Tanasis Avukatos

"And so some girls were attracted to my Greekness. But not that I'd misuse the fact too much, no, I have my limits. It happened to me several times that when I had Czech friends, I was successful with some girls and they blamed it on me being this exotic Greek. But that isn't true, it's a question of how the woman feels. So what if I'm a Greek. So I'm more hairy. That's about it. The character, the size, the head, that all stays."

"Dad had a positive approach to communism. He was actually a Stalinist. They threw him out of the party in 1968. Well, he was organised. He got organised during the civil war. He was organised in the USSR in Tashkent, and when he came to Czechoslovakia, he also joined the Communist Party of Greece. Except in 1968 when the communists here got into a quarrel, a similar thing occurred with the Greek communists. They declared Dad a Stalinist and threw him out of the party. But, well, Vidnava was quite a strange village. It had a simple street design, so in the first phase they sent almost all the war invalids, the people on wheelchairs, those without arms, the blind. My aunt was blind, for instance, that's why she was in Vidnava. There was a rectangular square there, streets at right angles, it was all flat, not like Jeseník. When they ran out of the last healthy comrades, they took Dad back into the party and he even became chairman of the local organisation."

(Q: "Well, and how did the Greeks in Greece see you?") "As a Czech. I was a Czech to them. I mean, to them, a Greek from America is an American. A Greek from Germany is a German. Consider that there are about ten million Greeks in Greece, and seven or eight million of us are abroad. So I was a Greek from the Czech Republic, thus I was a Czech to them. But at the same time we were all Greeks, we knew that. When they said 'he's Czech,' it meant 'he's from the Czech Republic' or 'he was in the Czech Republic'."

"We were Greeks when in the Czech Republic. That was because we only had a residence permit, as we reckoned that one day we'd go away, so we refused to become Czechs in the inside. Not everyone, some of us married Czech women and didn't give returning to Greece a second thought. They didn't even learn Greek, or just a little. In Greece, they considered us to be Czechs, but you could assimilate if you wanted to. But then there were Greeks who kept going to "Czech" taverns visited by Czechs, they spoke Czech, ate Czech sausages with mustard and drank Czech rum. And they thought of how nice it was back in the Czech Republic and how the girls were easier to manage there. Those ones stayed with their minds in the Czech Republic."