The Road to Lentekada

By Matthew Fronimos

Few journeys in life follow a straight line from one point to another. Whether it be meandering without a schedule or a long and arduous sojourn, most journeys involve adventure, adversity, setbacks, and unexpected joy that surpass one's expectations. Such is the nature of the Road to Lentekada with its many twists and turns as the author searches for his ancestral home in Greece.

Fascinated by culture, language, history, and genealogy since his youth, the author takes us on a journey to Greece where he searches for tangible evidence of his roots, including the actual homes of his grandparents who immigrated to America in the second decade of the twentieth century. The author, inspired by the biblical command to honor thy father and mother, seeks to extend this to his grandparents and beyond.

In 2016, the author returned to Greece on vacation, thirty-four years after having lived in Athens while serving with the United States Air Force. He shares many personal, nonclassified anecdotes about his experience of living in the land of his ancestors during the early 1980s. He takes us through his old neighborhood, which includes a visit to his former apartment, as well as a tour through the former Hellenikon Air Base, which had been closed and left abandoned for more than twenty-five years. Of course, no trip to Greece is complete without a jaunt to see the antiquities and a voyage to the islands.

For the majority of the journey, the author takes us to the small town of Kyparissia in the southwestern Peloponnese where he sets out to learn more about his ancestors and where they once lived. He seeks to find the mystical village of Lentekada, a place that his father spoke of but one that he could never find on a map. Whether by chance or divine appointment, the author had a series of encounters that enabled him to actually make a trip to Lentekada, which provided the opportunity to traverse the rugged road that his ancestors once traveled.

The favorable hand of serendipity continued to point him in the right direction as he met second cousins, people that he had no previous knowledge of prior to this 2016 trip. He was treated with incredible kindness and warmth as these relatives welcome him home to the patrida, his homeland, though he was born and raised in the USA. They also assisted with sharing information that helped arrange the puzzle pieces of the amazing family story.

Accompany the author on his true-life pilgrimage as he searches for his ancestral home. Are you ready to embark on the journey as we travel along the Road to Lentekada?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: May 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781662421266

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The Road to Lentekada

Matthew Fronimos

Copyright © 2023 Matthew Fronimos

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2023

ISBN 978-1-6624-2125-9 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-2126-6 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Introduction

Mapping Out the Journey

Detroit to Athens

Recharging the Battery

Three-Island Cruise

A Visit to the Past

The Antiquities Welcome Me Back

The Journey to Kyparissia

Exploring Nona's Hometown

Visiting the Cemeteries

The Journey to Lentekada

Lunch with Maria

Meeting Cousins

Lunch with Cousins

Meeting Dimitris

A Trip to Filiatra

Imagining Nona and Papouli

Learning More about Lentekada

Saturday Night in Athens

One More Trip to Ano Glyfada

Departing from Greece

Observations and Reflections

Listening to the Inner Voice

Epilogue

The Road Not Taken

About the Author

Dedicated to my precious daughter Margaret who will always be koritsaki mou, and to the people of Lentekada and Kyparissia

Acknowledgments

No man or woman goes on a journey through life without the aid of others. Even a solitary pilgrim marches onward with the assistance of those encountered along the way. The Road to Lentekada would not have been possible without the assistance, support, and encouragement of many people.

Thank you to my paternal grandparents, Apostolos and Yiannoula Fronimos, for providing the inspiration that motivated me to research their lives and attempt to know them better. Thank you to my wonderful parents, John and Lena Fronimos, who raised me in a loving home, gave me the gift of faith, and blessed my siblings and me with a modest inheritance that provided the needed financial resources to make the journey.

Thank you to my siblings, Greg, Tim, and Mike Fronimos and Sheila (Fronimos) Breen, who provided comradery, encouragement, and friendship through the years. In particular, I want to express gratitude to my brother Tim who took care of things while I was away and who participated in every step of the journey and listened to hours upon hours of my research findings and theories. Also, I extend great respect to my brothers Greg and Mike for their outstanding example of excellence and their ongoing interest in our family story.

Thank you to my daughter, Margaret Fronimos Dominguez, for providing me with purpose as she carries on the legacy of our family story, and to her husband, my son-in-law Miguel Dominguez, for recognizing the importance of our father-daughter relationship. May you always come upon calm waters and gentle breezes as you sail on with your own journey.

Thank you to my fiancée, Khulkar Khujamova, for her love and patience as I completed this project. Just as Alexander the Great found love with Roxanna, the Bactrian princess, somehow the road has led me to the same land, now called Uzbekistan, where I found you.

