family stories

Every family has its stories. American families, I think, have more of them because many of us honestly do not know our own roots. It's shrouded in mystery because nobody bothered to pass any notes down for posterity.

Not to mention there is no real use for such knowledge, is there? Well, maybe there is. I mean we could all just live for the moment right ... until we died. And then what? Then, maybe posterity matters. And our habits live on. Find any alcoholic and chances are that he comes from a long line of drunks. So the past does matter, doesn't it?

One story in our family regards the origin of my great-grandmother's family, the Petrellises. The Petrones were of Italian origin, that much is clear, but Petrellis is a Greek name, not an Italian one, and grandpa insisted that his mom (at left) was Greek "from an island off the coast of Greece and Albania."

Never one to let any lock lie unpicked in my infinite spare time I found out more about great grandma. It turns out that she wasn't born in Greece but in Italy in 1892. But the village she was born in was not your ordinary Italian village -- it was called San Giorgio Albanese, with the Albanese indicating that it was populated by Albanians, or rather Arbereshe, proto-Albanians who moved there centuries ago before there was an Albania proper.

So, little did anyone know but we are the progeny of a weird Mediterranean ethnic group. The Albanians (who call their own language "Shqip") have their own branch of the Indo-European language tree. The Arbereshe, though, are not really Albanians. They are the descendants of Albanians of the 16th century who have been living in Italy for hundreds of years.

Great Grandma wasn't completely "Arbereshe" though. Her mother was an Italian, while her father carried the Greek surname. But I found it hard to reconcile this idea that the family was Greek with the fact that they lived in a village in the mountains of Calabria with a group of proto-Albanians.

Then I happened up the fact that many of the Albanians that moved to Italy were not exactly Albanians either. They were "Arvanites" -- a Greek ethnic group that happened to share a common archaic Albanian language. The Arvanites were Greek Orthodox and defiantly Greek for centuries, to the point that they deny their connection with Albania, despite their linguistic connection. And a lot of them happened to live in Epirus, on the northwest coast of Greece, where there happen to be some islands.

According to the resources I found, the Arvanites were living in Greece for hundreds of years before they fled to Italy following Ottomon Turk invasions of the region. Now, this was starting to make sense. Great grandma was neither Italian nor Albanian nor Greek. She was all three!

The thought of sword wielding Turks driving my ancestors across the Ionian Sea to the hills of Calabria and the Sila Greca gives this comfortable American blogger shivers. But I am glad they made it, because if they hadn't made it, I wouldn't be here, and neither would Marta or Anna (or Papa for that matter.) So I guess the past does matter, and sometimes it is even interesting.