A Small Taster

In 1922 there was a great fire at the end of the Greco-Turkish war that destroyed the city of Smyrna (now known as Izmir in Turkey) where my family had lived for generations. The “Catastrophe of Smyrna” caused my Greek grandfather Alexandros, a civil engineer who built bridges and railways, to relocate to Alexandria, Egypt. Later, in the 1950s, the family were forced to leave the home they’d built in Alexandria when Nasser declared Egypt for Egyptians only, and they dispersed across Europe, some to Athens and Thessaloniki, some to France or Belgium. (The lingua franca of Alexandria in the early 20th century was French, so they all spoke it fluently.) My father and one of his brothers eventually ended up in the UK, because he felt “It was time to learn English, the international language of business,” and it was there, in London, that he met my mother.

Mum was an evacuee child, and she and her sister were inadvertently returned to London in the early days of WWII to live with their own mother, my grandmother, and together they all witnessed the Blitz firsthand. They were all gifted storytellers and sometimes described Hitler’s efforts to destroy London in very vivid and personal terms.

My mother once found a pile of old comics in what was left of the bombed-out home of a friend of hers who’d been killed by what she believed was a V-2. (She could distinguish between the different types of signature sounds the bombs made as they dropped out of the sky.) She found a lot of things in the bomb craters of south London that surrounded her in childhood and, while the detailed telling of that tale is a story for another day, those experiences were ingrained in her and a big part of why she bequeathed her love of comics to me.

My love of narrative and work ethic for it is a gift from all my kin, families both Greek and British - refugees, evacuees and storytellers, all. I sometimes wonder if all that generational trauma is also why I’m so restless.

Above is a panel from the book I’m working on at the moment* depicting the conflict in Smyrna. (Almost finished. Not far to the finish line now…) You’ll find more info on the great fire of Smyrna here.

*Formerly known as Skin Trouble, “the book about racism” co-authored with Angela Watson, new title TBA and to be published in 2025 by 23rd Street Books. You can check out a few other sketches and work-in-progress drawings on my Instagram feed.