There are countless stories of Greeks landing anywhere around the world—from South Africa to Panama to Alaska—and somehow making a go of it. Just recently we featured a story on the Greeks of the Bahamas, who are doing quite well, running their shops there, among the most solid citizens, trading patois with the locals, and also speaking Greek, attending their church by the water, drinking mango juice afterwards, feeling very much at home.
A few years ago we featured a story on the Greeks of Alaska, living there for generations, sharing a church with the indigent Russian Orthodox until they could build their own, living there for generations, suffering the bone-cold winters when cars won’t start and transportation is impossible (except for dog sled), learning to drape blankets over the windows in the summer to block the never-setting sun so they can go to sleep. “You get used to it,” said one old timer who had been in Alaska for decades, had run a trading post that became a local department store, and inevitably for a Greek, was thinking of returning to Zakynthos for his retirement.
Now I am told of the Greeks of Panama, who have done quite well, have built churches and schools, and are among the leading citizens of the country.
“Whatever we might be,” some local kafeneio sage told me once, “we are skoulikiawho always bury into the soil of our adopted land and learn to live off it.”
My father came to America, a poor boy from a poor village in Chios, and got his PhD from Columbia University. My relatives (not unique to them but in common with most Greeks) arrived here with nothing in their pockets and are now prosperous or at least comfortable. I marvel at the story of a group of first cousins, four brothers and a sister, who came here in the late ‘60s as kids, had the guts to pool whatever money they made working odd jobs to buy their first pizzeria, and have since created an empire. The most flamboyant of these cousins once gave me a ride in his customized Lincoln Continental Mark IV (the height of luxury then, with leather seats so pillowy and a vinyl roof so low and rakish that I could barely fit inside—I was the tall cousin),and while he was giving me a ride in his Lincoln (he was in his early 20s) invariably told me also about his boat and his plane and the various houses he was either building from scratch or customizing (lots of paneling and smoked mirrors) or claiming from the bank and turning into “paying rental units.”He had dropped out of high school because he had no patience for academic learning and his grasp of what all those banks and mortgage companies were telling him in his multifarious deals was probably cursory—but he knew exactly what he wanted and he usually got them to accept his version of the deal. “They either take it or leave it,” he said with a shrug of his Tony Manero silk shirt. And they usually did, because he could make them money.
An amazing story the dynamism of Greeks throughout the world who, apparently once they leave their native pond, never stop dreaming and never stop working to reach their dreams.
Dimitri C. Michalakis
