Retelling the Past in Contemporary Greek Literature, Film, and Popular Culture 1498563392, 9781498563390

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Retelling the Past in Contemporary Greek Literature, Film, and Popular Culture

Retelling the Past in Contemporary Greek Literature, Film, and Popular Culture Edited by Trine Stauning Willert and Gerasimus Katsan

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL Copyright © 2019 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Willert, Trine Stauning, editor. | Katsan, Gerasimus, 1968– editor. Title: Retelling the past in contemporary Greek literature, film, and popular culture / edited by Trine Stauning Willert and Gerasimus Katsan. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018052114 (print) | LCCN 2019000557 (ebook) | ISBN 9781498563390 (Electronic) | ISBN 9781498563383 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Greek literature, Modern—History and criticism. | History in literature. | History in motion pictures. | History in popular culture. Classification: LCC PA5210 (ebook) | LCC PA5210 .R48 2019 (print) | DDC 889.09/3582—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018052114 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

To the memory of Sophia Scopetéa (1947–2007) philologist, teacher, friend

Contents

List of Figures

xi

Acknowledgments xiii Introduction: History in the Storyteller’s Toolbox Trine Stauning Willert and Gerasimus Katsan

1

PART ONE Popularizing Neglected Pasts 1  G  etting Intimate with the Unwanted Past: New Approaches to the Ottoman Legacy in Greek Fiction Trine Stauning Willert

13

2  P  ublic History and the Revival of Repressed Sephardic Heritage in Thessaloniki Kostis Kornetis

29

Constructing Past, Present, and Future in Migrant Fiction 3  P  oetry Traversing History: Narrating Louis Tikas in David Mason’s Ludlow 49 Yiorgos Anagnostou 4  F  irst-Person Past, Second-Person Present, and the Future of Now: Gazmend Kapllani’s Transnational, Interpersonal Timescapes Karen Emmerich

vii

67

viii

Contents

Trauma, Sentimentality, and Crisis in Literature  5  T  o Remember and Forgive: The Afterlives of Queen Frederica’s Childtowns in Contemporary Greek Fiction Vassiliki Kaisidou

85

 6  F  ashioning a European Past for the National Self: Nikos Themelis’ For Some Companionship 103 Maria Akritidou  7  The Anxieties of History: Greek Fiction in Crisis Gerasimus Katsan

117

Satire and Nostalgia in Popular Culture  8  T  he Use of History for the Denunciation of the Present: Lena Kitsopoulou’s Athanasios Diakos—The Comeback 135 Constantina Georgiadi  9  T  elevision Fiction as a Window into a Nation’s Past: The Arbitraries and the Concept of the Neohellene Georgia Aitaki

151

10  A  ncient Greek Mythology and the Culture of the Neohellene in Animated TV Satire Jessica Kourniakti

165

11  C  hildhood Memories, Family Life, Nostalgia, and Historical Trauma in Contemporary Greek Cinema Maria Chalkou

185

PART TWO Preface 203 A Visual Journey Through the Lens 12  W  itnesses for the Future: The Past Reflected in the Despair of the Present Sonia Liza Kenterman 13  S  till, Short, Cut: The Early Films of Sonia Liza Kenterman Charles Lock

207 219



Contents ix

A Literary Echo of the Refugee Crisis 14  W  hat Are They After, Our Souls, Off the Coast of Lesbos?: Reflections on Elias Venezis’ “The Isle of Lios” (1928) Patricia Felisa Barbeito and Vangelis Calotychos     The Isle of Lios (1928) Elias Venezis

231 239

History from the Storyteller’s Viewpoint 15  Four Hundred Pleats Amanda Michalopoulou

257

16  Think Before You Learn Sophia Nikolaidou

261

Index 267 About the Contributors

273

List of Figures

 2.1  Drawing from the graphic novel Little Jerusalem 40  5.1  Yannis Atzakas, private photo, September 1955

91

 8.1  V  iolence, rape, and birth on stage, Athanasios Diakos— The Comeback 137  8.2  S  ketch by Lena Kitsopoulou, Athanasios Diakos— The Comeback 141  8.3  T  he crucified Christ on stage, Athanasios Diakos— The Comeback 142 10.1  Hermes, Menippus and Charon, OUK 171 10.2  The party logo for “MALAKAS,” OUK 172 10.3  The chair centaur, OUK 175 12.1  Dinner at Nikos’ house with Phoebus and Athena, Son of Sofia 209 12.2  The family tree, Son of Sofia 209 12.3  Nikos and Misha as Spartan warriors, Son of Sofia 210 12.4  Nikos’ birthday party and death, Son of Sofia 211 12.5  Youth playing in the ruined Olympic Village, Park 212 12.6  Violence and humiliation among desolate boys, Park 212 12.7  Brutal fighting and dog fight, Park 213 12.8  Vague lives existing in an obscure world, Park 213 xi

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List of Figures

12.9   Danny with lollipop and the Acropolis, Xenia 215 12.10  Danny and his brother taking the road, Xenia 215 12.11  On the rooftop of the abandoned Xenia hotel, Xenia 216 12.12  Danny with his white bunny, Xenia 216 13.1   Boy carrying infant sister, Nicoleta 220 13.2   Woman walking with sheet along highway, White Sheet 220 13.3   Policeman pouring milk, Nicoleta 221 13.4   Interior with aunt and infant niece, Nicoleta 222 13.5   Boy and infant in the setting sun, Nicoleta 223 13.6   Woman watching motorists taking a break, White Sheet 224 13.7   W  oman sitting on protective barrier; grandmother and granddaughter passing by, White Sheet 226 13.8   Woman with cigarette in silhouette, White Sheet 226 14.1   2015. Refugees arriving on Lesbos from Turkey

232

14.2   1 923. Group of refugees on two ships bounding for a new destination

234

Acknowledgments

Most of the contributions in this volume are thoroughly rewritten versions of papers presented at the international workshop “Hi/Stories in Contemporary Greek Culture: The Entanglements of History and the Arts since 1989” held at the University of Copenhagen June 23–25, 2016. The workshop was made possible through the generous funding of the Sophia Scopetéa Bequest. The workshop brought together young as well as more experienced scholars from the field of Modern Greek Studies along with fiction writers and film directors. It is our hope that the present volume reflects the fruitful meeting and exchange between scholars and artists, and the editors wish to thank the participants and contributing authors for their dedication to our vision and their cooperation. The editors and contributors wish to thank Charles Lock, executor of the Bequest, for his dedication to honor the legacy in Modern Greek Studies left by Sophia Scopetéa and to invest in its continuation. This book is a small fruit of this investment and it is our hope that it will produce strong seeds so that Modern Greek Studies will thrive in the future. We would like to express our thanks to commissioning editor Lindsey Porambo Falk and assistant editor Nick Johns for believing in the project and supporting us throughout the first phase of the publishing process, and to Associate Acquisitions Editor Judith Lakamper for seeing us through the final revisions and manuscript preparation. We extend gratitude to the anonymous reviewers who provided detailed criticism that assisted us to thoroughly restructure the volume and strengthen its arguments. The editors also thank the Department of European Languages and Literatures at Queens College-CUNY for its financial assistance in underwriting publication reprint permissions. Last but not least, very special thanks to our families, for their unconditional support and unfailing patience. xiii

xiv

Acknowledgments

The excerpts from David Mason, Ludlow: A Verse-Novel (Pasadena, CA: Red Hen Press, 2007) in chapter 3 are used by permission of the publisher. The epigraph in chapter 4 is taken from Konstantinos Tsitselikis, “Citizenship in Greece: Present Challenges for Future Changes,” in Multiple Citizenship as a Challenge to European Nation-States, edited by Devorah KalekinFishman and Pirkko Pitkänen (Rotterdam: SensePublishers, 2007), 145–170. Used by permission. A longer version of chapter 15, “400 Pleats” was first published in English in the anthology Decapolis, edited by Maria Crossan (Manchester: Commapress, 2006). Used by permission. Chapter 16: Excerpt from The Scapegoat by Sophia Nikolaidou copyright © 2015 reprinted by permission of the publisher, Melville House Publishing, LLC. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the Greek are those of the authors. The editors have endeavored to limit the use of transliteration throughout the text, preferring instead the use of Greek characters followed by a translation in English. However, where such transliterations have been necessary, useful, or unavoidable, they attempt to follow the pronunciation of the Greek.

Introduction History in the Storyteller’s Toolbox Trine Stauning Willert and Gerasimus Katsan

Because of its long and prominent history, Greece is a country that most people associate with a varied set of historical connotations. In modern times conceptions of history have been a central issue in Greek nation building and, like other contemporary societies, some of the most important symbolic struggles in Greece today take place over historical issues. The authors of this collective volume share a deep concern and interest in how history is treated, used, and changed through artistic expressions and popular culture in Greece. The title of this introduction uses the metaphor that history becomes a tool in the storyteller’s toolbox, which refers to the fact that the cultural creations analyzed in the book have to do with, at bottom, different forms of storytelling. “History” itself can be thought of as a specific type of storytelling, particularly as a way to present the story of a people or a nation-state. This is often a story told to the collective self to satisfy its need for self-identification and to answer the questions “Who are we?” and “Where did we come from?” while at the same time being a projection of that self-identification to the world at large. Moreover, while storytellers sometimes rely on history as a source or as an inspiration to tell great stories, well-written history ascribes to the very same aesthetic considerations and techniques of great storytelling and literature. Thus, there remains an intimate connection between the art of storytelling and the art of history. Considering that the building of modern Greek national consciousness was burdened with the task of living up to the narratives of Northern and Western European idealism about the classical age, it should come as no surprise that a strained tradition of historical consciousness developed in Greek society. For example, the role of the national school system became to educate young generations of Greeks to honor as well as to emulate the ancient and medieval golden ages of Greek Antiquity and Orthodox Greek Byzantium while 1

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also having to cope with an often-challenging underdeveloped public sphere, political conflict, and economic hardship, aspects of historical development not treated in formal history education. In the case of Greece, then, in exaggerated ways historical consciousness became a matter of being able to negotiate the contradictions between on the one hand a glorious, world-famous yet distant past, and on the other a humble, sometimes humiliated, and often apparently insignificant present. This tension—not uncommon in other collective or subjective historical narratives—between a past golden age and a present state of decay seems particularly intense in Greece because the ideal past is known to the whole world and it has become the country’s primary identity marker. Even though in the modern period Greece’s hardships and national traumas such as wars, occupations and authoritarianism, refugees and bankruptcies may not be unique, the way they contrast to an image of one of the world’s most highly regarded ancient civilizations makes the clash between these two versions of the past particularly marked. Such clashes of imaginary identifications and collective narratives bear the potential of great art. In what ways do the sensitive and creative perspectives of art approach and appropriate history in Greece? This question is at the core of the chapters in this book. However, with only one chapter referring directly to uses of antiquity in contemporary culture, perceptions of Greek Antiquity in contemporary Greek historical consciousness is not a central issue for this volume.1 The intention of this volume is to reach out to a general audience with an interest in better understanding Greece today through gaining insight into Greek history and the disputes and innovations that historical consciousness has generated in contemporary Greek culture since 1989. The year 1989 was a watershed moment in Greek as well as world history, resulting in entirely new geopolitical constellations and new prospects, as well as engendering a reoccurrence of past traumas and conflicts. The vast global changes that the end of the Cold War brought about produced or intensified an already existing historical anxiety in Europe and not least in Greece. The breaking of the Cold War status quo opened up enormous possibilities not only for the future but also for revisiting and reinterpreting the past. The decades that followed have seen some of the fiercest history debates in the Greek public sphere. History has become the new cultural battleground and many groups and factions compete over the right to define the “truest” version of the past. While the collapse of the Eastern bloc opened up access to previous inaccessible archival sources and oral history, for example from descendants of exiled Greeks in communist Eastern European countries or from ethnic Greeks of the Black Sea region (citizens of the Soviet republics) who were never included in the nation-state, other archives were destroyed as a means



Introduction 3

to demonstrate that now the past disputes between leftists and rightists were definitely over.2 In this way 1989 offered an unprecedented and rich access to historical sources and experiences but also a tendency toward shutting down unwanted connections with the past. The decades following 1989 are some of the most creative and productive in the history of Greek historiography with the emergence or strengthening of many new fields of history writing such as World War II and the Civil War, Ottoman Studies and Gender Studies. However, to the majority of people history is not something experienced through archival sources or historiography. In daily life, the past is usually mediated through cultural products such as fiction, literature, films, documentaries, TV series, and other forms of popular culture. History is also pervasive in commercials, public celebrations, and on social media. For this volume we have chosen to shed light on the uses of history exclusively from the point of view of storytelling. Of course, cultural artefacts such as television commercials and national holidays are also built around storytelling, but for the sake of this volume we concentrate on the classical forms of artistic storytelling. Our aim is to present the reader with the way a set of contemporary storytellers in different genres have incorporated previously under-explored or little-known themes, events, and epochs in modern Greek history and to show how the past, by being interpreted and re-presented in the present, can teach us a lot about contemporary Greek society. TV series and sitcoms may be considered the period’s most characteristic disseminator of popular culture and can be seen as society’s mirror. In a chapter analyzing the first Greek sitcom, The Arbitraries (1989–1991), Georgia Aitaki shows how the deep societal changes around 1989 were processed as they were happening, highlighting the dilemmas in Greek society as caught between historical traditionalism and a promised modernization that is both desired and unwanted. The year 1989 is thus a key date and suitable prism for understanding both the complex history of the modern Greek nation-state and the developments in Greek society that led to the years of collapse and recession beginning in 2010, what is today known as “the Greek crisis.” However topical, this aspect of contemporary Greece is also not a central focal point for the contributors of the volume, where only a single chapter directly examines cultural expressions in and about the economic crisis. This deliberate choice by no means indicates that we suggest that the crisis should be ignored. Yet, we fear that by turning all attention and scholarship concerning contemporary Greece toward the crisis perspective we risk overlooking a very large part of Greek culture and artistic and popular concerns.3 Except for the chapter on the 1989 sitcom, the works analyzed in this volume are produced mainly in the first decade of the twenty-first century with a few exceptions of works from the

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early years of the crisis. Yet the influence of the post-1989 moment in Greece imbues much of the cultural production that followed with a new sense of history and identity. Around that same time, one can witness a coalescence of post-structuralist and postmodernist ideas among contemporary intellectuals, artists, and writers that gave rise to a new sense of questioning the accepted stories of national identity and history. Storytellers chose to focus on narratives, periods, and themes that had either been under-represented or ignored in order to consciously reconsider the hegemonic versions of national history. The themes that form the point of departure for the stories told are varied and cover significant components of Greek history and culture such as ancient myths, the Ottoman period, the Greek War of Independence, and the Greek Civil War, but also less prominent or known aspects of Greek history such as the Greek Enlightenment, the long and tragic history of Greek Jewry, and migration to and from Greece. In a number of chapters, the past events are retold as a contrast and a direct comment on the contemporary context. In chapter 6 Maria Akritidou shows how a historical novel written in 2005 at the height of Greece’s European integration illuminates a past period when Greek intellectuals and bourgeoisie were deeply involved in trans-European affairs. Constantina Georgiadi illustrates in chapter 8 how a dramatic play written, produced, and performed in the midst of Greece’s deep economic crisis brings to life a Greek revolutionary hero from the Greek War of Independence by retelling him as a contemporary, unsympathetic, failed Greek. In chapter 14 Patricia Barbeito and Vangelis Calotychos juxtapose the refugee crisis of the 1920s with today’s desperate refugee situation. The idea for this book emerged from the authors’ fruitful discussions at the workshop “Hi/Stories in Contemporary Greek Culture: The Entanglements of History and the Arts since 1989” held at the University of Copenhagen June 23–25, 2016. The analyses of cultural expressions interpreting Greek history presented at the workshop tended toward exposing a certain anxiety and reluctance in fully facing or revisiting the past. Nostalgia seemed to be a prevailing mood in representing the past in the present. Sometimes this representation acted as a means to lighten the burden of the past, running the risk of superficiality and generalization, and sometimes it operated as a way to access a deeper emotional level when dealing with the traumas of the past. One salient dimension of the volume lies in the clash between more light or soothing approaches to representing the past and more psychoanalytical and iconoclastic representations. These two approaches serve different needs with regard to historical consciousness in a society. Several chapters present and analyze artistic expressions and also their reception among the Greek public, as illustrated in public debates and dialogues. Thus, the aim is not only to examine and



Introduction 5

understand what art does to history but also to attempt to understand what it does to the society that it addresses and whose memory it tries to correct or challenge. The book not only consists of academic writers analyzing texts, it also includes three artists themselves presenting aspects of their own work, and whose chapters illuminate how a writer or a film director chooses to incorporate history into her story, and how the inclusion of that history informs how she understands both the present and the historical moment presented. These contemporary artistic expressions are accompanied by a ninety-yearold short story by the great writer Elias Venezis (1904–1973) pertaining to the personal and emotional consequences of the mass expulsion of the Greek Orthodox population from Asia Minor, today’s Turkey; a historic legacy that artists—also those included in this volume—keep returning to in order to investigate the traumas and relational patterns that remain an undercurrent in much of the present Greek experience. One of the distinctive features of the book is that while history is at its center, the book is neither a history book nor a set of historical analyses. Rather it is a set of case studies about the uses of history in different cultural forms and contexts—the “encounters” and the “entanglements”—that illuminate both our understanding of the past but also of the present. This volume is divided into two parts that can be characterized as scholarly and creative, respectively. Part 1 is organized into four sections according to the thematic nature of the chapters. The first section consists of two chapters that center on the popularization of hitherto neglected pasts, such as the Jewish and Ottoman legacy. Trine Stauning Willert examines the intense Ottomanizing trends from the 2000s when Greece and Turkey were politically and economically closer than ever, and a number of novels witness the cultural rapprochement between the two countries by means of the common legacy of the Ottoman Empire. This closeness seems to have been reflected in historical fiction that exhibits a preference for intimacy between Greek and Turkish or Christian and Muslim characters. Through an examination of the burst of new cultural expressions reviving memories of Thessaloniki’s extinguished Jewry, including novels, documentaries, monuments, and feature films, Kostis Kornetis argues that public history opens new ways for a collective coming to terms with the past in order to reach a better understanding of the present. The second section includes two chapters that address a central theme in Greek history, namely relocation as a refugee or migrant experience. Yiorgos Anagnostou’s chapter illuminates a recent poetic interpretation of the experiences of a Cretan Greek immigrant and labor leader in the United States in the early twentieth century, while in her chapter Karen Emmerich discusses conceptions of time in the work of Greece’s first Albanian immigrant author.

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Each of the three chapters in the third section deals with contemporary Greek literature, investigating how symbolic historical periods such as the Enlightenment (Maria Akritidou), the Civil War (Vasiliki Kaisidou), and the Crisis (Gerasimus Katsan) are revisited in fiction, where the life and history of the nation is challenged and renegotiated. In the fourth section the performing arts, specifically theater, television satire, and cinema, are scrutinized. In the first chapter, Constantina Georgiadi presents an iconoclastic play where a national hero of the 1821 Greek Revolution is resurrected as a corrupt and violent modern Greek of 2012. Georgiadi shows how the play mocks contemporary Greek/ European materialistic life styles, racism, nostalgia for a national golden age, and traditionalist gender roles. National self-mockery is also at the core of Georgia Aitaki’s chapter. Through the lens of the satirical concept of the Neohellene, she shows how the huge societal and cultural changes taking place around 1989 were processed on a national level in the first Greek sitcom becoming a point of reference for Greek television history and an indispensable source for negotiations of contemporary Greek identity. In her chapter Jessica Kourniakti presents the moderately radical yet generically novel attempt of the 2011 satirical animated series to embody Greek stereotypes, including that of the Neohellene, and to create national self-criticism through the characters of Ancient Greek mythology. In the final chapter of part 1 Maria Chalkou writes about the recent developments of child and adolescent film narratives in Greek cinema, suggesting that such films, often playing with the nostalgic mode, open a different space from which to encounter and understand the meaning of history in a confusing contemporary moment. Part 2 consists of what can be loosely termed creative writing: reflections as well as literary pieces that illustrate—rather than analyze—the way that storytellers incorporate and utilize history as a concept. The first section presents a “visual journey” with contemporary cinema at its center. In a richly illustrated presentation Sonia Liza Kenterman, one of Greece’s young and most promising filmmakers, unfolds her own reflections on the strong role of Greek cinema as both a witness of the present providing testimony for the future and as a resource for accessing and interpreting official narratives and traumas in the past. She presents stills from contemporary young Greek filmmakers of her generation. Then, in an illustrated film analysis Charles Lock presents two of Kenterman’s short films highlighting her use of the journey— in a historical as well as contemporary setting—as a narrative symbol, and the power of image rather than plot. It is still too early to guess in which ways storytelling of the future may draw material from the current refugee crisis that has appeared in the first decade of the twenty-first century and intensified since the start of the civil war in Syria. The crisis reached a pivotal juncture with the closing of European



Introduction 7

borders in the summer 2015 that left tens of thousands of refugees stranded in Greece. In anticipation of a potential “refugee literature” to come, the next section by Patricia Felisa Barbeito and Vangelis Calotychos comments on the current crisis and puts it into perspective by referring to one of the earliest fictional representations of a previous refugee crisis, that of the Asia Minor Catastrophe in 1922 and the Population Exchange in 1923, written by “the preeminent storyteller of the refugees’ experience,” Elias Venezis. In addition to their diachronic commentary on historic events and literature, the authors present a first-time English translation of the short story to which their commentary refers. The final section of the volume presents two works of contemporary fiction by two of Greece’s foremost fiction writers, Amanda Michalopoulou and Sophia Nikolaidou. These stories illustrate the ways that history is indeed one of the “tools” of storytelling, as each brings to her writing a distinctive playfulness in the way history is incorporated both into the fabric of their narratives but also into a broader critique of Greek culture and society. More detailed analyses of these literary texts appear in chapter 1 and chapter 7. Just as the volume covers a variety of genres including prose literature, poetry, drama, media (film, documentary, and television), and historical moments, it also considers the rich variety of themes that are crucial for understanding contemporary Greece. These especially have to do with the abovementioned historical consciousness that has cultivated a preference for grand narratives combined with the reluctance or even the fear of facing problematic pasts where Greeks are not narrated as a homogeneous group. The chapters in this volume excellently highlight the rich pluralism of Greek cultural production with works that exhibit exactly this heterogeneity of the Greeks and their past. They suggest that Greeks and Greek history cannot be understood through generalizations, stereotypes, or prejudices, neither from within Greece nor from abroad, but must be read and experienced in all their complexity. It is our hope that this volume will engender debates and further explorations into the intersections between storytelling, history, and the present enhancing a better understanding of and for Greece and Greeks and their place in (world) history. NOTES 1.  This aspect has been dealt with other recent volumes such as Re-Imagining the Past: Antiquity and Modern Greek Culture edited by Dimitris Tziovas, and The Usable Past: Greek Metahistories edited by Keith Brown and Yiannis Hamilakis. Also, Johanna Hanink’s The Classical Debt deals in a thorough manner with the

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implications of Greece’s classical heritage for the development of modern Greek identity, though not from the perspective of art. 2.  During the short coalition government between the conservative New Democracy party and the communist KKE party in 1989, a part of the files kept by the security police about communists were burned in a symbolic act of reconciliation supposed to leaving behind the decades of civil strife and state persecution of the Left. 3.  The cultural aspects of the crisis have not been analyzed sufficiently yet but an important recent contribution is the volume Greece in Crisis: The Cultural Politics of Austerity edited by Dimitris Tziovas.

WORKS CITED Brown, K. S. and Y. Hamilakis, eds. The Usable Past: Greek Metahistories. Lanham: Lexington, 2003. Hanink, Johanna. The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in an Era of Austerity. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2017. Tziovas, Dimitris, ed. Greece in Crisis: The Cultural Politics of Austerity. London: I.B. Tauris, 2017. ———. Re-imagining the Past: Antiquity and Modern Greek Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Part One

POPULARIZING NEGLECTED PASTS

Chapter One

Getting Intimate with the Unwanted Past New Approaches to the Ottoman Legacy in Greek Fiction Trine Stauning Willert In front of the Parliament Building on Constitution Square two Evzones, members of the Presidential Guard, safeguard the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. They wear a uniform that has been designed upon the traditional costume of Greek freedom fighters, and myth has it that their kilt (called fustanella) has four hundred pleats symbolizing the four hundred years that the Greek people, according to the national master narrative, was “enslaved by the Turks.” In 2004 the author Amanda Michalopoulou took up this myth in her short story “The Four Hundred Pleats.”1 In the story two lovers—a young Greek woman who just returned from postgraduate art history studies in England and a soldier of the Presidential Guard in the traditional uniform—are sitting on the edge of the Acropolis rock watching the city of Athens and in particular the block of flats where the soldier’s family lives. The couple is trying to make a relationship work but their history, personal as well as national and transnational, is in the way. The family background of both is characterized by absence and distance. The young woman’s parents are so absorbed in their work of commercially promoting the Olympic ideal as preparation for the Olympics of Athens 2004 that they have no personal life and even forget their daughter’s birthday. The man’s parents are poor and uneducated and the generation gap between them and their two sons is unbridgeable. The story is a condensed metaphorical portrayal of Greek society’s self-image and relationship with its history; the ancient, the Ottoman, and the contemporary. The story has intertextual references to two well-known poems also reflecting on the relationship between time, history, and self-image by two of Greece’s most famous poets, Constantine P. Cavafy and Giorgiοs Seferis. Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” (1898/1904) points to the essential but empty role of the unknown Other that both allures and frightens the Self. In the poem, the Romans realize that 13

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they are nothing and their life becomes meaningless without the barbarians, a role that the Turks seem to have been given in the Greek national narrative. Michalopoulou’s short story challenges that emptiness, which is kept at bay through the never-dying “fear of the Turks.” When the soldier explains: “My kilt has four hundred pleats. One for each year of the Turkish occupation,” the woman replies with contempt: “Jesus, are you still afraid of the Turks? Can’t you live without enemies?” 2 When the short story was published in 2004 the collective fear of the Turks was at its lowest level ever with the Greek prime minister Costas Karamanlis attending the wedding of the Turkish prime minister Recep Erdogan’s daughter in July 2004,3 after a five-year period of continuous cultural, political, and economic rapprochement between the two countries. The apparently stabilized relationship between the two arch enemies might suggest a revision of the foundation of the Greek national narrative where the Greek freedom fighters against Ottoman rule have held a prominent position as guardians of the nation, symbolized in the Presidential Guard. The story seems to ask what is now the role of the traditional soldier (in Greek tsoliás), when there are no Turks to fear? The female protagonist is passionately attracted to him but cannot be intimate with him; he becomes “the pretty, white, ice-cold past.”4 The symbol of resistance to the Turks, his kilt with the four hundred pleats, does not come off because it has stuck to his skin: I tried to pull off his shoes and tights. Then I tried with his fustanella. My tsoliás didn’t resist; on the contrary. He squeezed my face between his palms, he kissed me with his frozen lips. The fabrics—hard, as if made of marble—were stuck to his skin. Whether I grabbed his bayonet or groped his sex under the kilt, I sensed the cold wind of history.5

This excerpt contains the intertextual reference to Seferis’ 1935 collection of poems called Mythistorema [Novel] where the third poem speaks about the protagonist’s relationship with a marble head whose eyes are “neither open nor closed” and whose cheeks have “broken through the skin.”6 The clothes of the soldier in Michalopoulou’s story are “as if made of marble” and the lovers sit on the rock of the Acropolis where “the columns lit up in the night as the teeth of some mythical monster.”7 The marble is a burden and also a hindrance for intimacy and instead of being beautiful in the sunset, the columns resemble a monster’s teeth. Like the broken skin of Seferis’ marble head, the skin of Michalopoulou’s soldier is also broken: “His skin was red, burning, full of blisters. It smelled burnt.”8 At the end of the short story the soldier abandons his lover by diving off the rock into the void. The skirt representing the four hundred years of “enslavement to the Turks” becomes an aesthetic object: “The fustanella



Getting Intimate with the Unwanted Past 15

opened like a fan around his body. The four hundred pleats rustled in the air.” 9 But the sight does not fill the young woman with joy or hope. Realizing that the relationship has ended she feels only envy and desire, perhaps for the freedom he achieved in jumping off the rock. Also the fallen pompom of his shoe “glistening in the first rays of the morning sun” becomes an aesthetic object that could fill her with joy as a souvenir from her lover but instead her reaction is one of self-destruction as she grabs her arm and bites it furiously until blood runs down her wrist and hand.10 The short story thus ends in frustration; the symbol of the national struggle for freedom leaves the protagonist alone unable to find confidence or hope in the national symbols surrounding her; symbols that have been so often praised in Greek literature such as the Acropolis, the Greek sun, or the traditional folklore pompom that is described as “glorious.” All she feels is self-hatred and instead of invoking nostalgia or pride for Greek folklore or the fight for freedom, the pompom smells of earth and blood. Michalopoulou’s short story addresses the Greeks’ identity crisis caused by the way their past has been told. The narrator left Greece because “I had come to hate Greece, don’t remember why. Or maybe I remember faintly: (. . .) The history class in school—if you know what I mean.”11 The experience of being Greek created in the narrator a wish to undo her identity: “I wanted to leave, you see. Not for the sake of art studies but to stop being who I am.”12 Upon her return to Greece and through her relationship with the “guardian of the Greek identity,” the tsoliás soldier, she reexamines what Greekness is—and finds that “the Greekest thing there is”13 is “not a hundred percent human,” he is “an idea”14 and she is left desolate and self-damaging when it turns out that a human relationship with this idea is impossible. The Ottoman legacy exemplified in this text as a persistent fear of the Turks and the petrification of the symbol of Greek resistance to “Turkish occupation” is one way of illustrating Greek society’s complex relationship with the past. The short story represents the deep psychic traumas that the (ab)uses of history have inflicted upon generations of Greek citizens and although obviously criticizing the hegemonic historical narrative it does not replace it with a more fruitful or empowering one. The young Greek woman is devastated by her relationship with history and the possibilities of a new gaze at the past are passed by, drowned in her own blood. The painful lack of intimacy that the young woman in Michalopoulou’s short story experiences and the general distance and cynicism between family members and between citizens and the national community has also been addressed in a new trend in Greek historical novels dealing with the Ottoman legacy. Intimacy is crucial for the feeling of belonging and especially intimacy with those sides of a community that are not associated with collective

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pride. In this context, the anthropologist Michael Herzfeld has studied the uneasiness or embarrassment associated with Turkish/“oriental” elements in Greek social discourses and has coined the term “cultural intimacy” as an analytical tool for the study of the nation-state and the making of collective identities.15 As noted by Iraklis Millas, who examined a large number of Greek novels with regard to the representation of Turks, “almost all the references to Tourkokratía in all the contemporary novels are associated with violent, barbarian, or at least ‘negative’ Turks. That is a consequence of Greek historiography. The literary discourse is connected with that of history.”16 However, Millas’ study includes only novels before 1998, that is before the “decade of Greek-Turkish rapprochement” beginning with the socalled earthquake diplomacy in 1999 when Greek authorities and civil society rushed to provide aid to Turkish earthquake victims and this aid was returned months later when Greece was also hit by an earthquake. The following decade, that for both countries was one of economic prosperity and relative political stability, provided the ideal framework for cultivating neighborly friendship and for breaking down old hatred, prejudices, and stereotypes. The rapprochement was especially seen in civil society with many bi-national initiatives and also a considerable increase in reciprocal tourism. This decade invited a rethinking of the Greek national myth that “has cultivated the myth of categorical difference between the stereotyped images of Greeks and Turks.”17 The decade offered an opportunity for change not least in fiction literature where hitherto “[t]he Turk has been described in Greek literature as brutal, despotic, violent, unintelligent, while the Greek on the contrary has been described as civilized, moderate, and brave.”18 While Michalopoulou’s short story examines the components of Greek identity through an encounter with the symbol of preservation of the Greek Self, the tsoliás soldier, a number of historical novels from the same decade narrate the Ottoman past of the Greeks by allocating a central role to Turkish/ Muslim elements or characters and allowing them to merge with symbols of Greekness. Here, a different kind of cultural intimacy is at play, namely the highlighting an aspect of culture that has traditionally been seen as a source of embarrassment, and the raising of its status, and its possible recognition as a cultural resource. The means to do this is cultivating intimacy with those elements through a construction of “the other within” or an act of “internalizing the other.” The kind of intimacy or familiarity that can be cultivated when approaching what is considered to be the supressed “other” through literature is different from the anthropological concept “cultural intimacy” because of its potential in healing collective traumas and subverting hegemonic narratives. This new trend of being open toward the perspective of others is reflected in the title of a 2008 historical novel The Others’ Truth by best-selling author



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Nikos Themelis and in the words of historian Maria Repousi, who in an interview given in 2007 attempted to defend the less ethnocentric perspective of her contested school history textbook, stated that, “There are truths also of other people. There is also their truth.”19 Already in 1998, the historian Antonis Liakos forwarded a similar argument about the versions of the past: “Often, however, when we speak about our own lost homelands, we forget the lost homelands of the Others. (. . .) If Venizelos [Greek prime minister] had the luck to see his homeland Crete included in the Greek state, for Kemal, Thessaloniki was a lost homeland.”20 What to a large degree characterized historical discourse in the 1990s was oral history and testimonies of survivors of the Greek-Turkish war and the population exchange in 1923. It was a continuation of the discourse of lost Greek homelands in Asia Minor, but with new perspectives, as Liakos argues: “It doesn’t make sense to forward the argument about who inhabited a land first and who came second (. . .). People who inhabited a land for twelve generations, don’t they have the right to consider it their homeland?”21 An echo of this argument is found in Yannis Kalpouzos’ 2008 novel Imaret: In the Shadow of the Clocktower where the Muslim protagonist claims that the Greek town Arta is as much his homeland as it is homeland of the Christians who in 1881 experienced the incorporation of their town into the Greek Kingdom: “We all had Arta as our common homeland. And how could it not be our homeland? When my father’s ancestors had been in the town from 1112 (1700), while my mother’s family was among the first Ottoman families to settle in Arta in 979 (1571).”22 The same question is addressed in two other novels, namely Theodoros Grigoriadis’ 1998 novel The Waters of the Peninsular and Maro Douka’s 2004 novel Innocent and Guilty. These widely read historical novels have at their core the question of the Muslims’ loss of their “Greek” homeland in Macedonia, Crete, and Epirus, respectively. The novels represent attempts to include the Ottoman legacy into the national narrative and thus in a constructive way trying to mend the flaws in Greek historical consciousness that Michalopoulou’s short story bring out. The decade 1998–2008, when these novels appeared, is unique because of its unprecedented material growth, the intensification of modernization processes, and the relative absence of tension with Greece’s neighbors, especially the arch enemy Turkey. The generosity and openness expressed in these works toward what has previously been thought of as a threat to national coherence could be seen as partly a result of this historical period of national strength and confidence. The novels provide a new cultural historical map of regions in Greece that used to be inhabited not only by Greek-speaking Christians but also by Jews and Muslims, sometimes Greek-speaking or bilingual. Such novels use

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a fictional construction of the others’ narrative as a means to investigate or modify the Greeks’ own narrative. The ability of literature to render the perspective of the other is what makes it potentially subversive. By creating intimacy and empathy with characters that are thought to be foreign by origin, religion, or name, they may become normalized, less foreign, or even a part of the self. This technique brings to mind Georgios Vizyenos’ masterpieces “Who was my brother’s killer?” (1883–1884) and “Moscov-Selim” (1895) in which the Greek narrator’s sympathy lies with the non-Greek protagonists in a way that the differences between them become blurred as ethnic, linguistic, and religious identities are shown to be merely constructions. Common for the three novels is that they have to a varying degree Ottoman Muslim or Turkish protagonists and/or narrators thus encouraging the reader to view history from the perspective of a non-Greek character. These novels are very different in their narrative techniques but they all cultivate intimacy with the Muslim and Turkish Other, either through an erotic and existential fusion, brotherly friendship and first-person narration, or family bonds and diary writing. Theodoros Grigoriadis’ The Waters of the Peninsular can be seen as belonging to a new way of dealing with the Ottoman legacy introduced with Rhea Galanaki’s 1989 novel The Life of Ismael Ferik Pasha where identities become blurred and historical facts or persons, popular myth and dreams are intertwined in a poetic writing style. The Waters of the Peninsular is built around a journey that takes place in the summer of 1906 through Ottoman territory, which is today part of Greece. The novel’s protagonist is a fictional Greek interpreter, Nikiforos Zlitidis, originating from the small town Achialos on the western Black Sea coast. Apparently, the novel’s itinerary from Thessaloniki to Constantinople is prompted by an Englishman, Steven, who has hired the Greek interpreter for his journey; the purpose of which is to track down seventy sacred springs in Eastern Macedonia and Thrace. A third character, Yunus, accompanies the two men. He is a young man who has escaped the Islamic seminary in Kavala, where he as an orphan was brought up and enrolled in the religious studies. The novel contains many dreamlike passages, and as the narration proceeds it becomes obvious that only the Greek character is of flesh and blood, while the Anglican Englishman and the Muslim Ottoman transubstantiate into other forms of being such as water and air. The non-Greek characters reflect aspects of the Greek character’s identity, aspects that he is mainly attracted to, also erotically, especially the Muslim character with whom he even exchanges identity. The chapters are structured according to the perspective of each of the three men and the principles they represent. So, the chapters following the perspective of Nikiforos have Greek titles, often from Greek

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folk culture, Steven’s chapters have titles from Yeats’ poetry or Christian tradition, and the chapters following the perspective of Yunus have titles from the Sufi tradition such as “Haqiqa” meaning truth, “Salik” meaning path, and “Marifa” meaning insight. The journey uncovers a palimpsest of cultures and civilizations of the region encountering ancient shrines, early Christian churches, and contemporary Sufi tekkes (monasteries) indicating the syncretic religiosity that the sacred springs represent. Through the experience of the former student we learn of the rigid religious learning of the Islamic seminary and how Muslim subjects of the Ottoman Empire could also feel unfree as in the following third-person inner monologue of Yunus when he has just escaped the seminary: “Kavala, for centuries enslaved, as her Christian inhabitants claimed, to the heathen. But was it not the same discontent that prevailed behind the walls of the seminary? The seminary kept the students as prisoners instead of opening their wings.”23 This Ottoman Muslim character is also looking for ways to liberate and get to know himself: “He longs to find someone who looks like him. To tell him how he is, who he is, even if it is his own self. Could he only make himself vanish, to kill himself for a while so that he could recreate himself.”24 Sufi mysticism, but also the Orphic mysteries, and Christian mysticism provide a liberating framework and path where boundaries between individuals and between the particular and the universal are dissolved. The novel can be read as an allegory over Greek identity, with the Greek character Nikiforos (meaning “he who brings victory”) adopting various identities as exemplified in this dialogue with the only female character of the novel: - What’s your name? - Zlitidis He hesitated - Nikiforos. But according to my papers I am Steven, and to Orpheus I am Aydin. - Who is Orpheus? - A friend, a Muslim. He gave me the name. The girl turned pale. - A Turk then! - I guess, even though he doesn’t really know where he comes from . . . 25

The multiple identity of the protagonist, who is at once the Greek Nikiforos, the English Steven and the Muslim/Turk Aydin (meaning “the enlightened”),

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is here revealed. The Greek girl, Eleni, is pregnant after being raped by Ottoman gendarmes and from this misdeed she carries two babies, whom she will name Nikiforos and Yunus and she will raise both with love. Eleni is perhaps the book’s most central character even though she is not a protagonist in the three men’s journey. The novel opens with the rape, which can symbolize the Ottoman’s assault of the Greek people, and ends with the birth of the twins named after a Greek and a Muslim/Turkish character, indicating that the Muslim/Turkish element will live on in the Greek genealogy even after the end of Ottoman rule. It may sound schematic, but without becoming banal it questions the possibility of drawing clear boundaries between national, religious, and gender identities in individuals as well as in territory, history, and religion. The intimacy in Grigoriadis’ novel is evoked in the relationships between the protagonists through third-person narration that interchangeably takes the inner perspective of each character. In the novel Innocent and Guilty Maro Douka uses another technique to create intimacy with the national other, namely by giving direct voice to its contemporary Turkish protagonist through diary entries.26 The novel has two types of chapters. One type consists of diary entries or personal letters written in the Cretan town Chania in 2002 by the fifty-two-year-old Turkish protagonist Arif. We learn about his life as a cosmopolitan academic who has a son and ex-partner in Germany and a girlfriend in London where he lives. He is a descendant of a Muslim Cretan family who was forced to migrate to Istanbul in 1916, but his grandparents and parents (the mother from Thessaloniki) kept speaking Greek considering Crete or Salonica their homelands. Arif has been commissioned by the BBC, The Guardian, and the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet to catalogue the Islamic monuments of Crete. He uses his grandfather’s and his father’s notebooks as guides to the Ottoman Chania, his family’s hometown, that has now vanished because most of the monuments of that era have been miskept. Through the confessional diary style, the reader comes close to the Turkish protagonist who appears to be a lone wolf that has been unable to build a family of his own and his relationships are characterized by distance: the son in Germany, the girlfriend in London, the mother and sister in Istanbul. We hear nothing of close friends, but both his grandfather and father report friendships with Greeks. In a way the contemporary Greek reader is invited to become his closest friend, to sympathize with his pains, fears, and hopes as he tracks down the genealogical lines and, in the end, begins a relationship with a Greek woman. The diary entries underscore, in particular, two aspects of the history of Cretan Muslims. First, their nostalgia for the lost homeland and the consequences for the following generations. The protagonist refers to the longing



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of his family members as he grew up: “My father’s language was Greek (. . .) not a day passed without him speaking with nostalgia about Chania”27 and “Endless times my grandmother had described the paradise from which they had been expelled.”28 The second dominant aspect is the progressiveness, open-mindedness, and inventiveness in trade and industry of his ancestors challenging the prejudices and stereotypes of Muslims in Greece: “The Christians liked to think of the Muslims as incapable of dealing with trade or science. For them the Muslim can only be a squire who slaughters Christians and tears out hearts”29 and “My grandfather was progressive; he had sent one of his sons to study law in Vienna. He measured time the European way; his peers accused him of being western-minded.”30 These statements give the Greek reader a firsthand, albeit fictive, glimpse of the past experienced through the eyes of a Turk. The second type of chapters, written in third person, follow contemporary life in Chania, also involving the visit of the Turkish protagonist, and revolve around the crime detection related to a murder associated with human trafficking but also the discovery of the not purely Greek ancestry of the Greek characters. The novel revives in a very thorough manner the history of Chania and its Muslim heritage—but with its parallel contemporary plot it also engages in contemporary relations between Turks and Greeks and their countries’ European paths. Innocent and Guilty presents its protagonist through the most individualized medium thinkable, namely the diary. However, it is a diary intended for communication, first to his British partner whom he addresses directly in the first entries, though realizing that she will be unable to read them as he writes in his mother tongue Greek, and then later to his German-born son and, of course, indirectly to the Greek reader of the novel. Furthermore, the protagonist’s search for his family’s ancestral land goes through the diaries of his father and grandfather. So the individualistic medium of the diary becomes what strengthens family ties and roots the individual in the genealogical line but also in the physical environment that he discovers through the ancestors’ reminiscences. If family ties and (male) descent are the central axis in Doukas’ novel, friendship is the relation around which the plot evolves in Imaret: In the Shadow of the Clocktower.31 The novel became author Yannis Kalpouzos’ breakthrough selling more than one hundred thousand copies. It seems like everybody knows it and it was reprinted by a new publisher in 2015 along with an easy-read version for adolescents. Contrary to Grigoriadis’ and Doukas’ partly metafictional novels, Imaret has a straightforward structure with two first-person narrator-protagonists and a chronological narration. Its accessible style has ensured the wide audience of this story that in a profound

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way has put the Ottoman legacy on the national agenda, so that the title, referring to a Muslim charity institution, has become common property. The Imaret of the title symbolizes the religious and ethnic tolerance that could be possible in a multicultural society as the Ottoman. Not that the novel purely idealizes life in the Ottoman town of Arta for being based on intercultural coexistence. There is much focus on interethnic strife, religious fanaticism as well as class and national liberation struggles, but the idea of the Imaret as a house of God, where everybody regardless of faith, wealth, and origin can be embraced, remains a proposal throughout the novel represented by the character of a wise Muslim grandfather. The narrative revolves around the friendship between a Muslim and a Christian boy who are born the same night in 1854. Their families are neighbors and because the Christian boy’s father is killed on that night his mother doesn’t have milk to breastfeed her newborn baby and therefore the Muslim mother breastfeeds both boys, who become like twin brothers, sleeping together and sharing every day of their childhood and early adulthood. The chapters are narrated in the first person in the style of childhood memories alternating between the Christian Greek protagonist, Liontos, and the Muslim Ottoman protagonist, Necip. The author’s motivation to write a book about Greek-Ottoman coexistence in his hometown Arta came from the notes of the writer and journalist Spyridon Paganelis, who in 1882 observed the following, here quoted from the novel’s epigraph: “Because of the close social relations that had developed between Greeks and Ottomans, the latter had put down the air of conqueror that normally characterizes the dominant race.” As in Douka’s novel the Muslims of Arta spoke Greek and they were eager to take part in Greek culture and learning. At the age of seven, the Muslim Ottoman narrator is honored at a Muslim ritual of Koran reciting. However, during the celebration of his excellence in Islamic learning he runs close to his Greek friend and unveils his deepest wish: “One day I will change school and I will come to the Greek school!”32 This wish comes true three years later when he is accepted in the Greek school after several exams and his grandfather’s persuasion of the schoolmaster. The Muslim grandfather plays a central role in the novel exemplifying the harmonious Greek-Ottoman coexistence and representing a synthesis of the Greek and Ottoman worlds through his education in both traditions. With his philosophy of human coexistence across divides, the Muslim grandfather appears as the author’s alter ego. Thus, not only is half of the novel narrated by a Muslim, but also the character that expresses the author’s message is an Ottoman Muslim. Or so it appears. For in the last chapter of the novel it is revealed by the impersonal narrator that the Ottoman grand­father’s



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grandparents were Greek Christians and that his grandmother had kept her faith while the grandfather had converted. Not only is the grandfather’s grandmother praised for keeping her Christian faith, she is also described as having had blond hair and green eyes, something that her great-greatgrandchild, the Muslim protagonist’s sister, had inherited, indicating that she was different from other Ottoman Turkish characters who are all described as dark-haired and dark-eyed. Furthermore, this grandmother had maintained in her old days that the Ottomans of Arta were descendants of Christian warlords, the so-called sipahis, Christians in the service of the Sultan, who in the seventeenth century had to convert to Islam in order to retain their privileges. So, what apparently is represented as the Ottoman Muslim Other in this novel is, in the end, revealed to be the Greek Christian Self. This ending nullifies the potentially progressive rereading of a fertile Greek-Ottoman exchange by confirming Greek superiority. The novel’s front covers (2008 and 2015) also indicate an exoticizing, idealizing, or orientalizing representation of the past. That the word “Tourkokratia” is replaced with “Othomanokratia” in the blurb of the second edition signals an intended progressiveness indicating that this novel dares to view the past with new eyes and so the readers may feel that they take part in a more enlightened national narrative. But to a large degree the novel taps into an orientalizing fascination with the past, also reflected in the popularity of TV series like the Turkish production Suleiman the Magnificent screened in Greece in 2012–2013. The Muslim or Ottoman other is only internalized to the degree that he assimilates into Greek culture. Despite all reservations about the banality of this novel it contributes to heightening awareness of the Ottoman past and it does recognize that Muslims and their descendants in Turkey today have at least an emotional ownership to their former Greek homeland. This is underlined with moving scenes of departure when the town becomes Greek in 1881 and the Muslims are encouraged to leave; scenes that resemble scenes from literature about the Greeks’ departure from Asia Minor. These three novels move from an allegorical approach to history and the use of magical realism in The Waters of the Peninsular to realism and source-based historiographic (meta)fiction in Innocent and Guilty ending with the more schematic or didactic use of history in Imaret. Common for the three novels is that they take place in Greek geographic areas and not in the Greek lost homelands of Asia Minor. They highlight the human potential that has been lost from Greece’s territory with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and they sympathize with the expulsed neighbors in a way that their emotional ownership to Greece is recognized. This is a way of recognizing the presence, albeit lost, of the other and cultivating intimacy with him. The novels use literary techniques such as interior third-person perspective,

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diary or memoirs, and the innocent perspective of childhood to create intimacy with Muslim, Turkish, or Ottoman elements in Greek history. The Muslim or Turkish characters all speak Greek and the Turk Arif even studied Greek literature in Thessaloniki and quotes Greek poetry. They are in different ways represented as part of the national self, thus internalized. Also in these novels, certain aspects of Ottoman and Muslim culture and society are accentuated for being progressive, sophisticated, or even modern. This accounts for the Cretan grandfather who excelled in trade and industrial invention and for the fine mechanics of the Ottoman clock tower that the grandfather in Arta maintains. However, not only are emotional bonds revived, the physical presence of the supressed Ottoman heritage is also resurrected in the novels. In The Waters of the Peninsular the tekkes and mosques of Northeastern Greece are pointed out, while Innocent and Guilty provides detailed historical accounts of mosques, minarets, and fountains of Chania and in Imaret we hear of the imaret, the clock tower, the mosques and synagogues, and the cemeteries. Part of this material culture has physically survived while most of it has been abolished or neglected and is given new life through the novels. On another level the novels are quests of masculine identity set in times of large historical upheavals such as the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century and the high era of Europeanization one hundred years later. Even if their masculine identity is destabilized, more in the first two novels, less so in Imaret, the novels confirm that collective, in particular national, identities are constructed, negotiated, and renegotiated through male characters. In more than twenty contemporary historical novels on the Ottoman period I have not come across a single one with a central female protagonist, at least not one representing a progressive attitude to collective identities. By giving national Others protagonist roles, these novels attempt to present readers with a picture of life in Ottoman times as more complex than the simplified image of clear-cut boundaries between opposing ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups. In this way, the authors provide less ethnocentric approaches to the history of the Ottoman Empire and nation-building, something that has also characterized contemporary historiography.33 The desire to reimagine the Ottoman past in familiar terms, that is of making it one’s own, and at the same time projecting it as an ideal of modern liberal multiculturalism, can be seen as a way of generating a national narrative that is supposedly closer to Western or European ideals. Rehabilitating the Ottoman legacy to also including periods of progress and coexistence may on the one hand show compliance with (Western) discourses of tolerance while on the other it represents a confrontation with Western cultural imperialism that through its traditional orientalist discourse has labeled Southeastern Europe as back-



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ward, intolerant, and soaked in age-old hatred due to its Ottoman legacy.34 By insisting on Ottomanizing the Greek past, these novels participate in collective negotiations over the origin, definition, and development of Greekness in the perpetual tension field between East and West, Turkey and Europe, but indeed leaning heavily toward a stereotypical European Enlightenment model—now also including Muslims/Turks. The novels—Douka’s and Kalpouzos’ more so than Grigoriadis’—thus represent pro-European narratives that inscribe Greek history into a Western tradition of demarcating the lines between (European) civilization and the Orient. Oriental elements and subjects are valued as they become Europeanized. From this point of view, the novels can be seen as typical of their time in the first decade of the twenty-first century, with its European optimism and Turkey’s aspirations to enter the European Union. A decade later, in the context of post-crisis Greece, post-coup Turkey, and masses of Middle Eastern refugees, these novels already seem as if they belong to a long-gone EU-topia of Greek-Turkish reconciliation and European innocence. NOTES 1.  The short story has been published in three versions. The first in Greek (2004), the second in English translation and adaptation with several changes (2006), and a second Greek version considerably condensed compared to the first version (2012). In this chapter I refer interchangeably to all three versions. A fourth and even more condensed English version appears in chapter 15 specifically prepared by the author for this volume. According to Michalopoulou, it is her tendency to condense her texts aiming at the shortest possible form. 2.  Amanda Michalopoulou, “Τετρακόσιες πιέτες” [Four hundred pleats]. In Με ορθάνοιχτα μάτια: εννέα συγγραφείς & εννέα φωτογράφοι [With Eyes Wide Open: Nine Writers & Nine Photographers], edited by Katerina Frangou, 127–37. (Athens: Kastaniotis, 2004), 128. 3.  Vangelis Calotychos. The Balkan Prospect: Identity, Culture, and Politics in Greece after 1989. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 121–22. 4.  Michalopoulou, “Τετρακόσιες πιέτες,” 2004, 132. 5.  Amanda Michalopoulou. “Τετρακόσιες πιέτες” [Four hundred pleats]. In Λαμπερή μέρα [Bright day], A. Michalopoulou, 198–207. (Athens: Kastaniotis, 2012), 201. 6.  The English quotes are from Edmund Keeley’s translation accessible at https:// www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/51457 (accessed September 8, 2016) 7.  Michalopoulou, “Τετρακόσιες πιέτες,” 2004, 134. 8.  Michalopoulou, “Τετρακόσιες πιέτες,” 2012, 205. 9.  Michalopoulou, “Τετρακόσιες πιέτες,” 2004, 137.

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10.  Michalopoulou, “Τετρακόσιες πιέτες,” 2012, 207. In the 2004 version, she bites her leg. In the version published in this volume, the sequence where the soldier jumps off the rock is omitted (by choice of the author). 11.  Michalopoulou, “Τετρακόσιες πιέτες” 2004, 131. 12. Ibid. 13.  Michalopoulou, “Τετρακόσιες πιέτες” 2012, 201. 14.  Michalopoulou, “Τετρακόσιες πιέτες” 2004, 132. 15.  Michael Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State. (New York and London: Routledge, 1997). 16.  Iraklis Millas, Εικόνες Ελλήνων και Τούρκων. Σχολικά βιβλία, ιστοριογραφία, λογοτεχνία και εθνικά στερεότυπα [Images of Greeks and Turks. Textbooks, historiography, literature and national stereotypes]. (Athens: Alexandreia, 2001), 361. 17.  Konstantinos Kosmas, Μετά την Ιστορία: Ιστορία, ιστορικό μυθιστόρημα και εθνικές αφηγήσεις στο τέλος του εικοστού αιώνα [After History: History, Historical Novel and National Narratives at the End of the Twentieth Century]. Unpublished PhD dissertation, (Freie Universität Berlin, 2001), 200. 18. Ibid. 19.  “Υπάρχουν αλήθειες και άλλων ανθρώπων. Υπάρχει και η δικιά τους αλήθεια” (http://news.in.gr/greece/article/?aid=808446 accessed 3 October 2016). 20.  Antonis Liakos, “Η ιδεολογία των ‘χαμένων πατρίδων’” [The Ideology of ‘lost homelands’], To Vima, September 13, 1998 (http://www.tovima.gr/opinions/ article/?aid=102902). 21. Ibid. 22.  Giannis Kalpouzos. Ιμαρέτ: Στη σκιά του ρολογιού [Imaret: In the shadow of the Clocktower]. (Athens: Metechmio, 2008), 53. The years in parentheses indicate Gregorian calendar years corresponding to the years following Islamic calendar. 23.  Theodoros Grigoriadis. Τα Νερά της Χερσονήσου [The Waters of the Peninsular]. (Athens: Kedros, 1998), 20. 24. Ibid. 25. Grigoriadis, The Waters, 216. 26.  The following analysis of Maro Douka’s novel draws on a fuller analysis presented in Trine Stauning Willert. The New Ottoman Greece in History and Fiction. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), chapter 6. 27. Maro Douka. Αθώοι και φταίχτες [Innocent and Guilty]. (Athens: Kedros, 2004), 437. 28.  Ibid., 188. 29.  Ibid., 34. 30.  Ibid., 20. 31.  The following analysis of Yannis Kalpouzos’ novel draws on a fuller analysis presented in Willert, New Ottoman Greece, chapter 6. 32. Kalpouzos, Imaret, 45. 33.  For a thorough overview of tendencies in Greek Ottoman historiography since the 1990s see chapter 2 in Willert, New Ottoman Greece. 34.  Maria Todorova. Imagining the Balkans. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).



