Kastoria

This city stitches affluence
from cruelty, soft skins and pelts;
snippets of chinchilla, mink
and fox fur litter cobbled streets,
mist swirls into gardens
from Orestiada's silver waters,
making apparitions of tall poplar trees.

Sephardic mansions' walls drip tears,
their courtyards sob and sigh and weep
lamentations for chaste girls
adorned in velvet, silk and pearls,
with floating hair and fur-trimmed sleeves,
whom Fascist soldiers raped.

Visions history deletes
waver like the lake's drowned weeds,
haunting fading upper storeys,
whispering in fallen leaves.

Stumbling, a stranger finds
an unlocked, nameless sanctuary,
a frescoed face upon a wall,
a gaze of deep serenity.

The Vlacherna's icon
manifests her spiritual grace
comforting the spirits flayed
from murdered girls and animals.



*Kastoria is a thousand-year-old
city on the shores of Lake Orestiada,
in the mountains of Western Macedonia,
Greece, traditionally a centre of the
fur trade. Only a handful of its large
Sephardic community survived the Holocaust.