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Dimitris Krallis examines the Egyptian footprint on the social and economic history of Lesvos
In 1905, Ioannis Krallis, age 11, son of Komninakis (a member of the Molyvos town council), drew on a large piece of paper a detailed map of Africa that also depicts a part of Asia as far as Balochistan. The horizons of this young Ottoman subject seem wide, and his imagination captures with coloured pencils and crayons, but also with precision, the colonial reality of this exotic world. In a corner of this map, where we usually find the legend in professional publications, Ioannis drew two squares. Within them he depicted, enlarged, two areas of the Middle East that obviously caught his interest. In one “window” he drew Palestine or, in his eyes, the Holy Land. In the other he sketched Egypt in considerable detail with an emphasis on the Nile Delta. If the Holy Land had a special place in the imagination of a child raised a Christian, the grandson of an influential notable bearing the prefix Hatzis in his surname (Hatzi- Anagnostou; the prefix denotes one who had taken a pilgrimage in the Holy Land), Ioannis’ interest in Egypt raises some questions. What could it be that brought Egypt to the mind of a young boy from North Lesvos?
The answer to our question may have an identity: Efstratios Kalligeris, known today as Barba Stratis. To the young Ioannis, Stratis, an uncle living in Egypt, was godfather.
In 1905, when Ioannis drew Africa, Stratis had already lived in Alexandria and Cairo for about twenty years. But what is it that drew people like Stratis to Egypt and what is the special relationship of the people of Lesvos to this off-centre and semi-autonomous area (under British tutelage) of the Ottoman world? A trip to Agia Paraskevi in Lesvos and the Museum for the Industrial Production of Olive Oil brings us to a room where the curators of the Museum mapped the footprint of the Agioparaskeviot migration. On the Museum’s well-drawn maps, we see that people from Lesvos are found both in Egypt and the Sudan, which, after all, in the second half of the 19th century was tied to the fate of the former. Stratis’ diary, which he wrote aged 21, when he first settled in Egypt, mentions a number of characters from Lesvos among the Greek community of Cairo and Alexandria.[1] Six people from his family environment and from Lesvos in general are recorded in Stratis’ diary as having settled in Egypt. Two more pass through it as visitors.[2] There were certainly more, given the tendency of immigrants to follow in the footsteps of relatives and acquaintances. The “malevolent” tavern keeper from Molyvos, the so-called Zanos, who accused Stratis’ brother-in-law, Spyridon Ioannidis, also from Molyvos, of embezzling the inheritance of a Skamniot, would probably have employed his fellow countrymen in his business in Cairo.
We know, however, that relations with Egypt were also emerging from Stratis’ own wider social circle. Gregorios Gogos, who had been a priest in Crete, Vraila (Romania) and Budapest, also served in Alexandria in Egypt, where he returned in 1875 to address a diasporic audience of Greeks on the occasion of the Feast of the Three Hierarchs. [3]
Gregory’s brother, the physician George Gogos, had examined Stratis in his capacity as a doctor in Molyvos, and Georgios’ son Andonis was a friend of Stratis’ brother Achilleas. The doctor’s daughter (Andonis’ sister), Andromache, was destined to marry Achilleas, move to Sykamnia and join Stratis’ wider family circle. Years later, Andromache became the mother-in-law of the now adult Ioannis Krallis, who strengthened through her his oblique contacts with Egypt. As for Ioannis’ father-in-law, Achilleas, he travels to Cairo in 1929, three years after the marriage of his daughter Maritsa, in order to liquidate Stratis’ estate and distribute it to his heirs. Part of this estate included land in Gezira, Sudan. The proceeds from the sale were distributed to Stratis’ nephews, Panagiotis Matzouranis and Kostis, Nikolaos and Efstratios D. Kalligeris, thus connecting four more families with Africa, which had so excited the young Ioannis’ youthful imagination.
We have mentioned above the Cairo tavern-keeper, Zanos, from Molyvos. He was the one who raised suspicions of an attempt by Spyridon Ioannidis to reap the inheritance which a Skamniote, named Georgios Kanelioglou, had left to his family. Stratis mentions in his diary that he met Georgios’ brother, Dimitrios, on the steamer en route to Alexandria in 1886. He explains that his brother-in-law Spyridon offered to guide Demetrios through the bureaucratic maze that awaited him in Cairo. The inheritance finally came into Demetrios’ hands a few years later, through Achilleas Kalligeris. What is interesting, however, is the way in which Georgios, who died in Sudan during the years of the revolution against the Egyptian authorities, took care of his property.
According to Stratis’ account, Georgios had entrusted his inheritance of 300 Ottoman pounds to Pasha Gordon. The Gordon in question is none other than General Gordon, known as “Gordon of Khartoum” or even “Chinese Gordon”, given his earlier activities in the Far East (1860-1864) during the Second Opium War and the Taiping Rebellion. Years later Gordon found himself in the service of the Khedive of Egypt and served in Sudan as his representative. There he apparently met Georgios Kanelioglou.
The Mahdi’s rebels killed Gordon in Khartoum in 1885, at which point, the general’s estate, including Kanelioglou’s inheritance, emerged in Cairo, where Demetrios, assisted by Spyridon, attempted to assert his family rights in the Egyptian courts. What space would the story of Gordon’s “martyrdom” in Khartoum have occupied in Ioannis’ young mind? How would he have felt knowing that a fellow countryman had met the famous general and died in the midst of an insurgency in Sudan, some years before Gordon’s own heroic death in Khartoum?
