Out of the Balkans

7/27/2019 Out of the Balkans

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Out of the Balkans

by Jason C. Mavrovitis

Part 1: Out of the Balkans

Chapter 1, continued

Eleni and Evangelia: Out of Thrace and the Black Sea

Copyright ©Jason C. Mavrovitis 2002. Online publication 2003. All Rights Reserved.

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Sozopolis' social life centered about the Orthodox Church, its fasts, feast days andliturgical dramas; the seasonal activities of fishing, salting, curing, sowing,harvesting, crushing grapes and making wine, threshing the grain, and preparingfor winter; the family's joy (name days, weddings, births and baptisms) andsadness (deaths, funerals and memorials services). The people lived on the coastof the sea fearful of periodic military conscription of their young men to fight infar away places, and of armies that descended on them for reasons unknown.

The Pontic Greek whose name the sisters bore was that of their paternalgrandfather Ziso Ortakioglis. Born in about 1800, he was one of the millions of Greeks whose unknown ancestors had populated Anatolia, Thrace and the citiesof the Pontos. In the nineteenth century, Ziso left his namesake city of Ortaköy tosettle in Sozopolis. Ortaköy was one of two towns, either modern Corum or Sivas,(51) each located on an ancient northern trade route in Turkey that led fromcentral Asia Minor to the Black Sea port of Amisos, today's Samsun.

Ziso was not actually his given name. It derived from the surname Zissimos, which may have been a corruption of Zosimos, an early fourth century Christian

saint of Cilicia, a region in modern Turkey. When this young man arrived inSozopolis from Ortaköy, people referred to him as Ziso, an abbreviation of hissurname, and identified him as being from Ortaköy or, "Ortakioglis." He settledin Sozopolis and in about 1835 married an eighteen-year-old woman namedSofia, who was of Greek parentage.

Conventions for given and surnames varied in the Balkans. Bulgarians andGreeks had different traditions. When they intermarried the form generally


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followed that of the husband's nationality. Greek women took their husband'sfirst and second name. Thus, Sofia became Sofia Zisova Ortakioglis (the feminineBulgarian form Zisova used to indicate "wife of Ziso").

Use of masculine, feminine and diminutive forms, the whim of administrative

officials, and errors in spelling introduced variants of the family's surname. By the early twentieth century the original Zissimos evolved to include Zissis, Ziso,Zisu, Zisou, Zison, Zisova, and even Zysopoulos and Zissopoulos, the latter twoforms created by late nineteenth century family members to elevate their socialstanding. The suffix, ~ poulos, implied upper class cosmopolitan Greek originfrom Athens or Constantinople.

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Ziso and Sofia Zisova lived in the early nineteenth century, when the Kingdom of Greece was born. Sozopolis was distant from the new Kingdom, but one canimagine the excitement and anticipation that news of the liberation of Hellenesfrom the oppression of the Ottomans must have created for Balkan Christians of all ethnicities.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Russian Tsar Nicholas proclaimed himself protector of all Orthodox Christian citizens of the Turkish Empire, a status thatgreatly threatened Ottoman suzerainty. The Tsar warned the Turks that if they did not recognize his role as protector, he would occupy the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, the northernmost regions of Turkey in Europe.[map /52] Another Turko-Russian war threatened.

The British and French were constantly on guard against Russian intentionstoward the Balkans and the Black Sea. Russia desperately wanted unfetteredaccess to the Aegean and had the strategic goal of taking Constantinople andturning the Balkans into a giant client state. Russia approached Britain with asecret plan to partition the Ottoman Empire. Britain remained convinced that it was in her best interest for the Ottoman Empire, described by Tsar Alexander as"the sick man of Europe," to be preserved.(53)

Between 1825 and 1852, Britain's exports to Turkey grew to the point that they exceeded those to Russia, Italy, Turkey and France. In 1852, 1,741 British shipstraded in the Black Sea, with great quantities of wheat and corn imported fromTurkey's provinces on the Danube.(54) For Britain, the smallest chance that its

access to the Black Sea through the Dardanelles and the Bosphorous, and controlof the eastern Mediterranean might be lost was an unacceptable economic risk.Political policy followed economic reality.

The immediate excuse for the Crimean War was a dispute between Russia andFrance over which Christian Church, Russian Orthodox or French Catholic, would hold the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Bethlehem.(55) Infact, the national interests of England, France, Russia and Turkey were at play.











