Finding Cousin Niko

Yasou!

Here is a story from my book about my mother’s trip to the island of Andros in 1991. But first, here is what my Yiayia (grandmother) Theone wrote about the island:

“Across the seas, down to the Cyclades and the island of Andros with its immaculate villages and wonderful people, partaking of an island specialty – Froutàlia – an Andriotiko omelet of home-made smoked pork and sausages, sliced potatoes and fresh-laid eggs.”  --- Theone Angelos Neris Καλή Όρεξη: Treasured Greek Recipes, 1966

I hope you enjoy it!

Love and good travels,

Katina

Finding Cousin Niko

In 1991, my mother Daphne traveled to the island of Andros, her father Leonidas’ birthplace, for the first time in her life. It was a dry mountainous island, large but sparsely populated. She only really knew that her father was from the village named Pitrofo. She took the short two-hour ferry trip from Mykonos to the Andros port town of Gavrion. From there, she took a bus to Pitrofo, unsure of what she would find there. When the bus driver stopped the bus and told Daphne this was Pitrofo, she looked outside the bus and saw nothing but occasional Greek houses and one taverna. She had expected to see some sort of a town center. She looked at the bus driver and asked,

“Pou pieno (Where do I go)?”

His response, “Pano, pano (up up).”

After getting off the bus, she started walking up the stairs, built into the hillside. All she really saw were houses, no real stores. When she came to a road, she walked up a little and then more stairs. After half an hour of climbing in the afternoon heat, she needed water and decided to stop at a house. She knocked on the door and a woman answered. In Greek, Daphne asked the woman,

“Boro no eco mia potiri nero (Can I have a glass of water)?”

“Ame! (of course)” The woman very nicely replied. She went inside and came back with a glass of water. She handed it to Daphne and asked,

“Pou passe (Where are you going)?”

Daphne explained in Greek that she was looking for her family here. Her last name is Neris, and she was looking for her uncle Yianni Neris or cousin, Niko Neris. The woman smiled widely. Then, she picked up the phone and made a call. Daphne had difficulty understanding the woman’s conversation on the phone because she spoke Greek very quickly. The woman pulled the phone away from her ear and looking at my mother said,

“Daphne?”

Incredibly surprised, Daphne answered the woman, “Ne (yes)?”

She had never told the woman her name. So how could she have known? The woman returned to the phone conversation. When she hung the phone up, she told Daphne that she spoke to her cousin Niko’s wife Mina and that Mina would be here to pick her up in a couple of minutes!

Even though they were first cousins, my mom had never met Niko before. The separations across the oceans were vast in those years. We didn’t have as much connectivity as we do now.

Daphne had met her Theo (uncle) Yianni, her father Leonidas’ brother, as a child when he came to America to work for Leonidas at the Olympia Bakery on Congress Avenue in New Haven. Theo Yianni would stay with the family for long periods. Leonidas owned the bakery with another man from the same village in Andros. Two families from the same village in Andros, bound together across multiple generations in Connecticut. The connections never really broke. They just waited to be found.

Over dinner that evening, with many drinks in them, Daphne sat in the house where her father Leonidas grew up, with a first cousin she had never met before that day. He was short and strong, jovial and talkative.