15 minute read
Greek Towns
Utah Historical Quarterly
Vol. 38, 1970, No. 2
Greek Towns
A SMALL NUMBER OF GREEKS had left Bingham as the strike progressed ; Mexican strikebreakers took their places in the mine bringing a new minority to Bingham. Others returned to Greece to fight in the Balkan War of 1912. The Greek government considered anyone bom on Greek land a Greek citizen forever. The men who answered the arms call expected to be returning to Greece in the near future and the war merely hastened their repatriation. At least 42,000 Greeks throughout America reported to the Greek army. 70 The number is conservative; statistics on Greek immigrants are not complete. Greeks from originally Greek lands, the "unredeemed" lands, considered themselves Greek citizens. The U. S. government determined an immigrant's nationality by his land of origin.
As the Bingham strike waned, trouble began in the Colorado coal mines owned by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Again Cretans became leaders of the strikers with Louis Tikas at their head. Altogether seventy-four people were killed throughout the coal camps. Twenty-two of them were killed in the Ludlow Massacre, including eleven women and two children who suffocated in tents that had been set on fire.
Tikas, whose bride was on her way from Crete to America, raised a white cloth of truce. When he reached the National Guard soldiers, their commander broke a rifle over his head and forced him into the crossfire of soldiers and strikers. Thirty Cretan miners with high-powered rifles walked over the mountains from Raton, New Mexico, to avenge him. A large contingent with guns and ammunition walked from Colorado Springs.
Within hours after the tragedy, the news reached every coffeehouse in the West and reinforced the distrust of the immigrants toward the mine owners and the American government. Court martial proceedings revealed that Lieutenant K. E. Linderfelt, through rashness in using force and through unwillingness to understand the immigrant personality, was directly responsible for the battle of Ludlow. His punishment was five files reduction in rank.
Now the Greek immigrants knew the full extent of the hostility felt for them. They retreated into a fiery nationalism, convinced that it was only a matter of time when they would finish their family obligations and return to their own country.
The aim of the immigrants to furnish their sisters with dowries and to return to Greece with enough money to establish themselves in business was fulfilled by forty per cent of them. The other sixty per cent extended their stay hoping to leave the mines and section gangs as soon as they had saved a sufficient sum of money to enter business. After a few years, with a greater amount of money, they intended to return to Greece.
The Greek government became alarmed at their native sons lengthening stay in America. Reports of their terrible living and working conditions were daily items on the front pages of Greek newspapers. Many young Greeks had returned to Greece crippled, blind, and destitute. A stream of newspaper reporters and government officials came to America to see the true situation. Few ventured far from the cities and towns. One held court in a hotel lobby and lectured the laborers for not having established themselves in commercial ventures as had the Greek immigrants in Egypt. All advised the men to return to Greece as soon as possible.
One of the most thorough investigators was a young woman, the wife of a publisher. Her education and her husband's advanced views of social equality allowed her an unusual freedom — a Greek woman traveling alone. Visiting briefly in the Greek enclaves of large cities, she sought out labor gangs dotting the Midwest, the West, and Canada.
She arrived in Utah in the winter of 1914. A letter from the Utah Fuel Company management addressed to mine superintendents asked that they "familiarize her with our Greek employees." She traveled into the Clear Creek, Utah, mine three miles in blackness until coming to shadowed men. Narrow shafts of light shone from the carbide lamps on their caps.
They stood in icy water rhythmically swinging pickaxes against a wall of coal.
She called, "Have life, young Cretans! May the God of Crete be with you!"
Startled by the unearthly feminine voice speaking their language, they dropped their picks and approached warily. The voice had seemed to come through the roof of coal from the sky. When light from their lamps fell on her face, they were astounded. A six-foot youth wept.
Maria Economou visited the young Greeks' drafty shacks where ten to fifteen men lived in each one and took turns cooking. Water was brought from a distance, and outhouses were precariously near streams. The men made gallant attempts to find a chair for her and a piece of cloth to cover a table. They told her of the oppression and complete control over them of the bosses and of their great fear of becoming ill. Although the miners paid a dollar a month for medical aid, the young Greeks were reluctant to ask help of the company doctors. The doctors "treated them like animals."