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WORKS CITED Calotychos, Vangelis. The Balkan Prospect: Identity, Culture, and Politics in Greece after 1989. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Douka, Maro. Αθώοι και φταίχτες [Innocent and Guilty]. Athens: Kedros, 2004. Grigoriadis, Theodoros. Τα Νερά της Χερσονήσου [The Waters of the Peninsular]. Athens: Kedros, 1998. Herzfeld, Michael. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. Kalpouzos, Giannis. Ιμαρέτ: Στη σκιά του ρολογιού [Imaret: In the shadow of the Clocktower]. Athens: Metechmio, 2008. Kosmas, Konstantinos. Μετά την Ιστορία: Ιστορία, ιστορικό μυθιστόρημα και εθνικές αφηγήσεις στο τέλος του εικοστού αιώνα [After History: History, Historical Novel and National Narratives at the End of the Twentieth Century]. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Freie Universität Berlin, 2001. Available at: http://www.diss.fu-berlin .de/diss/receive/FUDISS_thesis_000000001336. Liakos, Antonis. “Η ιδεολογία των ‘χαμένων πατρίδων’” [The Ideology of ‘lost homelands’]. To Vima, September 13, 1998. http://www.tovima.gr/opinions/ article/?aid=102902. Michalopoulou, Amanda. “Τετρακόσιες πιέτες” [Four hundred pleats]. In Λαμπερή μέρα [Bright day], A. Michalopoulou, 198–207. Athens: Kastaniotis, 2012. ———. “The Four hundred pleats.” In Decapolis, Tales from Ten Cities, edited by Maria Crossan. Manchester: Comma Press, 2006. http://www.belletrista.com/2011/ Issue10/features_1.php accessed 30 August 2017. ———. “Τετρακόσιες πιέτες” [Four hundred pleats]. In Με ορθάνοιχτα μάτια: εννέα συγγραφείς & εννέα φωτογράφοι [With Eyes Wide Open: Nine Writers & Nine Photographers], edited by Katerina Frangou, 127–37. Athens: Kastaniotis, 2004. Millas, Iraklis. Εικόνες Ελλήνων και Τούρκων. Σχολικά βιβλία, ιστοριογραφία, λογοτεχνία και εθνικά στερεότυπα [Images of Greeks and Turks. Textbooks, historiography, literature and national stereotypes]. Athens: Alexandreia, 2001. Todorova, Maria. Imagining the Balkans. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Willert, Trine Stauning. The New Ottoman Greece in History and Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

Chapter Two

Public History and the Revival of Repressed Sephardic Heritage in Thessaloniki Kostis Kornetis

According to Jacques Derrida, “Ghosts are the traces of those who were not allowed to leave a trace; that is, the victims of history and in particular subaltern groups, whose stories—those of the losers—are excluded from the dominant narratives [. . .].”1 They are the victims of history who return, seeking to redress the past injustice, namely seeking recognition and reward because they have not been given a “hospitable memory.”2 Although the modern city is considered to be the prime locus of collective memory, Thessaloniki stands out as a major case of erasure of its own past, primarily of the long Sephardic Jewish presence there. It is the city of ghosts par excellence, in line not only with Derrida’s assertion but also with Mark Mazower’s designation.3 Holocaust awareness has never been a forte of the city’s contemporary history. The process of post–World War II reconstruction entailed both material destruction (as an avalanche of old, mostly Jewish, houses were bulldozed to give way to apartment blocks) and mnemonic elimination of the Jewish past; in fact, the two went hand-in-hand. It is only since the mid-1990s that historians have started to systematically examine Thessaloniki’s traumatic and repressed Jewish history.4 The Jewish history of the city has gradually emerged as an issue of concern for local authorities too. After the inauguration of two monuments some years ago, the city recently announced the creation of a brand-new museum dedicated exclusively to the Holocaust. Here I revisit the ways in which a selection of filmic and literary works contributed toward setting the agenda for this revival of the city’s Jewish past. First, I discuss documentary depictions of the city’s dealing with its Jewish past. I then explore the ways in which “fiction is the repressed other of historical discourse,”5 by focusing on more recent examples of fiction (a novel, a film, a graphic novel) that followed this powerful revival of the past that reached a climax in 2015. The shift from the decades-long oblivion 29

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of the Jewish past to the present-day memory boom constitutes a reinforcement of a historiographical trend and a change of paradigm. All the above establish a form of public history, raising awareness regarding not only the genocide that led to the destruction of 98 percent of Thessaloniki’s Jewry after five centuries of continuous presence in the city, but also Thessaloniki’s Sephardic history as a whole. Thessaloniki was a complex case in terms of its ethno-religious composition and historical trajectory until well within the twentieth century. In many ways it represented a multiethnic, multicultural, and multireligious city: it contained a vibrant Jewish community, which was a historic diaspora from 1492 onwards, an even older Muslim community, a Bulgarian component, an Armenian one, and a Greek Orthodox population that was meant to become hegemonic after the city was incorporated into the Greek state in 1912. The city was radically transformed in the aftermath of the 1922 Greco-Turkish War by means of the massive arrival of refugees from Asia Minor, relegating the once predominant Jewish community—40 percent of the city’s population in 1922—to a secondary position. The radical reconfiguration of the city continued well into the Second World War. The Nazi occupation and the radical implementation of the Final Solution led to the almost total annihilation of the city’s Jewish community. The suffering of the few surviving Thessalonikan Jews did not end with the fall of the Third Reich but was accentuated through local insensitivity after their return either from the camps, from hiding, or from the mountains to a shuttered city. The urban and social fabric was lacerated beyond recognition, while anti-Semitism was rampant. The trauma of deportation, survival from the extermination camps, and the tragedy of finding one’s home destroyed or occupied, reached a climax with the Greek Civil War. The Christian inhabitants of the city chose oblivion as a way of dealing with the trauma of this enormous loss. The immediate postwar years were characterized by “a total absence of any comment, feuilleton or chronicle” of the Jewish issue and the tragedy that had befallen the city according to literary expert Frangiski Ambatzopoulou, one of the first scholars to deal with the issue of the Jewish presence-absence and its memory.6 The silence that accompanied the aftermath of the Holocaust is typical of all postwar European societies and was inevitably connected to other issues, such as oblivion regarding Jewish properties and a certain awkwardness caused by the sheer presence of survivors. Novelist Giorgos Ioannou, who suffered because of the plundering of the fortunes of the Jews inside his building and his own intimate friend’s annihilation, later on tried to explain the silence over the history of the city’s Jewry and its tragic fate, attributing it to the various traumas



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that Greek Orthodox people had to deal with: “Memories were still recent, we had our own trouble.”7 Throughout the first decade after the war there was little mention of the community’s existence. When looking at travel guides of Thessaloniki of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, one witnesses an overemphasis on the Byzantine past and the Orthodox churches but very little or no mention of the city’s Jewishness, even when pictures of Jewish sites, such as the Modiano Market, were depicted. The few exceptions in the realms of public history include the novels of the same Ioannou, the poems of Manolis Anagnostakis, and the idiosyncratic ethnographic work by Elias Petropoulos.8 Things did not change much even after the fall of the Junta and the “explosion of memory” of the 1970s and 1980s regarding the traumatic Greek past of the 1940s, the occupation period, the Resistance and the civil war. Jews were always considered to be somehow separate from the rest; in other words, it was “their” loss and their pain and not “ours.”9 The real turning point came in the 1990s when a handful of historians started to systematically examine Thessaloniki’s traumatic and repressed past, boosted by sporadic activities to that direction undertaken within the context of the “Thessaloniki: European Cultural Capital” venue in 1997.10 In the 2000s, some seminal scholarly works appeared, coupled by the endeavors of a few local intellectuals, beginning to uncover the city’s Jewish past. A parallel development related to the city’s Jewish history was the 2010 election of well-known wine-maker and businessman Giannis Boutaris as the city’s mayor, elevating the hidden legacy of the Jewish community to an issue of concern for local authorities. Public commemoration had started some years earlier with the first monument dedicated to the city’s “Jewish martyrs,” not without controversy, as the city’s authorities refused stubbornly to place the monument at a central place and it took several years for them to accept its current location, at the very suitable space of Freedom Square.11 Then followed the belated inauguration of the monument at the site of the Jewish cemetery, which was destroyed during the German occupation, in the actual premises of the city’s university. In 2018, Boutaris’ Holocaust Day speech turned viral, despite or maybe because of the very direct references to the responsibilities of the Orthodox population in the expropriation of Jewish fortunes on the aftermath of deportation—also referring to the plans for a much-longed Holocaust museum in the city, built with German funds. The visualization of the Jewish past of Thessaloniki began to preoccupy filmmakers, just like historians, only very recently. A special show of the TV series Paraskinio by director Takis Hatzopoulos on the issue and the documentary The Jews of Thessaloniki by Vasilis Vassilikos and Dimitris

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Sofianopoulos on the occasion of “Thessaloniki: European Cultural Capital” in 1997 opened the way to a growing interest in the topic. Even though both documentaries had gaps and serious methodological problems, they nevertheless triggered some discussion. But the first—and hence most polemic— documentary that aspired to touch upon the thorny issue of silence regarding the traumatic past was Salonique, Ville de Silence (2006) by Belgian cinematographer Maurice Amaraggi. The focus of the film is on how this multicultural and cosmopolitan city, where the Jews coexisted with Ottoman Turks, Greek Orthodox, and Bulgarians, ceased to exist in 1912 when it was incorporated into the Greek state. The great fire of 1917 destroyed almost one-third of the city and left more than half of the Jewish neighborhoods in ashes, forcing much of the Jewish population to relocate outside the city center and leading to its gradual ghettoization. Amaraggi stresses the fact that what is often seen as the city’s “rebirth,” following the fire, signified a downgrade for the Jewish community. Ditto for the influx of Greek Christians from Anatolia, following the Asia Minor disaster in 1922, which greatly upset the city’s demographic balance. Salonique, Ville de Silence culminates with the German occupation and the almost total extinction of the Jewish community in 1943. Since cinema, according to historian Maria Stassinopoulou, has been the field par excellence in which typologies of visualizing urban space have been forged,12 it is of particular interest how Amaraggi depicts the urban landscape as well as its mutation and the presumed oblivion of the entire process. “History has been erased here. Silence is complete,” says the narrator, when the camera hovers around the university campus, occasionally zooming on disparate ruins of the Jewish cemetery. The documentary looks at these premises correctly as a non-mnemonic space.13 The film relentlessly demonstrates how Jewish memory has been trapped within new and alien spatial structures. Hence, with the urban fabric of that time altered beyond recognition, the city cannot function as a screen that allows us to look into the history of the Sephardic community, its everyday life and traditions. “Every trace of Jewish presence in the city has been eliminated,” Amaraggi concludes, by means of indictment. However, his documentary is sealed by a diffuse nostalgia for the long-lost past. From the purely personal, subjective point of view of the so-called second or third generation of Holocaust survivors and its idiosyncratic gaze, this documentary is of particular interest. With nostalgia as his main guide, Amaraggi sanitizes the past and distorts the present; after all, nostalgia is always based on selective memory that positively values the glorious past in comparison and in contrast to the disrupted present.14 The documentary was innovative in many ways, touching on a decade-long taboo, but its public impact in Greece was quite



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limited, as it was only shown in Thessaloniki’s antifascist festival in the summer of 2006, attracting positive comments only by anti-authoritarian circles. Only a year later, in 2007, the Swiss Italian director Paolo Poloni also focused on Thessaloniki in his documentary Salonica, using the same materials as Amaraggi, albeit mixing them quite differently. The film begins with a multitude of interviews in the Jewish nursing home of the city. As in Ville du Silence, most interviews are conducted in Ladino, the Spanish dialect of the Sephardic Jews. Unlike Amaraggi, Poloni has no family links to the city, nor does he refer to it in the same polemical way or revealing nostalgia for the lost times. He hence avoids the nostalgic contemplation by talking to people of different generations and backgrounds, and instead of lamenting the loss of city’s pre-war multicultural past, he dives into the ethnic mosaic from which it is composed today and portrays the extent to which nationalism has fragmented the city’s core. Thus, despite its focus on the once-thriving Jewish community, he invests the film with multiple perspectives. Apart from the testimonies of Holocaust survivors, Salonica allows for constant interferences from other voices and generations. Here, as in in Ville du Silence, the Jewish absence is constantly counterbalanced by the corresponding Christian presence, and taboo issues regarding the two communities are tackled. Poloni uses, for instance, the testimony of Oscar Florentin, a young man in the 1940s, who offers a shocking testimony of how the looting of his parents’ apartment began the minute his family left home for the ghetto that preceded their dispatch to Auschwitz, echoing Giorgos Ioannou’s memories expressed in his short story “The Bed.” Poloni cleverly uses Devin Naar, a student at the time of filming and currently a history professor with a recent award-winning book on Jewish Salonica, as key protagonist, trying to unearth his family’s past.15 In the dramatic finale, Naar and his friends dig up the pavement in the very heart of the city’s modern university to discover fragments of the Jewish cemetery. The scene betrays dramatization, but Poloni moves rather skillfully between fiction and documentary to make his point. Just like Ville du Silence, and despite its qualities, however, Salonica had little impact on a wider public in Greece or Thessaloniki itself. In contrast to the previous documentaries, both filmed by non-Greeks, with or without family connections to the city’s past, Kisses to the Children by Vasilis Loules is a very different film, and one that became a considerable success. The film focuses on the childhood memories of five Greek Jews hidden in Christian homes during the Nazi occupation. Rather than mere informants, his interviewees are the real protagonists of the story. Loules digs deep into his witnesses’ memories and with impressive mastery extracts from

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them powerful and emotionally charged testimonies. In the end he manages to get what he wants: memories from a childhood that was forbidden to children who when they grew up felt guilty about having enjoyed playing at a time when their peers were perishing in the extermination camps. As the director says in an interview: While the people involved in the film are now quite old, you often have the feeling that they are talking to you as children. You can see that on their faces. This means that at the moment they were talking they returned back to the exact same condition in which they used to be back then.16

An intense physicality characterizes this film because Loules worked a lot with his informants, without resorting to fast, nervous editing, which would have resulted in fragmentary testimonies. On top of that, he keeps his interviewees in a state of constant emotional tension in order to read into their affect. In that sense, the film is reminiscent of Claude Lanzmann’s monumental Shoah (1985) and shares with it the persistence of returning to the past, trying to relive the trauma, reviving memories that the minds and bodies once knew well but do not seem to recall anymore. One of Shoah’s most memorable moments raises many questions about the ethics of interviewing: Boba, the barber of the Treblinka extermination camp, breaks into tears when called to relive his trauma, finding it unbearable. While that scene is nevertheless kept intact in the film, on the contrary, in Loules’ film we do not see the copious preparation, the strict methodology, and what this “return to childhood” actually meant for the persons in question. The interaction between the interviewer and the interviewee and the degree of mediation are not easily perceived by the viewer. Nevertheless, Loules himself gives us some cues: When the time had come to film the interviews, I knew where to focus and how to avoid them presenting their lives as a fiction story, as everybody does. I wanted to be as close to the primary experience as possible. . . . I had understood which were each one’s “buttons.” I made a separate questionnaire of dozens of pages, so that the story of their own, but also that of the wider Jewish community, followed an associational logic.17

And he adds meaningfully: “I knew I did not want another story about the Holocaust, but one that unfolds in its shadow.” In fact, none of the three films discussed so far, for different reasons, can be considered a Holocaust movie as such, even though the Holocaust defines their entire narrative structure and raison d’être. Thessaloniki as a place of silence is also present through the testimonies of Rosina Aser Pardo and Shelly Kunio-Cohen, often in contrast to the experience of Athens or Ioannina. We follow the traumatic city life after the



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Holocaust. Kisses to the Children ends with Rosina Pardo’s journey by train back to Thessaloniki. As Pardo says at the end of the film: Moving to Athens was not to redeem us from the city, a city full of ghosts. Moving to Athens was a matter of necessity and health. Of course, it turned out to be a redemption.

Pardo reenters the house on Tsimiski 113, where she and her two sisters passed all the years of the occupation, hidden by a Christian family. The emotion that emerges from her contact with the materiality of the past world is striking; in fact, the director invests in the revival of emotion through the stimulation of the senses. The dramatized atmosphere is extremely tense: Rosina walks up the wooden stairs, tightly holding the handrail; the house is empty; we see her sitting and looking out the window, alone; just herself and the ghosts of the past that she had been trying so hard to avoid. Taken together, these documentaries touch on the central issue of how people remember a virtually decimated community and a city that has changed radically, and what the slow and painful emergence of the repressed and difficult past means for individual (Jewish) and collective (Christian) memory at present. Nevertheless, while Salonique, Ville du silence and Salonica were never widely screened, Kisses to the Children became much better known and had an impact on Greek public consciousness, receiving a lot of positive attention and with a successful career abroad too, with constant screenings throughout Europe and subsequent tours in the United States. Its less polemic character, the fact that it focused on a positive story—of the salvaging of Jewish kids—rather than on the perishing of the rest of the community, and its careful dealing with thorny issues, such as the properties, powerfully touched upon by the other two, may have contributed to this success—a fact at times raised by a few Greek Jewish critics. While especially Amaraggi, and to a lesser extent Poloni, touch on the complex issue of Greek Christian “bystander” responsibility before, during, and especially after the genocide, Loules ultimately deals with the opposite story of Christian solidarity and self-sacrifice. Rather than reiterating the standard topos that the majority of Greek Christians hid Jews,18 however, the film’s complexity triggered fruitful discussions regarding the complexities of hiding, of trauma, of childhood memories and of the singularity of the “righteous among the nations,” namely people honored by Israel for having saved Jews during the Nazi occupation across Europe. A third reason, apart from production issues, which also played a role, might have to do with the fact that Loules managed to carve out powerful cinematic stories and memorable characters out of his poignant testimonies—which inevitably rendered the film more accessible to a larger audience.

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Eleven years prior to Loules’s documentary, Giorgos Skambardonis published the novel Ouzeri Tsitsanis [Tsitsanis’ Dive] (2001). As the title suggests, it focuses on the figure of legendary rembetika musician Vasilis Tsitsanis and his eponymous dive, during the years of the Nazi occupation in Thessaloniki, and features Thessaloniki’s Jewry and its tragedy. That backdrop unfolds mainly through the love story between a Christian youngster, Giorgos, Tsitsanis’ brother-in-law and co-owner of the dive, also involved in underground resistance activities, and Estrea, a young Jewish woman, also participating in the resistance. Even though Skambardonis skillfully reconstructs daily life during the occupation years in Thessaloniki, he nevertheless overemphasized the mistakes committed by the leaders of the Jewish community itself and in particular by chief rabbi Koretz, often blamed for betraying his flock—as well as on the detrimental role of the Jewish capos of the ghetto. The stereotypical depiction of Jewish betrayal, rather than Christian collaboration and complicity, is among the major weaknesses of this particular viewpoint, as is the insistence on Jewish passivity, a major conventional wisdom regarding the annihilation of the community in 1943. “Why do you think they won’t go away . . . Why don’t they do something?” wonders typically Giorgos, the protagonist, to whom Vassilis Tsitsanis reiterates that the answer lies in either their naivety or their fatalism: “Maybe the Jews have come to believe that nothing worse will happen to them, maybe they’ve come to believe it. Maybe they’re already dead, seeing it as kismet. . . . Having been convinced, that is, that they have to die.”19 As historian Rika Benveniste has recently argued, such viewpoints typically overcompensate for both German savagery and Greek Christian indifference, blaming somehow the victims for their fate.20 Still, the novel became a bestseller paving the way, alongside the aforementioned historiographic interest, to an ever-greater reckoning with Thessaloniki’s Jewish past, notwithstanding these clichés. More novels followed, not necessarily using the same trope. The most significant ones, attracting considerable attention, were Nikos Davvetas’ The Jewish Bride (2009) and Patricia Hislop’s best-selling The Thread (2011). Davvetas’ novel received positive reviews and was shortlisted for the National Book Award in 2010. Bridging the Greek Civil War with the thorny issue of property spoliation of Jewish fortunes by Christian opportunists, the book is a powerful indictment against the repressed memory of Thessaloniki and a call to remember the darkest pages of the city’s history. Hislop, on the other hand, capitalized on the success she had experienced in Greece with her novel The Island, creating a story about a fictional Greek family in Thessaloniki against the backdrop of the twentieth century that focuses for a good part on the city as a melting pot of Christians, Muslims, and, crucially Jews.



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This public history boom regarding the genocide reached an apogee with Cloudy Sunday (2015), Manousos Manousakis’ blockbuster based on Skambardonis’s novel. Cloudy Sunday, apart from a script based on a tightly-knit story, features Manousos Manousakis, an experienced TV director with a record of interesting movies in the past and a cast including many popular young actors. The impossible love story between Giorgos and Estrea takes place against a background of violence, executions, persecutions, bravery, treachery, and deportation, and it drives the unfolding of the plot—playing a much more central role than in Skabardonis’s novel, which focuses somewhat more extensively on the character of Tsitsanis. However, such a love story is not entirely new in Greek cinema: Dinos Dimopoulos’ film Amok in 1961 for instance involved such a story and a punchline that is reverberated in Ouzeri Tsitsanis (“Why are you fooling around with a Jewish woman?”), while Βetrayal by Kostas Manousakis in a script by Aris Alexandrou from 1964 depicts another impossible love story, between a Jewish girl and a German officer.21 Despite its evident flaws, however, Cloudy Sunday nevertheless does entail some features worth noticing. Most importantly, its focus on the Jewish community and its habits—we see a synagogue, a Jewish choir, Jewish families with their customs, and so on—no matter how clumsily. What is particularly striking is the use of Ladino by its members in many parts of the film— criticized by some film critics as exaggerated22—is central in terms of understanding this speech community’s outlook and the city’s diverse linguistic soundscape. Moreover, employing historian Jacky Benmayor as a historical consultant, the film’s historical veracity and verisimilitude is noticeable, despite its heavily melodramatic structure: starting with a very detailed and graphic representation of the most crucial moment in terms of the implementation of racial laws in the city, namely the obligatory gathering of all males at Freedom Square and their humiliation under the hot sun in early July 1942, it moves on to the qualitative leap in the Nazi occupation of the city with the measures of forced labor imposed upon a number of the community’s members, the ransom required and the imprisonment and torture of others. We also witness the crescendo in the implementation of racial laws by the occupation authorities: the obligatory wearing of the yellow star, the confinement of Jews in ghettos, and the ban from public transport and from all societies and guilds from early 1943 onward, culminating in the deportation of the community starting in mid-March 1943 and ending in July of the same year. Even in this linear reconstruction of the Jewish community’s itinerary toward its final deportation, there are moments of precision breaking decadelong taboos. It is not so much the Christian-Jewish relationship that I am referring to here, as the participation of Jews in the resistance that attacks

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the idea of a homogeneously helpless and passive community. This feature thus comes in contrast to writer Skambardonis’s own conceptualization of the Jews’ role in the plot. Moreover, the film’s original, graphic depiction of collaborators on all fronts—the Christian front, but even more tragically the Jewish one too, some of whom were tried and executed after the liberation, such as the notorious Vidal Hason, and others who worked as guards in the ghetto—is unprecedented. However, here the correspondence with Skambardonis’s obsession with Jewish betrayal is noticeable. Finally, there is a crucial scene in which Estrea flees from the ghetto and finds her family’s household entirely looted: not a single object is in its place and the walls and floors seem torn apart, just like in the chilling descriptions of Ioannou’s story “The Bed ”23 and Florentin’s testimony in Salonica. Despite certain imprecisions— for example the fact that the community looks small and peripheral, always gathering in one synagogue, at a time when in fact more than fifty synagogues operated in the city, the overemphasis on the responsibilities of rabbi Koretz and the clumsy depiction of the Nazis, this attention to some crucial historical detail is both rare and enlightening. Despite the numerous criticisms that one can utter in terms of both the novel and the film, in historical or aesthetic terms, watching Cloudy Sunday in a packed theater in Thessaloniki next to an avalanche of youngsters, I could not help but think that this was perhaps the first time that this audience was coming into contact with such historical facts about the city’s vibrant Jewish past, its extermination, but also the role of local actors in all this—thus internalizing the Holocaust not as a peripheral and foreign event but as a Greek one too. I had the exact same feeling when I watched Leon A. Nar’s theatrical show I Have Never Forgotten You, on the fictional return of a New Yorker of Salonikan Sephardic origins to the city of his ancestors, to converse with his dead grandmother. The show recounts the tragic love story between the grandmother who was also a singer (and hence is peppered with a repertoire of thirteen Sephardic songs) and another Thessalonikan Jew, who perished in the camps. I attended the play at the Municipal Theater of Kalamaria in the summer of 2017, standing, as there were no seats left. I kept thinking, watching the crowds that were singing along with “Adios querida,” that the experience was also fulfilling an educational task of sorts. As the program reads, somehow hyperbolically, “This is a work that reminds us . . . that there was a time when Greek Orthodox Christians, Jews and Ottoman Muslims used to live in peace, like brothers.” Little Jerusalem, a graphic novel by Electra Stamboulis and Angelo Mennillo on the first part of the twentieth century and the transformations of the hitherto multicultural city, was also published in 2015. The graphic novel’s capacity to enhance history’s limited representational strategies of the past is precisely underlined in the dark and idiosyncratic graphic novel Little Jerusalem. Stambouli and Mennillo’s graphic novel is quite exceptional and does not follow the established norms of the genre, featuring thick blocks of text that



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operate as guides and background to the story written in the form of a personal diary. Rather, it could fall under the rubric of “graphic journalism,” similar to Joe Sacco’s graphic chronicles of his voyages to Palestine and Bosnia. The story is about a young student of linguistics at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Romanos, raised in Bulgaria, and currently discovering his family’s roots: a Greek Orthodox father and a Sephardic Jewish mother. The choice of linguistics is not random: the graphic novel keeps referring to the fact that Thessaloniki was a multilingual space at least until the 1910s, featuring the public or private use of Ottoman Turkish, Ladino, Greek, French, Albanian, and Bulgarian. The style of the sketches is abstract and expressionistic at times and very precise and realistic at others, with some notable influence of Hugo Prat’s Corto Maltese—Pratt being himself half Sephardic. In one of Corto Maltese’s most famous strips, “Venetian Tale,” Corto, the sailor protagonist wanders around the ghetto in Venice, trying to discover the mysteries of the by now vanished but once thriving Jewish community, visiting the famous cemetery. Stambouli and Mennillo make a powerful statement regarding Thessaloniki’s amnesia and touch upon the taboo issue of repressing the past in terms of urban spaces and urban memory, the repression of aesthesis and the disciplining of the multisensory engagement with the city’s Jewish history in material terms.24 “Has everyone here drunk from the water of oblivion? Is it better to forget?” the protagonist wonders at a certain point. As the city constitutes the field par excellence for the observation of historical changes, such as political and social transformations, the graphic novel focuses precisely on these radical alterations looking at the city’s urban landscape. Former Jewish homes are changing owners, uses, names. It features Mordoch’s house, for instance, which later on became the city’s first national gallery, but also refers to the Jewish lower strata houses being bulldozed by building contractors after the community’s extermination: the Baron Hirsch that housed the eponymous ghetto, the 151 neighborhood, the Regi Vardar, Karagats, and all other Jewish quarters of the city that were razed, their crushed remains being sold for construction material. Finally, there are references to the destruction of the city’s historic fifteenth-century Jewish cemetery—one of the oldest in Europe, not only due to Nazi orders but with the complicity of the Greek local authorities too, who wanted to use this space for their own purposes. The graphic novel also includes references to a multitude of Muslims who were born in the city but then lived and thrived in Turkey, including Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the Communist poet Nazim Hikmet, both becoming major national symbols. It also features some more problematic and misleading, in my view, romantic references to the controversial leader of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) Nikos Zachariadis, born in Proussa, exiled to Siberia, and who played a dramatic role in Greek politics from the 1930s onward. The transnational character of these figures acted once again as powerful mementos

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of the fluidity between borders, ideologies, languages, and spaces that were lost forever. Despite some flaws, Little Jerusalem dealt effectively with the different layers of memory and time, dissolving the barriers between “then” and “now,” indicating a capacity to write and rewrite history, an element that rendered it quite popular, especially among young readers. The graphic novel was widely read, and was translated and published in Turkish as well, a rather unique phenomenon for such a genre, on a mainly Greek subject matter.

Figure 2.1.  In this image taken from Little Jerusalem one can see a collage of sorts between different depictions of the university area where the Jewish cemetery used to lie on. The postwar modern buildings and the planetarium are juxtaposed to the image of the rabbi, creating a chronotopical mixture between the time prior to World War II and the one after. Page from the graphic novel Little Jerusalem (Mικρή Iερoυσαλήμ), written by Elettra Stamboulis and drawn by Angelo Mennillo, Jemma Press, Athens 2015. (Turkish edition Küçük Kudus-Selanik, 2017; French edition Petite Jerusalem, 2018)



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Public History typically touches on issues that official history tends to neglect. The insurmountable problems that archival work on the Holocaust in Greece and Thessaloniki’s Sephardic history in general poses for the researchers (dispersed archival sources; non-collaboration between the various institutions; frequent lack of accessibility) render the need to find alternative ways to tackle the issue. A paradigmatic shift followed a decades-long oblivion of the Jewish past to the present-day memory boom. The films, novels, and graphic novel I have examined suggest that public history forms an unofficial corpus that not only informs, but also alters the way in which we tend to look at the history of Thessaloniki. As personalized stories and individual traumas are a case par excellence whereby the tension between the private and the public is accentuated, it is pointing out that public history promoting this “practical” or “usable past” (to quote Hayden White’s and Herbert Muler’s terms, respectively),25 opens up the way for a more nuanced analysis of memory, trauma, and repression leading to greater popular awareness. This public rendering of events not only does not trivialize the historical developments in question but, on the contrary, illuminates little known issues, complicating our view of the past posing a series of questions on memory, trauma, and representation. Finally, at a time in which the boundaries between the strictly academic and non-academic history are being increasingly blurred it is worth looking at how the synergies between the two fields are taking place. Returning to Derrida, it is no coincidence that the image of the ghost is present in most of the above artifacts—each one in its own unique way, pointing to art as a privileged medium to help us explore this difficult memory. Apart from the eliminated Jewry of the city, however, and its suppressed past, there are other specters haunting its present. In the words of Mark Mazower: “After a lengthy silence, the subject [of the city’s Sephardic past] emerged from the shadows to become a legitimate topic of discussion. As yet, however, no such discussion has opened concerning the departure of Thessaloniki’s Muslims. Their experiences are still overshadowed in the public mind by the simultaneous suffering of the Greeks refugees who took their place.” 26 It remains to be seen when Salonikans will decide to start honoring these ghosts too. NOTES 1.  Jo Labanyi, “Introduction: Engaging with Ghosts; or, Theorizing Culture in Modern Spain,” in Constructing Identity in Contemporary Spain. Theoretical Debates and Cultural Practice, ed. Jo Labanyi (Oxford and New York: 2002), 1–14 (1–2). 2.  Ibid, 12. 3.  See Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430–1950 (New York: Harper Collins, 2004).

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4.  For a full overview of the first courageous attempts to break the decade-long silence over the Jewish past of the city see Rika Benveniste, “Η ιστοριογραφία για το Ολοκαύτωμα στην Ελλάδα: Μια επισκόπηση” [The historiography of the Holocaust in Greece: An Overview], Synchrona Themata 24, no. 76–77 (2011): 104–109. 5.  Michel de Certeau, “History and Science” in Heterologies, cited by Hayden White, “Introduction: Historical Fiction, Fictional History, and Historical Reality,” The Journal of Theory and Practice 9, no. 2–3 (2005): 147–57 (147). 6.  See Frangiski Ambatzopoulou, Ο άλλος εν διωγμώ. Η εικόνα του Εβραίου στη λογοτεχνία: Ζητήματα ιστορίας και μυθοπλασίας [The persecuted other. The image of the Jew in literature: issues of history and fiction] (Athens: Themelio, 1998), 50. A telling exception was the newspaper Makedonia, which (despite its antisemitic past) published a series of articles on the extermination camps and the survivors from spring to autumn 1945. 7.  Odette Varon Vassar, “Η γενοκτονία των Ελλήνων Εβραίων (1943–1944) και η αποτύπωσή της: Μαρτυρίες, λογοτεχνία και ιστοριογραφία” [The Genocide of the Greek Jews and its Imprint: Testimonies, Literature and Historiography’] in Η εποχή της σύγχυσης. Η δεκαετία του ‘40 και η ιστοριογραφία [The time of confusion: the 1940s and Historiography] ed. Giorgos Antoniou and Nikos Marantzidis (Athens: Estia, 2008), 318. 8.  See Anna Maria Droumpouki, “Η θεσμική αναγνώριση της γενοκτονίας των Ελλήνων Εβραίων και η άγνωστη δράση του Ηλία Πετρόπουλου” [The institutional recognition of the genocide of Greek Jews and the unknown actions of Elias Petropoulos], unpublished paper presented at the conference “Censorships in Greece,” organized by the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation, December 17–19, 2015, Panteion University. 9.  See Odette Varon Vassar, Η ανάδυση μιας δύσκολης μνήμης. Κείμενα για τη γενοκτονία των Εβραίων [The unearthing of a difficult memory. Texts on the Jewish genocide] (Athens: Estia, 2013). 10. See Giorgos Angelopoulos, “Political Practices and Multiculturalism: The Case of Thessaloniki,” in The Politics of Identity and Difference, ed. Jane Cowan (London and NY: Pluto Press, 2000). 11.  See Paris Papamichos Chronakis, “Of Holocaust Monuments and parking lots. Legitimizing Jewish presence in contemporary Thessaloniki,” unpublished paper presented at the international conference Patrimoines, identités culturelles at mémoires collectives en Grece et en Turquie, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, March 21, 2008. Also see Anna Maria Droumpouki, Μνημεία της λήθης [Monuments of Oblivion] (Athens: Polis, 2014), 289–95. 12.  Maria A. Stassinopoulou, “Ο κινηματογράφος στον αστικό χώρο και η κινηματογραφική εικονογραφία της ελληνικής πόλης στο Μεσοπόλεμο. Ασύμβατες πορείες, διαφορετικές ταχύτητες” [Cinema in the Greek urban space and cinematic iconography of the Greek city in the interwar period. Incompatible itineraries, different speeds], in Η πόλη στους νεότερους χρόνους. Μεσογειακές και Βαλκανικές όψεις (19ος–20ος αι.) [The City in Modern Times. Mediterranean and Balkan Views (19th– 20th c.)], conference proceedings (Athens: Etairia Meletis Neou Ellinismou, 2000), 352–368 (352). 13.  See Kostis Kornetis, “Tο ντοκιμαντέρ ως κατηγορώ. Η περίπτωση του Θεσσαλονίκη, πόλη της σιωπής του Maurice Amaraggi” [Documentary as Accusa-



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tion: The case of Maurice Amaraggi’s Salonique, ville du silence] in Ντοκιμαντέρ: Μια άλλη πραγματικότητα. Θεωρητικά κείμενα για την ταυτότητα του ντοκιμαντέρ στον 21ο αιώνα [Documentary: Another form of reality. Theoretical texts on documentary identity in the 21st century] ed. Eirini Stathi (Athens: Aigokeros, 2009), 138–56. 14.  As historian Rika Benveniste concludes, nostalgia has its own rules and its own starting points and perhaps we should not judge it historically. Rika Benveniste, “Σχόλιο στην ταινία του M. Amaraggi” [Commentary on the film by M. Amaraggi], unpublished paper in the workshop “Πέντε ντοκιμαντέρ για τους Εβραίους της Ελλάδας” [Five documentaries on the Jews of Greece] organized by the Group for the Study of the Jews of Greece, one of the first and most dynamic for discussing the history of Greek Jews in Thessaloniki. Byzantine Museum, Thessaloniki, February 3–4, 2007. http://histjews.blogspot.com. Accessed 25 April, 2018. On the analytical problems of nostalgia of the multicultural Thessaloniki also look at Paris Papamichos-Chronakis, “Για την «πολυπολιτισμική Θεσσαλονίκη», Σκέψεις για ορισμένες χρήσεις του όρου” [On “multicultural” Thessaloniki. Reflections on certain uses of the term], Thessalonikeon Polis, 13, June 24–29, 2011. 15.  Devin E. Naar, Jewish Salonica. Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016). 16.  Stavros Dioskouridis, “Φιλιά εις τα παιδιά” [Kisses to the Children], LiFO, November 21, 2012, http://www.lifo.gr/mag/features/3513. Accessed 25 April, 2018. 17. Ibid. 18.  See Thanasis Triaridis, “Για την ιερή μνήμη των Εβραίων που φύγανε” [On the sacred memory of the Jews who are gone], in Σημειώσεις για το τρεμάμενο σώμα [Notes on the trembling body] (Athens: Typothito, 2006), 321–31. 19.  Giorgos Skambardonis, Ouzeri Tsitsanis [Athens: Patakis, 2013 (1st ed. 2001)], 226. On the “positive story” of the rescue of Jews by gentiles in neighbouring Katerini look at the documentary “By-Standing and Standing-By” by Fofo Terzidou (2012). 20. Rika Benveniste, Αυτοί που επέζησαν. Αντίσταση, Εκτόπιση, Επιστροφή. Θεσσαλονικείς Εβραίοι στη δεκαετία του 1940 [Those who survived. Resistance, deportation, return. Salonikan Jews in the 1940s] (Athens: Polis, 2014), 21. 21.  Giorgos Andritsos, Η Κατοχή και η Αντίσταση στον ελληνικό κινηματογράφο [Occupation and Resistance in Greek cinema] (Athens: Aigokeros, 2005). 22.  According to the anonymous film critic of Rizospastis, “the overuse of Spanish [sic], with a bad accent, a rigid discourse, uttered with difficulty, absurdly used in duets” [η κατάχρηση της ισπανικής γλώσσας, η εκφορά κακόφωνη, ο λόγος ξύλινος, βγαίνει με κόπο, παράλογη η χρήση του στα ντουέτα], “Ουζερί Τσιτσάνης” [Cloudy Sunday], December 4, 2015. 23.  Giorgos Ioannou, “Το κρεββάτι” [The bed], in Η σαρκοφάγος [Sarcophagus] (Athens: Ermis, 1971). 24. Vangelis Calotychos, Modern Greece: A Cultural Poetics (Oxford: Berg, 2003). Yiannis Hamilakis, Archaeology of the Senses. Human Experience, Memory, and Affect (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 25.  K. S. Brown and Yannis Hamilakis, “The Cupboard of the Yesterdays? Critical Perspectives on the Usable Past,” in The Usable Past. Greek Metahistories, ed. K. S. Brown and Yannis Hamilakis (Lexington Books: Oxford, New York, 2003). 26. Mazower, Salonica, 354.

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WORKS CITED Ambatzopoulou, Frangiski. Ο άλλος εν διωγμώ. Η εικόνα του Εβραίου στη λογοτεχνία Ζητήματα ιστορίας και μυθοπλασίας [The Persecuted Other. The Image of the Jew in Literature. Issues of History and Fiction]. Athens: Themelio, 1998. Andritsos, Giorgos. Η Κατοχή και η Αντίσταση στον ελληνικό κινηματογράφο [Occupation and Resistance in Greek cinema]. Athens: Aigokeros, 2005. Angelopoulos Giorgos. “Political Practices and Multiculturalism: The Case of Thessaloniki.” In The Politics of Identity and Difference, ed. Jane Cowan. London and NY: Pluto Press, 2000. Benveniste, Rika. “Η ιστοριογραφία για το Ολοκαύτωμα στην Ελλάδα: Μια επισκόπηση” [The historiography of the Holocaust in Greece: An Overview], Synchrona Themata 24, no. 76–77 (2011): 104–109. Benveniste, Rika. “Σχόλιο στην ταινία του M. Amaraggi” [Commentary on the film by M. Amaraggi], unpublished paper in the workshop “Πέντε ντοκιμαντέρ για τους Εβραίους της Ελλάδας” [Five documentaries on the Jews of Greece] organized by the Group for the Study of the Jews of Greece, one of the first and most dynamic for discussing the history of Greek Jews in Thessaloniki. Byzantine Museum, Thessaloniki, February 3–4, 2007. http://histjews.blogspot.com. Accessed 25 April, 2018. ———. Αυτοί που επέζησαν. Αντίσταση, Εκτόπιση, Επιστροφή. Θεσσαλονικείς Εβραίοι στη δεκαετία του 1940 [Those who survived. Resistance, deportation, return. Salonikan Jews in the 1940s]. Athens: Polis, 2014. Brown K. S. and Yannis Hamilakis. “The Cupboard of the Yesterdays? Critical Perspectives on the Usable Past.” In The Usable Past. Greek Metahistories, ed. K. S. Brown and Yannis Hamilakis. Lexington Books: Oxford, New York, 2003. Calotychos, Vangelis. Modern Greece: A Cultural Poetics. Oxford: Berg, 2003. De Certeau, Michel. “History and Science” in Heterologies, cited by Hayden White, “Introduction: Historical Fiction, Fictional History, and Historical Reality,” The Journal of Theory and Practice 9, no. 2–3 (2005): 147–157 (147). Dioskouridis, Stavros. “Φιλιά εις τα παιδιά” [Kisses to the Children], LiFO, 21 November 2012, http://www.lifo.gr/mag/features/3513. Accessed 25 April, 2018. Droumpouki Anna Maria. “Η θεσμική αναγνώριση της γενοκτονίας των Ελλήνων Εβραίων και η άγνωστη δράση του Ηλία Πετρόπουλου” [The institutional recognition of the genocide of Greek Jews and the unknown actions of Elias Petropoulos], unpublished paper presented at the conference “Censorships in Greece,” organized by the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation, 17–19 December 2015, Panteion University. ———. Μνημεία της λήθης [Monuments of Oblivion] (Athens: Polis, 2014). Ioannou, Giorgos. “Το κρεββάτι” [The bed], in Η σαρκοφάγος [Sarcophagus]. Athens: Ermis,1971. Kornetis, Kostis. “Tο ντοκιμαντέρ ως κατηγορώ. Η περίπτωση του Θεσσαλονίκη, πόλη της σιωπής του Maurice Amaraggi” [Documentary as Accusation: The case of Maurice Amaraggi’s Salonique, ville du silence] in Ντοκιμαντέρ: Μια άλλη πραγματικότητα. Θεωρητικά κείμενα για την ταυτότητα του ντοκιμαντέρ στον 21ο αιώνα [Documentary: Another form of reality. Theoretical texts on documentary identity in the 21st century] ed. Eirini Stathi. Athens: Aigokeros, 2009.



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Hamilakis, Yiannis. Archaeology of the Senses. Human Experience, Memory, and Affect. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Labanyi, Jo. “Introduction: Engaging with Ghosts; or, Theorizing Culture in Modern Spain.” In Constructing Identity in Contemporary Spain. Theoretical Debates and Cultural Practice, ed. Jo Labanyi. Oxford and New York: 2002. Mazower, Mark. Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430–1950. New York: Harper Collins, 2004. Naar, Devin E. Jewish Salonica. Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. Papamichos-Chronakis, Paris. “Για την «πολυπολιτισμική Θεσσαλονίκη», Σκέψεις για ορισμένες χρήσεις του όρου” [On “multicultural” Thessaloniki. Reflections on certain uses of the term], Thessalonikeon Polis, June 13, 2011, 24–29. ———. “Of Holocaust Monuments and parking lots. Legitimizing Jewish presence in contemporary Thessaloniki,” unpublished paper presented at the international conference Patrimoines, identités culturelles at mémoires collectives en Grece et en Turquie, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, 21 March 2008. Skambardonis, Giorgos. Ouzeri Tsitsanis [Athens: Patakis, 2013 (1st ed. 2001)]. Stassinopoulou, Maria A. “Ο κινηματογράφος στον αστικό χώρο και η κινηματογραφική εικονογραφία της ελληνικής πόλης στο Μεσοπόλεμο. Ασύμβατες πορείες, διαφορετικές ταχύτητες” [Cinema in the Greek urban space and cinematic iconography of the Greek city in the interwar period. Incompatible itineraries, different speeds. In Η πόλη στους νεότερους χρόνους. Μεσογειακές και Βαλκανικές όψεις (19ος–20ος αι.) [The City in Modern Times. Mediterranean and Balkan Views (19th–20th c.)], conference proceedings. Athens: Etairia Meletis Neou Ellinismou, 2000. Triaridis, Thanasis. “Για την ιερή μνήμη των Εβραίων που φύγανε” [On the sacred memory of the Jews who are gone], in Σημειώσεις για το τρεμάμενο σώμα [Notes on the trembling body]. Athens: Typothito, 2006. Varon Vassar, Odette. “Η γενοκτονία των Ελλήνων Εβραίων (1943–1944) και η αποτύπωσή της: Μαρτυρίες, λογοτεχνία και ιστοριογραφία” [The Genocide of the Greek Jews and its Imprint: Testimonies, Literature and Historiography’] in Η εποχή της σύγχυσης. Η δεκαετία του ‘40 και η ιστοριογραφία [The time of confusion: the 1940s and Historiography] ed. Antoniou Giorgos and Nikos Marantzidis. Athens: Estia, 2008. ———. Η ανάδυση μιας δύσκολης μνήμης. Κείμενα για τη γενοκτονία των Εβραίων [The unearthing of a difficult memory. Texts on the Jewish genocide]. Athens: Estia, 2013.

CONSTRUCTING PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE IN MIGRANT FICTION

Chapter Three

Poetry Traversing History Narrating Louis Tikas in David Mason’s Ludlow Yiorgos Anagnostou

On April 20, 1914, a strike for basic labor rights by 1,200 miners and their families, mostly immigrants, was violently ended by the National Guard and mine guards in the coal fields of Ludlow, Colorado. This infamous historical event, now referred to simply as “Ludlow” or the “Ludlow Massacre,” was “the most notorious example of open class warfare in American history.”1 The strikers’ tent colony, set in the now-ghost-town of Ludlow, was machine gunned and burned to the ground, leaving more than twenty people dead, including women and children. Louis Tikas, an immigrant from the island of Crete and organizer for the United Mine Workers of America union, was shot in the back in cold blood, as were two other strikers. One of the “bleakest and blackest” chapters in American labor history, and commemorated by the labor movement as a key symbol of workingclass struggle and sacrifice against exploitation, the events at Ludlow illustrate the synergy of state and capital to brutally suppress labor.2 Ludlow is a historical event of immense political importance. As such, the Ludlow event invites reflection. Authors, scholars, artists, and communities, as well as institutions—the state, labor unions, churches—keep returning to Ludlow to (re)consider its significance. More than a century after its occurrence, the magnitude of Ludlow’s horror still haunts the nation, a disturbing memory of unleashed violence conventionally displaced, “written out of the space of national memory” though it “remains a vital and living ‘place’ in the memory of organized labor.”3 Increasingly, Ludlow is remembered locally, nationally, and internationally outside the labor movement. It represents a site of public memory, and a disputed one because religious, national, vernacular, and scholarly interpretations assign to it divergent, often contradictory, meanings. Ludlow “was a tragedy, an accident, a travesty, depending 49

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upon your point of view,” playwright and poet Brighde Mullins remarks.4 In other words, how we define and interpret Ludlow is a contested issue. The lack of agreement over the commemoration of Ludlow extends to the question of the role of the immigrant participants in the strike. This question is fraught with difficulties given that the archive is scant regarding their subjectivities. How does one come to know with any degree of certainty the identifications that motivated immigrant participation in the labor struggle? There is a great deal at stake in understanding the conditions that propelled the immigrant strikers to act the way they did. Was it an Old World code of honor, or a working-class consciousness raised in the immigrants’ encounters with New World exploitation? Was it perhaps both? What role did religion play in their actions? Seeking answers to these questions means sorting out multiple interpretations and identifying historically reliable renderings of the past. This quandary over credible interpretations of Ludlow’s immigrant strikers provides the departure point for my discussion. The inquiry into authoritative historical reconstruction matters for yet another reason. It helps us recognize how a wide range of contemporary narratives (national, labor, ethnoreligious) interpret immigrants’ motivations selectively for their own purposes. Being able to identify the most persuasive rendering of the Ludlow past illuminates what other renderings exclude in their ideological uses of Ludlow in the present. Scholarship (history, archaeology, oral history, cultural studies) and the arts (poetry, opera, popular song) each engage separately with the question of strikers’ identifications, though notably there have been instances where the two—scholarship and the arts—occasionally converse with one another. David Mason’s poem Ludlow: A Verse-Novel offers a notable example, one that interlaces poetry and history in the telling of Ludlow. I make this text the focal point of my inquiry in relation to its representation of a real historical character, Louis Tikas. Born Ilias Anastasios Spantidakis (1886–1914), Tikas was an immigrant and a union organizer whose life entangled a village on the island of Crete—the place of his birth—and the state of Colorado—the place of his immigration.5 I wish to examine whether a poem, a product of exercising the imagination, illuminates in some way history, a product of interpreting facts. I argue that the text of Ludlow presents a persuasive representation of the historical Tikas and subsequently complicates competing interpretations of that past. Relying on facts to reconstruct the historical Tikas presents a historiographical problem. The scarce archive regarding his life, even more dire in relation to his pre-American past, renders this figure elusive. To what degree is it possible to reliably narrate the historical Tikas? How is art or scholarship to magnify “[t]his footnote nearly lost from pages of the history books”?6



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“The search for Louis Tikas is a search for a shadow, an almost vanished memory,” author Wallace Stegner writes.7 It appears impossible to recover the richness of this historical person’s inner sense of self. The “real” Tikas unavoidably resides at the border of fact and fiction. In the pioneering and most authoritative reconstruction of this subject’s life, Zeese Papanikolas anchors his work to the available archive, elicits oral narratives, but also resorts to imagination to piece together a story out of scant and fragmentary evidence. “What I am about to write,” he notes about his book Buried Unsung, “is hardly fiction, nor is it quite history.”8 It “is speculative and it is full of doubts, a work of reconstruction, of guesses as well as facts. And so it is a work of the imagination.”9 This interweaving of fact and fiction has led some to relegate Buried Unsung to the status of folkloric history and thus “lesser” history. But this downgrading misses the project’s reflective engagement with the historiographical quandary of how to recover historical subjects for whom the official archive is thin at times, silent at others. Unofficial sources such as oral history, vernacular lore, and contingent evidence provide Papanikolas the route to inscribe a subject previously seen as one “without past” into history.10 In restoring a degree of visibility to Tikas’s pre-American life and the manner in which this past connects with his better known American biography, Buried Unsung confronts the official historiography of its era on at least two interrelated counts: it challenges the privilege it accords to the written record, and in turn it demonstrates that the purportedly comprehensive truth that this official record produces is only partial. A claim of knowing Tikas with absolute certainty is in itself a fiction. The verse-novel Ludlow, as a poem, builds on the insights of Buried Unsung and reanimates its historiographical questions. David Mason, the poet laureate of Colorado, creates poetry that is metered and in blank verse, narrative verse that “braids fact and fiction.”11 It assembles its narration on imagination, historical evidence, poetic tropes, and scholarship. Readers may puzzle over my decision to turn to a poem to explore questions of historical construction, for Ludlow is explicit in constructing its characters imaginatively. It wholly invents, for instance, one of its main female characters, Luisa Mole, a woman of Welsh and Mexican ancestries. It is also clear about the role of artistic creativity in the narrative construction of the male protagonist, Louis Tikas: “Imagination’s arrogance is all / I bring to this, a storyteller’s hope/ of touching life in others, a poet’s love / of tropes and cadences, the sway of words.”12 In the afterword too, Mason makes a point of acknowledging the reign of the imagination in construing Tikas: “I have also felt free to imagine Louis’s mind, using my own experience of having lived in Greece. I even gave him a sex life.”13 Ludlow places fictionality at its center, marking itself as a self-referential poem, a work of art that unmistakably

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brings attention to itself as a literary artifact. The poet leaves no doubt about Ludlow as an imaginative reconstruction. This is an important reminder, of course, that art constructs its own diegetic world rather than reflecting reality. But it also raises a vital question regarding the role of poetry in relation to the historiography of immigrant subjectivity. Ludlow imagines Tikas’s private life; it brings to life inner experiences and feelings that largely escape the historical archive. What is the historical significance of this poetic evocation, if any? I will return to this thread later when I further reflect on the convergences between the language of poetry and the language of history in the narration of the past. Another thread in the poem raises a whole new set of questions, prompting thoughtful reflection on the way in which a poet evokes the past, and consequently the way in which poetry engages with history. Mason’s decision to turn an actual historical figure into Ludlow’s male protagonist inevitably brings history deeper into the fabric of the poem, raising the question of the ethics and politics of representation in the poetic evocation of a legendary historical figure. This specific intertwining between poetry and history is the focus of my chapter. Even though it acknowledges its status as fiction, Ludlow does not neglect the value of facts. It is a piece of art strikingly attentive to the scholarship of the historical realities it fictionalizes. It is a partial reconstruction, to be sure, but nevertheless one anchored in the historical archive: “We piece together Tikas as we make / our own past from what evidence we find.”14 The poet is deeply indebted to historical writings to align its poetic telling with historiographical findings, and some of these intellectual debts are explicit. For example, the seminal work of Zeese Papanikolas looms large in the text: “There are photographs and there are books, / the best by Papanikolas, who found / more because he sought more—in libraries, / in voices of the old.”15 Though the speaker makes no acknowledgment of additional scholarly debts, a reading of Ludlow against relevant scholarship illuminates its close conversation with the historiography of that era. Mason’s is an interpretive reconstruction of course. The poet knows that history is not the enumeration but the narration of facts, the result of the questions we ask in the present about the past, the ways by which we place certain facts next to each other to make meaning: “There are the facts, but facts are not the story.”16 The poem recognizes its simultaneous harnessing of the power of fiction and the power of fact. The imaginative creation of Tikas and the known path of that historical figure interweave a narrative that is impossible to illuminate without understanding the manner in which Ludlow entangles poetry with history. One narrative arc in the poem coupled with its construction of the historical Tikas reveals that the mapping of his regional (Cretan), ethnic (Greek-



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American), post-ethnic, and national identities (Greek and American) takes place in close alignment with the ways in which the historiography of the United States and Greece narrates the respective identities in the corresponding historical context. The poem’s reliance on history authoritatively constructs a historically credible character and injects a refreshing level of sociological and historical nuance into the conversation about Louis Tikas’s identities. It construes him as a hyphenated subject, a Greek-American, and in so doing it underlines this subject’s plurality. The text then performs an interventionist function: it offers a counternarrative to those national narratives that claim a singular identity for this subject. To illuminate Ludlow’s intervention in the representation of Tikas, I place this poem in relation to a Greek narrative that claims Tikas as a national subject. But let us first note that Ludlow enters a terrain of crisscrossing representations where an impressive range of academic disciplines, a variety of institutions, and several modes of storytelling place the Ludlow incident at the center of their interests. For the labor movement, Ludlow is a symbol of collective mobilization against class exploitation. For the academy and the arts, Ludlow is an object of knowledge and source of inspiration and represents the raising of political consciousness regarding class-related issues. Monuments commemorate the event though there has also been opposition to this recognition. The humanities and the social sciences—history and archaeology in particular—document and comment on Ludlow’s significance. Journalism and biography popularize it. Filmmakers cast their lens to bring it closer to wide audiences. Poetry evokes it and opera performs it. Popular song returns to it, and painting puts it in its interpretive canvas. Ludlow therefore is more than a historical event. It is a field of cultural production where narratives in a wide variety of domains—education, national and international media, local communities, religion, and the arts, among others—probe its significance and claim it for their own purposes. Ludlow functions as a “cultural field” where society debates, often in intense conflict, issues of vital political importance: relations of capital and labor, immigrant exploitation, the memory of state-sponsored violence, and the ideological uses of the past, among others. This terrain is contested and therefore draws attention to questions of authorship. Who claims valid knowledge about Ludlow and the subjectivities of the immigrant participants? Questions regarding the uses of this knowledge are inevitably raised too. What purpose do particular narratives serve? The idea of Ludlow as a cultural field allows the examination of the way Ludlow, the poem, portrays one of Ludlow’s most celebrated historical figures, Louis Tikas, whose brutal murder during the negotiations for a cease­ fire during the confrontation between the National Guard and the strikers has

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turned him into a working-class legend. Tikas himself represents a cultural field on its own. He is the subject of oral history, biography, hagiography, poetry, public commemoration, documentary, song and music, media commentary, painting, scholarship, and journalism. And, as I have noted, the depictions of Tikas in this cultural field, as we would expect, are often conflicting. Scholars writing from a Greek Orthodox perspective portray Tikas as an Orthodox martyr,17 while the labor movement claims Tikas as a political martyr of American unionism. The Greek media, in addition, construe him as a national (Greek) hero while popular culture places Tikas as a national (American) subject. I turn to Ludlow as a text operating within the Ludlow/ Tikas cultural field to show that in this terrain of cross-cutting representations the poem makes visible what other narratives fail to acknowledge. Ludlow narrates this immigrant beyond a single national identity, as a hyphenated Greek-American subject. Mason’s Ludlow places Tikas as a fictional character in a social environment where identities are multiple, shifting, and partial. Immigrants navigate available national, ethnoreligious, and regional identities, confer identities to each other—which they negotiate—and imagine possibilities for new identifications. When the fictional Tikas says, “Den eimai Romaios, eimai Kritikόs. / I’m not a Greek, I am a Cretan,”18 the poet construes a poetic persona for Tikas that asserts the primacy of regional Cretan identity.19 At this moment in the story, the historical Tikas finds himself in Denver in 1912, six years after he arrived in the country and two years after he applied for American citizenship. The speaker still posits Tikas’s birth village as the source of deep belonging: “[H]ome was Loutra, poverty, the house, / the olive press, his father serving coffee.”20 But in addition to this diasporic identification, a host of additional identities enter the conversation too. Gus Kutsofes, an immigrant from the town of Corinth and in historical time Tikas’s business partner in their co-owned coffeehouse in Denver, Colorado, enters the conversation: “‘Cretan and Corinthians, we’re all Greek.’ / ‘Yes,’ said Louis, soaking a rusk in oil / and yolk, ‘but we had to come to America / to make it happen.’ ‘Soon we’ll all be Greeks. Greek-Americans. / Whatever we want.’”21 Gus introduces the idea of an emerging hyphenated identity, and moves one step further, to advance the American ideology of identity as choice; identity as a product of personal agency. The poem has immigrants imagine new ways of relating to the host country as they internalize and consent to its dominant ideology of voluntary affiliation, becoming American in this manner too. Identity in these exchanges is a matter of both being and becoming. All this talk of existing and emerging identities does not represent poetic license. These identity positions were indeed historically available for immigrants at the time. For example, the identity claim by the immigrant



