By Anastasios M. Tamis*

On Friday, March 24, 2023 at 10am the great benefactor, perhaps the greatest humanist of the post-war Hellenism of Australia, the noble patriot Zisis Dardalis (Tsaousis) passed away at the age of 85 after a battle with dementia for at least the last ten years. His family for ten years carried the cross of care and stood by him, supporting him and dedicating their own social life to him.

Zisis Dardalis was born in the town of Siatista in the Prefecture of Kozani on June 29, 1938. His father was Christos Tsaousis or Dardalis and his mother was Polyxeni, née Zisis Prokas. With the declaration of war, Christos Dardalis joined ELAS and launched a campaign together with other Kozanites patriotic fighters against the German and Bulgarian invaders in Macedonia.

In March 1943, Christos Dardalis came down from the lairs of Dilofos, where he was hiding with the other fighters, to transport his sick wife to the hospital in Thessalonike. Polyxeni Dardalis, from the hardships of the occupation and from the shortages caused by the absence of her patriot husband in the mountains, had contracted pneumonia. Her transfer to the Hospital of Thessaloniki or Athens had been judged by the only doctor in the area as a necessary condition for survival.

Unfortunately, the nightmare was lurking. Unknown Greek Germanophile traitors alerted the Gestapo headquarters and arrested Christos Dardalis while he was with his sick wife at the hotel in Kozani, to take him to the basements of the Gestapo in Kozani. Scenes of horror and tragedy followed when his sick wife desperately tried to save him from the hands of the Gestapo with unspeakable woes and pleadings. Christos Dardalis, during his transfer to the headquarters, desperately threw himself from the vehicle to escape. This was followed by a short chase and execution in the streets of Kozani.

However, fate that had not completed its tragic task was looming. Inconsolable as she stood, his wife Polyxeni was soon seized by a high fever and her health deteriorated. Her weak body could not react. Psychologically she had followed her husband to those scenes of horror that preceded the execution. His execution deprived her of the strength for resilience and endurance. About forty days after the execution of her husband, she died of pneumonia, abandoning the five-year-old Zisis Dardalis under the care of her sister Photini Proka.

The aunt protected the restless Zisis until he was nine years old and finally locked him up in the National Orphanage of Florina in 1947. He stayed in the orphanage of Florina until 1951, and after finishing the primary school there he was transferred to the Aristotle Technical School of Kalamaria in Thessaloniki from 1951 to 1953, where he learned the art of the woodcarver, an art that helped him much later to improvise and make the first machines of his factory himself. It was there that for the first time his steps met with another leading figure, who played an important role in the history of Hellenism in Australia, Ierotheos Kourtesis, who as high priest in Kalamaria was also deputy director of Aristotle.

In 1953, his uncle, Nikos Dardalis, a livestock merchant and meat agent throughout Macedonia came to Thessaloniki and took him out of Aristotelis Technical School to take him with him as his slaughterer and assistant. For seven years, Zisis Dardalis followed his uncle to all the villages and towns of Macedonia from where they bought the animals for slaughter: goats, sheep, calves, cows and buffaloes. There were thousands of animals slaughtered by him. But to this day he prided himself on having a light hand and the animals were not tyrannised during the slaughter.

Zisis Dardalis remembered endless days of hard and inhumane labour, remembered the day that began at dawn and ended after midnight; told endless stories with animals that he slaughtered and regretted, with animals that he slaughtered with care not to cause pain; he remembered his difficult relations with his uncle, the difficult days of Christmas and Easter; the dark and ruthless rooms that took the lives of animals for people to live and celebrate Christmas. He remembered the difficult fifties, the uncertain political situation, a present that did not foreshadow a future.

