Toil and Rage in a New Land: The Greek Immigrants in Utah Greek Land

Utah Historical Quarterly

Vol. 38, 1970, No. 2

Toil and Rage in a New Land: The Greek Immigrants in Utah

By Helen Zeese Papanikolas

Copyright by Author, 1970

Greek Land

FROM THE DAYS BEFORE HOMER, the Greeks have been sojourners in foreign lands. As if in exile they lived in large Greek colonies throughout Europe, Australia, North and South America, or alone in isolated outposts of Africa and Asia. The word for foreign places, xenetia comes often in Greek conversation. It evokes loneliness in alien lands and nostalgia for Greek earth. From ancient times to the present, songs of xenetia are part of daily life.

The lament of Americans that there are no longer frontiers to conquer may never be known by the Greeks. Greece has always been too poor to sustain her people. The celebrated glories of ancient Greece overlook the hard life of the common people, but one of them, Hesiod in his Works and Days, tells of his peasant love for the land, yet his longing for more food and to be less tired each evening after struggling with the dry, rocky earth.

It was this age-old poverty that brought the first young Greeks to Utah seventy years ago. To avoid three-years service in the Greek army and, for those living in Greek lands still held by the Turks, to avoid serving in the hated Turkish army were compelling factors, but escape from poverty was the paramount force for emigration.

They came, determined and optimistic. They were a realistic people moulded by a bitter national history, by the natural, living faith of the first Christian nation, by a rich folklore, and by a belief in Fate.

The strategic position of Greece in the Mediterranean had made it the battleground for waves of invaders. Grey stone Frankish, Venetian, and Turkish castles still stand and mar hills and mountainsides. The longest occupation was that of the Turks who ruled the Balkans for more than four hundred years. Foreign rule stripped Greece of lands, forests, minerals, and metals. It turned the people into serfs, of whom a great number were killed in wars, reprisals, and the bubonic plague.

In 1453 when Greek lands were conquered by the Turks, the country's scholars fled to other parts of Europe where for centuries they and their descendants kept alive the Greek language, religion, and the fervor to redeem their lands from the Turks. Many others took refuge in monasteries where they were never heard from again. Recently discovered manuscripts attest to the existence of these scholars. Much of what their work contains will never be known; the pages disintegrate at a touch.

During the centuries the Turks ruled the Balkans, time stood still for these captive peoples. While the Reformation, the Renaissance, and the Age of Enlightenment were changing the world, Greece and the otherBalkan countries knew nothing of these great forces. As the Ottoman Empire grew weak, its repressions toward subject nations became harsh. The Orthodox church and the teaching of Greek were suppressed. Byzantine churches with their brilliant mosaics, a unique contribution to the world, were converted to mosques. Their mosaics were plastered over. With each generation learning lessened until illiteracy reached into the higher clergy. By the end of the sixteenth century, even archbishops had trouble writing their names correctly.

Yet schools were held at night in caves and cellars. Children of immigrants who attended Greek schools in America learned a poem from those years. A child asks God to bring out the moon to light the way to caves, to learn, he says, "letters and the things of God."

A lullaby from Turkishoccupation times is still sung: "And if they tie you to the cross, my child, endure silently." Mothers raised sons to fight the Turks, handed them precious muskets, and told them to come back with their guns or not at all.

Folk songs, dirge-like, lamenting the death of young men; the perfidy of the Turks; and the courage ofthe young deacon, Athanasios Diakos, roasted alive, yet singing his love of Greek mountains and earth until he died, fed the soul of the people. There were no folk songs about Heaven, unknowable — a luxury to contemplate when each day was a struggle to survive. There were many songs and poems about birds, symbol to the enslaved Greeks of freedom. They had great love for them swooping down to eat scanty grain and soaring above battlefields effortlessly and far removed. Flying off at will wherever they chose, birds were often messengers of truth, sometimes harbingers of evil news — an eagle appearing from a battleground with a severed head in its talons.

