Archive for July, 2010
It is still occasionally possible to see, when travelling around rural Serbia, surviving examples of the extended homestead – the main house and around its courtyard (known as an avlija) a cluster of secondary dwellings and structures. The traditional family structure was called the zadruga: it comprised an extended family of, for example, a man and his wife, living with their married sons and their children, or alternatively, two or more brothers and their wives and children. The head of the zadruga was the starešina, who would live in the main building with his wife (the stanarica). The other couples would sleep in simpler outbuildings known as vajati.
An average sized zadruga might be a household of a dozen or so individuals, although up to 25 or more members were not so rare when a starešina was in residence with two or three married sons all of whom had young families. When the starešina died, a new one, usually the eldest able-bodied son or brother, would take over. From time to time, one of the married sons or brothers would break away to set up his own zadruga.
The starešine collectively within its village made up the village council of elders, or kmetovi. The council used to be known as the opština but after WW2 this was changed to odbor.
Complex factors contributed to the slow decline of the zadruga – among them, the fragmenting of land holdings into less viable units, the running out of land which a break-away son or brother could claim to set up a new zadruga, declining birth and death rates, the rise of individualism and interest in more private nuclear family households, and the move to towns and the values associated with modernity which were inimical to the traditional structures. Today most Serbian households are nuclear and the head of a household is simply called a domaćin.
Throughout the long 19th century, there were two main classes of Greek immigrant in Britain.
On the one hand, there were the wealthy merchant families, whose kinship ties formed an extended network of family homes and businesses throughout the Mediterranean, Aegean and Black Seas, and beyond. For instance, the Mavrogordato family in London and Manchester had kin in Alexandria, Egypt; in Ottoman Constantinople; in Firenze (Florence) and Livorno (Leghorn), Italy and Castellammare, Sicily; in Taganrog and Rostov, Russia; and in Calcutta, India. Other prominent families included the Negreponte, Paspati, Psicha, Ralli and Rodocanachi. And, of course, these intermarried and formed different business partnerships over the decades of the 19th century.
On the other hand, there were a large number of Greek merchant seamen – cooks, donkeymen, firemen, sailors – who worked in the Greek or British merchant navy. Many of these were of humble origin and not necessarily from Greek islands or coastal communities – plenty came from peasant backgrounds in the mountains. If they settled in Britain, then tended to do so in sea ports such as Cardiff and Newport (Monmouthshire) in South Wales, or Newcastle and South Shields on Tyneside. Some then ran cafes, or fish and chip shops, or boarding houses for mariners.
Of course, the two broad types of Greek immigrants in Britain were connected. The merchants traded in currants, cotton or tobacco, and the sailors manned the merchants’ ships that took these goods overseas.
When starting on your Greek family history research, you should not expect your ancestors to have had Athenian roots. Athens was a small town at the time of Greek independence in 1832 – the population in 1840 is thought to have been approximately 26,000 (tiny compared to the Greek population of Constantinople – 120,000 – at the same date). The merchant families often had roots in Constantinople or Smyrna, or on islands such as Chios in the North Aegean and Syros in the Cyclades, outside the immediate post-independence borders of Greece. Ermoupoli on Syros was in fact the principal port in Greece until Patras and Piraeus rose to pre-eminence in the 1870s.
Bluebird Research would be happy to assist you with your Greek family history research, wherever your ancestors came from. Contact us with the information you already have about the family genealogy and we would be pleased to give you our assessment without charge.
The Greeks formed the largest European community in Egypt before the First World War: 62,973 Greeks were counted in the 1907 census. As well as Alexandria, Cairo, Ismailia and Port Said, Greeks settled and lived in smaller towns such as Damietta, Edfu, Helwan, Kantara, Mansoura, Tanta and Zagazig.
Overwhelmingly, they were of the professional and merchant class. In the cities, Greeks were bankers and financiers, lawyers and doctors, architects and engineers; however, they played no role in the civil service. Everywhere they were cotton factory owners and exporters, traders and money-lenders, grocers and shopkeepers, tobacco merchants and cigarette manufacturers, distillers and millers, hoteliers, innkeepers, restaurateurs and cafe owners. They also had shipping interests in Alexandria (where the Greek community was almost 25,000-strong) and along the length of the Suez Canal. Of course, there were working class Greeks too, many of whom arrived in the mid-19th century as immigrants from the Ottoman Empire (for instance, from the Greek islands in the Aegean, such as Kasos) rather than from independent Greece, labouring on the Canal and finding work as mechanics, carpenters, cooks and sailors.
