Читать книгу Elita and her life with F.W. de Klerk - M Meiring - Страница 6

Elizabeth Lanaras was born on 11 March 1952 in Kolonaki, an affluent suburb of Athens. Her parents, George and Helen (known as Nitsa), belonged to the younger generation of Greeks who were rebuilding their lives after the Second World War.

Elita, their first child, was a plump, healthy baby, enthusiastically welcomed by her grandmothers, grandfather and a collection of aunts, uncles and cousins, all of whom were present at all the rites attendant on the birth of a Greek infant. Old-fashioned snapshots show the baby in her bath, in her cot, at her christening, her first steps, her first baby party, sitting on granny’s lap, stiffly held by grandpa, a round-tummied toddler hand in hand with her father on the beach.

None of these photos give any hint of the desperate, turbulent world beyond this close-knit circle who met so often and posed so cheerfully for the camera. These smiling images of family and friends, arm in arm around birthday cakes and daintily laid tables, tell a great deal about the indestructibility of the Greek spirit. Around Kolonaki, Athens was still largely a city in ruins. The devastation of a world war, followed by a civil war, had transformed “Beautiful Greece” into a wasteland of poverty and famine.

After the initial success the Greek forces had enjoyed in October 1940 against Mussolini’s Italian invasion, Hitler sent his own troops and the German SS, with tanks and Stuka bombers, into Greece in 1941. The whole country was occupied until 1944, when the Nazis were finally routed.

In spite of their position of privilege, young Greeks such as George and Nitsa also suffered under the deprivation and terror which gripped the country during the German occupation. Even before the war, divisions in Greece ran deep; but in resisting first the Italians and then the Germans, these differences were put aside. There was a temporary collaboration between the militant, pro-Communist National Liberation Front and the pro-government forces of the Greek Democratic League that supported the monarchy.

Immediately after the German withdrawal, this coalition collapsed when the pro-Communist forces attempted to take over the government. A bitter civil war ensued, bringing another four years of suffering to the country. At least one eighth of the Greek population was wiped out during the two wars. Greek morale was further undermined by the so-called pedomasoma, during which about 28 000 children were kidnapped by pro-Communist guerrillas and taken to neighbouring Communist countries. There they were adopted and completely indoctrinated into communism; only a few would ever be reconciled with their parents.

George Lanaras had only just completed his studies when he went to fight on the side of the Greek Democratic League. He served in the northern regions of the country, where he drove heavy vehicles through the dangerous mountainous areas. Here, guerrilla snipers of the National Liberation Front inflicted heavy losses on pro-government forces, but George would later tell of how he had enjoyed driving those perilous roads because they lay in the Naussa region from which the Lanaras family had originally come. This daredevil attitude, typical of George, would also colour his later business career.

After these two devastating wars, a severely traumatised Greek population was further reduced by the large-scale emigration of young people to other countries. For many young men who could find no means of livelihood in Greece, this seemed the only option. But Greece was to rise from the ashes, as it had done so often before throughout its long history of victory and defeat.

To a large degree, those who lived in Kolonaki were spared the worst miseries of the two wars, the extremes of poverty, the loss of homes, the desperate struggle to survive. Here there was a spirit of commitment to the future and it was at this time that George Lanaras, still in uniform but no longer on active service, met the young Nitsa Zotiadis. She was the daughter of the wealthy, dynamic Menelaos Zotiadis and his popular, intellectual wife, Martha.

George was earmarked to join the family firm, the long-established and well-known Lanaras Textiles. He and Nitsa were married in a traditional Greek ceremony, with all its rich symbolism and with both extended families present, although the festivities were inevitably scaled down because of the general shortage of food and other supplies.

The rebuilding of Greece progressed slowly. Britain was unable to help the impoverished population, in spite of Winston Churchill’s declared policy that Greece must at all costs be saved for the West from the power of Soviet Russia. The Americans had supported the Greek government during the civil war and later, under President Harry Truman, their Marshall Plan would help get the country on its feet again. “Uncle Truman”, as the president quickly became known in Greece, understood the Greek morale, but with time even he was daunted by what is historically regarded as a Greek inevitability: political uncertainty.

Seemingly above the eternal political infighting, Kolonaki concentrated on economic revival. It had long been an enclave of the country’s elite; most of its residents were shipping magnates and industrialists such as the Lanaras family – all of whom were occupied in exercising the ancient Greek flair for business. Like George and Nitsa, most of the other young entrepreneurs in Kolonaki were scions of old, well-known and well-off families. Living there was like being a member of an exclusive club.

