The Inscription on the Back of the Photo: “Dear Mother, I Survived”

A Pontic Greek woman who fled to a refugee camp in Drama after the Greek genocide lost her husband to Turkish forces and had no idea what happened to two of her sons. Years later, she traveled back to Rize, the city she was driven from, and stood at the familiar fountain across from her old home.

When she knocked on the door, a Turkish army colonel and his wife were living there. She told them the house had been her family home. The colonel not only invited her to stay as long as she wished, but used his military rank to investigate her missing children, discovering one had been killed and the fate of the other remained unknown.

Dear mother, I am your son. I survived but I could not tell you.

During her stay, the woman revealed where she had hidden gold coins inside the old bakery oven before the expulsion. The colonel helped her retrieve them and split the valuables with her as promised, then loaded ten trunks of household goods onto a truck as a gift for her daughter's dowry, saying the items were payment for having lived in her house.

Back in Drama, neighbors crowded into her home to see the trunks. When they opened one of them, they found a photograph of the colonel and his wife. Flipping it over, they read the inscription on the back: "Dear mother, I am your son. I survived but I could not tell you. Whatever you and my sister need, I am here for you. I am close to you."

The colonel had recognized his own mother the moment she appeared at his door and spent the entire week giving her everything he could, never once revealing who he was until she was safely back across the border.