This week: two stories about matriarchs in the Mediterranean and the lingering presence of lineage in the present day.
The birth of honoured peasant
In our first story, Peter Polites tells us the story of Midwife Friday who assisted in the birth of his mother in a small village in Greece.
Through the eyes of Midwife Friday, the story beautifully captures the harsh realities of village life, her resilience shaped by war and loss, and the enduring strength of a community bound by tradition and survival.
Pigeons, cats, rosegardens
In our next story, a mother and her children have a heartfelt conversation about their fragmented past, trying to piece together their connection to Greece and Istanbul, Turkey. Through anecdotes passed down from their mother about their grandparents—some factual, some hearsay—coupled with exchanges of their own imagined stories, they grapple with gaps in their family history, confronting questions of identity and lineage.
Sometimes… we just need a little fantasy… to bring the past back to life.
This story featured music by Blue Dot Sessions: La Naranja Borriana, Rosino Reverie
All The Best Credits
Executive Producer: Phoebe Adler-Ryan
Editorial Producer: Melanie Bakewell
Host: Madhuraa Prakash
Transcript
Madhura Prakash: Stories from around the corner and around the country. You’re listening to All The Best. Proudly supported by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. You’re listening to All The Best from FBI Radio 94. 5. I’m Madhura Prakash. Before we get into this week’s stories, I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge that I’m recording from stolen Gadigal land, and pay my respect to Gadigal elders past and present, and also recognize that the area where FBI radio is situated Redfin has long been a place of storytelling, strength, resistance, and resilience for First Nations communities.
You’re listening to All The Best from FBI Radio 94. 5. I’m Madhura Prakash. This week, two stories about matriarchs in the Mediterranean and the lingering presence of lineage in the present day. In our first story, Peter Polites tells us the story of his mother’s birth in a small village in Greece.
Peter Polites: Midwife Friday was flipping leaven dough off a pan when her neighbor yelled through the shutters that she had to go. She was told that the woman, called Torch Peasant, had started crowning. Her moans had become screams. Midwife abandoned the stove, leaving it to burn the rest of its wood. A container of flour was left open and the lid of a tin of olive oil unscrewed.
She put her hands through a birthing smock and gestured to her two young sons to follow. Her sons could be a helpful distraction, playing with the daughters of Torch Peasant as she gave birth. Just as they left, one of the boys stepped back into the house to pocket the talus bones of a goat so they could throw jacks.
She thought herself a nightingale, inscribing a finger in the paths, running from her home to the bottom of the village. The stone houses were built angled down the mountain. Running downhill was an ease. Her legs went too fast and tangled her skirt, so she reached down and bunched the brown cloth in her hand, so she could move unencumbered.
Midwife Friday emerged from a lane into the village square. She knew the large open space well. Flanking her was the cafe and the general store. Men, who were too old for field work, sat around the cafe. A song about thieves wailed through the tin radio, sound from the speakers competing with her pattering feet.
Men looked up from her backgammon boards and saw them from the side of their eye. The Kafonio men must have lifted their fingers off their red and black discs. They yelled something at her, she was too single minded to hear them. Her foot slid on the mossy step she nearly killed. Both of her hands extended out for balance and her two boys grabbed her to make sure she didn’t fall.
She arrived at the loquat tree in front of Torch’s house, momentarily distracted by the gold fruit. When her gaze hit the house, she realized something was wrong. The front wall of the house had been torn open from the ground up. The living space was completely exposed. Inside the house, parts of the wooden roof had collapsed next to the fireplace and had shattered the grain urns.
Tiny greens had taken root and shot up amongst the weathered, broken furniture. The house was a reminder of her own unpropitious times. The homes she thought she knew much about, which had their own nature. The first one that was taken away from her through war, destruction and exile. Perfume of the golden fruit filled her nose.