The Greek communities in Egypt today are dwindling. There was a mass exodus after the July 1952 Revolution and an estimated 70% of the community is thought to have emigrated from Egypt during the years 1957-62. Of course, many headed for Greece, even if only temporarily; many more emigrated to Australia and North America.
Family history research for the Greeks of Egypt is challenging but not impossible, depending on the quality of the background information and the availability of surviving records from which to reconstruct family trees. Bluebird Research provides professional family history research services and would be delighted to take enquiries from those interested in researching further their Egyptian Greek ancestry. Please contact us for an assessment and estimate.
It would be naive to expect family history research in Russia, and many other places within the former Soviet Union, to follow the comparatively smooth path that it can take in most of the English-speaking world and in many countries in Western Europe. Even if the First World War, the ensuing Civil War and the Great Patriotic War (as the Second World War is known in Russia) are put to one side, millions were arrested, killed, internally deported, or incarcerated in the Gulag. For a great many others, the social revolution provided for a new, albeit still relative freedom of movement, and travel for education, employment and political career, often across great distances and what are today’s international borders, became commonplace.
The NKVD, a precursor of the KGB, disappeared many tens of thousands of Soviet citizens at Moscow’s Lubyanka prison. The victims were drawn in from all across the USSR and from all sections of society, from the poorest to the elite, from the apolitical to the committed Stalinist, and from the capital itself to the remotest corners of the Soviet empire. The photographer and collector of Soviet era visual art David King gathered mugshots of some 166 of these victims for publication in a volume called Ordinary Citizens: The Victims of Stalin (Francis Boutle, 2003). Apparently, King obtained the photographs from the NKVD’s interrogation files held by Russian human rights organisation Memorial, which documents the Soviet repressions across Russia and campaigns for official rehabilitation of the victims. It publishes regional and local memorial books and lists of the executed.
Among the haunting photographs in King’s selection are the following:
Fedor Andreevich Baikov – peasant, born 1861 in Moscow, executed 20 October 1930 on charges of anti-Soviet agitation
Pyotr Petrovich Dragachevatz (Dragačevac) – lithographer, born 1886 somewhere in what was later Yugoslavia, executed 19 April 1939 on charges of anti-Soviet espionage
Stefan Leonovich Geltman – collective farm technical manager, born 1886 in Zamość, Poland, executed 20 September 1937
Wolf Shmulievich Genpelman – Jewish apprentice locksmith, born 1914 in Dombrovitsy, near Rivne (Rovno), Volhynia, Ukraine, executed 1 November 1940 on charges of being counter-revolutionary
Yelena Ignatievna Oshmyago – railway guard, born 1911 in Sprugi, Belarus, executed 10 October 1939 on charges of railway sabotage
Dionis Petushkov – Russian Orthodox monk, born 1863 in Tver’, Russia, executed June 1931 on charges of anti-Soviet activities
Ruzya Iosifovna Todorskaya – technician, born 1900 in Łódź, Poland, executed 9 October 1937 as a Trotskyist
On the cusp of the 20th century, Romanian peasants still lived their lives much as their forefathers had done: their customs, their belief systems, their culture and their clothing had evolved gradually over the centuries without any sharp disjunctions from the past.
Families were large, notwithstanding high infant mortality rates. Pregnant women enjoyed no lying-in period but would work up to the very day of giving birth. Traditionally, a baby would be baptised and christened by the end of the week of its birth. The baptism was celebrated in the church without the presence of the parents of the child, the godparents standing in loco parentis during the service. A godparent is known by two names: naş or naşǎ expresses, respectively, the godfather’s and godmother’s relationship to the godchild (the fin, or finǎ), while cumǎtru expresses the godparent’s relation to the parents of the godchild. Marriage between cumǎtri and between the close kin of cumǎtri is prohibited. This even had an effect on attendance figures at a baptism, as all those present and who witnessed the baptism were considered in some way to have become cumǎtri.
Marriage was expected and, while love matches were not so unusual, often arranged between two families, with a family friend acting as go-between, rather than instigated by either partner. A proverb relates how a young man was married by his parents up to the age of 20 years, by his own choice to the age of 25 (although military service could swallow up much of these five years of his life), but from that age on he was in the hands of the old women, the babas.