Their lives, the men said, were cheap; thousands more could take their places. Minor injuries worsened under careless medical care and led to amputations. They lived in constant fear of losing an arm or leg which would relegate them to penury for the rest of their lives. There was no compensation law. The "Company" decided what it would pay for an amputation, usually $300.00 to $500.00. Those with serious illnesses could expect to go to the "Kingdom of Pluto."
At Bingham the journalist confronted R. C. Gemmel, manager of Utah Copper Company. In regard to housing, he stated that the men "choose their own habitations. Even if we built them new ones, they would not inhabit them."
She was further disgusted at the enthusiasm the men showed for a tarnished Greek performer, Madame Sophia. Accompanied by violin and laouto, she danced and sang "with the grace of an elephant and the voice of a wolf." One of the men told her, "If we didn't have even this diversion from time to time, we would become animals completely." Until morning the men waited their turn to dance with "this famous Pavlova of the mines."
Those men on isolated labor gangs, she found, fared far worse. Without school, without church, "their souls withered." A Greek proverb had arisen in the new country: "In America even the beasts can learn." But this was not true for the men on the extra gangs and road crews of the deserts and plains.
With life so lacking in the least of comforts, a few of the men began to take out citizenship papers and to marry. The crowded boardinghouses and their camaraderie were for the very young; the men wanted their own homes. It was taking longer to complete their family responsibilities than they had expected. To postpone marriage until they returned to Greece was unrealistic. Too, even though they were laborers and worked hard, they were financially better off than educated men in Greece. Without their knowing it, their Americanization had begun.
A small number of men married German, Jugoslavian, Italian, and native American women. The European women learned to speak Greek fluently and followed Greek customs. American wives and their children were seldom close to Greek culture.
"Intermarriage with foreigners was considered as bad as death." Girls did marry Greeks "in spite of their peculiar traits . . . and were despised more than Greek women." 78 American women who married Greeks were usually waitresses and domestic workers, the only women besides prostitutes whom the men encountered.
The majority of men brought picture brides from Greece. The brides came from the same village or nearby village as that of their groom. The men asked their families to choose their brides. Women of the same age as the men were ignored for younger women who had been children when the men left Greece. In Carbon County twenty-two families had their roots in the village of Mavrolithari (Black Rock) in Roumeli.
All women who emigrated to America were not uneducated. They came because their families could not provide dowries. Greek laborers in America often married women who had educational and social backgrounds superior to their own. A great many of these women came in 1922 when a compulsory exchange of populations took place between Greece and Turkey. Four-hundred thousand Turks left Greece for Turkey and 1.3 million Greeks were forced to leave Asia Minor where they had lived since the days of Homer. Wealthy Greek families were suddenly impoverished, and many of their daughters came to America.
Other women who had left their villages at the age of seven or eight to work for families in towns and cities also came to America. As servant girls they were not paid. The families for whom they worked were bound by honor to provide dowries later. Death or changes in the employers' circumstances left many servant girls with dowry money too meager for marriage but enough for passage to America. Marriages for these women were arranged by relatives. If a woman had no kin, a koumbdros, the best man at From the mountains of Roumeli, her parents' wedding or the godfather of a child in the family (a sacred relationship more binding than one of blood), assumed the responsibility. If no one was available, any man or woman, from the same province if possible, considered it a duty to find her the most suitable husband.
Some unbetrothed women came properly accompanied by brothers or cousins. Jubilant young men rushed to make their bids. The inclinations of the women's male relatives, more often the practical matter of the size of the men's savings, determined who would be the grooms. As in their native land, the women had little voice in the matter.
Regularly men, whose passage had been paid by a group of fellow villagers, returned to Greece, married, and came back to America with a bevy of young women for the waiting bachelors. Immigration officials became suspicious of these lone men surrounded by women. Newspapers and magazines published reports of girls being "sold" to immigrants. Women detectives were stationed on ships and trains to prevent these crimes.