The Sultan ruled for the French Catholics. Britain and France sent warships tothe Dardanelles on 8 June 1853 to support the Turks. On July 3 the Tsar orderedhis troops to occupy Moldavia and Wallachia. Turkey declared war on Russia on 5October.

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The first great opportunity for the Greek Orthodox of the Black Sea coast to become free had come. Russia and its people supported the Orthodox Christiansof the Balkans and it was to Russia that they looked for deliverance from theTurk.

News of Russian troop movements must have been cause for both celebrationand alarm in Sozopolis. Immediately after the Ottoman declaration of war onRussia, the British and French fleets entered the Bosphorous to protectConstantinople. On 30 November Russian warships destroyed seven Turkishfrigates, effectively the entire Turkish fleet, at Sinope on the southeastern coast of the Black Sea. Britain and France declared war on Russia in March of 1854 insupport of Turkey. Their warships entered the Black Sea while French troopsmarched north from Gallipoli through Adrianopole toward Burgas and Varna.[map / 56]

In April of 1854, units of the British and French fleet anchored off Sozopolis. When boats approached Sozopolis' beach, Sofia Zisova Ortakioglis took anancient saber from the wall of her home and called Orthodox Greeks to arms insupport of the Russian cause. Her action came to naught. British and Frenchpersonnel landed without bloodshed to obtain water and establish a smallmilitary presence. However, Sofia's passionate response was not forgotten. She became known in the city of Sozopolis and its environs and in the oral tradition of the family as Yia-Yia Mahera, Grandma the Knife.

The Anglo-French alliance proceeded north, establishing a headquarters at Varnafrom which they were the first in history to lay underwater telegraph cable. Itprovided communication from their headquarters to their base in the Crimea. Forone year, the alliance besieged the Russian fortress at the Crimean naval base of Sebastopol. Each side in the struggle suffered great loss of life to hunger, cold anddisease. The alliance captured the burned out ruins of Sebastopol; a Pyrrhic victory. The result was, for Russia, a temporary loss of territory and, for theOttoman Empire, a delay in its inevitable collapse.

Ziso and Sofia Ortakioglis' son, Hristodul (born c. 1838), took his father's originalsurname, Zissis. Hristodul married a young woman named Vasiliki Vserkozov whose father, Dimitri was Bulgarian and mother, Sultana Antoniou, Greek. InHristodul's death certificate, both he and Vasiliki are identified as OrthodoxChristians, Greek nationals, and Bulgarian citizens living in Sozopolis. Thedetailed if inconsistent differentiations made in legal documents of the time

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reflected the ethnic, religious and nationalist awareness that was growing in theBalkans.

Hristodul witnessed his mother Sofia's rage at the Anglo-French preparations toland at Sozopolis, and was old enough to have followed the progress of the

Crimean War. Russia's defeat was certainly a disappointment for Bulgarians andGreeks who longed for freedom. The next generation would support new Russianthrusts toward the Bosphorus and the Aegean.

In 1899 Sofia, the youngest of four daughters born to Hristodul and VasilikiZissis, was barely fifteen when Konstantinos Kapidaglis,(57) a dashing andadventuresome widower who was twenty-six years older than she, married her.Constantinos claimed to have been forty-one at the time. However he alsomaintained that he remembered the Anglo-French fleet anchored in the bay of Sozopolis, which would add perhaps five years to his age.

Constantinos came to the marriage with three children from his first wife,Harliklea Zurmali Georgiu who died in 1895 giving birth to a daughter, alsonamed Hariklea. Constantinos' eldest son Stavros, born in 1881, was older thanhis new stepmother; his second son, Zenovios, was about the same age.

The Capidaglis family first appeared in Sozopolis in the eighteenth century. Thesurname derives from the place Kapi Dagi ("Door of the Mountain" in Turkish),an Island in the Sea of Marmara, Turkey, and site of the ancient Greek colony of Kyzikos, later known as Kapidagi, and now the modern city of Belkis. He, just asZiso Ortakliogis, was an immigrant to Sozopolis, and named after his place of origin "Kapidaglis." There is no record of his given name. He married a woman of Sozopolis and with her had a daughter, Theofano.