Her scent stirring the body to the present, blessed to break those sorts because her mind would have stuck on the dead who stayed behind. She looked around for help and called out to the neighbourhood. From around the corner came Musk, the village dullard. She was carrying a water jug and wearing a floral dress that was more appropriate for ceremonies.
There was oil and chicken blood stains on it, ruining the fabric that indicated she came from a prosperous family. Musk clicked her mouth. Her throat moved up and down as she gulped. Midwife Friday asked where the whole peasant family lived. Musk groaned. She put the water jug down and it involuntarily tipped slightly to the side.
Some water rushed out of the top. Musk mumbled a curse and the water was from the only tap in the village, which was just past the outskirts, past the cemetery. Midwife knew that each spillage was a loss. It meant one less pot of beans soaked and boiled. She spoke like her lips and tongue were too big for her face.
There’d been an earthquake, big one, yes, big wheels, Stonewall split, musk, now tell me where the family is. Midwife Friday extended her palms out in front of her. She curled her fingers in rolling waves to elicit the information out of the woman. The family had moved to a rental. Since the earthquake, their house had not been rebuilt.
Top of the village, to the school. Three thank yous from midwife Friday, and she pulled up her skirt in folds. She called to the two boys to follow. The three of them criss crossed through the veins of the village. Paths made up of mortar and stone, so smooth, that children went barefoot without hazard.
Everyone that lived there broomed their parts and adopted different sections to keep free of leaves and twigs and dirt. And when they did their duties for the village, they talked amongst themselves, kept abreast of important things to monitor, like which girl was smart and would need extra books, and which boy was too handsome and silly, and which family would need extra help this winter but were too proud.
Midwife Friday passed the kafanio again, one of the oldies yelled out to her, We tried telling you but you Turks are too quick. Since the forced migration, running through villages created a single minded response in her. All other sounds turned off and she focused on the place that was in front of her and what she needed to get through it.
Sound became a distraction. She knew this and it served her well at times. In the last few years, the mortars could be blocked out. Explosions gone while her eyes were between a woman’s legs, listening to the tempos of her breath as it quickened. I am Midwife Friday, she would say. I can pull out a baby while the guns crack near me across the hills.
But other times, she missed important information. This power was a part of her now. She thanked it for helping her escape. The predominantly Greek village that she came from in Asia Minor when it was attacked by the Ottomans. It led her to become one of the many refugees involved in the Grand Population Exchange.
The single focus and the mercy of the saints made sure her sons were safe in this high mountain village on an island. She approached the top of the village and heard the wailing sounds that indicated someone was birthing. When she found the house, sitting on the steps were two girls, five and seven years old.
Both had their arms around their knees. Midwife Friday crouched and reassured them. She knew each child and had guided them out too. She knew each child’s character. How the older one needed distraction. How the younger one was scared for only herself. Before she disappeared into the house, she looked at her sons and pointed to the two girls.
The oldest girl was named Open Sea and the youngest was called Very Foreign. That’s it. Thank you.
Madhura Prakash: That was Peter Polites reading an excerpt from his book, God Forgets About the Poor. It was recorded as part of Queer Stories, an LGBTQIA plus live storytelling event and podcast by Maeve Marston. Maeve’s running something else this year, the Blue Mountains Writers Festival, where Peter Polites is appearing on two panels and hosting a writers workshop.
Find out more by heading to www. bluemountainsridersfestival. com. au. In our next story, a mother and her children try to piece together their connection to Istanbul, Turkey, and wonder if they are making up the past.
Mom: We went back in 1968.
Daughter: I, I think this was in Istanbul.
Mom: I was three years old.
Son: Going around with her grandfather.
Daughter: I’m not sure now.
Mom: You know, I remember being on the shoulders of my pop.
Daughter: You were sitting on someone’s shoulders, and
Mom: Going to the shop to buy chiclets, which are like chewing gums, and him coming out of the bathroom with shaving cream all over his face, and going with him to, you know, slaughter chickens.
Daughter: The, why, the blood? Splattered against the wall and the chicken ran around without its head for about 15 seconds.