The period of engagement was short, usually merely the necessary three weeks from betrothal to allow for the wedding banns (strigǎri) to be read out in the parish church on consecutive Sundays. The two sponsors (nuni) played a central role in the marriage ceremony – they were often godparents of one or both of the bride and groom.
A deceased’s body was customarily laid out for three days in his or her own house, before being taken to church for a short service and burial in the adjacent graveyard. Prayers for the dead were then said at three, nine, 20 and 40 days, and then on the anniversary of the death for seven years (this was the customary period of mourning during which, for example, a widow was expected not to re-marry).
Britain relieved Ottoman Turkey of Cyprus during the gathering days of the late Victorian era, before the unthinkable possibility of imperial decline had occurred to anyone within the British elite.
In June 1878, a defensive alliance was struck between Britain and Turkey against Russia expansionist ambitions. In exchange for its protection, Britain occupied and administered Cyprus (with the proviso that it would withdraw from the island if Russia withdrew from Kars in Armenia). So in July 1878 the British sailed into Larnaca to assume its new responsibilities.
A habit of census-taking was well-established in Britain by this time, with the decennial censuses of the population informing and directing social policy and cultural debate – these are now very familiar to family historians with English, Welsh and Scottish ancestors, as those from 1841 to 1911 (or to 1901 in the case of Scotland) have been digitised and published online. So of course the British administration wanted immediately to get down to the serious business of counting and measuring and understanding its new subjects.
The Cyprus census returns of 1881, 1891 and 1901 show how small the population was: respectively, 186,173, 209,286 and 237,022 persons. The population was overwhelmingly rural too: the largest town, Nicosia, had only 11,536, 12,515 and 14,752 inhabitants in these three census years. As for religion, the population was majority Greek Orthodox: 73.9% in 1881, 75.8% in 1891 and 77.1% in 1901 (although the figures for Nicosia were markedly lower, being only 54.2% Orthodox in 1901). The great majority of the remainder of the population was of course Sunni Muslim.*
Registration of vital events also began to be placed upon a more sound footing from 1895. Births, marriages (from 1889) and deaths of British and other non-Ottoman subjects were registered by the Commissioners, being the chief British administrators of the six Districts of Famagusta (Ammochostos), Kyrenia, Larnaca, Limasol (Lemesós), Nicosia (Lefkosia) and Paphos. Births and deaths of Ottoman subjects (both Greek and Turkish Cypriot) were registered by the mukhtars (village heads). However, there was no official civil registration of non-British marriages until 1923.
The British also closed any overcrowded and/or unsanitary graveyards and opened new cemeteries away from human habitations.
They did all the other things that, for better or worse, usually accompanied British colonial rule in the late Victorian era – they tried to create more equitable taxation and a fairer judiciary; they started a programme of public works, laid roads, and modernised the harbour in Larnaca; they introduced a postal system, laid a telegraph cable to Egypt and opened a government savings bank. And of course the British rules of the road were enforced: drive on the left and overtake on the right, irrespective of whether you were driving a cart, riding a bicycle or leading a beast of burden.
There was of course no thought of political self-determination for the people of Cyprus, let alone enosis with Greece. However, the system imposed by the British seems, for its time and at that time, to have been more progressive than oppressive, even if it suffered from the under-funding and uncertainty which came from its unclear status before annexation in 1914.
For the family historian, too, the advent of British rule, with its censuses and civil registration, was probably a boon. The civil registers from 1895 onwards are held in the local register offices, while the censuses are in the custody of the State Archives but – it should be noted – do not list every member of the household as they do in Britain.
*The census counts are of course regarded as controversial by some, given the politicised history of modern Cyprus, but there seems no sound reason to doubt their basic accuracy. Contemporary commentators remarked upon the intelligence and co-operativeness of the Cypriots at census-taking and felt the census figures to be reliable and uncontentious. As well as Orthodox and Muslim, there were also minority communities of Maronites and Armenian Apostolic Christians on Cyprus.
In 19th century Russia, a child would be baptised as soon as possible after birth, usually within one day or two. The reason for this is that, prior to baptism, a child is heathen and therefore spiritually at risk (and, of course, given heavy infant mortality rates, at risk also of dying a heathen in early infancy). The child’s godparents will renounce the devil upon behalf of the child prior to its baptism. The child can then be immersed in consecrated water and christened, and a small protective cross fastened round its neck.
