Constantinople - 1906
  
© Nikolas Ioannou
My grandparents
with 3 of there 5 children

Not Even My Name is the unforgettable story of Sano Halo's survival of the
death march at age 10 that annihilated her family as told to her daughter, Thea and
the poignant mother/ daughter pilgrimage to Turkey in search of Sano's home 70 years after her exile. Sano, a Pontic Greek from a mountain village near the Black Sea, also recounts her ancient, pastoral way of life in the Pontic Mountians.

The dreadful realization that something was amiss came little by little to Sano's village. Strangers began to inhabit the fields and forests, always watching from a distance like birds of prey. Turkish soldiers made periodic raids to seize men for slave labor in foul, lice-infested labor camps, where most died of disease, malnutrition and exposure. Then in the spring of 1920, Turkish soldiers pounded on doors with the butts of their rifles and shouted General Mustafa Kemal's (Ataturk) proclamation: "You are to leave this place. You are to take with you only what you can carry " On their death march, victims lay where they fell and buzzards hung above their heads. So ended the 3,000 year history of the Pontic Greeks in Turkey.

Stripped of everything she had ever held dear, even her name, at age 15 Sano was sold into marriage to a man who brought her to America. He was three times her age.
Not Even My Name follows Sano's marriage, the raising of her ten children, and her
transformation from an innocent girl who lived an ancient way of life in a remote place, to a nurturing mother and determined woman in twentieth-century New York City.