When Theofano Kapidaglis married her husband, Tsvetkov, he took his father-in-law's surname, thereby securing it. One can only wonder why. The nameTsvetkov was maintained as a middle name in the next generation by their son,Constantine Tsvetkov Capidaglis

In the later half of the nineteenth century Western European powers and theOttoman Empire continued to be threatened by Russian intentions in theBalkans. Russia persisted in its effort to dominate the Balkan Peninsula. In 1875Orthodox risings in Bosnia, Montenegro and Serbia against their Turkishoppressor generated the sparks that ignited the next war between Russia and

Turkey. After two years of diplomatic negotiations conducted to the cacophony of rifle fire and cannon, and failure of an international conference atConstantinople, the Russians declared war on Turkey.

Russian forces crossed the Danube and besieged the Ottoman held fortress of Plevna, on the Danubian Plain north of the Balkan range. A contingent of theRussian army bypassed the fortress and joined a large number of Bulgarian volunteers to hold the Shipka Pass against great odds, thus preventing Turkish





reinforcements from surging north to reinforce Plevna. The Battle of ShipkaPass(58) was bloody. Bulgarian volunteers ran out of ammunition and resorted tothrowing stones and body parts of their dead comrades at the Turks beforestopping them with bayonets and knives.

When Plevna fell, Russians stormed south through the Balkan range achieving arout of Turkish forces and the near capture of Constantinople. On 3 March 1878, within view of the minarets of the City, the belligerents signed the Treaty of SanStefano which recreated 'Big Bulgaria,' a Bulgarian state equal to that that hadexisted in medieval times, reaching the Aegean and making impossible Ottomancontrol of Albania by land. Russia had finally positioned itself to dominate theBalkans. The people of Bulgaria still celebrate 3 March as the date of theirliberation and formation of the modern Bulgarian State.

"Big Bulgaria," created under the Treaty of San Stefano,(59) was bordered by theDanube on the north and the Black Sea on the east, and incorporated all of historically identified Macedonia. "Big Bulgaria" would have extended south toinclude the city of Kastoria and the village of Mavrovo (more in Chapter Two).

In 1879, wishing to strengthen an already dominant position in the Balkans,Russia's Tsar Alexander II nominated a favorite nephew, German Prince Alexander of Battenberg, to the executive, princely position in the new state. The young Prince came to a strife ridden government still trying to organize itself.

Jealous and concerned about possible Russian dominance in Eastern Europe,Britain and Austria reacted against the Tsar's ambitions with the support of France, Italy and Germany. They applied great diplomatic pressure on Russia.Isolated and fearful of another Crimean catastrophe, Russia relented. The resultthree years later in 1881 at the Congress of Berlin were agreements that thwartedRussian plans and changed the borders.

The agreement split Bulgaria into three parts, one of which was a new, smallerBulgarian State under Prince Alexander. Split off from 'Big Bulgaria' was a regionstill subject to the Ottoman state and occupied by Turkish forces, but headed by aChristian governor: Eastern Roumelia.(60) It was located south of the BulgarianState between the Balkan and Rhodope mountains and extended to the Black Sea.The treaty also gave the Ottomans territory in European Thrace, Macedonia and Albania.

The geopolitical interests of Russia and Britain reversed when Eastern Roumeliaunited with Bulgaria in 1885-86. Russia's Tsar Alexander III, who became Tsaron Alexander II's assassination, unlike his predecessor detested Bulgaria's Prince.The Tsar's antipathy toward Prince Alexander was based in part on his refusal tomake Bulgaria a vassal state of Russia. And the Tsar had been against Roumelia joining with Bulgaria to create an even greater land barrier to any Russian drivetoward the Bosphorus. The British, on the other hand, concerned that the



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Russians might still attempt an advance in the Balkans, were pleased thatRoumelia joined Bulgaria.

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Before 1878, in anticipation of the Turko-Russian, war Russian agents had beenat work recruiting irregular militia as far south as Sozopolis. ConstantinosCapidaglis was a man of action. He became commandant of the secret militia inSozopolis and hoped to participate in an attack on Constantinople and theemancipation of Greek and Bulgarian Orthodox peoples. While his hope wasunfulfilled, Constantinos' military experience and demeanor became the basis forhis nickname, Generalis [photo / 61].

Constantinos' anti-Turk fervor never waned. At the outbreak of the Turko-Greek war in April of 1897, he volunteered to serve in the Greek army. German trainedTurkish troops crushed the Greek people's ill-timed attempt to win freedom inCrete, Thessaly and Macedonia.

