Saint Spyridon: A Creation Story

Depending on who you ask, the word ‘home’ can have many definitions. If you were to ask me, I would say that home is a place I am familiar with and can trust to always be there for me whenever I return, no matter how long I am gone. My home is in Worcester, in the center of Massachusetts. While I was born and raised in this city, spending most of my life there, it existed as a home for countless others for centuries before me.

The history of Worcester is not unfamiliar to most other urbanized metropolitan cities throughout New England. The city started out as a small settlement, but eventually developed into an industrial powerhouse. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, large influxes of migrants began arriving to Worcester to seek work.

My grandfather was born in 1900 in a small village in Bitola, which is currently in modern-day Macedonia. In this area of the world, the history was dynamic. At the time of my grandfather’s birth, Bitola had only been recently emancipated from Ottoman Turkish rule. Centuries of ethnic groups enduring oppression caused severe conflict throughout the Balkans, resulting in frequent disputes and strife. My grandfather grew up in a poor shepherd household throughout these events. He was Aromanian, a small ethnic minority of nomadic Romanians who lived throughout the Balkans. When he was still young, his father attempted to steal a sheep for food for their family. However, the shepherd, who was Bulgarian, caught him in the act and stabbed him to death, leaving his body in a ditch on the side of the road and his family without a father to feed many mouths. My grandfather’s mother knew the difficulties of the situation she was in now, so she told my grandfather, now eleven years old, to leave the country by himself and go to a land across the sea. One that was open to all, with more freedoms than one could ask for in his whole life. He followed his mother’s words and started his long journey to the United States of America.

Life was not much easier in the USA. Ellis Island was a tedious process, and after getting through, he went to the city of Worcester where he knew of a large community of Greeks who worked in factories with similar stories to his own. He worked long days in a bakery, which was backbreaking for someone his age. Eventually, after years of hard work, he and a friend managed to buy the bakery. From here, they established a pie-selling business, which soon turned into a thriving enterprise. The bakery became very well known throughout Worcester, and its popularity led to its expansion into a pie factory known as Table Talk Pies today. Graciously, my grandfather hired Greek immigrants who needed work after they arrived in the country.

The Worcester Greek community grew as immigrants heard of a Greek-owned business they could work at for good pay. This caused the small Greek Orthodox church that they attended to become overcrowded. My grandfather and other investors solved this by building the Saint Spyridon Greek Orthodox Cathedral, one of the largest churches in the state, to meet the needs of their ever-growing population. While his place of birth may have been Bitola, his home was now Worcester. In addition to his work in the community and the factory, he married a woman with whom he had nine children. However, none of these children would grow up to be my parents because his wife unfortunately passed away, leaving him a widower. Later, he would marry my grandmother.

My grandmother was a woman who had experienced the world in ways most people could not imagine. She was born in the late 1920s in a poor village in northern Greece and grew up with five sisters. Her grandfather, one of the few people in the village who had learned to read and write, was a priest, which was a great honor at the time. My grandmother worked as a schoolteacher, walking many miles every day to teach in a small classroom. Life was difficult but simple.

That was, until World War II. The fighting on all fronts brought the Axis powers into Greece, eventually leading to the complete German occupation of northern Greece. In my mother’s now-occupied village, complete order was implemented by the Nazi soldiers. However, as my grandmother would recount, their presence was not even close to the pain she would endure in the following years. In her village, the Germans had no reason to be hostile and acted as more of a neutral force that did not harm the people who lived there.

The new problem was that with Greece under the control of the Axis, the Allies made it difficult for food to be imported in the hopes of weakening the Germans strength. This tactic caused everyone in the village, German and Greek, to nearly starve to death. Because this bordered a Romanian village in Greece, my great-grandfather and a group of men crossed the mountains by foot into Romania to bargain for food in an effort to save the village. They managed to gain an audience with Antonescu, the fascist prime minister of Romania, who listened to the men and sent them on their way with enough food to sustain the village.

However, all was still not well. World War II may have ended for the rest of the world, but it never truly ended in Eastern Europe. Romania was later invaded by the Soviet Union, which forced a communist government on the people and outlawed religion.

In Greece, the abrupt removal of German forces caused a power vacuum. The result was one of the bloodiest civil wars that Europe had seen.

My grandmother, still a schoolteacher during this time, would walk her route to the school she taught at and pass people on the road who were begging for food. On her way back, she would see those same people lying on the ground, dead from starvation. Nobody would be around to move their bodies once they died. She would see wheelbarrows full of the dead parked stationery in the street, and dead soldiers with their genitals cut off and shoved into their mouths. No one can imagine what this time was like, to carry on with such horrors and be expected to wake up fine the next morning. Her time during the civil war was that of constant terror. My grandmother lived in constant fear that her family would be executed by communists for being religious and not in support of the ideology. She had concerns that nationalists would assume they were communists because of their Romanian ethnicity.

After countless near-death experiences throughout the war, the strife eventually ended, leaving her village a desolate, ash-filled wasteland. Life in Greece would never be the same for anyone who lived there. My grandmother reached out to a man who lived in Worcester, Massachusetts, who promised her a good life free from the difficulties in Greece.

Despite what she thought, life was not good when she arrived. The man who promised her a good life all but lied, as he abused her and treated her harshly. He was a wealthy man, but aside from money, he offered her nothing but pain. When she tried to cut him out of her life, he stalked her and threatened her life. Finally, with the help of her priest, this man was finally cast out of her life. However, being in her thirties, she was now concerned that she would never get married again. But then she went to a function at Saint Spyridon and met my grandfather, a recently widowed man, who ended up marrying her and having my dad and aunt.

I was born in 2003 and my grandfather died in 1987, but my grandmother was still alive throughout my childhood. I grew up only a street away from the house my dad grew up in. Worcester had always been my home. I did not travel much until I became older, so the backyard was my vacation, and the woods were my escape. My childhood memories are filled with my friends and I running in the woods behind our elementary school and looking for the monsters and creatures we believed to live there. Catching frogs in the nearby pond and fist-fighting my cousin, who lived down the street, were routine. But my best memories were always in my church, Saint Spyridon. This is where I was baptized and spent every Sunday learning about the church and the people painted on the church walls.

When I think of home, the word ‘Worcester’ comes to mind. But realistically, this cannot be my home because the concept of home is specific, or at least it is in my mind. I do not know every nook and cranny about my city. Whenever I go out with my friends, we can always find a new location to see something that we didn’t know existed. So, while my home is in Worcester, the city is not where I call my home. I have many memories in my house, but, truly, I cannot say this is my home as well. Perhaps it is a secondary home because even though I’ve lived and grown up there, when the word ‘home’ comes up, it is my church that comes to mind. The church my grandfather built to bring everyone together is the same church where my grandparents’ fates intertwined and where I was received into the Orthodox church. Saint Spyridon is where I still return to today.