It was 20 years ago that Sophie Arvanitou made Tenedos her own spiritual Ithaca. She took it upon herself to uncover the genealogy of her family but, in that, uncovered the historical story of the island of Tenedos. The people who lived there, and their families who migrated, came to the fore, and as she dug deeper to tell her own story, she was beginning to tell a lot more. The story of her personal quest – to uncover the rich history of these people – resulted in her being asked to speak at Museum of Tenedos M. Hakan Gürüney, on behalf of UNESCO; as part of a program by UNESCO to preserve and disseminate Greek folk heritage and to grow international understanding and peace among peoples. This all from a humble woman, with no historical and genealogical degrees or education, who only wanted to collate and capture her family’s story to understand who she is.
The tyranny of ignorance
A story within another story is Sophie’s story; a story that was born out of the tyranny of ignorance. Ignorance of her past, her roots, her heritage bore a need to understand and to know who she is. A story she had to build herself, to find herself.
I first met Sophie ten years earlier purely by accident. It was at a photographic exhibition in Richmond, Melbourne on the Pontian Genocide. She was hunched over a photo and staring into it, not at it, ever so intently. Quite suddenly, she took her eyes of the photo and turned her gaze my way and she started to tell me she’s from Tenedos, Asia Minor. I smiled complacently as she regaled me with stories about her family, her search for her roots, and what her quest has uncovered so far all the way from Tenedos to Australia. For twenty minutes she spoke almost at me, I admit now that I didn’t pay a lot of attention to what she was saying, but – in having said that – I was taken aback by her passion. Following this, Sophie and I would occasionally bump into each other, and the first topic of conversation was always this eternal mission to find her roots; to experience herself her ancestors’ experience, their wanderings … their life. She wanted to know what it was like to walk in their shoes, and the fire in her belly was well and truly lit. I knew all along this was a woman who not only wasn’t going to give up, but would see out this quest to the very end.
Sophie was born in Melbourne in 1963. Her father Dimitrios was born in 1936 in Nea Tenedos Chalkidiki Greece, her mother Christina Papageorgiou was born in 1939 in Nemea Corinth, Greece. Her grandparents were born in Tenedos, Turkey; her great-grandparents were too. And her great-great-great grandparents were as well.
“I always wanted to know where my grandfather and my grandmother were from – to understand what was this place Tenedos,” Sophie tells Neos Kosmos.
It was her great-great-great-great grandfather Theodoros Arvanitis – born in Vitola, Macedonia – who arrived in Tenedos approximately 1818. This is where it all begins.
The Arvanitis family have been in Tenedos since the early 1820s, when Theodore Arvanitis left Vitola and decided to settle on this tiny island. He married a local Tenedian and together they had five children. One of them was Sophie’s great-great grandfather Ioannis Arvaniitis who married Eleni. The family owned vineyards and are listed in the local land registry. His son Panagis married Katerina and they had six sons and one daughter. The family tradition of farming the land continued to the next generation by his son, Sophie’s great grandfather Manolis, born in 1872, who married Despina G. Avgerinos, born in 1875. They had three children Panagis born 1896, Archimidis born 1896 and a daughter named Georgia born in 1901. By 1906, many of his friends and family had left Tenedos for Africa and the USA to look for work.
As Sophie was researching her family, she noticed herself becoming more and more interweaved into the lives of all the Tenediotes of the time. They were in the early stages of migration, opting for countries such as America, and as they came back home, they told tales of opportunity and work in lands far and wide. Upon hearing this, Sophie’s grandfather decided to migrate to West Virginia in the USA, to work in the mines.
Sophie went on this quest alone because her family didn’t like to talk about Tenedos; it was unlucky. They didn’t want to remember the days as being a ‘refugee family’. Everything, she had to find out herself. A humble hospital worker, moonlighting as a genealogist. At this stage all she knew was that it was in Asia Minor, but not a lot more. She found out it was close to Constantinople (Istanbul), near where Troy stood.
But it was the images which allowed her mind to grasp the magical place of Tenedos, and begin to put things into a tangible and understandable order. She was noticing more and more people in the images, not just relatives and family but Tenediotes that were connected in some way, that she felt connected to. Even though she has searched far and wide, she took a more grassroots approach and literally looked in her own backyard in Melbourne.
“I had heard names; families of Tenediotes in Melbourne,” she explains. She began collecting phone numbers and went to their house with a bunch of photos in her hands. From these visits, she began to trace not only her family history, but to create one for the whole island. Slowly, slowly her family tree was growing green, with strong branches stretching further and further with each visit. The tyranny of ignorance was vast becoming the tyranny of knowledge.
For her grandmother Kirgiakitsa
The way Sophie remembers her mother speaking of her grandmother Kirgiakitsa was one of the initial reasons for her very own Ithacan journey. She says her great grandmother would always prefix the word Tenedos with ‘my’ – it was her Tenedos; and now it was Sophie’s.
She has found third cousins, quarter cousins, friends and many others on all corners of the earth. The search stopped being one single story a long time ago, it was now the story of the Greek presence on the island. She travelled to America to meet relatives, Greece to speak with more and of course, Tenedos. The stories she encountered in her path were as nostalgic as they were sweet. A family history that was as rich as it was diverse and not tied to a single moment, or a single place.
Through her search, she found her fourth cousin Elijah Tampourakis – a scholar and writer who also suggested presenting her work to UNESCO. The minute the organisation saw the work she has accomplished, they asked her immediately to speak about her spiritual journey and what it uncovered. She owns thousands of images, of the folk of Tenedos, and UNESCO was impressed not only by the myriad of images but their ties with the diaspora and the connection to Greek folk history.
” I hope that someone will show interest to organise a photo exhibition,” she says enthusiastically, wanting to show her island and its culture. And now her own history, collated in a self-published anthology – her vision and her promise to Kyriakitsa.
“I promised myself, and silently I promised Kyriakitsa that I would,” she says, and she shows me the anthology with much hesitation.
“With care please,” she pleads with me as I slowly open her family’s story as seen on the pages. I am left without a shadow of a doubt that this booklet is more precious than life. Her history, that took her 20 years to know and understand. As they say, if you don’t know where you are from, you can’t know where you are going – you are a leaf that doesn’t know it’s part of a tree.