Crete was however brought closer to enosis (union with Greece) largely becauseBritish, French, Russian, and other allied forces intervened to end the bloodshed.These are the same forces whose admirals are so poignantly remembered by Madame Hortense, the aged courtesan in Nikos Kazantzakis' book Zorba theGreek.(62) Because of her relationship with warships and admirals, Zorba calledher " Bouboulina."(63) The Admirals' fleets occupied the Cretan city of Chaniaand bombarded the insurgent Greeks on Akrotiri to contain the insurrection.

Constantinos did not talk about his experiences in the Turko-Greek War. TheGreek army collapsed at the first assault of the Turks and fled across Thrace. It was an ignoble end to an enthusiastic beginning forced by excited and irrationalmobs of zealous and unrealistic patriots in Athens.(64) Constantinos returned toSozopolis.

By 1905 Constantinos and Sofia had added three children to their family: Hristos, Vasiliki and Theafano. Perhaps in anticipation of the bad times ahead, and to find work to sustain his family, Constantinos immigrated from Sozopolis to a refugeecamp in the area of Thessaloniki and then to Athens, Greece. His Greek nationality and past service in the Greek army made him welcome. Constantinosconsidered himself more Greek (more of a Hellene) than the mainlander Greeks;he called them savage Christians (agriochristiani ). He established himself and

his family in a home in Kalithea, Athens, where he worked at his trade as a tailor.His home was to become first Eleni and Evangelia's, and subsequently the entirefamily's stepping-stone to America.

Sofia's sisters, Sultana and Smaragda, both married Greek men of Sozopolis:Ioannis Thoma and Demetrios Parousis, respectively. Sultana's children, Thomasand Ioanna, immigrated to the United States. The third, Eleni, lived in Chicagoand likely brought her mother to Chicago to live with her after her father died.

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When last seen Smaragda Parousis and her family lived in Athens. They may havechanged their names and fled to Bulgaria or Romania in the late 1940's at the endof the Greek Civil War. They were on the losing communist side.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the fourth sister, Eleni (photo), lived in

Burgas ( Pyrgos), Bulgaria, with her cousin, Sofia Georgi Stateva. Eleni worked asa seamstress in this growing port city to the north of Sozopolis. There, in a time of growing unrest, she met and married her husband, Stefan.(65)

Eleni gave birth to her daughter on 26 October 1904, the Eastern Orthodox FeastDay of St. Demetrios.(66) The baby was named Demetra in honor of the Saint on whose feast day she began her life.

Little Demetra did not keep her original name. She contracted smallpox in hersecond year, and in their prayers her parents promised the Theotokos (theMother of God ~ the Virgin Mary) that if she lived they would baptize theirdaughter Evangelia, which translated from Greek means "good news."(67) Shesurvived, and was named Evangelia (photo). Years later, in 1916, at the edge of New York City's "Hell's Kitchen,"(68) she became known as Lily.

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In 1906 the position of Greeks in Bulgaria was becoming untenable. Bulgarianshad for many years been envious of and angry with the Greek population whoseeducation, success in commerce, and historical alignment with the Greek Orthodox Phanariotes(69) in Constantinople gave them great economic andsocial advantage. The Bulgarians considered Greeks to be privileged, overbearingand agents of their Ottoman overlords. Travel inland was dangerous for a Greek. Angry Bulgarian peasants and brigands roamed the forests and lonely roadsdemanding that Greeks acknowledge themselves as Greek-speaking Bulgarians.(70)

Through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries one of the greatestabuses to Bulgarian ethnic pride was the Patriarch's appointment of Greek speaking bishops to serve the Bulgarian Orthodox population.

After the success of the 1821 revolution both Bulgarians and Turks becameapprehensive about the resurgence of Greek chauvinism. A Megali Idhea (GreatIdea) fired the Greek imagination. It was a grandiose vision whose aim was to

recapture Constantinople, recreate the Byzantine Empire, and free and unite allHellenes in Turkish territory. This unification would have included coastal Anatolia, Thrace, Constantinople, and the Greek cities of the Black Sea.

Growing Bulgarian national consciousness had as its primary goal deliverancefrom the "yoke" of Greek culture, not emancipation from Ottoman rule. Centralto their ambitions was the establishment of a Bulgarian Orthodox Church, withits own language, bishops and clergy. In frustration, the Bulgarians went so far as



















to enter into negotiations with the pope with the thought of possible conversionof the entire Orthodox population to Roman Catholicism.