Proverbs from the days of brilliant antiquity and from enlightened Byzantium were sharpened and honed by the Turkish centuries. They spoke a terse philosophy and held the people together with the bondage of sharing. Many proverbs were of God, Fate, Charon, and the Devil. A few times Heaven was invoked, without sentimentality and fanciful reflections: "Not even in Paradise can man live alone." "Thrashings originated in Paradise." The Greeks responded to reality: "What Fate has written in black ink, the sun can not whiten."

The epoch of Turkish rule added words to the pure Greek language or gave old ones a poignancy and emotional content that render them untranslatable: xenetia; filotimo, the self-respect that all of a man's actions attest to; leventia, love of life, gaiety, courage in the face of death; kleftourid, the haunts of the klefts, the guerrillas, ever ready to confront or ambush the Turks.

The Greeks survived despite living daily with death, torture, and repressions. Rather than destroy the Greek will, the Turkish vise made the Greek people the most nationalistic of all Balkan peoples. They were not divided by languages and religions into Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic, Roman Catholic, and Moslem as were other Balkan countries. "To be Greek is to be Orthodox," was said for four hundred years and continues to be said.

In the early 1800's guerrillas arose whose heroism is the true heritage of the Greek of today. The Golden Age of Pericles was too distant and unapproachable. Only a small number of the educated were acquainted with that greatness. The common people knew at most a few Aesop's fables; the bravery of a Spartan youth who hid a baby fox in his tunic and stood at attention before his general while his flesh was eaten; the heroic stand against the Persians at Thermopylae.

But the exploits of the Greek guerrillas were known to all. These klefts, meaning thieves because they struck in the secrecy of night, survived through cunning. One of the great kleft heroes, Karaiskakis, a leader in the Revolution, said, "Sometimes I play the trumpet and sometimes the touhelekiaP The trumpet is a Greek instrument, the toubelekia, Turkish.

Kief tic triumphs and defeats are the substance of Greek folk songs. Sung to the deep vibrating of the clarino (clarinet) and the ominous bagpipes, they kept alive Greek identity throughout the centuries of Turkish domination. Historians record the amazing fact that so little Turkization took place as to be negligible. A few Turkish foods and minor social practices are all that point to this long subjugation.

When the Balkan peoples won their independence, they looked back to the time before the Turkish occupation as the great days of their history. The Greeks looked back to Byzantium at the height of its magnificence. They were several centuries behind the times. They had become a rustic people with no industries, their land denuded. Ancient temples had been destroyed under the orders of the conquerors and crushed for paving roads; the Parthenon had been bombarded by Turkish cannon. The great city of Athens had been reduced to a provincial town of five thousand people.

The economy of Greece became dependent on the export of the currant crop. France imported almost all of this fruit for wine-making; a disease infesting currants had ruined the entire French crop for a generation.

By the end of the last century France began to control the currant blight, and Greece's economy became unsteady. In 1907 the currant crop failed, and Greek economy collapsed. The poverty of the country became one of acute suffering. There was only one hope: America. The Greek government encouraged the emigration knowing their young men would follow the old pattern of working in a foreign country, sending back large amounts of money, and after a few years returning with a sizable sum — all of which would help the country financially.

Earlier emigrants wrote braggadocio letters with photographs enclosed showing themselves in their new American finery. Advertisements of former Greeks, labor agents in America, appeared in all newspapers on the Greek mainland and in Crete; steamship agents traveled from towns to steep mountain villages and astounded their coffeehouse audiences with exaggerated stories of easy money in America. "Work is everywhere. Your two hands are all you need."

The young men were impatient to leave for America. They lived in a country of 50,000 square miles, 35,000 square miles less than the State of Utah. Three-fourths of the people lived off the land, a land so stony and arid that only one-fifth could be cultivated. A Greek folk poet says:

The field is poor, the fatted lambs are hungry. It is a waste of seed to sow it.

The dowry system, the only means to distribute what little wealth there was, condemned young men to labor for their sisters' dowries before they could marry. Even at harvest, work was not available for all. Many men and women never married, but grew old working in the fields of others. Men passed their time in coffeehouse indolence; women went from one relative to the other to help in illness and in death.

America was the great light for Greece exile.

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