May 23; celebrating family history 🎉
Happy Sunday,
This weekend Ellie and I are back in the family summer home in Troitsa, celebrating the birthday of Ellie’s grandmother Elena, who was born here in this house exactly 85 years ago today.
It’s remarkable and very special, in these fast times we live in, that someone is sitting in the yard of the house they were born in, celebrating their 85th birthday. When I look at my own life, with all the countries and relocations, I will hardly be able to do the same when I turn 85.
What’s also remarkable is the story of this house and the family that it belongs to. Ellie’s great-grandparents (grandmother Elena’s parents) were born around the turn of the 20th century in a little village called Vissinia, near lake Kastoria in the Manastir Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire, which today lies in the Western Macedonia region of northern Greece. In 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne finalized the new European borders after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and included a provision for an exchange of residents according to ethnicity. Hundreds of thousands of Greeks made their way across the border, from now-Bulgarian areas on the Black Sea coast and in the Rhodope mountains, in exchange for hundreds of thousands of former Ottoman subjects, who were classified as Bulgarians or Macedonian Slavs, and now had to move to the Bulgarian homeland they had never been to.
Thus Ellie’s great-grandfather Panteleimon Andreev, his brother Stefan Andreev, and their two young brides had to make plans for moving too. Today we don’t have a lot of information on what exactly made them do what they did, but the decision was made to send the brides alone to Bulgaria, to scout for a place where they could build a new existence. The young men themselves would instead leave to the US for a few years, so they could earn enough money working there, to pay for setting up a new life in a new country.
About two years after the Andreev brothers arrived in Cincinnati, they received a telegram from Shumen in Bulgaria, in which their wives told them about a small plot of land with a house, in a village close to Shumen called Troitsa, that they wanted to buy. Having saved up just enough to pay for the trip back across the Atlantic, the new house, and some capital to start new businesses with the trade they learned in Ohio, they set off to reunite with their wives, in a new country, after nearly three years of absence.
Over the decades that followed, the courtyard in Troitsa was used for keeping livestock, a truck repair workshop, a vegetable garden, and today it’s a beautiful flower garden with a summer kitchen and a pool. The old house that stood here was torn down in the early 1930s, and a new, roomier house was built that still stands today, with the addition of electricity, running water, and air conditioning.
Grandmother Elena was born here in 1936, moved to Shumen after marrying Ellie’s grandfather Georgi in the 1950s, and the house was inhabited by its founders, her parents, until they passed away of old age in the 1990s.
And here we are today, almost 100 years after the family first came here, and 85 years since Grandmother Elena was born. Who knows, maybe in 85 years another family member will be sitting here in this garden, writing the rest of the story, of what happened to us.
And maybe that story will start today, of how I closed my laptop, grabbed my glass of wine, and dove straight back into the pool after sharing this with you 😎
Thanks for checking in today and talk to you next Sunday! 😇
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