Succumbing to pressure from Russia, which did not want to lose its BalkanOrthodox Slavic brothers to Rome, the Porte decreed establishment of the

autocephalous Bulgarian church in 1870 and invested its first Exarch.(71) Wealthy Bulgarians established schools and reading rooms. These institutions were the instruments used to strengthen Bulgarian identity and put pressure onthe Greeks of Eastern Roumelia. In September of 1885 a revolution inPhilippopolis (Plovdiv) proclaimed union with Bulgaria. The following April theunion was accepted and ratified by the European powers and the Ottomans.(72)

Prince Alexander failed to gain popular support in Bulgaria even after winning ashort war against Serbian attempts to expand its territory at the expense of Bulgaria. Tsar Alexander III's antagonism against the Prince never waned, and in1886 Prince Alexander was forced to abdicate. In 1887 Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg was offered and accepted the throne of Bulgaria. Prince Ferdinand andhis premier, Stephen Stambulov, led Bulgaria forward toward a rapprochement with Turkey engendering support from the Sultan, who appointed bishops of theBulgarian Exarchist Church to important sees in the Ottoman's multi-ethnicMacedonia.

At the turn of the twentieth century the Balkan states were in crisis. Bulgarians,Greeks and Serbs contested for dominance and territory in geographically illdefined Macedonia. The region also contained minorities of ethnic Turks, Vlachsand Albanians who participated in the struggle. Guerrilla bands formed andfought each other in Macedonia, Thrace and Bulgaria. Each savaged the otherspopulations, committing atrocities in the name of their nationalist and religious

cause.(73)

As Greek Macedonians gained military success, Bulgarians became more belligerent toward the Greeks in Thrace and in what had been Eastern Roumelia.Finally, in the summer of 1906, provoked in part by the Patriarch's appointmentof the Greek Bishop Neophytos to Varna, pogroms broke out against the Greek population on the coast of the Black Sea.

The Greeks of Varna, Pyrgos, and Anchialos saw their homes, churches, schoolsand shops destroyed by organized Bulgarian mobs led by guerrilla bands knownas comitadjides.

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On the night of 30 July 1906, Anchialos burned. Bulgarian militia and mobsconducted a pogrom that resulted in the slaughter of four thousand of its sixthousand Greek inhabitants.









Awakened by Sozopolis' church bells, Hristodul and Vasiliki Zissis wondered atthe glow in the sky to the north, across the bay. In the days that followed their world disintegrated about them. They heard stories of the holocaust in Anchialos,of arson whose flames consumed homes and shops, and of murder and lootingthat had visited friends and family in the city of Pyrgos.

In Pyrgos, Hristodul and Vasiliki's daughter, Eleni, her husband, Stefan, were victims of the terror and violence of that night. Clinging to their baby, Evangelia,and carrying what few belongings they could, they joined Greek families who ranthrough the streets toward the docks and small boats that held hope of escape.Stefan stumbled and fell. The press of humanity trampled him to death andpushed Eleni and her child into the sea. Greek fishermen picked them out of the water and for several days carried them south through the Bosphorus, then westpast Constantinople, across the Propontis, through the Hellespont and, finally,into the Aegean Sea.

With dread, and tears, and despair, Eleni retraced the route of her ancientancestors. She was at sea with the crew of a fishing boat. A destitute widow withan infant and an unknowable future, she had one purpose ~ to survive.

Eleni and Evangelia never returned to the shores of Bulgaria. With thousands of other refugees they found their way to Greece. The Greek government, thoughimpoverished by the war with Turkey, established Nea Anchialos (New Anchialos), a community near Volos for refugees from Anchialos. Eleni andEvangelia went to another settlement named Euxeinoupolis, near Almyro, southof Volos.(map / 74) Eight hundred families from Eastern Roumelia settled in Nea Anchialos, and an additional nine hundred made their way to Euxeinoupolis.(75)

As an adult, Evangelia told of the plague she experienced as a child in Sozopolis,and of bodies carted out of the city to be burned. But it was at the refugeesettlement, an incubator of disease and death, not Sozopolis that she was at anage to remember such horrors.

High-ranking military officers who governed Euxeinoupolis stole refugee foodand relief supplies to sell for personal gain. Eleni organized the women to protestthis corruption, led a march on the military's headquarters, and, according tofamily members who proudly retold the story, she physically savaged the colonelin charge. Refugees in her camp had no further problem receiving aid.

Eleni (photo / 76a) and Evangelia (photo / 76b) spent several months inEuxeinoupolis. They eventually made contact with and joined Eleni's sister and brother-in-law, Sofia and Constantine Capidaglis, who with their children lived inKalithea, Athens. They welcomed the refugees to their home.

