This collection on http://www.archive.org houses the speeches of Peter Stathoulis, my late father, a prominent member of the Greek diaspora in South Africa. The speeches, numbering around one hundred, cover aspects of his life and his involvement in the Greek community in Alberton and South Africa from the 1960s to the late 2000s. They serve…
Conversations at Keza’s
“Gia sou Vasili. Ela. Ti nea? Ti na sou keraso?” Keza always greeted me almost like a son. Definitely like a nephew. His kafeneio is up in the village, a block away from the main square and church, in front of a triangle of roads where three roads meet in a low triangle. “Your health,…
Conversations as I look past my feet
There is a photograph that was stored on my father’s small Olympus camera. He was in the alone in the village and had taken a whole lot of pictures of the house, the village, the mountains and the plain filled with red poppies. He was alone because from the time my mother had her spinal…
Conversations about Pigs
One year when my brother and I were teenagers my father sent us to Greece in December. The trade-off for going to spend 3 weeks in the village was a few days skiing in Seefeld, Austria. Two years before that my father had taken my brother alone on a winter trip. All I remember from…
Converations from Tripolis
I have walked from Tripolis to Kakouri. One third of the distance might include the outskirts of Tripolis, until you reach the provincial road to Levidi that crosses your path perpendicularly. After this the road narrows. There is a small church on cement stilts opposite on the right. The road narrows and has a shiny…
Conversations on Blessings
My father would always say we should count our blessings. We always had to go to church on St. John’s day, 6 January, when the priest blesses everyone in church with Holy Water from the Epiphany sprinkled with a sprig of Sweet Basil. The heady mix of a summer day in South Africa, incense, candle…
Conversations while Looking at a House
No 45 in Kakouri lies on the southwest comer of the intersection of a small tar back road from Tripolis to the bigger village of Levidi and a road that goes up into the village and down into the planes to the even smaller village of Simiades, in the shadows of the tallest mountain in…
Conversations on Directions
My father always drew a distinction between a house and a home. The former was a shell that was never filled with love or tradition; the latter was filled with family, love, tradition, happiness and sadness. As Zorba the Greek might have paraphrased: “A home held the whole catastrophe”. Before Greece started its cadastral records…
Conversations about Rabbits
The smell of stifado alone warmed me up that winter evening. The onions that were stewing released an earthy tone reminiscent of the harvest smell in the plains. This was sweetened by the cinnamon and wine. The slow bubbling of the pot on top of the wood burning stove made the kitchen so inviting, warm…
Conversations at an Interview
Alberton in the seventies was already blown wide open when one of the Greek community’s sons underwent gender reassignment surgery. In his teens he became a she. There was never any malicious talk that I can remember from that conservative community. There were no hushed whispers when she came to church. We used to be…
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