This was the environment into which Elita was born, three years after the civil war, in a spacious apartment on the broad Vasissilis Sofia Avenue. She would grow up in the rarefied air of a neighbourhood that was the hub of what would later be described as the second Golden Age of Greece (after the first Golden Age under Athenian ruler Pericles, in the fifth century BC). It was an era of remarkable growth and the creation of personal wealth after the devastation of the wars of the previous decade.

Kolonaki, with its grand houses and luxury apartment blocks around the beautiful old palace, is also home to impressive ambassadorial residences and various museums. Well-known international visitors frequent the restaurants and tavernas, including numerous writers and artists. It was here that American writer Henry Miller (author of a popular book on Greek travel, The Colossus of Maroussi) established a close friendship with the famous Greek author George Katsimbalis, as well as with the charismatic diplomat poet George Seferis. Seferis was attached to the Greek Embassy at Pretoria and so became well known in South Africa.

In the 1960s, the world became aware of the vast wealth of shipping magnates such as Aristotle Onassis and Stavros Niarchos, with their ostentatious lifestyles and sensational marriages and divorces. Kolonaki maintained a conservative distance from such flamboyance. It was particularly important not to appear “in the papers” and especially not via reports of scandalous liaisons. In this milieu George Lanaras would rise to become a highly regarded shipowner, known as one who never exchanged his base in Greece for another country, such as Argentina in the case of Onassis, or America and England, as did several other Greek shipping magnates.

Kolonaki may have been spared some of the upheavals of war, but a number of its sons died in the two conflicts and some of the old established families found themselves in financially reduced circumstances. But it was a neighbourhood with a very clear philosophy: the past is the past, it is the future that matters.

This was also George Lanaras’s motto. He had studied at the University of Athens, qualifying as a chemist so that he could join the family firm. Lanaras (also the Greek word for wool) was so much part of the textile industry that after the war, thanks to its collective expertise, the business could be speedily revived; before long the factories were in production again.

Because of their family’s determination to improve their lives rather than to dwell on the past, as children neither Elita nor her sister, Martha (who was three years younger), heard anything of the hardships of the war years. They were also ignorant of the grim circumstances in which their grandparents had come to live in Kolonaki. Much later they would discover that they were descendants of the illustrious Philikê Etairia (The Friendly Society). This movement is generally accepted as one of the instigators of the Greek Revolution of 1821, which heralded the beginning of the long struggle to win independence from Turkey.

The knowledge that she was descended from the Philikê, as they are familiarly known, gave Elita a feeling of pride. Growing up, she believed that it somehow defined her “Greekness”. She and Martha loved listening to and retelling stories of the Philikê: “We come from them, the Philikê Etairia.”

Since ancient times the history of Greece has been marked by continual shifts in the ruling powers of city states, islands, and smaller communities, followed by waves of migration and emigration. Over centuries a diaspora of Greek communities developed in various Western as well as Eastern countries. Greek merchants often moved to major trade routes, because, compared to the flourishing cities of Europe and the Middle East, Athens had become little more than a village. Large Greek communities were thus established everywhere and remained Greek down the centuries, holding fast to the Greek Orthodox faith and their mother tongue.

In the fourteenth century the Ottoman Empire (based in modern Turkey) began to launch incursions into Europe and by the fifteenth century these attacks had reached Greek-controlled cities and regions. Many raids and battles resulted in the Turks achieving widespread domination over the Greek diaspora in countries such as Bulgaria, Asia Minor and the islands around the Greek mainland. Four centuries of Turkish rule would lead to the Greek Wars of Independence, inspired by groups like Philikê Etairia.

The movement was founded in 1814 in Odessa by a number of Greek patriots who had lived under Turkish rule for generations in the diaspora on the coast of the Black Sea in Bulgaria. In 1821, when Philikê Etairia hero Alexander Ypsilantis attacked the Turks in Rumania with eight hundred men, the war of independence began in earnest. Ypsilantis suffered a crushing defeat, but across Greece the insurgents remobilised and the conflict would eventually continue for six bloody years.

The fame of the Etairia lived on in numerous stories, especially those about the military hero Theodore Kolokotronis, a clan chieftain from the Peloponnesian region. His cruel and spectacular victory at Nauplion ensured the Philikê Etairia a place of honour in Greek history. Tony, Elita’s future husband, may not have been a direct descendant of Theodore, but he was a member of the Colocotronis clan, which remains an illustrious name in Greece to this day.

