“I remember the day when my father got killed in the civil war. When Mom learnt about it, the whole family and my siblings put on black clothes. People in the Balkans do take things like this quite seriously. My mother’s three brothers, my uncles, had also been killed before. I remember that day very well. As a young boy, I got scared, and I ran to my younger uncle. For us this was the worst moment of the civil war.”
“When we were fleeing through Albania, they were helping us. It was after the war, and the situation was different. People in these villages tried to help us. I remember that Mom was working there. It took a long time till we got to the sea, and till the officials, who were leading us as we walked, prepared the way for us. Mom was scraping corn, in order to get something. The older people would always build a simple hut, a wooden shelter covered with beech leaves, and we would stay there.”
“I remember that we communicated through letters. Thus we obtained addresses of our siblings. My grandmother as a very energetic woman. She was illiterate, but she had lots of energy. We got the addresses and we travelled through the whole country in order to visit them. It was amazing how welcoming the people were. The railway employees would look at the address and take us by train all the way there. Thus we travelled all over the country without any problems.”
“You asked about my father. I don’t remember him too much. He was actually born in America. My grandfather was a Greek Orthodox priest and he was in one of the first great settlement waves which immigrated to America. Then he decided that as soon as he earned some money, he would go back to Greece. In the village we thus had an iron bed and even a gramophone, they had brought it from there.”
“If Greek women put on black widows’ clothing, they usually never remarried. My mom became a widow when she was twenty-seven. My aunt’s husband, my aunt also lived here, and her husband died in the Hlubina mine, in an accident where sixty miners perished. She remained alone here. That’s the way it was in Greece. I don’t know, now it’s probably different, but in the 1950s and 1960s, only few of these women married again.”
Aristidis Spiropoulos was born in 1943 in the Greek region of Grevena. When he was four years old, he had to leave Greece with his mother and younger sister. They travelled via Albania, then by ship to Poland and from there to Czechoslovakia. Their father died during the civil war. His elder brothers had arrived to Czechoslovakia earlier, and they had been place into children‘s homes. His younger sister died in Mikulov due to pneumonia. Aristidis with his mother and other relatives moved to the Krnov region. His mother never remarried and she remained a widow. Aristidis became an electrician and in 1967 he married a Czech, with whom he has two daughters. His grandchildren have strong ties to Greece, they are active in Greek dance ensembles and choirs. Mr. Spiropoulos was considering returning to Greece, but he eventually decided to stay because of the family. He however enjoys visiting Greece, he likes the Greek mentality, and both his siblings have returned there. Nevertheless, he calls Albrechtice in the Czech Republic his home.