Son: Shooting pigeons to put into pie.
Mom: Pigeons coming out of the oven onto the table. The rabbit out the front, which was probably the next night’s dinner. Of the buildings, the smells.
Daughter: And just the grounds of the hospital
Mom: in solid stone. Rose gardens and there’s lots of cats. That was their home.
*French singing*
Daughter: my mom’s grandparents were raised, uh, as orphans in a hospital in Istanbul that was run by French nuns in l’Hôpital de la Paix in Istanbul, Turkey.
Son: It was gifted to the nuns for their service to Turkish soldiers in a war.
Mom: And so, after the war, my grandparents, who were orphans, got sent to that with many others.
They grew up there together and they stayed there together and they worked there together. They married there, had their kids there and they’re buried there. It was more than a hospital. It was like a community of grocers, chemists. It was pretty much a city within a city, but everyone spoke French.
Daughter: I used to not be able to
answer the question, like, where is your family from? Or where does your family come from?
Mom: Where do I come from? I consider myself
Son: Yeah, that’s a really complicated question for me.
Daughter: I remember the first time I asked that question and the first answer I got was, well, we’re, um
Mom: I was born here, I was Australian.
Son: I don’t like to say that, like, I’m Australian, because what the fuck does that mean? It’s like a, a fragmented cultural Diaspora.
Daughter: He asked me where I was from and I said, Oh, Greek and Turkish. And he got really excited and started asking me all these questions. It’s not that hard, but I just haven’t done it for so long.
Son: I remember like not being able to actually articulate like, they’re not in Greece, they’re in Istanbul, and they’re married to orphans that speak French. Because we’re also not Greek enough to be Greek.
Mom: Yeah, because it’s the intrigue of, you know, what we don’t know.
Son: Trying to string together an imagined past that I don’t really have access to being from.
Daughter: Because I don’t want to say, like, I’m something I’m not. I don’t want to pick up something that doesn’t belong to me.
Son: So, there’s stories about cats.
Mom: Uh, specifically the cat in the kitchen in Istanbul.
Son: Anyway.
Mom: My pop in the kitchen.
Son: He was a baker in there, I think.
Mom: You know, cooking a big roast.
Son: In front of a wood fire oven.
Mom: There’s no screen door on the back door of this kitchen. And so the cat…
Son: He used to see a stray cat in the windowsill because
Mom: the cat is on the bench eating. So the cats are everywhere there.
Son: You know, I imagine he’s got one of those big pizza spatula things that’s for shoveling holes and whips it under the, the feet of the cat and slips it in
Mom: open the furnace and thrown him in with the rope
Son: and slips it into the the fire oven.
Mom: may have been exaggerated a little bit,
Son: just the absurdity of it.
The story goes.
Mom: My dad was engaged to somebody else and then they went to a New Year’s Eve ball that was a masquerade ball. My mum and dad met there in masks.
Son: It was a horrid love affair at his own engagement party and that perhaps she was one of the workers serving drinks. Is that an extra detail?
Mom: Who told you this?
Son: I don’t know, maybe I’ve edited it. And then they fell madly in love in that moment. And were wed the next day.
Mom: I believe they were engaged a few weeks later. Yeah. Ran away. Yeah. Or even married a few weeks later. I’m like, I don’t know. Something like that.
Son: There seems to be this kind of trait of the fantastic and the absurd that threads through these stories.
It’s like a. Like a movie, but I think like the fantastic of it Comes from the inability to articulate it and so you can project fantasy onto it
Daughter: Do you think it’s true?
Mom: I think they are true.
Son: Who cares? I don’t care if it’s true. I like it.
Daughter: I was doing an assignment in school. This was when I was writing this story. I decided to set the story in the hospital. I wound up spending hours and hours googling the Armenian genocide in Turkey. I read this story . Many of the surviving Armenians spoke about the massacres, hospitalized in the psych ward of La Paix, written accounts of torture and abuse, people who had lost their entire family.