In 1830, after the War of Independence, Greece became a monarchy and began to work towards national unity. This was known as Megali Idea (the Great Idea), according to which the Greek language, history and especially the Orthodox faith would be encouraged in Greek-speaking areas. As a result many groups in the diaspora, such as Bulgarians, Albanians, Serbians, Jews and also Turks, describe themselves as Greeks in their ethnic languages and remain faithful to Greek aspirations.

Elita’s maternal grandparents, Menelaos and Martha Zotiadis, were descendants of the Etairia who lived in Bulgaria. (Martha’s family had originally come from Anatolia). They met in Burgas, a Bulgarian city on the Black Sea. Menelaos was a respected dealer in chemicals as well as other commodities; Martha, a graduate in philosophy, also had a passion for literature. They were members of the Greek elite on that coast, taking the lead in the city’s cultural life. Family tradition has it that Martha had to accept an arranged marriage with Menelaos because her parents would not allow her to marry her Bulgarian-born love, who may also have been a Moslem. Menelaos although not attractive, was nevertheless Greek, and, as was the norm then, Martha agreed to marry this clever and affluent man.

Towards the end of the First World War, Greece entered the fray on the side of the Allied Forces and with their help was finally able to throw off the Turkish yoke. Turkish possessions were handed over to Greece and in 1920 a controversial series of repatriations began in which more than a million Greeks in Turkish territories, including Bulgaria, were returned to Greece, while Turks in Greece were repatriated to their fatherland.

One hundred years after the Philikê Etairia instigated the revolution against the Turks, the young Zotiadis couple’s stay in Burgas was brought to a dramatic end. They had to “return” to Greece, in spite of the fact that the Zotiadises had lived in Bulgaria for generations and regarded it as their fatherland. Like thousands of other families, they travelled by boat to Thessalonica.

These mass relocations brought about an appalling disruption of people’s lives. Menelaos and Martha, accustomed to a life of luxury in Burgas, could bring only a few of their possessions. They arrived in Thessalonica in 1926, with one and a half million Greek refugees, in an unknown fatherland with a comparatively sparse population of five million people.

Some of those repatriated could hardly speak Greek and possessed only the clothes that they wore. Disease, hardship and famine were rife in the chaos which prevailed, but Menelaos wasted no time in setting up a business. Soon their first child was born, a daughter who was baptised Helen but called by her pet name Nitsa. Not long afterwards they had a second daughter, Niki.

Menelaos, apparently always controversial in his outlook, was not only a businessman but also a well-known and often contentious writer of political articles. Only fifteen years after their arrival in Greece, his fondness for polemics would cost him dear. During the German Occupation of World War II, Menelaos, by then well established in Thessalonica, fearlessly criticised the occupying powers. They prosecuted him and the family had to flee. In 1941 he, Martha and their two young daughters boarded a boat for Athens with a few suitcases. The rest of their possessions were to follow later.

When they arrived in the harbour of Piraeus they found themselves once again in the midst of a hungry, desperate mass of humanity. Most were fugitives from the northern regions, trying to escape the German tyranny. Teeming Piraeus served as a springboard to Athens, where the refugees hoped to find work and safety.

In Athens shanties sprang up everywhere, under trees and awnings, along pavements and in alleys. Schools were set up in streets; hunger drove Greeks to collaborate with German soldiers, which embittered relations among themselves.

The two Zotiadis daughters also had to go to school in the street, but the family was soon able to find a home with relatives in Athens. Niki clearly remembers how children from all classes sat together in the streets doing sums, and how rich and poor were equal in the disruption of wartime.

With his unquenchable drive, Menelaos soon had another business on the go, and had even found a place for his family to stay. Then the Zotiadises suffered a tremendous loss. The cargo boat from Thessalonica with all their possessions blew up in Piraeus harbour. All their worldly possessions –valuable antique furniture, heirlooms, books and paintings- were destroyed.

Martha, accustomed to a rigidly formal lifestyle, nevertheless set up her home to the best possible standards she could achieve in the circumstances. She saw to it that her daughters received a good education; she obtained books and, where there were theatres open, arranged for them to attend performances. She also made sure that her daughters had elegant manners: guests had to be correctly introduced, the table always properly laid, food beautifully presented. No matter how slender the means, Martha made sure that standards were properly maintained.

Menelaos had no time to brood on past losses but concentrated on providing for his wife and children. And predictably, once again he began to write political articles for any publication that would accept them.

Nitsa, a sensitive child, received a fine education in spite of difficult circumstances and was soon fluent in Greek, French and English. By the time she met her hero, George Lanaras, she was an attractive, well-groomed, fashionably-dressed young lady – and an extremely wealthy one.