Invariably the waiting bachelors complained that the traveler had chosen "the best one for himself" and had charged too much for expenses. Yet so thankful were they for Greek wives and homes that the resentments were momentary.
In America's work-day world of mine and mill shift work, where holidays honoring saints and martyrs were unknown, the marriage customs of Greece had no place. There was not the shrewd Peloponnesian exuberance over dowry haggling. Because Greek women were scarce in America, it was not uncommon for the dowry process to be reversed and for favors to be extended to the bride's family.
The Roumeliot groom leading a procession of garlanded horses and mules (his mother left at home; a symbol perhaps of the cutting of the cord) to the bride's house where he lifted his bride on a horse adorned with an elaborately embroidered blanket and his friends loaded her dowry on the decorated animals became a memory.
The Cretan week-long celebration to honor the bride and groom with roasted kids and abundant wine for the entire community, which often left families impoverished; the compliance with intricate taboos; and the singing of mantinddes, couplets, were reduced to three days of intense joy. Marriage was one of the seven mysteries (sacraments) and the most important event in a person's life.
Wedding ceremonies were performed in backyards of mine company houses and boardinghouses. Pistols were shot into the air; delicacies from Salt Lake City Greek importing stores covered the tables made of planks on sawhorses; one or two overworked Greek women hurried about with bowls and platters; dancing and singing went on for hours, each man determined to prove his leventia. All the while American children and adults gaped into the yards.
Many women came alone with tags tied to their clothing. Their future husbands had not enough money to do otherwise for them. One of the first Cretan women to come to Carbon County was left at the side of the tracks in a sagebrush flat thirty miles north of Helper, Utah. A stranger approached her speaking the unfamiliar Roumeliot dialect of Central Greece. He took her by wagon to a section gang farther off where the man who was to be her husband was working. Such women suffered not only from the fear of corning alone to a country whose language they did not know, but from violating the rigid code of their people. In the Mediterranean countries where a poor man's only possessions were his self-respect and his daughters' virginity, women were chaperoned with paranoid obsession. 80 Women traveling alone to America were tragically burdened with the anxiety that they would be suspected forever of having questionable morals.
The wedding spurred more men to bring brides. Newspapers in towns took note of the weddings: "GREEK GIRLS ARRIVE Nearly [a] dozen most handsome maidens have arrived from [their] native land with some of the best young men as husbands . . . make life much more pleasant for young men." Soon nuclei of young families were in every mining camp in Carbon County as well as in Salt Lake City, Ogden, and the mine, mill, and smelter towns of northern Utah. Life now changed drastically for the Greek men. The gaiety of the boardinghouses and coffeehouses gave way to serious concern for their families.
In Utah another element was added to being aliens in America. The extremely nationalistic Greeks, a provincial, insular people, were set down among an equally provincial people, the Mormons. Still close to their violent, persecuted past, well along toward accomplishing their goal of "making the desert blossom as a rose," they viewed the Greeks with defensive animosity.
Although all South Europeans shared the Mormons' contempt, the Slavic peoples, less conspicuous because of their coloring and less inclined to strike out and "disturb the peace," and the Italians whose common fellowship with the Irish and native Americans in the Roman Catholic church, enemies all, were a shade less repugnant than the Greeks, a large proportion of them darkly handsome Cretans, the result of the Moorish conquest of Crete when male Cretans were murdered and their women subjugated. To the Mormons the Greeks were interlopers among the "white" population; they were clannish, would not marry outsiders, and thought they were an exceptional people with the only true religion on earth.
The Greeks on the other hand, thought the Mormons, a high percentage of them of Nordic strains, dull people "without salt." They called them "white headed" and "inhospitable." "They wouldn't give you a glass of water if you were choking to death." Greeks avoided certain restaurants in small towns; they had either been ignored or rudely served. The Mormons were also clannish, would not marry outsiders, and thought they were an exceptional people with the only true religion on earth.