Thank you to my cousin, Mary (Papastergion) Fernimos, for reading the manuscript, for giving thoughtful feedback, and for providing uplifting wind in my sails to continue. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Aunt Stemma and Uncle Nick Hadjimarkos for their constant warm embrace as they treated me like a son, for sharing their knowledge about the family with me, and for tolerating my insatiable curiosity over the years. Another big thank you must be extended to my cousin, Mary Ann Fronimos, who freely shared information, encouraged me to keep going, and was always there for me when I needed support. Thank you to Pete and Mary Fronimos in Chicago, whom I first met in 1990, along with his brother Tom. They embraced me immediately and treated me with the virtue and spirit of philoxenia.

Thank you to my newly discovered cousins Konstantinos and Kalliopi Antonopoulos, Giorgios and Theodosia Paraskevopoulos, Panayiotis Takis Antonopoulos, Maria Stringa, and Georgios Fitsaros. I appreciate their loving embrace and hospitality and all the valuable information which filled in so many of the missing pieces in our story.

Thank you to Christos Antonopoulos who kindly served as my translator and to Kostas Nikolopoulos for taking me to his parents' home in Rodia where we enjoyed an incredible feast. A special thank you to Antonis Nikolakopoulos for actually taking me to Lentekada and to his wife, Maria, who graciously introduced me to her husband. Without their assistance, this story would have followed a very different path.

Thank you to all of the friends who made special contributions along the way. Thank you to Dimitris Zogokis Skiouros and Erisa who treated me like a long-lost brother. Thank you to Aristeia Mantzouni and Sofia Alexandropoulou at the municipal offices in Kyparissia for taking the time to help with research and to Kostas Dimitrakakis for sharing his knowledge of the history of Lentekada. Thank you to Achilleas Gazis, Carol Kostakos Petranek, and all the friends on the Hellenic Genealogy Geek page on Facebook for their help with conducting research once I returned to Michigan.

Thank you to George and Katerina Dimopoulos for their outstanding food and service over the years at Senate Coney Island and for introducing me to their niece Nancy Dimopoulou and her sister Karen. Thank you to Alla Dickson, a great artist who took the time to review my manuscript and offered helpful feedback while she was writing her own story. Thank you to all of my friends on Facebook who followed the daily posts about the journey and gave me the idea that this story might be worth sharing with others.

There were so many others who provided outstanding service at the hotels and restaurants that I frequented. Thank you to Max, Georgia, and all the staff at the Amarilia Hotel in Vouliagmeni, in suburban Athens as well to Georgia, Popi, Eleni, and all the staff at the Apollo Art Resort Hotel in Kyparissia for a clean room, excellent meals, friendly advice, and expressing interest in the journey. Thank you also to Giorgios at the Panorama Restaurant in Vouliagmeni and Achilles and Carmen Fotinopoulos at the NYNIO Restaurant in Kyparissia for the outstanding food and nice conversation. I would like to extend a thank you to all the many people who I encountered along the way, each of whom contributed in some way to the success of the journey.

Thank you to Gretchen Willis, my publishing coordinator at Page Publishing, for all your guidance in completing this project. Without your assistance, this dream would have never become a reality.

Finally, thank you to Almighty God for all the blessings that you bestowed on me. Apart from you, I can do no good thing. Δόξα τω θεώ!

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; (Meditation XVII from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions by John Donne, 1623)

Prologue

One of the most popular pastimes in the United States in recent years has been genealogy. It is not a new phenomenon, but with the advent of the DNA test, creation of social media, and the increasing number of websites dedicated to genealogy research, it has become increasingly possible to find information about one's ancestors and to connect with unknown living relatives all over the world.

In America today, people spend thousands of dollars and thousands of hours pursuing their hobbies and interests, whether that be playing or watching sports, collecting things of value such as classic cars, visiting historical sites, and numerous other activities that bring them joy. In my case, I have chosen to spend a significant portion of my time and money on genealogical research. This is not a task that was imposed on me like the responsibilities dictated by an employer. Instead, this desire rose up from within and became a labor of love.

From 2007 through 2013, I was blessed with the opportunity to live and work in South Korea, one of the most rewarding periods in my life. My role in Korea was to teach English, first to children and then to university students and adults. I absolutely loved this job. During that time, I developed a great affinity for the Korean people and their culture. One of the things that I admired most about the Korean people was the respect and honor that they rendered toward their ancestors. This showed up in numerous ways in Korean society, such as at the Chuseok festival, and with their use of a special linguistic pattern called jondaemal, where they use honorifics to speak with respect to people who are older.