Traditionally, Russians were given just a single Christian name (their middle name being, of course, the patronymic derived from the forename of the father). This custom continued while elsewhere in Europe children began to be given a distinguishing second (even third etc) forename, in response to population increase and the rise of individualism. But in Russia one name was held to be enough, as each forename itself was thought to have its eponymous representative in heaven, being effectively the guardian angel of all bearers of that forename, and an Orthodox Russian peasant could not have two such angels.
Family history research in Russia is blighted by the twin ravages of the 20th century, those of war and of revolution. Inevitably, vital records of birth or baptism, marriage, and death or burial, have been lost, damaged or destroyed, but this is not true of all places at all times and prospects for research should not be needlessly or prematurely written off. When searching through Orthodox baptism registers, it helps to know, and is rather convenient, that baptism swiftly follows birth, compared to other communities and faiths where baptism may take place four or more weeks after birth, necessitating a longer and more speculative search of the registers.
Traditionally, kinship in Greece society is very strong, with three concentric rings of attachment: the household, the close kin and remoter kin.
The close kin, or kindred, is broader than in the modern English-speaking world. It ascends up to one’s eight great grandparents. Laterally, it extends out to great uncles and aunts and to their children and grandchildren (one’s true second cousins*). No distinction is drawn between kin on the paternal and maternal sides of a Greek family – they are regarded equally. Everyone within this definition is recognised as being kindred and marriage within it is prohibited: for instance, one should not marry one’s second cousin.
Marriage within the seventh degree of kin – to a child of one’s second cousin – is permitted and is not uncommon in Greek village communities. However, it is thought of as being somewhat ill-starred and inauspicious, and it is discomforting for a villager who survives to great old age to see his or her descendants – such as two great great grandchildren, or a great grandchild and a great great grandchild – marry one another, as may happen in communities where nonagenarians and centenarians are not rare.
Remoter kin are of course recognised, although with further degrees they shade into unrelated members of the village. More distant direct lineal ancestors – one’s great great grandparents and higher up in the family tree – are known generically as “great grandfathers” (although of course strictly speaking this is incorrect) or just as “ancestors”. Similarly, collateral kin such as third cousins are acknowledged although the ties of blood and affection are much looser.
Interestingly, two brothers from one family may marry two sisters from another family only if they do so on the same day. The reason for this is that the rules of kindred apply also to affinal kin (family acquired through marriage). In other words, when a person marries, he or she takes on their spouse’s kindred as their own, so that (for example) the spouse’s brother or sister becomes their own brother or sister too (which is why the two brothers can only marry the two sisters on the same day, as otherwise the brother entering into the second marriage would be viewed virtually as marrying his own sister).
When listening to oral history being recounted by an elderly relative, or when reading old family correspondence, it is important to understand that kindred terms are used both of consanguineous kin (blood relations) and affinal kin (in-laws, those acquired upon marriage). Thus the term “nephew” can be used equally for a sibling’s son, or for a spouse’s sibling’s son. Moreover, terms such as “nephew” and “niece” can be used by extension for the children of nephews and nieces (grand nephews and grand nieces) without distinction. These usages can be confusing and one needs to be aware of them constantly when reconstructing Greek family histories from family evidence.
* A second cousin (being the grandchild of a great uncle or great aunt) is not to be confused with a first cousin once removed (being the grandchild of an uncle or aunt, and the child of a first cousin, sometimes erroneously called a second cousin).
Marriages in most jurisdictions must be witnessed by third parties to be valid – for instance, in England two persons are needed by law both at a civil ceremony and at a religious wedding. However, in Greece, the role of the sponsors of a marriage is far stronger and more culturally important.
The wedding sponsor enters a kind of spiritual kinship with the bride or groom he or she is sponsoring, becoming koumbaros (if male) or koumbara (female) to one another, and these terms are also understood to apply to close kin of the two koumbaroi.
A sponsor at a wedding will traditionally become the godparent to the first child of that marriage (and sometimes of subsequent children too) and very frequently also the sponsor at their godchild’s own marriage later on. Koumbaroi are therefore key figures at both baptism and marriage ceremonies.
If a wedding sponsor is not a blood relation of the bride or groom, or the godparent not a blood relation of the godchild, the creation of the koumbaroi is such that marriage between their close family (brothers, sisters, children etc) is forbidden. This prohibition extends to marriages between the godchildren of a godparent, who also may not marry one another.