In a photo from the 1930s, Ioannis’ eldest son, Nikos, appears in Chinese garb next to his carnival-clad cousins and his brother Stratis (himself looking perhaps like an archaeologist in Egypt). Is it possible that in Nikos’ young mind the story of Gordon remains vivid, both given Gordon’s well-known connection to China – the general appears in a series of photographic representations in Chinese costume – and because of a family memory that brings the defender of Khartoum “close” to the family? In any case, the family’s ties to Sudan are not limited to the Kanelioglou court case. We know that Stratis’ nephew, Panagiotis Matzouranis (the son of his sister, Ourania), also moved to Sudan. There he raised a family. Spyros Ioannidis, the son-in-law and later partner of Stratis, saw his daughter Eleni marry Michael Valtikos from Chios, who had a career as a lawyer in the Courts of Egypt.
In addition to direct and indirect personal contacts and relations with Egypt, Stratis and his godson Ioannis would have been exposed to Egypt from their school days. Stratis’ diary attests that in his youth he had studied for a year at the Evangeliki School in Smyrna. In the curriculum for the first grade of the Gymnasion, where Stratis was placed after examinations, we find a reference to the History of the Eastern Nations taught by the school director, M. Paranikas along with D. H. Nikolaou. Of the two, the acerbic Stratis singled out Paranikas – in whose book on the history of the Evangeliki we find the relevant curricular information – as “unworthy”. There remains, nevertheless, the serious suspicion that Egypt must have been among the Eastern Nations in question. As for Geography, a subject taught by A. Vallindas and D. H. Nicolaou, it covered Asia Minor in general, [and] the rest of Asia and Africa. It would certainly also have featured Egypt. It is, moreover, interesting that the Geography of Asia and Africa was taught in the first year of high school, with European geography featuring only in the following year.[5] We have here a certain prioritization of the East, which may have played a role in the formation of the youthful imagination of both Stratis and his godson, Ioannis? Either way, Ioannis’ map seems to be directly compatible with both the human geography of North Lesvos and the educational priorities of the time.
In the ensuing years, the mansion that Stratis Kalligeris built in Skala Sykamnias in 1909 with the proceeds from his successful mercantile activity in the Egypt was bequeathed to his nephew Dimitrios and was destined to become a gathering place for his numerous nephews and nieces. In interiors decorated with mementos from Egypt, two to three generations of the family experienced a wide world open to movement and communication; a world that was colonial, but also cosmopolitan.
All this in a period, after the end of the Balkan Wars, the First World War, and the Asia Minor campaign, a time quite different from the era that brought Stratis to Cairo. As for the other, more famous “offspring” of Egyptian wealth, the chapel which Stratis financed on the rocks above the port of Skala in Sykamnia, the Panayia Gorgona (the Mermaid Madonna), it soon lost its Egyptian identity and was associated once and for all, by virtue of Stratis Myrivilis’ pen, with the lost Anatolian homelands to the north and east of Lesvos.
Epilogue:
1) This story focuses on Egypt but, as we saw, it also involves interesting digressions that take us as far as China, if only by way of Pasha Gordon. With Mariza’s help, we may, however, follow Ioannis’ thoughts all the way to Beijing. On the card we see depicted the Ottoman Greek Gymnasium of Mytilene. The intended recipient in Beijing is Karl Preuss, a Guard at the Imperial German Embassy in China.
The intermediate nodes on the card’s route to Beijing remain unknown. The card does, however, bear on the recto, an Ottoman stamp with the Tughra (imperial insignia) of Abdul Hamid II and a Suez stamp from the unavoidable Egypt. A postal stamp informs us that the recipient had departed Beijing without leaving an address, and so the postcard, after receiving a Beijing (Pekin) postmark dated September 10, 1909on the verso, was returned to Lesvos, and joined many other postcards in the archive.
2) The first marriage of Ioannis Kralis (Komninakis brother) was to an Ioakimoglou with whom he had 3 children. Although after the passing of Ioannis’ first wife he remarried having 2 more children, contacts with the Ioakimoglou family were maintained. Of the Ioakimoglou offspring, Konstantinos settled in Alexandria and is described in Egyptian records as a banker, cotton exporter, owner of the company “Costis Z. Joakimoglou & Co”, and member of the Alexandria Sporting Club. Later on, communication between the Ioakimoglou and Krallis families, which had atrophied for years, was restored by Komninakis. In 1923, Komninakis initiated correspondence with Konstantinos, who was in Alexandria. The latter responded warmly. A year later, the Krallis and Kalligeris families would strengthen their “Egyptian” ties and acquaintances, as the creator of the map of Africa, Ioannis, son of Komninakis, married the daughter of Achilleas and Andromache, Maritsa.
[1] In our research we work on the basis of a transcribed copy of the manuscript diary of Efstratios K. Kalligeris of 1887 entitled “Synoptic Diary”. This copy belongs to the archive of Andreas and Maria Korakas. The original, part of which survives in photocopies, has yet to be located.
[2] Spyridon and Panteleimon Ioannidis, Dimitrios Komopoulos, Kefalas, Zanos, Georgios Kanelioglou and Efstratios Georgiadis.
[3] Gr. Gogos the Lesbian, Archimandrite, Michael Tositsas and Nikolaos Stournaris : A Panegyric speech on the anniversary of the Greek educational establishments in Alexandria (Alexandria)
[4] See related document from the archives of Mariza Krallis.
[5] Matthaios K. Paranikas, History of the Evangelical School of Smyrna (Athens: Alethia Press, 1885), 199.
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