Another way that Koreans demonstrate respect is through their maintenance of familial history in a genealogy book that is called jokbo. Through this family registry, they seek to preserve their specific family history, and it is passed on through the eldest son of each subsequent generation. While in Korea, I met people who told me that their jokbo could testify to five hundred and even one thousand years of family history. The existence of this Korean system inspired me to go far beyond a mere collection of family anecdotes and the names of three generations that preceded me. In what has come to be known as the journey, I set out in earnest purpose to discover the long history of our family.

*****

Since I was a kid, I have been fascinated with learning more about our family story. Through my youth and into adulthood, the collection of facts and anecdotes gave me a sense of satisfaction but left me still wanting to know more. I am a second-generation American whose four grandparents all immigrated to the United States between 1911 and 1924. I come from a family of mixed ethnic heritage, and apparently, this distinctiveness made a lasting impression on me early on in life. Who am I? is one of the quintessential questions that all humanity asks themselves, and it was something that I frequently pondered. My dad was born in America to parents who emigrated from Greece. My mom was also born in the United States to Irish parents who came from a place that was divided by politics, Grandpa from the newly independent Republic of Ireland and Grandma was reared in Northern Ireland, a part of the United Kingdom. My parents and grandparents were very proud of their European heritage, but their first priority was to be good and loyal Americans.

From a young age, I took pride in both ethnic legacies because the blend made us different from everyone that we knew, including our relatives. From 1958 through 1975, my immediate family lived in the Warrendale neighborhood on the west side of Detroit, Michigan, within a twenty-minute drive to the US–Canadian border. Being so close to a foreign country provided us ample opportunities to go abroad to Canada for shopping, sightseeing, for lunch or dinner, and even just to take a leisurely drive. Our neighborhood was populated predominantly by Polish and Eastern European immigrants or their descendants. It was common to hear Polish or other languages in the local shops and church.

We were middle-class families who lived mostly in modest two-bedroom bungalows of just over one thousand square feet. The houses were neatly aligned with roughly ten feet between each one. For the most part, everyone maintained their property very well. This was our world, and it was sufficient for us as our parents sought to pursue the American dream. We walked to school, we played in the streets, and we were at least acquainted with most of the families that resided in each of the fifty-six houses on our quarter-mile-long block.

We lived on Stahelin (pronounced STAY-lin) Street, but we could name the twenty-three streets that ran north and south between the Southfield Freeway and Rouge Park. This was our world. To venture out two or three miles in any direction felt like navigating uncharted territory. Many of the houses in Warrendale were constructed during the post-World War II boom of the late 1940s and early 1950s. There were bakeries, fruit stands, small grocery stores, barbershops, restaurants, hardware stores and various other small shops which lined the main streets of Warren Avenue and Joy Road, the two main east-west thoroughfares. It was far from lavish living, but no one was poor.

In all my years of living there, I don't recall ever meeting a Muslim, a Jew, a Buddhist, or a Hindu. The only African American people that I remember meeting were our very friendly mailman, Mr. Wilson, the sanitation workers who picked up our trash in the alley behind our houses, and our beloved sports stars that we saw on TV or heard described on the radio. The neighborhood was composed of Catholics and Protestants and probably some people with no particular religious affiliation. Our local church, SS. Peter and Paul, had its own private school with over eight hundred students ranging from kindergarten through eighth grade, but there were also a few public schools in the area, namely Cody High School, Ruddiman Junior High, and Carver, Dixon and Kosciusko, Elementary Schools. There were no schools dedicated to our ancestral heroes such as Theodoros Kolokotronis or Daniel O'Connell. The nearest Catholic high schools were all several miles away. The mass at church was either said in English or Polish, once the vernacular replaced Latin in the mid-1960s.

As a young Greek Irish American kid growing up in this cultural milieu with an Eastern European ethos, I was intrigued by the fact that we were different. We had a funny surname, which people struggled to pronounce correctly. I knew all of the Polish curse words by the time I was ten and occasionally deployed them for comedic effect. To ensure that we didn't get lost in this world, Mom always made us wear a green Irish badge on our school uniform every March 17 to celebrate St. Patrick's Day to help us remain cognizant of our heritage and the nuns at school overlooked it.

On special occasions such as weddings or funerals, our family would go to SS. Constantine and Helen Greek Orthodox Church, which was five miles to the east on Oakman Boulevard toward the center of Detroit. This was the church that my grandparents helped start and most of our Greek relatives attended. I recognized early on that it was different from the Catholic Church, and I liked it. When I returned back to my world in Warrendale and told kids that I had visited the Orthodox Church, their reaction was almost as if I had told them that I went to Mars. They had no sense of a world other than our predominantly Catholic, eastern European enclave and not much beyond it.

