Growing up in Rethymnon of Crete, in the family of a refugee of the Asia Minor disaster

Abstract

 The following is the true story of a small child who was born to Cretan parents in Rethymnon, Crete on October 28, 1939. Immediately upon the declaration of the Italian-Greek war on October 28, 1941 his father enlisted and left for the war front. Three months later, on February 14, he was killed in the mountains of southern Albania. His corpse remained forever in the mountain range of Trebesina.

In 1944, the boy’s mother married an Asia Minor refugee who had come to Rethymnon as a little boy, without parents, only with his slightly older sister, after the Asia Minor disaster and the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey. He was placed in the Orphanage of Rethymnon while his sister joined a Rethymnon family as a house servant. So the boy of our story found himself growing up with an Asia Minor refugee as his normal father. Living and growing up in a refugee’s family, the boy experienced closely and at firsthand the poverty of real life. The poverty, the misery, the economic impasses, the social and political difficulties of the crucial for the integration of the refugees period of post war, 1945-1960.