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from Corinth, a town that was part of the Greek state in 1912, internalizes the Greek national narrative: regional linguistic and cultural identifications, particularly powerful among Greek-speaking rural populations throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century,22 are seen as being superseded by a common national identity. It was indeed in the United States, as the poem suggests and historiography asserts, that a Greek national consciousness ultimately superseded (but did not obliterate) all-powerful regional identifications among various immigrant populations who originated from within and outside the boundaries of the Greek state. As historian Yannis Papadopoulos notes, for populations from areas outside the Greek kingdom at the time, “attachment to Greek state institutions and solidarity with Greeks from other provinces of Greece and the Ottoman empire were not self-evident”:23 The Greek- or Turkish-speaking Orthodox emigrants from Asia Minor and Thrace did not necessarily identify themselves with the irredentist policy of the Greek state. Greek diplomats considered the immigration experience to be a way for immigrants to assimilate the dominant discourse of the “Great Idea” through social intercourse with Greeks from mainland Greece. As the Greek consul in Adrianople (Edirne), Leon S. Matlis, wrote . . . [:] “All, without exception, have Greek as a mother tongue and are Orthodox Christians; nevertheless, there is a great need for the benevolent impact of frequent social intercourse with other Greeks in America. Unfortunately, the Thracians’ national conscience, their patriotic feeling, is very little developed.”24

Nevertheless, this situation does not necessarily apply to the historical Tikas. Historical evidence points to a simultaneous operation of a pre-immigration national (Greek) and regional (Cretan) identity for this subject.25 But upon immigration, as the poem conveys, the historical Tikas did embrace a range of new subject positions, including that of Americanization and post-ethnicity. Tikas entered a particular path toward Americanization via a newfound political identity, that of union organizer, and the historical archive allows us glimpses into this side of his identity, from reports to testimonies to photographs of Tikas with other labor leaders. I show that Ludlow narrates this Americanization into the working-class movement and it construes the impact of this process on the fictional Tikas’s practices of identity in close alignment with the available historical knowledge about that era. My analysis illuminates that there is considerable correspondence between the historical evidence about Tikas’s real life and the poetic reconstruction of this figure’s significant departure from certain Cretan customary and Greek national practices, such as regional and national antagonisms, and thus the reconfiguration of his Old World identities. The poem displays a particularly shifting terrain of identity, namely the transformation of an immigrant from one who lacks political consciousness of

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class exploitation (allegedly Tikas was first hired in the mines as a scab) to one who joins the union and becomes an active participant in the American labor movement. Within six years after his emigration, the newcomer from agrarian Crete enmeshes himself into a working-class identification in industrial America and the discipline in conduct demanded by organized labor.26 When the poem reconstructs this dramatic trajectory, it builds on historical scholarship, this time border theory. Life and work in the mines placed immigrants within a borderland of class, ethnic, and racial divisions. Laborers of various nationalities and racial identities, foremen, and representatives of the companies were operating within a volatile and violent “zone of contact,” a social space of interethnic and intraclass mixing where racism, including among the laborers’ ranks, and class oppression were rampant. Unsafe working conditions induced an ever-present fear of fatal accident. Theft in the scales and nonpayment of overtime were a source of rage. Company policies that monitored the spatial movement and consumer options of the miners were stifling. Everyday racism was taxing to the soul. Immigrants understood, Sarah Rudd writes, drawing from the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, “that to ‘survive the Borderlands’ one must live without borders and ‘be a crossroads.’”27 Being at a crossroads was a new social location for the immigrants, one in which their regional or national identifications had to take into account encounters with cultural Others. Survival required transcending national animosities fueled by nationalism and abandoning Old World customary laws. Living without borders meant crossing into new identities and ways of relating with Others. Tikas’s emerging political identity as a union organizer was a new identity outside structures of tradition, “born in a zone of contact,”28 a space where diverse cultures mix and collide. It was “the material conditions of everyday life,”29 exceedingly taxing to endure, that brought about a dramatic reconstitution of immigrant subjectivity. Ludlow registers the notoriously exploitative workplace. Pay was meager: “he worked that day / for nothing but new calluses and sweat / . . .”30 Daily injustices in the workplace, associated with the racism of foremen and guards, fermented the drive for collective resistance: The men who argued at the scales were beaten / senseless by the guards while Tikas watched, / but each night after work the Greeks would talk / of apergies, strikes . . . and how long they would wait / and what some unarmed men could do to guards.31

Under these conditions, amply documented by historians,32 it was the union that offered the historically available route to collectively battle the harsh bleakness of coal-producing labor in the borderlands. For the immigrants, union membership required a range of new modes of conduct, a set of rules and regulations in contradistinction to Old World social practices. To begin,



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Old World ethnic animosities had to be disciplined, as solidarity across national divisions was paramount for the strength of the collective mobilization. Working-class solidarity was an imperative to battle the company’s tactics to import miners, often scabs, from “a variety of different ethnic groups to hinder communication and increase divisiveness among the miners.”33 Ludlow speaks to this formation of the immigrant as a new political subject who embraces working-class solidarity across ethnic differences: “Legends of Tikas: a train car spilled Bulgarian scabs / at Ludlow, and the Greek, who might have sought revenge / for fallen comrades in the Balkan War, instead / went out to meet the men, explain the strike to them / and talk them into joining.”34 And this, in relation to racism toward African Americans: Another load of scabs—these men were black, and Greeks / ran shouting “Mavri, mavri,” as if the devil had come, / and some of the blacks were beaten, / but here too Tikas stopped the fights, so legend says, / declaring that even Niggers (the word he used) were men / and should be given the respect due every man.35

Class solidarity demanded the transcendence of national and racial divisions. It opened a new social space where immigrants were called to see others and themselves beyond the particularities of ethnic identity and in alignment with universal working-class interests, even if the union itself did not always deliver this ideal in actual practice. “On the whole,” as historian Thomas Andrews writes, “strikers upheld a vision of Americanism best summarized by the old republican motto, E pluribus unum.” Camp members from more than twenty nationalities cooperated, “forging a whole that transcended the sum of its parts.”36 The clash of classes in the borderland also entailed a “clash of cultures.”37 The imperative of conformity to the union’s strategies of resistance demanded that immigrants abandon Old World modes of fighting oppression. Greek miners were seen as an intractable problem in this respect, as they often tended to resort to militancy—armed struggle—and acts of interpersonal vengeance, practices attributed to their experience in the Balkan Wars and Greek historical modes of armed resistance against foreign occupation.38 Hence Tikas’s crucial role as a mediating force to align the Greek laborers with labor union policy. If Greeks were positioned to enter the “industrial war,” they had to engage it within the parameters of the union, not within their past histories of resistance. In Tikas’s report to the United Mine Workers of America Secretary Treasurer (District 15), on August 28, 1913, he notes: Conditions in the Southern Coal Fields of this state are so tyrannus [sic], the injustices, brutalities and cohersions [sic] heaped upon the miners are such, that I found the spirit manifested among my three hundred and fifty countrymen

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working there to be that of war. They are ready at any time . . . to engage in an industrial war and to fight, just as their fathers and brothers in the fatherland have fought the Turks until their freedom has been obtained.39

Understanding the conditions in the borderlands helps us grasp the circumstances that prompted immigrants to move beyond pre-American modes of identification and action. The realities of the borderlands confronted the ever-present realities of that past. They pressed for conscious deliberation regarding ways to address immigrants’ new circumstances to best serve their class interests. This self-reflection in the context of pressing conditions explains the enabling of some immigrants to move beyond deeply-seated understandings of how to resist oppression. If the latter entailed tactics of guerrilla warfare, the industrial war necessitated organized opposition under the union’s guidance. In other words, Old War modes of resistance were misaligned with those required by the modernity of the New World. This fault line between the new and the preexisting in a moment of crisis drives individuals to question habitual ways of behaving, bringing about “rational and conscious computation” for coping via new strategies.40 The pressure that borderland conditions exerted on the immigrant body and psyche ruptured enduring social practices associated with the regional culture of immigrant origins, contributing to the formation of new identities. Ludlow captures this strained transformation, evoking the work conditions assaulting the miners’ senses, making work unbearable: “The first day Louis Tikas hauled a pick / beneath the earth, smelling sweat and mule shit, / kerosene and dust, he felt his heart / screaming to be let out.”41 Consciousness of exploitation as well as the high probability of fatal mine disasters contributed to the urgency of resisting the system. Survival in the borderlands required collapsing national and racial borders through the political act of joining the union and strikes: “Some little guy named Tikas, ram-rod straight / in sweater and work boots like he owned the joint / said, ‘I bring to the union sixty-three Greeks!’”42 The historically new American and post-ethnic identities of the immigrants as unionized working class, including Tikas’s, cannot possibly be understood independently from the borderlands of class exploitation and racism that indelibly marked immigrants’ experience as laborers. The expression of immigrant cultural identities was also linked with organized labor. For, at the time, working-class Americanism collided with “pure Americanism,” an ideology that rendered hyphenated immigrants as undesirables. “[T]here is no room in this country for hyphenated Americans,” Theodore Roosevelt stated in a 1915 speech to the nation. “[A] hyphenated American is not an American at all. This is just as true . . . of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen.”43 But “labor’s version of Americanism”44 “embraced the concept of cultural pluralism, if



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only in the interests of labor solidarity.”45 Respect of other people’s identities, and therefore recognition of one’s own national and racial uniqueness, was valued to promote interracial and cross-cultural togetherness within the labor’s socialization of the immigrants into American democratic and patriotic ideals. Working-class Americanism accommodated differences, due to a large extent to the political exigencies of recruiting immigrants to its ranks. But there was also immigrant agency. Immigrants “fashioned their identities out of their own experiences, the language and ideas they brought with them, and those they” were exposed to in their interfaces with the union.46 In this context, Louis Tikas could perform his new American identity, as a labor leader, and, in another context, sport his Cretan identity with no trace of contradiction. The festivities associated with the Greek Orthodox Easter Sunday celebration on April 19, the day before the assault on the strikers’ tent colony and Tikas’s murder, speak to this cultural intermingling, which eyewitness testimonies have recorded and Ludlow evokes: On Sunday the spitted meat was turned above the coals / and Greeks announced that Christ was risen. And that day / women played a game of baseball, while the men / cheered and hooted, drank from heavy barrels of beer. / Louis donned his Cretan cap, his boots and breeches / Greeks from Peloponnesos, Greeks from Roumeli, / some in costume, some in common working clothes, / danced to lyra and bouzouki, circling the fire, / . . .47

Louis Tikas: the American citizen, the unionist, the advocate of workingclass Americanism, the post-ethnic. Ilias Anastasios Spantidakis: the Cretan, the Greek, the diaspora Cretan. This historical figure resists the conferring of a unitary identity. To capture this terrain of parallel, shifting, partial, and emergent identities, David Mason hyphenates Tikas. This is marked centrally in the poem. Mason uses the label “The Greek-American”48 as the title of the section on Tikas’s formative years in Colorado. This is a section in close conversation with history, a route that establishes the multitude of Tikas’s identities. This hyphenation also carries a historical corollary, albeit implicitly, that of the public circulation of an institutional Greek-American identity within immigrant Greek America at the time.49 Mason’s use of the hyphen is not accidental. As Jennifer DeVere Brody reminds us, “the hyphen performs—it is never neutral or natural.” It “marks a space of suspension . . . a trope of perpetual tension.” The hyphen makes visible on the page those “intermediate, often invisible and shifting spaces”50 that may operate within immigrant and diaspora subjectivities, in contrast to the neat homogeneity that a national identity seeks to assert. Tikas, not wholly national: “almost a Greek, almost American.”51 The plurality and intermediacy of the hyphen confronts the unifying function of the national.

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Ludlow’s investment in the historically centered evocation of Tikas offers an authoritative reconstruction, partial to be sure yet a historically and sociologically informed approximation of this subject’s range of identifications. Grounding this figure in scholarship, Ludlow gestures to the reader to accept with relative reliability, and within the severe limitations of a meager historical archive, that the sign “Tikas” translates into a multiplicity of identities instead of a singular one. This is the political work the poem performs: in its fairly dependable recognition of the subject’s plurality it assertively confronts any account that claims this figure’s singularity. Ludlow builds on history to acknowledge the complexity of the past and establish a convincing counterclaim to any narrative that casts Tikas as a unitary subject. This observation connects Ludlow with ideas and institutions beyond the event itself; it places the poem within the cultural field “Tikas/Ludlow.” Because a cultural field always animates relations between a particular event and the discourses that make it their object of inquiry, it is imperative to examine the ways in which the poem relates to other narratives—religious, national, transnational, labor—about Ludlow. Moreover, because a cultural field is always a field of struggle where one interpretation vies to establish its truth over another, these questions direct attention to the manner in which particular claims and counterclaims clash to authorize their own version of Ludlow.  One way that Ludlow’s hyphenated Tikas intervenes in this cultural field is by challenging Tikas’s appropriation by the Greek media as a national hero, an ideology that inundated the public domain on the occasion of the release of the documentary Palikari: Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre.52 Journalists, commentators, filmmakers, and bloggers in Greece portray Tikas as brave and noble, ultimately a national hero. Their accounts interweave personal and family heroism, attributes which in turn they connect with regional—Cretan—heroism, and eventually the heroism of the nation. Tikas is seen as someone who transplants the national value of resistance against oppression and performs it against labor exploitation in the United States. Consequently, he is extolled as a “wondrous Greek,” “our own Louis.” Brave and one of our own, Tikas exemplifies the heroic nation. The national narrative does reproduce an idealized version of the concentric model of Cretan identity,53 albeit neglecting to take into account the constitutive role of the American experience in shaping Tikas’s subjectivity. Historians and archaeologists of Ludlow alert against this national reading. “We must . . . avoid the temptation,” Philip Duke writes, “to see Tikas simply as a transplanted palikari (a courageous young Cretan man who epitomized the struggle for freedom against the Ottoman empire).”54 Ludlow’s historical reconstruction authorizes this position too. As I have shown, immigrant union activism was



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realized as political identity born out of the border zone of labor experience in the American West, not merely as transplanted national identity. Why should this matter? It matters because to recognize the constitutive role of the American experience in shaping the immigrants’ life trajectory and identifications is to acknowledge the syncretic aspects of diaspora experiences. It means to understand diaspora transnationally instead of nationally. As I have explained elsewhere, the hyphenation in the immigrant subject confronts the ideological homogenization of the diaspora as a seamless extension of the nation.55 Ludlow’s poetic reconstruction of a historical figure participates in a conversation of wider critical concern, namely the question of reclaiming the voices of those who contributed to the making of history but who have been underrepresented in history’s archive. There is an ethical dimension in this issue—namely, how to bring these voices into representation without violating the subjectivities that are spoken about. And there is a political aspect as well. The manner by which representations are construed matters because representations perform the ideological work of advancing particular (national, religious, class) interests at the expense of alternative perspectives. Hence the importance of artists, authors, and scholars in shaping inclusive representation and reflecting on the ethics and politics of such representation. In the narrative thread that I discuss in this chapter, Ludlow engages with these questions via a close conversation with history. Given the uncertainties regarding Tikas’s subjectivity, the speaker in the poem construes a partial yet historically and sociologically sound approximation of the range of identities that Tikas must have negotiated in real-life. Poetry traverses history to produce a historical figure who is not fixed as a unitary subject. The poem relies on context to refrain from assigning a definitive national identity to its subject, and in doing so it illuminates the complexity of identity during that era, as well as the problem of its representation. In this respect, Ludlow alerts contemporary cultural producers, including filmmakers, authors, critics, journalists, and the media in general to the difficulty of recovering these identities, and underlines the ethical and political responsibility for bringing the nuances of the past into representation in the present. An additional narrative route in Ludlow’s evocation of immigrant subjectivity travels through sheer poetic imagination. As I mentioned previously, a thread in the poem explicitly imagines Tikas. It visualizes his most intimate moments, including those that take place in brothels. Or it ventures into picturing Tikas sleepless, yearning for the sensual pleasures of his natal place—the sea, the smells—missing what “was almost freedom.”56 Or his ambivalences, even outright critique of America. This poetic excavation of private moments brings to life experiences and feelings that largely escape

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the historical archive. Notably, the poet undertakes imaginatively what a historian, according to the historiography of subjectivity, must undertake ethnohistorically. For as Michel Foucault has it, the obligation of the historian is to “seek [the singularity of events] in the most uncompromising places, in what we tend to feel is without history—in sentiments, love, conscience, instincts.”57 History’s turn to subjectivity and Ludlow’s respective poetic interest in these “most uncompromising places” converge then in valuing precisely the exploration of areas of human experience that are prone to elude the archive. In this second unexplored route, Ludlow relies on the imagination to construct the subjectivity of a historical figure. In doing so it places itself in conversation with historiography at yet another level, beyond the aim of persuading the reader of the truth of its reconstruction. In the example of Ludlow, poetry contributes to bringing the complexity of history deeper into the cultural fabric of society. In its narrative accessibility, this verse-novel promotes public history. But it also fuels the conversation between the arts and scholarship, for artists and scholars to learn from each other’s perspectives and angles of inquiry; from each other’s language. “A story is the language of desire,” the poet writes.58 Ludlow animates the desire to continue narrating immigration; it feeds the urge to mine the complexity of the past in the language of poets and scholars. Scholars have been striving to meet the language of poetry and poets have been working to intersect with the language of scholarship to illuminate life experiences and the social world. Both communities stand to gain by continuing to cultivate this language, the language that Ludlow, certainly, unequivocally, performs admirably. Acknowledgments: I thank Eric L. Ball, Yannis Papadopoulos, and Zeese Papanikolas who read the manuscript in various stages and offered valuable insights. I express my appreciation to the editors of this volume for their collaborative spirit and substantive feedback. NOTES 1.  Dean Saitta, Mark Walker, and Paul Reckner, “Battlefields of Class Conflict: Ludlow Then and Now,” Journal of Conflict Archaeology 1 (2005): 200. 2.  Wallace Stegner, “Foreword,” in Papanikolas, Zeese. Buried Unsung: Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1982): xvii. 3.  Saitta et al., “Battlefields,” 208. 4.  Brighde Mullins, “A Person with a Name,” review of David Mason’s Ludlow: A Verse Novel. The Dark Horse (Summer 2007): 84. 5. Approximately five hundred thousand individuals, the majority men, immigrated to the United States during the first mass wave of immigration (1890–1922) from Greece and Greek communities of the Ottoman Empire. They were a part of the



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vast immigration wave predominantly from southeastern Europe to a rapidly industrializing United States. It is estimated that by 1910 there were about eleven thousand Greeks working in the intermountain states of Utah, Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, and Idaho, mostly unskilled laborers in railroad construction and the mining industry. See Georgakas, “The Greeks.” 6.  David Mason, Ludlow: A Verse-Novel. (Pasadena, CA: Red Hen Press, 2007): 56. 7.  Stegner, “Foreword,” xvi. 8. Zeese Papanikolas, Buried Unsung: Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre. Foreword by Wallace Stegner. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1982): 7. 9.  Ibid., p. 8. 10.  Yiorgos Kalogeras, “Εθνοτικές γεωγραφίες: Κοινωνικο-πολιτισμικές ταυτίσεις μίας μετανάστευσης” [Ethnic Geographies: Sociocultural Identifications of a Migration]. (Κατάρτι, 2007): 212. 11. Mason, Ludlow, 224. 12.  Ibid., 79. 13.  Ibid., 224. 14.  Ibid., 79. 15. Ibid. 16.  Ibid., 135. 17.  Timothy Patitsas, “Remembering Tikas: A Pilgrimage to Loutra,” A Journal of Orthodox Faith and Culture: Road to Emmaus 3, no. 46 (Summer 2011): 56–62. 18. Mason, Ludlow, 46. 19.  The poet’s translation of Romaios (Roman) as Greek is not self-evident. Romaioi (plural) were Orthodox subjects of the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire, and then upon the Ottoman conquest the designation Romioi (the vernacular rendering of Romaioi) referred to the ecumenical Greek Orthodox community, which at the time was under the jurisdiction of the Orthodox Patriarchate in Istanbul. Belonging to this community signaled primary identification with the Patriarchate, and often underlined antagonistic tension when it came to the identification with the Greek state. Crete, Tikas’s birthplace, was part of the Ottoman Empire’s Orthodox millet (Millet-i Rum) until 1898 but remained under Ottoman sovereignty until the conclusion of the Balkan Wars (1912–1913) when it was officially integrated with Greece. “[E]migrants from the Ottoman empire identified themselves with the ethno-religious group (millet) to which they belonged (namely, the Millet-i Rum, that is, the Orthodox community instituted officially in the Ottoman empire during the Tanzimat reforms under the authority of the patriarch of Constantinople) and with their hometown or county of origin, rather than with a political authority, that is, either the Ottoman or the Greek state.” See Yannis G. S. Papadopoulos, “The Role of Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Class in Shaping Greek American Identity, 1890–1927: A Historical Analysis,” in Identity and Participation in Culturally Diverse Societies: A Multidisciplinary Perspective, edited by Assaad E. Azzi, Xenia Chryssochoou, Bert Klandermans, and Bernd Simon, 9–31, (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). 20. Mason, Ludlow, 47. 21.  Ibid., 51. 22.  Dimitris Tziovas, “Heteroglossia and the Defeat of Regionalism in Greece,” Kampos. Papers in Modern Greek 2 (1994): 95–120.

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23.  Papadopoulos, “The Role of Nationalism,” 14. 24.  Ibid., 13–14. 25.  Yiorgos Anagnostou, “Louis Tikas: Cretan and Greek Identities in Poetry and History,” 2017. http://immigrations-ethnicities-racial.blogspot.com/2017/10/louis-tikas -cretan-and-greek-identities.html. Accessed 31 October 2017. 26.  Kostis Karpozilos, “Κόκκινη Αμερική” [Red America]. (Πανεπιστημιακές Εκδόσεις Κρήτης, 2016). 27.  Sarah M. Rudd, “Harmonizing Corrido and Union Song at the Ludlow Massacre,” Western Folklore 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 37. 28.  Richard R. Flores, “The Corrido and the Emergence of Texas-Mexican Social Identity,” The Journal of American Folklore 105, no. 416 (Spring 1992): 174. 29.  Walker, cited in Rudd, “Harmonizing,” 37. 30. Mason, Ludlow, 85. 31.  Ibid., 87. 32.  James R. Barrett, “Americanization from the Bottom Up: Immigration and the Remaking of the Working Class in the United States, 1880–1930,” The Journal of American History, Discovering America: A Special Issue 79, no. 3 (December 1992): 996–1020. 33.  Walker, cited in Rudd, “Harmonizing,” 37. 34. Mason, Ludlow, 172. 35.  Ibid., 172. 36.  Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War. (Harvard University Press, 2008): 252. 37.  Philip Duke, “The Ludlow, Colorado, Coal Miners’ Massacre of 1914: The Greek Connection,” in The Archaeology of Xenitia: Greek Immigration and Material Culture, edited by Kostis Kourelis, 21–27. The New Griffon. Vol. 10. (Athens: Gennadios Library at the American School of Classical Studies, 2008): 21. 38.  Greek labor militancy fell into the hands of mine corporate owners who used it for their own purposes. In a letter to the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company (CF&I), which dominated mine operations in Colorado, stockholder Lamont Montgomery Bowers, a businessman and associate of John D. Rockefeller Sr., owner of CF&I, wrote: “the murderous Greeks who are now back here from the Turkish wars. These Greeks are nothing but bloodthirsty devils, and the labor leaders are back of them, supplying them with guns and ammunitions.” See Martelle, Blood Passion, 93. This explains the union’s urgency to discipline labor resistance. 39.  Priscilla Long, Where the Sun Never Shines: A History of America’s Bloody Coal Industry. (New York: Paragon House, 1989): 267. 40.  Aaron C. Cargile, “Being Mindful of the Habitus of Culture,” China Media Research 7, no. 3 (2011): 13. 41. Mason, Ludlow, 84. 42.  Ibid., 88. 43.  Cited in Brody, Punctuation, 88. 44.  Barrett, “Americanization,” 1009. 45.  Ibid., 1010. 46.  Ibid., 1012. 47. Mason, Ludlow, 174.



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48.  Ibid., 4. 49.  See Papadopoulos, “The Role of Nationalism,” 23. 50. Brody, Punctuation, 85. 51. Mason, Ludlow, 53. 52.  Lambrini Thoma, Palikari: Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre. (A NonOrganic Production, 2014). 53.  Herzfeld, Michael. The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). 54.  Duke, “The Ludlow,” 25. 55. Yiorgos Anagnostou, “The Diaspora as a Usable Past for a Nation-in-Crisis: Media Readings of Palikari: Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre,” Filmicon: Journal of Greek Film Studies, Occassional Papers (November 5, 2014). http://filmiconjournal .com/blog/post/32/the_diaspora_as_a_usable_past_for_a_nation_in_crisis. Accessed 11 May 2017. 56. Mason, Ludlow, 140. 57. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, CounterMemory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by Donald F. Bouchard, 139–64. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977). 58. Mason, Ludlow, 57.

WORKS CITED Anagnostou, Yiorgos. “Louis Tikas: Cretan and Greek Identities in Poetry and History.” (2017). http://immigrations-ethnicities-racial.blogspot.com/2017/10/louis-tikas-cre tan-and-greek-identities.html. Accessed October 31, 2017. ———. “The Diaspora as a Usable Past for a Nation-in-Crisis: Media Readings of Palikari: Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre.” Filmicon: Journal of Greek Film Studies, Occasional Papers, (November 5, 2014). http://filmiconjournal.com/ blog/post/32/the_diaspora_as_a_usable_past_for_a_nation_in_crisis. Accessed 11 May 2017. Andrews, Thomas G. Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 2nd edition. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999. Barrett, James R. “Americanization from the Bottom Up: Immigration and the Remaking of the Working Class in the United States, 1880–1930.” The Journal of American History, Discovering America: A Special Issue 79, no. 3 (December 1992): 996–1020. Brody, Jennifer DeVere. Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Cargile, Aaron Castelán. “Being Mindful of the Habitus of Culture.” China Media Research 7, no. 3 (2011): 11–20. Duke, Philip. “The Ludlow, Colorado, Coal Miners’ Massacre of 1914: The Greek Connection.” In The Archaeology of Xenitia: Greek Immigration and Material

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Culture, edited by Kostis Kourelis, 21–27. The New Griffon. Vol. 10. Athens: Gennadios Library at the American School of Classical Studies, 2008. Flores, Richard R. “The Corrido and the Emergence of Texas-Mexican Social Identity.” The Journal of American Folklore 105, no. 416 (Spring 1992): 166–82. Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by Donald F. Bouchard, 139–64. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977. Georgakas, Dan. “The Greeks in America.” Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora XIV, nos. 1 & 2 (1987): 5–53. Herzfeld, Michael. The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. Kalogeras, Yiorgos. “Εθνοτικές γεωγραφίες: Κοινωνικο-πολιτισμικές ταυτίσεις μίας μετανάστευσης.” [Ethnic Geographies: Sociocultural Identifications of a Migration]. Κατάρτι, 2007. Karpozilos, Kostis. Καρπόζηλος, Κωστής. “Κόκκινη Αμερική.” [Red America]. Πανεπιστημιακές Εκδόσεις Κρήτης, 2016. Long, Priscilla. Where the Sun Never Shines: A History of America’s Bloody Coal Industry. New York: Paragon House, 1989. Martelle, Scott. Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008. Mason, David. Ludlow: A Verse-Novel. Pasadena, CA: Red Hen Press, 2007. Mullins, Brighde. “A Person with a Name.” Review of David Mason’s Ludlow: A Verse Novel. The Dark Horse (Summer 2007): 84–88. Papadopoulos, Yannis G. S. “The Role of Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Class in Shaping Greek American Identity, 1890–1927: A Historical Analysis.” In Identity and Participation in Culturally Diverse Societies: A Multidisciplinary Perspective, edited by Assaad E. Azzi, Xenia Chryssochoou, Bert Klandermans, and Bernd Simon, 9–31. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Papanikolas, Zeese. Buried Unsung: Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre. Foreword by Wallace Stegner. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1982. Patitsas, Timothy. “Remembering Tikas: A Pilgrimage to Loutra.” A Journal of Orthodox Faith and Culture: Road to Emmaus 3, no. 46 (Summer 2011): 56–62. Rudd, Sarah M. “Harmonizing Corrido and Union Song at the Ludlow Massacre.” Western Folklore 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 21–42. Saitta, Dean, Mark Walker, and Paul Reckner. “Battlefields of Class Conflict: Ludlow Then and Now.” Journal of Conflict Archaeology 1 (2005): 197–213. Stegner, Wallace. “Foreword.” In Papanikolas, Zeese. Buried Unsung: Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1982. Thoma, Lambrini. Palikari: Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre. Directed and Edited by Nickos Ventouras. Original Score by Mangos Ventouras. A Non-Organic Production, 2014. Tziovas, Dimitris. “Heteroglossia and the Defeat of Regionalism in Greece.” Kampos. Papers in Modern Greek 2 (1994): 95–120. Walker, Mark. “The Ludlow Massacre: Class, Warfare, and Historical Memory in Southern Colorado.” Historical Archaeology 37, no. 3 (2003): 66–80.

Chapter Four

First-Person Past, Second-Person Present, and the Future of Now Gazmend Kapllani’s Transnational, Interpersonal Timescapes Karen Emmerich The immigration experience may and must be put to good use for a critical/ reformative reflection of the national self. —Konstantinos Tsitselikis, 20071

The first decades of the twenty-first century have seen a number of changes to Greek citizenship law, specifically regarding the children of immigrants who are born in Greece. Since the early days of the Hellenic Republic, citizenship has been based primarily on jus sanguinis (right of blood) rather than jus soli (right of the soil)—which is to say, Greek law has defined national belonging along bloodlines, encouraging a quasi-racially-defined sense of “Greekness.” To be born in Greece is not necessarily to be legally Greek, even if one might know no other country. Prior to 2010, while individuals determined to be of Greek descent living elsewhere in the world met with few legal or financial obstacles when applying for citizenship, children born in Greece of two non-Greek parents had no clear path to citizenship. Only as pressure mounted, including pressure exerted by external actors within the European Union, regarding the human as well as civil rights of the roughly 8 percent of the population characterized as “immigrants” (as well as the 1 percent of the population that has official or unofficial “minority” status), did lawmakers begin to broaden naturalization options for first- and second-generation “migrants”—the latter of whom would, again, elsewhere not be considered “migrants” at all, given that Greece was their place of birth.2 As Greek politicians, lawmakers, and other public figures debated this series of proposed changes, one “migrant voice” was also demonstrating a steadfast commitment to advocating in print for a more nuanced and compassionate understanding of the challenges facing the hundreds of thousands of 67

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non-citizen residents of Greece. Gazmend Kapllani, born in Albania in 1967, crossed the border into Greece in 1995. Despite his uncertain legal status, he learned Greek and earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Athens, followed by a PhD in political science and history from Panteion University. While pursuing doctoral research on images of Albanians and Greeks in Greek and Albanian media, respectively, he also actively intervened in that field as a weekly columnist for the newspaper Ta Nea, often focusing on his own and other immigrants’ experiences in Athens. In 2006, he published his first book, Μικρό ημερολόγιο συνόρων, translated into English by Anne-Marie Stanton-Ife as A Short Border Handbook in 2009 and subsequently into several other languages. Based once more on his own and others’ stories of migrant life, the book explores the causes and effects of what Kapllani calls “border syndrome”—an illness “difficult to describe,”3 which disproportionately strikes those born in poor places who cross geographical or political borders only to face invisible yet unwavering social, cultural, economic, linguistic, and legal borders as well. Even after you have “made it,” you can never be entirely cured, Kapllani writes: the illness continues to “sit there, in a latent state, wedged between time and space, wedged between your body and the gaze of others,” ready at any moment to make you “experience your body and your face and your origins as a burden.”4 A Short Border Handbook was certainly not the only book featuring migrants to appear in Greek around the turn of the twenty-first century. On the contrary, many novels reflected a cultural fixation with Greece’s most recent arrivals, often portraying them in a distinctly negative light. Consider, for instance, Petros Markaris’s 1995 Νυχτερινό Δελτίο (translated by David Connolly as Deadline in Athens for the US edition), written from the point of view of a hardened Greek detective for whom Albanians are mere violent thugs on whom crimes can be pinned easily and without consequences.5 Other books, meanwhile, continued a long-standing literary interest in the population exchange of the 1920s, or offered fictional accounts of Greek migrant experiences elsewhere in the world. Yet A Short Border Handbook stood apart for having been written by a non-native speaker of Greek—one who belonged, moreover, to an ethnic group widely disparaged in Greek popular media. Kapllani’s second book, Με λένε Ευρώπη [My name is Europe], published in 2010, expands this treatment of immigrant themes. Once again, it features a narrator who seems to be an alter ego for Kapllani. Interwoven with stories of his experience as a migrant, ranging from the 1990s to an imagined trip back to Albania in 2041, are sections presenting the first-person testimonials—many of which were previously published in his column in Ta Nea—of refugees and migrants both to and from Greece, as well as young



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men and women born in Greece but made stateless by Greece’s ethnicallybased citizenship laws. These two books, by combining the autobiographical, the biographical, and the fictional, become both indexes of and meditations on the commonalities between different individuals’ tales of border crossing and life on some “other” side. In the process, Kapllani offers a fierce, even activist critique of mechanisms of national belonging that are based on ethnic or racial exclusion. Konstantina Georganta has suggested that Kapllani’s radicality lies in the way he “proposes the figure of the immigrant as a symbol of identification in a changing Europe.”6 Even more radical, I believe, is Kapllani’s fundamental understanding of Europe (and not only Europe) as always having been engaged in processes of change, and the movement and heterogeneity of people(s) as a historical constant rather than a historical anomaly. In a recent lecture at Harvard, Kapllani noted his bafflement at the fact that both Greeks and Albanians, “people who travel so much and have a huge Diaspora,” and who lived “under multinational Empires for centuries [. . .] are so troubled by the idea of a mixed identity.”7 For Kapllani, raised under a totalitarian regime in Albania, the projection of a single, stable ethnonational identity feels particularly ominous; indeed, part of the project of both nationalism and totalitarianism is to emphatically, even violently deny the unsettled nature of identities of all sorts. Kapllani’s writing, on the contrary, continually undermines any conception of national, cultural, or even personal singularity or stability. In the pages that follow, I explore the narrative techniques by which he does so: Kapllani’s interspersing of the first and second person; his intermingling his “own” story and those of others; his invocation of the factual and the fictional alike, even in moments of supposed life-writing; and his collapsing of past, present, and future, partly in the service of drawing parallels between migration to and from Greece. In placing migrants’ experiences at the center of his investigation, Kapllani challenges conventional understandings of national belonging and promotes new modalities of a truly global citizenship, pointing toward a different potential future for Albania, Greece, Europe, and beyond. A Short Border Handbook weaves together two threads: non-italicized passages written in either the third- or second-person singular, presenting generalized thoughts on the migrant experience; and italicized, first-person passages offering a personal account of the narrator’s experiences. These italicized passages offer darkly humorous, almost cartoonish scenes of life in totalitarian Albania,8 then track the week it took the narrator to cross the recently-opened border along with thousands of fleeing others. The book opens with an italicized prologue that serves as a conceptual link between

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the narrator’s story and the broader musings on “border syndrome”9: “I’m not crazy about borders; I can’t honestly say I hate them, either. It’s just that they scare me, that’s all, and I always feel uncomfortable when I get too close to one. [. . .] Perhaps it’s because of my passport”10—an Albanian passport which, as a “bad” or “suspicious” passport, not only creates difficulties at every physical border crossing, but also serves as a constant reminder of the centrality of borders to his life even prior to his decision to leave Albania. After all, growing up in a totalitarian state meant growing up in a place where the transgression of borders—by means of Italian television or radio, or learning foreign languages, not to mention attempts at escape—was fraught with danger. This prologue doesn’t merely treat the narrator’s individual case but also gestures to broader social groups: the plural “you” referred to once or twice as an addressed subject (presumably the book’s Greek readership), as well as the “they” and “we” that appear as early as the second page: “Those who have never experienced the urge to cross a border, or who have never experienced rejection at a border, will have a hard time understanding us.”11 The first non-italicized passage of the book is titled “Why are you telling us all this?”—a question posed from the reader’s point of view—and offers an explicit response to the failure of imagination demonstrated by the very question itself: the migrant must tell his story, in hopes his non-migrant listeners may attain some vicarious understanding by following and perhaps even identifying with his narration. “The most he can hope for is that they will understand, first him, and then all those who cannot speak, who don’t know how to speak, who don’t have the courage to speak and who bury their narratives deep inside themselves instead.”12 This, then, is Kapllani’s project: to utilize his position as a public figure in order to advocate on behalf of his fellow immigrants who are less able to share their stories in the public sphere, in part because they do not share either his access to nationally-distributed print media or his fluency in Greek. Indeed, what interests me most in Kapllani’s work is his dexterous manipulation of linguistic elements in order to communicate—or, we might say, to create a grammatically coded representation of—the migrant experience. The strategic use of person and number, for instance, allows Kapllani to negotiate between the individual and the collective, and even to collapse the plural experiences of multiple migrants into a second-person singular, the “you” that appears for the first time in the third non-italicized section—a “you” that implicitly invites identification on the part of the reader. The title of this section, which Stanton-Ife translates as “The migrant in the realm of the imperative” is, in Greek, “Ο μετανάστης και το ‘βασίλειο των πρέπει,’” which might otherwise be translated as “The migrant and the ‘kingdom of musts,’” as the impersonal verb “πρέπει” is treated as a plural



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noun, these musts or have tos. This section, full of short sentences, repetitive syntax, and the ever-present imperative, grammatically embodies the urgency of the immigrant experience. Kapllani’s kingdom of musts is also a realm of the continuous present, one in which any imagined future can never stray too far from the here and now: the goals to be achieved are daily, weekly, or monthly at most: “You have to get a job. Any job. You have to survive. You have to find somewhere to live. [. . .] You have to, have to, have to . . . without end or expiry date. [. . .] Not for you the privilege of wanting.”13 Yet Kapllani is careful not to collapse all experiences into this one, communal “you.” The final sentence of this brief section explicitly recognizes that not all migrant stories are the same: “migrants, whatever their superficial similarities, differ from each other in exactly the way that everybody in the world differs from everybody else.”14 With that phrase, Kapllani addresses what some might lodge as a critique of the book, a discomfort with the way he speaks for others—those who “don’t know how to speak, who don’t have the courage to speak”—telling a story as if it applied to all first-generation migrants carrying “bad passports” or no passports at all. This recognition of the divergent nature of migrants’ stories will take more concrete shape in My Name is Europe, with the incorporation of first-person narratives describing the real-life experiences of multiple individuals. Even in this book, however, a careful reading begins to break down the illusion of a singular, communal experience fostered by the use of the secondperson singular. The first several passages in the first-person singular, which describe the narrator’s youth, are full of tales of his family’s and neighbors’ run-ins with party officials, gesturing to the range of ways of interacting with structures of power, from collusion to various forms of resistance—of transgression, or border-crossing, if you will—even within the tightly controlled borders of a totalitarian state. About a third of the way into the book, we move into a recounting of the narrator’s physical flight from Albania to Greece. These sections, too, demonstrate the variety of ways in which one can cross borders, as the “caravan of human beings” the narrator encounters on his way is not a mere mass of bodies but a gathering of individuals whose arrivals, much less stories, are not the same. One middle-aged man drops to the ground, weeping, mourning the seventeen years in prison that preceded this moment;15 another, far younger man is fixated on the idea that TV stations in the West show nothing but sex; while a female migrant discussed earlier in the book arrives, if she arrives at all, already having been the victim of sexual violence along the way. On reaching the nearest village, where a reception center has been set up for the thousands of refugees crossing the border by foot, those who speak Greek are singled out for their ethnic ties to the surrounding population.16 Even the narrator—who, like Kapllani, speaks Italian

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and French, and has begun learning English—is able to leave the reception center far faster than others because of his language skills. His basic English allows him to communicate first with a policeman who looks on him kindly, and then with a Greek filmmaker named Christos, who strikes up a conversation with him about Ismael Kadare and communism, and, after a brief interaction, invites him to ride back down with the crew to Athens, where he hosts the narrator in his apartment, lends him clothes, and helps him navigate his initial entry into the black-market workforce. Linguistic knowledge, here, seems to become an indication of education and culture, a guarantee of “worth”—and, perhaps, a testament to the willingness of even the well-intentioned to overlook the humanity of those with whom they are unable to communicate, since only the English-speaking narrator is “chosen” from among this mass of linguistically incomprehensible others to be given a helping hand. Likewise, an unfortunate Greek deaf-mute who gets swept up in the crowd at the refugee reception center is unable to prove his identity until provided with pen and paper on which to write his way to freedom—an incident that highlights the ultimately arbitrary nature of the ethnic, linguistic, geographical, and political borders that feature so centrally in this book. Yet if the acquisition of language is tantamount to the acquisition of culture, it remains sadly insufficient for the acquisition of untroubled cultural, much less political, belonging. Kapllani’s eventual mastery of Greek, as well as his first-hand knowledge of what it means not to speak Greek as an immigrant (rather than tourist) in Greece,17 is of course what allows him to write this book, to communicate something of the migrant condition to Greek-language readers—a condition with which many will already be familiar, as we are reminded by the narrator’s encounters with Greeks who have spent time as guest workers abroad, or by passing references to historical figures such as Louis Tikas, a Greek labor organizer shot and killed during a strike in Colorado in 1914. Yet knowledge of the local language is presented not only as a way of gaining entry, however partial or conditional, but also as a torment: “You learned the language so that you wouldn’t stick out any more, but you were only shooting yourself in the foot in the end. Because it is now that you really feel utterly and completely foreign. If you didn’t know the language, at least you’d be spared everything they say on the news,” where you often see projected “a magnified view of your dissonant, repellent, terrifying face.”18 Even still, language-learning is also an indication of the one hope for a long-term future—not for you but for your child, who “doesn’t speak broken Greek”19 and has grown up “thinking of himself as a native.”20 And yet your child’s future is, if anything, even more uncertain than yours: “He wants to make this country his own, because he has no other country to love.”21



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Both the Greek the English versions end with an epilogue, though the latter is not a translation of the former: Kapllani seems to have written a new text specifically for his Anglophone audience. In it, he returns to the frame initiated in the book’s prologue, describing the characteristics of “border syndrome” and sharing his “dream of a world in which there are no migrants,” which would also be “a world free of tyranny; a world free of poverty; above all a world free of the desire that people have to take control of their own destiny.”22 He ends with a brief meditation on the impulse to take control of others’ destinies: he imagines an immigration officer, born of immigrants, but ones Greek enough to ensure his own citizenship, “checking other people’s ‘bad passports,’ people who perhaps have the same passion [. . .] to put down roots here so that someday their own children might be able to carry a ‘cool’ passport in their pockets.”23 This imaginary officer becomes a figure of ironic exclusion, of the ways in which borders both signal exclusion and foment competition and antagonism, rather than solidarity and cohesion. He also becomes a hypothetical example of the fact that outsiderhood does not necessarily teach compassion for the next group of outsiders to arrive, particularly when arbitrary notions of ethnic belonging are allowed to shape political realities. A Short Border Handbook seems to end, then, with a figure of its own potential failure as a tool for advocacy. By the same token, this final image also highlights the urgency of Kapllani’s attempt to foster compassion by bringing otherwise divergent communities together into a transhistorical imagined community of migrants. The epilogue to the Greek version seems to have a far more specific objective: to convince Greek readers—addressed as “Honored ladies, honored gentlemen”—of the need for immigration reform. In it, Kapllani shares some of the difficulties he himself faced in obtaining legal resident status in the country, even after living in Greece for many years, graduating from a Greek university, and being gainfully employed by a newspaper with national distribution. In parts, the prose reads like a negative version of the “kingdom of musts” we encountered earlier: “You can’t sleep because you don’t have papers. You can’t dream because you don’t have papers. You can’t fall in love because you don’t have papers. You can’t plan for a future because you don’t have papers. [. . .] All you think about day and night is papers.”24 Anticipating his readers’ objections—“You’ll tell me, I came uninvited. Yes, I did.”25—he also draws on their familiarity with bureaucratic incompetence, narrating his attempts to stay on the right side of the law in both Greece and Albania, until the law itself becomes untenably contradictory. He ends with an appeal to reader’s sense of compassion: “In the place I came to, I’ve been working and living for all these years, and people still see me as a historical accident. And I love this country. It’s the country where I live. It’s the country where

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I’m raising my child. So why can’t I be allowed to live a dignified, human life?”26 This rhetorical question, followed by a closing address to his readers, seems to place responsibility for change in the hands of ordinary citizens. Yet while the understanding of the migrant to which Kapllani gestured at the beginning of the book can certainly be initiated on a cultural plane, it ultimately needs to pass into the realm of legal action: popular compassion or empathy is not enough; pressure must be brought to bear on political and legal structures as well. This epilogue is, in a sense, both a cry of despair and a gesture of hope. The tension between these two poles runs through A Short Border Handbook and comes to structure Kapllani’s next book as well. My Name is Europe also deals with issues of migration and national belonging, exposing the inequalities built into an international system in which human rights are variably protected by national governments, and where the gaps between one nation’s jus soli and another’s jus sanguinis will inevitably leave countless individuals legally stateless. Like his earlier book, My Name is Europe consists of two interwoven threads. In a series of non-italicized, numbered sections, a firstperson narrator who once again seems to be a Kapllani alter ego returns from Greece to visit his native Albania, now a part of the United States of Europe and a site of increased immigration, deep racism, and virulent nationalism. At a family dinner, his cousin’s wife expresses her distaste for Chinese immigrants and her objection to the government’s plan to confer citizenship on long-term residents: “With the mess of a government we have, they’ll wipe us off the face of the earth. You’re born an Albanian, you don’t become one. If they become Albanians, there goes the purity of our race!”27 Here, Kapllani echoes both the general rhetoric and an actual rallying cry of the Greek far right, projecting into an imagined future and onto a foreign country the current-day tensions surrounding both migration and the financial crisis that have beset Greece in recent years.28 Midway through the book, the passages recounting the returning expatriate’s impressions of a future Albania abruptly cease, giving way to a series of reminiscences of the narrator’s early days in Greece: his love affair with a woman named Evropi (Europe); the role linguistic and cultural education played in their relationship; her family’s leftist past; her communist grandmother’s years as a political exile. These passages seem to pick up, in a way, where the story of A Short Border Handbook left off, with the narrator’s induction into Greek society, this time by way of romance and passion—even by way of a community of women, who are mostly absent from that earlier book. This first-person narrative is punctuated by italicized passages of a very different nature. In this case, however, these passages are not general musings on the migrant experience, but specific narratives attributed to particular



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individuals identified by first name, many of which were originally published in Kapllani’s newspaper column. It is unclear whether, or to what extent, these narratives have been edited or otherwise shaped by Kapllani, though his choice of what to include certainly evinces a politicized approach to the question of citizenship and belonging. Many of these passages present the testimonials of refugees who came to Greece fleeing war, sexual violence, persecution, or abusive regimes in places such as Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan, and Pakistan. Others present the stories of individuals born in Greece to non-Greek parents who are unable to attend university, to travel outside the country, to find legal employment or even rent an apartment, because coming of age also means becoming stateless. Others still present tales of Greeks who left their homeland as political refugees or economic migrants, often living without documentation in the countries to which they fled. In My Name is Europe, Kapllani thus trades his earlier, generalized commentary on the migrant condition for a series of testimonials that attest both to the uniqueness of each migrant’s story, and to the difficulties that migrants’ lives share in common. The book also makes clear that these difficulties are not intrinsic or unavoidable, but are rather externally imposed, the result of discriminatory legal structures put in place to protect the “purity” of a “race” that was, in fact, never pure at all. Particularly in the narratives of non-citizen natives of Greece, certain words begin to crop up—including, crucially, “περιμένω,” or “to wait.” In contrast to the strings of imperatives we encountered in A Short Border Handbook, here we have entered a realm of forced inaction, as the question of legal status comes to hamper any concrete action one might hope to take. “No sense waiting for your draft papers,” a young man born in Athens is told by the police, “you foreigners aren’t in the population registers.”29 When asked how he keeps busy, another man born in Athens to Nigerian parents who has been repeatedly stopped by police, imprisoned for lack of papers, and threatened with deportation, answers, “I spend a lot of time on music and street theater. My papers? I’m still waiting for them, for the past two years. The future? The future, my friend, is my dreams. That’s my shield, my freedom.”30 “When my father died,” we hear from someone else who has been living for years in Greece and whose six-year-old daughter was born there, “I was the only of my siblings who couldn’t go to the funeral. Because my residence permit still hadn’t been issued . . . I’m still waiting for it, I go around with a ‘certification.’”31 The Kapllani alter ego who narrates the non-italicized sections also speaks of circulating with only a “certification,” waiting for a residence permit “that would probably come only two weeks before it was due to expire.”32 In this atmosphere of perpetual waiting, the word “μέλλον,” or “future,” becomes code for the absence of hope, particularly for those young

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people born in Greece to immigrant parents: “How do I see the future? Hard work and keep walking, as the ad says” (a reference to the Johnnie Walker ads);33 “The future? I don’t know. I’ve lost everything. I’m living in a constant struggle for survival, financial and psychological”;34 “Because you don’t have normal papers, you can’t make plans for the future. Just imagine: to be twenty years old and not be able to plan for the future!”;35 “Our parents had hope for a better future. We think only of how to leave, because here where we were born we can’t see any future at all”;36 “I feel humiliated. I feel as if someone has violated my dreams, my personality, my future. I feel as if they’ve pushed me to a permanent margin. Isn’t it inhuman to make us kids who were born here feel like stateless outcasts?”37 This repetition of the same narrative of waiting for a future that is impossibly slow to arrive—as embodied in the “papers,” “residence permit,” or “pink slip”38—raises broader questions, already treated in the epilogue to A Short Border Handbook, about the justness of citizenship law in Greece, and of the laws pertaining to immigration. Kapllani’s curation of these narratives thus highlights the banal inhumaneness of a citizenship regime that renders tens of thousands of children stateless, merely in order to uphold an ethnically defined understanding of what the nation should be—an understanding based, as Elpida Vogli and others have shown, on a series of “national myths” rather than any truth regarding the ethnic constitution of the Greek state, which has always been heterogeneous and subject to flux and change.39 Structurally, the repetition of these descriptions of legal limbo comes to disrupt the futurity of any individual story—even the frame story of Kapllani’s alter ego, whose return to Albania is abruptly dropped midway through the book, in a structural move that leaves the story oddly suspended, much like the lives of so many of the migrants and non-citizen natives whose tales are included in this book. One could, however, venture a more positive reading of the fact that Kapllani abandons his frame narrative midway through: Kapllani’s book turns from imagining a bleak future for the United States of Europe, to offering a nuanced rendering of a present-day, multiethnic, multilingual, and multicultural Greece, as exhibited in the array of narratives he collects within the covers of this book. Of course it takes a peculiar stretch of the imagination to see these repeated narratives of legal injustice and state-sponsored discrimination as a collective tale of hope. Yet in some sense, Kapllani’s reliance on these numerous testimonials, while stressing the many negative aspects of migrant life in Greece, also attests to the fact that the multiethnic future Greek nationalists fear—the destruction of a falsely presumed “purity of the race”—is already emphatically present. In one passage, another migrant who came to Greece from Zimbabwe at the age of six speaks of the refuge he finds in the underground rap clubs of Athens, which serve as a “πατρίδα” or “homeland” for



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outsiders of all sorts, including Albanians, Poles, Africans, Filipinos, Latin Americans, and of course non-citizen natives of Greece. Similarly, My Name is Europe itself provides a space where these narratives—written in Greek by long-time residents of Greece who are nonetheless considered outsiders, or by “ethnic Greeks” who have experienced outsider status elsewhere, often as a result of whatever financial or political outsider status that originally forced them out of Greece—can come together and mingle, creating a de facto community that destabilizes the myth of Greek homogeneity. Moreover, in his postscript to the book, Kapllani suggests that this community already exists out in the real world, not only between the covers to his book. Describing the streets he walks through almost every day, he mentions signs in Bulgarian, Russian, Albanian, and so on, all owned by firstgeneration migrants who grew up speaking a variety of languages. “Today,” he writes, “we communicate in the same language, Greek. We exist and coexist in the same neighborhood, in the same city, in Athens. [. . .] We are the ‘new settlers’ of Athens, this city of settlers par excellence.” These settlers include the many “ethnic Greeks”40 who came from Asia Minor in the early twentieth century, but also other “old settlers” who came, Kapllani writes, “from the Greek countryside. One of those, who lives in the next building over, described to me how, when he first came to Athens, the kids at school made fun of his village way of talking. He felt so stigmatized and foreign that, when he got home from school, he would shut himself up in the kitchen—he didn’t have his own room—and cry, and he tried as hard as he could to get rid of his ‘village language’ so he wouldn’t stick out, wouldn’t feel foreign.”41 The dominant narrative about migration in Greece is that the formerly homogenous nation-state is now undergoing a sudden, unsettling change, with the arrival of unprecedented numbers of migrants. In this closing passage, Kapllani reminds us that Greece has always been far more multicultural and even multilingual than the pervasive myth of Greek homogeneity would have us believe. He also reminds us that this myth is not only false but destructive, creating a pervasive fear that often brings about the very ills it imagines. “Migration,” he writes, “is a mirror that returns our gaze. If we see it as an opportunity, it will become an opportunity. If we see it as a threat, it will become a threat.”42 Kapllani’s books document the harms done to individuals when migration is seen as a threat—harms that then create resentment, frustration, and anger among those excluded. Yet Kapllani’s books also create opportunities, as well, for the very sharing of stories that invite readers to see that mirror for what it is, and to push for real-world cultural and political changes that wouldn’t consign immigrants and non-citizen natives to the status of perpetual outsiders, but would on the contrary recognize them as settlers, newcomers, neighbors.

