Iris Tsahilis
Collection of German stamps
ed. Metaihmio, 2022, p. 395

Iris Tsahili is holding a small black album for her stamp collection. It contains only German stamps from a certain period of time and belongs to her mother. It didn’t belong to her, she just held it, waiting for it to be returned to its owner. The legacy that a German officer left during the occupation, with the promise that he would return to pick it up. He never returned.

This enigmatic little album, although it seems to be the cause of serious, lengthy and intense research by an author who seems to be struggling to discover traces of a German, his life after leaving Greece is simply the only reason to turn to himself and return to his family history, but above all to meet his so unknown mother. This is an occasion to record the great social, anthropological and political history of this place since 1922 through the eyes of a family and a scholar of systematic research, study, recording and interpretation, a professor of archeology such as Jachili. Except that in this book he gives up science, he gives up method, he gives up coherence.

Follow your intuition, instinct, feeling. She vividly and convincingly describes the long and dark period from the refugee of 22, whose victims are also her ancestors, to the suffering of the Great War and the catalyst for civil conflict.

In search of answers, the heroine discovers an entire era buried in silence.

She is drawn to the sudden, unplanned, associative, she pursues the meaning of a deeply fragmented world and tries to look beyond what she has seen, to trace the past with perseverance, perseverance and an unquenchable thirst for truth. He picks up small pieces using whatever material is available to him, he requests information from the files he finds, with the key question of who the German officer was and what happened to him when he left for the Russian front. With relentless, persistent research revealing to her new, stream-changing evidence, evidence, invisible sides, a tangle of faces and names, she finally faces the challenge of combining, imagining, daring.

Digging for memory

And he really dares. Courageously and honestly, with dignity, without immodesty, with tenderness and acute delicacy, she intensively delves into her memory and reveals layers full of events in the life of the surroundings, Thessaloniki, the country, Europe, in the center of which is the life of her mother, Dimitras Angelida. As a refugee child, next door to wealthy Jewish neighbors, she was able to study and become a teacher to give meaning to progress as a reality of life. But also to survive the domination of the conquerors, the loss of neighbors, to marry and, nevertheless, to cover this husband and father with a veil of secrecy, who remains invisible and in the end is banished, cut off and finds himself in exile in Athens.

Short stories without a strict novelistic course, without order, a creative chaos that does not absorb, does not upset, but passionately and intensely twists us into the past, so intense, so sharp, not as far away as we think.

Questions

And the question always remains, who was Dimitra Angelidou, what were her thoughts, her feelings, what did her young life hide or protect? Why does the German from the neighboring waiting room choose her to give her stamps, why does he promise her that he will come back for them? And this black thing, an object capable of gathering hatred for the conqueror, why does it remain intact among the things and bequeathed untouched all these years later?

In the stories, words, descriptions, one can feel living love, gratitude, admiration for Tsakhili’s mother. This woman who stood strong and whole in poverty, need, war. Who managed to learn, to stand out, to escape from the fate that chose a different path for her, and to be able to write, together with her friends and classmates, the due book about her beloved and inspiring teacher Milto Kunduras. A panorama of an era when its characters didn’t say or didn’t say enough, or when they said precious things they didn’t want to say. And Tsakhili undertakes to speak about what is memories, questions and traumas, without a judgmental look, but with understanding and acceptance of what was said, and even more so of what was silent.