In fact, once when I was in fifth grade, the teacher announced that we were going downtown on a field trip. Of course, we were all very excited at the prospect of riding on a yellow school bus because we walked to school each day. When the teacher asked us to raise our hand if we had never been to downtown Detroit, I was shocked to see that almost one-third of my classmates raise their hand. On Sundays, we were required to stay dressed in our church clothes until a certain point in the day, maybe 3:00 p.m., at which time we were permitted to change into our play clothes. The neighborhoods in Detroit during the 1960s and early 1970s were still relatively insular, with many of them established based on the ethnicity of the majority of their residents. To the best of our knowledge, there was no other Greek Irish family except at 7356 Stahelin.

So I grew up with the realization that our family was unique. Being half Greek and half Irish, we knew of no one who was like us, so it was always a great joy to spend time with our three living grandparents, our twenty-five aunts and uncles, and forty-three cousins who generally lived fifteen or twenty minutes away. As a result of the juxtaposition of our family in the Warrendale neighborhood, I became very curious about issues related to religion, ethnicity, and culture. This inquisitive nature caused me to ask a lot of questions, a trend that has continued throughout my life. Why do Dad's relatives go to the Orthodox Church while Mom's family and our family go to the Catholic Church? Is it possible to be equally Greek, Irish, and American? Why do we live in this neighborhood where there are few Irish people and no Greek people except us? Why can't we live closer to our cousins? Why do we celebrate Easter twice? From early on, my mind was fully engaged in trying to understand the world in which we lived.

My mother, Lena (O'Keefe) Fronimos, was born in Detroit in 1932 during the height of the Great Depression, less than a decade after her parents came to America. Her father, Laurence O'Keefe, was born on a farm in County Kerry, Ireland, in 1903 and came to America in 1924, after first going to Scotland and then Canada. As a teenager, he participated in the struggle for independence of his country. He was captured by the British and held in Macroom Prison briefly but managed to escape while being transported by car. He made his way to Liverpool and then Scotland, where he had some relatives. They helped him pay for passage to Halifax, Canada, but with the auto industry booming in Detroit in the 1920s, he eventually made his way to America, and Detroit in particular. He was proud to be an American and instilled this in his six children.

My maternal grandmother was Mary Anne (Daly) O'Keefe, born in County Tyrone near Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1899. She was from a Catholic family which lived in the midst of the Troubles between Protestants and Catholics, Irish, and British. Like my grandfather, she also immigrated first to Canada and then on to America. She followed her brother, Harry Daly, to Detroit once he secured a job and a place to live. Technically, Grandma was a British subject by virtue of where she was born, but her ethnicity was Irish. Laurence and Mary Anne eventually met in Detroit, married in 1925, and raised five daughters and one son.

My father, John Fronimos, was born in Detroit in 1928, the seventh of ten children. Both of his parents lived in the province of Greece called Messenia. My paternal grandfather, Apostolos Fronimos, was born in 1891 and was the youngest of twenty-four children. Yes, you read that correctly, twenty-four children! The story is that his father, Dimitrios Anastasopoulos Fronimos, became a widower when his first wife died in childbirth. Left with twelve children, including a newborn infant, he needed to find another wife. Before long, he married his second wife, Stathoula, and together they had another twelve children, with Apostolos being the youngest. Dimitrios died when Apostolos was just four years old, and Stathoula passed away when he was the age of thirteen. My grandfather immigrated to the US in 1911 when he was twenty and settled directly in Detroit.

My paternal grandmother, Yiannoula (Stringou) Fronimos, was born in 1895 and was the youngest of six children. Her father, Ioannis Stringas, died just before she was born, so she never knew him. Her mother, Stamatoula Stringou, died when she was thirteen, so she was raised by her older siblings. In late 1915, Apostolos returned to Greece to take a bride, and in an arranged marriage, he married Yiannoula. As a newlywed couple, they came to Detroit to start a new life. She was already pregnant when they arrived in America in April 1916, but the child died during childbirth. The doctor told her that their son died because he was too big, and that as a result, she would never be able to have any more children. This tragedy didn't discourage the young couple as they went to have six daughters and three sons.

The goal of my journey has been to honor my parents, grandparents, and other ancestors by telling their story because in the end, it is our story and it provides insight into who we are as people. With this collection of information, it is my hope to better understand my parents and grandparents and, ultimately, myself. A further aim is to recreate the family tree with more details much like the Koreans do with their jokbo and to provide this legacy to our descendants. I believe it is imperative that we preserve our past for the benefit of the future.

