The Bronze Head

My grandmother's side of the family - the Haniotis - have a house on a generous piece of land right in the middle of Mitata. I always thought that they had accumulated their wealth through their merchant business exporting oil and honey to Piraeus and St. Petersburg. Until my uncle Nicko (Loudzis) told me another story.

My great -grandfather had land up on Paliokastro - the mountain between Mitata and Paliopoly, where the Athenians and the Spartans battled it out a couple of thousand years ago, and where the temple to Aphrodite was also said to have stood. It was there that in the 1880s, someone working on the terraces there for my great-grandfather found a strange spherical object and brought it back to Priniathika, a sub-village of Mitata. He obviously didn't know what he had because his children were soon kicking it around outside. My great-grandfather found out about it and managed to get it - Nicko told me that he bought it for a "piece of bread", which is usually an idiom for "almost nothing".

So I am walking through the Ancient Museum in Berlin in the 1990s and I see this bronze head of a youth from about 300BC and I see it is from Kythera. I am lucky that the curator happens to be there and knows something of the piece. I speak to him and tell him that my relatives came from Kythera and apparently my great-grandfather had sold a bronze head back in the 1880s. The curator was dry and sceptical, and asked my Grandfather's surname. I said Haniotis and his eyes nearly popped out. He had done his thesis on the head and knew that the man who had sold it to the ancient museum back in the 1880s was indeed named Haniotis and that that information wasn't public knowledge.

To tell you the truth the head isn't that impressive, at least to a layman like me. It is quite damaged on the one side - possibly from the football game - and it is difficult to imagine that is considered a very fine piece from the period.

So the end of the story is that my great-grandfather received about 35 thousand reichsmark (pre-WW2 German currency) which would be worth about three quarters of a million Australian dollars in the 1990s. He used the money to set up or expand his export business, and bought the house and land with it.

The wealth is long since spent, and the house needs about the same amount of money to modernise it as it took to buy it in the first place.