Members of the family worked in Athens as tailors, seamstresses and millinersand used their talents to design, drape, cut, sew and finish dresses, gowns, suitsand coats. They honed the skills that would provide for their economic futures.





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According to family oral history, Eleni was so accomplished that she came todesign and make dresses for Greece's Queen Olga and her daughters.

Eleni's career in Athens was short-lived.

Peace was unknown in the Balkans during the first two decades of the twentiethcentury. Each ethnicity's claim to Macedonia and the zeal of all to rid themselvesof their Turkish overlords made for a complex armed struggle. Guerilla warfare was rampant in Macedonia, Epirus and Thrace. In 1908 Albanian nationalismsparked a revolution that by 1912 gained the Albanian people home-rule with theright to establish schools and publish newspapers. It also confirmed the 1878 boundary of Ottoman territory, which favored the Albanian population in thevilayets of Scutari, Janina, Monastir and Kossovo.(77) Neighboring statescoveted all four vilayets: Scutari ~ by the Montenegrins; Janina ~ by the Greeks;Monastir and Kossovo ~ by Bulgars, Serbs and Greeks.

A secret Balkan coalition of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro, the"League," had ambition to rid Macedonia of Turks and to divide the spoils. In theFirst Balkan War of 1912 the Turks lost. The result: Albania became a nation withless territory than it had coveted, and the Island of Crete united with Greece.

Dividing the spoils was more problematic than the League had hoped. In 1913,Serbia, Greece, Romania and Montenegro fought Bulgaria for territPage 22

Sometime before April of 1912 Eleni married a man named Christos Stamatiou.But family oral history and photographs indicate that Eleni and Evangelia were inPiraeus for one or two years before coming to America. Where was Christosduring that time? Was Eleni's marriage an arrangement so that she mightimmigrate to America? These questions go unanswered.

We know that Christos and Eleni witnessed increased tensions in the Balkan. Hehad few skills and they were without land or financial resources. They saw thedispossessed, those without any hope of gainful employment to support theirlives and families, board ships to emigrate, leaving the Balkans and Greece forCanada, Argentina, Australia and America. He and Eleni made the decision toemigrate, to find a future in the New World that America offered.

According to entries on the S.S. Macedonia's "List or Manifest of AlienPassengers for the United States," Christos Stamatiou arrived at Ellis Island on

20 April 1912. He was alone, married, and 38 years of age. His destination wasSouth St. Paul, Minnesota, where he was to join a friend. His last place of residence in Greece was "Efxinoupolis." The document shows his place of birth as"Anhialos," Greece. The entry either is a misspelling of Anchialos in Bulgaria, thecity that suffered total destruction in the Bulgarian pogrom of 1906, or areference to Nea Anchialos in Greece. The name of his wife, who remained inGreece, is decipherable on the manifest as "Eleni". [photos]


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Christos made his way to St. Paul, Minnesota to work for the railroad or in thestockyards and slaughterhouses that had become central to St. Paul's economy.

On 31 July 1912, Eleni and Evangelia embarked on the S.S. Macedonia for aseventeen-day voyage to America. It was a long trip in steerage for young

Evangelia.(79) She never forgot the crowded, dirty conditions; slop buckets, foulair and barely edible food. Eleni and Evangelia arrived at Ellis Island on 17 August 1912. The ship manifest shows that Eleni's nearest relative in Athens,Greece was her sister, Sofia, and that Eleni and Evangelia were on route to joinEleni's husband in St. Paul where he lived at "211 East 7th Street", just a mile orso north of the stockyards. On the manifest their place of birth was identified as,"Sozoupolis, Boulgaria."

Among the many places of origin Eleni's fellow immigrants listed on the S.S. Macedonia's manifest were Skyros, Chios, Mitylene, Gallipoli, Pirgami, Arakova,Fokis, Dervitsami, Athens, the Aegean and Ionian Islands, and Turkey.Destinations in the United States were countrywide, including Chicago,Minneapolis, Oakland, Boston, Morgantown, Detroit, Duluth and Des Moines.

Ellis Island records show that after passing their physical examinations Eleni andEvangelia were detained for three days while waiting for Christos to send money to them for their train tickets to St. Paul.(80) When funds arrived Elenipurchased the tickets, and at 3:00 PM on 20 August 1912, released from EllisIsland, they began their lives in America.(81)

ory in the Second Balkan War. In the end, Serbia and Greece shared Macedonia.[map / 78]












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