It is worth paying attention to the names of godparents given in Greek Orthodox church baptism registers and certainly always noting them down, in case they gain in significance in your research at a later date. Godparents do not usually feature in contemporary civil birth registers, although they may be recorded in the kind of composite registers collated by some communities and containing a single overview record of an individual’s life (birth, baptism, marriage, death etc).
Miroslav Krleža, the Croatian writer, said in his 1952 speech “On the Freedom of Culture” that the greatest native cultural achievements of Yugoslavia (as opposed to those of, say, its Austrian or Turkish heritage) were Croatian church buildings, the frescoes of the Orthodox Church in Serbia and Macedonia, and the stećci of Bosnia.
The stećci or mramorovi are the monolithic carved headstones of the medieval Christian cemeteries of Bosnia and Hercegovina (at that date known as Hum). They span maybe 500 years from the 12th century onwards, pre-dating the Ottoman conquest and surviving it for a while. Most headstones in Europe are flat slabs, but the stećak is a massive solid monumental chunk of stone, inscribed with Cyrillic characters and sculpted in relief, some featuring human figures raising a huge right hand. It is not possible to describe the expressive power they exert, but that power is undeniable.
How exciting would it be to find one of these gravestones for an ancestor! Sadly, that it is unlikely to be. Although Ivan Lovrenović writes in Bosnia: A Cultural History (Saqi, 2001) that an estimated 60,000 stećci survive, and the names of the deceased and even of the stonemasons may be known, the chances of continuity of surname and of researching a family back to the 15th or 16th century in Bosnia are all but negligible. However, the names on the stećci must certainly have their descendants, both Christian and Muslim, and any visitor to their ancestral homeland in Bosnia or Hercegovina should take the time to drop by at one of these graveyards – known as mramorje or groblje – and experience their power. Lovrenović quotes an inscription on one stećak and one hopes that the sentiment will preserve this and all the other stećci for many generations to come:
Be blessed he who passes by And damned he who damages it.Stara Serbia, Old Serbia, was the unliberated rump of the country left behind inside the Ottoman Empire after the core of continental Serbia – the Principality or free Serbia – gained its independence from the Turks. While the Serbs and other Slavs referred to the region by this name, the Turks referred to it as Arnavutluk, on account of its Albanian (in Turkish, Arnaout or Arnaut) inhabitants.
The heartlands of Stara Serbia were Kosovo and Metohija, respectively regarded as the battlefield and the garden of Serbia. But Serbian settlement in the region has ebbed and flowed with political events, and from time to time during the Ottoman era, such as in 1690, there would be a mass exodus of the population northwards to safer parts of Turkey-in-Europe and beyond the Dunav (Danube) to Banat and elsewhere in the Austrian Empire. The times of Serbian emigration would coincide with times of Albanian immigration, so that the balance of the population in Old Serbia could swing over the course of the centuries, with an Albanian majority at times and a Serbian at others.
There was not a simple Muslim versus Orthodox Christian opposition, however, as a significant number of the Albanians, who in these parts were Ghegs, were Roman Catholic and referred to as Latins (and, indeed, some of them, members of the Klementi tribe, are thought to have fled north with their fellow Christian Serbs when Islamic rule became too oppressive). Of course, many Catholic Albanians converted to Islam over time. Again, as in other places and other contexts within the Ottoman Empire, we read of the Albanian Latins being torn between two faiths and cultures, trying “to bridge over the passage between the two creeds by adopting Mahommedan names, and thus passing for Mussulmans abroad, while they remain Christians at home” (G Muir Mackenzie & A P Irby, Travels in the Slavonic Provinces of Turkey-in-Europe, Daldy Isbister & Co, 1877).
Of course, too, those Serbs locally who converted to Islam out of conviction, or for advantage, or for a quiet life, tended to assimilate with the Albanian population and would be regarded henceforth as Arnaouts (just as they became Muslim Bosniaks in Bosnia).
The Serbs of Old Serbia have always been in a double bind when not in a position of ascendancy. On the one hand, there is a pressure upon them to get out, applied by the majority Albanian population and inevitably internalised by the Serbs as a wish to escape from their invidious minority position and to be able to live in peace elsewhere. On the other hand, Serbs do not want to abandon their historic Stara Serbia: the more Serbs leave it, the fewer claims they will have upon it. This is the reason why Serbian governments have periodically encouraged return migration to and colonisation of Old Serbia.