The revelation happened on a summer morning in 2017. Two cousins ​​were fixing tiles in their grandfather’s old house in Karatzakioi, a small town northwest of Istanbul. They were sweeping the floor with a brush to level it before pouring cement, and suddenly they saw something flickering. They even combed their hair a little and began to see the letters. They took a marble slab and carried it out into the garden. “All we could read was the date: 1887,” says Kerem Sogilmaz K. He photographed it and sent it to his Greek friend. “It seems that a Greek woman is buried under your house,” he told him and sent him a translation. “Here lies the servant of God, Chrysula Rodakis. March 1887.”

Thus began Kerem’s search for the descendants of Chrysula and the history of their house. Even then, he knew little about the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923. “I don’t know why I felt such a strong need for it, but it was definitely a wonderful trip,” he told me when we met in Thessaloniki. The world premiere of his documentary “In Search of Chrysoula Rodaki”, in which he captured the whole journey, took place at the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival.

His research began in 2017 with a conversation with the elders of his village. Indeed, they told him, many Greeks lived there. All beloved by the Turks. But no one remembered the details of the family that lived in the house, except for the fact that the father was a Greek and a forester. Kerem first tried to search the mortgage office, but the records there date back to 1950. He decided to turn to the Ottoman archives. “Why are you digging them, they may come and demand a house,” some warned him. Others urged him to smash the marble because “the Greeks hid gold inside.”

But he didn’t give up. When he realized that he would not be given permission to search the Ottoman archives, he continued his searches in the archives of the Patriarchate as well as the archives of the United Nations. He felt he had reached a dead end until one day he thought of uploading a photo of the tombstone to Facebook in search of Rodaki’s descendants. He didn’t expect to get such a big response. Among the hundreds of messages he received, one woman gave him interesting information: “The displaced refugees named their new villages after the old ones because they missed them and loved them. What does the word Karatzakioi mean?” he asked him. “A deer,” answered Kerem. “Then perhaps the descendants of Chrysula live in the village of Dorkada,” she told him.

Kerem traveled there and met three old women whose parents hurried to leave with so many other people from Asia Minor, leaving everything behind. They told him that Rodakis did not exist in their village. Of course, many died along the way. Others succeeded, but their hearts remained riveted to their homeland. There, in Dorkad, while listening to their testimony, Kerem felt that the trauma had been passed on to the next generations. “Even today, the melancholy of exchange is evident in the collective memory,” he notes. He returned to his homeland and continued his search. In another contact he made via Facebook, a Greek woman from Switzerland sent him a list of the names of refugee farmers. In it, he had many lists with the surname he was looking for. He contacted at least 50 Rodakides in different regions of Greece, but did not find those he was looking for. He began to get frustrated again, until last October he received a message from Theodoros Georgiadis. “I believe that the family you are looking for is mine.” Then the 65-year-old man did not even have a Facebook account. His cousin showed him the photograph and he, knowing his family history well, contacted him. “I often travel to Istanbul for work (he has an industrial paper and plastic company). It would be easy to meet there sometime,” she told him. However, Kerem was impatient. That same week he went to Thessaloniki.

There, in the café, Mr. Theodoros told Kerem the story of Chrysoula. He began by showing him a family tree he had made himself. “This goes back seven generations,” he told him proudly. One part of the family came from Gialikioy, the other from Karatsakioy. His father was the younger brother of Chrysula. Their uncle, Rodakis Georgiadis, was childless and adopted Chrysoula. When she died at the age of 18 from a then incurable disease, probably pneumonia, she was still unmarried and therefore was buried under the name of her adoring stepfather. Chrysula of Rodakis. “Why wasn’t she buried in the cemetery?” Kerem wondered. Theodore had no answer, but Kerem later learned that some Turks did not want the Greeks to bury their dead in their own cemeteries. They buried them in the garden and placed a headstone inside the house.

When Kerem Sogilmaz discovered a tombstone with Greek inscriptions in his grandparents’ house, he set out to find out who it belonged to.

Theodore’s story of that day didn’t stop there. He told Kerem the stories he had grown up with. When his family arrived in Northern Greece, they were trying to survive under very difficult conditions. There was poverty and malaria was rampant. He remembers being told that at some point they found tobacco that someone had planted and ate it, thinking it was a salad. Apparently they were bitter and told each other that even the salads in the garden were bitter. Suddenly they were unwanted in their homeland and refugees in their new country. They were told to go to Dorcadas or Askos, because there is fertile soil and there are houses abandoned by the Turks. In such a house, in Askos, Mr. Theodoros was born. He stayed there until the age of seven, and he has many memories of the loggia where the whole family gathered every night. “Some have never been able to adapt. Of the twenty conversations, half were in Turkish,” he recalls.

Although his father was born in Greece in 1923, he grew up with the need to return to Turkey, to walk around the places where his parents lived. In 2000, Mr. Theodoros agreed and they went to two villages together. “It was very emotional. He felt like he was finding his roots.” In Gialikia they met a man who was then 102 years old, who spoke Greek and remembered his family. He took them to his house, which was abandoned. They were touched to learn that the subsequent owners built a new house in the neighborhood and live there. “Maybe one day the owners will come back from Greece,” they always said. In Karatsakioi, they did not find anyone who could give them information. A few months later after this trip, a lawyer approached them and said that if they had documents, they could claim the house they discovered, but they never thought to enter into this process. “Someone can also come to us and claim their land “Those things don’t happen. Those stories are in the past,” he says today.

But now, having met Kerem, Mr. Theodoros had the opportunity to do what his father was not capable of. “I told him that I really want to visit this house. He told me that I had an open invitation and I immediately booked the tickets,” Mr. Theodoros explains. Indeed, two days later he crossed the threshold of a house built by his grandparents from brick and wood. “He had a unique aura, and I experienced great excitement when I entered the space that my family lived in.” When he saw the gravestone of Chrysula in the garden, he caressed it and wept. For her and all his loved ones who have passed away.

At the hospitable table laid in the garden by Aunt Kerem, they talked for hours about life in their villages in Greek and Turkish, where they grew up. Family gatherings, the familiar sound of the clarinet. Even the round pumpkin pie his aunt baked for him that day tasted the same as the pie his mother always baked for him. “Through the tombstone, we contacted the Kerem family. We feel like we’ve always known each other. It sounds banal, but in fact we have nothing to separate, on the contrary, we have a lot of links,” emphasizes Mr. Theodoros. The next morning, they placed the tombstone in the farmhouse, along with a bouquet of flowers from the garden, and together they took it to the small refugee museum. “For many years, the gravestone of Chrysula was in our house. Sometimes like a mirror showing us how little we remember from the past. Or as a window into a story we may never have encountered. But the mission of the tablet has already been completed. Now the world will be able to see her in the museum and find out that this girl once lived in our village,” concludes Kerem.