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NOTES 1.  Tsitselikis, Konstantinos. “Citizenship in Greece: Present Challenges for Future Changes.” In Multiple Citizenship as a Challenge to European Nation-States, edited by Devorah Kalekin-Fishman and Pirkko Pitkänen (Rotterdam: SensePublishers, 2007), 145–70. 2.  The move toward greater recognition of the rights of at least some native-born “migrants” has not, however, been smooth; for instance, legislation passed in 2010 was subsequently overturned by the courts in 2013. The 2015 changes to the legal code regarding naturalization, while a great improvement, only cover children born to parents who have been legal residents of Greece for at least five years, thereby leaving many native-born children stateless. The recent increase in numbers of asylum seekers, as well as the increase in anti-immigrant sentiment across the European Union, has complicated yet further an already complex situation. For a thorough account of current Greek law pertaining to the rights of refugees and migrants, see Papasiopi-Pasia (2015). For further elaboration on the issues at stake, see Tsitselikis (2007) and Christopoulos (2001). For an excellent history of Greek nationality law in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Vogli (2007). These scholars all explicitly critique the myth of Greek homogeneity, an ideological stance that supports limitations to the rights of recent arrivals. 3. Gazmend Kapllani, A Short Border Handbook, translated by Anne-Marie Stanton-Ife (London: Portobello Books, 2009), 2. 4. Kapllani, Border Handbook, 152. 5.  I certainly don’t mean to suggest that Markaris—born in Istanbul to parents of Armenian and Greek ethnic backgrounds, fluent in Turkish as well as Greek—shares his protagonist’s racism regarding Albanians and other “others.” On the contrary, Markaris’s novel engages in a trenchant social critique that reflects the deep suspicion of Albanians that characterized Greek popular culture in the 1990s and beyond, while also responding to that suspicion critically and creatively. 6.  Georganta Konstantina, “The unbearable similarity of the other: The multiple identities of Gazmend Kapllani’s migrant narratives,” Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture 3, no. 2 (2012): 190. 7.  Gazmend Kapllani, “Being Greek and Albanian: The ‘No Man’s Land’ of a Double Identity in the Balkans,” talk at Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Nov. 9, 2011, text at http://gazikapllani.blogspot.com/2011/, n.p. 8.  See Asimakoulas (2013) for a discussion of the “bitter wit” in the book, and the challenges it poses to translation. 9.  While Ann-Marie Stanton-Ife’s translation is truly powerful throughout, the 2009 Portobello Books edition makes a typographical intervention here which I consider unfortunate: while both the prologue and epilogue are italicized in Greek editions of the book, the English translation presents them as non-italicized prose. This shift de-couples the prologue and epilogue from the similarly italicized firstperson passages that run throughout the book, and also lessens the effect of the distinction between italicized and non-italicized passages. And while each section in the Greek edition begins on a new page, the Portobello English edition collapses



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first-person and second-person sections into longer chapters, again disrupting the structural logic of the Greek. 10. Kapllani, Border Handbook, 1. 11. Kapllani, Border Handbook, 2. 12. Kapllani, Border Handbook, 4. 13. Kapllani, Border Handbook, 14. 14. Kapllani, Border Handbook, 15. 15. Kapllani, Border Handbook, 42. 16.  For a discussion of the separate immigration categories assigned to “ethnic Greek” Albanians and Greeks of the Pontus region, see Mylonas (2013), Konsta and Lazaridis (2010), Christopoulos (2001), and Tsitselikis (2007). 17.  See the section titled “If you were a tourist” (Kapllani 2009, 21–23), in which Kapllani contrasts the treatment of two primary categories of foreigners in Greece, the tourist and the immigrant. 18. Kapllani, Border Handbook, 101–02 19. Kapllani, Border Handbook, 68. 20. Kapllani, Border Handbook, 132. 21. Kapllani, Border Handbook, 138. 22. Kapllani, Border Handbook, 154. 23. Kapllani, Border Handbook, 156. 24. Kapllani, Border Handbook, 176. 25. Kapllani, Border Handbook, 176. 26. Kapllani, Border Handbook, 186. 27.  Gazmend Kapllani, Με λένε Ευρώπη, (Αθήνα: Λιβάνη, 2010), 109. 28.  Georganta argues that by displacing onto Albanians racist sentiments that clearly dovetail some Greeks’ own regarding Albanians and others, Kapllani invites those readers to “seek the similarities between their own reality and that of a future that is familiar but also geographically and nationally displaced,” and potentially even rethink the “dominant national and social narratives they grew up with” (Georganta 2012, 192). 29. Kapllani, Ευρώπη, 81. 30. Kapllani, Ευρώπη, 251. 31. Kapllani, Ευρώπη, 106. 32. Kapllani, Ευρώπη, 303. 33. Kapllani, Ευρώπη, 84. 34. Kapllani, Ευρώπη, 242. 35. Kapllani, Ευρώπη, 248. 36. Kapllani, Ευρώπη, 288. 37. Kapllani, Ευρώπη, 301. Just as A Short Border Handbook ends with a passage demonstrating the lack of compassion established migrants can have for more recent arrivals, here, too, we occasionally find some troubling language in the ways non-citizen natives distinguish themselves from migrants: “We were born here and the state treats us as if we just came yesterday!” (Kapllani 2010, 301) or “I was in the cell for three days, in the dark, sleeping on the ground, in a microscopic cell with two Pakistani guys who didn’t speak Greek or English, either” (Kapllani 2010, 250).

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Kapllani doesn’t comment on these statements, but to my mind they serve as indicators of ways in which jus soli citizenship also arbitrarily denies rights to some while conferring them on others. 38.  The “pink slip” is given to those who have applied for asylum and is treated as a de facto residence permit because it allows the holder to remain legally in the country while his or her claim is being adjudicated. See chapter 2 of Cabot (2014) for an illuminating discussion of the competing understandings of the “pink slip” among asylum seekers, police, bureaucrats, and legal aid workers. 39.  See, once again, Vogli (2007), Christopoulos (2001), and Tsitselikis (2007) for discussions and contestations of these ethnically exclusive “national myths,” developed in the early years of the Greek state and operative up through the current moment, despite nearly continual changes in the ethnic, cultural, and linguistic makeup of the population of Greece. 40.  I use this phrase here out of convenience, but also recognize that part of the project of this paper, as of Kapllani’s work, is to contest the very notion of an “ethnic Greek” identity, particularly one that travels along blood lines. After all, who could be more ethnically Greek (if we want to cede such a concept) than someone who was born in Greece, raised in Greece, attended Greek school, and so on? 41. Kapllani, Ευρώπη, 344. 42. Kapllani, Ευρώπη, 346.

WORKS CITED Asimakoulas, Dimitris. “Migrant Bitter Wit: Translating a coping mechanism in Gazmend Kapllani’s Μικρό Ημερολόγιο Συνόρων.” New Voices in Translation Studies 10 (2013): 1–20. Cabot, Heath. On the Doorstep of Europe: Asylum and Citizenship in Greece. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Christopoulos, Dimitris. “Το τέλος της εθνικής ομο(ιο)γένειας: παραδοσιακές και νέες μορφές ετερότητας στην Ελλάδα.” Στο Μετανάστες στην Ελλάδα, επιμέλεια Αθανάσιος Μαρβάκης, Δημήτρης Παρσάνογλου, Μίλτος Παύλου, 57–80. Αθήνα: Ελληνικά γράμματα, 2001. Georganta, Konstantina. “The unbearable similarity of the other: The multiple identities of Gazmend Kapllani’s migrant narratives.” Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture 3, no. 2 (2012): 187–97. Kapllani, Gazmend. “Being Greek and Albanian: The ‘No Man’s Land’ of a Double Idenity in the Balkans.” Talk at Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Nov. 9, 2011. Text at http://gazikapllani.blogspot.com/2011/. Accessed August 25, 2017. Kapllani, Gazmend. Με λένε Ευρώπη. Αθήνα: Λιβάνη, 2010. Kapllani, Gazmend. A Short Border Handbook. Translated by Anne-Marie StantonIfe. London: Portobello Books, 2009.



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Kapllani, Gazmend. Μικρό ημερολόγιο συνόρων. Αθήνα: Λιβάνη, 2006. Konsta, Anna-Maria and Gabriella Lazaridis. “Civic Stratification, ‘Plastic’ Citizenship and ‘Plastic Subjectivities’ in Greek Immigration Policy.” International Migration and Integration 11 (2010): 365–82. Markaris, Petros. Νυχτερινό Δελτίο [Deadline in Athens]. Αθήνα: Γαβριηλίδης, 2008 [1995]. Mylonas, Harris. The Politics of Nation-Building: Making Co-Nationals, Refugees, and Minorities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Papasiopi-Pasia, Zoe. Δίκαιο αλλοδαπών. Αθήνα: Εκδόσεις Σακκουλά, 2015. Tsitselikis, Konstantinos. “Citizenship in Greece: Present Challenges for Future Changes.” In Multiple Citizenship as a Challenge to European Nation-States, edited by Devorah Kalekin-Fishman and Pirkko Pitkänen. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2007. 145–70. Vogli, Elpida. “Έλληνες το γένος”: η ιθαγένεια και η ταυτότητα στο εθνικό κράτος τωνελλήνων (1821–1944). Ηράκλειο: Πανεπιστημιακές εκδόσεις Κρήτης, 2007.

TRAUMA, SENTIMENTALITY, AND CRISIS IN LITERATURE

Chapter Five

To Remember and Forgive The Afterlives of Queen Frederica’s Childtowns in Contemporary Greek Fiction Vassiliki Kaisidou

At the height of the Greek Civil War (1946–1949), in 1947, Queen Frederica of Hanover established the Royal Welfare Fund with the purpose of evacuating and thus saving the children living in war-stricken villages. To implement this humanitarian intervention, she founded fifty-four children’s homes, widely known as παιδοπόλεις (henceforth childtowns),1 which accommodated orphans and destitute children, as well as children whose parents had joined the Democratic Army of Greece (DSE) founded by the Communist Party of Greece during the Civil War. It is this campaign that gained Queen Frederica the reputation of being not only the “Queen of Hellenes” but also the “Mother of the Orphans.”2 In the postwar era, the public discourse on the queen’s camps and the children’s lived experiences was limited and at most times reduced to official narratives. It was not until the 1980s that this topic spawned lively debate and rekindled cultural interest. From then on, and especially since the 2000s, the childtowns attracted considerable scholarly attention and triggered multifarious, often unexpected or contrasting, rereadings in cultural texts and the public sphere.3 The dawn of the twentieth-first century witnessed an outpouring of literary responses to the queen’s camps. Here I provide an overview of the aesthetics and thematics as well as the reception of these responses (one that engaged historians and the childtown evacuees themselves), and consider three virtually unexplored novels that closely engage with the topic: Vassilis Boutos’s The Queen’s Tears (2000), Thanassis Skroumbelos’s Bella Ciao (2005), and Yannis Atzakas’s Murky Depths (2009).4 These narratives retell the unsettling stories of the children of the Civil War informed by different personal agendas, which either uphold or complicate the official memory of the childtowns. Although negotiating this controversial and narratively malleable topic in fairly different ways, the authors share the common preoccupation of thematizing 85

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traumatic childhood experiences so as to foreground different forms of reconciliation with the past. Crucially, fictional accounts of the childtowns, which are often selective in the way they revisit this contested past, have important implications for the complex interrelationship between individual agendas and/or memories and collective recollections of the Civil War. The legacies of the Greek Civil War, together with the public history that framed the childtowns, account for their emergence in literary narratives since the 2000s. Although for most European countries, the end of World War II in 1945 ushered in a peaceful period of social reconstruction, in Greece the war became protracted, taking the form of an internecine conflict between the Left (members of the Communist Party and citizens with allegiance to the noncommunist Left), and the Right (Security Battalions, right-wing paramilitary groups, and, chiefly, the monarchist National Army), concluding in the 1949 victory of the US supported National Army and the defeat of the DSE.5 As noted above, what was at stake amid mounting civil unrest was the evacuation of minors from war-torn areas (chiefly northern Greece). Queen Frederica’s campaign accommodated around eighteen thousand children throughout Greece from 1947 to 1950, when most of the childtowns ceased operation and the majority of the children returned to their home villages.6 Equally, in 1948 the Communist Party transported approximately twenty thousand children to socialist countries of Eastern Europe where they would be provided shelter and education until peace was restored.7 Evidently, both evacuation projects were underpinned by a strong ideological component. The daily life in the queen’s camps, for instance, took a semimilitaristic form and operated under the tenets of anticommunism aiming to create fiercely nationally minded citizens.8 The ideological charge of Queen Frederica’s project in the context of political unrest becomes more tangible if we consider the official use of the rhetoric of “παιδοφύλαγμα” [Child-Gathering] to display the childtowns as a much-needed remedy to the “παιδομάζωμα” [Child-Abduction]—the transportation of children to Eastern Europe by the Communist Party—thereby legitimizing her campaign on a domestic and international scale.9 If the historical realities of the Civil War were bitter, its legacies were even more burdensome. Over the ensuing decades, the political divide between the Left and the Right was intensified and it was not bridged until the collapse of the seven-year military Junta in 1974 and a number of conciliatory movements performed in the 1980s (such as the recognition of the Resistance as “National” by the PanHellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) and the 1989 coalition government between right-leaning and left-leaning parties). As Polymeris Voglis observes, it is this split in political identities that accounts for the divided collective memory of the civil conflict until the late 1980s.10 Following Voglis’s remark, I will demonstrate that the pre-1990s representa-



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tions of the childtowns in public history overtly engage with either the Left or the Right. Here I use the term public history to define the process in which historical knowledge is constructed (or challenged) through objects, artifacts, and memorials, but also works of art, including fiction.11 Several pre-1990s texts restrict their interest in the childtowns to the confines of this dualistic take on the collective memory of the Civil War. To begin with, the conservative intellectual and acclaimed novelist Stratis Myrivilis’s 1948 political speech Communism and Child-Abduction epitomizes the right-wing rhetoric. He praises government-funded children’s homes for saving minors’ lives and goes as far as to suggest a supranationalist project of establishing a new internment camp to rehabilitate the dangerous young communists remaining in the Greek state.12 Next, Nicholas Gage’s autobiographical novel Eleni (1983) problematizes the evacuation program organized by the Communist Party but ignores Queen Frederica’s camps, and also has a polemic (considered by many as anticommunist) subtext, which sparked renewed public debate over the children of the Civil War. A quite different viewpoint is given by Stratis Haviaras in The Heroic Age (1985). Aligned to the left-wing discourse, the author portrays the queen’s camps as state apparatuses of biopolitical control and places of exile. It was not until the 1990s that the (hi)stories of childhood displacement during the civil unrest gained real momentum in the public sphere and found new modes of expression shying away from political divides. The boom in the historiography of the Civil War and the engagement with “bottom-up” practices of historical investigation, such as the collection of oral testimonies of previously excluded subjects (i.e., the women or children), acted as a catalyst for this development. In this light, the formerly silent community of childtown evacuees articulated their lived experiences in the form of autobiographical narratives and shared them in printed and online media so as to bestow their own “truthful” meaning on a contested past.13 Those testimonies, as well as the recently published literary narratives of the childtowns, often steer away from political polarization and their divided collective memory discussed above. Instead, as individual accounts of the childtowns proliferate, they emerge fractured and dissonant, being rather contingent upon personal agendas and local variations.14 The awakening of literary interest in the queen’s camps in the 2000s is partially triggered by wider public and historiographic interest; yet, arguably, this should also be associated with the burgeoning literary publications on the Civil War over the last fifteen years and their tangible focus on its unexplored aspects.15 Among these, Marlena Politopoulou’s historical crime novel, The Polaroid’s Memory (2009) is well worth mentioning here as it affords an alternative account of the childtowns. Although a couple of characters

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document their disturbing memories of orphanhood, dislocation, and confinement in the queen’s camps, the nub of Politopoulou’s narrative is essentially counterfactual. She tells the story of a peculiar network of children adoption by sympathizers of the Communist Party, which was organized and monitored by an undercover partisan. In this way, Politopoulou maps unconventional ways in which institutional welfare policy is undermined by small-scale initiatives from below. The Polaroid’s Memory is very much relevant to my argument, not because the novels that I will discuss explore alternative scenarios about the queen’s camps, but because Boutos, Skroumbelos, and Atzakas also renegotiate their memory in new and unexpected ways. Respectively, these novels tailor the childtowns to a romanticized and easily digestible form, engaging in an ideologically laden historical fraud and a historically sensitive portrayal of children’s agency. Each author employs different aesthetic and ideological agendas in rewriting the children evacuees’ histories and, therefore, reshaping the collective memory of the camps. In The Queen’s Tears, Vassilis Boutos, who was born in 1959 and thus has no exponential connection to the Civil War, delves into historical archives to produce a mass-marketed historical novel. Set at the beginning of peacetime, in 1949, in the childtown Holy Shelter in Arta, the novel begins by describing the sexual abuse of young Thomas by the watchman, Panaretos. Thomas’s emotional distress ostensibly leads to his suicide attempt by drowning. Interestingly, Boutos downplays the transgressive act of raping and Thomas’s suffering;16 instead, he goes a long way to depict the ethos of gossip, hypocrisy, and provincialism among the petite bourgeoisie (on the micro-level of the childtown and the locality of Arta), through what Dimosthenis Kourtovik dubs kitsch “popular-romantic aesthetics.”17 Although kitsch is slippery as a concept, carrying largely pejorative connotations (often identified as “low” or commodified culture), at the same time, the term is unique in its ability to denote the manipulation of the senses and emotions.18 Kitsch has strong popular appeal and, in light of its particularly evocative capacity, I use “kitsch” as an analytical tool through which to approach the strikingly emotive language of the novel. Boutos’s sentimental writing puts forward a rather sanitized portrayal of the camps (wherein rape surfaces as an exceptional incident among a cohort of kind-hearted group-leaders) and significantly blunts his critique on the malfunctions of the queen’s camps. Rather, in his desire to write beautifully, he documents a distressing past through rose-tinted glasses. Take for instance, his distinctly old-fashioned prose in narrativizing the moment when, traumatized and formerly hidden, Thomas meets his group leader: “their emotions were shared even by the walnut tree, as some of its tears took the form of snowflakes. [. . .] The moon, as if partaking in the joy too, scattered



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its light lavishly and the entire childtown was glowing.”19 Here, sentimentalizing and verbose imagery, relying largely on the personification of natural events, serves to embellish the characters’ affects in what would arguably be a troubling meeting. Boutos’s kitsch poetics centers on, by and large, the overuse of figurative language (chiefly evocative metaphors) to depict Thomas’s anguish and despair after sexual harassment. Only seldom does the text bring about an unexpected, yet again toned down, subversion of hackneyed emotionality by bluntly alluding to Thomas’s partisan family, hierarchies, and corruption, and the indoctrination mechanisms lurking behind the peaceful façade of the childtown (which in fact also echo the stunted democracy in postwar Greece). Boutos’s writing makes better sense if we read it as a mainstream fiction importantly divested from social or ethical preoccupations. As he maintains in a December 28, 2000, interview in Radiotileorasi newspaper, The Queen’s Tears stems from mere curiosity toward unknown camp experiences in Greek realities, following his commercially successful novel Rhodes Blood Libel. In this effort, he prioritizes an emotive, palatable format for the reading public, which is also amenable for a serialized television version (as occurred with Rhodes Blood Libel).20 It is this lack of some kind of political or moral obligation vis-a-vis commemorating painful experiences of institutionalization that accounts for Boutos’s uncritical engagement with this disputed past. If Boutos’s narrative circles around the winners of the Civil War while steering clear from bold vocabulary to record the realities of the childtowns, this is by no means the case in Thanassis Skroumbelos’s Bella Ciao, published five years later. The novel opens in an aggressive tone exhibiting the sexual abuse perpetrated by a group of guards named “Bokoi” in the childtown of Kifissia north of Athens. Such brutalities are described in harrowing detail and the camps are portrayed as prison-like institutions. Born in 1944, Skroumbelos is a child of the civil unrest, whose writing is somewhat reminiscent of the leftist master-narrative of the childtowns as violent punishment regimes and ideological apparatuses of “monarchofascism.” Hence, it comes as no surprise that Bella Ciao received rave reviews from left-leaning media channels. For instance, both Panos Ramantanis’s article in Left.gr on December 30, 2012, and the anonymous book blurb in the Movement Against Racism blog on September 9, 2014, save from exalting its aesthetic merit, also underline its historical authenticity. Only historian Riki Van Boeschoten throws Skroumbelos’s “deliberate distortion of historical truth” into stark relief, stating that instead of Queen Frederica’s camps he documents the rehabilitation centers of young dissidents in Kifissia (as attested by the archival material that Skroumbelos himself provides at the end of the text).21 Van Boeschoten’s icy critical commentary raises

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concerns around the historical legitimacy of Skroumbelos’s creative liberties in revisiting the childtowns. Bella Ciao prejudices historical accuracy in setting forth a personal agenda, yet it transcends left-wing rhetoric dogmatism (as Van Boeschoten claims), reimagining the childtowns by interweaving personal with collective experiences. The histories of the male evacuees, Paulie and Timothy, effectively dramatize the link between the human body and the body politic. They embody the collective wounds of the Civil War that remained open until 1974, when the two protagonists and former guerrilla sympathizers meet again after their forced migration to the United States. Bella Ciao pivots on the act of remembrance, negotiating Timothy’s (who suffers from post-traumatic amnesia) effort to retrieve his childhood memories. Yet, the bulk of the novel is given over to Paulie’s personal memory-narrative, which documents the legacies of the 1940s for the Greek Left (i.e., doctrinal rigidity, victimization discourse, inner divides, and pervasive suspicion), thus mapping its selfnarrative from the civil conflict up to the end of the Junta.22 Skroumbelos’s historically inaccurate narrativization of the queen’s evacuation program falls within a personal agenda of pairing personal and collective self-analysis to critically reevaluate the left-wing politics; by unearthing haunting aspects of the 1940s he aims to encourage collective reflection on their unresolved effects in the present. In contrast to the negative light in which the childtowns are introduced in Boutos’s and Skroumbelos’s novels, Yannis Atzakas’s autobiographical Murky Depths employs different, more nuanced strategies to negotiate the precariousness of the childtown evacuees, while undoing the myths on the camps’ repressive and dehumanizing structure. The plot illuminates Yannis’s (the writer’s alter-ego) venture to record his traumatic memories as a childtown subject at the dusk of his life, upon return to his summer house in the Pelion mountains. By skillfully navigating the genres of autobiography and fiction, Murky Depths is positioned in the interstice between the testimonial and the fictive, as Atzakas himself suggests in a recent interview: “If I aspired to something, that would be to elevate personal testimony to the lofty realm of logos, by applying the modes of fiction.”23 Atzakas’s liminal autobiography unfolds through the use of the double viewpoint (alternating between Yannis and the “Child,” his younger self), a common literary device in the bildungsroman genre. It is this narrative strategy that enables Yannis to surpass the self-representational hurdles in the face of trauma and work through the residue of the past by assuming the role of an empathetic listener, endowed with heightened critical sensibility. At the same time, Atzakas seems to be writing his personal story as an “ανταρτόπληκτο” [guerilla-stricken] child to problematize the tension between personal and public life. Take for instance the epigraph of the novel



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which reads, “To the children of the Civil War, bitter seeds of the ears harvested by the double-edged sickle.”24 In opening up to collective experiences, this phrase points to the extrovert and ethical character of his self-representational narrative; namely, the moral obligation to assert the memory and restore the dignity of the children whose microhistories of suffering during civil violence were until recently omitted from mainstream history. The book was a best-seller and won the Anagnostis Best Novel award in 2009, yet what went largely unnoticed in the many critical discussions it sparked is the wistful tone in which Atzakas mythologizes childhood hardships and shortages, without undermining the historical backdrop (as we have seen in Skroumbelos’s novel).25 Conversely, in Murky Depths, Atzakas brushes against the grain of most testimonial or fictional accounts of the childtowns by mapping the complexity and divergence of the evacuation program, one that comprises practices of control and indoctrination in tandem with moments when the disciplinary place is transformed through collective play and companionship developed among children.26 Equally, Atzakas challenges the poetics of victimization and brings into sharp focus the agency of the trauma sufferers, designating the queen’s camps as places of displacement and isolation but also empowerment and reinvention. This is illustrated by the educational opportunities provided in the childtowns that contributed to the author’s upward mobility and his literary formation.

Figure 5.1.  Yannis Atzakas after his dismissal from the childtown Saint Dimitrios, in Thessaloniki, September 1955. Photograph courtesy of Yannis Atzakas and Agra Publications.

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What emerges first from the fictional rereadings of the queen’s camps is a forceful intertwinement of the historical with the fictional. All three authors seem to be demanding a sense of legitimacy in the historiographic field. Skroumbelos and Boutos act as “writers/historians” and interpolate the sources used in their archival research, while Atzakas inserts personal and historical photographs to create a visual archive of his testimonial narrative. Yet, they all go some way to corrupt the authenticity of their texts with creative imagination and selective remembrance of moments past that is informed by the needs of the present and accounts for the making of history. In exhibiting a traumatic past through the lens of emotionality, ethics, or nostalgia, they set forth the contingency of historical truth and voice a spectrum of childhood experiences. Therefore, those texts induced different reactions amongst the childtown evacuees [Παιδοπολίτες], many of whom have not only read but also identified with Yannis in Murky Depths. They prize the way in which Atzakas tempers the harrowing experiences of deprivation, orphanhood, and dislocation with the affective potential of joyful childhood reminiscences and the social emancipation afforded by the childtowns. The defense mechanisms of disavowing unsettling memories are brought into play and this may well account for this novel’s popularity among the community of childtown evacuees. By contrast, Boutos’s and Skroumbelos’s treatments of sexual abuse are largely disputed and have often stirred strong reactions.27 Secondly, the ethics of revisiting historical traumas is manifested differently in each novel. Undeniably, all three authors broach highly disputed and unexplored aspects of the 1940s, such as the adoptions scheme of Greek children by American families, which operated with loose state control at several orphanages. In doing so, however, their motives differ remarkably. As indicated earlier, Boutos counterbalances moral challenges (if any) through the commodified format of his work, in juxtaposition to Bella Ciao, wherein Skroumbelos aims to voice the untold stories of the children evacuated in his birthplace, the Kolonos neighborhood in Athens. In Skroumbelos’s words, “Narrating their story—the story that neither they themselves nor anyone else could tell [. . .] was my duty to these friends of mine.”28 This becomes even more apparent in Murky Depths, which is permeated for the most part by a felt moral imperative to communicate the collective suffering of the Civil War children. For all their thematic and aesthetic discrepancies, the unmistakable point of contact of the novels is the negotiation of different forms of reconciliation with the past through the act of forgiveness. Seventy years since its outbreak, the Civil War continues to cast its troublesome shadow over Greek society, calling for collective self-reflection and engagement with the public recognition of



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survivors and witnesses from both warring sides. What is at stake in this process of healing open wounds, is to forgive those regarded as “villains” in each political group, since, as philosopher Paul Ricoeur argues, forgiveness helps individuals and collectivities alleviate the burden of the past and escape the vicious circle of hate.29 Yet one should distinguish between what Ricoeur calls “easy” and “difficult” forgiveness and thus differentiate forgiving from the effortless process of forgetting or disavowing. Instead, as Nikolas Demertzis notes in his consideration of the concept in the context of the cultural trauma of the Greek Civil War, “difficult forgiveness goes through recollection, the effort to recall and symbolically reconstruct the past in the present.”30 In what follows, I delineate the authors’ distinct writing approaches which stretch across the spectrum of an incomplete, easy, and difficult forgiveness. In The Queen’s Tears Thomas returns to the childtown in adulthood, not to seek revenge but to forgive his rapist, yet both characters are significantly underdeveloped. Panaretos Boukis’s feelings of guilt are sketchily narrativized (although it is crucial that Boutos attempts to demarcate the repentance of the right-wing perpetrator, thus avoiding a left-leaning accusatory narrative). Likewise, there’s barely any mention of Thomas’s initial agony and later reassessment of his traumatic childhood toward coming to terms with it. This said, the ending seems highly unconvincing and the characters come together in a rather awkward handshake denoting the repudiation of past wrongdoings in record time: “So, did you come here after all these years to take revenge for my wrongdoings?” “I came to reconcile with my traumas.” [. . .] There was an awkward silence. “Will we not shake hands?” Boukis asked timidly. “Do you suggest this because you do regret and seek reconciliation?” “I will not hide the fact that before, I died and immediately came back to life, yet now that I see you alive, I feel most relieved.’ They reluctantly shook hands.31

The ideological subtext percolating in Boutos’s text here is the climate of “rapprochement” between the two political adversaries and the necessity to cope with the bitter residue of the Civil War. A closer look at the last scene brings to mind the fabled May 1984 handshake of the leader of the DSE, Markos Vafeiadis, and the Chief of the State Army General Staff, Thrasyvoulos Tsakalotos. This was deemed a conciliatory gesture toward the reparation of the sociopolitical fabric, which was torn apart by the enduring effects of the

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civil unrest. Thus, it is Boutos’s poetics of reconciliation and forgetting the tumultuous past that prompt him to set forward a clumsy positive transcendence of trauma and easy forgiveness, glossing over painful recollections. This somewhat uplifting ending stands in stark contrast to Skroumbelos’s hardly redemptive narrative. In Bella Ciao the characters seem unable to forgive the senseless violence of the “Bokoi,” whose brutal rape caused the death of the young Angelos, Paulie’s sister’s—that is, the female guerrilla fighter Eleni’s—only son. Perhaps the most tangible sign of this inability to forgive and forget in the novel is given by the heroes of the Resistance, such as Eleni. Haunted by Angelos’s death, she cannot let go of the past and, after the war is over, she retaliates by chasing the three culprits and executing them in the cruelest way. Her vindictive act implies that vengeance and silence are effective ways to deal with trauma and undo wrongs, while forgiveness is denied as unjust. Intriguingly though, this does not apply in the very same way to the children of the war. Paulie and Timothy take a critical distance from the past and mitigate its burden through the act of recollection and working through repressed memories. It is precisely this different mindset that makes Paulie suggest that Eleni’s revenge is futile because it only binds the victims into a circle of hate. In his words, “the blood she was about to spill would not bring the redemption she was expecting; blood opens up trenches, makes bridges break, alienates people.”32 In this light, although forgiveness is not fully achieved, the protagonists do acknowledge the vanity of rancor and, in the end, reinvest in social life. Finally, Murky Depths offers a different form of closure. Here, forgiving is expressed in a more sophisticated guise, through the work of remembering, mourning character’s various losses, and coming to terms with his family. Although he initially points an accusatory finger to his grandmother for his displacement, “I would secretly blame her that from one moment to the next I had been taken away from the family house, [. . .] away from everything I knew and loved,”33 through the lens of adulthood Yannis shows comprehension to the cultural and financial motives that caused her decision. Accordingly, he later goes on to accept and meet up with his exiled father, in spite of having internalized as a child the anticommunist discourse that identified him with a dangerous traitor. As I have already noted, Yannis incorporates his personal story of suffering within the collective injury of political unrest. Therefore, Atzakas’s narrative does not spring from resentment nor does it aim to articulate a criticism of the childtowns scheme. As he himself maintains, it rather aims to “settle old scores,” since “had I written the book for Queen Frederica’s camps thirty years ago, it would have been a denunciation of a certain policy. Now, however, it means to function as a therapy.”34



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Put differently, in Murky Depths, the therapeutic effects of forgiving when writing traumatic childhood experiences are brought forward through the calm tone of sobriety and acceptance, which makes possible remembering a troubled past while letting go of it. This is nicely captured in the ending of the novel, which offers an allegorical description of Yannis’s last wander on the hill above the seashore: He reached the edge. Now there was only water in front of him. [. . .] After a while, the burning sickle slowly appeared on the horizon; in rising, it marked the soft clouds and a line of blood colored the waters. [. . .] He gazed in awe across the waters and his soul sunk into secret turmoil, like a calm wave. In the fullness of time, he thought, the seashores will disappear. The granite arm will sink all over and its giant rocks [. . .] will be submerged in the wet silence of the seas.35

The passage has an undertone of tranquillity and reconciliation, woven within the eschatological connotations about the end of the world in the water. Here, the water evokes the metaphor of memory as a deep, unexplored seabed navigated by the narrator.36 Τhe sun coloring “the sea with blood” is paralleled to the “sickle” of the Civil War (which we saw in the epigraph of the novel), denoting the horrendous historical realities of civil strife that evoke painful childhood memories. This graphic imagery signals forgiveness as an outcome of reconciling with and narrativizing trauma, a process that entailed confronting one’s inner resistances and took Yannis almost fifty years to engage in. At the end, Yannis learns to speak of what he suffered, whom he was hurt by, what he gained, and what he lost as a child evacuee, conceiving forgiveness as a type of remembering that alleviates the haunting power of the past and makes the future possible. Atzakas’s conceptualization of forgiving as the pinnacle of an arduous and long-lasting process of mourning suggests that the notion of forgiveness may be the common thread running through the novels, yet it lends itself to different treatment by each author. Boutos and Skroumbelos, by contrast, although equally concerned with its liberating potentialities, relay a schematic and a facile version thereof. A recent article on Queen Frederica’s campaign draws on the legacy of the childtowns’ national-mindedness [εθνικοφροσύνη] to feature political commentary on excessive state intervention in social welfare in contemporary Greece.37 This illustrates how a formerly silenced page of history has gained currency in public discourse and, revisited through different personal agendas, it acquires tangible relevance to the present. It will have become apparent by now that fictional retellings of the childtowns were instrumental in popularizing the topic to wider audiences; hence, they should be understood within the context of the contemporary public history of the

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Civil War as a response to the demand for a non-institutional reconciliation with the cultural trauma of the Civil War. The three novels negotiate the experiences of children evacuees in unusual and often contradictory ways. These range from Boutos’s kitschification of the queen’s camps, to Skroumbelos’s unreliable representation of the childtowns to rethink the role of the Left during the “long” Civil War, up to Atzakas’s emphasis on self-discovery facing the challenges of orphanhood. This ambivalence in fictional representations of the childtowns is reflective as much of the different agendas and multiplicity of personal experiences (i.e., first-hand or mediated memories, local divergences) underwriting the narratives, as of the incongruities of the public history about the 1940s. If anything, these cultural texts renegotiate the collective memory of the childtowns, and subsequently the Civil War, which surfaces all the more contested and multifaceted and cannot be confined to the binary of left-wing or right-wing discourse as with pre-2000s cultural narratives. Furthermore, despite their different levels of moral engagement with the subject matter, they all gear toward the idea of remembering a bitter past without rancor through a more or less successful attempt to forgive. Therefore, what should not be passed over is that fiction about the queen’s camps furthers a bottom-up reconciliation with the Civil War past through the public recognition of its underrepresented and perhaps most vulnerable victims. I am grateful to Trine Willert and Gerasimus Katsan for their insightful comments and support during the editing process. I am also indebted to Dimitris Papanikolaou and Dimitris Tziovas, who both inspired and challenged me to attend the voices of Civil War children. Parts of this chapter form part of my doctoral project which is supported by the A. S. Onassis Foundation. NOTES 1.  In English scholarship, the childtowns are often transliterated into “paidopoleis.” Cf. Loring Danforth and Riki Van Boeschoten, Children of the Greek Civil War: Refugees and the Politics of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Gonda Van Steen, Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid pro-quo (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019). 2.  Danforth and Van Boeschoten, Children of the Greek Civil War, 90. 3.  For the evacuation of children amid civil strife see Lars Bærentzen, “The ‘Paidomazoma’ and the Queen’s Camps,” in Studies in the History of the Greek Civil War (1945– 1949), eds. Lars Bærentzen et al. (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1987), 127– 58; Mando Dalianis and Mark Mazower “Children in Turmoil During the Civil War: Today’s Adults,” in After the War Was over: Reconstructing the Family, Nation, and State in Greece, 1943–1960, ed. Mark Mazower (Princeton: Princeton University Press,



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2000), 98–100; Tasoula Vervenioti, “Περί ‘παιδομαζώματος’ και ‘παιδοφυλάγματος’ ο λόγος ή τα παιδιά στη δίνη της εμφύλιας διαμάχης,” in Το όπλο παρά πόδα. Οι πολιτικοί πρόσφυγες του ελληνικού εμφυλίου στην Ανατολική Ευρώπη, edited by Eftyhia Voutira et. al. (Thessaloniki: University of Macedonia Press, 2005), 101–23. 4.  The translations of texts from the Greek are my own and all subsequent references are to these editions. 5.  For a brief overview of the Greek Civil War see Mark Mazower, ed., After the War Was over, 3–21; Philip Carabott and Thanassis D. Sfikas, eds., The Greek Civil War: Essays on a Conflict of Exceptionalism and Silences, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 2–18; for an analysis of its backdrop and early stages see David Close, The Origins of the Greek Civil War (London: Longman, 1999). 6.  Danforth and Van Boeschoten, 98 and 103–5. 7.  Ibid., 44–49 and 98–99. 8. Conversely, in children’s homes in the Soviet bloc children were taught to embrace the communist values (Danforth and Van Boeschoten, 72–74). On the propaganda reading material provided in the childtowns, see Loukianos Hasiotis, “Εθνικοφροσύνη και αντικομμουνισμός στον νεανικό Τύπο: Η περίπτωση του περιοδικού Παιδόπολις, 1950–51.” Istor 15 (2009): 277–305. 9.  Danforth and Van Boeschoten, 91–93. It is worth noting, however, that the prioritization of children’s issue amid civil strife is not specific to Greece. As Loukianos Hasiotis has convincingly shown, despite several structural differences between the countries’ history, the Greek childtowns share striking similarities with the Francoist welfare centres established during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). The hogares infantiles were institutions of social control which, much as the paidopoleis, sheltered war-handicapped children of both sides so as to protect and indoctrinate them in anticommunism and religious faith (Catholicism). See, in this respect, Loukianos Hasiotis, “Raising the ‘Future of the Nation’: Child Welfare in Spain and Greece during the Civil Wars (1936–1939, 1946–1949),” in Children and War. Past and Present, ed. by Helga Embacher et al. (Solihull: Helion and Company Ltd, 2013), 213–33. 10.  Polymeris Voglis, “Η δεκαετία του 1940 ως παρελθόν: μνήμη, μαρτυρία, ταυτότητα,” Ta Istorika 47 (2007): 441–45. 11.  Hilda Kean and Paul Martin, The Public History Reader (London: Routledge, 2013), xiv–xix. For an account of the public history framing Queen Frederica’s Welfare Fund, see Loukianos Hasiotis, “Εμφύλιος πόλεμος και δημόσια ιστορία: η περίπτωση του ‘Εράνου της βασίλισσας,’” Ta Istorika 60 (2014): 107–24. 12.  Stratis
Myrivilis, Ο κομμουνισμός και το παιδομάζωμα (Kalamata: Typografeia Simaias, 1948), 15–18. 13. The upsurge in testimonial accounts of childtown evacuees is inextricably linked to the boom of memoirs about the decade of the 1940s since the 1980s. See also Hasiotis, “Εμφύλιος πόλεμος και δημόσια ιστορία,” 120–122. 14.  For example, the testimonial narratives of children evacuated in the childtowns are multivoiced. Some emphasize the childtown’s humanitarian and protective ethos, largely voicing the right-wing master-narrative. For example, Thomas Theologis, Φρειδερίκη και παιδοπόλεις χωρίς φόβο και πάθος. Με αφορμή την εκπομπή “Η μηχανή του χρόνου” (Athens: Pelasgos, 2006); and Antonis N. Venetis, Επιστολές

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(Athens: Armos, 2014). Others try to strike a balance between distressing memories of institutionalization and upward mobility. See, Dimitris Halaris, Τα βάσανα μικρών ανθρώπων. Από τον Έβρο στη Σύρο. Παιδουπόλεις (Nomarchiaki Aftodioikisi Rodopis-Evrou, 2010); and Nikos Dimou, Μνήμες που δεν έσβησε ο πόλεμος. Eμφύλιος και παιδοπόλεις (Ioannina: n.p., 2017). Likewise, plural identities emerged from the testimonial narratives of the “Auxilio Social Children” that emerged in post-dictatorship Spain. Despite the emphasis placed on the exertion of disciplinary power in the hogares, some interns engaged more with victimhood, while others were self-presented as resilient survivors. Cf. Ángela Cenarro, “Memories of Repression and Resistance. Narratives of Children Institutionalized by Auxilio Social in Postwar Spain,” History & Memory 20, no. 2 (2008): 58–59. 15.  Other than the three texts discussed in this paper, since 2000 six novels have been published touching upon, more or less extensively, the queen’s camps (the most recent being the gloomy picture painted by Kosmas Harpantidis [2017] Το άκυρο αύριο [Invalid Tomorrow]). On the literary reception of the children of the Civil War at large, see Leonidas Rempelakos, Effie Poulakou-Rebelakou, Dimitrios Ploumpidis, “Health Care for Refugee Children During the Greek Civil War (1946–1949),” Acta medico-historica Adriatica 12, no. 1 (2014): 135–52. At the same time, the 2015 cinematic production Παιδιά της Ελλάδας [Fils De Grèce] directed by Dimitris Grigoratos together with Maria Savva’s interactive performance Το ξύπνημα της μνήμης. Παιδιά – πρόσφυγες του ελληνικού Εμφυλίου [The Awakening of Memory. Child Refugees of the Greek Civil War] (2016–2017) show the artistic preoccupation with painful childhood stories during the civil conflict. 16. What perhaps explains Boutos’s moderate stance is his attempt to prevent undesirable reactions to his novel, such as those sparked off by his Η συκοφαντία του αίματος [Rhodes Blood Libel] (1997), which broached Jewish death camps in Corfu and led to him being sued for defamation of the memory of the dead. 17.  Dimosthenis Kourtovik, “Δάκρυα Γλυκερίνης,” review of The Queen’s Tears, by Vassilis Boutos, Ta Nea, 2000, Vivliodromio, 29. 18.  Monica Kjellman-Chapin, “The Politics of Kitsch,” Rethinking Marxism 22, no. 1 (January 1, 2010): 28–29, accessed August 20, 2017, doi:10.1080/089356909 03411578. 19.  Vassilis Boutos, Τα δάκρυα της βασίλισσας. (Athens: Nefeli 2000), 116. 20.  This can be inferred by Boutos’s 2001 interview broadcasted on ERT television channel (http://archive.ert.gr/75003/). 21.  Riki Van Boeschoten, “Διαβάζοντας το Bella Ciao,” I Avgi, March 14, 2006, 19. 22. As Skroumbelos notes in a March 13, 2008, interview to Lifo newspaper (http://www.lifo.gr/mag/features/498) Bella Ciao forms part of what he calls ‘the trilogy of the Left,’ also comprising the novels Οι κόκκινοι φίλοι μου [My Red Friends] (2003) and Τα Μπλε Καστόρινα παπούτσια [Blue Suede Shoes] (2007). 23.  “Γιάννης Ατζακάς: λογοτέχνης,” Cityportal Thessaloniki, accessed August 20, 2017, http://www.cityportal.gr/articles_det1.asp?subcat_id=140&article_id=14887. 24.  Yannis Atzakas, Θολός Βυθός (Athens: Agra, 2009), 7. 25. Vangelis Hatzivasileiou’s book review marks an exception. Vangelis Hatzivasileiou, “Τα ιδρύματα της βασιλίσσης,” Entefktirio 84 (January–March 2009): 164–66.



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26. Thereby, Murky Depths resonates with Petros Koutsiambasakos’s novel Πόλη Παιδιών [Children’s City] (2012) which unfolds in the 1970s—when the remaining childtowns operated as orphanages. Likewise, this novel negotiates the disruptive potentialities of play and childhood friendship against the monotony of institutionalized confinement. 27.  This information is collected through oral and phone interviews with twenty childtown evacuees and is in accordance with Boeschoten, “Διαβάζοντας το Bella Ciao,” 19. I am grateful to childtown evacuee Nikos Tsoukas for sharing with me the contact information of the members of the Childtowns Alumni Association (headquarter in Volos). 28.  Thanassis Skroumbelos, “Το να ανακαλείς μνήμες και να πονάνε είναι καθαρτήριο ψυχής και καρδιάς,” I Avgi, March 14, 2006, 19. 29. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, history, forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 280–82. 30. Nikolas Demertzis, “The Drama of the Civil War Trauma,” in Narrating Trauma: on the Impact of Collective Suffering, ed. Ron Eyerman et al. (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2011), 157. 31.  Boutos, 494. 32.  Thanassis Skroumbelos, Bella Ciao (Athens: Nefeli, 2005), 270. 33.  Atzakas, 69. 34.  “Γιάννης Ατζακάς: λογοτέχνης.” 35.  Atzakas, 278. 36.  Cf. ‘το άπατο πηγάδι της μνήμης’ [the bottomless well of memory] and ‘στους θολούς βυθούς της μνήμης’ [in the murky depths of memory]. Atzakas, 11 and 73. 37.  Tasos Kostopoulos, “Η κληρονομιά της Φρειδερίκης,” I Efimerida ton Syntakton, January 15, 2017, accessed August 18, 2017, http://www.efsyn.gr/arthro/ i-klironomia-tis-freiderikis.

WORKS CITED Atzakas, Yannis. Θολός Βυθός [Murky Depths]. Athens: Agra, 2009. Baerentzen, Lars. “The ‘Paidomazoma’ and the Queen’s Camps.” In Studies in the History of the Greek Civil War (1945–1949), edited by Lars Bærentzen, John Iatrides, and Ole L. Smith, 127–58. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1987. Boutos, Vassilis. Τα δάκρυα της βασίλισσας. [The Queen’s Tears]. Athens: Nefeli, 2000. Boutos, Vassilis. Interview with Niki Typaldou. Radiotileorasi, December 28, 2000. Boutos, Vassilis. Για μια θέση στο ράφι [A place on the shelf ], Yorgos Margaritis— Vassilis Boutos. No 2. Presented by Maria Houkli. Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation (ERT), 2001. Accessed December 13, 2018. https://archive.ert.gr/75003/. Carabott, Philip, and Sfikas, Thanassis D. The Greek Civil War: Essays on a Conflict of Exceptionalism and Silences. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Cenarro, Ángela. “Memories of Repression and Resistance. Narratives of Children Institutionalized by Auxilio Social in Postwar Spain.” History & Memory 20, no. 2 (2008): 58–59.

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Cityportal Thessaloniki. “Γιάννης Ατζακάς: λογοτέχνης” [“Yannis Atzakas: the author”]. Accessed August 20, 2017. http://www.cityportal.gr/articles_det1 .asp?subcat_id=140&article_id=14887. Close, David. The Origins of the Greek Civil War. London: Longman, 1995. Danforth, Loring M, and van Boeschoten, Riki. Children of The Greek Civil War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Demertzis, Nikolas. “The Drama of the Civil War Trauma.” In Narrating Trauma: on the Impact of Collective Suffering, edited by Ron Eyerman, Jeffrey C. Alexander, and Elizabeth Butler Breese, 133–61. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2011. Gage, Nicholas. Eleni. London: Collins, 1983. Halaris, Dimitris. Τα βάσανα μικρών ανθρώπων. Από τον Έβρο στη Σύρο. Παιδουπόλεις [The Ordeals of the Little People. From Evros to Syros. Childtowns]. Nomarchiaki Aftodioikisi Rodopis-Evrou, 2010. Hasiotis, Loukianos. “Εθνικοφροσύνη και αντικομμουνισμός στον νεανικό Τύπο: Η περίπτωση του περιοδικού Παιδόπολις, 1950–51.” [“National-mindedness and Anticommunism in the Youth Press: the Case of the Magazine Paidopolis, 1950– 51”] Istor 15 (2009): 277–305. ——. “Raising the ‘Future of the Nation’: Child Welfare in Spain and Greece during the Civil Wars (1936–1939, 1946–1949).” Ιn Children and War. Past and Present, edited by Helga Embacher, Grazia Pontera et al., 213–33. Solihull: Helion and Company Ltd, 2013. ——. “Εμφύλιος πόλεμος και δημόσια ιστορία: η περίπτωση του ‘Εράνου της βασίλισσας.’” [“Civil War and Public History: the Case of the ‘Queen’s Fund’”] Ta Istorika 60 (2014): 107–24. Haviaras, Stratis. Τα ηρωικά χρόνια [The Heroic Age]. Athens: Kastaniotis, 1999. Kean, Hilda, and Martin, Paul eds. The Public History Reader. London: Routledge, 2013. Kjellman-Chapin, Monica. “The Politics of Kitsch.” Rethinking Marxism 22, no. 1 (January 1, 2010): 27–41. Accessed August 20, 2017. doi:10.1080/08935690903411578. Kostopoulos, Tasos. “Η κληρονομιά της Φρειδερίκης” [“The Legacy of Queen Frederica”]. I Efimerida ton Syntakton, January 15, 2017. Accessed August 18, 2017. http://www.efsyn.gr/arthro/i-klironomia-tis-freiderikis. Kourtovik, Dimosthenis, “Δάκρυα Γλυκερίνης” [“Sugary Tears”]. Review of The Queen’s Tears, by Vassilis Boutos. Ta Nea, 2000, Vivliodromio, 29. Lifo. “Ο Θανάσης Σκρουμπέλος ανάμεσα στις θρυλικές τραβεστί του μπαρ “Χαβάη” [“Thanassis Skroumbelos amidst the legendary drag queens of the Hawaii bar”], March 13, 2008. Accessed April 10, 2018. http://www.lifo.gr/mag/features/498. Mazower, Mark, ed. After the War Was over: Reconstructing the Family, Nation, and State in Greece, 1943–1960. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. Movement Against Racism. Review of Bella Ciao, by Thanassis Skroumbelos, September 9, 2014. Accessed April 10, 2018. https://www.kar.org.gr/2014/09/09/ bella-ciao-με-σημείο-εκκίνησης-την-ιστορία-των/. Myrivilis, Stratis. Ο κομμουνισμός και το παιδομάζωμα [Communism and ChildrenAbduction]. Kalamata: Typografeia Simaias, 1948.



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Politopoulou, Marlena. Η μνήμη της πολαρόιντ [The Polaroid’s Memory]. Athens: Metaihmio, 2009. Ramantanis Panos. Review of Bella Ciao, by Thanassis Skroumbelos. Left.gr, December 30, 2012. Accessed April 10, 2018. https://left.gr/news/vivliokritiki-bella-ciao Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, history, forgetting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Skroumbelos, Thanassis. Bella Ciao. Athens: Nefeli, 2005. ——. “Το να ανακαλείς μνήμες και να πονάνε είναι καθαρτήριο ψυχής και καρδιάς” [“To recall memories that hurt is purifying for the soul and heart.”] I Avgi, March 14, 2006, 19. Theologis, Thomas. Φρειδερίκη και παιδοπόλεις χωρίς φόβο και πάθος. Με αφορμή την εκπομπή “Η μηχανή του χρόνου” [Frederica and childtowns without fear and passion. On the occasion of the TV broadcast ‘The Time Machine’]. Athens: Pelasgos, 2006. Van Boeschoten, Riki. “Διαβάζοντας το Bella Ciao” [“Reading Bella Ciao”]. I Avgi, March 14, 2006, 19. Venetis, N. Antonis. Επιστολές [Letters]. Athens: Armos, 2014. Vervenioti, Tasoula. “Περί ‘παιδομαζώματος’ και ‘παιδοφυλάγματος’ ο λόγος ή τα παιδιά στη δίνη της εμφύλιας διαμάχης” [“The Discourse on ‘ChildrenSalvation’ and ‘Children-Abduction’ or Children in the Maelstrom of the Civil War”]. In Το όπλο παρά πόδα. Οι πολιτικοί πρόσφυγες του ελληνικού εμφυλίου στην Ανατολική Ευρώπη [The Political Refugees of the Greek Civil War in Eastern Europe], edited by Eftyhia Voutira et al., 101–23. Thessaloniki: University of Macedonia Press 2005. Voglis, Polymeris. “Η δεκαετία του 1940 ως παρελθόν: μνήμη, μαρτυρία, ταυτότητα.” [The decade of the 1940s as past: memory, testimony, identity.”] Ta Istorika 47 (2007): 437–56.

