Her short story “Mother’s skirt” stood out in the 9th International Student Competition on “Education and the Uprooting of Hellenism”.
He is only 17 years old, he does not come from Asia Minor and yet, in just a few lines, he manages to close all the pain and violence of the Asia Minor Catastrophe.
The 3rd grade student of the Model General High School of Heraklion and member of the Creative Writing Club, Rodanthi Brilaki, competed with her short story “Mother’s Skirt” and won a Prize in the Short Story category at the 9th International Student Competition on the theme “Education and Uprooting of Hellenism”.
The award ceremony took place online on Friday, December 16. The competition was organized by the Museum of School Life and Education of the National Center for Research and Rescue of School Materials and the Department of Educational Radio and Television and Digital Media of the Directorate of Support Programs and Education for Sustainability of the Ministry of Education and Religion.
Schools from all over Greece, Cyprus and Omogenia participated with short films, videos, photo stories, comics, visual compositions, short stories. The students searched for and narrated in their own way the drama of the uprooting and the Asia Minor Catastrophe. The Honorary Committee of the Competition includes people of letters and culture, academics, education officials, such as the director Pantelis Voulgaris, Anna Vassiliadis, President of the Women’s Literary Society.
From childhood … to the awards!
Rodanthi, although only 17 years old, is used to awards and distinctions. Since the 6th grade of elementary school, she has taken part in respective competitions, while she also stood out as a student of Thrapsanos High School.
As she tells Cretalive she likes literature, she learned to read from Kindergarten so she could enjoy books.
Although she does not come from Asia Minor, she managed to capture all the bitterness of that period in her text.
He is a member of the Creative Writing Group at the Standard High School of Heraklion and on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Asia Minor Catastrophe, they had studied the specific topic. First the text was written and then the competition was updated.
She likes, apart from Alki Zei and Georges Sarri, Eugenia Fakinou.
She herself writes to express her feelings and the awards are for her a way to reward her hard work.
Even though she has a penchant for Literature, she wants to study Chemistry!
The philologist of the school, Mrs. Maria Fiolitaki, reports that this year children from other schools, middle schools and high schools, are participating in the Club, a total of 25 students.
The Asia Minor Catastrophe was a topic they had worked on a lot.
The group is very active, the children measure distinctions in several competitions while participating with great passion and enthusiasm.
“Mother’s Skirt”
Its text is as follows:
It was hard to say what scared me more. Thoughts danced through my mind frantically and thumped violently at the corners of my heart as I sat in the uncomfortable, wicker chair. I looked around terrified: the bronze knob seemed like a huge bat, the girls like little witches who wanted to torture me, Mrs. Kate like the evil stepmother out of a fairy tale. Mother back in Smyrna always told me that my thoughts and ideas made me shiver with terror. Panagis teased me about my habit of making up stories and then entering them and thinking they were reality.
It wasn’t my fault, really. The sky that day saw fires and rained ashes. I did not imagine this because at home everyone around me was running in panic and Panagis was serious and speechless. And then very quickly I remember the living room of the French embassy, ​​the cheap burgundy sofa that smelled of tsipouro, the mother who dragged me into the world, the port, the voices. I was trying to understand why we were huddled together so much and why she took out her gold cross that never left her stately chest. Then I remember the boat, the sea pouring black, turbulent and my panic that I lost her skirt. He told me. “If at some point I let go of my skirt and your eyes. Don’t lose her because you lost me”! I had only a piece of cloth left in my hands. The skirt goes, the mother goes, the Virgin Mary goes, our beautiful house goes too. I didn’t hear anything.
At the port where I arrived after much suffering, I was looked for by an elderly couple who hugged me in their arms. The infamous aunt Elpiniki, as if she heard the destruction and our sufferings, came to take me. Her house smelled of green soap and cardamom. In the garden she had a large lemon tree where I always sat to avoid her howling for lost relatives. I wasn’t talking. It was terrifying how I felt; the redemption of the mind would never come.
After the first difficult weeks passed, my aunt enrolled me in the girls’ school where she worked as a teacher. It may have looked nothing like my school in Izmir – a two-story stone building overlooking the sea – but there I felt that there was a future even though in that present I saw in the eyes of the locals we were the foreigners who had come to devour them. How wrong… we had come from an alien, distant Greece, looking for a hug. The wandering, especially that of the mind, was unbearable and the memories we carried hurt, hurt a lot.
To hurt less, I studied, wrote, lost myself in my books, relaxed….Knowledge was the medicine for my open wounds and… the cloth from mother’s skirt. Even today as I sit here, I hold it tightly in my hands, trying to forget the misery of the world, and with it I wipe away the tears that will never stop flowing.
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