Alkis C. Raftis - PERSONAL WEB SITE

           My grandfather Nicholas Raftis came to Athens around 1870 from Vissani, a mountain village in Epirus, south of Albania. As tradition had it, each village in that region was turned to a different trade or craft, and his village produced bakers. He opened a bakery in the Monastiraki neighborhood of Athens. His ninth child, Constantine, my father, played national league soccer with the "Apollo" team and became an electrician. He started his own motor winding workshop but later bought a printing shop. He joined the Resistance against dictator Metaxas in the 1930s. During the German occupation he organized the network of clandestine printing shops producing leaflets calling the people to revolt. He took part in the Civil War and in 1946 was caught by the royalists and court-martialed "for conspiring to overthrow the regime." He was condemned to death and spent several months in the death cell, while he was offered the chance to save his life by signing a declaration against his beliefs. His brothers finally bribed the military judges, who revised his sentence to life imprisonment. He was released 10 years later under the reconciliation measures, together with two other members of his family who had also fought in the Resistance and the Civil War.

         My maternal grandfather, Theodore Meziltzoglou, had a grocery store in a town called Saranda Eklisies (Kirklise in current usage), in Eastern Thrace, north of Istambul. He spoke Turkish, Bulgarian and Ladino, and traveled frequently to procure his supplies. Each time the Greeks were displaced after a lost war he opened a new shop further, in Xanthi, in Drama and in Salonica. My mother Fotini, the eldest of three sisters, was among the first Greek women to study mathematics. She became a high school teacher, an early feminist and a member of the Resistance. She raised her two children without any outside help. Forty years later she was decorated with the Medal of the Resistance.

My sister Lucia is a pharmacist employed by the Greek Social Security Institution.

         In 1971 I married in Douala, Cameroon, Chariklia Drossi, a dentist-orthodontist from the village Kriekouki in Boeotia, Greece. We divorced in Paris in 1975. In 1984 I had a son, Alexis, with Dr. Florence Oualid, social psychologist in Paris. Between their holidays in Greece I visit them often in Paris.