Chapter Six

Fashioning a European Past for the National Self Nikos Themelis’ For Some Companionship Maria Akritidou

The twenty-first century found Greece part of the newly minted Eurozone and with a government elected on a platform of Europeanization and modernization. The new millennium was also ushered in with a call to rewrite (national) history—a call taken up as the mantra of the History of New Hellenism (1770–2000), an ambitious ten-volume encyclopedic work of public history, distributed by a prominent centrist daily newspaper.1 The term “New Hellenism” appearing in its title was first introduced in nineteenth-century nationalist historiography in order to denote a continual “genealogy of Hellenism” from antiquity up to the present;2 here, however, it is taken as the sole subject of national history, pointing to an exclusive focus on the recent past— before and after the “War of Independence” against Ottoman rule in 1821 and the formation of the modern Greek state in 1830—breaking away from a historiographical tradition privileging a diachronic approach of continuity. The desire to reengage with the “history of new Hellenism” in the public sphere can be understood as a consequence of “the sudden presence of the past”3 that the 1989 reshuffling of space and ethnic identities in the Balkans brought about; new mental maps were drawn parallel to the new geographical borders and Greece had cause to rethink its place in the Balkans and in Europe. The same workings of the historical imagination underpinned the production of fictional narratives that take up as their subject the very notion of the “past of new Hellenism,” as a reconfiguration of the period leading up to the birth of the nation-state. This reconfiguration can take the form of a focus on the encounter either with the “West” or the “East”; while the former—the fashioning of a European past—will be the main focus of this chapter, it should be juxtaposed to the parallel and more prominent fictional rehabilitation of a hitherto “forgotten” Ottoman past, reimagined 103

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as a common experience of Ottoman heritage within new conceptions of national histories in the Balkans. So, it is not surprising that the first two volumes of the History of New Hellenism are dedicated to this very past, the period before the formation of the modern Greek state. What is telling, however, is the choice to cover so extensively a time span of only fifty years (i.e., 1770–1821). This starting point places the beginning of national history at the heart of eighteenth-century European modernity, signaling the development of national consciousness (and the consequent desire for a nation) by the Greek-speaking Orthodox population in Ottoman lands (and beyond). While attributed to many factors (economic, political, and military), this process was galvanized by an intellectual movement that would come to be known as the Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment. The term is a historiographical construct, developed after World War II in order to designate a temporal structure that offers a different historical conception of the “dark ages” up to the 1821 revolt; Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment proper is usually set in the 1770s and thought to be preceded by two previous phases, beginning around 1600.4 The Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment is a concept of history that ties the birth of the modern Greek state to the secular philosophy of Enlightenment, “merging the fate of ‘new Hellenism’ with the fate of Europe” by placing emphasis on an enlightened bourgeois class, “the role of intellectuals, the development of their communicative networks, and their social mobility.”5 Here, the sense of continuity with an ancient past, which was part and parcel of the development of national consciousness, is not considered a given but a product of the privileging of antiquity as the basis of European modernity. The Enlightenment is thought to be the driving force behind the advancement of the claim to a heritage that “allowed educated Greeks to see themselves as distinct from the rest of the Balkan populations under Ottoman rule or other members of the Christian Orthodox Millet-i Rum.”6 This concept was reworked by the History of New Hellenism; decades of specialist research are condensed in this ambitious work of public history and major themes include, among others, the merchant communities in the diaspora, the rise of print culture and the circulation of books, the role that European ideas (and idealizations) of antiquity played in the development of a national consciousness. These are all themes taken up in the novel For Some Companionship,7 published in 2005 by Nikos Themelis, a writer already credited with recounting the successes and failures of the modern Greek bourgeoisie from late nineteenth-century Balkans to interwar Greece (1880–1936), in a popular trilogy published at the turn of the twenty-first century. In contrast to the broad time span covered by his previous works, For Some Companionship is set in a very specific year: 1794. This single chronology places the plot during what



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is considered the “critical decade” of the Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment.8 The novel contrasts the condensed time span to a broad geography, mapping out some of the spaces where this intellectual movement flourished during the last decade of the eighteenth century: the Habsburg monarchy (specifically Vienna and the Transylvanian town of Brasow), and the Republic of Venice (specifically the Ionian island of Corfu). The exclusion in the novel of territories held by the Ottoman Empire is worth noting and is characteristic of the very conception of history with which the novel engages. In its most basic version the narrative of the NeoHellenic Enlightenment ascribed to a “dream of Europe,” and, while “sober, without apparent nationalistic implications,” it “radically cut off recent Greek history from its Balkan and Ottoman contexts.”9 For Some Companionship, while undermining a nationalist or even heroic interpretation of the processes that led to the revolt against Ottoman rule, adopts a Eurocentric perspective, which is not without its own set of problems. As Elli Skopetea put it more simply, “‘Becoming Western’ implies, among other things, adopting Western values”; this is a process that can be understood as one of self-colonization, making the symbolic capital of antiquity a burden as well as a driving force of nation formation.10 The novel, however, as I will contend, lays a claim to a “dream of Europe” that avoids the language of heritage and genealogy, proposing instead an understanding of the fashioning of the national subject based on the notion of companionship, already stated in its title. The Greek word συντροφιά (or, with a slight change of accent, συντροφία) although translated as companionship, can also have the meaning of company (commercial and otherwise) and fellowship or society. In what follows, by focusing on the instances where the meaning of the title is unpacked, I argue that this fictional reconfiguration of a—specifically European—past is grounded not on genealogical claims but on a language of belonging based on different bonds, those of distinctly and radically modern emotions. The novel’s threefold narrative structure charts a geographical and ideological map of companionship in late eighteenth-century Southeast and Central Europe. The main protagonist, Theophanis, is a typical figure of the NeoHellenic Enlightenment and of the concurrent historiographical construct of the “conquering Balkan Orthodox merchant.”11 A prominent member of the Greek Orthodox trading community in Brasow, he identifies as a Graikós [= Greek], a term of self-identification, which, unlike that of Hellene, did not point to an ancient ancestry but to the cultural and linguistic reality of the late eighteenth century.12 As an enlightened merchant, he is an ardent supporter of educational and editorial projects in his town and beyond the Danube, as he is becoming increasingly frustrated by the multilingualism of his community

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and concerned with the preservation of the language of the “Graikoí.” He is also more interested in geographical inquiry than the word of the gospel, although luxury editions of both the Bible and of the 1553 posthumous edition of Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia are on display at his house: the first one closed, the second one lying open on the page with the map of Brasow, listed as Cronenstatt [German: Kronstadt]. The merchant, displaying signs of a burgeoning national consciousness that seeks grounding in geography as well as in history, insists on the Greek-origin name Stephanopoli for his town, although his fellow merchants, including his son, call it simply Vrasovo, referring to its local, non-Saxon, common name. The emphasis on the politics of naming and multilingualism in the novel serves to highlight the development of national consciousness as a work in progress, in accord with the historiographical understanding of the period under the narrative on the Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment. The three different cultural spaces mapped out by the novel—Stephanopoli/Brasow, Vienna and Corfu—correspond to three, interconnected, stories. The first is that of the protagonist’s daughter; Theophanis is a widower and hopes to marry her to a Greek Orthodox who speaks the Greek language. As soon as the chosen groom, the son of an aristocrat in Corfu, arrives in Vrasovo as he calls it—to the merchant’s dismay—the youngsters fall in love; the engagement, along with the deposit of the dowry, is expedited and the betrothed couple starts on its way to Corfu. When they are robbed, and the dowry lost, the aristocrat father of the groom, who is revealed to be in a dire economic situation, seeks the cancellation of the planned wedding. But his son, an enlightened scholar and student of medicine in Padova, diverges from his father’s will and marries his betrothed in Corfu, privileging the companionship of souls over money: “The purpose of marriage was not the glorification of families and the multiplication of fortunes. Above and beyond the dowries, what mattered was the coupling of people, the companionship [συντρόφευμα] of souls.”13 The merchant’s son will show the same contempt toward his father’s wishes. He is sent to Vienna to deposit a monetary legacy by a benefactor for the establishment of a school for the Greek-speaking community; but he has another, double, objective: to avoid an arranged marriage and to reach Paris so that he can fight on the side of Robespierre for the French Revolution. Upon his arrival in Vienna, the budding Jacobin learns the news of Robespierre’s execution (Paris, July 28) and he decides to seek out the brothers Pouliou—historical figures, whose editorial project, the first surviving Modern Greek newspaper, features prominently in accounts of the Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment. The brothers invite him to a gathering at the home of a merchant, where the main topic of conversation is a fellow named



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Rigas, a name that instantly recalls to today’s Greek reader the leading historical personality of the Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment, Rigas Velestinlis, or Feraios. There he encounters many young liberals, all easily recognizable as would-be companions of Rigas, executed alongside him in 1798 for actively propagandizing a revolt against Ottoman domination. The youngster feels a real comradeship: “around him [was] an eminent fellowship [συντροφία] of like-minded men. A fellowship worth being a member of with all the power of one’s mind and soul.”14 He chooses to stay in Vienna in the service of the Pouliou brothers, assisting them in finding subscribers but also in the circulation of secret subversive pamphlets, as he makes the decision “to live honestly and yet without betraying his ideas, somewhere between Vrasovo and Paris.”15 He will also find a different sort of union: when his brother, already living in Vienna, is killed in an accident leaving behind a pregnant, non-Greek-speaking mistress, he decides to marry her, feeling “a need for her companionship [συντροφιά].”16 Back in Brasow, the merchant Theophanis will end up discovering himself the merits of a companionship through a series of misunderstandings. When letters arrive from Corfu informing him that his daughter’s fiancé is less than fluent in Greek—not unusual for members of the Libro D’Oro in Greekspeaking Venetian lands—and of the economic situation of the aristocratic groom’s family, he sends word for the wedding to be cancelled and the dowry to be returned; he is, of course, too late. When another letter arrives from his son in Vienna informing him that he will not be returning, but without any mention of whether he had deposited the money entrusted to him, Theophanis misunderstands, thinking his son has embezzled the funds and abandoned him for Robespierre. Having spent his fortune on the (now lost) dowry and feeling obliged to return the embezzled money, he decides to marry a rich widow, a match that, up to then, he had refused. This last misunderstanding is resolved on the eve of the wedding, when the benefactor informs him that he has received a receipt for the deposit. By then, however, the widower has realized that he does in fact desire the marriage: to the bride, who confesses to him that she can’t have any more children, he replies that it does not matter, since “we are getting married for some companionship [συντροφιά].”17 A marriage in the name of companionship seems almost revolutionary to the widow. The wedding will go through but with an unfortunate glitch for the merchant who placed such emphasis on the propagation of the Greek language: the ceremony is in Romanian, as they chose not to marry in the Greek Orthodox Church for fear of gossip. However, when the eventful summer of 1794 ends and winter comes, Theophanis feels more and more secure “at the thought of how right his judgment proved, to choose companionship as the single most important thing in life.”18

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This is the concluding sentence of the narrative; it is tempting to read the phrase, which echoes the title of the novel, as a discourse of conciliation, a politics of disengagement, a retreat into the private sphere after plans are thwarted and the future no longer seems under control. It is perhaps telling that the most successful characterization of the novel was that of a somewhat lighter prose intermezzo (compared to the ambitious trilogy that preceded it) and of a romance.19 But it is precisely the concept of companionship that complicates the apparent call to domestic passivity: companionship, as a pairing of souls and as choice of love as a natural right, is the common thread in all three sub-plots of the novel, but it also denotes the commercial companionship of merchants in Brasow (the trading company), and the fellowship of the “Vienna Circle,” a political company, a secret society or association based around the would-be Rigas’s companions. In this triple interweaving, the concept of companionship is not one of private disengagement. Rather, it charts a new sensitivity implied by new forms of collectivity: trading company, secret society, companionship of souls, all forms signifying a different “imaginary of belonging,”20 forms intrinsically modern as well as deeply political. The formulation of new communal bonds and social emotions is also a central element of the narrative of the Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment, where it is closely connected with the ideological work of printing and book circulation, which was in fact on the rise during the last decade of the eighteenth century, when “a new born public sphere was in the making [. . .] by the means, quite simply, of public communication: mainly through the medium of the printing press.”21 Print culture is manifestly a central theme of the novel: the merchant Theophanis, owner of an impressive private library, also pursues the establishment of a common library in his Transylvanian town, while his son ends up working for a printing house in Vienna. Both projects carry a pedagogical as well as a political meaning; communal libraries and newspapers were the cornerstones of an emerging public sphere made possible through the support of traders and trading companies that aspired not only to commercial but also to cultural transfers in service of the “common good.” The circulation of the printed word was also a major contributing factor to the other kind of company (i.e., secret revolutionary societies). The interconnection of trading companies and secret societies in the novel, through the linguistic use of the concept of companionship, again here points to a common emotional language of belonging. After all, the most prominent secret society behind the preparation of the Greek revolt in 1821, and one that emerged through the newly formed public sphere, was aptly called The Society/ Company of Friends [Φιλική Εταιρία], utilizing as its title a language of political bonds that became part of the “vocabulary of a Greek patriotism.”22 The “Vienna Circle” of comrades in the novel (the secret fellowship led by Rigas



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and promoted through the use of print culture) is a precursor of this very society of friends and companions. By emphasizing how the young Jacobin, the protagonist’s son who longed to join Robespierre in Paris, opted for companionship both in the public and in the private sphere, the novel seems to underline the importance of the latter part of the triad of liberty, equality, and fraternity that was at the core of the French Revolution; companionship appears here to be understood as “a fraternal language of civic sentimentality,”23 invested with political meaning and liberating potential. The very notion of sentimentality brings us back to the triple meaning of the concept of companionship in all its complexity throughout the novel, and the charting of a new, distinctly modern sensitivity brought about by new forms of collectivity. How does the third meaning, the common theme of companionship of souls that runs through all three stories in the novel, acquire social meaning and political value? In other words, how does sentimentality of a non-civic nature fit into the Republic of Letters? The answer is to be found in the private library of the merchant in Brasow. Apart from the two treasures on show—the silver-bound gospel and Cosmographia—one would also find issues of the brothers Pouliou’s newspaper, trading manuals, as well as two geographical monographs, two translations of scientific and philosophical European treatises, one paraphrases from the French Encyclopédie and an anonymous political pamphlet, all major works in modern Greek of leading Enlightenment scholars, published (or written) during the second half of the eighteenth century.24 In short, what is on display is the discourse of trade and economy side by side with the emancipatory discourse of science and philosophy, with an emphasis not only on original works but on translation projects that embody the secular spirit of knowledge transfer in an emergent public sphere. But knowledge was not the only thing being transferred in the last decade of the eighteenth century, which was after all the decade that witnessed the rise of sentimental fiction. The absence of sentimental fiction from the protagonist’s library does not go unnoticed in the novel: The School for Delicate Lovers, a collection of stories translated by Rigas Feraios, is shortly considered as a gift for the merchant’s daughter but deemed inappropriate. Published just four years before, in 1790, by the same printing house where the protagonist’s son will end up working in Vienna, it consisted of loose translations of short stories by the contemporary French novelist Rétif de la Bretonne. Its publication inaugurated a tradition, as it was followed in 1792 by Love’s Outcomes: A Μoral Love Story with Songs from Constantinople Composed in the Common Tongue for the Entertainment and Enjoyment of the Noble Youth, considered the first example of original (sentimental) narrative prose short fiction in print in modern Greek. The moral love story mentioned in the subtitle stands for a threefold narrative synthesis,

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consisting of short stories that seek to adduce (at least) three different outcomes of romantic love. Although published anonymously, the work is attributed to the Cypriot Ioannis Karatzas, a close friend of Rigas and one of the youthful liberals encountered in the fictional gathering of companions during the Viennese summer of 1794. The translated and the original late eighteenth-century stories depicting contemporary society were meant to be both entertaining and didactic, and constituted a fictional manifestation of the emancipatory program of Enlightenment featuring inter-class marriage as the means of social change and secularizing romantic love as natural desire. In other words, they advocated for the right to choose one’s companion. The stories aspired to the new politics of love of eighteenth-century European sentimental literature; this was a discourse of sentimentality that overcame religious and class differences and contributed to the fashioning of a new subject, a modern subject bound, if only in fiction, to a world and ethics of emotions. It’s what Luisa Passerini defines as the moment when Europeans invent a representation of the self in which romantic love, which of course was and is a universal, is reconfigured as part of the very core of the new European subject.25 The connection of Themelis’s novel with these stories of young love and defiance is not only one of thematic motifs, linguistic loans, or the spectral presence of Rigas’s ideas and companions. If these ideas, in conjunction with the works in the merchant’s library, map the ideological background of the novel, realistic sentimental literature defines its form, the form of a romance as it was aptly, if somewhat bemusedly, characterized. But it is a very specific incarnation of that form, one embedded in history (i.e., historically situated): the novel appropriates (without imitating) the fiction of the historical epoch it seeks to represent, both thematically and formally. In doing so, it also hints at the ideological content of the form of eighteenth-century sentimental literature, teasing out its radical potential and reminding us that the political can be reformulated by the narrative means of realistic sentimental prose. It is this very aesthetic gesture that complicates the text’s ideology, allowing the concept of companionship in all its meanings, including that of private love or friendship, to be invested with a radical content. The appeal “for some companionship” becomes a call not to private emotions but to social affective bonds, one not of private sentiment but of aspiring collectivity and of participation to the formation of the very idea of modern Europe, of the modern European subject. Of course this representation of the past is bound to a very specific idea of the European subject: one produced by modern secular bourgeois morality.26 This romance of a novel is a fictional project that provides a historical grounding for the middle class; it calls attention to the fact that middle-class



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ethics were once in conjunction with a liberating discourse of a new imaginary of belonging, be that romantic love that privileges companionship over dowries and genealogical or linguistic purity, fraternal bonds of civic and political friendship, or the care for the “common good” in the service of a trading company which aims to benefit society. Again, this is a very particular conceptualization of European modernity and modern Greece’s relation with it. In engaging the historiographical narrative of Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment, the novel ignores a critique of the self-colonizing aspects of that relation and of the process of cultural transfers that it describes. However, at the same time, this staging of a European commonwealth of emotions constitutes a claim to community and to European modernity not based on the rhetoric of debt to ancient heritage, but on a different language, that of liberty, equality, and fraternity. In any case, we can better understand the aesthetic gesture of the novel and its historical poetics when it is placed within the discursive networks of historical imagination at the time of its production. During the year of the novel’s publication (2005), and only a short time after the wide circulation of the History of New Hellenism, a public debate erupted on the formation of the modern Greek nation: Was New Hellenism a community based on genealogical ties of continuity or on civic bonds formed during the period of Enlightenment? The heated discussion was indicative of the unresolved issues of national self-awareness at the heart of public history and historical imagination.27 This is a question intertwined with the discourse on Europeanness, on what it means to be European, a discussion that has known many versions since 1989.28 Also in 2005, the historian Anthony Molho, reflecting on the discourses of Europe and on Europe in discourse, evoked a well-known 1814 quote by Madame de Staël (“Il faut, dans nos temps modernes, avoir l’esprit européen [In our modern times, it is necessary to possess a European spirit]”). He did so in order to pose the following questions: “One hundred and ninety years ago, when Mme. De Staël wrote these lines, l’esprit européen was perhaps easier to identify than it is today. How would we, today, wish to come to terms with this esprit? What exactly would we want to embrace or reject?”29 Themelis’s novel, published the very same year, is a tentative answer to that question, through the language of emotions and belonging. What is of interest here is not the validity of this specific representation of the past (true or false), but the way that past, already mediated through historiographical discourse, is narrativized as part of the project of “inventing [Modern] Greece.”30 For Some Companionship is neither a nostalgic revisiting of the past nor a reworking of historical trauma. Thoroughly realistic in its form and light-hearted in its content, it rather seeks to put forth a particular historical consciousness by staging a past “European self” for the

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future, not only through its content but also its form, drawing from the literary archive. It tracks back to the beginning of it all: of modern Greek fiction, of modern Greek history—at least as it is mediated and systematized by a certain critical tradition belonging to the historiography of the “Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment” that gained new currency during the turn of the twenty-first century in the field of public history. By appropriating and reworking the form of eighteenth-century sentimental literature, it is harking back to what is considered an inaugurating point of modern Greek literature, bringing forth incarnations of a modern, and specifically European, subjectivity in order to tell a story about the “making” of the modern Greek national self as part of a European commonwealth of modernity. The interrogation of the European project of a modern commonwealth has gained a new prominence during the recent “crisis,” which “sparked off a debate about Europe and a rethinking of its identity, cultural values and orientation.”31 Returning to Themelis’s For Some Companionship from the vantage point of our present, steeped in the discourse of crisis and in a resurgence of nationalism, only serves to highlight the precariousness of the novel’s aesthetic gesture and of the possibility of fashioning a common European past that claims a community of civic and social belonging by circumventing the rhetoric of genealogy and debt. NOTES 1. Vassilis Panayiotopoulos, ed., Ιστορία του Νέου Ελληνισμού (1770–2000) [History of New Hellenism (1770–2000)] (Athens: Ellinika Grammata and Ta Nea, 2003–2004). The call to “rewrite history” was part of the advertising campaign as well as repeatedly stated by the editor in interviews. 2.  For the construction of a genealogy of Hellenisms see Antonis Liakos, “Hellenism and the Μaking of Modern Greece: Time, Language, Space,” in Hellenisms, Culture, Identity and Ethnicity from Antiquity to Modernity, ed. Katerina Zacharia (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 211. 3. I borrow the phrase from a study on the shifts in historical consciousness brought about after 1989, see Chris Lorenz, “Unstuck in Time. Or: The Sudden Presence of the Past,” in Performing the Past: Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe, ed. Karin Tilmans, Frank van Vree and Jay M. Winter (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 67. For the specific case of Greece in this context, I rely on Vangelis Calotychos, The Balkan Prospect. Identity, Culture, and Politics in Greece after 1989 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 15–33. 4. For a survey of Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment in English, in a volume that also includes translations of its seminal works, see Paschalis Kitromilides, “The Enlightenment in Southeast Europe: Introductory Considerations,” in Discourses of



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Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe (1770–1945): Texts and Commentaries, vol. 1, Late Enlightenment: Emergence of the Modern “National Idea,” ed. Balász Trencsényi and Michal Kopeček (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2006), 45–53. 5.  See Manolis Patiniotis, “Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment: In Search of a European identity,” in Relocating the History of Science: Essays in Honor of Kostas Gavroglu, ed. Theodore Arabatzis, Jürgen Renn and Ana Simões (Cham: Springer, 2015), 124 and Liakos, “Hellenism and the making of Modern Greece,” 215. Both studies trace the ideological implications of the development of this schema by the scholar C. T. Dimaras. 6. Dimitris Tziovas, “Introduction: Decolonizing Antiquity, Heritage Politics, and Performing the Past,” in Re-imagining the Past: Antiquity and Modern Greek Culture, ed. Dimitris Tziovas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 2. For the “attempt to claim participation in European modernity” through ancient heritage, see Yannis Hamilakis, The Nation and its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 76–77. 7.  Nikos Themelis, Για μια Συντροφιά Ανάμεσά μας [For Some Companionship] (Athens: Kedros, 2005). All references to pages are to this edition and all translations are mine. 8.  Constantinos Th. Dimaras, “Dix années de culture grecque dans leur perspective historique (1791–1800),” in La Grèce au temps des Lumières (Geneve: Librairie Droz, 1969), 37–60. 9. Patiniotis, “Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment,” 120, 128. Cf. the seminal paper on the subject, Elli Skopetea, “Ο Ρήγας και το Οθωμανικό Πλαίσιο του Ελληνικού Διαφωτισμού [Rigas and the Ottoman Context of Greek Enlightenment],” Ta Istorika 19 (2002): 280. 10.  Elli Skopetea, “The Balkans and the Notion of the ‘Crossroads between East and West,’” in Greece and the Balkans: Identities, Perceptions and Cultural Encounters since the Enlightenment, ed. Dimitris Tziovas (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 174. For the notion of self-colonization see Tziovas, “Introduction: Decolonizing Antiquity,” 2–3. 11.  Traian Stoianovich, “The Conquering Balkan Orthodox Merchant,” Journal of Economic History 20 (1960): 243–313. 12. For a brief survey of the “Greek political and cultural geographies, real and imagined” of the time see Peter Mackridge, Language and Identity in Greece, 1766–1976 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 32–47. The English term Greek with reference to the characters of Themelis’s novel does not denote nationality but should be considered a shorthand for a variety of identifiers used during the late eighteenth century. 13. Themelis, Companionship, 173, italics mine. 14. Ibid., 246, italics mine. 15.  Ibid., 240. 16.  Ibid., 262, italics mine. 17.  Ibid., 319, italics mine. 18.  Ibid., 324, italics mine.

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19.  Dimitris Mitropoulos, “Προξενιά, Διαφωτισμός και Άρωμα Γαλλικής Επανάστασης [Matchmaking, Enlightenment and a Whiff of French Revolution],” Ta Nea, July 2–3, 2005. 20.  For the triple meaning of companionship, as well as an analysis of the connection of Enlightenment and typography in the novel, see Panayiotis Noutsos, review of Για Μια Συντροφιά Ανάμεσά μας [For Some Companionship], by Nikos Themelis, Mandragoras 36 (2007): 136. 21.  Nassia Yakovaki, “The Philiki Etaireia Revisited. In Search of Contexts, National and International.” The Historical Review / La Revue Historique 11 (2014): 177, http://dx.doi.org/10.12681/hr.334. 22.  Yakovaki, “The Philiki Etaireia Revisited,” 173. 23.  Adrian O’Connor, “‘Through the Bonds of Sentiment’: Fraternité and Politics in Revolutionary France,” in Trust and Happiness in the History of European Political Thought, ed. Laszlo Kontler and Mark Somos (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 423. 24. See For Some Companionship, 89. For an in-depth analysis and a comparative reading of the historical poetics of the novel, see Maria Akritidou, Όψεις του Παρελθόντος του Νέου Ελληνισμού στο Σύγχρονο Νεοελληνικό Μυθιστόρημα [Facets of the Past of Modern Hellenism in Contemporary Greek Fiction] (Berlin: Edition Romiosini, forthcoming). 25.  See Luisa Passerini, Love and the Idea of Europe, trans. Juliet Haydock and Allan Cameron (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009). It is worth noting that in the historical encyclopedia published the years immediately preceding the novel, the article on the literature of the period features the works by Rigas and his companion as indicative of a new ethics and as part of the pedagogical and political project of Enlightenment, see Miltos Pechlivanos, “Λογοτεχνία 1770‒1821. Ανάμεσα στην Ωφέλεια και την Τέρψη [Literature 1770‒1821. Between Benefit and Enjoyment],” in History of New Hellenism (1770–2000) (see note 1), 2: 192–3. 26.  Pechlivanos, “Λογοτεχνία 1770‒1821,” 193. For the analysis of the political function of sentimental literature I also rely on Ellis Markman, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 27.  See Antonis Liakos, “H Ανακαίνιση της Εθνικής Ταυτότητας [The Renovation of National Identity],” To Vima, March 6, 2005, where he reiterates that the political stake of the ongoing debate is the civic ties of belonging, both to the imagined community of the nation and to that of Europe. 28.  See, for example, the summary of a 2003 public discussion on the meaning of a European collective identity in Gerasimus Katsan, History and National Ideology in Greek Postmodernist Fiction (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson, 2013), 180. 29.  Anthony Molho, “A Harlequin’s Dress. Reflections on Europe’s Public Discourse,” in Finding Europe: Discourses on Margins, Communities, Images, 13th–ca. 18th Centuries, ed. Anthony Molho and Diogo Ramada Curto (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 1. 30.  Peter Bien, “Inventing Greece,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 23, no 2 (October 2005): 217–34.



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31.  Dimitris Tziovas, “Narratives of the Greek Crisis and the Politics of the Past,” in Greece in Crisis: The Cultural Politics of Austerity, ed. Dimitris Tziovas (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), 26. Cf. Katsan, History and National Ideology, 180–81.

WORKS CITED Akritidou, Maria. Όψεις του Παρελθόντος του Νέου Ελληνισμού στο Σύγχρονο Νεοελληνικό Μυθιστόρημα [Facets of the Past of Modern Hellenism in Contemporary Greek Fiction]. Berlin: Edition Romiosini, forthcoming. Bien, Peter. “Inventing Greece,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 23, no. 2 (October 2005): 217–34. Calotychos, Vangelis. The Balkan Prospect. Identity, Culture, and Politics in Greece after 1989. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Dimaras, Constantinos Th. “Dix Annees de Culture Grecque dans leur Perspective Historique (1791–1800).” In La Grèce au Temps des Lumières, 37–60. Geneve: Librairie Droz, 1969. Hamilakis, Yannis. The Nation and its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Katsan, Gerasimus. History and National Ideology in Greek Postmodernist Fiction. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson, 2013. Kitromilides, Paschalis. “The Enlightenment in Southeast Europe: introductory considerations.” In Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe (1770–1945): Texts and Commentaries. Vol. 1, Late Enlightenment: Emergence of the Modern “National Idea,” edited by Balász Trencsényi and Michal Kopeček, 45–53. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2006. Liakos, Antonis. “H Ανακαίνιση της Εθνικής Ταυτότητας [The Renovation of National Identity].” To Vima, March 6, 2005. ———. “Hellenism and the Μaking of Modern Greece: Time, Language, Space.” In Hellenisms, Culture, Identity and Ethnicity from Antiquity to Modernity, edited by Katerina Zacharia, 201–36. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008. Lorenz, Chris. “Unstuck in Time. Or: The Sudden Presence of the Past.” In Performing the Past: Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe, edited by Karin Tilmans, Frank van Vree and Jay M. Winter, 67–102. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010. Mackridge, Peter. Language and Identity in Greece, 1766–1976. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Markman, Ellis. The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Mitropoulos, Dimitris. “Προξενιά, Διαφωτισμός και Άρωμα Γαλλικής Επανάστασης. [Matchmaking, Enlightenment and a Whiff of French Revolution].” Ta Nea, July 2–3, 2005. Molho, Anthony. “A Harlequin’s Dress. Reflections on Europe’s Public Discourse.” In Finding Europe: Discourses on Margins, Communities, Images, 13th–ca. 18th

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Centuries, edited by Anthony Molho and Diogo Ramada Curto, 1–17. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007. Noutsos, Panayiotis. Review of Για Μια Συντροφιά Ανάμεσά μας [For Some Companionship], by Nikos Themelis. Mandragoras 36 (2007): 130–36. O’Connor, Adrian. “‘Through the Bonds of Sentiment’: Fraternité and Politics in Revolutionary France.” In Trust and Happiness in the History of European Political Thought, edited by Laszlo Kontler and Mark Somos, 412–35. Leiden: Brill, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004353671. Panayiotopoulos, Vassilis, ed. Ιστορία του Νέου Ελληνισμού (1770–2000) [History of New Hellenism (1770–2000)]. 10 vols. Athens: Ellinika Grammata and Ta Nea, 2003–2004. Passerini, Luisa. Love and the Idea of Europe. Translated by Juliet Haydock and Allan Cameron. New York: Berghahn Books, 2009. Patiniotis, Manolis. “Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment: In search of a European identity.” In Relocating the History of Science: Essays in Honor of Kostas Gavroglu, edited by Theodore Arabatzis, Jürgen Renn and Ana Simões, 117–30. Cham: Springer, 2015. Pechlivanos, Miltos. “Λογοτεχνία 1770‒1821. Ανάμεσα στην Ωφέλεια και την Τέρψη [Literature 1770‒1821. Between Benefit and Enjoyment].” In Ιστορία του Νέου Ελληνισμού (1770–2000) [History of New Hellenism (1770–2000)]. Vol.2, Η Οθωμανική Κυριαρχία, 1770–1821. Διαφωτισμός, Ιστορία της Παιδείας, Θεσμοί και Δίκαιο [Ottoman Domination, 1770–1821. Enlightenment, History of Education, Institutions and Law], edited by Vassilis Panayiotopoulos, 181–97. Athens: Ellinika Grammata and Ta Nea, 2003. Skopetea, Elli. “Ο Ρήγας και το Οθωμανικό Πλαίσιο του Ελληνικού Διαφωτισμού [Rigas and the Ottoman Context of Greek Enlightenment].” Ta Istorika 19 (2002): 278–80. ———. “The Balkans and the Notion of the ‘Crossroads between East and West.’” In Greece and the Balkans: Identities, Perceptions and Cultural Encounters since the Enlightenment, edited by Dimitris Tziovas, 171–76. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Stoianovich, Traian. “The Conquering Balkan Orthodox Merchant.” Journal of Economic History 20 (1960): 243–313. Themelis, Nikos. Για μια Συντροφιά Ανάμεσά μας [For Some Companionship]. Athens: Kedros, 2005. Tziovas, Dimitris. “Introduction: Decolonizing Antiquity, Heritage Politics, and Performing the Past.” In Re-imagining the Past: Antiquity and Modern Greek Culture, edited by Dimitris Tziovas, 1–26. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. ———. “Narratives of the Greek Crisis and the Politics of the Past.” In Greece in Crisis: The Cultural Politics of Austerity, edited by Dimitris Tziovas, 19–64. London: I.B. Tauris, 2017. Yakovaki, Nassia. “The Philiki Etaireia Revisited. In Search of Contexts, National and International.” The Historical Review / La Revue Historique 11 (2014): 171– 87. http://dx.doi.org/10.12681/hr.334.

Chapter Seven

The Anxieties of History Greek Fiction in Crisis Gerasimus Katsan

Since the initial shock in 2009, dealing with the economic crisis has become the major preoccupation of Greek society in general. Indeed, one could say that the topic has become all encompassing, and even the perception of Greece abroad, it seems, has become indelibly connected to that one word: crisis.1 On the ground in Greece, the depressing physical evidence of the crisis seems to be everywhere: the ubiquitous graffiti; the homeless; the beggars; the closedup store fronts festooned with “for rent” signs; the crumbling infrastructure. Yet, despite the apparent devastation, there has been an “explosion of creativity” in culture and the arts.2 Like all people in Greece, contemporary writers have been deeply affected by the continuing economic crisis and its social repercussions. As is typical in Greece, artists and intellectuals have been called on for commentary and analysis of the situation in the media almost as much as the economists and the politicians. Beyond the interviews and op-ed pieces one finds in the major newspapers, increasingly the thematics of “crisis” have seeped into contemporary literature itself. Some writers have attempted to make sense of the meaning and impact of the crisis by directly addressing it in their work: prominent figures such as Rhea Galanaki and Petros Markaris, for example, among many others, have actively commented on the crisis, in both the Greek and the international press, but also in their fiction. Still others have included the crisis as simply part of the backdrop and context of their contemporary stories—unavoidably perhaps, and maybe even a little unconsciously, as if now it is taken for granted as an accepted part of the general atmosphere.3 How, then, does contemporary literature describe, characterize, imprint, and possibly ameliorate the effects of the crisis? The crisis has prompted literary responses from a wide variety of writers across different genres; what do they reflect about the experience of the crisis in Greece, and how do they echo the ways in which ordinary people have been 117

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affected by it? As we have seen over the past several years, moments of crisis inspire, or rather demand, a response within the broader culture. Crucially, writers have used connections to recent Greek history to contextualize their understanding of how Greece has found itself in such a state. The current crisis might be understood as having grown out of the post1989 moment. That earlier period sparked a different kind of crisis, one of national existential angst, that affected the way writers of fiction approached the issue of national culture and identity. At the same time, the unavoidable effects of globalization as well as ideas about postmodernity were coming to the fore in Greece. Writing about the period, historians such as Constantine Tsoucalas and Yiorgos Chouliaras, for example, made emphatic assertions that nationalism and national culture are both inescapable and obdurate, which speaks to their uneasiness with the idea of the obsolescence of national culture and makes an implicit argument against the postmodernist tendency to critique grand narratives such as nationalism.4 It is for this reason that much of the fiction produced after 1989 in Greece is informed by postmodernist discourses and aesthetic preoccupations.5 As Kathleen Fitzpatrick has commented, of all the various complexities and contradictions that postmodernism implies or contains, it is a “discourse determined by the concept of obsolescence, even as obsolescence is conversely determined by the discourse of postmodernism.”6 For Fitzpatrick this makes postmodernist theory useful because it is not a “thing,” or set of signs “with a real referent that exists in the world as we know it”; rather it is a “discursive function” that provides “a common language for [speaking about] crisis.”7 In this sense, it is apparent that both writers responding to the crisis of national identity in the 1990s and those who write about the current crisis have found postmodernist techniques such as historiographical metafiction or self-referentiality useful in their depiction and critique of contemporary Greek culture via historical contextualization. Some critics have begun to use terms such as “The Crisis Generation” and “Crisis Literature” to label what they see as a transformation in Greek literature in general. The notion of a “generation” of writers, of course, is quite common in Greek literary criticism and is often employed as shorthand to describe or incorporate a large set of diverse historical processes, aesthetic developments, and/or social movements. On the one hand, it is certainly easy to envision the current one as a “lost generation,” especially when one thinks of the dire effects of the crisis on young people—such as the vast unemployment rate of people under twenty-five, and the general hopelessness that seems to have permeated the young in Greece. Naturally, it remains to be seen whether the crisis will leave its mark on an entire literary generation in ways similar to those of the First World War, the Asia Minor Catastrophe,



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the Greek Civil War, or the Dictatorship of the Colonels so many decades ago. On the other hand, just as young and old alike have been affected by the crisis, critical engagement with, and reaction to, the crisis is hardly a generational phenomenon limited to only “young” writers. So ultimately, it may be missing the point entirely to think about contemporary writing in such terms. Nevertheless, novelist and critic Makis Karayiannis, for example, has noted a shift in perspective away from the “individualistic turn toward the mundane microcosm of daily life” that characterized writing roughly from the early 1980s to the mid-2000s. Karayiannis in essence criticizes the so-called post-Junta Generation for abandoning social and political consciousness to write about more esoteric personal and private concerns.8 He is not alone in making this particular observation: Elisavet Kotzia voices similar ideas, for example, suggesting that post-Junta writers had “no sense of vision, duty or mission” to national, social, or political issues, while Mackridge and Yannakakis posit that, compared to earlier generations, post-Junta writers lacked a “moral responsibility in relation to society . . . or to primordial philosophical issues of good and evil.”9 Karayiannis asserts, however, that even before the advent of the current crisis, writers had begun to express “a negative sense of indignation and disappointment” with contemporary developments.10 Whereas post-Junta writers had “abandoned political, ideological and national myths” for the expression of something more purely personal, private, and individual, or had made an “idiosyncratic” escape into historical fiction; now, writers find themselves at a “turning point” beyond which once more political and social considerations will dominate the literary landscape.11 Karayiannis’ use of the term “turning point” (στροφή) is reminiscent of the poet Giorgios Seferis, suggesting as it does a wholesale transformation is afoot.12 To be sure, Karayiannis echoes critic Vangelis Hatzivasileiou, who argues this “turning point” has coincided with a resurgence of the political novel, the historical novel, the crime novel, and other genres that appear to lend themselves to critical engagement with contemporary issues while putting aside the personal for a broader collective experience, opening a space that “brings to the fore the relationship between the self and the other that seeks their antithetical or conciliatory coexistence.”13 In an almost reactionary way, Hatzivasileiou draws a connection between the rise of individualism in literature to the deeper effects of a self-absorbed contemporary society that had lost its way, but that has now been jolted by the crisis into a renewed sense of collective identity and purpose. According to this view, the previous generation, it seems, was also “lost,” and its “navelgazing” deleterious to the life of the nation. Nevertheless, Hatzivasileiou makes a rather easy explanation here, blaming the whole post-Junta generation for its exhaustion with politics and its desire to explore other thematic

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avenues. But is the notion of a renewed collectivity and sense of purpose in the wake of the crisis a reality or simply the wishful thinking of an ostensibly conservative commentator? Whether one agrees with Hatzivasileiou’s perspective or not, there is some credence to the idea that, even before the crisis happened, certain writers had begun to become skeptical or critical about the direction of contemporary Greek society. Ersi Sotiropoulou’s Zigzag Through the Bitter-Orange Trees (1999), for example, can be read as a biting criticism of the moral decay evident in a society that has become shallow, egotistical, self-absorbed, and benumbed by a contemporary world inundated by television, commercialism, materialism, and postmodern globalization.14 The characters’ search for meaning and depth is thwarted at almost every turn while the novel illustrates and implicitly castigates the vapidity of contemporary culture in general, full of empty signifiers, commodified images of ancient Greece, the old-fashioned clichés of nationalist ideology, and the fake, prefabricated simulacra of global culture. If the novel was criticized in some quarters for its tastelessness and crudity verging on the pornographic, it remains nonetheless an unflinching and unapologetically uncomfortable reflection of contemporary Greece. Sotiropoulou provides neither a moral resolution nor a prescription for a better society, yet the novel ends on a moment of hope, as Nina, the youngest of the protagonists, asserts her determination to “write whatever [she] like[s]” while the not so pleasant world described in the novel is erased in a metafictional puff of smoke.15 Another example is a text that seems to clearly prefigure the crisis: Amanda Michalopoulou’s Why I Killed My Best Friend (2003). Like Sotiropoulou, Michalopoulou criticizes the contemporary scene, but from a much more overtly historical and political perspective that also supplies much more context for how Greece comes to find itself in its “predicament.” A chronicle of the post-Junta period, the novel follows the lives of its protagonists, Maria and Anna, as they first come of age in the era of punk rock and PASOK, and then later in the waning political idealism and material excesses of what can be thought of as “the roaring nineties”—that decade of unprecedented and unbridled economic growth that fueled the rise of the “Neohellene.”16 Paradoxically, Maria, the daughter of a conservative upper-middle-class family, becomes a radical political activist, while Anna, whose parents were exiled radicals during the Junta, becomes something akin to a cynical and shallow “fashionista.” Driving the novel is an ongoing political debate and cultural criticism between the friends that culminates in direct political activism and protests against Europeanized modernization and European Union-funded development such as the Athens Metro, the Attic Highway, as well as the preparations for the Olympic Games. A committed leftist, Maria sees the new



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metro, for example, as part of the dehumanizing effects of global capitalism. In a manifesto for her activist group she writes: They presented it to us immaculate, marble, smelling of disinfectant, like an airport bathroom. Cold, white fluorescent lighting. Private security guards. The Athens Metro is a moving walkway that transports us home after hours of low-paying, back breaking work. It feels like the inside of a bank, exudes an air of industriousness and order. . . . Was the new metro designed for people so exhausted they’ve become zombies? Is this the new Athens we have become so proud of? This imitation of Brussels?17

Michalopoulou questions the ideology behind this iteration of Europeanization or modernization for Greece in the run-up to the Olympics, but also the ineffectiveness of this kind of old fashioned leftist ideology as well.18 Maria’s deep belief in political action and protest ultimately comes to nothing: she and her friends are seen as a small group of fringe crackpots, and they are ultimately ineffectual in their protests. Later, however, the novel also is critical about the ways that European influence affects the way of life in Greece. Anna’s wealthy and elitist husband Malouhos, an architect with half-baked theories about using bad architecture as an impetus for revolution, ironically summarizes this “new” way of life for Maria: They’ve been promised Europe, right? And Europe has been brought to their doorstep. A semblance, of course, no one’s actually importing the Eiffel Tower. . . . At first it’s all well and good. You take a number at the bank, you don’t have to push and shove anymore. You conserve energy. And why? So you can work even harder. You buy a car on monthly installments. Then a second car . . . you buy a television with Dolby surround sound, the whole house quakes as you watch the war in Yugoslavia, or a dozen people with handkerchiefs over their faces overturning cars and setting them on fire. You curse them. You’re afraid they might set your car on fire too. You keep working like a slave, buy a weekend home. . . . If you live that way for ten, fifteen years, what do you think will happen? . . . I’m not talking about my generation, Maria, I’m talking about kids in their twenties. Where will they be in ten years?19

She answers: “I know those kids well. Most of them dream whatever dreams their parents told them to. A master’s degree, a good job working for the European Union, lots of money. They’re just kids, and you know what they’re most afraid of? Unemployment.”20 Here, of course, Maria is mocking the bourgeois “Greek Dream” and it’s unrealistic yet mediocre expectations. Some might argue that it was in fact a generation of Greeks brought up on this idea that planted the seeds for the crisis that, in retrospect, seems to have

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been inevitable. But Malouhos counters her sarcasm: “No, they’ll get tired of being afraid. They’ve got brains, and they’re already bored. Sooner or later they’ll reach the limits of the situation. And the situation is already starting to reach its own limits. In five, maybe ten years at the most, everything’s going to burn.”21 From our vantage point today, this passage seems remarkably prescient given the explosion of protests, riots, and the political upheavals that have taken place since early in the crisis, a mere six years after the novel was published. Perhaps initially the crisis indeed might have given the impetus, especially to the young, to attempt to change the system that has created such widespread misery. The morass of the subsequent political and economic “solutions” such as the various memoranda that imposed financial austerity on Greece could be seen to have put out the fire. Elias Nisaris’ Greek Suffocation (2013) is perhaps the one novel that could be said to be “representative” of the younger generation—especially given that its author was born in 1980. A fairly experimental, sometimes metafictional work, and partially autobiographical, it is written mostly in the mode of stream of consciousness from the perspectives of several different characters. The protagonist, Stelios Agripniotis, lives through both the bleakness of the crisis and its effects on him and his family. While working in an advertising job he hates, he publishes an autobiographical novel called The Mama’s Boy about a dysfunctional family; his novel roundly castigates the way Greek parents raise their children and offers bitter criticism about Greek society in general. This has the natural effect of alienating his father and siblings. The family crisis here mirrors the generalized crisis, particularly after his father has a stroke. When a co-worker attempts to express words of comfort to him, Stelios’ internal response sums up the entire crisis: in a long passage, which becomes something of a “rant,” he makes a list of everything he hates in the world, including then Prime Minister Giorgos Papandreou’s inability to tell a convincing lie and his choice of the miniscule and far-flung island of Kastelorizo to make his momentous bankruptcy announcement in 2010. Both humorous and tragic, the passage incorporates the character’s personal peeves about friends, relatives, co-workers, relationships, and daily life with a larger commentary on a variety of cultural and political references: I hate the songs they play on the radio, the silence when I return home, the headaches I get in the evening . . . Papandreou’s inability to tell a good lie . . . the “generation of” whatever generation it might be, the gossipy columns on informational portals, the idiocy that reigns in this country, the Exarcheia neighborhood, the little beer-soaked talk in the evening after work, the journalist who exulted over Kastelorizo, Panandreou’s choice of Kastelorizo from which to announce his malakia, because it is the furthest edge of the country that represents the analogous extreme edge on which Greece finds itself, because it is



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the most ignored place in Greece—even betrayal has its own semiotics—I hate that I couldn’t manage to leave for America . . . I hate the security of a bank account, I hate falsetto popular singers, I hate melodic artsy-fartsy singers, I hate the mobile phones turned on at concerts, which replaced the lighted cigarette lighters that I also hated . . . I hate movies that speak of the loneliness of the big city, I hate that warm feeling produced by movies that speak about the loneliness of the big city, I hate film critics who think they speak better English than I do, I hate people who speak good English but laugh at the English spoken by others, I hate Papandreou’s English, I hate his I-mac, I hate Kastelorizo, I hate austerity, I hate all this talk about the crisis.22

The novel’s sardonic humor underscores the simple exhaustion of operating endlessly in “crisis mode.” At the end of the novel, Stelios finds solace and hope that a “new Greece” is possible via “real” human connections and a new romantic attachment to the young woman who helped him through his own personal crisis. While this can be seen as a rather trite conclusion, it emphasizes one view that the cure for the alienation and asphyxiation of the crisis might lie in the development of human relationships that somehow transcend traditionalist values of family and community. With his Trilogy of the Crisis, Petros Markaris is perhaps the most prominent writer to directly incorporate the thematics of the crisis into his fiction.23 Markaris has always been a keen social critic, and has often explained in interviews that he feels the genres of mystery, crime, and the police procedural in particular, lend themselves to that kind of critique of contemporary society: “Crime writing provides the best form of social commentary, because so much of what is going on in Greece now is criminal. . . . I wanted to tell the real story of how the crisis has developed and how it affects ordinary people.”24 Thus, the “low” genre allows him to reach a wide audience that a more overtly literary, social, or political novel might not. Given the popularity of the Inspector Haritos series (Haritos is the noir inspired hard-boiled protagonist in these novels), the Trilogy was an apt vehicle to take on the crisis. Moreover, as Patricia Barbeito suggests, “The burden of the past and the correlative insistence of reading the present through the past, is a particularly critical issue for the contemporary Greek writer,”25 and the entire series makes direct connections to significant historical moments that can be seen, in part, as the seeds of the current crisis and, through the murders depicted, also become the ironic and macabre solution to it. Perhaps the most satisfying aspect of Markaris’ novels for the average reader may be the ironically appropriate—and perhaps grimly symbolic— modus operandi of the killers, the methods used to commit the murders, as well as the identities of the victims. In the first novel, Expiring Loans, for example, the victims are beheaded; these are mainly “crooked” investment

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bankers and financiers who are involved in shady deals and “offshore” money laundering. In The Settlement, the victims are tax evaders who are killed by hemlock poisoning by a figure known only as the “National Tax-Collector.” Prospective victims are given the chance to save their lives if they pay their taxes. In the next installment, Bread, Education, Freedom, the victims belong to the so-called heroic generation of the Polytechnic and have the famous slogan of the 1973 uprising (also the title of the book) ingeniously attached to them via cell phones. That it turns out they are gunned down by their own children is another symbolic twist. Markaris has been accused of moralizing a little too much for this. Hatzivasileiou, for example, while praising the previous novels for the deft way they incorporate the crimes with the social commentary, criticizes Markaris for becoming too didactic here because he seems to support the “ideology of self-justice” or revenge on those perceived to have been the true cause of the crisis, and on whom the murderers perform an act of justifiable punishment.26 This may be the case as well in the epilogue, Closing Credits, where the victims are the children of well-known members of the Civil War generation, both left wing and right wing, whose murderers—a group calling itself the “Greeks of the 1950s”—sends out statements that end in the refrain: “Turn back and start from the beginning. But this time do it right.”27 Beyond the symbolic or even didactic scope of the murders themselves, one of the elements that makes Markaris’ novels so popular is the way he describes the effects of the crisis on Haritos’ family. By the end of the novels, for example, given the austerity and hardships caused by cut wages and so forth, the family is reduced to eating as if they were living through the occupation again: lentil soup and boiled greens become their mainstay meal. The arc of the daughter’s story throughout the series follows the effects of the crisis as well. In earlier novels Markaris has traced how Katerina struggles to complete graduate studies while her parents sacrifice in order to help her achieve the “dream” of a good education and a promising career. Moreover, Katerina then falls in love with, and eventually marries, Fanis, a doctor. What more could a middle-class couple want for their daughter? Yet, Katerina struggles to find work as a lawyer after she graduates, while Fanis is an “honest” doctor doing his residency at a state hospital (Markaris never allows him to succumb to taking “little envelopes”—that is, extra cash under the table from patients seeking preferential treatment). At one point the young couple considers leaving Greece to seek better fortunes abroad but decide to stay and stick it out with their families. Katerina eventually opens her own practice where she helps mainly poor immigrants and other unfortunate people, often for very low fees and usually pro bono. In the meantime, she also spearheads the creation and the management of a homeless shelter. All these efforts to



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help people, especially African immigrants, mark her as a target for right wing thugs, who beat her up in the last novel.28 Along the way Markaris finds the opportunity to illustrate a wide swath of the experiences of “ordinary people,” showing how the crisis has brought out both the best and the worst in Greek society. Haritos seeks justice as a member of the police force, while the novels themselves seek justice for the plight of the average person. If the family’s solidarity, compassion, togetherness, and eagerness to help their fellow man may seem unrealistically portrayed at times, they offer at least a glimmer of hope in a society that has gone so wrong in so many ways. As Markaris’ Trilogy suggests, one of the ways certain contemporary writers have approached the problem of “crisis” is to contextualize it within the broader recent history of Greece in an attempt to answer the question: “How did we get here?” To paraphrase the words of Sophia Nikolaidou, another writer who has been deeply affected by recent events in Greece and attempts to understand them in her novels, there seems to have been a return to the “great themes” of literature, of which for her the most important are history and politics, as a result of the political and social angst that has taken place of the last few years.29 Her novels reflect this sea change, and her sentiments seem to echo those of Hatzivasiliou and Karayiannis to some extent. Yet, unlike many of her contemporaries, Nikolaidou has not sought to speak in an entirely direct manner about the “crisis,” rather she has used it as a stepping stone for a deeper consideration of Greek history and politics as they operate both on the level of the lives of individuals as well as on the level of the institutions that govern society. Moreover, Nikolaidou also seems to reflect what some critics of postmodernism have called “the new earnestness,” which posits the end of postmodernism’s playfulness, its constructedness, its endless irony, its moral and cultural relativism, and its tendency to undermine grand narratives. Most of these critics observe that advances such as the internet and other telecommunication technologies have caused a major transformation that has fundamentally altered the ways we interact with the wider world, and how we can now perceive and construct the possible realities this “new world” offers. In place of postmodernism there appears to be a return to a straight forward and realistic attempt to understand the contemporary scene. To characterize Nikolaidou’s novels as “straight forward and realistic,” however, is to ignore a significant aspect of her writing: the playfulness and irony to be found in the structure of her narratives. Her novel Tonight We Have No Friends (which won the Athens Prize for Literature in 2011), sets the flashpoint of the crisis—the December 2008 demonstrations that erupted in the wake of the wrongful death of a teenage boy at the hands of the police on the streets of Athens—within the frame of a history that extends as far back as the 1922 Asia Minor Catastrophe, but which focuses on the occupation of

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Thessaloniki during the Second World War. It then follows several narrative strands in later historical moments, particularly the post-Junta years and the rise of PASOK. Despite her ostensible “earnestness” in terms of her serious desire to understand the meaning of recent history as it applies to the crisis, Nikolaidou employs a more or less postmodernist approach to history that enables her to comment upon the existing situation through the lens of those other “defining” historical events. Like her contemporaries Michalopoulou and Sotiropoulou, Nikolaidou is deeply suspicious about how Greece has arrived at its current state of being. While the novel begins in the contemporary setting—although the beginning of the crisis is by now a “historical event” in itself—it moves back and forward in time from the 1930s to the 1980s. Along with this complicated historical meandering, the novel follows three major narrative strains associated with the main characters. First, initially set in 1981 at the moment of PASOK’s rise to power, is the story of Soukiourgolu, a third generation Asia Minor refugee who lives with his grandmother, who came to Greece following the Greco-Turkish War in the enforced exchange of populations in 1923. His story involves his progress through graduate school in the history department of the University of Thessaloniki, and his “radical” choice to write his dissertation on the German occupation, a historical event disturbingly within the range of living memory.30 This entire narrative strand is rife with metafictional motifs revolving around the writing of history, and is a sort of blank parody of the “campus novel,” in which the internal workings and politics of a major Greek university are exposed. These academic politics are also closely tied to the party politics of the period, as well as the broader political implications of the unbearable history of the occupation and the Civil War. Sub-narratives here belong to Asteriou, the curmudgeonly professor who oversees (and ultimately plagiarizes) Soukiouroglou’s dissertation, and whose own tribulations within the politics of the academic system have made him bitter and jaded; as well as the story of Exangelos, the now-retired professor of history who secured his position during the occupation, and whose unapologetic Germanophilia and collaboration with the Nazis during the war go unpunished. Exangelos’ story becomes the second major narrative strand of the novel. The third narrative strand involves Fani, an undergraduate in the history department, and her would-be boyfriend Stratos. Both of their families’ narratives, who represent both extremes of the political spectrum, are intertwined throughout the historical portion of the novel. Ultimately, what ties the narratives of the novel to the present moment is Soukiouroglou’s desire to join in the 2008 demonstrations, but when he goes to participate in the rioting, vandalism and destruction at the university where he himself studied, he finds that he cannot bring himself to do so. Despite his disillusionment



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with the institution and the kind of corruption it represents within the workings of what is ostensibly a corrupt society, Soukiouroglou comes to realize that destroying it in the manner the protesters do is essentially wrong: “For years he’d dreamt of doing it—but he can’t. He can’t even look. He didn’t know how books sizzle when they burn. Pop! suddenly into the night.”31 Like Sotiropoulou’s Zigzag Through the Bitter-Orange Trees, Tonight We Have No Friends ends in a metafictional puff of tear gas smoke. The novel argues that lurking behind events that on the surface were sparked by the killing of an innocent boy, are decades of unhappy, dirty, and unresolved history. Nikolaidou’s next novel, The Elephants Dance (translated into English under the less fanciful title The Scapegoat) continues the story, following several of the characters of the previous novel. The author takes up a similar approach here, but this time including an even more metafictional, fragmented narrative style that incorporates a multiplicity of voices, both from the present and the past. Once again, the novel begins in the contemporary setting of Greece in the midst of the crisis, then it moves backward and forward in time from the 1940s to the 2010s. The story is based on a true historical event, the Polk case (1948), but it has been given a complete fictionalization. The contact point between the narrative strands this time is the Greek Civil War, but the central event is the murder of an American reporter who had been in the field trying to interview members of the communist forces. In order to appease the Americans and continue to receive military aid, the nationalist authorities pin the crime on a patsy, Manolis Gris, an innocent but left-leaning reporter for a local Thessaloniki newspaper.32 Gris is tortured for a “confession,” tried in a kangaroo court, and given a life sentence. In the present-day narrative, Minas, a high school senior who hates his classes and refuses to sit for the national exams, must write a term paper about the event for his history class taught by Soukiouroglou, the protagonist of Tonight We Have No Friends. As Minas researches the murder case, he interviews certain people who were involved, including Gris’ lawyer, Dinopoulos, now in his eighties, and looks at archival documents and material amassed by his own father, himself a reporter who researched the case early in his career. There are multiple layers of metafiction at work in the novel, including Minas’ writing of the term paper and struggling with the theories of history posed by his teacher, as well as the article written by Minas’ father about the case. A further layer are the references to fragmented documentary texts such as police and newspaper reports from the 1940s. Throughout the novel, the question of the relativity of historical understanding is at stake. As Minas struggles to find evidence of the truth to the reasons behind the Gris case, his teacher, Soukiouroglou, attempts to illustrate to him the impossibility of ever completely knowing the truth,

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particularly via a contested and tenuous history. At one point in class the teacher gives the following example: —Let’s take the familiar case of an airspace violation, Souk said, and the students in the front row nodded. The other day, for instance. It was the third story on the news. The Greek minister made some statements, et cetera et cetera, he continued, feigning boredom. But if you spoke Turkish and could read Turkish newspapers, you’d see that their approach to the situation was different. They spoke about obstruction of military drills, illegal infringement, and so on. . . . So, he continued . . . let’s say fifty or a hundred years from now a Belgian historian decides to write about the incident, and has those sources at his disposal. What objective reality can he offer? —That the sky exists. And that maybe some airplanes flew through it. [Minas answers]33

Given this simple example, Nikolaidou comments upon the futility of first, knowing anything solid about the past and, second, our inability to express that knowledge via objective and verifiable sources. Implied here, perhaps, is that the (meta)fictional form is more apt to fill in the gaps. Nikolaidou fragments the narratives and includes multiple points of view: members of Gris’s family tell both his story and their own; the police who interrogate Gris also tell the story from their own side; American generals and witnesses are given voice, while various members of Minas’ family reminisce about the old days and discuss the current problems facing Greece. These multiple narratives are complicated by the fact that sometimes characters speak in the “present” tense of the contemporary story, but at other moments also speak in a specific historical moment. Often the narrative strands and the characters intersect in surprising ways, such as when it is revealed that Dinopoulos (Gris’ lawyer) was in love with Minas’ grandmother and insists on meeting her again as a proviso to telling his version of the case. Meanwhile, Minas falls in love with Dinopoulos’ granddaughter. At the same time, there is a relentless critique of the motives of everyone involved, particularly in light of the historical expediencies and the nationalist ideology that allowed them. Gris is “sacrificed” for the good of the nation in the eyes of those who make him the fall guy. All of the characters, at one point or another, attempt to come to grips with this idea, and none of them succeed. Finally, although multiple characters and points of view are exhibited in the novel, the one voice that never appears is Manolis Gris himself. The center of the history, and the center of the controversy that involves all the characters, he is nonetheless silenced and objectified both by the official history as well as Minas’ student work that attempts to find the real truth behind the case but never actually does. Underpinning all of these narrative strands is a continued examination of the contemporary moment, mainly viewed through the workings of a public



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school in Thessaloniki. In the present, as in the past story, the official narratives and presuppositions of those in power are critiqued. Moreover, the novel is an intricate meditation on the convergences of history that help to explain the way things are in Greece today; that it ends up “de-doxifying” the institutions of Greek education, as well as official historical narratives, is a product of the postmodernist techniques Nikolaidou applies to the construction of her story. Of the various complexities and contradictions that postmodernism implies or contains, it is in some sense determined by notions regarding the obsolescence of a large range of traditional ideas about art, culture, and the possibility of ascertaining the truth about what is “real,” even as it acknowledges its own ephemerality. What makes postmodernism useful, according to some critics, is that it provides strategies for speaking about “crisis.” Given the “crisis” of national identity, and the anxiety over its obsolescence, a reconfiguration has been taking place. In Greece, postmodernism has allowed the exploration of alternative choices in terms of the way Greek identity is consciously constructed through all types of cultural and social institutions, without constraints as to what the narratives, histories, or myths that constitute that identity should be. Greece has returned to a moment of national anxiety that has made it ponder once again the notion of obsolescence. During the past ten or so years contemporary writers have continued to find postmodernist metafictional techniques apt for supplying their works with a common language with which to speak about crisis. It is a language that makes new connections between the current moment and the history that leads to it. In many of the works I have mentioned here the main response seems to be one of solidarity in the face of devastating events, and as well as one of determination to get through it all with as much dignity as possible. NOTES 1.  See Dimitris Tziovas, ed., Greece in Crisis: The Cultural Politics of Austerity (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), 19. One could argue that the crisis period began in December 2008, when riots in response to the police shooting of fifteen-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos expressed widespread outrage and discontent with the government. 2. Tziovas, Greece in Crisis, 4. 3.  See Eleni Papargyriou, “Και Τώρα Τί; Η Πεζογραφία της Κρίσης (2014–2016).” July 3, 2016, in Η Εφημερίδα των Συντακτών and Maria Boletsi, “The Unbearable Lightness of Crisis: (Anti-) Utopia and Middle Voice in Sotiris Dimitriou’s Close to the Belly,” in Tziovas, ed., Greece in Crisis. 4. See Tsoucalas’ and Chouliaras’ chapters in Harry Psomiadis and Stavros Thomadakis, eds., Greece, The New Europe, and the Changing International Order (New York: Pella, 1993).

