After the war, they returned to Greece to escape the Communists in Bulgaria. His wife pleaded with the local commander, playing on her Bulgarian nationality, and he was given a reprieve.

Here she eloped with a Greek doctor, who was arrested by the Bulgarians in 1941 and sentenced to death (largely because of his nationality). She, too, lived close to the Black Sea just outside Edirne (Adrianopolis) and under the provisions of the Treaty of Lausanne she, too, was shifted westwards to the region of Drama. She spent three decades in miserable internal exile before the Greek Government rescued her during Khrushchev’s capricious thaw.ĭimitri’s maternal grandmother was a Bulgarian. His sister, who stayed, survived a number of pogroms before being deported to Siberia in the mid-Thirties. For all that, Dimitri’s grandfather made the right decision when he left Novorossisk. Dimitri’s father was sent to Athens for safety and nearly died there, along with the tens of thousands who failed to survive the merciless winter of 1941-2. In 1941 the Bulgarians stormed through Thrace and eastern Macedonia and he sought refuge in the Italian-controlled region of Macedonia, where the occupation was considerably less harsh. So instead of continuing his career as an entrepreneur, he was given a little patch of land and told to become a farmer.

The region was still coping with hundreds of thousands of refugees from Anatolia and eastern Thrace, victims of the Treaty of Lausanne which had regulated the great population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923. There was no room for Dimitri’s grandfather in the cities or towns of northern Greece. The growing pressure of Stalinism persuaded him that the business skills which he had acquired in Istanbul and Trebizond would be better employed in Greece. The Soviet Government had ended the NEP, the experiment with small-time capitalism that would be replaced by the Five-Year Plan and collectivisation. In the late Twenties, the paternal grandfather of Dimitri, a close friend of mine from Thessaloniki, decided to leave Novorossisk, the Russian Black Sea port.

Ascherson black sea