I just,
I was just horrified at the place that, you know, grandma was born and raised and where our great grandparents were from and the things that were happening around them at that time. And in asking mum more questions about her grandparents, Based on the timeline, it might be quite feasible, mum’s grandparents were orphaned as a result of the genocide.
Mom: Dad didn’t talk a lot about his upbringing, um, I would want to ask, you know, at every dinner or lunch, but then he’d just shut it down and it wasn’t probably till the last year that he was alive and then I’d go home and I’d scribble everything down that he, that he said.
Son: He was raised by the toy maker.
It’s his uncle. And that’s who taught him to paint. Who is said to have been more of a father to him than his own father.
Mom: And he would pretty much rip the tablecloth. from under the food and all the food will go to the floor and shit.
Daughter: Something about it all being lost in a fire and gambling the house away.
Son: In a game of cards, the banker with the gambling problem, who was only there to legitimize him as a son because the mum had had a unmarried child with the French maestro.
Mom: Um, it wasn’t until after dad passed away that I found a note with a few other names, Jacques Saint Colier, Dad’s real father still a few people alive that may be able to fill those gaps in, but they don’t wanna talk about it.
Daughter: It’s trauma.
Son: There’s always kind of an attitude from the people of like, what do you wanna know that for?
My grandparents came to this country in the mid sixties from Istanbul.
Mom: There was a lot of talk between mom and dad about the problems in Istanbul between Muslims and Christians. And that’s why they left. But pretty much came here with 10 cents in his pocket.
Son: Their surname, when they left that place, was Siponopoulos.
Mom: There were probably three languages being mixed around at home. Turkish, French and some Greek. Mum couldn’t speak the language. She didn’t drive. She didn’t know anybody. And she was pregnant.
And I think he asked his workmates, where is the sea? You know? ’cause obviously they wanted to be by the sea and they told him to hop on the Cronulla line. I was born there, I think it was a house in Seaview Street. Um, there was a name change that happened. You know, we had the name Spinopolo you know, what sort of surname is that?
And he’s got, you know, 85 letters and lots of Os changed his name to Sinclair
Daughter: The whole thing has never not felt mystifying.
So I grew up as a sickly.
Mum would clear the furniture in the lounge room and expose the wooden floor and they’d be dancing and drinking and lots of food.
Mom: Eggplants, zucchinis, radishes, dill. We would have to drive 40 minutes to a specific grocer in uh, Kingsford, Lakemba.
Son: You know like those ones at the hot Christmas where they’re all Got their shirts off and they’ve got drinks in their hands and olives on the table and everyone’s holding a dart.
Mom: He cooked for a week before. He got entertaining, lots of food, lots of dancing, lots of music.
Son: We’d sit down sometimes and look at these slideshows and it was something else. There’s travel, there’s food, there’s colour, there’s big smiles and there’s lots of people around. There’s vivaciousness, like vitality, like, suck the marrow out of life.
Grandma’s fashion was always standout. She always had big hair, glam makeup.
Daughter: Her outfits and her clothes and her shoes and her wigs and her silk scarves and her cigarettes.
Son: Um, so she always looks glamorous and fantastic in those photos, always in the sun.
Daughter: I’m very embarrassed to admit this, but I remember as a child being so scared of Pop because of his accent and the way that he sort of like smelt, like it felt very foreign to me. Uh, all of the treasures and trinkets…
Son: wrought iron sculptures, I think of a hat and a guitar…
Mom: rows of velvet fabric…
Daughter: the chessboard…
Son: there were crucifixes all over his house…
Mom: lots of paintings.
Daughter: An organ.
Mom: Saucepans from Spain.
Son: Roses.
Daughter: Spartan helmet.
Mom: Swords.
Daughter: A compass.
Mom: You know, that was part of who they were.
Son: I don’t remember the first time I realised that our family was from somewhere else. I always knew that Pop had a funny accent. He talked weird. Sometimes I didn’t understand him. I don’t think I even realised that it meant he was from somewhere else until after he was dead.