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5.  See Gerasimus Katsan, History and National Ideology in Greek Postmodernist Fiction (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). 6.  Kathleen Fitzpatrick, The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006), 40. 7. Fitzpatrick, Anxiety, 41. 8.  Makis Karayiannis, “Τοις Εντευξομένοις” (Blog). Feb. 12, 2012, accessed Jan. 13, 2015. 9.  Peter Mackridge and Eleni Yannakakis, eds., Contemporary Greek Fiction in a United Europe (Oxford: Legenda, 2004), 11. Kotzia is quoted in Mackridge and Yannakakis, who elaborate on her notions about the “malaise” of the younger generation. 10.  Karayiannis, “Τοις Εντευξομένοις.” 11.  Karayiannis, “Τοις Εντευξομένοις.” 12.  Giorgos Seferis, Greece’s first Nobel Prize winner in 1963, whose first published book of poetry entitled Turning Point (Στροφή, 1931) marked the beginning of the shift from Karyotakism (a form of self-centered, pessimistic symbolism) toward what would eventually become the full-fledged modernism of the Generation of the Thirties. 13.  Vangelis Hatzivasileiou, “Η κρίση και η ελληνική λογοτεχνία.” Ελευθεροτυπία, July 3, 2010. 14.  See my chapter on this novel in History and National Ideology in Greek Postmodernist Fiction. 15. Ersi Sotiropoulou, Zigzag Through the Bitter-Orange Trees (Northampton: Interlink, 2007), 223. 16.  On the concept of the “Neohellene” see Jessica Kourniakti and Georgia Aitaki in this volume. 17.  Amanda Michalopoulou, Why I Killed My Best Friend (Rochester: Open Letter, 2003), 57. 18.  Michalopoulou has often visited this seminal moment in recent Greek history. See her short story “The 400 Pleats,” chapter 15 of this volume, as further example of how she connects history to the contemporary moment. 19. Michalopoulou, Best Friend, 131–132. 20. Michalopoulou, Best Friend, 132. 21. Michalopoulou, Best Friend, 133. 22. Ilias Nisaris, Ελληνική Ασφυξία: Μυθιστόρημα για την Κρίση (Αθήνα: Οι Εκδόσεις των Συναδέλφων, 2013), 53–54. 23.  The trilogy actually became a quartet, as Markaris added a fourth novel as an epilogue. In order of publication, they are: Ληξιπρόθεσμα Δάνεια (Expiring Loans, 2010), Περαίωση (The Settlement, 2011), Ψωμί, Παιδεία, Ελευθερία, (Bread, Education, Freedom, 2012), Τίτλοι Τέλους (Closing Credits, 2014). 24.  See Julian Borger, “Crime Writer Petros Markaris Channels Greek Rage into Fiction.” The Guardian, May 13, 2012, and the blog “Mrs. Peabody Investigates,” May 16, 2012. The blog conflates a direct quotation from Markaris and reported speech in the Borger interview. 25.  Patricia Felisa Barbeito, “Telling Ewes from Rams: Economics and Gender Disorder in Petros Markaris’s Inspector Haritos Mysteries.” In Out of Deadlock: Fe-



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male Emancipation in Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski Novels, and her Influence on Contemporary Crime Fiction, Enrico Minardi and Jennifer Byron, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 73. 26.  Vagelis Hatzivasiliou, “3+1 Αστυνομικά του Μάρκαρη για την Κρίση.” Ο Αναγανώστης: Περιοδικό για το Βιβλίο και τις Τέχνες. 27. Markaris, Closing Credits, 144. 28. Barbeito conducts a fascinating analysis of Markaris’ “domestication” of the noir genre, suggesting that the family-oriented subplots transform Haritos from a “hardboiled” noir stereotype into an “increasingly nuanced, sympathetic and empathetic character” whose close-knit extended family serves as a solution, albeit a traditionalist and “heteronormative” one, to the crisis. Barbeito, “Undoing His/story,” 2017, 251. 29.  These comments are based on my personal conversations with Nikolaidou. 30.  For a discussion of the conflation of the Second World War and the current debt crisis, see Tziovas, Greece in Crisis, 27–31. 31.  Sofia Nikolaidou, Απόψε δεν Έχουμε Φίλους [Tonight We Have No Friends]. (Αθήνα: Μεταίχμιο, 2011), 272. 32.  Nikolaidou has ironically changed the name of the actual “scapegoat” of the real case (Gregorios Staktopoulos) to “Gris,” which suggests “Greece” itself was the patsy in the affair and, by extension, in the current crisis too. Another playful aspect here is that “gri” can refer to the color grey, and is a pun on the name Staktopoulos, “staktis” being a synonym for ash/grey. 33.  Sofia Nikolaidou, The Scapegoat, translated by Karen Emmerich, (New York: Melville House, 2015), 219. See the full excerpt in Chapter 16.

WORKS CITED Barbeito, Patricia Felisa. “Undoing His/story: On Fathers, Domesticity and Agency in Petros Markaris’ Crisis Trilogy.” In Greece in Crisis: The Cultural Politics of Austerity, edited by Dimitris Tziovas, 239–55. London: I.B. Tauris, 2017. Barbeito, Patricia Felisa. “Telling Ewes from Rams: Economics and Gender Disorder in Petros Markaris’s Inspector Haritos Mysteries.” In Out of Deadlock: Female Emancipation in Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski Novels, and her Influence on Contemporary Crime Fiction, edited by Enrico Minardi and Jennifer Byron, 67–86. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015. Boletsi, Maria. “The Unbearable Lightness of Crisis: (Anti-)Utopia and Middle Voice in Sotiris Dimitriou’s Close to the Belly.” In Greece in Crisis: The Cultural Politics of Austerity, edited by Dimitris Tziovas, London: I.B. Tauris, 2017. Borger, Julian. “Crime Writer Petros Markaris Channels Greek Rage into Fiction.” The Guardian, May 13, 2012. Chouliaras, Yiorgos. “Greek Culture in the New Europe.” In Greece, The New Europe, and the Changing International Order, edited by Harry Psomiadis and Stavros Thomadakis, New York: Pella, 1993, 79–122. Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006.

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Hatzivasileiou, Vangelis. “Η κρίση και η ελληνική λογοτεχνία.” [“Greek Literature and the Crisis.”] Eleftherotypia, July 3, 2010. Hatzivasileiou, Vangelis. “3+1 Αστυνομικά του Μάρκαρη για την Κρίση.” [“3+1 Markaris Mysteries about the Crisis”] The Reader: Journal of Books and the Arts. Web. No date. Accessed April 8, 2018. http://www.oanagnostis.gr/31-αστυνομικά -του-μάρκαρη-για-την-κρίση/. Karayiannis, Makis. “Τοις Εντευξομένοις” (Blog). Feb. 12, 2012, accessed Jan. 13, 2015. http://mkaragiannis.blogspot.com/2012/blog-post_21.html. Katsan, Gerasimus. History and National Ideology in Greek Postmodernist Fiction. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013. Mackridge, Peter, and Eleni Yannakakis, eds. Contemporary Greek Fiction in a United Europe. Oxford: Legenda, 2004. Michalopoulou, Amanda. Why I Killed My Best Friend, translated by Karen Emmerich. Rochester: Open Letter, 2003. Markaris, Petros. Ληξιπρόθεσμα Δάνεια. [Expiring Loans]. Athens: Gavrilidis, 2010. ———. Περαίωση. [The Settlement]. Athens: Gavrilidis, 2011. ———. Ψωμί, Παιδεία, Ελευθερία. [Bread, Education, Freedom]. Athens: Gavrilidis, 2012. ———. Τίτλοι Τέλους: Ο Επίλογος [Closing Credits: The Epilogue]. Athens: Gavrilidis, 2014. Nikolaidou, Sofia. Απόψε δεν Έχουμε Φίλους [Tonight We Have No Friends]. Athens: Metaihmio, 2011. ———. Χορεύουν οι Ελέφαντες. [The Elephants Dance]. Athens: Metaihmio, 2012. [Published in English as: The Scapegoat, translated by Karen Emmerich. New York: Melville House, 2015.] Nisaris, Ilias. Ελληνική Ασφυξία: Μυθιστόρημα για την Κρίση [Greek Suffocation: A Novel of the Crisis]. Athens: Ekdoseis Ton Synadelfon, 2013. Papargyriou, Eleni. Web. Accessed April 4, 2018. “Και Τώρα Τί; Η Πεζογραφία της Κρίσης (2014–2016)” [“And Now What? The Fiction of the Crisis (2014–2016”]. E Efimerida ton Syntakton, July 3, 2016. http://www.efsyn.gr/arthro/kai-tora-ti-i -pezografia-tis-krisis-2014-2016. Peabody, Mrs. “Mrs. Peabody Investigates.” Web. Blog. May 16, 2012. https:// mrspeabodyinvestigates.wordpress.com/2012/05/16/petros-markaris-greek-crime -writer-and-social-commentator/. Accessed April 6, 2018. Seferis, Giorgios. Στροφή [Turning Point]. Athens: Estia, 1931. Sotiropoulou, Ersi. Zigzag Through the Bitter-Orange Trees, translated by Peter Green. Northampton: Interlink Books, 2007. Tsoucalas, Constatntine. “Greek National Identity in an Integrated Europe and a Changing World Order” in Greece, The New Europe, and the Changing International Order, edited by Harry Psomiadis and Stavros Thomadakis, New York: Pella, 1993. 57–78. Tziovas, Dimitris, ed. Greece in Crisis: The Cultural Politics of Austerity. London: I.B. Tauris, 2017.

SATIRE AND NOSTALGIA IN POPULAR CULTURE

Chapter Eight

The Use of History for the Denunciation of the Present Lena Kitsopoulou’s Athanasios Diakos— The Comeback Constantina Georgiadi During the summer of 2012 a play entitled Athanasios Diakos—The Comeback by playwright Lena Kitsopoulou was being advertised in the daily newspapers, TV shows, and the internet as one of the greatest events of the current Athens Summer Festival. Since the late 1990s, Kitsopoulou has been considered an acclaimed author and director of the new generation, recognizable by her personal theatrical writing and staging.1 Reading the theatrical news of the summer festival, one would be rather puzzled by the combination of the name of Kitsopoulou and that of Athanasios Diakos, a Greek hero of the 1821 Revolution, that led to Greek independence and the formation of the Greek nation-state. What did Kitsopoulou have to do with one of the most famous Greek national heroes of the revolution? What did Athanasios Diakos as a hero have to do in a festival of European standards in 2012 in Greece? What did the historical past have to do in a modern theatrical event? Why did a historical play suddenly appear on the stage? Which is the revolution that Kitsopoulou refers to and where did it take place? One answer to this last question could be: in the streets of Athens, or, in the streets of most large Greek cities. The year 2012, during which Kitsopoulou’s play was written, had been the crucial moment in which the Greeks really began to experience the consequences of the ongoing financial crisis that had started in 2009. After the announcement of the 2008 global financial crisis, the bygone exotic destination of Greece had become the center of the world literally overnight, considered the black sheep of the global crisis for the next few years.2 Following the initial shock of the violent outburst of a national crisis, Greece entered a new historical era. Everyday life would have to adjust to sudden reforms, to austerity measures, to the specter of unemployment, to sudden impoverishment, to wage reduction and loss of property. The Greeks gradually grew familiar with a new vocabulary that included words and 135

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phrases recently unknown in everyday life, such as Eurozone, Eurogroup, the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, Creditors, Capital Controls, the Memorandum, Grexit, and the Humanitarian Crisis. A barrage of sociopolitical events had already begun in December 2008, after the murder of a fifteen-year-old student by two police officers in the Exarcheia district of central Athens that resulted in large demonstrations and protests that climaxed in violent riots in many Greek cities. In May 2010, during antigovernment demonstrations on austerity measures, three bank employees died of asphyxiation in a firebombed building. In February 2012, three historical buildings in Athens were burned down following the introduction of governmental antiausterity measures. As a climax of these tragic events, in April 2012, a seventy-seven-year-old man committed suicide publicly in Syntagma Square, the capital’s busy main square near the Greek Parliament, a central place of public demonstrations and protests.3 In this context of social turbulence, anxiety, and violence Kitsopoulou’s play seemed somehow irrelevant. Before its staging it was assumed, by the majority of the press, as a play that would probably honor Greek history and its heroes despite the fact that the subject of the play felt contradictory to Kitsopoulou’s avant-garde reputation both as a playwright and theater director; nevertheless, the festival organizers scheduled the performance to be recorded so that it could function as an educational tool for students.4 The play was finally staged in July 2012 but it seemed that it did not really fit most people’s expectations concerning its plot and staging approach.5 In contrast to the live audience’s reactions, the press was, in its majority, negative toward the play and humiliating toward Kitsopoulou. Except for a few articles in the press that praised the performance, most of the reviews were highly critical of the play and its author, focusing mainly on the blasphemy of the Greek hero and the violation of Greek history.6 Some of them made fun of the hero’s resemblance to a prominent member of Golden Dawn—the Greek neo-Nazi party that gained momentum parallel to the crisis—because he was portrayed as a long-haired macho man with a long, twisted mustache.7 The convoluted story told in the play revolves around the revolutionary hero Athanasios Diakos (1788–1821), who was tortured and killed by Ottoman soldiers. In the play, he is saved just before he is killed and transported together with his young lover Krystallo through a time machine from the past to contemporary Athens, where they have been married and are living in a modern apartment. Diakos becomes a successful businessman owning his own souvlaki shop with a Kurdish employee, Mohamed, working as a delivery driver. Mohamed and Krystallo are having an affair and she is pregnant with his child. In a quarrel between the married couple in their kitchen, Krystallo reveals to Diakos that she is not in love with him anymore and that the child she is carrying is not his. Diakos refuses to believe his wife’s betrayal, beats her mercilessly, and then rapes her on the kitchen table. Meanwhile,



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Mohamed arrives holding a bouquet for Krystallo asking Diakos permission to marry his wife. Diakos wishes he had not been saved from his brutal death in the past and he would rather have died as a hero. He recalls his past life, the idyllic natural landscape of Greece and humanity’s moral values before modernity. Krystallo suddenly is ready to deliver and Diakos and Mohamed set her on the kitchen table and cover the lower half of her body with a plastic sheet, in the manner that a gynecologist would do with a clean sheet. In a long scene in which Krystallo’s labor seems never ending, Diakos, in an extremely emotional state, murders her while Mohamed runs away. The plot of Athanasios Diakos—The Comeback gives the impression of a play about marital relations and their tragic consequences in an extreme, but not improbable, version. A number of textual and performance elements enrich the play in a way that goes beyond a typical extramarital story. Kitsopoulou’s choice of Diakos is significant: in the public sphere he is widely known for his torturous death at the hands of the Turks, who impaled him on a stake (souvlisma). In this form of execution, which is a typical martyr story in the post-Ottoman Balkan countries, the victim suffers a slow and agonizing death on the stake from the weight of his own body. It is because of this spectacularly horrible death that Kitsopoulou chooses this particular hero. She emphasizes the violence and seeks to shock the audience with her long and repulsive verbal and physical descriptions on stage of the torture of impalement. Toward the end of the play, Diakos, on all fours, with his pants down, revives his impalement in a prolonged scene in which he pleads for a

Figure 8.1.  Diakos on all fours imitating his torture of impalement while pleading for a return to the past. Photograph courtesy of Leonidas Dimakopoulos/ http://leonidasdimakopoulos.gr/

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return to the past. The slow and rhythmical movements of his body during his imitation of the impalement refer also to sexual intercourse. At the same time, Kitsopoulou ridicules Diakos in the present by transforming him into a souvlaki-shop owner, which is a play on words between his manner of execution and his way of making a living (since souvlisma is the folk expression for impalement). Violence is thus a core element of the play. In addition to the impalement, the play is full of provocative, violent language and the performance is pointedly based on brutal scenes such as the repeated beating of the expectant Krystallo, her prolonged rape on stage, and finally the harsh slaughtering of her and her unborn baby. Outside the domestic environment, violence expands in society. A policewoman is present around the stage during the performance and a group of riot police is lined up at the back of the stage. They beat Mohamed with their batons while Diakos in a fit of rage flings around chairs, steaks, or anything he finds on stage. The battle scenes between Mohamed or Diakos and the riot police is a representation of real, violent events familiar to the Greek audience since the crisis began. A stage representation of the biblical Eve committing suicide with a revolver, like the man who a few months earlier killed himself publicly in the busiest square of Athens, the same location as the “indignants” protests during the financial crisis. The newspaper Diakos reads on stage is full of crimes and financial scandals. Kitsopoulou clearly brings to the audiences’ eyes a representation of living realities of fear and violence in the years of crisis. Apart from the brutality, Kitsopoulou’s play condemns the way modern Greeks are accustomed to live. Diakos and Krystallo live in a modern and stylish apartment with a lavish kitchen and luxurious bathroom, mimicking the aesthetics of the neo-bourgeois lifestyle. The play constantly ridicules this lifestyle, for example, through the oppositional use of popular Greek songs of the past, or by Diakos wearing traditional tsarouchia (pompom shoes). Additionally, “the nouveau riche” image of modern Greeks and their lifestyle is being mocked by the hero’s speaking in the fifteen-syllable rhyming couplets of Greek folksongs, reminding the audience of their deeper agricultural and provincial origins. In their modern apartment Krystallo is represented as completely absorbed by a consumerist way of life, despite the fact that her name is also drawn from the nineteenth-century Greek folk tradition, representing an innocent and bucolic way of life. Krystallo reflects the world of today, being at ease with modern conveniences and a plethora of goods, defender of a world of abundance. She impels her husband to sell meat of lower quality to his customers to make more profit and to use his glorious name for the reputation of his business. Unlike Krystallo, Diakos’ behavior contrasts the nouveau-riche aesthetic of their bourgeois apartment. He is presented as a proud Greek who refuses



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to deceive his customers or to use his heroic name for ephemeral glory despite his wife’s incitement. His honesty proves to be hypocritical, he is constructed as a violent character, a primitive macho man, ruled by his bestial instincts, conservative in his ideas and his moral principles and values, rejecting gender equality and resorting to physical and verbal abuse. He is a misogynistic, sexist, brute, as well as a racist and homophobic über-Greek (Eλληνάρας).8 Racism features in both Diakos and Krystallo as they constantly characterize Mohamed as black, ugly, and stupid. Krystallo who is supposed to be in love with him, even carrying his child, refers to him with insults and derogatory words. Both Diakos and Krystallo are represented in contrast to the official state-driven historical narratives of textbooks and national celebrations: history in the play has been completely reversed to mirror today’s Everyman, more specifically, today’s Greek people. The crisis is only the special circumstance under which the brutal, hypocritical, and greedy nature of the modern Man/Greek comes to the surface. In the present, everything is demythologized and measured by monetary gain, even the revolution (“It was for money that the struggles took place! [. . .] It was for money that the Revolution took place, it’s clear as day”).9 Diakos is now a coward and cannot recognize himself. “I’m all out of heroism, my God, how did I come to this?” he questions himself.10 History is used to emphasize the contrast between the idealized world of the past and the world of today. Diakos questions even his own status as a hero, which was imposed on him by society. Kitsopoulou’s main idea in the play is revealed when she suggests that the cause of today’s decadence is neither the crisis nor the Germans, but humans themselves. This reflects an opinion expressed repeatedly in the press since the financial collapse began, meaning that the crisis is mainly existential/ethical rather than economical. The modern way of life, that is consumerism as a political means and as an individual choice, has led people to distance themselves from the meaningful aspects of life. People have lost contact with their human values, concentrating mostly on the abundance of goods and on making more and more money. In the decades before the crisis the political system itself enabled people to acquire easy loans from the banks to fund their increasingly extravagant lifestyle. Postwar Greece, a rather poor and constantly changing country, after its entrance to the European Economic Community would have to find its pace to follow the rest of the developed European communities. A shallow sense of identity vaguely connected to ideas of Europeanness and belonging to the “developed world” was fuelled by this rabid consumerism. Kitsopoulou’s play is a comment on ethical and existential crises that existed even before financial breakdown. The last was only the cause of revelation of an already existing situation, which had just reached its point of saturation.

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Kitsopoulou’s play opens with Mohamed, the Kurdish immigrant in Greece, with a monologue in his mother tongue (partly a fixed idiom by the playwright supported with an improvisation by the actor) mixing it with words that could belong to a common linguistic code such as “mama,” “papa,” “bebek.” He reminisces about his own past, he gestures and cries. He apologizes, and his voice smoothens. It looks as if he is trying to explain to the audience that wretched people need only to be embraced. Eventually, his emotional monologue collapses by brutality: a famous song by Stratos Dionysiou, “A Stranger,” is heard over the loudspeakers. Diakos repeatedly calls Mohamed a Turk, a label he constantly refuses, except at the end of the play, when he finally identifies himself as a Turk. “If you are a stranger, you are always a stranger,” Dionysiou sings while Mohamed speaks. Diakos, who admits that Mohamed is a wretched man that has struggled for his survival, constantly behaves like a racist toward him, insulting him for being an immigrant and a foreigner. Once again Kitsopoulou reverses the heroic figure of Diakos to denounce today’s social hypocrisy. Kitsopoulou’s play denounces in a shocking and brutal way social and individual decadence, including all kinds of human degradation: violence in all its forms and transformations, racism, sexism, greediness, immorality, lack of ideals. Instead, for Kitsopoulou the dominance of money, the absence of real love, self-humiliation, betrayal, hypocrisy, and indecency constitute the nature of contemporary humans, and of Greeks in particular. In some of her preliminary pencil sketches for the play, Diakos is drawn sitting naked on a chair wearing only his pompom shoes, while next to him Krystallo and Mohamed, naked with their clothing and underwear pulled down, hold the Greek flag. In another version of the same sketch, Mohamed also holds a plastic bag from the German discount supermarket Lidl, where most immigrants and low-income families cover their everyday needs.11 In addition to the main characters of the play, Kitsopoulou introduces a scene that initially puzzles the spectator. Toward the end of the play, at the back of the stage, a figure representing the crucified Christ ascends on a table at the same time as two figures representing Adam and Eve enter the stage holding fig leaves. Someone is following them holding a tree. Eve opens the refrigerator and eats an apple. The biblical couple starts fighting and Adam beats up Eve. Then he forces her into the car and both leave the stage. A spotlight falls on Christ from the back. At the same time, Diakos is being nostalgic about his life in the mountains. It is at this point that Eve enters the stage to commit suicide. Following this scene, Diakos slaughters Krystallo. At the end, Christ, still carrying the cross on his shoulders, descends from the table, tries to enter the apartment but the cross cannot pass through the door, so he enters sideways



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Figure 8.2.  Diakos, Krystallo, and Mohamed in one of Kitsopoulou’s sketches for the performance. Athanasios Diakos—The Comeback by Lena Kitsopoulou, Athens 2012, drawing sketch courtesy of Lena Kitsopoulou.

and goes to the bathroom to urinate. Then the lights go off. Kitsopoulou uses these biblical references in the same way she uses history. Adam and Eve are the reversed archetypes who cheat and betray each other, just like Diakos and Krystallo, just like Everyman. Religion can be inverted just like history in order to transmit a message for the present that since the creation of Man, violence has been deeply rooted in humanity. The author herself, who played Eve in the performance, after taking off her long blond wig, addressed the

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Figure 8.3.  Christ crucified in the background before Krystallo is slaughtered by her husband. Photograph courtesy of Leonidas Dimakopoulos/ http://leonidasdimakopoulos.gr/

audience at the end of the play, insisting on the dominance of violence in every aspect of life today: she questioned herself and the audience about the element of human nature that drives people to the atrocity of violence toward their fellow men. Undoubtedly, Kitsopoulou’s play has emerged in the context of crisis. But it also belongs to a particular theatrical movement dominant in Britain during the 1990s widely known as “In-yer-face theater,” a type of theater-writing and staging that prompts the audience’s hard thinking and self-questioning of human nature. Its main target is to activate the audience emotionally so that it will react against inertia and indifference and acknowledge its own responsibility. Mainly a “theater of sensations,” “In-yer-face” theater is “confrontational,” “blatantly aggressive or provocative, impossible to ignore or avoid.”12 Kitsopoulou’s early years as a playwright coincides with the dissemination of this particular theatrical style of the 1990s.13 Indeed, one can easily trace some of the most important traits of the “In-yer-face” movement in Kitsopoulou’s dramaturgy in general, Athanasios Diakos—The Comeback included.14 In this play, for example, she uses explicit scenes of sexual abuse as well as scenes of extreme physical or verbal violence and pain: the prolonged beating of Krystallo’s head on the kitchen table and on the door, just because she is wearing lipstick; the slapping and kicking of her whole body while she is



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pregnant, her rape, and finally her brutal murder by her husband are only a few examples of the “In-yer-face” mode in Kitsopoulou’s play. This includes the violent impact of the language, which emphasizes a sexual vocabulary of swearwords and would-be taboo words in real life (e.g., “fuck,” “cunt,” “slut,” etc.). Kitsopoulou’s language is thrown at the audience as a continuous slap in the face, yet she says nothing differently than the way people think and speak in their private and intimate lives. The use of fifteen-syllable rhyme is significant because, on the one hand it refers to the past: the fifteen-syllable verse is inscribed as the meter of Greek folksongs and is considered the national poetical meter. The fifteen-syllable rhyming couplets characterize Cretan literary tradition but are also used in nineteenth-century Greek historical drama and comedy and it features the development of a modern Greek national identity. The mode was popularized in the 1960s in the plays of satirical playwright Mentis Bostantzoglou (Bost). Kitsopoulou experiments with fifteen syllable rhyming couplets and reinitiates a further introduction of this mode in modern theater.15 On the other hand, it becomes a standard model of speech in the play. It is the formal way of the characters’ mode of speaking that differentiates theater from real life. The combination of a vulgar vocabulary with the rhyming verse creates a comical effect for the play as a whole. But it is also applied to exemplify an easy way for people to hide their real feelings for each other. At the end, when the masks are revealed, and human bestiality comes to its lowest point, all the characters are forced by nature to leave this idiom behind. When verse is abandoned, swearwords become a part of natural speech and the play takes on a more serious tone. Out of the controversy between the characters emerge some distinctive binary notions, all part of human nature: animal/human, civilization/primitiveness, hypocrisy/truth, morality/immorality, decency/indecency, mildness/cruelty, honesty/cheating, tragic/comic. Kitsopoulou intensifies those oppositions to illustrate the ugliness of human nature/identity, which in this particular case, at this point of time and political circumstances, happens to picture the Greeks. Finally, on a deeper level, the play also disputes European identity, questioning not only the “europeanness” of the Greeks, but also the “europeanness” (in the sense of humanitarianism) of Europe itself. The financial crisis in Greece has put into question the “Europeanness” of the Greeks, their ability as a nation to follow the capitalistic (and “realistic”) rhythms, financially and culturally, imposed by the most developed northern European countries. The eternal question, whether Greece belongs to the West or the East comes to the fore. On the other hand, in response to the economic crisis, Europe itself was put into question. The continuing rise of right-wing governments as well the ongoing rise of neo-Nazi or fascist parties and the following dominance of violence and racism, and even European monetary funding

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tactics, have put into dispute the old humanitarian values of Enlightenment on which the European idea was built. To summarize, the Greek crisis seems to concern not only the Greeks but Europe as a whole. “In-yer-face” theater is usually distinct in two versions: the “hot” and the “cool.” The hot version usually takes place in small theaters with an audience between fifty and two hundred people and it uses the “aesthetics of extremism.”16 On the other hand, the cool version, presented in bigger theaters, mediates “the disturbing power of extreme emotions” by using a number of distancing devises, one of which is comedy.17 Kitsopoulou is in the middle of the two versions. One cannot question the power of the language or the effect of bodily action and violence, but Kitsopoulou also uses a series of distancing devices to further move the spectator beyond the shocking experience. Comedy is one of the most effective mechanisms in her plays and also functions in Athanasios Diakos—The Comeback. Sometimes the spectator laughs at the characters but acknowledges that they also laugh at themselves because what they see onstage is also a part of their own nature. In another distancing technique, Kitsopoulou makes use of a stand from which Diakos communicates his story to the audience. The description of the torture of impalement is delivered by a man wearing a suit and tie and using a formal and scientific language. Furthermore, the use of popular music with words that usually reverse the action or reflect the character’s thinking (e.g., during the rape of Krystallo we hear the song “Save Me” by Rita Sakellariou, or, as we have seen, after Mohamed’s initial monologue the song “Stranger” plays, also creating a comical effect that distances the spectator from identifying himself with the play). The fifteen-syllable rhymed speech is also an alienating technique, as well as in some cases the use of a spotlight dropped on a character. In addition, the setting is separated from the audience, giving the impression of “a small island” on the stage. The characters repeatedly direct their words from that “island” to the spectators, reminding them several times that they are in the theater and what they see on stage is not for real, a distancing technique of modern and postmodern theater. Distancing techniques alienate dramatic characters, such as Diakos, Christ, Adam and Eve, from history itself and its hegemonic national narratives inscribed in collective memory. When Diakos kills Krystallo with a kitchen knife, he throws on her a basin full of blood instead of using a special effect to create a realistic blood flow. Further examples are the guard of the theater in a police uniform holding the tree of Adam and Eve and the absence of theater curtains. At the end of the play, even the dead rise, get in a car, and leave the stage. If theater is a game that transmits a message, in the case of Athanasios Diakos—The Comeback, the message is communicated with the use of history. Kitsopoulou creates something new by introducing history into the “In-yerface” theater mode and by combining the specific elements of the movement



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with the hero of the Greek Revolution. According to some scholars thinking about the uses and abuses of history in the present, the historical past often appears in times of crisis.18 They suggest that the reasons that people resort to the past, particularly in the context of our globalized society, is the lack of foreseeable prospects. The absence of a predictable future creates the conditions for turning toward an “idealized” past.19 As the future collapses “the past intrudes in the form of nostalgia, in the inner place from which the interest for history and memory unfolds.”20 In the case of Athanasios Diakos—The Comeback, Kitsopoulou is the one that reminisces about the past, exhibiting nostalgia for the supposedly utopian/idyllic past and she tries to awaken the audience to their present situation. For her, the hero brings with him the ideals of the past: bravery, heroism, moral values, self-sacrifice for the common good. In the dramatis personae of the play he is expressly described as “the hero of the Revolution.” She speaks of the historical figure himself, not someone who is just being called Diakos. According to Margaret MacMillan, the restoration (in Kitsopoulou’s case, we can say “deformation”) of historical figures indicates our modern thirst for heroes, invoking the aid of the past in order to understand, through history, good and evil, and the virtues and vices of the present.21 Diakos is useful precisely because he has a strong imprint on the public collective memory and consciousness; his impalement is inscribed deep in the memory of the Greek populace and reinforced through his portrayal in Greek history. In the official Greek national narrative, Diakos is the ultimate positive model-hero of the revolution. Kitsopoulou, knowing the positive impact of this historical figure, brings the hero to the present and reshapes his virtues to the vices of the present, ostensibly castigating the whole Greek nation, as well as Europe of the present day, and even Humanity in its entirety. If it were not for the hero’s name this could be a family drama about marital infidelity and domestic violence. The interpolation of History via the eponymous hero of the revolution imbues the protagonists and the worlds they represent with metonymic/symbolic significance. Kitsopoulou distorts, inverts, and deforms the historical figure in order to represent and parody contemporary Greeks. The onetime hero with his ideals of freedom and selfsacrifice, has been replaced by a Greek who has nothing left to believe in; a man whose very identity is in crisis. Finally, Kitsopoulou’s play is about the crisis of identity in contemporary Greece, which has led to the wider crisis that is not only financial, but mostly existential and ethical. NOTES 1.  Grigoris Ioannidis, “Η δραματουργία της Λένας Κιτσοπούλου” [“Lena Kitsopoulou’s playwriting”], accessed August 1, 2017, http://www.greek-theatre.gr/public/

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gr/greekplay/index/reviewview/6. I would like to thank Panayiota Mini and Anna Stavrakopoulou for their helpful notes on the text. My gratitude to Lena Kitsopoulou for trusting me her unpublished manuscript, as well as Eva Veneka (Athens Festival Archive Curator) for her assistance to the access of the recorded performance of the play. I would also like to thank the colleague Nikos Potamianos for bibliographical information on the uses of history. 2.  See Grammatas, Theodoros. “Greek Society During the Period of Crisis: The Role of History as a Mechanism of Repelling the Present.” Gramma 22, no. 2 (2014): 37–43; Patsalidis, Savvas, Anna Stavrakopoulou. “Introduction: From the Years of Utopia to the Years of Dystopia.” Gramma 22, no. 2 (2014): 7–12; Rosi, Lina. “The Diverse Landscape of Contemporary Greek Playwriting.” Gramma 22, no. 2 (2014): 19–36; Dimitris Tziovas, ed., Greece in Crisis: Culture and the Politics of Austerity (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017); George Tzogopoulos, The Greek Crisis in the Media (UK: Routledge, 2013); Theodoros Chiotis, ed., Futures: Poetry of the Greek Crisis (UK: Penned in the Margins, 2015); Ourania Hatzidaki and Dionysis Goutsos, eds., Greece in Crisis: Combining critical discourse and corpus linguistics perspectives (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture) (Netherlands: John Benjamins Publishing Co, 2017); Karen Van Dyke, ed., Austerity Measures: The New Greek Poetry (UK: Penguin Books, 2016). 3.  Elizabeth Sakellaridou, “Whose Performance? The Politics of Protest and Terror in Greek Civic Life,” Gramma 22, no. 2 (2014): 191. 4.  “Εβγαλαν Σουβλατζή - Κερατά - Συζυγοκτόνο τονΑθανάσιο Διάκο” [Athanasios Diakos Presented as a Souvlaki Shop-Owner, Cuckold and Wife Murderer”], accessed May 31, 2016, http://www.protothema.gr/culture/theater/article/220730/ ebgalan-soyblatzh_-kerata-syzygoktono-ton-athanasio-diako/. 5.  The play was presented on July 14–16. “Lena Kitsopoulou, Athanasios Diakos—The Comeback,” accessed May 31, 2016, http://greekfestival.gr/en/events/ view/lena-kitsopoulou—2012. 6.  Negative reviews: “Εβγαλαν Σουβλατζή” [“Diakos Presented as a Souvlaki Shop-Owner”], “Λένα Κιτσοπούλου: τζάμπα μαγκιές” [Lena Kitsopoulou: meaningless tricks], Ioanna Blatsou, Vena Georgakopoulou. For some positive appraisals see Luisa Arkoumanea, Christos Paridis, Giorgos Smyrnis. For a gallery of performance photographs one can cite the Athens Festival website: http://greekfestival.gr/gr/events/ view/lena-kitsopoulou-2012. Also, in “Αθανάσιος Διάκος, Η επιστροφή” [Athanasios Diakos. The Comeback], accessed May 31, 2016, in: http://gkoultoura.gr. 7.  “Μήνυση Μπαρμπούση για το copyright του Α. Διάκου!” [Law suit for the copyright of A. Diakos!], accessed May 31, 2016, in: http://tvxs.gr/news/blogarontas/ minysi-mparmparoysi-gia-copyright-toy-diakoy. 8. Compare this representation of contemporary Greek male identity with the discourses of modern Greek identity and the concept of the “Neohellene” as examined in the chapters by Jessica Kourniakti and Georgia Aitaki in the present volume. 9. Lena Kitsopoulou, Αθανάσιος Διάκος—Η Επιστροφή [Athanasios Diakos— The Comeback], typewritten manuscript, 33–34. 10.  Lena Kitsopoulou, Αθανάσιος Διάκος [Athanasios Diakos], 38.



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11. One can find those sketches in “Aθανάσιος Διάκος η Eπιστροφή http://gkoultoura.gr/post/27337244991/ (accessed March 6, 2018). See also Christos Paridis, “Λένα Κιτσοπούλου. Αθανάσιος Διάκος. Η Επιστροφή” [“Lena Kitsopoulou. Athanasios Diakos. The Comeback”]. For a gallery of performance photographs, see the Athens Festival website: http://greekfestival.gr/gr/events/view/lena-kitsopoulou-2012. 12.  Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre:British Drama Today (UK: Faber & Faber, 2001), 4. 13.  “Σύλλογος Αποφοίτων Γερμανικής Σχολής Αθηνών. Λένα Κιτσοπούλου (89)” [“Alumni Association of the German School of Athens. Lena Kitsopoulou (89)”], accessed August 1, 2017, http://www.ex-sathen.gr/index.php?option=com_content& view=article&id=137:kitsopoulou_lena&catid=158&lang=GR. Also, “Kitsopoulou Lena,” accessed August 1, 2017, http://www.greek-theatre.gr/public/gr/greekplay/ index/view/23. 14.  Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today, 3–35. 15.  Only a year later after Kitsopoulou’s Diakos, in 2013 Golfo, a fifteen-syllable boucolic play by Spysidon Peresiadesis staged, while, in 2014 and 2016, another play of the same genre, The Shepherd’s lover by Demetrios Koromilas is presented in Athens. 16.  Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, 5. 17.  Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, 6. 18.  Η Δημόσια Ιστορία στην Ελλάδα. Χρήσεις και Καταχρήσεις της Ιστορίας [Public History in Greece. Uses and Abuses of History], ed. Andreas Andreou et al. (Thessaloniki: Epikentro, 2015), 16. 19.  Antonis Liakos, “Οι Πόλεμοι της Ιστορίας. Σημειώσεις Επί του Πεδίου” [“The Wars of History. Notes on the Field”], in Αθέατες Όψεις της Ιστορίας. Κείμενα Αφιερωμένα στον Γιάνη Γιανουλόπουλο [Invisible Aspects of History. Texts Dedicated to Gianis Gianoulopoulos], eds. Despina I. Papadimitriou, Serafim I. Seferiades (Athens: Asini, 2012), 143–44. 20. Antonis Liakos, Αποκάλυψη, Ουτοπία και Ιστορία. Οι Μεταμορφώσεις της Ιστορικής Συνείδησης [Revelation, Utopia and History. The Transformations of Historical Consciousness] (Athens: Polis, 2012, 2nd edition), 370. 21.  Margaret Macmillan, Χρήση και Κατάχρηση της Ιστορίας [The Uses and Abuses of History], trans. Mina Kardamitsa-Psychogiou (Athens: A. Kardamitsa, 2012), 27.

WORKS CITED Andreou, Andreas, Spyros Kakouriotis, Giorgos Kokkinos, Elli Lemonidou, Zeta Papandreou, Eleni Paschaloudi. “Εισαγωγή” [“Introduction”]. In Η Δημόσια Ιστορία στην Ελλάδα. Χρήσεις και Καταχρήσεις της Ιστορίας [Public History in Greece. Uses and Abuses of History], edited by Andreas Andreou, Spyros Kakouriotis, Giorgos Kokkinos, Elli Lemonidou, Zeta Papandreou, Eleni Paschaloudi, 9–26. Thessaloniki: Epikentro, 2015. Association of the German School of Athens. “Σύλλογος Αποφοίτων Γερμανικής Σχολής Αθηνών. Λένα Κιτσοπούλου (89)” [“Alumni Association of the German

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School of Athens. Lena Kitsopoulou (89)”]. Accessed August 1, 2017. http:// www.ex-sathen.gr/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=137:kitsopo ulou_lena&catid=158&lang=GR. “Aθανάσιος Διάκος η Επιστροφή” [Athanasios Diakos the Comeback]. Accessed May 31, 2016. http://gkoultoura.gr/post/27337244991/. Αθανάσιος Διάκος[Athanasios Diakos]. “Εβγαλαν Σουβλατζή - Κερατά - Συζυγοκτόνο τον Αθανάσιο Διάκο” [Athanasios Diakos Presented as a Souvlaki Shop-Owner, Cuckold and Wife Murderer”]. Accessed May 31, 2016. http://www.protothema .gr/culture/theater/article/220730/ebgalan-soyblatzh_-kerata-syzygoktono-ton -athanasio-diako/. Arkoumanea, Luisa. “Ο Αθανάσιος Διάκος και η Βόμβα που δεν Έσκασε” [“Athanasios Diakos and the Bomb that did not Explode”]. Accessed May 31, 2016. http:// www.tovima.gr/culture/article/?aid=473736. Athens and Epidaurus Festival. “Lena Kitsopoulou, Athanasios Diakos: The Comeback.” Accessed May 31, 2016. http://greekfestival.gr/en/events/view/lena-kitso poulou—2012. Blatsou, Ioanna. “Το ‘φαινόμενο Λένα’” [The phenomenon named Lena], accessed May 31, 2016, in: http://www.topontiki.gr/article/38675/fainomeno-lena. Chiotis, Theodoros (ed.). Futures: Poetry of the Greek Crisis. UK: Penned in the Margins, 2015. Grammatas, Theodoros. “Greek Society During the Period of Crisis: The Role of History as a Mechanism of Repelling the Present.” Gramma 22, no. 2 (2014): 37–43. Georgakopoulou, Vena. “Αθανάσιος Διάκος, Η επιστροφή” [Athanasios Diakos. The Comeback], accessed May 31, 2016. http://www.protagon.gr/epikairotita/politis mos/athanasios-diakos-i-epistrofi-16920000000. Hatzidaki Ourania and Dionysis Goutsos (eds.). Greece in Crisis: Combining critical discourse and corpus linguistics perspectives (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture). Netherlands: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 2017. Ioannidis, Grigoris. “Η δραματουργία της Λένας Κιτσοπούλου” [“Lena Kitsopoulou’s playwriting”]. Accessed August 1, 2017. http://www.greek-theatre.gr/public/ gr/greekplay/index/reviewview/6. Kitsopoulou, Lena. Αθανάσιος Διάκος—Ηεπιστροφή [Athanasios Diakos—The comeback], typewritten manuscript. Athens: 2012, 46. Kitsopoulou. “Kitsopoulou Lena.” Accessed August 1, 2017. http://www.greek -theatre.gr/public/gr/greekplay/index/view/23. “Λένα Κιτσοπούλου: τζάμπα μαγκιές” [Lena Kitsopoulou: meaningless tricks], accessed May 31, 2016. http://www.topontiki.gr/article/39944/lena-kitsopoyloy -tzampa-magkies. Liakos, Antonis. Αποκάλυψη, Ουτοπία και Ιστορία. Οι Μεταμορφώσεις της Ιστορικής Συνείδησης [Revelation, Utopia and History. The Transformations of Historical Consciousness]. Athens: Polis, 2012, 2nd edition. ———. “Οι Πόλεμοι της Ιστορίας. Σημειώσεις Επί του Πεδίου” [“The Wars of History. Notes on the Field”]. In Αθέατες Όψεις της Ιστορίας. Κείμενα Αφιερωμένα στον Γιάνη Γιανουλόπουλο [Invisible Aspects of History. Texts Dedicated to Gia-



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nis Gianoulopoulos], edited by Despina I. Papadimitriou, Serafim I. Seferiades, 137–160. Athens: Asini, 2012. Macmillan, Margaret. Χρήση και Κατάχρηση της Ιστορίας [The Uses and Abuses of History]. Trans. by Mina Kardamitsa-Psychogiou. Athens: A. Kardamitsa, 2012. “Μήνυση Μπαρμπούση για το copyright του Α. Διάκου!” [Law suit for the copyright of A. Diakos!], accessed May 31, 2016, in: http://tvxs.gr/news/blogarontas/minysi -mparmparoysi-gia-copyright-toy-diakoy. Paridis, Christos. “Λένα Κιτσοπούλου. Αθανάσιος Διάκος. Η Επιστροφή” [“Lena Kitsopoulou. Athanasios Diakos. The Comeback”]. Accessed May 31, 2016. http:// www.lifo.gr/mag/features/3260. Patsalidis, Savvas, Anna Stavrakopoulou. “Introduction: From the Years of Utopia to the Years of Dystopia.” Gramma 22, no. 2 (2014): 7–12. Rosi, Lina. “The Diverse Landscape of Contemporary Greek Playwriting.” Gramma 22, no. 2 (2014): 19–36. Sakellaridou, Elizabeth. “Whose Performance?: The Politics of Protest and Terror in Greek Civic Life.” Gramma 22, no. 2 (2014): 189–202. Sierz, Aleks. In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today. UK: Faber & Faber, 2001. Smyrnis, Giorgos. “Αθανάσιος Διάκος – Η επιστροφή, της Λένας Κιτσοπούλου: Ο Διάκος κερατάς!” [“Lena Kitsopoulou’s Athanasios Diakos – The Comeback: Diakos as a cuckold!]. Accessed May 31, 2016. https://www.monopoli.gr/theater/ eidame/item/113994. Tziovas, Dimitris (ed.). Greece in Crisis: Culture and the Politics of Austerity. London: I.B. Tauris, 2017. Tzogopoulos, George. The Greek Crisis in the Media. UK: Routledge, 2013. Van Dyke, Karen (ed.). Austerity Measures: The New Greek Poetry. UK: Penguin Books, 2016.

Chapter Nine

Television Fiction as a Window into a Nation’s Past The Arbitraries and the Concept of the Neohellene Georgia Aitaki Every look into television’s past is bound to reward the curious inquirers with more than they bargain for. Overviews of institutional and technological histories, glimpses into local production cultures, connections with social and political change, as well as insights into issues of representation, form, and aesthetics, have all been identified as important, intertwined axes of historical enquiries of television.1 There are also certain television programs that hold a unique place in a nation’s cultural memory and broadcast history; that might be because of some kind of pioneering status or a special relationship they have developed with a specific national culture or through achieving noteworthy popularity. Such instances can constitute entry points into a given culture, as it is through striking examples of popular culture that outsiders can learn more about what a culture is like, what it feels touched by, and what it laughs with/at, as well as understand more about how the media (and television in particular) contribute to the construction of collective identities. The Arbitraries (MEGA Channel, 1989–1991)2 was a Greek television program that reached iconic status for Greek culture and society and is remembered by local audiences mostly as a synonym for a particular historically situated identity, the Neohellene. An examination of this show can serve to inform us about the different, yet intertwined, facets of the life of a nation that can become visible through a historical enquiry of national television. More specifically, I locate the program within the historical context of the birth of private television in Greece and the quick adoption of a commercialentertaining model, and I pinpoint its contribution to the formation of specific television sub-genres. Moreover, I clarify how The Arbitraries became involved in the representation of moments of societal tension and in negotiations of what it means to be Greek. 151

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The Arbitraries holds a special place in the history of Greek television in many ways. It is one of the first comic programs broadcast by the newly founded Greek private television station—MEGA Channel; it premiered on Wednesday, 22 November, 1989, only two days after the channel’s official launch. Created by screenwriter Vasilis Nemeas and directed by Nikos Koutelidakis, The Arbitraries was broadcast for two consecutive seasons.3 The story revolves around the interaction between two neighboring families, delivered in comic, even satirical, style. Despite their spatial proximity— they live on different floors of the same building—the relationship between the two sides is mainly characterized by feelings of strong dislike, or even enmity, that tends to display itself in action. At the core of the program sits an intense, yet often absurd, rivalry between two families that do not appear to have that many differences—something that is perhaps implied by the fact that they both have the same surname but no relationship of kinship. The family of Andreas Chatzigiorgis consists of Andreas, an unsuccessful yet nonchalant lawyer, his rich wife Zanette and her quirky sister Eleonora. The family of Kostas Chatzigiorgis consists of Kostas, ambitious owner of a profitable piano restaurant, his wife Soula, and their daughter and aspiring actress Thodora (who insists on being called Ursula—a more appropriate name for her acting career), as well as the Spanish housekeeper Dolores and Soula’s street-smart brother Babis. Apart from their mutual contempt, both clans share an obsession with becoming rich(er), a tendency in showing off, as well as a disregard for moral and legal barriers. It has been argued that the launch of private channels in Greece came with a significant increase in the production of local television fiction, as the latter is usually associated with higher ratings (which equals higher advertising revenue for the channels).4 In that sense, The Arbitraries and other productions of television fiction, as well as genres such as game shows, set the tone for a prioritization of entertainment as a distinctive characteristic of the postderegulation broadcasting system, as opposed to the notion of “quality” as the normative mission of state-owned television.5 This constitutes, in fact, the beginning of an era characterized by a clear orientation toward the production and delivery of programs with a “commercial flavor”6 and the adoption, as in other countries in Europe, of a commercial-entertaining production logic.7 What is more, according to television historian Stathis Valoukos, The Arbitraries was also a trendsetter: it introduced the sub-genre of “cohabitation comedies,”8 in which the close yet problematic relationship between neighbors or between members of the same family who live under the same roof constitutes the main humorous resource, a model that was copied and broadened by many other comedies of the time. The extent to which this particular sub-genre can be coined as a particularity of Greek television production



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lacks empirical evidence, but it is safe to say that the spatial coexistence of different character types—and their subsequent misunderstandings, disputes and, in some cases, reconciliations—became a trope and a template that was followed and enriched during the 1990s, and is still present in more recent productions as well. Apart from its pioneering status, audiences and critics alike tend to remember the program as an insightful commentary on a period of interesting sociopolitical fermentation, emphasizing its popular status as a synonym for a particular identity, the Neohellene,9 defined here as a striking exemplification of a particular performance of Greekness based on morally problematic behaviors, individualistic interests, and unlawful tendencies. While a neutral understanding of the term simply refers to the Neohellene as the national appellation of the modern Greek state since its foundation in 1832, it rarely has this meaning in popular parlance. When Greeks use the word today, they have a specific type of person in mind; however, the term remains largely understudied and its culturally intricate content is inaccessible to foreigners. The Neohellene becomes a problematic performance of identity, in need of a contextual, evaluative, and ideological vivification which can become possible through a closer look at popular culture artifacts.10Along these lines, it can be argued that the cultural power of The Arbitraries lies to a large extent in its ability to define and construct the Neohellene discursively; to ascribe meaning to a popular—yet intangible concept—and, one could argue, to attribute ideological meaning to it. While the idea is complex, here I propose some introductory points that can work toward the clarification of the relationship between The Arbitraries and the notion of Neohellene. Traces of this engagement are retrievable as user comments below episodes which have been uploaded on YouTube (on MEGA channel’s official account). Contemporary viewers still quote The Arbitraries as a direct representation of the culture of the Neohellene based on the characters’ repertoire of worldviews and behaviors. This relationship is more concretely manifested in critical responses to the program. In a piece that accompanied one of its numerous reruns in 2013, one critic contended that The Arbitraries is ultimately a story about national identity, describing the program as “the best adaptation of Greek DNA on television. A series that started in an era when we wanted to become European, twenty years before we reached the conclusion that we would have been better off remaining Balkan.”11 In another critical commentary, The Arbitraries is explicitly associated with the notion of the Neohellene: It is a fact that The Arbitraries documents the rise of petty bourgeoisie through the character of the lawyer who keeps losing trials and who is sustained through

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the dowry of his semi-crazy wife, on whom he’s cheating, the swindler restaurant owner with the folksy wife who strives to step up socially through a Filipino maid and psychoanalysis, and the Neohellene who envisions a Greece swimming carefree in a sea of money.12

I am particularly concerned with the aforementioned angles of reading the program; firstly, as a product of its time and secondly, as a synonym for the Neohellene. Through a close look at both of these key characteristics of The Arbitraries, we will be able to understand its “historical” value, that is the factors that contribute to its iconic status for Greek culture and society. Historical enquiries revolving around television products are able to deliver a number of interrelated histories, including specificities of local production cultures, as well as ties with particular sociopolitical contexts. On one hand, television fiction is the result of technological capacities, professional skills, and material resources, among other things, available at a specific moment in time. On the other hand, as Milly Buonanno argues, “[w]ithout faithfully mirroring reality, and without actually distorting it, televisual stories select, refashion, discuss and comment on issues and problems of our personal and social life.”13 This is true in the case of The Arbitraries as well. On one hand, it is a TV show in which one can witness the creative freedom that television practitioners experienced during the very first years of the operation of private channels in Greece, as well as their inexperience and technical flaws of the productions (e.g., bad lighting, awkward editing). But most importantly, it is a TV program in which one can identify recognizable aspects of life in Greece during the late 1980s and early 1990s. It would be hard to disagree that The Arbitraries teems with references that manage to anchor it to a specific historical time, making it sometimes impossible for younger (let alone international) audiences to decode it in full. This connection with social reality could of course be attributed to the comic nature of the show. We know from TV comedy-related literature that humorous texts are often offered for more intimate readings because they are rooted, produced, and consumed in specific cultural contexts.14 Read in reverse, this could mean that the critical analysis of fiction can be used as a rich resource of cultural markers, which inform the viewers about dominant cultural views and social behaviors.15 What, then, does the program tell us about its time? The Arbitraries is very clearly temporally defined already from the opening credits sequence that informs the viewers that the story is situated “just before 1992,” during a period of preparation before the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, a defining moment for the European Union (EU). For Greek society, as for other EU members, the year 1992 had particular weight as an emblematic moment, prognosticating a considerable transformation on many levels, including eco-



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nomic prosperity. Similar contextual cues can be found in other episodes as well. In episode 12, for instance, Kostas decides to hire Dolores as a singer at his piano-restaurant and justifies his decision within a framework of internationalization on the path to a united Europe. In episode 24, Soula buys an answering machine and proudly shows it to Dolores, who is not impressed because she was already familiar with this kind of technology from when she was living in Spain. Soula then complains that Greece is always delayed in adopting such novelties, despite its membership in the European Economic Community (EEC, the predecessor of EU). In episode 50, Andreas and Kostas visit a bank and try to convince the manager to approve a big loan; the two sides also negotiate the possibility of applying for funding from the EEC.16 The above references tie the universe of The Arbitraries with a particular series of events taking place in the real world. Greece’s membership in the EEC/EU, alongside generous doses of expectations and misunderstandings about what such a membership entails, are all registered in various instances of the program, placing it in a particular period in recent Greek history. In addition to that, the show includes references which prove its close monitoring of the contemporary Greek political reality. As Valoukos has argued, the antagonism between the two main characters and their families is a direct reference to a political rivalry that monopolized the public life of Greece at the time, that between Andreas Papandreou (leader of PASOK, the Panhellenic Socialist Movement) and Konstantinos Mitsotakis (leader of the conservative New Democracy Party).17 The first names of the two protagonists, Andreas and Kostas (short for Konstantinos), clearly point toward this interpretation. References to other iconic concepts, issues, and trends of the time can be found in many episodes throughout the program’s two seasons. In episode 1, Soula and Kostas discuss the possibility of hiring a Filipino maid to help them with errands around the house. In the same episode, their daughter Thodora/Ursula shows her interest in aerobic exercise. In episode 5, Soula starts therapy with a psychologist as a sign of class status. In episode 12, Kostas presents Dolores, a Spanish woman, as a new addition to their staff at the piano-restaurant and an attraction for his Greek customers, since Greeks “love foreign stuff.” In episode 21, Kostas gets lured into becoming involved with the stock market. In episode 24, Soula returns home from a shopping splurge and explains to Dolores that she purchased home appliances, a new car, and even a piece of real estate on credit. These may sound as casual sub-plots aimed at enriching the main storylines of the show and/ or incorporating comic scenes, but audiences of the late 1980s and 1990s would identify with all the above instances as common social views, practices, and preoccupations of the time.18 In this sense, The Arbitraries is not

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only anchored in macroframes of reference related to larger sociopolitical processes and changes, but also in familiar aspects of the ordinary life. Along these lines, the title of the show itself could be read as another culturally relevant reference, most probably incomprehensible for younger audiences or viewers/readers recently introduced to Greek culture. The original title of the program in Greek has a double meaning. The first meaning, also adopted in this chapter as the most accurate translation—The Arbitraries—points to people whose existence or actions lack a logical explanation or foundation. The second meaning is admittedly contextual and connects the title with a problem that was discussed intensely in the 1990s: dwellings constructed without necessary building permits. The roots of this problem go way back; in the 1960s, many Greeks would build houses without waiting to acquire the appropriate permits from the authorities. To legalize such a building, one would have to go through an exhausting bureaucratic process, so most Greeks would rather leave the matter unsolved and use the fact that the number of illegal houses in Greece are already too big as an excuse to legitimize the process of building without following the right procedure. Obviously, this second meaning of the title reveals the opportunity for a metaphorical reading of the program to emerge. The protagonists of The Arbitraries could be seen as the exemplification of a cultural identity that has been constructed in such an unorthodox manner from the very beginning, making it impossible to “fix” its problematic aspects without a great deal of effort. It is in the ways described above that television fiction can provide a window into a nation’s past. The numerous contextual references present in The Arbitraries allow for specific aspects of life in Greece (although an emphasis on urban surroundings cannot be denied) in the late 1980s and early 1990s to survive until today. But what the program is mostly remembered for is its dedicated investigation of the notion of Greekness (defined here as the existential question of what it means to be Greek), with a particular interest in dissecting the mentality and the behavioral repertoire of the Neohellene. In this sense, The Arbitraries can be seen as an expression of a recognized tradition of cultural texts (mostly literature and films) in which identity-related anxieties are articulated through fictional stories.19 In order to at least kick off a discussion about how a product of popular culture acquires such a widely accepted relationship with an identity marker (although the word Neohellene itself is never mentioned in the program), it is important that we identify some interpretive perspectives that can inform our understanding of what exactly the Neohellene is. The first is based on a reading of the Neohellene as an identity informed by middle-class anxieties. The relationship between the two families is based on a permanent condition of antagonism—a game of keeping up with the Joneses—where each family strives to match their neighbors’ financial and social status. Even though both



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fantasize about transcending the boundaries of their class and escaping their surroundings, it almost seems as if this kind of game is the only thing that makes the existence of these individuals meaningful.20 Along the same lines, in the second season of the show, the two families experiment with the idea of a possible collaboration as business partners, an attempt that is continuously undermined by their mutual and inextinguishable hatred of each other. However, both sides share a common dream: to make enough money to be able to upgrade their quality of life, which translates into the acquisition of new apartments, cars, and other material goods, as well as the adoption of an attitude of powerful and esteemed business owners. Overall, they never manage to form a functional coalition and despite their (minimum) efforts, their relationship always seems to return to square one. Their thoughts, their plans for the future, their business ideas are, by default, directed toward spitefulness or making the other side jealous, rather than making themselves content. In the following excerpt, Kostas explains to the family’s (newly hired and freshly introduced to Greek culture) Spanish housekeeper, Dolores, the peculiar relationship his family has with their neighbors and presents the feelings of rivalry as something that brings the family together: Kostas: With that lady and her family, we are in a state of war, understand? Dolores: No señor [No Sir]. Kostas: Guerra [War], girl, something like the civil war of Spain, Franco, democrats . . . Dolores: Si señor [Yes Sir]. Kostas: If you want to become a member of this family, you have to hate them too. Dolores: But they didn’t do anything to me. Kostas: You are going to make me burst, girl. Here in Greece people are envious of each other, they hate each other. We live with passions, con pasiones [with passions], understand? Dolores: Si, en España somos apasionados, pero no . . . [Yes, in Spain we are passionate but not . . .] without any reason. Kostas: My dear girl, if your neighbor buys a new car and parks it outside your front door to show off, what will you do? Dolores: Nothing. Kostas: Here in Greece, you go and buy a better car than him. And you go and park it in his bedroom if possible, understand? Dolores: Ah si, si. Comprendo [Ah yes, yes. I understand]. (Season 1, episode 12, 09:50–10:40)

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A second perspective allows for a gendered analysis of the identity of the Neohellene. It is safe to say that all the main characters contribute pieces to the larger puzzle that reveals the image of the Neohellene, showcasing different—yet complementary—aspects of a kind of flawed Greekness. However, it is the male characters that primarily give shape to the identity of the Neohellene. The antagonism between the two patriarchs, Kostas and Andreas, is a trope that is present from the beginning of the show and continues until the very end. Their disputes and reconciliations, as well as intense personalities, steal the spotlight from the wives’ own contest-like life. Their styles are different; Kostas is the type of guy who thinks out loud, who is always working up a new cunning plan, gradually developing into a dark—almost Machiavellian—character, whereas Andreas is depicted as less desperate, yet always ready to jump into a good ruse that has the potential of yielding money or power. The duo is very well complemented by the character of Babis, a morally flexible character who participates in most of the two families’ devious business plans but does not hesitate to step down when he feels that his personal values and interests are being compromised. Babis remains, however, an important piece of the puzzle, as his character essentializes the opportunistic side of the Neohellene, always prioritizing his individual interests while trying to get along with everyone. The following excerpt from episode 38 is telling of such a behavior; after spending a night in jail for setting up an illegal gambling (card playing) den in the kitchen area of the piano restaurant, Kostas is devastated, but Babis promises he will find a way to fix everything through his contacts: Babis: You will open the restaurant again. Kostas: But these bastards took away my permit. Babis: Hey. You must trust me. You will open the restaurant again. Kostas: But how, Babis? Babis: My boy . . . do you think that Babis is sleeping? No, he is awake twentyfour hours a day and he is thinking, thinking. . . . I have access to political persons holding high positions in all parties. Kostas: And how can this be? Babis: Ah my little Kostas, do you live in the Middle Ages? Nothing can be done with just one party. You need crossfire to hit your goal. To make you understand, in the previous elections I transferred supporters of New Democracy with my truck on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and supporters of PASOK on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Kostas: And they didn’t figure you out?



