Pappou Niko's eternal exile

"It was all for nothing , all my struggles, all my privations and I'm alone. I try to figure out the reason for this and each time, I am more and more at a loss."
Nikos Syrmos

Nikos Syrmos.

6 Jan 2014

Dean Kalimniou

My youthful recollection of pappou Niko is of an exceedingly tall old man, possessed of severe eyebrows perpetually pressed into a frown. The lines on his face were so deep that they appeared to have been incised with a scalpel. He never, ever smiled. Clad always in a suit and tie, his round eyes would penetrate your epidermis and bore deep inside you. "Go to him," my mother would say, noticing my apprehension. "He has no grandchildren of his own."
This was not entirely true. As pappou Niko fixed you with his gaze, you knew that instead of looking at you, he was in fact, confronting the image of the infant children he left back in Dervitsiani, when he fled Albania in order to avoid certain execution. Further than that, he was looking at the grandchildren that he had never seen but knew only from the few letters that managed to emerge relatively unscathed from the ravages of the Albanian censors. Here in Melbourne since the late forties, he never remarried and lived alone, desperately despondent at not being separated from his family and despondently attempting to retain some type of connection with the life circumstances compelled him to leave behind. Yet in his solitude in far away Australia, he was constantly surrounded by his adopted family, the large migrant community of Northern Epirots, to whom he was more than just a beloved grandfatherly figure. As a spy, activist and staunch fighter for the freedom of the Greeks of Northern Epirus, he paid the ultimate price for his patriotism. For this, the quiet old suit-clad and towards the end of his tortured life, broken man, was revered.
Born in 1902 in the village of Dervitsiani, Nikos Syrmos had his foretaste of exile early, migrating to Argentina after the death of his parents. The experience of being an orphan, as he confided in his epistolary correspondence to his children later, caused him to value family more than anything else. Returning from Argentina and re-settling in his village, where he married his beloved Kostanto ("Nikova" as she was referred to in the village), his bravery, outspokenness and commitment to public works to improve the life of his fellow villages soon attracted the attention of Vasilis Sahinis, the leader of the Greek minority in Albania, who recruited him to his committee. As a result, Nikos Syrmos was at the forefront of Greek efforts to overturn the Albanian government's 1935 decision to close all Greek schools, in violation of the treaties that welded Northern Epirus to the Albanian state. His activism, in co-ordination with the Northern Epirot community and the Greek state was instrumental in having the World Court overturn the Albanian government's decision, compelling them to re-open the schools and guarantee the Greek minority some basic rights.
These triumphs would be short-lived however, as Italy occupied Albania in 1939 and set about revoking all the rights of the Greek minority in Northern Epirus. In 1940, Nikos Syrmos would welcome the victorious Greek troops into Dervitsiani, only to see them retreat again in the wake of the German invasion a year later. It was at this time, when Albanian officials, collaborating with the Italians, began to actively persecute the Greeks of Northern Epirus, that the first Northern Epirot resistance groups appeared in the area of Delvino, led by two locals and former officers of the Greek army. Soon after, several resistance groups were formed by the local Greek population all over southern Albania. In June 1942 these groups were organized under one leadership and the Northern Epirus Liberation Front was formed. The leading spirit behind the creation of this organisation was Nikos Syrmos' friend and mentor, Vasilis Sahinis, thus placing Nikos in a unique position to follow events as they unfolded and also participate in the liberation movement.
Nikos' chance came when, in December 1942, he took part in the Northern Epirote resistance organised attacks on Italian-controlled frontier posts and gendarmerie stations, particularly in the regions of Zagoria, Pogoni, Delvino, and Agioi Saranda. When not fighting, Nikos, who offered his services to the cause for free, had to fend for his growing family of five children, a particularly difficult undertaking in impoverished, war-torn Albania. Nikos, along with his other fellow villagers, also had to bear the brunt of brutal counter-attacks and persecution by Italian forces, aided by the ultra-nationalist Balli Kombetar, specifically aimed to terrorise and demoralise villages with Greek sympathies. During this time, he participated in the operation that saw Northern Epirot forces secure the village of Politsiani and set up headquarters there. It was a result of this activity, and the fact that at the time, the Northern Epirus Liberation Front seemed to be the largest and most effective resistance group in Southern Albania, that the British decided to send a mission there. Nikos Syrmos was at the meeting and bore witness to this historic event.
As he related to his friends in Melbourne years later, the British Mission proposed that the Northern Epirus Liberation Front, the Albanian Communist Party and EAM, the Greek Communist resistance, should collaborate to form a stronger force against the Axis and Albanian collaborationists. This troubled the leadership of the Northern Epirots, who felt that EAM's internationalist convictions were being exploited by an Albanian Communist Party that was far from internationalist and instead, highly nationalistic. The Northern Epirot leadership felt that should their interests were inimicably opposed to those of the Albanian Communists and that should they prevail in post war Albania, then the rights of the Greeks in Northern Epirus would be compromised. In a quandary as to how to proceed, Vasilis Sahinis sent Nikos Syrmos on a mission into Greece in order to obtain advice about any proposed collaboration.