Author Thea Halo plans a Pontian heritage memorial
American writer Thea Halo has secured the support of the Greek Culture Ministry for her planned memorial to Pontic Greeks and their culture at Aghios Antonios near Thessaloniki. Welcoming Halo to his office on April 15, Culture Minister Evangelos Venizelos wished the project well and affirmed that his ministry was glad to support such a worthy endeavor. Since writing her acclaimed book «Not Even My Name» (Picador), which commemorates her mother Sano’s survival of a death march forced on Pontic Greeks in Turkey in 1920, Halo has cherished the idea of creating a heritage foundation in memory of all the Pontians who died, or were dispossessed and exiled. While a writer in residence this year at Anatolia College in Thessaloniki, Halo garnered support for the foundation, which she envisages as showing the Pontic contribution to humanity. Halo’s mother had lost all track of her family and fellow villagers. Only after publication of the book in 1997 and the Greek edition (Govostis Press, translated by Marina Frangos) in 2000, did Halo learn that descendants of her mother’s relatives were living in Aghios Antonios, a village which was named after their original home in Asia Minor. The heritage foundation is to feature a replica of Sano Halo’s village in Turkey with its traditional wooden houses. The innocence of the Pontians will be depicted by two life-size bronze statues, one of a calf tied to a live apple tree and the other, a nine-year-old girl in Pontic dress, by its side. Halo wants to use a living tree that would blossom each spring: «It would represent the triumph of good over evil, the indestructibility of the Pontic people and their culture.» Other tasks associated with the foundation include creating a research center, a data base of information on missing Pontians, a Pontic lexicon and grammar, and a series of marble plaques, along the lines of those on Ellis Island, to commemorate individual Pontians. The last of these projects is vast in scope and potentially expensive, but Halo is counting on the assistance of Pontians themselves in addition to help from the ministry. Halo told Kathimerini English Edition that she hoped to collect the equivalent of one euro or one dollar from every person of Pontian origin for the foundation. Meanwhile, «Not Even My Name» is still selling well, and its use as a set text in some American colleges means that the story of the Pontians is being kept alive abroad as well as in Greece. Halo is currently working on a screenplay for a film of the book.