America was a paradox. The young mothers were disturbed by their rejection. Yet, they found in America a freedom they could never have known in their own country. They were free from want; they could cook meat regularly, not only on Christmas and Easter; they could dress themselves and their children in Sunday finery.
They were also free from the domination of their elders, particularly their husbands' families, safely back in their native country. The higher status of American women benefited them. Still they lived in nostalgia for the "old country." Each year in their communal reveries, oranges grew bigger, grapes more abundant, and flowers more profuse in their barren homeland.
The new families tended to live near each other in what were soon called "Greek Towns" by the natives. In Magna the families settled first in Ragtown, then on the west side of the town. In Helper they lived near the Helper Grade School, in Price on Carbon Avenue, in Salt Lake City near the railyards in the vicinity of their church. In Bingham, the more cosmpolitan of the mining camps, the families lived in Copperfield, Carr Fork, and wherever housing was available. In Ogden the great number of Greek rail road workers dispersed after the completion of construction projects. A small group of businessmen remained but lived in various parts of the city.
All of the houses had small gardens. The plentiful water from irrigation streams was a great satisfaction to the mothers; in their villages they had had to carry water from the village well and walk miles each day to pasture their goats and work small plots of ground that depended on rainfall. In the mining camps every family had chicken coops, rabbit hutches, a shed for washing clothes, another for coal and wood, and many, especially in Helper, domed mud ovens for baking bread.
The Greek Towns were hives of activity. Almost every house had several adults attached to the family. Young men, sometimes relatives, sometimes only from the same family, lived with the young families.
Besides raising her children without the help of mothers and grandmothers as was done in her village, the immigrant mother was regularly confronted with her husband's bringing home several bachelors from the mine or sheep camp. Greek hospitality required that she leave the washboard, the bread baking, or the ironing and immediately prepare a banquet for the men who were so unfortunate as to be deprived of daily Greek cooking.
The mothers spent much time canning fruits, vegetables, tomato paste, and pickles to last the year. Canning, unknown in Greece because of the expense of bottles and lids and only now being introduced there, was a gift to the women. They also prepared preserved crabapples stuffed with almonds, sugared orange and grapefruit rind, and other fruits and sweets to serve guests. In America there was plenty of fruit and sugar even for the working class.
The Greek people could not understand the frugal Mormon attribute of eating as cheaply as possible. Among the Greeks kisses and embraces were perfunctory rituals on greeting people, on leavetakings, namedays, and church celebrations. They were shocked to learn that Mormon children were punished by being sent to bed without food. Love and food were synonymous to the Greeks. To the Greeks a person could be sick; he could be grief stricken; but to be hungry was the worst evil to befall him.
There were so many young Greeks living in boardinghouses and so many more than there was room for that many families ran boardinghouses. In accordance with Greek propriety — that no hint of scandal be attached to the women — the families lived in houses separate from the boardinghouses or in quarters apart. In mining camps such as Sunnyside running a boardinghouse was arduous work. Water was hauled in barrels from the river.
The owners of boardinghouses raised chickens and kept flocks of lambs to provide meat for their roomers. Many Greeks left the laboring ranks at this time to raise lambs for Greek boardinghouses.
Greek life was changed by the coming of brides. The great number of marriages resulted in the consecration on August 15, 1916, of a second Greek church in Utah, the Assumption. 82 Like the church in Salt Lake City, the Price church was of traditional Byzantine construction in which the dome rests on a square supported by four pillars. The nave of the church is in the form of a cross. The icons, called the "Bible of the unlettered," cover the iconostasis, the altar screen. The lamps burned oil that had been blessed at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. As in the Salt Lake City Greek church, there were few seats, following Greek custom that decreed it disrespectful to sit during the three-hour service.
The icons always include Christ on the right, the Virgin and Child on the left, John the Baptist in his animal skin, Saint George on a white horse destroying the dragon, Saint Demetrios on a brown horse spearing the Anti-Christ, the archangels Michael and Gabriel, the Last Supper above the center door (called the Royal Gate), and the life of Christ in a row above these. The Evangelists and the Twelve Apostles are depicted about the dome.