And I was like 13, 14 years old. I don’t think I ever realized that, but it just wasn’t a part of anything.
Daughter: The togetherness, the language, the food, the things that I feel like are lost.
Son: Diluted over time.
Daughter: I think about the clock in Pop’s house, the one that would chime every hour on the hour would do the bam, bam, bam, bam. Bum, bum, bum, bum. Do you remember?
Mom: But as time goes on, you know, unless you find out more, it will fade away.
Son: It’s the gaps that you can fill with, with fantasy.
Mom: Or whether it’s because they’re not here anymore and I grab onto those things. I want to keep them going.
Son: Grabbing at something to like anchor me that’s just not real. It’s not, because I know that it’s fantasy.
Mom: Um, do I feel any cultural loss? I feel like I don’t know enough about the culture that they came from.
I don’t really feel connected to that culture at all.
Greek people, Turkish people, if you hear them speaking a language, when you walk down the street, I stop. Yeah, I feel connected to that and I love to listen to that. I don’t hear it anymore, yeah.
Daughter: Do you remember?
Mom: I can sing a couple of French songs that I sang to you as a baby. You want me to sing them?
Daughter: Well, gosh.
Mom: Il était une végère, un petit patapon, Il était une végère, qui gardait ses moutons. Qui gardait ses moutons.
Daughter: I feel that strong need to share that this is like not real French. This is the way that mom sang the song to me that I learned the song and it’s
*French singing*
I’ve accepted that we won’t have absolute um, answers and maybe that matters less. Then, like, getting to some landing point where you feel comfortable and where there’s some kind of practice that feels like it can be revived.
Son: I kind of like that we don’t know.
Daughter: I mostly now care about reconnecting and redefining that in a way that feels important and meaningful for me.
Son: Because if I knew it might not be so fantastic. I know there’s dark stories under there too. I probably don’t want to fucking know.
Daughter: Uh, I feel, I feel grief about the confusion around it. I’ve learned to accept that there will be some Things that we won’t know.
Son: It can stay magical. It can stay, it can stay that, that’s fine. Um, and because those people and those times are gone. I can’t get them, nor do I want to, I don’t need, you know.
Daughter: It’s taken me a lot of years to have the confidence to say that I feel lost.
And I do, yeah, and I do. I do feel lost.
Son: It would have been nice to have this idea of this big experience. But I know in those stories as well, there’s big fights, there’s falling outs, there’s a lot of heartache, there’s a lot of trauma, and I can just see the good parts from afar and imagine that that’s the whole thing.
Daughter: And I do think about, and I’ve thought about this even, you know, before you were pregnant, Mel, what, if I had a kid and they said to me, like, where am I from, which is a normal question that kids asked, what would I say? And am I able to answer that question? Because I remember asking mum that question as a really young kid.
And we’re still kind of asking the question. …
Madhura Prakash: That story was produced by Mel Bakewell, with supervising production from Joanna Bell. It was produced as part of Signal Boost with support from the Wheeler Centre and the Ian Potter Foundation. All the best would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands on which we make these stories and pay our respects to elders past and present.
All the Best is made at FBI Radio on Gadigal land, in association with SIN and 3RRR on Wurundjeri, Woiwurrung and Boonwurrung lands, and ACCC on Arundey and Warrumunga lands. The All the Best editorial producer is Mel Bankwell, and Phoebe Adler Ryan is our executive producer. Our social media producer is Isabella Lee, and our social media assistant is Seth Emmerich.
Patrick McKenzie is our community coordinator, and Janaye Madden is our content assistant. Shining Bird composed our theme music and Annie Hamilton designed the artwork. We’re heard across Australia on the Community Radio Network. and were made possible by the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Community Broadcasting Foundation.
You can find our full archive of more than 500 episodes at all the best radio. com. I’m Madhura Prakash, thanks for listening.