On June 19, 1960, he arrived in Australia. He was tired of slaughtering. He was called by his sister, Nassiou Dardalis, who had been here since 1956. Australia had more animals for slaughter. Australia needed slaughterers and skinners. They approved the invitation with pleasure. He settled in Yarraville at his sister’s house. Tired of his job as a butcher and skinner in Greece, he sought change. He took refuge for work at the Glass Factory, a factory through which half of Melbourne’s Greek immigrants had passed; the other half had passed through Tom Piper. His tenure here was ephemeral. Three days later he left the factory after a dramatic adventure he had on the night shift. Zisis had snatched the caretaker, his supervisor, from the moustache because he did not testify the truth to the factory management about the damage that preceded it. He lost his job for handcuffing.

The next day he sought his fortune at the Swift slaughterhouse in Newport, where he worked for four months in the vast meat refrigerators. The nature of the work did not win him over. Neither did his third job in the skins of William Anglis where he worked for only two months, nor the 2.5 years he spent in the Day Craft textile washing and ironing machine, where he became a supervisor and appointed and protected many Greek labourers.

Meanwhile, working at Day Craft, he had the opportunity to watch his aunt Photini Proka, who was making Dim Sims at the garage of her home in Footscray. His aunt Photini, who had protected him during the difficult years of his orphanage, was brought by Zisis at his invitation in 1962. Only nine months Fotini Proka worked with the Chinese, from whom she had learned the art of making the dim sims. Zisis recorded the mechanisms of the preparation and agreed with his aunt to make the Dim Sims so that he could sell them the next day, after his work in Day Craft, in Greek fishing shops. In the morning he would paddle at Day Craft, in the evening at the Greek fishing clubs. In three months he bought an abandoned café shop at 38 Napier Street, Footscray. That’s where mass production began. Everything was then prepared by hand, first in the garage, then in the café. Flour often spoiled; cabbage smelled. Photini was making the products, Zisis was selling them.

Things changed when Zisis left Day Craft and devoted himself entirely to the factory he opened in Footscray with 14 workers, whom he increased to 22, until 1970 when he stayed there. Along with Dim Sims he began to prepare spring rolls. Up to 140 dozen were prepared per day in the pan, by hand (compare with the 140,000 it produces in 2023 per day). This is how the Marathon Foods Industry was born. The commercial reach and dynamics of the plant did not go beyond the metropolitan area of Melbourne. The commercial target was the Greeks who maintained the “restaurants,” the fishermen, and the wholesalers who distributed in the province. This included Kostas Gellalis (Harcon), Tom Kyvelos, Jim Diamantaris, Giannis and Kostas Kosmas, Borg Brothers, PFD and John Lewis. The itineraries were made with two different rosters: Monday and Thursday the first, Tuesday and Friday the other.

In 1970, the need arose to organise a wider space, to reconstruct and refurbish the factory, to upgrade the products of the Marathon Foods Industry. The factory was moved to 119 Nicholson Street, East Brunswick (1970-1978). The number of workers increased to 40 people, while at the same time machinery was imported and made. Its products enter the central fish market of Melbourne. They opened new horizons for the industry to produce these products.

Easter 1978 offered him the opportunity he had been waiting for. A factory that cleaned guts at 51-53 Hobsons Road, Kensington was closed. The spaces and the possibilities for expansion and landscaping were very positive. The offer for the purchase of the abandoned factory is made quickly and professionally. In three days, the deal was closed. The factory was moved to the new facilities, after these had been upgraded, by maintaining the same products, the machinery and the production. Demand continued to grow by leaps and bounds. Dardalis bought and then dissolved the opposition: two Chinese companies and one Greek one.

On July 18, 1982, in the heyday of commercial activity, strangers set fire to his factory, whilst he was in Greece with his family. On November 21 of the same year, the rigid and unaffected industrialist has the new plant ready. This is where the industrial take-off begins. Zisis, with the engineers he employs, crafts in the factory, creates and produces new machines. He brings his ideas together from his fruitful tours of European and American food machinery exhibitions. But its aim is to expand the industry in Europe and Asia. He is interested in exports. The Australian market no longer satisfies him, it does not represent him. The establishment and operation of a huge industrial plant in Budapest, Hungary, for the markets of Eastern Europe, does not fill him. He looks forward to a complete upgrade of his factory in Australia, to dominate the Asian basin.