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Babis: No way. Because the route for New Democracy was headed to the North and for PASOK to the South. I erased my traces on the spot. (Season 1, episode 38, 04:56–05:47)

To better understand this collective identity, which is constructed by the above group of individuals, it is important to turn to a third interpretive lens that draws a connecting line between the Neohellene and questions of morality. More specifically, here the Neohellene is associated with unlawfulness, expressed primarily in the main characters’ (almost natural) tendency to deceive others (including the State and the laws) in order to promote their own interests. In this sense, this point of view sheds light on the relation between the Neohellene’s moral values on one hand, and behaviors and actions on the other. A general disregard for the law and a fixation on getting rich through questionable methods is the preeminent feature in most characters’ view of the way toward a wealthy life. Illegal importation of goods, setting up uncertified gambling sites, investment frauds, and receiving bank loans with forged documents are only some of the activities the protagonists become involved in without appearing to feel terribly bad about it. On the contrary, they often justify their actions as simply following the norm. In episode 27 Zanette describes the 1990s as “the era of skullduggery” and adds that such activities are “a national sport.” According to this worldview, illegality is not only socially acceptable, but also a defining characteristic of a culture, at least at a certain point in time. Kostas Chatzigiorgis often stands out as particularly prone to under-thetable activities; completely driven by his desire to become wealthy quickly and effortlessly, and his need to continuously brag about outsmarting everyone else, he is often the instigator of devious plans which aim at bringing money to his family. In episode 46, for example, he asks Dolores to pose as a Spanish investor willing to put large amounts of money into Kostas’ new business in order to convince the bank to approve his request for a big loan. When Dolores expresses some hesitation, Kostas explains to her that such deceitful tactics are the Greek equivalent of “business as usual”: Kostas: So, Dolores, did you have a think about it? Dolores: Señor Kosta, you are taking a big risk and I’m scared. Are you seguro [sure]? Kostas: [laughing cunningly] Dear Dolores, you know how much I like you. Like you are my own child. Dolores: Gracias [thank you] Señor Kosta. Kostas: In Greece, my child—and take this as a lesson—nobody has progressed with a crucifix in their hands.

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Dolores: A crucifix in their hands? Queres decir [you mean to say] a real [she uses two fingers to make the sign of the Christian cross]? Kostas: [laughingly] No, my child, so to speak! What I mean to say is that unless you commit fraud, skullduggery, deviousness, monkey business . . . Dolores: Oh how beautiful the Greek language is! Kostas: Oh sure! Especially if one masters it the way that I do. So, so, all of our—otherwise beautiful—country’s economic power is based on the concept of skullduggery. It’s a matter of principle. Dolores: And this, let’s say, has been this way since the ancient times? The Acropolis, so to speak? Kostas: I don’t know about then, but something must have taken place then as well. Someone must have received a bribe for the Parthenon marbles. (Season 2, episode 46, 15:43–16:42)

In this sense, the program paints a picture of a society that not only describes, but even acknowledges its identity in terms of problematic values and behaviors. This could be read as an indication of the internalization of the “flawed Greekness” to the point that challenging or rejecting it is completely out of question. Finally, a fourth interpretive perspective is particularly concerned with the humorous attire of the Neohellene. As a comic text with obvious satirical intentions, The Arbitraries addresses the culture of the Neohellene as a laughable matter, inviting the viewer to adopt a similar stance: to laugh at all the extreme behaviors and circumstances that take place on-screen. While it is not possible to be explicit about the reception of The Arbitraries at the moment of its original broadcast, in terms of whether audiences would recognize aspects of the caricature in themselves or in others, the fact that the program is remembered today as a satirical take on Greekness is revealing. The question then becomes, is the program chastising these problematic facets of Greekness? And is it at all successful in inviting the viewer to repudiate the “qualities” of the Neohellene? Or does this humorous attire eventually work toward the opposite direction, essentially de-problematizing unsettling facets of the national self? It could be argued that The Arbitraries sets out with the intent to provide Greek viewers with a mirror image of a society that is, despite the optimism inspired by the changes on a European level, showing some clear signs of dysfunction. Nevertheless, as the program unravels throughout two seasons, the satirical approach loses its critical edge and the viewers are repetitively exposed to plots and tropes which fail to sustain a distance between the satirized target



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and the audience. On the contrary, as the characters turn more and more into caricatures of themselves, their negative aspects are naturalized and the viewer may also end up feeling sympathetic toward them. As a result, it could be said that The Arbitraries promotes humor as a necessary condition for coming to terms with the existence of the Neohellene, undercutting in this way the power of satire. To conclude, by putting The Arbitraries under the microscope, its status as a key moment in Greek television fiction has been clarified. The program’s proximity with the cultural context, which constitutes its primary frame of reference and richness in cultural markers, turns it into a valuable resource for an investigation of social reality in the late 1980s and early 1990s. What is more, its extensive commentary on issues related to modern Greek identity could inspire even more readings focused on the ways that television fiction draws from wider sociocultural (and even intellectual) debates. And while it does not in any way constitute an instance of artistic excellence or aesthetic innovation, the way it is remembered as a synonym for the Neohellene confirms its value as a television product of “historical” value. The relationship between television fiction and the concept of the Neohellene is an example of a topic which can benefit more from a deeper investigation of popular culture’s contribution to the construction of contemporary Greekness. The above concerns should also take into account the status of Greek television as an industry primarily producing programs for internal consumption. Language barriers and other issues of access to broadcast programming make it difficult for non-Greeks to peek into “the private life” of the Greek nation, to use John Ellis’ definition of national broadcasting.21 In this sense, scholarly work that investigates both contemporary and older television products performs the important task of mediating aspects of national culture to an international readership. The cultural power of television is undisputable. It has had an enormous effect in both our domestic and consumer culture, it has developed unique specificities in the ways it constructs and disseminates messages, as well as exercised incredible influence in the construction of collective identities, and it has embellished our lives with programs which define who we are, either on an individual or a collective level. The relationship between a popular television program and a particular identity, as discussed here, prove the status of television as an entry point into contemporary Greek history and culture. What it means to be Greek can indeed be clarified through a close analysis of how television products reproduce, interpret, and enrich a culture’s selfunderstanding and self-reflection. Perhaps television cannot explain everything; I believe that it can, at least, provide some clues worth following.

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NOTES 1. Helen Wheatley, “Introduction,” in Re-viewing Television History: Critical Issues in Television History, ed. Helen Wheatley (London & New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 7. 2.  The original Greek title is Οι Αυθαίρετοι. The Arbitraries is somewhat awkward and simplified translation of the title, but a more elaborated explanation can be found later in the chapter. 3. According to retrodb.gr (a combination of imdb and Wikipedia registering information—such as credits, plot summaries, etc.—on Greek television programs), The Arbitraries was scheduled for rerun in 1990, 1991, 1992, 1996, 1999, 2003, and 2013. One could argue that the number of times The Arbitraries was shown in reruns constitutes an indication of the program’s popularity. However, for the Greek commercial context, reruns should mostly be understood as a programming strategy aimed at filling programming gaps (e.g., in periods during which original programming is not broadcast, for example, summer months), rather than a response to audience’s requests or wishes. 4.  Ioanna Vovou, “Στοιχεία για μια μετα-ιστορία της ελληνικής τηλεόρασης. Το μέσο, η πολιτική και ο θεσμός” [Elements for a meta-history of Greek television. The medium, the politics and the institution],” in Ο Κόσμος της Τηλεόρασης: Θεωρητικές προσεγγίσεις, ανάλυση προγραμμάτων και ελληνική πραγματικότητα [The World of Television: Theoretical approaches, program analysis and Greek reality], ed. Ioanna Vovou (Athens: Irodotos, 2010), 124. 5.  Ibid., 125 6. George Tsourvakas, “Public Television Programming Strategy Before and After Competition: The Greek Case,” Journal of Media Economics 17, no. 3 (2004). 7. Angeliki Koukoutsaki, “Greek Television Drama: Production Policies and Genre Diversification,” Media, Culture & Society 25, no. 6 (2003). 8. Stathis Valoukos, Η Ελληνική Τηλεόραση (1967–1998) [Greek Television (1967–1998)] (Athens: Aigokeros, 1998). 9.  The original Greek word is “Νεοέλληνας” and it literally means “the new Greek.” 10.  It is worth noting that its most eloquent interpretation has been realized by another product of popular culture; the homonymous 1993 song by singer/song-writer/ stand-up comedian Tzimis Panousis summarizes who the Neohellene is in the best possible way. 11.  Panos Michalos, “Οι Αυθαίρετοι: Η σειρά όλων των Ελλήνων” [The Arbitraries: The series of all Greeks],” oneman.gr, July 10, 2013, http://www.oneman.gr/keimena/ diaskedash/watchlist/oi-aythairetoi-h-seira-olwn-twn-ellhnwn.2327685.html. 12.  Afroditi Grammeli, “Αυθαίρετοι και ωραίοι [Arbitraries and cool],” Το Βήμα [To Vima], July 4, 2013, http://www.tovima.gr/opinions/article/?aid=520829. 13.  Milly Buonanno, The Age of Television: Experiences and Theories, (Bristol & Chicago: Intellect, 2008), 72. 14.  Andy Medhurst, A National Joke: Popular Comedy and English Cultural Identities (Oxon & New York: Routledge, 2007).



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15.  John H. Weakland, “Feature Films as Cultural Documents,” in Principles of Visual Anthropology, ed. Paul Hockings (Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995), 45–67. 16.  In the second season, the two families become co-founders and partners in an ambiguous water extraction and bottling facility. Their antagonistic relationship, however, continues to create frictions. 17. Valoukos, Η Ελληνική Τηλεόραση (1967–1998) [Greek Television (1967– 1998)], 70. 18.  It is interesting to note all of the above are included either as unique entries or indicative examples in other entries in Vasilis Vamvakas and Panayis Panagiotopoulos’ Η Ελλάδα στη Δεκαετία του ‘80. Κοινωνικό, Πολιτικό και Πολιτισμικό Λεξικό [Greece in the 80s. Social, Political and Cultural Dictionary] (Athens: Epikentro, 2014). 19.  Vangelis Calotychos, The Balkan Prospect: Identity, Culture, and Politics in Greece after 1989 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 20.  Some exceptions, however, appear from time to time. In episode 14, Thodora/ Ursula criticizes her parents’ obsession with getting rich. Eleonora often adopts a position of critical distance toward her family’s actions and involvement into obscure activities. Even Babis occasionally expresses some concerns about the families’ meaningless rivalry. 21.  John Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), 5.

WORKS CITED Buonanno, Milly. The Age of Television: Experiences and Theories. Bristol & Chicago: Intellect, 2008. Calotychos, Vangelis. The Balkan Prospect: Identity, Culture, and Politics in Greece after 1989. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Ellis, John. Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982. Grammeli, Afroditi. “Αυθαίρετοι και Ωραίοι [Arbitraries and Cool].” Το Βήμα [To Vima], July 4, 2013. http://www.tovima.gr/opinions/article/?aid=520829. Koukoutsaki, Angeliki. “Greek Television Drama: Production Policies and Genre Diversification.” Media, Culture & Society 25, no. 6 (2003): 715–35. Medhurst, Andy. A National Joke: Popular Comedy and English Cultural Identities. Oxon & New York: Routledge, 2007. Michalos, Panos. “Οι Αυθαίρετοι: Η Σειρά Ὀλων των Ελλήνων” [The Arbitraries: The Series of All Greeks].” oneman.gr, July 10, 2013. http://www.oneman.gr/keimena/ diaskedash/watchlist/oi-aythairetoi-h-seira-olwn-twn-ellhnwn.2327685.html. Tsourvakas, George. “Public Television Programming Strategy Before and After Competition: The Greek Case.” Journal of Media Economics 17, no. 3 (2004): 193–205. Valoukos, Stathis. Η Ελληνική Τηλεόραση (1967–1998) [Greek Television (1967– 1998)]. Athens: Aigokeros, 1998.

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Vamvakas, Vasilis and Panayis Panagiotopoulos. Η Ελλάδα στη Δεκαετία του ‘80. Κοινωνικό, Πολιτικό και Πολιτισμικό Λεξικό [Greece in the 80s. Social, Political and Cultural Dictionary]. Athens: Epikentro, 2014. Vovou, Ioanna. “Στοιχεία για μια Mετα-Iστορία της Eλληνικής Tηλεόρασης. Το Mέσο, η Πολιτική και ο Θεσμός” [Elements for a Meta-History of Greek Television. The Medium, the Politics and the Institution].” In Ο Κόσμος της Τηλεόρασης: Θεωρητικές Προσεγγίσεις, Aνάλυση Προγραμμάτων και Eλληνική Πραγματικότητα [The World of Television: Theoretical Approaches, Program Analysis and Greek Reality], edited by Ioanna Vovou, 93–140. Athens: Irodotos, 2010. Weakland, John H. “Feature Films as Cultural Documents.” In Principles of Visual Anthropology, edited by Paul Hockings, 45–67. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995. Wheatley, Helen. “Introduction.” In Re-viewing Television History: Critical Issues in Television History, edited by Helen Wheatley, 1–12. London & New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007.

Chapter Ten

Ancient Greek Mythology and the Culture of the Neohellene in Animated TV Satire Jessica Kourniakti

At midnight, on November 4, 2010, the much-anticipated pilot of the animated series ΟΥΚ αν λάβοις παρά του μη έχοντος (You shall not receive from one who does not have, henceforth OUK) premiered on the Greek private television network, Mega Channel. A project by graphic designer Yiannis Tsitsonis and TV screenwriter Giorgos Pheidas, this series was geared toward adults and was intended to be a ground-breaking moment in Greek television history. OUK was the first Greek animated series to be broadcast on primetime, albeit in the late fringe of that segment in Mega Channel’s schedule. The greenlighting of an unprecedented genre by a major private TV network heralded a new frontier in Greek television programming, and OUK’s late-night time slot intimated to spectators that they were in for a world of profanity and graphic images. Promoted as a show where “South Park meets Karaghiozis” (the protagonist of Greek folk shadow puppet theater), and as “a contemporary, fierce satire of our hypocritical Greece that leaves none of our local myths standing,” OUK further roused great expectations regarding the bite of its satire and its transgressions on the ivory towers of Greek history and culture.1 Derived from a dialogue from Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead (a Greek satirical work written under the Roman Empire in the second century CE), the premise and the title of OUK, with their matter-of-fact implication of default, were, of course, profoundly informed by the heightening discourses and conditions of the Greek crisis.2 In short, OUK and its promotional taglines seemed to promise a radical satire debunking national myths and narratives in Greece, one refracted through the lens of the contemporary moment and mediated by an original creative medium. Yet, OUK was discontinued in 2011, not for its transgressive content, but for its relatively low TV viewership figures and the limited financial 165

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resources for the continuation of the project. Overall, the series did not confront the sensibilities of its viewership, with the exception of some religious persons and parents, who took issue with the representations of Jesus Christ as a hip teenager and jet-setter, or who misconstrued the target audience of the series.3 In some cases, the expectations of those spectators who were eager to see OUK transgress the conventions of Greek satire were left wanting, as evidenced by posts on the Greek online forum Insomnia: “I don’t understand why [OUK] is considered to be so revolutionary, its humor is not particularly caustic/offensive to anyone, I found it to be rather ordinary with the exception of two or three scenes.”4 In a similar vein, some forum users were disappointed to find that OUK initially hesitated to implicate national heroes in its spoofs: “Why doesn’t it include any of the figures of the Greek Revolution? [What about] Alexander the Great?”5 Others, including seasoned fans of adult animation, took a more favorable approach to OUK from the outset in commending the series as a solid attempt “by Greek standards” or by lauding it as existing in “a league of its own,” in light of the novelty of its medium and the mediocrity of Greek television in general.6 Notwithstanding the mixed reviews of OUK’s viewership, in the spring of 2011 approximately fifty-eight thousand spectators signed a petition for the network to greenlight the creation and broadcasting of a do-over of the series finale. In November 2017, the pilot of the series (uploaded after OUK was discontinued) has been viewed almost seven hundred thousand times on YouTube, a statistic that attests either to the magnitude or devotion of its fan base, or both.7 Whereas OUK may not have presented a particularly radical satire of Greek society and culture in terms of its thematics and animation strategies, it did accomplish something quite different to what its promotional taglines foretold of the series. The two-pronged objectives of OUK—to satirize social hypocrisy on the one hand and to debunk national myths and narratives on the other—were closely intertwined in their reproduction of a well-known stereotype of contemporary Greekness. This stereotype was that of the “Νεοέλληνας” (Neohellene), whose vainglorious attachments to revered icons of Greek history and culture, contradictory standards, and apoliticization have widely circulated in Greek popular culture and public discourse since the 1990s.8 In its (re)animation of the tropes of the Neohellene, the project of Tsitsonis and Pheidas did not contest this stereotype, nor did it challenge or deride the pantheon of Greek history and culture purportedly held dear by the Neohellene. Rather, OUK borrowed these tropes in order to make an evocative statement about the place of animation in mainstream culture in Greece. In doing so, the series won over a large fan base for its community-making qualities, as well as for introducing animation into the history of Greek primetime television.



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Since the announcement of the crisis in 2009, animation has flourished in Greece.9 The same can be said of other forms of creative expression, including literature, theater, performance, and film (a well-known example being the international success of what has been called the “Weird Wave of Greek Cinema”). This explosion in creativity is closely intertwined with Greece’s current predicament; it challenges “arguments about funding for cultural activities being a luxury in an age of austerity,” “gives way to new forms of sociality and community,” and/or demonstrates “resourcefulness and [a desire to] restore what is seen to be lost.”10 More specifically, since 2010 Greece has seen the introduction of two new international festivals dedicated to animation, projects have received funding from European programs and domestic benefactors, and animated series have appeared on primetime TV (since OUK) and in the form of web series.11 The creation of the bilingual website Greek Animation in 2015 (in Greek and English)—which includes a history and database mapping the seventy years of Greek animation, painstakingly researched and made open-access by a team led by animation trailblazer, Angelos Rouvas—works in such a way so as to provide guidance and a networking platform for aspiring animation artists, to establish the visibility of Greek animation, and, of course, to archive the material in a historical moment when physical collections are threatened by major budget cuts in Greece. Meanwhile, the advent of cost-effective computer animation software, video-sharing platforms, and social media, since the 2000s, have further facilitated the creation and circulation of animated projects by aficionados and novices alike. At the level of state institutions, however, animation continues to lack recognition as an art form in its own right, such that the history of the medium in the country has recently been described as “a history of persistence” in the prominent American periodical Animation Magazine.12 Greek animators continue to feel that “[t]he state has never shown any interest, or understanding for animation,” given that funds or broadcasting support are very rarely allocated to the development of animations or children’s programming.13 Furthermore, the activities of domestic animation companies have historically been dominated by the production of TV commercial reels (a phenomenon that began to gather momentum in Greece in the 1960s), the implication being that the industry has not afforded animators the resources necessary to embark on noncommercial or feature-length projects.14 By extension, the limited (but growing) animation literacy of Greek TV viewers also presents obstacles, with animation artists feeling that “the people did not take animation seriously” until recently.15 It is no doubt in light of such long-standing prejudices toward the genre that articles on Greek animation festivals disclaim: “Animations are not for children (they are for everybody).”16 These

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circumstances and insights help to put into perspective the presentation of OUK as a ground-breaking moment in Greek animation and TV history. In lacking an organized animation industry and major animation powerhouses (in the style of Disney Studios or Pixar for instance), the trajectory of Greek animation has been constituted of “isolated, fragmented and sometimes heroic efforts by talented artists” (i.e., animations outside those of the advertisement sector).17 In this sense, the heterogeneity of Greek animation can be used as a sort of index in order to unfold certain key aspects of the generic possibilities of the genre, with animation broadly understood here as encompassing “movement that is drawn, inanimate objects brought to life by models and drawings, and film that is ‘not live action.’”18 By virtue of its self-evident artifice, animation can “redefine the everyday, subvert accepted notions of ‘reality,’ and challenge the orthodox acceptance of our existence.”19 For instance, as in other contexts, animators in Greece have harnessed the perceived infantility and innocuousness of hand-drawn illustrations in order to push the limits of censorship and propriety in ways that live-action cannot do as easily.20 A famous example is the 1971 short animated film Σσσστ (Shhhh) by Thodoros Maragos, whose scathing satire of the repression and modernization projects of the military dictatorship that ruled Greece between 1967 and 1974 still managed to win an award at the Thessaloniki Film Festival in Greece under that regime (albeit not without controversy).21 It is important to note that satire does not necessarily entail that a film is humorous, and Maragos’s animation is a case in point. When performed insightfully, satire is rather understood “in terms of its diagnostic power—the (intellectual) assassin’s blade turned into use as a surgeon’s scalpel.”22 At the same time, this should not be taken to mean that satire cannot be sharply perceptive and humorous at once. Of particular relevance to this chapter is the 1996 short film We Greeks by Greek animation veteran Jordan Ananiadis, due to the fact that it presents a humorous satire of the Neohellene. In this film, Ananiadis makes a number of allusions regarding gender inequality in Greek society (on the emotional labor expected of women and on their objectification, in particular), as well as a pointed comment on the undemocratic underpinnings of the democratic polity of classical Athens. In the same animation, he assembles portraits of the Neohellene through nonmatching combinations of hand-drawn puzzle pieces (for instance, a piece depicting a cowboy’s head and torso, with one of a fustanella), the implication being that this version of Greekness is riddled with contradictions (in the context of this film, specifically because for all his pride in his heritage as a Greek, the Neohellene imitates foreignisms).23 The artifice of animation is equally able to undercut harmful stereotypes, an indicative example being the short film “Alex”: A Story About Greece’s



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International Image Crisis (2012) by the collective Omikron Project. Using clean-cut computer imaging and a narrator with a flawless (standard) English accent, this film challenges the sensationalism of depravity rallied around Greece in the contemporary moment by the international media (including representations of Greek people as lazy and corrupt). In doing so, Alex subtly (and literally) pronounces the self-referential sense of propriety that underlies many northern European criticisms of Greece today, and invites the questioning of this self-image. As Angelos Rouvas has observed in a recent bilingual volume on the history of Greek animation, however, while animated storytelling in Greece has historically grappled with a range of social and political issues, “a bold proposal as a solution to these problems was rarely put forth, or even a new perspective that would open the way for awakening, reflection and action.”24 It was one such perspective that the taglines of OUK seemed to promise to its viewership, an expectation that was further roused by the renown of American adult animated sitcoms for their transgressive content. Around the time of OUK’s airing, the hugely popular animated series South Park—which, in addition to being widely accessible online, was being broadcast by MTV Greece—was lauded among its Greek fan base for being “so indiscreet and sacrilegious that it operates cathartically, like a protest march.”25 The adult animated sitcom refers to a genre of animation whose content is considered to be inappropriate for child or family audiences, and which borrows features from live-action sitcoms traditionally produced for television. To different extents, such series place profanity, sexual acts, graphic violence, and black comedy within the familiar frames of the sitcom (for instance, the family, a band of friends, a workplace, or a school), in order to capitalize on cultural resources that enjoy “favorable dissemination and market acceptance,” while simultaneously problematizing normative phenomena and (ideally) subverting them.26 The processes through which adult animation accomplishes this have influentially been paralleled with carnival and the carnivalesque, as theorized by Russian philosopher and critic Mikhail Bakhtin: The Simpsons and other successful domestic animated comedies have been able to explore darker, subversive aspects of family life thanks to the possibilities of the cartoon esthetic. But, like carnival, they offer their critique in a familiar and culturally acceptable environment: the traditional sitcom format. It is precisely this mixture of shock and reassurance that distinguishes the new animated television comedy.27

The liminal space of carnival, after Bakhtin, encompasses four categories: the emergence of a collectivity that transcends social hierarchies and divides; interactions and performances that transgress on propriety and normative

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behavior; “mésalliance,” or the free intermingling of things otherwise held to be diametrically opposed to one another, such as the sacred and the profane; and the “profanation” of what is held sacred outside the carnival.28 While OUK assumed the Neohellene as its familiar frame of reference, the series was reticent to carnivalize the iconic moments and figures of Greek history and culture venerated by this stereotype. The pilot of OUK begins in the underworld in the third century BCE. The Cynic philosopher Menippus has just died and must pay an Obol to Charon, the ferryman of Hades, to cross the river Styx into the underworld. However, Menippus is penniless and offhand with Charon, whose skeletal demeanor begins to writhe with frustration as he realizes that Menippus will not pay up, nor be gracious about this matter. As the squabble over Menippus’s passing escalates, and he proclaims “you shall not receive from one who does not have,” Hermes, the Olympian messenger god, god of wealth, and the guide to the underworld, appears on the scene and joins the altercation. At that juncture, the spectators have been introduced to the three main characters of OUK—Menippus, Charon, and Hermes (figure 10.1)—whose fates will be bound together in a bureaucratic deadlock between debtor and underworld functionaries across time, space, and belief systems (since much of the action of the series is set in contemporary Greece, in the world of the living and in Christian heaven). The fourteen episodes of the series follow the misadventures of the triad to earn Menippus a Euro in various crisis-stricken realms, so that Charon and Hermes can kill him off, settle the accounts of the Olympian administration, and retire to Miami with the rest of the gods, who have handed over of the management of the universe to the Christian god and saints. From this vignette of the premise of OUK, it will have become clear that the series used the theme of debt as its organizing principle, as its “controlling idea,”29 in order to speak about the contemporary moment in Greece. Menippus’s perpetual failure to find or keep a job that would earn him a single Euro was a comment on the growing difficulty to secure employment and a livable wage in 2010. Cast in the role of the Three Wise Men in episode 6, the European “Troika” pay a visit to an adolescent Jesus Christ on Christmas Day in order to requisition the gifts they bore him as an infant (and on his birthday, no less!), an obvious allusion to the accountability of Greece’s international creditors for the stringency of austerity in that country. The feeling that Greece has lost its national sovereignty to its European creditors was further conveyed by the repeated intrusions of German Chancellor Angela Merkel in various scenes, and was most evocatively animated in the penultimate episode of OUK, in which world leaders play a casual game of “Worldopoly, the Greek edition” (also the title of the episode, and a play on the name of the property market-driven board game Monopoly).



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Figure 10.1.  (From left to right) Hermes, Menippus, and Charon. Courtesy of Yiannis Tsitonis.

What is less obvious, however, is that there is a subtext to OUK that locates the origins of the social subject of its satire in the Greek postdictatorial period that began in 1974, with the series focusing on the 1980s in particular. The series signposts the periodization of its thematic focus in a number of ways. In an episode titled “Truths and Blood,” a play on “truths and lies,” Menippus and his sidekicks establish a political party that goes by the name of MALAKAS, an acronym that stands for “Great Indecisive Popular Independent and Unaligned Coalition” and is a play on the widely used and multipurpose Greek slang word “malakas” (meaning “wanker,” “asshole,”

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Figure 10.2.  The party logo for “MALAKAS.” Courtesy of Yiannis Tsitonis.

“idiot,” or “dude,” and in some contexts, gullible or “gawkish, perhaps vaguely infantile” (figure 10.2).30 In an election campaign reel for MALAKAS, which claims to be a nondiscriminatory party, there appears a photo of Greece’s former dictator, Colonel George Papadopoulos, in order to exclude “former and current dictators” from that same party. This is the single direct reference to Greece’s dictatorial past across the series, and is perhaps an allusion to the fact that the political and social consensus of the postdictatorial period in Greece was built on the rejection (and oblivion) of that past.31 More importantly, the photo of Papadopoulos works in such a way so as to foreground the postdictatorial period, a foregrounding that is reinforced by the fact that OUK’s references to Greek politics converge almost exclusively on the two major parties that dominated the country’s political landscape between 1974 and 2011 (when the final episode of OUK was produced), namely, the conservative party New Democracy (ND) and the center-left Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK).



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More to the point, however, is the representation of the 1980s as a decade that transformed the values and consumption patterns of Greek society. This is most apparent in episode 10, titled “Of the Revolution,” which opens with a history television program that ironically presents Greece’s accession to the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1981 as a revolution. In this episode, a balding, wheezing TV historian enumerates a number of paradigmatic shifts catalyzed by the 1980s, including the importation of “German limousines” (BMWs) to Greece; the immigration of Bulgarian women (and their sexual objectification in their host country); the emergence of clientelistic relationships between politicians, small business owners, and trade unions32 as well as nepotism within the political parties PASOK and ND. Compacted in this framing of the 1980s, consumerism, luxury, hedonism, clientelism, and nepotism, all coalesce to engender the version of Greek society that OUK stakes out to satirize. OUK’s representation of Greek society was heavily informed by the stereotype of the Neohellene, and this frame of reference was not accidental. More specifically, like early animated sitcoms aired in the United States in the 1950s, OUK drew upon existing cultural resources to progress its own definition and agenda,33 which was first and foremost to connect Greek audiences to the genre of adult animation. For this reason, the series capitalized on the television and popular culture literacy of Greek spectators in order to reassemble “a particular version of the Greek self”34 as the staple of its own form of situation comedy: The Neohellene is generally regarded as a discrete breed of modern Greek, whose disposition has been conditioned by the relative stability and burgeoning prosperity of the postdicatorial period, especially the 1980s. By and large, he (the Neohellene is typically gendered male) is typecast as complacent and oblivious to political and social issues; as self-centered and partial to comfort, luxury, and imported (but domesticated) lifestyles; and as riddled with double standards to the point of farcicality.35

The 1980s represent a landmark decade in recent Greek history, not solely due to Greece’s accession to the EEC, but principally because of the rise to power of its first socialist governments under Andreas Papandreou and PASOK. With its inaugural slogan of “Change,” its populism, and its rehabilitation of the political left (during what was still the Cold War), the era of PASOK is remembered as a golden age of democratization and prosperity in Greece. Briefly, this decade saw the upward mobility of the Greek working and lower middle classes, the privatization of the Greek media industry, and the advent of “lifestyle,” understood in that context in terms of “conspicuous consumption, sexual liberalization and increased participation in the growing

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economies of pleasure.”36 However, PASOK is also remembered as having overindulged its clients (with the provision of employment in the public sector, for instance), for nepotistic exchanges and political scandals. The examples of the ways in which OUK borrowed tropes from the 1980s and reconstructed the Neohellene as a staple site in which to ground its genre abound and must necessarily be limited to a few indicative illustrations. Notable are the several cameo appearances in OUK of an animated Blake Carrington, the fictional oil tycoon from the American soap opera Dynasty (1981–1989), which began to air on Greek television in 1981. As Vicky Karaiskou observes, in the 1980s such soap operas “portrayed family structures in what was then for Greeks a radically different framework of behavior, culture and aesthetics,”37 with its melodrama, flaunting of wealth and glamorous costumes. In 2010, however, spectators in their early twenties most likely had no clue as to who Blake Carrington was. In incorporating this character from a memorable American series, OUK both alluded to the advent and consumption of foreign mass culture in the 1980s and provided a metacommentary on genre and media in general, which are believed to attract older viewer demographics.38 Equally important was OUK’s use of stock characters. For instance, the recurring appearance of an unhelpful, middle-aged tax office employee (presumably appointed in the 1980s), with a Post-it® note on her coffee mug that reads “I must not forget to do nothing today,” is a stock character that resurfaces across diverse genres in Greek popular culture. Similar examples can be found in the lyrical repertoire of the comedy hip-hop group The Half-Mackerels, which became hugely popular in the 1990s (a pertinent specimen is the 1998 song “Public-Sector Forever”), as well as in the equally (if not more) popular satirical TV series Oh Dear! [It’s] the Bastards! (1997–2000).39 In an interview in December 2017, graphic designer Yiannis Tsitsonis signaled to the author of this chapter that the character in question was in fact a “chair-centaur,” an evocative colloquialism for stereotypically obstructive bureaucrats, inseparable from their desk chairs and ensconced in their positions in the public sector. With the upper body of a woman and the lower body of a rolling office chair (a humorous detail easily missed when viewing the busy frames of OUK; figure 10.3), the character of the tax-office employee made manifest the potential of animation to create a visual pun out of a popular portmanteau word,40 a visual effect that live action could not have accomplished as easily. Note should also be made of the multivalence of the party name of MALAKAS, which ends up winning a general election in episode 9 with a two-part campaign that advocates the legalization of marijuana and the introduction of universal free Wi-Fi in Greece (a feat also owed to the fact that a mysterious



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Figure 10.3.  The chair centaur. Courtesy of Yiannis Tsitonis.

virus is causing politicians to die splattery deaths when they speak untruths). A hugely popular word whose ambiguities connote both insult (idiot, or asshole) and solidarity (dude),41 in the context of this episode “malakas” captures many of the internal contradictions of the stereotype of the Neohellene, as well as his lack of political perspicuity, since the victory of MALAKAS implies that the voters are themselves “idiots” (an allusion to the perceived failings of the two dominant parties of the postdictatorial period, which were nonetheless reelected by voters). With the blazoning of MALAKAS across the episode, however, OUK additionally capitalized on the knowledge of audiences that this word is not entirely acceptable on Greek primetime TV,42 thus inviting its spectators to take delight in the perks of adult animation. Among OUK’s purported objectives was to demythologize Greek history and culture. It will have hopefully become clear that whereas OUK did satirize the 1980s, a satire of that decade is today more or less intrinsic to the use of the stereotype of the Neohellene. In order to engage more closely with the extent to which the series interrogated or subverted national myths associated

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with its staple of Greekness, it is important to consider how OUK broached other historical landmarks and cultural icons. The Neohellene tends to be faulted for his “lack of ‘historical sensitivity’ to any period of history except antiquity or select, highly mythologized events of the contemporary past, such as the 1821 War of Independence and the resistance movement of World War II.”43 Yet like the social stereotype it staked out to satirize, OUK either glossed over or entirely evaded grappling with the more contested periods and moments of Greek history, while leaving largely intact the heroes and mythologized events of Greece’s past. I have already indicated that the series made a single direct reference to the dictatorship of 1967 to 1974, with the appearance of a photograph of Greece’s former dictator in episode 9. In eschewing to engage with life under that regime, to animate Papadopoulos, or even to satirize directly those many apologists of the dictatorship in postdictatorial Greece (a low-hanging fruit for satire), OUK left largely untapped “a pivotal point in recent Greek history” and “the basis of the construction of contemporary political identities.”44 Furthermore, in alluding to this dictatorship on two additional occasions by virtue of a landmark event of resistance to the regime—the student occupation of the Athens Polytechnic in November 1973 (in episodes 2 and 13)—the series reproduced a rather normative way of remembering the dictatorial period: one that converges on the diametrical opposition between power and resistance. In fact, this dominant memory of the dictatorship is largely indebted to PASOK, which identified as a movement that developed out of the antidictatorial resistance in the 1980s.45 Other conspicuous lacunae in the series included Greece’s Ottoman past, the Cyprus question in the twentieth century (and the overall tension between Greece and Turkey), the Greek Civil War of the 1940s (black humor on this period is perhaps still felt to be premature), as well as the Macedonia naming dispute that has consumed Greek national discourse since the 1990s. With cameo appearances by the Communist Resistance fighter Aris Velouchiotis (in episode 7), the Greek Independence hero Theodoros Kolokotronis (episode 10), and Sophocles (episode 12), the series signposted those figures and periods purportedly admired by the Neohellene. These figures were only slightly carnivalized, however, mainly through the process of mésalliance. For instance, Aris Velouchiotis appears in Christian heaven to protest the misrepresentation of that realm as spread with “green pastures” (as per the Old Testament book of Psalms) when, in actuality, heaven is in drought. Kolokotronis fights righteously alongside taverna waiters, when the shopowning free-riders refuse them employment contracts, while Sophocles—a tragedian of Classical Athens—is indebted to Menippus—a Cynic and satirist of the Hellenistic period—for his revolutionary play Antigone. These figures



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were not subjected to profanation, with the use of irreverent language, bodily excess, or splatter in the way that Menippus was, for instance. Rather, with its playful nonlinear movements in space and time, OUK gave presence to and animated these figures as symbolic icons in Greek collective consciousness, in order to invite the renewal of community bonds around a new creative medium for TV viewers. In the spring of 2011, Mega channel set up a minisite (whose hyperlink is no longer active today) calling for a minimum of forty thousand signatures to greenlight the creation and airing of one final episode of OUK.46 With this initiative, the network was most likely looking for an indication of viewership figures to assess whether such a comeback was worth its while, while simultaneously rallying a sense of commitment among spectators to tune in for a prospective series finale do-over. With the petition signed by approximately fifty-eight thousand spectators, Mega approved the episode; but the directors had to seek sponsorship for its actualization, as evidenced by the product placements for the mobile network operator Cosmote in the finale. In this episode, titled “The apple of discord,” Menippus finds a job in an apple-packaging factory, a thinly disguised allusion to a Nazi concentration camp. During his interview with an animated Adolf Hitler, Hitler unabashedly proclaims the death of workers’ rights and a master plan to reduce Greece to a capitalist reserve of cheap labor. Menippus responds as follows: “Cheap labor? We gave to the planet democracy, science, philosophy and theater. [. . .] They called us the cradle of civilization. And now we are only worth cheap labor?” To this, Charon solemnly adds: “Menippus, when we were passing them the torch of civilization, we should have probably asked for an invoice.” If the reader has found the latter quote to be remotely amusing, she would most likely not feel the same way in viewing the episode (particularly due to the stirring orchestral music of E. S. Posthumus). When OUK faced difficult times, it resorted in all seriousness to one of the mainstays of modern Greek culture and abandoned its minor carnivalization of national heroes. In its animated palimpsest of Greece’s past and present mediated by the social stereotype of the Neohellene, OUK did not produce a particularly scathing satire of Greek society, nor did it transgress on the ivory towers or venture into the more contested orbits of Greek history and culture. In (re)animating this well-known stereotype, the project of Tsitsonis and Pheidas sought to introduce the genre of adult animation into Greek primetime by invoking the familiar tropes of the Neohellene so as to reconcile TV viewers with their medium. In doing so, they incrementally unfolded for their audiences the generic potential of animation to appeal to diverse demographics, to produce imaginative visuals of social clichés, and to challenge the conventions of propriety in

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Greek television in minor, yet telling, ways. Through this unfolding, and as viewers came to evaluate the series on its own terms (rather than as the “Greek South Park”), some of the most vehement critics of OUK began to concede that it would be a shame for the series to be discontinued: “I sat down to watch the first episode again, and I got to the last available one. [. . .] I’ve reconsidered. It might not be that original [but] it’s something that needs to exist on television. It can be improved quite a lot but [. . .] it’ll be a malakia [meaning “it will suck”] if it is cut.”47 When viewed within the frame of the flourishing of creative activity in Greece since 2009, the approach of OUK to Greek history and culture was primarily geared toward a preservation of what might be lost within the conditions of crisis. As figures associated with Greek independence and with resistance in theaters of modern war and ancient tragedy, the animations of Velouchiotis, Kolokotronis, and Sophocles participated in a reaffirmation of the tenacity of Greekness in precarious times. In sidestepping controversial or difficult periods in Greece’s past, OUK held back from advancing a proposal for alternative ways of being, such that the economy of its historical references was constituted of conventional landmarks rather than unusual or potentially transformative ones. The representations of the politics and culture of postdictatorial Greece, as well as those of the Neohellene, worked in such a way so as to reproduce more or less normative critiques of the recent past and present, and, of course, to entertain. As evidenced by the greenlighting of the series finale do-over, however, the novelty of the genre of the series and the strategies of its producers also provided the conditions for the creation of new networks of community. OUK made television history as the first Greek adult animated series to be broadcast on primetime and opened up a field on which it became possible for others to follow. NOTES 1.  “Πρεμιέρα στο Mega για το σίριαλ ‘Ούκ αν λάβοις,’” Media, Newsbeast, last modified November 1, 2010, https://www.newsbeast.gr/media/arthro/67672/ premiera-sto-mega-gia-to-sirial-ouk-an-lavois. 2.  Daniel Knight has observed that the phrase “Greek crisis” is a problematic one, in the sense that it has become a global banner under which moralizing discourses of blame deflect attention from other controversial issues in Greece and in Europe. In this essay, I use the term for reasons of brevity and in order to indicate precisely these discourses, as well as the scope and depth of the effects of austerity and global financial market imbalances in Greece. Daniel M. Knight, “The Greek Economic Crisis as a Trope,” Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 65 (2013): 147–59, https://doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2013.650112.



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3.  For a viewer’s response to the negative reactions to OUK, see “Σχετικά με το ‘Ούκ αν λάβεις παρά του μη έχοντος,’” Tromaktiko, last modified November 6, 2010, http://tro-ma-ktiko.blogspot.ch/2010/11/blog-post_7567.html. 4.  Stormrain, reply to “Ελληνικό South Park: Ούκ αν λάβοις παρά του μη έχοντος,” Insomnia, November 7, 2010, http://www.insomnia.gr/topic/374708 -ελληνικό-south-park-ούκ-αν-λάβοις-παρά-του-μη-έχοντος/page-9. 5.  Toxovolos_UK, reply to “Ελληνικό South Park: Ούκ αν λάβοις παρά του μη έχοντος,” Insomnia, November 7, 2010, http://www.insomnia.gr/topic/374708 -ελληνικό-south-park-ούκ-αν-λάβοις-παρά-του-μη-έχοντος/page-9. 6.  Respectively: PhlegethoN, reply to “Ελληνικό South Park: Ούκ αν λάβοις παρά του μη έχοντος,” Insomnia, November 6, 2010, http://www.insomnia.gr/ topic/374708-ελληνικό-south-park-ούκ-αν-λάβοις-παρά-του-μη-έχοντος/page-8. Tsi fotis, reply to “Ελληνικό South Park: Ούκ αν λάβοις παρά του μη έχοντος,” Insomnia, November 13, 2010, http://www.insomnia.gr/topic/374708-ελληνικό-south-park -ούκ-αν-λάβοις-παρά-του-μη-έχοντος/page-12. 7.  “Ούκ αν λάβοις παρά του μη έχοντος—Επεισόδιο 1,” the series pilot of Ούκ αν λάβοις παρά του μη έχοντος, produced by Γιάννης Τσιτσώνης and Γιώργος Φειδάς (Athens: Liquid Certainty, 2011). 8.  Jessica Kourniakti, “From Fascist Overload to Unbearable Lightness: Recollections of the Military Junta as Kitsch in Postdictatorial Greece,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 35, no. 2 (October 2017): 344, https://doi.org/10.1353/mgs.2017.0023. 9.  Angelos Rouvas, “Greek Animation 1945–2015: 70 Years of Creativity,” in 70 Χρόνια Δημιουργίας Ελληνικών Κινουμένων Σχεδίων, or 70 Years of Greek Animation, eds. Panagiotis Kyriakoulakos, Aristarchos Papadaniel and Angelos Rouvas (Athens: ASIFA Hellas Hellenic Animation Association, 2016), 99. 10.  Dimitris Tziovas, “Introduction,” in Greece in Crisis: The Cultural Politics of Austerity, ed. Dimitris Tziovas (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2017), Google Books e-book, paragraph 7. 11.  Rouvas, “Greek Animation 1945–2015,” 99. 12.  Peter Schavemaker, “A History of Persistence,” Animation Magazine 30, no. 2 (February 2016): 32–34, ISSN: 1041-617X. 13.  Schavemaker, “A History of Persistence,” 33. 14.  Michela Morselli, “Greece,” in Animation: A World History, Volume II: The Birth of a Style—The Three Markets, ed. Giannalberto Bendazzi (New York: Routledge, 2017), 214–15. 15.  Schavemaker, “A History of Persistence,” 32. 16.  LIFO, “Τα κινούμενα σχέδια δεν είναι για τα παιδιά (είναι για όλους),” Μικροπράγματα, LIFO, last modified September 18, 2012, http://www.lifo.gr/team/ bitsandpieces/32644 . 17.  Rouvas, “Greek Animation 1945–2015,” 29. 18.  Nichola Dobson, The A to Z of Animation and Cartoons (Plymouth: Scarecrow Press, 2009), xiiv. 19. Paul Wells, Understanding Animation (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 11. 20. Wells, Understanding Animation, 20.

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21.  Schavemaker, “A History of Persistence,” 32. 22.  Andrew B. Chrystall and Janet G. Sayers, “King Konsumer: Menippean Satire, Spectatorship, Sacrifice and Consumption,” Continuum 31, no. 2 (2017): 268, https:// doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2016.1257690. 23.  We Greeks/Εμείς οι Έλληνες, a short animated film directed by Jordan Ananiadis (Athens: Greek Film Centre, 1996). 24.  Rouvas, “Greek Animation 1945–2015,” 99. 25.  Nikos Voulalas, “Up & Down,” TV, Athinorama, last modified January 15, 2009, http://www.athinorama.gr/tv/article/up_kai_down_-105720.html. 26.  Paul Wells, “‘Smarter Than the Average Art Form:’ Animation in the Television Era,” in Prime Time Animation: Television Animation and American Culture, eds. Carol A. Stabile and Mark Harrison (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2003), 26. 27. Michael Tueth, Laughter in the Living Room: Television Comedy and the American Home Audience (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2005), 198. 28.  Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 417; 192. 29.  Paul Wells, Animation: Genre and Authorship (London and New York: Wallflower, 2002), 16. 30.  See James Faubion, Modern Greek Lessons: A Primer in Historical Constructivism (Princeton NJ and Chichester, West Sussex: Princeton University Press, 1993), 223. The acronym in Greek is: Μεγάλος Αναποφάσιστος Λαϊκός Ανεξάρτητος και Ανένταχτος Συνασπισμός (ΜΑΛΑΚΑΣ) [Great Undecided Popular Independent and Unincorporated Union]. 31.  On the construction of this consensus, see Peter Siani-Davies and Stefanos Katsikas, “National Reconciliation After Civil War: The Case of Greece,” Journal of Peace Research 46, no. 4 (2009): 565–72, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343309334611. On the oblivion of the dictatorship in the postdictatorial period, see Neni Panourgiá, Dangerous Citizens: The Greek Left and the Terror of the State (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 150–53. 32.  The program satirically called them “μαγαζοτζαμπάσιδες” (literally shopowning free-riders), and “Γσεενίτσαροι” (a combination of the acronym ΓΣΕΕ, which refers to the foremost Greek trade union, General Confederation of Workers, and Janissaries, the Ottoman Sultan’s bodyguards originally recruited among (Greek) Christian minors). 33.  Wells, “‘Smarter Than the Average Art Form,’” 25. 34.  Georgia Aitaki, “Laughing With/At the National Self: Greek Television Satire and the Politics of Self-Disparagement,” Social Semiotics 27 (November 2017): 2, https://doi.org/ 10.1080/10350330.2017.1408893. 35.  Kourniakti, “From Fascist Overload to Unbearable Lightness,” 344. 36. Panagiotis Zestanakis, “Revisiting the Greek 1980s Through the Prism of Crisis,” in Consumption and Gender in Southern Europe since the Long 1960s, eds. Kostis Kornetis, Eirini Kotsovili and Nikolaos Papadogiannis (London, Oxford and New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 259. 37.  Vicky Karaiskou, Uses and Abuses of Culture: Greece 1974–2010 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 61.



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38.  Carol A. Stabile and Mark Harrison, “Introduction: Prime Time Animation— An Overview,” in Prime Time Animation: Television and American Culture, eds. Carol A. Stabile and Mark Harrison (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2003), 9. 39.  In Greek, respectively: Tα Ημισκούμπρια, “Δημόσιο Forevah” and Α.Μ.Α.Ν. Τα Καθάρματα! 40.  The chair-centaur has been associated in the past with appointees of the conservative party ND in the period 1989–1990. David H. Close, Greece since 1945: Politics, Economy and Society (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 240. A brief Google search indicates that the chair-centaur is today widely used in Greek public discourse and blogs to refer to civil servants, power-hungry politicians, and football referees. 41. Nikos Vergis and Marina Terkourafi, “The M-Word: A Greek Collocation Between Solidarity and Insult,” in Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Im/Politeness, ed. Marina Terkourafi (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2015), 42. 42.  Stamates Beis, “Μαλάκας,” in Η Ελλάδα στη Δεκαετία του ΄80: Κοινωνικό, Πολιτικό και Πολιτισμικό Λεξικό, eds. Vasiles Vamvakas and Panayes Panayiotopoulos (Athens: Epikentro, 2014), 312. 43. Penelope Papailias, Genres of Recollection: Archival Poetics and Modern Greece (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan: 2005), 27. 44.  Dimitris Asimakoulas, “Translating ‘Self’ and ‘Others’: Waves of Protest under the Greek Junta,” The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture 2, no. 1 (June 2009): 25, https://doi.org/10.1080/17541320902909532. 45. Hagen Fleischer, “Authoritarian Rule in Greece (1936–1974) and its Heritage,” in Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes in Europe: Legacies and Lessons from the Twentieth Century, ed. Jerzy W. Borejsza and Klaus Ziemer (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006), 254. 46.  “Σώστε το ‘Ουκ’!” Zappit, last modified May 9, 2011, http://www.zappit.gr/ seires/soste-to-ouk/15572. 47.  Marantonis, reply to “Ελληνικό South Park: Ούκ αν λάβοις παρά του μη έχοντος,” Insomnia, December 5, 2010, http://www.insomnia.gr/topic/374708 -ελληνικό-south-park-ούκ-αν-λάβοις-παρά-του-μη-έχοντος/page-915.

WORKS CITED Aitaki, Georgia. “Laughing With/At the National Self: Greek Television Satire and the Politics of Self-Disparagement.” Social Semiotics 27 (2017): 1–15. doi:10.108 0/10350330.2017.1408893. Ananiadis, Jordan. We Greeks/Εμείς οι Έλληνες. YouTube video of short animated film, 7:49. Directed by Ιορδάνης Ανανιάδης [Jordan Ananiadis]. Athens: Greek Film Centre, 1996. Posted by “Jordan Ananiadis,” November 16, 2010. https:// youtu.be/qanBWtkppEs. Asimakoulas, Dimitris. “Translating ‘Self’ and ‘Others’: Waves of Protest under the Greek Junta.” The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture 2, no. 1 (June 2009): 25–47. doi:10.1080/17541320902909532.

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Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and his World. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984. Beis, Stamates. “Μαλάκας” [Malakas]. In Η Ελλάδα στη Δεκαετία του ΄80: Κοινωνικό, Πολιτικό και Πολιτισμικό Λεξικό [Greece in the 1980s: A Social, Political and Cultural Dictionary], edited by Vasiles Vamvakas and Panayes Panayiotopoulos, 310–312. Athens: Epikentro, 2014. Chrystall, Andrew B., and Sayers, Janet G. “King Konsumer: Menippean Satire, Spectatorship, Sacrifice and Consumption.” Continuum 31, no. 2 (2017): 266–76. doi:10.1080/10304312.2016.1257690. Close, David H. Greece since 1945: Politics, Economy and Society. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. Dobson, Nichola. The A to Z of Animation and Cartoons. Plymouth: Scarecrow Press, 2009. Faubion, James. Modern Greek Lessons: A Primer in Historical Constructivism. Princeton, NJ and Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1993. Fleischer, Hagen. “Authoritarian Rule in Greece (1936–1974) and Its Heritage.” In Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes in Europe: Legacies and Lessons from the Twentieth Century, edited by Jerzy W. Borejsza and Klaus Ziemer, 237–75. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006. Karaiskou, Vicky. Uses and Abuses of Culture: Greece 1974–2010. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015. Knight, Daniel M. “The Greek Economic Crisis as a Trope.” Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 65 (2013): 147–59. doi:10.3167/fcl.2013.650112. Kourniakti, Jessica. “From Fascist Overload to Unbearable Lightness: Recollections of the Military Junta as Kitsch in Postdictatorial Greece.” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 35, no. 2 (2017): 339–68. doi:10.1353/mgs.2017.0023 LIFO. “Τα Κινούμενα Σχέδια δεν είναι για τα Παιδιά (είναι για Όλους)” [Animations are Not for Children (they are for Everybody)]. Μικροπράγματα [Bits and Pieces]. Last modified September 18, 2012. http://www.lifo.gr/team/bitsandpieces/32644. Maragos, Thodoros]. Σσσστ [Shhhh]. YouTube video of short animated film. Directed by Θόδωρος Μαραγκός [Thodoros Maragos]. Athens: produced by the director, 1971. Posted by “Theodoros Maragos,” August 9, 2009. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=CcM_T9X1Clg&t=156s. Morselli, Michela. “Greece.” In Animation: A World History, Volume II: The Birth of a Style—The Three Markets, edited by Giannalberto Bendazzi, 214–15. New York: Routledge, 2017. Newsbeast. “Πρεμιέρα στο Mega για το Σίριαλ ‘Ούκ αν Λάβοις’” [Premiere on Mega of the Series ‘You Shall Not Receive’]. Media. Last modified November 1, 2010.https://www.newsbeast.gr/media/arthro/67672/premiera-sto-mega-gia-to -sirial-ouk-an-lavois. Omikron Project. “Alex”: A Story About Greece’s International Image Crisis. YouTube video of short animated film, 2:14. Directed by Omikron Project. Athens: Omikron Project, 2012. Posted by “omikronproject,” November 9, 2012. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehsxIjeRaME. Panourgiá, Neni. Dangerous Citizens: The Greek Left and the Terror of the State. New York: Fordham University Press, 2009.