I have always been proud of being Greek and Irish in terms of ethnicity and American by virtue of citizenship. This book, The Road to Lentekada, tells the story of my search for details about the Greek side of my family. By no means is it intended to be a slight against the Irish side as I hope to write a similar work to honor them in the future. To tell the complete story in one exhaustive volume would be too cumbersome to read. Both branches of our family have fascinating stories, and it is my desire to chronicle as much of it as I can for our family and friends to understand and enjoy, as well as those interested in the trials and tribulations, joy, and satisfaction that comes with genealogy research. The Road to Lentekada tells the story of my trip to Greece in October 2016 as I sought to discover the details of our family story.

Are you ready to embark on the journey along The Road to Lentekada?

Introduction

Mapping Out the Journey

If you look at the map of Greece today and try to find the village of Lentekada, you will not find it no matter how long or hard you search. This is not because it is a mythical place like Camelot, El Dorado, or Shangri-La. It does have very special meaning to those who have some connection to it, and for many, it is revered as holy ground. For nearly four decades, I searched for Lentekada on maps, but to no avail. Since I was unable to find it, I began to devise theories that might explain this mystery. Of course, they were all incorrect.

Lentekada (pronounced len-dee-KOH-thuh) is, in fact, a real place. It is a village in the regional unit of Messenia, one of six such jurisdictions in the Peloponnese, the large peninsula to the west of Athens in Greece. Messenia can be found on the western side of the Peloponnese, facing the Ionian Sea. It is further subdivided into six municipalities: Kalamata, Mani, Messini, Oichalia, Pylos-Nestoras, and Trifylia. The municipality of Trifylia has its local government based in the coastal town of Kyparissia, and Lentekada is near this town. Over the years, Greece has undergone several administrative reforms, so internal boundaries have changed quite a bit, creating certain challenges for amateur genealogists like myself.

Lentekada is a village made up of two separate settlements, one still populated and the other abandoned. In 1956, the uninhabited part known as Upper Lentekada or Ano Lentekada (Άνω Λεντεκάδα) was renamed Agia Triada (Αγία Τριάδα), a name that means Holy Trinity. At the same time, the populated Lower Lentekada or Kato Lentekada (Κάτω Λεντεκάδα) was renamed Rodia (Ροδιά), which means pomegranate. Lentekada was split into two separate villages as far back as 1912, but the locals and diaspora Greeks from the town feel no need to make a distinction between the two places because it is still viewed as one locale.

When you look at a map of the Peloponnese, you will find the town of Kyparissia due south of the city of Patras, which is in the northwest corner. By road, the distance is 158 kilometers (95 miles), but only 110 kilometers (66 miles) by air. The road from Kyparissia to Lentekada is much shorter. If you were a bird flying southeast out of Kyparissia at a 45-degree angle, you would find Lentekada roughly 6 kilometers (3.5 miles) away. However, if you were to drive there from Kyparissia by truck or car, the trip measures more like 16 kilometers (9.5 miles) to Kato Lentekada (Rodia) and an additional 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) to the upper village of Ano Lentekada (Agia Triada).

The road takes a circuitous path as it winds its way through the mountains to an altitude of 420 meters (1,365 feet) above sea level. The trip can be treacherous at some points as you ascend and descend the mountains named Psychro, Viglatouri, Asfakidia, Faneri, and Loustra, and pass through the villages of Mili, Mplemeniani, Vryses, Karavouni, Mouriatada, and Daras. At several points along the way, the road is barely wide enough to serve one vehicle. When faced with oncoming traffic, someone is forced to give way to the other driver. One mistake or hasty move could cause one of the driver's to go off the road, plunging hundreds of feet into the deep ravines below. There are no guardrails, walls, or fences for protection.

The road to Lentekada is no journey for a timid driver or for a fuel-efficient compact car. When you think of our ancestors traversing these very same roads for centuries on horseback or in carts pulled by donkeys, it just boggles the mind and makes one wonder at the number of casualties that occurred.

Some believe that Lentekada was founded in the first decade of the nineteenth century in response to oppression from the ruling Turkish regime because of the difficulty with reaching the village. However, records exist that show that the village existed as far back as 1689, when it was inhabited by 76 residents. By 1700, the population nearly doubled to 140 residents, and by 1907, the village reached its peak with 415 men, women, and children living there. It was at this time that my sixteen-year-old grandfather called Lendekada home. He would have traveled along the steep and rugged roads between Lentekada and the big city of Kyparissia, going back and forth on horseback, not knowing that within a few years, he would be riding in streetcars and buses in America.

Just four years later in April 1911, at the age of twenty, Papouli set