Dedicated with love to my maternal grandfather,

Constantine Socrates Patterson

from whom I derive my Asia Minor and Pontic Greek ancestry

Constantine Socrates Patterson
3 November 1906 - 6 February 1992

he area known today as Turkey has been inhabited continuously by the Greek people since around 1200 BC. During the Early Iron Age, a large migration of early Greeks from the western Aegean, primarily from Athens in Attica, settled the areas that later became Ionian cities in Asia Minor.  Traditionally, this large-scale movement was attributed to the invasion by the Dorian Greeks of parts of mainland Greece, however most scholars today attribute the migration to a series of interrelated socio-economic events. (Fragkopoulou, 2015; Sweeney, 2017).

The city of Byzantium, which became Constantinople in 330 AD and Istanbul in 1930, was established aound 700 BC by Ionian Greeks from Megara, a town and municipality in Attica, Greece, west of Athens. On the southern coast of the Sea of Marmara where it starts to narrow to the Dardanelles lies the Cyzicus Peninsula, now called by the Turkish name Kapu Dagh, but suffused in Greek history (Hasluck, 1910).

In 1893, a young man by the name of John Socrates Papanagnosti left his home in the Greek Orthodox fishing village of Vathy, located at the northern tip of the Cyzicus Peninsula.  He had just celebrated his twenty-first birthday, and was bound for America, in search of the dream that led many people to this country.  Reaching Liverpool, England, he boarded the SS Luciana with two bags in hand, and arrived at New York harbor on 4 November 1893.  He gave his profession as confectioner and his age as 20 years, 7 months, although numerous later records give his birthdate as 28 September 1872, so he was likely 21 years and 1 month.

By his surname, John Socrates Papanagnosti was the descendant of a Greek Orthodox priest named Anagnostis-- papas meaning descendant of a priest.  The 1841 Ottoman Census identifies a Greek Orthodox priest living in Vathy Kyzikus named Papa Dimitri with two sons, Yanakis, age 26, and Anagnostis, age 15.  It is believed that Anagnostis, like his father, became a Greek Orthodox priest, thereby giving his descendants the patronymic surname Papanagnosti. He was very likely John Socrates Papanagnosti's grandfather.

John Socrates eventually changed his surname to Socrates Patterson, an anglicized version of the name he was born with, probably because it was easier for Americans to pronounce.  Nine years after his arrival in the United States, he returned to Asia Minor to take as his wife, Helene Kelessidis, the daughter of Kosta (George) and Callirhoi (Caroline) Kelessidis of Constantinople.  It was likely an arranged marriage. Socrates was thirty-one years old, and Helene was a girl of seventeen.

Socrates and Helene Patterson, ca. 1903

Helene Kelessidis, by the origins of her surname, was a descendant of the Greeks of Pontos, whose Ionian forbearers settled in the Black Sea region of  Asia Minor. 19th century records trace the Kelessidis family to Trapezounda, a city on the Silk Road in northeastern Turkey's Trabzon Provence at the southern coast of the Black Sea. In the 1920s, some Kelessidis family members gave their country of origin as Russia, citing as their place of birth, Bakhchysarai on the Crimean Peninsula and Sozopolis in what is today Bulgaria.

The newlyweds settled in New London, Connecticut, where Socrates had established a successful confectionary business.  Over the next fifteen years, seven children were born to the couple.  My grandfather, Constantine Socrates Patterson, was their third child.

The pages linked below represent my attempt to tell the stories of the great-grandparents I never knew, through my family's written and oral history and my own research into their lives.