Testimony: Konstantinos Panayiotakes (1907-1991)
I went to Cesme for the last time on Sunday, August 28 (1922). I stopped at Tarsana. I did not go any further; it was chaos. Horse-drawn wagons, carriages, pushcarts, cannons, harnesses, saddles, cases of ammunition, knapsacks, every sort of war material scattered pell-mell. Shouts, orders, the trampling of hooves, the din of automobiles, the whistles of steamships, the groaning of machinery, the dry noise of chains raising and lowering anchors. Faces, tired, distressed, caked with dust, eyes red with eyelashes loaded with muddy sweat.
And amidst the indescribable confusion, hundreds of master less animals formed columns, one following the other, searching for a way out. Many fell into the sea to drink and there they remained, bloated by the salt water. Calamity.
From our mistakes and from the calculations of the foreigners, an epic was ending; the final act of the drama of the Hellenism of Asia Minor. I realised I would not again set foot in this land. I would not again see Saint Haralambos, the great church with the suggestive twilight on normal days and floodlit on holy days. I would not slake my thirst at the springs of Marasios and the wells of Arkatza. The lights of Karakare would not again seem to me as being suspended in mid-air. I would not again pass by the noise of the marketplace, the silent Turkish quarter and the melancholy shadow of the aigheira trees of the mosques. I would not again find myself in the familiar and loved surroundings of the enviable Krenaia School.
The Yialoudaki and Taliani of Ayia Paraskeve would remain distant dreams, as would the varied coast from Lithri and Reizdere up to the foothills of Mimada, which resembled a witch's embroidery on the azure satin of the serene gulf.
I grabbed a horse and left with a heavy heart. I stopped at the curve of the Kasapion for a little. How I longed to go up to Ayios Elias!! From there, I cast a last glance at the beloved city, which had the sad fate to bind its name with the Great Catastrophe (Smyrne). I moved towards Kato Panayia, galloping along the road that, like all the roads in Asia Minor, would be traversed by tormented columns in a few days, leaving bloody traces and human bodies in their passing. Which every stop and every start would be for them, the beginning of a new torment, until they would be finally exterminated, having beforehand got to know all the bestiality of men with dark souls, stirred up by leaders drunk on raki and the unanswered indifference of everyone to the fate of the Christians of the East.
In this epoch of horror and blood, the examples of humanity are rare, moving and comforting amidst the overflowing of insanity, of blindness and of the evil of the human animal. When the women and children of Kato Panayia reached Cesme, exhausted by terror, objects of contempt, a hodja, an imam, who lived near the Kaimakame's spring, had stored some water. With sleeves rolled up, and cup in hand, he watered, with the help of his followers, the thirsty herd.
I recall this scene as it was related to me and I remember with kindness that man whom I only knew by face. How many times did we rest on the steps of his house with my co-students! Great was the act and the courage of the Muslim cleric in those days, when in the same city, amongst The groups of the murdered, the bloodied mouth of the martyred Father Nikole in an ultimate fit of pain, bit to pieces the .... , bent the breast of Theophanides under the stone mortar and hung from the tree with hook under the chin, Father Kourpas was being dismembered.
And further on, another Zalongo. At this one the heroines were not the warrior women of Souli, they were the civilian girls of Alatsata. After crossing themselves and making an invocation, with the wish and the convulsion of a hapless mother, they passed into the realm of Legend via the source springs of the Aheron river, without dances and songs. Maybe this is why no one has been found to sing about them until now.
"From one well, I brought out thirty-nine; one was from Reizdere. I counted them one-by-one. From the other, they brought out, before me, about fifteen." These are the words of Konstantinos Photakes who brought them out and helped with their burial. Alatsata had many wells... as did Asia Minor.
Note: Panayiotakes was born in Kato Panayia (Cesme), Asia Minor on 10 August 1907, one of four children; his siblings are Nikolaos, Aphrodite and Kyriake. He left his home as a refugee for the first time in 1914, finding refuge on the island of Chios. At the end of the First World War, he returned home.
After the Genocide Panayiotakes settled in Kato Panayia, Elia prefecture, western Peloponessos. He married Argyro and they had three children: Paraschos, Maria and Kyriake. He arrived in Australia on 24 December 1975 and died in 1991.
Source: O Kosmos, 31 July 1992.