The most vivid memory I have of Oxi Day — 28 October 1940 — isn’t from a school parade or a patriotic ceremony. It comes from a hot July day on the island of Chios, where I was born and raised. Every year, on 22 July, the island celebrates the great feast of Saint Markella, and as a child I longed for that day with anticipation — the stalls, the music, the people, and the sweets my mother might buy me.

That morning my father woke me before dawn.

“Get up, Sotiri! We’re going to pick almonds,” he said in his deep, commanding voice.

“But today’s the festival!” I protested, my heart sinking.

He didn’t waver. “We’ve got work to do. We’re not here for festivals.”

My father, Giorgis Hatzimanolis (Zekas), the tall, strong refugee from Asia Minor — was a man of few words and unbreakable will. I feared him a little, but I respected him deeply. That day, angry and silent, I vowed not to speak to him — my own small rebellion for being kept from the feast.

As we rode our mule up toward Vigla, a hillside filled with almond trees, my father began to speak.

“It was a July like this when they called us,” he said quietly. “July 1940. I’d just married your mother. I was twenty-nine.”

I straightened up, listening. My father rarely spoke about the war, and this time his story wasn’t about Achilles or Kolokotronis — the heroes my grandfather used to tell me about — but about himself.

Honours presented to the author’s father in recognition of his heroism and self-sacrifice during the Albanian Front campaign. Photos: Supplied

“The world was already burning,” he continued. “One country after another fell to the Germans. We hadn’t entered the war yet, but we knew our time was coming. When mobilisation came, all of us from Chios gathered at the port. They gave us rifles and sent us to Alexandroupoli.”

He paused for a moment.

“Were we afraid? Of course. But we didn’t show it. We sang as we sailed — songs of homeland and freedom. I didn’t know if I was fighting for the house we built here on Chios, or for the one we lost twenty years earlier in Meli, in Ionia. But I fought for both. For both homelands. For both lives.”

By the time we reached the field, I had forgotten my sulking. My father climbed the almond tree, shaking its branches, while I gathered the fallen nuts and his words — golden kernels of memory dropping from the branches above.

He spoke of long marches, hunger, cold and courage. Of friends who never returned. Of the Albanian Front, where he and his comrades fought the Italians and later faced the German invasion. “We fought hard,” he said, “but they were too many, and we were tired, hungry, frozen.”

When Greece fell, he walked home — ragged, half-starved, but alive. One Sunday, the village priest read out his name in church: a medal for “heroism and self-sacrifice.” The only man from the area to receive such an honour. But my father never called himself a hero.

Certificate of the War Cross, Third Class, awarded to Giorgos Hatzimanolis for his “heroism and self-sacrifice” during the operations of the Albanian Front (1940–41). Photo: Supplied

“They called me that,” he said, “but I didn’t mean to be. Circumstance made me one. True heroes are people like your grandfather Nikolís, who hid for two years in a cupboard in Asia Minor, exiled himself to Ikaria, and every evening, sitting on his doorstep, would look across the sea and ask your grandmother:

‘Do you think we’ll ever go back?’

And she’d pour him a raki and say, ‘We will, Nikolí mou.’”

Years later, while travelling through the Balkans, I passed signs that read Pogradec, Korçë, Tepelena — names my father had once spoken, the places where he fought. The history I had learned as a child under that almond tree came alive before my eyes.

Yes, my father was a hero, not just because he captured Italians or earned medals for bravery, but because he never stopped fighting. Whatever life brought, he would say: “We never give up.”

That day, he didn’t hold a rifle. He held his memory.

My hero didn’t go to the festival.

My hero was my father, Giorgis Zekas, the refugee who learned to fight without hate.