Further clues about Knoxville's early Hellenic community
by Jack Neely
In the fall I wrote about what seemed an inexplicable anomaly, a gravestone in Victorian-era Old Gray Cemetery, carved entirely in Greek. It dated from 1904, before World War I, a time when there were presumed to be few or no Greek immigrants here. But it turns out it's not the only one.
The Nikolaos Kolokythas grave had been indexed at the McClung Collection as something like Enoade Keitai, as if that that was the guy's name. I learned that's not actually a name, but a Greek phrase that means "Here is," or, in context, "here is buried."
So, on a hunch I looked up another grave listed under a very similar "name" in the same index. It's also in Old Gray, and with the help of caretaker Alix Dempster, I found it. As I figured, it's another gravestone carved entirely in Greek, also by itself among non-Greeks, maybe 100 yards away from Kolokythas.
It's a simple marble slab, visible from the lane in the sparser northwest quadrant of the cemetery. It's a basic flat stone of its period, and looks as if it might have had an ornamental urn or something mounted on its top, but which is now long gone. It's inscribed entirely in Greek capital letters.
My friend Deena Kaiousias and her father translated it for me. It says, "Here is Photios Galanis, born in Toporista of the Gortynas in 1879 and died 13 June 1911. May the earth upon him be light."
His hometown seems obscure; I wasn't able to find it in a couple of atlases. Where he died is clearer. Unlike Kolokythas, Galanis rated an obit in the newspaper, though there his name was spelled in the obit as Photis Gallenas.
"Photis Gallenas, a Greek, died at the Knoxville General Hospital Tuesday morning about 8:00 after an illness of five months," goes the story. "The deceased had been in the United States about seven years, and for a while was a proprietor of a restaurant at Athens, Tenn. He was brought to this city and place in the hospital four months ago...." That's all it says. He may not have known Knoxville except through a hospital window. And this graveyard was in sight of Knoxville General.
I don't know how he had settled in Athens. Maybe he just liked the name.
* In one column I referenced an eccentric ca. 1935 pamphlet-history on file at McClung, which indicates the first Greek immigrant to Knoxville was one "Bob Alexander" who was in Knoxville by 1900. I found some references to a Robert, or Bob, Alexander, who ran a cafe at an address at 136 South Central, where several other Greek immigrants later thrived, but was unable to find anything else about the guy—not even his real name.
George Philis, a doctoral student at UT, is working on a project about the Greek-immigrant experience in the South. He has found a great deal about Mr. Alexander.
The real name of the first Greek immigrant to take up long-term residence in Knoxville might have been forgotten had not Philis found a 1959 article in the Knoxville Journal about the growing Greek Orthodox community; it quotes John Cazana, one of the few still around then who remembered Konstantinos Koustoulis. Cazana said Koustoulis came to Knoxville in the late 1800s and changed his name to make it easier for us to pronounce. Why Koustoulis picked the name Bob Alexander is unclear, but we might be able to guess: Bob, because it was easy; Alexander, because it was the Greek name most familiar to Americans.
Philis found Koustoulis through Ellis Island records. He says the first evidence of Koustoulis sailing over was in 1904, though he may have made one or more trips here before that. It seems that Koustoulis/Alexander was an international sort of guy, and spent much of his adult life going back and forth between Knoxville and his native Greece, where he probably retired.
* Finally, I got an unexpected call last month from a woman named Elaine Goodwin, who lives in Durham, N.C. She has never been to Knoxville in her life, except to pass through on a trip out West years ago, but it turns out that she's the only reader I've heard from who had personal information about the man who may have been the first Greek immigrant buried in Knoxville, Nikolaos Kolokythas. She believes the man whose stone set me off on this expedition is her great-grandfather.
She says her own father, Nicholas, was named for our Kolokythas. Her maiden name was Kithas, a simplification. Others had told me that Kolokythas meant a grower of squash or cucumber. Goodwin says she grew up being kidded about the name, called 'pumpkin' by other Greeks. That's her understanding of her name's meaning.
She says that family lore has it that her grandfather was a restaurant cook in Knoxville, but was robbed and murdered here around the turn of the century, an all-too-common fate for many, especially those who hung around South Central. Though Knox County's scant records say Kolokythas died of typhoid, I bet it's the same guy. She's hoping to make a trip here to see the grave.
February 5, 2003 * Vol. 14, No. 6
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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