In 1997, the production of Marathon Foods Industry factory covered 65 percent of the total production and demand of the Australian market in Dim Sims, Chicken Dim Sims, Chicken and Prawn Rolls, Mini    Rolls, Hamburgers, Spring Rolls, and lately in pies of three kinds, cheese balls and since last week in soutzoukakia exported to Greece and to the markets of Eastern and Central Europe. Its products are now exported throughout Asia and New Zealand.

Let’s give a census deposit of the industry. At the Kensington plant, about 90 workers are currently employed, products with a total weight of 80 tons per day are produced, for example 1200 Dim Sims per minute and 120,000 Spring Rolls per eight-hour day. In the 1990s, the annual total value of sales in Australia alone exceeded $20 million, while it was expected to double in the coming years with the start of massive exports to the Asian and European basin. The factory’s engineers nevertheless continue to build new machines and boost production. In return and in addition to the individual services offered, the company offers them every Friday two-hour training on health and safety issues by specialists coming from Melbourne Colleges and Universities. The products of the industry are not touched by human hand, they do not contain preservatives, colours, nor flavour chemicals. In the period that followed the industry spent many millions of dollars to build new wings and equip itself with perfect German and Italian machinery, an investment of many millions also to meet the demands of the future.

I once asked Dardalis about the Marathon name and he said: “I decided after eleven months to call my work Marathon because it was a daily Marathon for me. I ran every day at excessive speed to catch up with the fishing boats, a constant Marathon, which in ten months cost me eleven infringements for traffic violations for speeding and withdrawal of my license twice.”

Dardalis decided to pay a dividend on the proceeds of his company Marathon Food, in order to strengthen and germinate the Hellenic Studies in the universities of Melbourne; to demonstrate absolute confidence in the NCHSR (EKEME) and the University of La Trobe, having as his collaborator the Hellenistic Professor of Greek Epigraphy, Professor Michael John Osborne; to cooperate blindly with the eloquent and prudent diplomats Georgios Veis and Georgios Konstantis, and to invest his absolute trust in this writer and his associates since 1992, when the Archives of the Greek Diaspora were founded, to which his name was given, on the proposal of the Director of EKEME.

After Dardalis contracted dementia in 2008, at a time when his creation, EKEME, was going through a difficult crisis, his involvement began to gradually decline. The weakening of his mental functions, perception, judgment, speech and of course memory gradually began to tame Dardalis’ will and passion.

In 2010, his family took over the general state of management. His wife Salli, his daughters Jenny and Christina and his son-in-law Lazarus and the rest of the family members take action and initiative. The giant of endurance and giving, the man who gave to everyone else what he had been deprived of as a child (as he repeated), slowly resigned himself to his surroundings.

Hundreds of expatriates in Australia, as well as Greeks and Cypriots, all those who had received his noble hospitality, his love, his Dardalian affection, for years continued asking about the health of Dardalis. For 13 years his state of health was associated with Australia. They could not understand that there could be Hellenism in Australia without Zisis Dardalis. His figure became legendary.

I will close this note by testifying to the ineffable affection, the titanic struggle that his daughter Jenny and his wife Sally undertook to care for him, daily and unceasingly. For years, day after day, morning and afternoon, the two women shared the care of their husband and father. With patience and perseverance, with pain and optimism, endless hours to take care of him, to look after his needs. They felt the same love for Zisis until the day he crossed the borders of this ephemeral life. They deserve praise. Let them become examples to be imitated by thousands of people who care for the victims of dementia.

*Professor Anastasios M. Tamis taught at Universities in Australia and abroad, was the creator and founding director of the Dardalis Archives of the Hellenic Diaspora and is currently the President of the Australian Institute of Macedonian Studies (AIMS).