There is a story I like to think my grandfather told me when I was still a boy.
Then again, childhood is a country where memory and imagination live under the same roof, and no one bothers to tell them apart. Looking back now, I cannot honestly swear that I didn’t invent half of it myself. But then, why should that make it any less true?
As a child—and later as a young man—I grew up listening to old Nikolakis Mallios, the greatest storyteller our corner of Greece ever produced. If today I carry a storehouse of stories of my own, it is because he spent a lifetime filling it. Out of the thousands he told, surely a few must have happened exactly as he claimed.
Not that he would tolerate any doubts.
Challenge him, and he’d bristle with indignation before declaring, hand on heart,
“Upon my honour! I didn’t finish grammar school only to insult truth and science!”
Well, let us leave him that victory.
For my own part, I would gladly place a hand upon the Gospel for certain details: the names, the villages, the years—and for the fact that more than one old villager remembered the story exactly the same way.
It is the story of Thanasis.
The man who left the mountains of Arcadia and made himself rich in America.
People whispered that, in his younger days, he had worked for the Black Hand, the loose network of Italian gangsters that would later become the Mafia. In time, he parted from the Sicilians under what he jokingly called a “gentlemen’s agreement” and built a family of his own—one made entirely of Greeks: cousins, brothers-in-law, godsons, baptismal kin and lifelong friends bound by honour as much as blood.
But that is another tale.
When he finally returned home in the 1960s to die where he had been born, no one in Andritsaina called him Thanasis anymore.
To everyone he was simply Brookly.
Brooklyn.
Some even nicknamed him “Onassis,” partly because he had money, partly because it rhymed, and partly because villages have always preferred a good nickname to a proper name.
Now you might ask what is so remarkable about any of this.
Thousands of Greeks crossed the Atlantic in those years. They fled hunger, wars, failed harvests and uncertain futures, chasing the rumour that in America dollars lay scattered across the streets waiting to be picked up.
So what makes Thanasis any different?
Patience.
A storyteller should never rush to the heart of his tale.
Today we only set the table.
Tomorrow, Diotima will serve the meal.
For Thanasis was supposed to sail on the Titanic.
A few years earlier, his brother had emigrated from Agios Sostis, a little chestnut village lying in the shadow of the Temple of Epicurean Apollo, only a short walk from Ampeliona—the birthplace of the great filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos.
Like so many Greek immigrants of the time, once he had found his footing in America, he sent for his younger brother. The invitation came with a ticket, paid for in dollars earned an ocean away.
Thanasis reached Piraeus nearly a week before his departure.
From there he was to sail to Southampton, where the Titanic would begin her maiden voyage on 10 April 1912.
Until then, the harbour became his home.
He slept on the docks beneath the open sky.
By day he drifted through the bustling streets, living off scraps left behind on tavern tables, swallowing whatever wine remained forgotten in abandoned glasses. At sunset he joined the city’s drifters, finding a doorway, a stone step or an empty alley where sleep came easier than tomorrow.
On his final evening in Piraeus, he wandered into the notorious district of Vourla in Drapetsona.
A group of prosperous gentlemen were deep into their food and drink. Thanasis waited nearby with the patience that only hunger can teach. When the men eventually staggered off in search of the brothels for which the neighbourhood was famous, he quietly slipped into their places.
He polished off the leftover lamb.
Then emptied an untouched jug of wine in one glorious swallow.
The long walk back to the harbour would change the course of his life.
Or so he always claimed.
Out of the darkness appeared an old Romani woman.
She stepped directly into his path, caught him firmly by the arm and stared into him with eyes that seemed to burn like live embers.
“Listen carefully, Thanasis,” she said.
“Don’t leave tomorrow.
The English ship you’re going to board will sink before it reaches the other side.”
Nothing more.
She turned…
and disappeared into the night.
Whether she truly vanished or whether the wine carried her away with the rest of his drunken visions, Thanasis himself could never say.
The next morning he awoke with his head pounding.
The harbour was already alive with passengers hurrying aboard.
He watched them for a long while.
Then, without another thought, he made his choice.
He would stay.
For the rest of his life he never knew whether the old woman had been flesh and blood, a dream, or a messenger sent by God.
Only one thing seemed certain to him.
He had been warned.
He never boarded the ship that would have taken him to Southampton.
Days later, the Titanic disappeared beneath the freezing waters of the North Atlantic.
Thanasis remained alive.
Years afterward, whenever anyone asked how such fortune had found him, he never claimed wisdom, courage or luck.
He would simply shrug in that quiet way mountain people often do, as though the answer were obvious.
“First comes God’s will, my child…
Only then comes our own.”
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