I was born in Agrinio. I grew up there. I remember being always in the company of people, either inside or out in the fields. I remember their smiles and a burden I would much later understand to be accumulated toil and difficulties. Making ends meet. The town and the people changed quickly. Children of the place, orphans of chief shepherds and landowners, my father’s brothers and sisters, left-wing as they were, they had lost most of their kin to death, exile and victimization after the civil war. Refugees from Hisarlik, the ancient Troy, my mother’s family were tobacco workers. I grew up with a younger sister. My grandparents, issued from large families in the community of refugees, told us stories about the East and Asia Minor. My father, Thomas Bokoros, instead of tales, recited Homer to me by heart. He took me for strolls into mythology and the history of Man’s thought and culture. We must go forward without forgetting where we came from, he used to say. Carrying in his open hands the mess of the wounded left, he revealed to me, hidden and abandoned, a glade of our land’s deep history, when, tireless, he would take me with him wherever he could bring back to life a deeper meaning into men’s love for their country. His brother and his brother’s wife were both primary teachers and it was with him that I learnt to read and write, it was him who showed me how to paint and taught me into Law. “Study” was his prime talk every time he would set eyes on me. My mother wanted me to work hard and to insist on the impossible. «There is no ‘I can’t’, only ‘I don’t want to’», she would say, in an attempt to push a bit further with desire the limits which were always narrow and scarce. Each of them in their own way believed that the challenge lies in virtue, not in profit. In the summer we worked in the fields. When I was by myself I daydreamed. I had hardly started studying painting than all of them started to leave us, except for my mother. Alive remained the archetype of patience and the memory of the quest for virtue. Such is the background against which are set the pictures I recognise as my childhood’s. After I was 18 and left Agrinio, all of this becomes engulfed in time as a mythical past. The blooming flora in the fields, the fastening of the tobacco under the trees, the water, wells, streams, the stone house in town, the cast iron balcony, the street, the back yard. Linen hanging out, clean, freshly ironed on Saturdays. All of us together around the table. Cooked dishes and cakes in the kitchen. Fresh fragrant bread and smoking burning shrubs.
Later everything seemed to have been ready for a long time; I carry it all from when I was a child. In the middle of the night, I remember, before daybreak, we would leave on foot, from Megali Chora Street to Psilogefiro. Earthpaths. Electricity didn’t reach the tobacco fields. The trees cast their huge and indefinite dark shadows in the starry summer sky enveloped in night sounds, a mixture of birds or small animals’ in nests and in the shrubs. Frogs and reeds crackled in the streams. Crickets, owls, bats, scops owls and other undiagnosed ones amidst our steps and our stumbling. Dogs going wild and far away cocks. Sometimes our path would be closed by slow donkeys or mules which dragged their ropes grazing in the dark. In the neighbouring fields, behind tobacco nets and whitewashed walls shadows grew and disappeared nurtured by storm lamps, those mythical heroes. Dragging feet and bronze sprayers scattering cooling clouds on the dried leaves which rattled upon being turned round or fanned in the drying trays. The tobacco smell brought the sleepy bodies back to life. Theirs was the virtue of toil and the responsibility. Half way there, before we crossed the national road, to our right, there was a whitewashed icon in the midst of the Barbary fig trees and the reeds. Sometimes we would light the extinguished lamp. The sparkle of the match would shine in the darkness and then the light would slide gently into the oil leaving a sweet glimmering in the nothingness of night.