When they first came to Agrinio from Asia Minor, refugees, my grandmother Polykseni, then a child, started working in the tobacco stores. She was given a jar with water she had to carry for the tobacco workers to drink, for them to refresh themselves, for the tobacco dust to settle down. She was kept waiting on her weak legs until she was called upon to offer coolness to those who were thirsty. Lots of dust and lots of bitterness, the tobacco inside that place.
Have you noticed? It is still fragrant in there.
The tobacco stores of the Papastratou Brothers closed down when I left Agrinio. When Thodoris Gonis, art director of the municipal regional theatre, proposed I had an exhibition in my home town, I asked for that place to be opened again so I could show there what I had been doing all those years I had been away. They hesitated at first. The Papastratou Foundation eventually accepted, they sent an engineer of theirs to check if the building could receive visitors after so many years of abandonment and even much more in operation. I wanted it as it was, accepting a slight coating to the colour of the inner walls, nothing else, and, one Saturday (All Souls’ Day it was), its doors were opened for two months. It was spring, shortly after Easter, people who had never entered the place got in and they saw, together with my work, the memory of the town. And I felt somewhat lighter from the weight I owe to that place, abandoning it as I left.