A picture taken during the consecration of the church shows a large number of men standing outside of the church wearing military caps of the Hellenic Society. Such organizations were sanctioned by the Greek government for the purpose of keeping alive among her emigrant sons the idea of returning to Greece. Nostalgic and emotional appeals of country and family were brought to the men by Greek visitors.
The first priest of the church was Father Markos Petrakis, bearded with his hair hanging to his shoulders. In noting the arrival of the old country priest wearing black robes, a silver cross, and tall priest's hat, the
News Advocate of Price printed the hope that the priest "would have a steadying influence on the Greek boys."
Special trains ran from all of the coal camps bringing the men to Price for the consecration of the church. The Sunnyside Italian band met them at the station and escorted the men, shouting and shooting off their guns for good luck, to the church.
In the Price and Salt Lake City churches there was now a sprinkling of women and young babies in the congregations. Feasts on saints' days and national holidays brought several hundred people together. Dancing with hands clasped, the men sang the old songs of the war against the Turks, songs of necessary cruelty:
Weddings and baptisms were held on Sundays. Lambs were roasted on spits; goatherders from the mountain draws brought fresh goat cheese; young mothers laid out delicacies made from paper-thin sheets of dough layered with cheese or nuts and honey. Brides and grooms wore flowered wedding crowns (stefana) made of embroidered white cloth that had been ordered, along with white coated almonds, mastiha, and other Greek liquors, from the Atlantic Importing Company in New York. Before a wedding an enterprising Greek jeweler from Salt Lake City made the rounds of Carbon County's mining camps with a supply of rings and bracelets that the miners bought for their countrymen's brides.
The women brought the folklore and customs of their country with them. In the Greek Towns, houses were never dark at night. Vigil lights from family icons glowed in each one.
The women helped each other in times of illness. At first they were reluctant to call in American doctors and attempted to care for their families with folk cures. In each Greek Town there were women adept at curing the Evil Eye. At all hours of the day or night they were called upon to administer secret formulas for children taken ill suddenly, for which there was no explanation except that they had been looked upon with envy by someone who possessed the Evil Eye.
Others were known for folk curing. In the Magna-Garfield-Bingham area the leading practitioner was Mrs. Nick Mageras, known as Magerou. She was also a midwife and for decades was in great demand by Greek, Italian, and Slavic women.
In Carbon County the authority was John Diamanti, called "Uncle John" even as a young man. He not only prescribed folk cures, but was consulted to explain dreams, to predict the sex of an unborn child, and to read the shoulder blade of the Easter lamb. Peering at the bone and feeling its bumps and demarcations, he foretold, accurately it is said, what the coming year would bring.
For special remedies the immigrants went to Alex Rizos, a druggist from the mountainous region of Epirus, Greece. For more than fifty years, first in Bingham then in Salt Lake City, Mr. Rizos mixed manjouni, a tonic made of quinine sulphate, powdered Peruvian bark, honey, nuxvomica, rhubarb herb, cinnamon, and other ingredients. He dispensed contemporary drugs, but also leeches and vizikdnti (powdered Spanish fly), that on application to the skin produced large blisters. These were twisted open, and the "uncleanness" in the body was released.
With weddings, baptisms, and a few funerals weekly Sunday events, Gregory Halles, confectionery winner in the Paris Exposition of 1904 and other fairs, became a leading figure in Greek ceremonial life. Mr. Halles and his wife provided wedding crowns, ornamental candles, baptismal medals, cakes, ftlo (the paper-thin sheets of pastry important in Greek cooking), and, most essential of all, memorial wheat.
Forty days after a death, commemorating the forty days that Christ walked the earth after His Crucifixion, wheat was boiled until plump; sweetened; and mixed with nuts, pomegranate seeds, parsley, Jordan almonds, and raisins. A thick coating of powdered sugar was spread over the molded wheat and decorated with silver almonds, dragees (small silver candy beads), and green fir trees, symbol of eternal life.
Family and friends ate the wheat, called kolivo, as a sign of mutual forgiveness with the dead person. The soul had then finished its wanderings and was ready to meet God.
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