know whether Sano Halo would have cooked any of these, so I have picked one at random that sounded both easy and unusual.

Melitzanes me Ryzi Moussaka

or, Eggplant with Rice Moussaka

4 large eggplant

salt

1½ cup water

½ cup oil

½ cup rice

2 ripe tomatoes, finely chopped

½ tsp black pepper

Cut the stalks off the eggplant, wash them, and slice them lengthwise into long strips. Salt them and put them in a colander for 30 minutes to get rid of their bitterness. Next, rinse them in plenty of water and squeeze them tightly with your hands to remove all the liquid.

Then, heat the oil in a pan and fry the eggplant slices, a few at a time so that they brown a little on both sides. Mix the rice and tomatoes together; add a tiny bit of salt and the pepper, throw the mixture onto the browned eggplant and toss. Put the whole mixture into a pan, add the water, and cook the eggplant and rice over low heat for about 30 minutes.

And that’s it.

The author, Thomais Kiziridou, goes on to add that it’s a fasting dish that in the Pontus would be eaten during the August Lent before the Assumption of the Virgin.

Melitzanes (the ordinary Greek word for eggplants) were also called mantzanes, from the Hindu badanjan. The vegetable apparently did not arrive in the Pontus until the 17^th century.

Book quotes from Thea Halo’s Not Even My Name (Picador, New York, 2000).