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Papailias, Penelope. Genres of Recollection: Archival Poetics and Modern Greece. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Rouvas, Angelos. “Greek Animation 1945–2015: 70 Years of Creativity.” In 70 Χρόνια Δημιουργίας Ελληνικών Κινουμένων Σχεδίων, or 70 Years of Greek Animation, edited by Panagiotis Kyriakoulakos, Aristarchos Papadaniel, and Angelos Rouvas, 29–135. Athens: ASIFA Hellas Hellenic Animation Association, 2016. Schavemaker, Peter. “A History of Persistence.” Animation Magazine 30, no. 2 (2016): 32–34. Siani-Davies, Peter, and Katsikas, Stefanos. “National Reconciliation After Civil War: The Case of Greece.” Journal of Peace Research 46, no. 4 (2009): 565–72. doi:10.1177/0022343309334611. Stabile, Carol A., and Harrison, Mark. “Introduction: Prime Time Animation—An Overview.” In Prime Time Animation: Television and American Culture, edited by Carol A. Stabile and Mark Harrison, 1–11. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2003. Tromaktiko. “Σχετικά με το ‘Ούκ αν Λάβεις Παρά του Μη Έχοντος’” [Regarding ‘You Shall Not Receive From One Who Does Not Have’]. Web. Last modified November 6, 2010. http://tro-ma-ktiko.blogspot.ch/2010/11/blog-post_7567.html. Tsitsonis, Yiannis, and Giorgos Pheidas, producers. Ούκ αν λάβοις παρά του μη έχοντος [You shall not receive from one who does not have]. Episodes: 1 (pilot), 7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14 (finale). Athens: Liquid Certainty, 2011. Tueth, Michael. Laughter in the Living Room: Television Comedy and the American Home Audience. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2005. Tziovas, Dimitris. “Introduction.” In Greece in Crisis: The Cultural Politics of Austerity, edited by Dimitris Tziovas. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2017. Google Books e-book. Vergis, Nikos, and Terkourafi, Marina. “The M-Word: A Greek Collocation Between Solidarity and Insult.” In Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Im/Politeness, edited by Marina Terkourafi, 41–70. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2015. Voulalas, Nikos. “Up & Down.” TV, Athinorama. Last modified January 15, 2009. http://www.athinorama.gr/tv/article/up_kai_down_-105720.html. Wells, Paul. Animation: Genre and Authorship. London and New York: Wallflower, 2002. ——— . “‘Smarter Than the Average Art Form’: Animation in the Television Era.” In Prime Time Animation: Television Animation and American Culture, edited by Carol A. Stabile and Mark Harrison, 15–32. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2003. ——— . Understanding Animation. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. Zappit. “Σώστε το ‘Ουκ’!” [Save ‘Ouk’!]. Web. Last modified May 9, 2011.http:// www.zappit.gr/seires/soste-to-ouk/15572. Zestanakis, Panagiotis. “Revisiting the Greek 1980s Through the Prism of Crisis.” In Consumption and Gender in Southern Europe since the Long 1960s, edited by Kostis Kornetis, Eirini Kotsovili and Nikolaos Papadogiannis, 357–383. London, Oxford and New York: Bloomsbury, 2016.

Chapter Eleven

Childhood Memories, Family Life, Nostalgia, and Historical Trauma in Contemporary Greek Cinema Maria Chalkou

Memory narratives of childhood and adolescence, set in a specific historical context, can be traced in Greek cinema as early as in the 1950s and 1960s.1 However, the rise of the child or adolescent as a major narrative agent in Greek cinema, typically of memory stories taking place in a historical and cultural past, is a phenomenon of the 1990s and 2000s. Athena Kartalou interestingly suggests that this newfound narrative centrality of the child is a defining characteristic of the postmodern Contemporary Greek Cinema that distinguishes it from the modernist, auteurist, politicized, and largely left-wing New Greek Cinema, dominant in the 1970s and 1980s, in which children were either absent or reduced to symbols.2 While this new type of child-centered film redefines Greek cinema by making a definite rupture with the national film canon of the time, simultaneously it establishes strong links with contemporary European cinema since, as Rosalind Galt notes, “throughout the 1980s and 1990s, narratives of [. . .] childhood memory, became a popular subgenre in European cinemas.”3 This includes a series of wide-ranging, critically acclaimed, and popularly successful nostalgic films, from both Western and Eastern Europe, such as Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman, 1982), My Life as a Dog (Lasse Hallström, 1985), When Father Was Away on Business (Emir Kusturica, 1985), Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988), Toto the Hero (JacoVan Dormael, 1991), Tito and Me (Goran Marković, 1992), Life is Beautiful (Roberto Benigni, 1997), etc., which continued its success in the 2000s with hits such as Malèna (Giuseppe Tornatore, 2000) and The Chorus (Christophe Barratier, 2004). This much celebrated trend of European cinema, which innovatively balanced art-house and mainstream aesthetics to revisit the European past afresh, along with the earlier but highly influential semi185

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autobiographical coming-of-age Fellini’s Amarcord (1973), set the model for a cluster of similarly themed Greek films of related aesthetics. Apart from Το δέντρο που πληγώναμε (The Tree We Hurt, Dimos Avdeliodis, 1986), which is highly idiosyncratic in its style and narrative, early attempts to adapt the European trend are Ο παράδεισος ανοίγει με αντικλείδι (Red Ants, Vasilis Boudouris, 1987), Ο ψύλλος (The Flea, Dimitris Spyrou, 1990), and Το πεθαμένο λικέρ (The Dead Liquer, Giorgos Karypidis, 1992). As turning points, however, can be seen Τέλος Εποχής (End of an Era, Antonis Kokkinos, 1994), which succeeded in restoring the popularity of Greek film after a long period of commercial decline, and Peppermint (Costas Kapakas, 1999), which introduced nostalgia as the major trope through which the past could be told.4 This was followed by a spate of coming-of-age films set in the past (Πίσω πόρτα/Backdoor, Yorgos Tsemberopoulos, 2000; Ακροβάτες του κήπου/The Cistern, Christos Dimas, 2002; Δύσκολοι Αποχαιρετισμοί: ο μπαμπάς μου/Hard Goodbyes: My Father, Penny Panayotopoulou, 2002; Ένα τραγούδι δεν φτάνει/A Song is Not Enough, Elissavet Chronopoulou, 2003; Η χορωδία του Χαρίτωνα/Chariton’s Choir, Grigoris Karantinakis, 2005; Uranya, Costas Kapakas, 2006; etc.), which culminated with Tassos Boulmetis’s ΠΟΛΙΤΙΚΗ κουζίνα (A Touch of Spice, 2003), a film of phenomenal popularity and commercial success, while recent Νοτιάς (Mythopathy, Tassos Boulmetis, 2015) can be seen as a late manifestation of the trend. These films vary in terms of ideology, production context, sociopolitical frames, degree of commercial success, and international visibility. It can be said, however, that they share certain common thematic, narrative, and aesthetic characteristics: similarly to their European counterparts, they typically focus on a boy or on a male adolescent coming of age to tell personal histories in a historically and/or culturally specific setting,5 challenging previously established Greek cinematic norms of representing history and the national past. The choice of the films to employ children and adolescents as narrative agents works on multiple levels. On the one hand, it implies that the story is told from marginalized perspectives since children are commonly perceived as vulnerable and powerless: they live at the margins of the adult society, they do not share responsibility for the established state of affairs, and are often victims of the choices and actions of adults. On the other hand, it indicates innocence, ideological purity, and political distance. As Galt argues, “through the self-involved world of childhood,” children and adolescents are employed by the films as a narrative tool to avoid the political.6 It is notable that in the 1960s and 1970s, in the turbulent and highly polarized Greek sociopolitical context, a similar trend of child-centered and nostalgic literary works, including novels by Alki Zei7 or George Sari,8 used a child’s or an adolescent’s perspective to politicize narratives; to evade censorship and voice left-wing ideas



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on painful and controversial historical pasts such as the Metaxas dictatorship or the Occupation. By contrast, in the post-1980s era, after the collapse of Communism and the disenchantment with politics in Greece, children are used by Greek filmmakers as a major vehicle to defy the dominant practice established by left-wing New Greek Cinema and depoliticize narratives. Perhaps they are also used to emphasize the irrationality and incomprehensibility of history or even the impossibility of reaching historical truth. Particularly telling is a scene in Uranya where a boy with his girlfriend, while lying on a roof and observing the night sky, discuss adult conflicts and family tensions. They believe that such problems had begun with the Greek Civil War, but when the girl asks why Greeks fought each other, the boy is unable to answer: he makes a gesture of ignorance and incomprehension and quickly turns the discussion to another direction. Moreover, the enhanced and magical way children view the world allows the films to often adopt humorous and playful narratives, which merge the real with the imaginary and the dream-like. Films like Peppermint, The Cistern, A Touch of Spice, Chariton’s Choir, Uranya, and Mythopathy employ aesthetics of magic realism, where surrealism, fantasy, and the paranormal can coexist with the everyday: red umbrellas soar to the sky, a car falls from the heavens, people can live more than two hundred years, a stuffed crow comes to life, a billiard ball moves by its own will, etc. It is clear, therefore, that the films, by using the point of view of children and adolescents, promise to cast onto the past an innocent, politically unprejudiced, fresh and playful as much as an erratic gaze “from below.” Another major feature of the films is that they posit subjective memory, eyewitness accounts, and micro-history as the key ways of accessing the past. Many films are “framed as flashbacks or narrated as memory by the same character as an adult looking back” at his or her own childhood or adolescence.9 The death of a friend (End of an Era), a reunion party (Peppermint), a return-trip to the homeland (Alexandria, Maria Iliou, 2001), a theatrical premiere (A Song is Not Enough), the announcement of the grandfather’s trip from Istanbul to Athens (A Touch of Spice), the selling of an old house (Πανδώρα /Pandora, Yiorgos Stamboulopoulos, 2006) motivate memory of an experienced, personalized past and of marginal histories of the everyday, such as family life, friendship, and romantic love. Emphasis, therefore, is placed not only on the past but on the notion of individual memory as a trope of recalling it and on first-hand knowledge that is further stressed by first person voice-over narration. Importantly, these narratives involve real autobiographical elements of the films’ directors10 with the inside perspective being highly valued and used by promotion strategies to give authenticity to the films. As Kerwin Lee Klein argues, memory humanizes history, makes it “more accessible” and appeals to us

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because it projects immediacy.11 The films, therefore, through memory and personal witness claim immediacy, originality, and access to omitted by official histories marginal aspects of the past. Subjectivity and memory, however, imply not only authenticity but also selective narratives that employ oblivion, breaks, and omissions, even distortions as films often fuse dream, magic, and fantasy with reality. In both The Cistern and Chariton’s Choir, for example, the end of the films indicate an unstable, unreliable narrator since it is revealed that the whole narrative did not refer to actual events but to a dream (Chariton’s Choir) or a fantasy (The Cistern) in which characters and depicted events were manipulated by the narrator’s imagination. Therefore, an inherent internal tension between authenticity, originality, invention, and fabrication can be traced in the core of the films. Employing individual memory and micro-history to address dark and painful historical topics was not unknown to politicized Greek cinema of the 1970s and 1980s. A good example of this are the three memory monologues in Ο θίασος (The Travelling Players, Theo Angelopoulos, 1975) that recount the Asia Minor Catastrophe (1922), The December Clashes (1944), and the experience of the prison island Makronisos (1947–1957). However, New Greek Cinema tended to construct master narratives of the national past12 that often spanned huge periods of time13 in which subjective memory and personal story appeared as one narrative instrument among others, while the main focus was fixed on political and collective history. By contrast, the new film trend deploys individual stories, subjective memory, and—as previously discussed—creative imagination as major vehicles of revisiting historical past with a dramatic shift of focus away from the political reality and collective fate to exclusively personal relations and preoccupations. Moreover, these films shift the emphasis away from periods of history with which New Greek Cinema was preoccupied, such as the Greek Civil War and the persecution of the defeated Left, to revisit either familiar (e.g., the Junta, as is commonly called the Dictatorship of the Colonels) or neglected chapters of previously repressed traumatic histories, such as those of ethnic persecution and geographical displacement (A Touch of Spice). However, most of the narratives almost obsessively return to the 1960s and early 1970s, to what is commonly termed as “long-1960s” that can embrace culture and politics from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. In this context, a particularly recurrent time frame is the military Junta (1967–1974)14 which, was previously depicted by New Greek Cinema in political terms with an emphasis on authoritarianism, repression, and persecution.15 The Junta—and more broadly the political and the historical—however, is now either evaded or reimagined. In some cases politics and history are entirely absent (e.g., The Flea) or appear indicatively as part of the setting



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and of the background action. In Hard Goodbyes, for example, the focus is exclusively on the personal turbulences of the protagonists while the historical frame is mentioned only momentarily when the portrait of the dictator Papadopoulos is seen on the wall of a classroom or by radio and TV commentary heard in the aural background of the film. However, there is not any evidence that historical and political reality impacts the lives of the characters. In other films, politics and history cause fleeting ruptures in the narrative by popping up abruptly as a dark and threatening force that crucially upsets narration and life. In The Cistern, for example, the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974 interrupts both the flow of the narrative and the normality of the characters’ lives. In the midst of a colorful, imaginative, and joyful film, real black-and-white newsreel material suddenly invades the screen depicting disturbing images of war, deep human pain, and violent mass expatriation, while the male characters are taken away from their families to participate in the war. More often films include scattered hints of political issues where politics might slip on the screen in humorous and trivial forms but again as a fleeting threat to a peaceful life. Thus, the notorious wedding of Princess Sofia in 1962—which caused mass demonstrations for its extravagant luxury in a country still suffering from poverty—in Peppermint is reduced to gossip between two sisters-in-law, Alkistis and Ariadni. However, Ariadni’s excitement with the glamorous details of the prospected event is grounded by Alkistis’s playful comment that if her left-wing husband were aware of her fascination with the royal family, she would get in trouble, reminding us in a lighthearted manner of the deep political schism of the Greek society of the time. Later, when the extended family is gathered around the table to celebrate Easter, Alkistis and Ariadni’s husbands, one right-wing and the other leftist, are involved in a strong political argument where bitter accusations on personal and family issues are exchanged, destroying the celebratory atmosphere and family unity. In all cases, however, the damage caused by history and politics is repairable: in The Cistern men return from Cyprus safe and sound, with the war having acted as a catalyst to bring them closer to their families, to restore and strengthen relationships. Similarly in Peppermint, the two brothers-in-law quickly forget their political differences and unite facing the common need to discipline their children. Nevertheless, history and politics are not only a backdrop to personal and family adventures or an occasional intrusion into the everyday, but they are also an organic part of the narratives since they decisively influence the characters’ lives and create major personal, family, or community problems. Life, for instance, is violently disrupted when a boy and his family are forced into exile (A Touch of Spice) or when a girl’s mother, who is involved in the resistance against the Junta, is imprisoned (A Song is Not Enough). In other

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films, narratives establish a deep connection between history, politics, and the family as family members are active politicians generating domestic tensions and young protagonists’ identity crisis (Backdoor and Πρώτη φορά νονός/ Little Greek Godfather, Olga Malea, 2007). Alternatively, in Chariton’s Choir and Uranya, history and politics disturb the idyllic routine of an entire community when the residents of a small village—a microcosmic representation of the Greek nation—are directly confronted with secret services and military officers of the Junta. Importantly, in both films the Junta is mostly an external force on the community that invades the peaceful world of the village to impose nationalist and military order since even the local authorities and institutions, such as the police or the school, fail to perform the Junta’s instructions. Moreover, often a major traumatic experience of personal loss is either essentially or superficially associated with a historical event or figure. In A Touch of Spice the expulsion of the Greeks from Istanbul in the 1960s brings about not only the loss of home and homeland but also the loss of the most intimate people, the little protagonist’s first romantic love and his grandfather, who are left behind after his family moves to Athens. This loss is further confirmed by the boy’s failure of returning to Istanbul by train and reconnecting with them, a fact interestingly marked by the arrival of the Junta and the appearance of the tanks on the streets. In The Cistern, the exact dates indicating the beginning and the end of the dictatorship (April 1967–July 1974) frame the entire story in which the death of a close friend is ambiguously caused by the young protagonist who must come to terms with dark feelings of guilt. In Hard Goodbyes it is again in the historical frame of the Junta that the father of the boy is killed in a car accident causing a deep feeling of loss and trauma, while in A Song is Not Enough, the girl of the story experiences rejection and neglect when her mother is imprisoned. However, not only major but also minor traumas are linked to history and politics. In The Cistern, for instance, the boy’s grandmother, a stubborn and royalist old woman and a powerful matriarchal figure who resembles a witch, curses her grandson because his mother refused to name him after Queen Frederica. This curse haunts the entire story and the consciousness of the boy, and it is what seems to motivate the death of his friend. Loss and personal trauma, therefore, somehow—seriously or playfully, directly or indirectly—are connected to political and historical trauma indicating that history is profoundly traumatic. Apart from a few exceptions (e.g., A Song is Not Enough) the tone of which is rather dramatic, most of the films tend to use comedy, satire, and even ridicule as major means to address the historical and the political shifting away from the grim historical accounts of New Greek Cinema. The target of the satire is usually the representatives and the symbols of the political establishment, more generally, and of the Junta, in particular, such as amoral



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Chameleon-like politicians, uniformed men, the dictator Papadopoulos’s portrait or the Junta’s emblem of the phoenix. Satire often focuses on the performative and ceremonial character of the politics related to political speeches, inaugural ceremonies, nationalistic celebrations, and other public rituals as an essential part of the domestic political life and of the dictatorship’s culture. For example, manifestations of the regime’s theatricality—and by extension artificiality, pompousness, and emptiness—are found in Backdoor’s depiction of the massive stadium celebrations of the “Military Virtue of the Hellenes” or in the obsession of the military officer and the nationalist school teacher in Chariton’s Choir with the performative details of staging a musical act and wining the local choir contest. At the same time, resistance against the political establishment and especially against the Junta is often a deliberate performative gesture that destroys the order and the conventions of the rigid symbolic system of the official rituals. Thus, in the context of a school celebration in The End of an Era, the students attempt—but fail—to stage the antiauthoritarian Rhinoceros by Ionesco as a gesture of protest against the regime. By contrast, in Chariton’s Choir the children of a school choir disobey orders and during the choir competition publicly perform a song with antiestablishment allusions damaging the expectations of their nationalist teacher and of the military officers. In Little Greek Godfather the boy has to deliver a political speech, but reminiscent of the boys in When Father Was Away on Business and Tito and Me, he changes the words giving a new meaning to the ritual.16 Moreover in Uranya, the local community is painstakingly prepared to celebrate a huge event supported by the Junta authorities, the visit of the Greek-American US vice president. During the arrival of the American official, however, the children secretly replace the proper gramophone record with another one of banned political songs by Mikis Theodorakis. As a result, the event is triumphantly accompanied by a resistant anthem heard from the loudspeakers and provoking chaos. The scene draws on and playfully reworks two older films, Amarcord by Fellini, in which the Fascists shoot down a gramophone playing the socialist anthem “The Internationale” and Ο Θανάσης στη χώρα της σφαλιάρας (Thanasis in the Land of Slap, Panos Glykofridis and Dinos Katsouridis, 1976) in which the Greek comedian Thanassis Vengos disrupts a similar Junta local ceremony accidentally turning on the loudspeakers of his van playing the very same Theodorakis song. With this reworking of two well-known older films, Uranya establishes a connection to and a sort of continuity with a specific cinematic cultural past, both European and Greek, turning it into cultural heritage. Resistance, performative or not, is possible and mostly successful as the films allow childcharacters to intervene and disrupt the political order in a way adults cannot, in contrast to the dominant trend in the narratives of New Greek Cinema, in

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which history victimizes individuals turning them into passive and suffering bodies. The above-mentioned Vengos incident is characteristic of this shift in representation: the disruption of the Junta ceremony is unintentional and victimizes the film character, while in Uranya the children perform an intentional action that remains unpunished. Another crucial aspect of the films is that, following the established European canon, they focus almost exclusively on boyhoods. With only a couple of exceptions17 in which the narrator is a woman, the vast majority of the films, even when they are made by female directors18 and regardless of their gender politics—progressive or reactionary—adopt a boy’s point of view, raising important questions around female agency regarding the memory of the national past. Apart from revealing the marginality of female perspectives in Contemporary Greek Cinema, boys in the films function as an effective narrative tool as they enjoy the privilege of moving freely between the family house and the public sphere. Thus, on the one hand, major parts of the narratives are confined to the domestic space, with the national past and history being experienced through the realm of domesticity and family life. The films often celebrate the pleasures of domesticity: the intimacy of the family members, the everyday rituals such as the family gatherings around the table, the joy of exploring secret domestic spaces, such as rooms or closets, or creating protective spaces and private hide outs under beds, tables, etc. In this context, some of the boys even claim domesticity, as, for example, the young protagonists of The Cistern and A Touch of Spice who demonstrate a particular inclination toward cooking and occupy the kitchen, a traditionally unconventional place for a boy. Simultaneously or alternatively, the films largely focus on dysfunctional families and family tensions identifying the crisis of masculinity as a major problem. Fathers are typically presented as domesticated or weak personalities, lacking authority, agency, control, and power, occasionally being inclined to infidelity (their sexuality is ridiculed) or domestic violence. They usually have difficult relations with their children or they are unable to understand and support them, or are simply absent. In the few cases the fathers are active and dreamers, they die (Backdoor, Hard Goodbyes) causing huge psychological trauma and becoming the object of their children’s desire who have a strong emotional attachment with them. At the same time, although the stories deprive girls and women of narrative agency, the domestic space appears mainly as the realm of women with the films tending in the background action to picture stereotypical but strong female figures and even to illustrate matriarchy (The Cistern). The centrality of the emotive and powerful image of the mother who functions as the symbol of familial stability and cohesion usually disputes and contrasts the collapsing father figure. Children



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often seek and receive support, inspiration, and guidance from marginal or unconventional individuals external to the family or belonging to the extended family. Typically, these are figures of wisdom or free spirit, such as the grandfather in A Touch of Spice, the homosexual uncle in Backdoor, or the marginalized half-mad wise man in The Flea, that embrace alternative forms of social and gender identity. Children are acute observers of the family microcosm and adult life with narratives both challenging and celebrating traditional family values, criticizing and, at the same time, nostalgically longing for them. Crucially, while the films deconstruct the traditional male identity, they simultaneously restore traumatized masculinity and redefine it through the young protagonists and especially through the male adult narrator or the central male character (Chariton’s Choir) recurrently played by Georges Corraface, who personifies a refined and tender masculinity. On the other hand, boys enjoy a degree of independence to occupy a public territory outside of the domestic setting and away from the controlling eye of the adults. Either as individuals or as a part of a group of friends, boys are in search of identity and self-determination, astutely observing community life, exploring and consuming culture, such as cinema and music, and facing the challenges of socialization and friendship (The Cistern, Chariton’s Choir, Uranya). As adolescents, they explore a variety of subcultures of the 1960s, such as the leftist youth movement of “Lambrakides,”19 hippie communities, drugs (Backdoor), rock music, and parties (End of an Era). Public space can embody and reflect history and politics (e.g., the Junta symbols or the tanks on the streets) and—as seen—provides opportunities for symbolic disruption of the established political canon, while the school—as a mechanism of discipline and of state ideological control—occasionally appears as a grotesque Felliniesque world deriving directly from Amarcord’s colorful and extravagant satire (Peppermint). It is interesting that the experience of the public space is often mediated by previous cinematic representations of European films of the same category, notably including not only satirical but also poetic, nostalgic, and dreamy allusions originating, for instance, in Amarcord, such as a fog scene (Peppermint) or a seaside scenery and a hanging laundry drying outdoors (Uranya). A major part of the outdoor exploration of life—and secretly in the family home—is sexual awakening (Peppermint, Backdoor, Uranya), with boys, while discovering their sexuality, being presented as desiring sexualized subjects. Young girls are usually linked to romantic love, while attractive grown-up women (stereotypically prostitutes or domestic servants) are objects of sexual desire with their bodies—through the male child’s or adolescent’s intra-diegetic gaze—becoming part of the film’s visual spectacle.20 Thus, the memory of the past appears as highly sensualized.

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As already mentioned, the child-centered films of the 1990s and 2000s obsessively return to the “long 1960s.” This return is perhaps the result of a cross-generation choice, since the 1960s and early 1970s are defining spaces and formative years of all active generations of both filmmakers and viewers. Most of the film directors of the trend lived their own childhood or adolescence during the “long 1960s” while at the time of the films’ release, this was a relatively recent past either personally experienced by a significant part of the audience or familiar to younger generations of viewers who came into contact with it indirectly—but for long and consistently—through the sustained popularity and the widespread consumption of its cultural products. The “long-1960s” in Greece was a Janus-faced period of mass emigration and political upheaval, but also of sociopolitical radicalization, increased economic development and modernization, as well as of explosive cultural creativity and openness. It was a period of hope—of expectations for democratization, sociopolitical change, and progress—the intellectual and artistic cultures of which crucially determined the Greek political and cultural life of the following decades, continuing even today to exert a powerful influence on the Greek public sphere. The films’ return to the “long 1960s” demonstrates a strong nostalgia for this era regardless of the dark historical periods such as the Dictatorship of the Colonels. The films celebrate a double potential, that is the potential of childhood or adolescence alongside the cultural and political potential of the 1960s. At the same time, they construct strong narrative tensions: on the one hand, there is a rather dark, threatening, or painful background, mostly associated with history or personal losses and, on the other, there is a joyful dimension linked to the pleasures of childhood and adolescence—including family life, friendship, games, rebellion, sexual awakening, or romantic love—as well as to the pleasures of the optimism and of the cultures of the 1960s. Films depict not only troubled but joyful boyhoods that coexist with history and politics, celebrating life and culture, and undermining the power of historical reality to affect them. The optimism of the 1960s and its expectations of progress are celebrated through a fixation to travelling, open horizon, and the sky. There is a constant emphasis on transcending the limits and widening the experience of both the world and life. In The Flea, for instance, a boy named Ilias is surrounded in his room by world maps while dreaming to expand his horizon and surpass the limits of his small mountain village by travelling away, a dream he shares with the boy in Uranya as well. Ilias publishes a little handwritten newspaper, representing for him an open window to the world, a means of communicating with what exists beyond the narrow life of his birthplace. In A Touch of Spice the boy’s uncle is also a sailor who, while travelling, sends his family postcards with pictures of places from all around the world that are precious



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to the boy, who carefully preserves them. The uncle connects the family with the wider world by also bringing back new products, tokens of technological development. Maps and travelling are also the passion of the protagonist of Mythopathy. A recurrent narrative motif of the films is their obsessive concern with science, airplanes, levitation, and space travel. In The Flea, the boy is immersed in a book on Thomas Edison while in Hard Goodbyes, the warm voice of the father is heard to read a passage from a Jules Verne novel. Similarly in The Flea, the boy under the night sky reads to his friend—a man notably nicknamed Galaxy—an extract from Icaromenippus, or the Sky-Man by Lucian describing space voyages in ancient times. In Peppermint the boy dreams of becoming a pilot, he crafts small airplanes, lifts a handmade hot-air balloon, and eventually becomes an aerospace engineer. Likewise in Uranya, the boy dreams of becoming a cosmonaut. When he breaks his leg the doctor gives him a gift of a magazine picturing the “profile of the Apollo 11 mission,” while his and his friends’ hideout is an airplane wreck in the woods left there from World War II. In A Touch of Spice, the protagonist as an adult is an astronomer, who as a child was taught geography and astronomy by his grandfather in his grocery shop in Istanbul with the help of spices, while his final fantasy when returning to his grandfather’s old grocery is a reconstruction of the solar system made by spices and other domestic ingredients. The fascination with cosmonauts and the moon landing in 1969—part of the collective memory of many generations, marked by politics, the Cold War, and the space race but also a symbolic act indicating that everything is possible—is recurrently present in the films.21 Uranya confirms this sense of mobility and limitless freedom in the final dream-like levitation scene, where the boy is floating into the air22 when he is obstructed by taller people to watch the moon landing on TV. In Hard Goodbyes, however, the boy relates the moon landing with his very personal desire of his father’s return. As he cannot accept his father’s death and still waits for him, when the rest of the family is gathered around the TV set, he refuses to watch the much-expected event, realizing that “everything is possible” is a false hope. Nostalgia is not associated only with dreamy and—today—unfulfilled expectations of limitless freedom, mobility, and progress. By recalling the 1960s and 1970s, the films address the lived or mediated memories of the audience and, through an investment in the popular culture and the material legacy of the era, motivate spectators’ personal and collective memory to develop a strong sense of cultural nostalgia. The centrality of popular culture (cinema, music, television, radio, advertisements, etc.) in evoking the past and producing nostalgia is pivotal. The movies of Old Greek Cinema and the popular songs of the 1960s have been widely recycled for decades by televi-

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sion and other media, providing plenty of visual and aural representations of the time and contributing to keeping the “long 1960s” alive in broader public memory. The child-centered films heavily invest in this diachronic popularity by celebrating, and thus recontextualizing and legitimizing, the popular culture of the time—once criticized and rejected as of low aesthetics, politically suspect, and unworthy of attention—turning it into national cultural heritage: the joyful use of the 1960s or early 1970s popular songs by The Cistern, which is interestingly inscribed to “the master” Vassilis Georgiadis—a major figure of Old Greek Cinema—the amusing reenactment of a scene from the popular Sakellarios’s film Η κυρά μας, η μαμμή (Mrs. Midwife, 1958) by Uranya, and the hilarious recurrent appearance—as intervals to the narrative—of an old TV cooking show starring Nena Menti (a popular contemporary TV actress) in The Cistern are characteristic examples of how films through popular culture evoke the past and capitalize on cross-generational cultural memory and identification. As Lutz Koepnick has pointed out, the films “reinscribe the popular as the nation’s most viable common ground,” as “a site of authenticity,” and as “the primary site at which national identity comes into being and can be consumed most pleasurably.” 23 Moreover, there is a stress on the materiality and the aesthetics of the 1960s, on familiar objects, props, costumes, and their colorful design, which appear as essential elements of the films’ iconography and pastiche aesthetics. The pictorial style and the sensationalism of the cinematic image are accompanied by occasionally dream-like atmosphere, pleasurable soundscapes, and an emphasis on the senses (taste and gastronomy, for example, in A Touch of Spice) as well as the celebration of the male voyeuristic gaze that further sensualize the past. In these ways, the immersion in the past becomes, as Belén Vidal has noticed, “a sensory experience”24 and a pleasurable spectacle. Thus, apart from history and politics, in the evocation of the “long 1960s” there is a dynamic interplay between a desire for boundless freedom, mobility, and progress, celebration of popular culture, and the prominence of sensory pleasure, well exemplified by Uranya, the narrative of which imaginatively merges all these crucial elements. The boys’ object of a love interest is Uranya, a sensual young prostitute—played by the Italian star Maria Grazia Cucinotta—whose name literally means “from the heavens” and by extension divine. The boys are obsessed with Uranya and save money to visit her and experience first-time sex. However, the young protagonist is obsessed with the sky too (Uranos) and is willing to sacrifice sex in order to buy a television set, the brand name of which is also Uranya, and view the live broadcast of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The political and cultural legacy of the 1960s is still debated, and these films make a significant contribution toward challenging and reshaping public



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memory of the period. Such representations of the Greek past, however, and especially of the colonel’s regime have been strongly criticized as being unable to engage critically with or even falsifying history, obscuring political realities, and audience’s historical understanding.25 However, most of the films do not— and by no means—claim historical accuracy. By featuring a reduced or grotesque historical and political past and by foregrounding the personal and the cultural, they reframe the ways the past has been narrated and perceived, opening up new space for the marginal, the neglected, and the ordinary. At the same time, they open a dialogue with the films’ present time insecurities to attack the diachronic shortcomings of Greek society and political affairs such as deeply rooted nationalistic public discourse, authoritarian behavior, and intolerance to the Other or the still surviving schism in Greek society caused by the Civil War. Political corruption, populism, and clientelism (Backdoor, Little Greek Godfather)26 or other pertinent sociopolitical issues such as the disastrous massive building construction in Athens are also discussed (Backdoor). Nevertheless, in contrast to New Greek Cinema, which returned to dark historical periods to give mournful, politically critical, and painful accounts of national history, the child-centered films of the 1990s and 2000s construct mostly nostalgic and seducing recollections of the national past changing radically the way history and past cultures have been evaluated and imagined by Greek cinema. NOTES 1.  For example, Ξυπόλητο Τάγμα (The Barefoot Battalion, Gregg Tallas, 1953) and Ανοιχτή επιστολή (Open Letter, Yiorgos Stamboulopoulos, 1968) employ memory flashbacks of historical trauma (Occupation) and boyhood nostalgia. 2.  Athena Kartalou, “The child inside them: searching and representing childhood in New and Contemporary Greek Cinema,” in “Catch me if you can . . .”: Childhood and its representation in contemporary Greek cinema, ed. Vaso Theodorou, Maria Moumoulidou, and Anastasia Oikonomidou (Athens: Egokeros Publications, 2006), 115. 3.  Rosalind Galt, The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 12. 4.  Kostis Kornetis, “From politics to nostalgia—and back to politics: Tracing the shifts in the filmic depiction of the Greek ‘long 1960s’ over time,” Historein, no. 14 (2014), 92. 5.  Galt, 12. 6.  Galt, 12. 7. E.g. Το καπλάνι της Βιτρίνας (Wildcat Under Glass, 1963). 8. E.g. Όταν ο ήλιος . . . (When the Sun . . . , 1971). 9.  Galt, 12. 10. E.g. A Touch of Spice, Chariton’s Choir and Mythopathy. See Kartalou, 124–25.

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11.  Kerwin Lee Klein, “On The Emergence of ‘Memory’ in Historical Discourse,” Representations, no. 69 (Winter 2000), 129. 12.  Kartalou, 117. 13.  See Panayiota Mini, “The historical panorama in post-1974 Greek cinema: The Travelling Players, Stone Years, Crystal Nights, The Weeping Meadow,” Journal of Greek Media & Culture, vol. 2, no.2 (October 2016), 133–54. 14. E.g. End of an Era, Backdoor, The Cistern, A Song is Not Enough, Chariton’s Choir and Uranya. 15.  Kornetis, 89–91. 16. On Little Greek Godfather, see Tonia Kazakopoulou, “In the Name of the Father: Rituals of Gender and Democracy in Olga Malea’s First Time Godfather,” in Contemporary Greek Film Cultures from 1990 to the Present, ed. Tonia Kazakopoulou and Mikela Fotiou (Bern: Peter Lang, 2017), 151–77. 17.  Alexandria and A Song is Not Enough. 18. E.g. Hard Goodbyes: My Father and Little Greek Godfather. 19.  Named after left-wing member of Parliament Grigoris Lambrakis, assassinated in 1963 by right-wing exteremists. 20.  Alan O’Leary, “Seminar 3 (2013): Heritage Cinema,” Italian Cinemas/Italian Histories, http://italiancinema-mumbai.tumblr.com/post/59310319891/seminar -3-2013-heritage-cinema. 21.  The fascination with cosmonauts and moon landing recalls the film My Life as a Dog. 22.  This is reminiscent of the closing scene of When Father Was Away on Business. 23.  Lutz Koepnick, “‘Amerika gibt’s überhaupt nicht’: Notes on the German Heritage Film,” in German Pop Culture: How ‘American’ Is It?, ed. Agnes C. Mueller (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 193. 24.  Belén Vidal, Figuring the Past: Period Film and the Mannerist Aesthetic (Amsterdam: University Press, 2012), 13. 25.  Kornetis, 89–102. 26. For Little Greek Godfather, see Kazakopoulou, 151–77.

WORKS CITED Galt, Rosalind. The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Kartalou, Athena. “The child inside them: searching and representing childhood in New and Contemporary Greek Cinema.” In “Catch me if you can . . .”: Childhood and Its representation in contemporary Greek cinema, 112–39. Edited by Vaso Theodorou, Maria Moumoulidou and Anastasia Oikonomidou. Athens: Egokeros Publications, 2006 (in Greek). Kazakopoulou, Tonia. “In the Name of the Father: Rituals of Gender and Democracy in Olga Malea’s First Time Godfather.” In Contemporary Greek Film Cultures from 1990 to the Present, 151–77. Edited by Tonia Kazakopoulou and Mikela Fotiou. Bern: Peter Lang, 2017.



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Klein, Kerwin Lee. “On The Emergence of ‘Memory’ in Historical Discourse.” Representations, no. 69 (Winter 2000): 127–50. Koepnick, Lutz “‘Amerika gibt’s überhaupt nicht’: Notes on the German Heritage Film.” In German Pop Culture: How ‘American’ Is It?, 191–208. Edited by Agnes C. Mueller. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Kornetis. Kostis. “From politics to nostalgia—and back to politics: Tracing the shifts in the filmic depiction of the Greek ‘long 1960s’ over time.” Historein, no. 14 (2014): 89–102. Mini, Panayiota. “The historical panorama in post-1974 Greek cinema: The Travelling Players, Stone Years, Crystal Nights, The Weeping Meadow.” Journal of Greek Media & Culture, vol. 2, no. 2 (October 2016):133–54. O’Leary, Alan. “Seminar 3 (2013): Heritage Cinema.” Italian Cinemas/Italian Histories. http://italiancinema-mumbai.tumblr.com/post/59310319891/seminar-3 -2013-heritage-cinema. Vidal, Belén. Figuring the Past: Period Film and the Mannerist Aesthetic. Amsterdam: University Press, 2012.

Part Two

Preface

One of the goals of this volume is to include examples of the way that changing notions of history have been incorporated into contemporary popular culture by creative artists. If, on the one hand, scholarly ideas about the meaning and uses of history have developed in challenging and often uncomfortable ways over the past thirty years in Greece, on the other hand writers and other artists have set about to not only explore this development but to contribute to its transformation within the broader range of social and popular consciousness. Often these creative artists seek in the use of history a way to come to grips with and to comment upon the dramatic events of the present. In part 2 the reader will encounter examples of creative art—visual or literary—which incorporate history—from significant historical events to small daily trivialities—into their reflections on identity and belonging in the contemporary Greek experience. The first section presents a “visual journey” via reflections on contemporary cinema. The two texts presented grew out of a series of conversations and interviews between the editors, Professor Charles Lock, and Director Sonia Liza Kenterman, as well as the presentation and discussion of Kenterman’s films at the 2016 Workshop Hi/Stories in Contemporary Greek Culture: The Entanglements of History and the Arts since 1989. These contributions appear as a primarily visual commentary to the scholarly analysis of cinema and television that presented either nostalgic projections of traumatic pasts (e.g., Chalkou) or mocked contemporary Greeks as conceited reflections of their glorious ancestors (e.g., Aitaki and Kourniakti). In chapter 12 Kenterman presents stills from three feature films by contemporary young directors commenting on how they participate in the changing landscape of the popular imagination. In turn, in chapter 13, Lock presents a creative reflection on Kenterman’s films, plumbing his own understanding of the visual power of 203

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her films’ images. Lock’s close reading of Kenterman’s visual style of story telling considers the way in which the films encounter, in the first case, the repercussions of the specific historical moment of the Greek Civil War, and in the second, an “ahistorical” present condition, that evokes what Kenterman herself would call the “archive for the future.” Kenterman’s films enter into contemporary conversations negotiating historical understandings and how they have impacted notions of Greek identities. As in the films Kenterman presents in her chapter, her own films utilize motifs that she sees prevalent in other contemporary directors’ work, such as the metaphor of the absent or lost father—or potential father—the lack of direction or sense of identity in Greek society today, or the interrogation of national historical traumas and official national narratives about the Greek past. We see these chapters as complementary; Kenterman’s choices of films in chapter 12 mark a new trend in contemporary Greek cinema while Lock’s discussion of Kenterman’s work in chapter 13 gives us a sense of her artistic vision and aesthetic approach. The stills from both feature films and short films serve as artistic visual reflections of several themes treated in the scholarly chapters of the volume: migrant identity and the problem of belonging (Emmerich and Anagnostou), the Greek Civil War and its impact on children’s lives (Kaisidou), nationalist perceptions of Greece’s glorious past—whether ancient or revolutionary (Georgiadi and Kourniakti), nostalgia and mocking of nostalgia (Georgiadi, Aitaki, and Chalkou). The second section includes a commentary on and a translation of Elias Venezis’ 1928 short story “The Isle of Lios” by Vangelis Calotychos and Patricia Barbeito. In their reflection upon the text, the translators suggest the connection between Venezis’ historical moment and our own, in which the echoes and the despair of the refugee crisis of the early twentieth century come to haunt the contemporary one. The final section is comprised of a short story and an excerpt from two contemporary novelists, Michalopoulou and Nikolaidou, whose work has been analyzed in part 1 (Willert and Katsan). These texts illustrate, indeed, how history comes to serve the literary writer as a tool for storytelling, and as an entree into an understanding of the present.

A VISUAL JOURNEY THROUGH THE LENS

Chapter Twelve

Witnesses for the Future The Past Reflected in the Despair of the Present Sonia Liza Kenterman

In a period where many film directors in Greek cinema are turning inward, there are still scriptwriters and directors who reflect on significant contemporary social and political issues, giving their own interpretation of what is happening now. In this chapter I present a visual journey through three recent films that, to me, are unique in the way they choose to talk about important social issues: they represent them in a personal way and through the eyes of their young heroes. They emphasize small, private stories through which they present national and universal issues, translating and always staying faithful to the point of view of their characters. As witness to what is happening now, cinema provides archival footage for the future. Conscious of itself as witness, cinema anticipates its future views through a sense of how the present might be projected into and onto the future. Greece is currently undergoing economic and social troubles of historical importance. In documenting and questioning the present, how does cinema provide testimony for the future? To what extent will the cinema of today be central to future discussions of this epoch in Greek history? But also, from its point of departure in the present, how is the past reflected as what is behind every present moment? Stills from Son of Sofia (2017),1 Park (2016)2 and Xenia (2014)3 are presented as moments that capture a fragment of a representation, or rather a recreation of a social situation. The “still” has exemplary archival force: its trajectory through time bears enduring witness to a single moment. These films frame the recent national past in relation to master narratives of the Greek nation, interrogating and critically engaging the official national past and the Greek identity that it engenders. To me, what these films suggest is that in order to move forward and face the future less burdened by the past, 207

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we need to demythologize or de-glorify the national construction of Greek history, which has proven to be such a trammel in recent years. Past glory and authoritarianism, past and present constitute the common references and devices in these films. The adolescent male protagonists are surrounded by traces of fading glory and reenactment of authoritarian and violent means of communication and control. Detached from a collective past they search for recognition and belonging, a search that the films are likely not to give any answers to. The weight of the haunting past and its fortified identity proves to impede their quest for their own identity, or even their need to define where they stand in the world. Unable to relate to either a past Greek identity built on references to ancient glory or very recent history, the characters reject both in the hope of creating a “new” identity. SON OF SOFIA, A FILM BY ELINA PSYKOU (2017): THE WEIGHT OF THE PAST ON THE PRESENT AND IT’S SHADOWS Set in Athens during the Olympic Games of 2004, when the games returned to their country of origin, young Misha moves from Russia to Athens to be reunited and to stay with his mother, Sofia, from whom he has been separated for two years. Uprooted from his homeland, he must accept and adapt to a new life in Greece—a life dictated by Nikos Benakis, the seventy-fiveyear-old man whom his mother was hired to look after and, much to Misha’s surprise, his mother has married. Nikos, the renowned storyteller of the TV series The Grandfather of the Earth, which aired during the dictatorship of the Colonels (1967–1974), immediately sets off to educate Misha and to inculcate in him a sense of Greek identity based on the glorious past. In an elliptical way and with a fairytale naivety, he floats through different historical eras. Through short sketches—glimpses, utterly detached from any sociohistorical context—he represents his version of the national, heroic past. The capstones of Nikos’ perception of the past synchronize with those of Greek authoritarian regimes: King, Fatherland, Religion, Family, and Antiquity. Although a seemingly negative hero, the director presents Nikos’ own point of view, offering the viewer a chance to understand him and his choices. Moreover, the director presents these problematic capstones as an unavoidable part of the Greeks’ identity, suggesting perhaps, that contemporary Greek society must come to terms with them before a new and more applicable national narrative can emerge.

Figure 12.1.  The time of Misha’s arrival coincides with the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games in 2004. In this first dinner scene, Misha must adapt to a family structure and new customs, Greek food, Nikos’s rules, and his altered mother who follows them. Seated amongst the Olympic mascots, Phoebus (the name meaning pure, clean, light connected to the god Apollo) and Athena (the goddess of wisdom, strategy, and war), Sofia explains how Misha’s father liked to tell him that they named him after the bear who was the mascot of the Moscow Olympic Games in 1980. Nikos steps in, discarding this: “Tell him his name was after the Archangel Michael.” Then, a parade of the heroic Greek past begins as Nikos dresses up to reenact and revive the nation’s myths in order to intensively Hellenize Misha. Son of Sofia, a film by Elina Psykou.

Figure 12.2.  “Greek lesson number one: The Family.” Nikos explains, in Greek only, his personal glorious past, of which he is so proud: his father was a general during the Metaxas dictatorship (1936–1940) whose slogan was “Fatherland, Religion, Family.” He carries on teaching Misha about the family terminology and concludes with the phrase “I am now your father.” Three things must become clear for Misha: 1) the only accepted language is Greek—yet he is not heard pronouncing one word in Greek throughout the film, 2) he must abolish his mother tongue as well as abolish his real father and fatherland, and 3) in return, he will become Nikos’ descendant and heir. Son of Sofia, a film by Elina Psykou.

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Figure 12.3.  “Greek lesson number five: Glorious Antiquity.” Dressed as Spartan warriors, Nikos teaches Misha the ethics of ancient Sparta: strict military discipline and militaristic education which lasted twelve years. At the age of seven, the state would take the boys from their mother to train them as warriors, preparing them to fight courageously for their country. Son of Sofia, a film by Elina Psykou.

Throughout the film, Nikos overtly forces his interpretation of Greek history on the boy, believing it is more important and superior than other versions. A past that overcasts his view of anything that is, or could, evolve in contemporary Greece and which suffocates any ability to affect change in the present. Sheltered in his perception of a glorious past, Nikos lives in its wake: for him the past is worth reviving, it must be revived, for the future to have meaning. Therefore, he demands of Misha that he abolish his own memories and inherit the world as he presents it to him. However, the film ends in an act of rebellion against Nikos and his authoritarian worldview.

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Figure 12.4.  Nikos’ seventy-fifth birthday. Misha invites the only friend he made when running away from the house. The friend invites other friends and Misha encourages them to dress up with the costumes from Nikos’ dressing room with the excuse of throwing him a party. All the young men are immigrants from various countries, taking over this fortress of nationalism. Nikos has a stroke and Misha can take revenge for being victim to Nikos’ authoritarian imposition of Greek identity. Even more than this, he convinces his friend to kill him. But the bullet tragically hits his mother instead. Son of Sofia, a film by Elina Psykou.

PARK, A FILM BY SOFIA EXARCHOU (2016): A DISTANT OBSERVATION OF YOUTH IN DESOLATION Sofia Exarchou’s film Park also revolves around the historical moment of contemporary Greece hosting the Olympic Games in 2004. The film is set in the derelict facilities of the Olympic Village in Athens, just twelve years after the closing ceremonies, showing the once polished and excellently equipped sites now falling into neglect and ruin. The spectacular bubble and the ephemeral wealth produced by the stock market—which enabled the glossy, excessive lifestyle of the 2000s—have collapsed. The Olympic Village now hosts, or rather shelters, poor families. A group of youngsters spend their entire time drifting around the dilapidated sites. Throughout most of the film we hardly understand why and how they ended up there. Opaque characters with unknown stories, no evident background behind them and too young to have experienced the former prestigious status of this place, they kill time engaging in arbitrary violence. In this film, the director presents without comment what she cannot comprehend.

Figure 12.5.  Deserted youth among the rusted and deserted relics of a former pseudograndeur. The 2004 Olympic Village and the athletic venues of ephemeral glory have become their playground. They resort to releasing their energy in distorted versions of the Olympic disciplines. Park, a film by Sofia Exarchou © 2016 Neda Film, Faliro House Productions.

Figure 12.6.  Alienated from the rest of society, their peers, and their families, this group of boys burst into violence which bonds them together. Emotionally and physically abusing each other, they vandalize the campus and the sport stadiums where they spend all their time. Bullied and harassed by the older teenagers, the young ones accept being forced to take part in actions that humiliate and disgrace them, desperately in need of recognition. Park, a film by Sofia Exarchou © 2016 Neda Film, Faliro House Productions.

Figure 12.7.  Apart from being brutal to each other, they also organize dogfights to earn their pocket money. Park, a film by Sofia Exarchou © 2016 Neda Film, Faliro House Productions.

Figure 12.8.  Vague lives existing in an obscure world. Their lives last a moment. Their world and their actions last a moment. Their existence seems to be suspended. They ended up in this place randomly and surrendered themselves to randomness, without thinking about the future or desiring anything. Without purpose, defeated, and disdaining themselves. Park, a film by Sofia Exarchou © 2016 Neda Film, Faliro House Productions.

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XENIA, A FILM BY PANOS KOUTRAS (2014): IN A FATHERLAND WITH NO FATHER AND NO CITIZENSHIP Two Albanian brothers, Danny and Odysseas, raised in Greece and born in Albania make a journey trying to discover their Greek father whom they have never met. Since their (Albanian) mother’s death, they are left without parents and without citizenship: their fatherland (Greece) denies them citizenship because their Greek father never acknowledged them. Driven by the desire to secure their citizenship and be accepted by their fatherland, they set off on a journey in search of their father, as well as auditioning for a TV reality show. The two will never find their father but will be given citizenship through an old, gay singer who was a friend of their mother. After a stormy encounter with the man they thought to be their father, and after threatening him with a gun, they leave his house. They have come of age but also sink into darkness. The sun sets and so does their innocence. They understand that something very difficult is ahead of them. Their father could be any Greek man. The film takes place at the time when Golden Dawn, the neo-Nazi party of Greece, gains more and more power, support, and recognition, moving away from its former taboo status. As the two brothers navigate the nighttime streets of Athens, we witness racist outbursts and attacks on foreigners by neo-Nazis. The violence also directly affects the protagonists when, in a provincial town, Danny gets in a fight with other Albanian teenagers. The film challenges the boundaries of Greek identity and the meanings of homeland and country of origin. In an era of multiculturalism and racism, the fundamental issue of defining fatherhood in Greece adopts a different meaning. The director refused to receive the awards of the Hellenic Film Academy as a protest to the immigration laws that until then had only granted Greek citizenship to persons who could prove their consanguinity—that is, their direct descent by blood from Greeks (known as jus sanguine), and which was opposed to the idea of citizenship given as the right of the land of birth (known as jus soli). In 2015, the law was finally changed allowing persons with at least eight years of education in Greece to obtain Greek citizenship. The uniqueness of this film is that it reveals the contemporary social and political issues of Greece through the eyes of sixteen-year-old Danny; a character portrayed as always optimistic but not simplistic. The director imbues his hero with optimism and deep love. Through him we see a colorful Athens, contradicting the foreseeable depictions of a gray city, hit by the crisis and by wretchedness. Contrary to Exarchou’s film Park, Koutra’s film is surprisingly colorful with musical and comedic elements.

Figure 12.9.  Danny, extrovert and swirling, positive and easygoing with childlike habits, stands at the rooftop of his brother’s apartment building, gazing at the view of the city. The Acropolis in the background is an ironic touch—a comment the director always likes to make in his films. Xenia, a film by Panos H. Koutras.

Figure 12.10.  Starting their journey across the country, by bus, by hitchhiking, and on foot, to find the man they believe is their father. Photo by Katerina Paspaliari. Xenia, a film by Panos H. Koutras. Photo by Katerina Paspaliari.

Figure 12.11.  In the middle of their journey, lying in front of the sign of XENIA, a hotel chain owned by the Greek Organization for Tourism (EOT). The Xenia concept and design was launched in 1953 under the Marshall Plan aiming to increase tourism to Greece. Architecturally innovative and always built in the best spots of every region, it is now derelict and defeated. No signs of the former glory of the hotel. Xenia, a film by Panos H. Koutras. Photo by Katerina Paspaliari.

Figure 12.12.  Danny’s life is accompanied by a dreamy world of fables and fantasies. His fantasy-friend, a stuffed animal toy, his bunny from childhood, always accompanies him. He surrenders himself to its tenderness. Xenia, a film by Panos H. Koutras.



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For me, these films stand as an undisguised tapestry of images of contemporary Greece, and thus these images, together with many other contemporary films, create a total reconstruction and presentation of Greek reality, which not only has an archival meaning for both the audience and historians of the future, but also creates a cinematic puzzle, or even a source, from which other films are inspired and come in turn to complete. All these stills recompose a fresco of reality that possibly, with the distance created between the historical events and the films’ directors, help us to understand the reality that surrounds us.4 NOTES 1.  Ο Γιός της Σοφίας (Son of Sofia, Elina Psykou, 2017). 2.  Park (Park, Sofia Exarchou, 2016). © 2016 Neda Film, Faliro House Productions. 3.  Ξενία (Xenia, Panos Koutras, 2014). 4.  The text in this chapter accompanying the film stills and captions is the result of a creative collaboration between the editors and Sonia Liza Kenterman.

Chapter Thirteen

Still, Short, Cut The Early Films of Sonia Liza Kenterman Charles Lock

In two short films, Nicoleta1 and White Sheet,2 Sonia Liza Kenterman presents the raw materials of cinema and of narrative: A journey. A road. Two distinct images of Greece are shaped, one of the nation just after the Civil War (1946–1949), the other of our own times, hardly (or not yet) to be identified by any specific historical event, nor to be named as an epoch. Through the journey on foot we are to understand some of the trials, the pains, the loyalties, and compromises of a war that sunders families; sixty or seventy years later, on the road, a solitary woman unmoving while the traffic hurtles by, we are offered an image of perplexed humanity, of anomia and frustrated sympathy, and most prominently of aporia: there may be a road—there certainly is—but there’s nowhere to go. Nicoleta shows us a series of warm and still interiors, linked by journeys across stony terrain without any obvious track, undertaken by an unnamed eight-year-old boy who is charged by his mother with the task of carrying his infant sister across the mountains to their aunt; the historical context is of the period following the Greek Civil War, and the unseen father must be a communist, presumably engaged in the fighting, though whether he is in hiding or already killed is left unclear.  White Sheet shows a highway along which others travel, and on or alongside which the female protagonist stands, sits, lies down, but does not and will not move. Hers is a contemporary struggle, of the outsider who insists on remaining an outsider while seeking attention in that role: this is the pathology of one who refuses to fit in yet longs to be acknowledged for that refusal. To describe a film is to rehearse what is most easily remembered in words: the plot, the characters, what happens. In Kenterman’s short films there is not much that can be retrieved by the discursive memory, for each of them is austerely cinematic, and thus resistant to easy paraphrase. It is on the retina that 219

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Figure 13.1.  Boy carrying infant sister. Nicoleta, a film by Sonia Liza Kenterman.

her films stay, as images, still, or very slowly moving. Exemplary is the scene in Nicoleta where the boy has just stolen a pail of milk from a herder whose vigilance was rather for his animals than for what they had already yielded. Before he can give the milk to his sister, a figure looms, of a policeman, severe and tall and threatening. We may expect drastic consequence: arrest, violence, anger, voices raised, children screaming. But the silence is maintained while the policeman ever so gently, with exquisite cruelty, pours the

Figure 13.2.  Woman walking with sheet along highway. White Sheet, a film by Sonia Liza Kenterman.



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milk out onto the ground. Our own thoughts are calmed, our apprehensions allayed, and what had been narrative anxiety gives way to optical curiosity: Is that how milk moves? Can poured milk so defy gravity? And then we realize that this pouring in slow motion is not just a most hurtful taunt to cause distress to the boy; it is a mode of negotiation. The boy hands over a coin, his only coin, and the pouring—at a speed almost glacial—comes to a pause.

Figure 13.3.  Policeman pouring milk. Nicoleta, a film by Sonia Liza Kenterman.

This is the epitome of movement in the film: whatever is kinetic is slow in motion (though not in slow-motion), and is soon enough brought to a still. The unmoving of what is depicted on-screen is matched by the holding of the eyes that watch. Blocking is a device that usually holds the eyes from moving into pictorial depth; here it is used in combination with insistent horizontals to encourage us to read or scan the screen laterally, and slowly: the “non-track” of the boy’s moving is formed by striated rock-formations—the setting is in Epirus—whose bunched, impacted horizontals inhibit a drifting of the eyes, whether vertically or into the screen’s depth. Each outdoor scene is carefully framed and closed off, the eyes held to the screen’s surface by foregrounded lines, of a protruding door handle, a horse’s reins, thistles, the spokes of a wheel or the bars of a gate: each is abstracted from the whole so that as parts they are both visual obstacles and (for a moment) cognitive enigmas. The interiors are even more tightly constructed, their lighting owing much to Dutch interiors of the seventeenth century, with muted light and much framing by sills and jambs. The checkerboard floortiling brings paintings by the Dutch Pieter de Hooch (1629–1684) specifically to mind. The interior can be closed up further into a still life: fruit, a bottle, a table edge, part of a cloth. And yet there is also electric light, which dis-

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Figure 13.4.  Interior with aunt and infant niece. Nicoleta, a film by Sonia Liza Kenterman.

persed across the darkness can transform a village into a display of warmth and welcome, deceptive as that will be in narrative terms. In the brief safety of his aunt’s house the light-switch fascinates the boy, whose repeated finger movements doubly disrupt the careful and even lighting of the scene. Such homely Dutch interiors, for all the warmth and constancy of their lighting, afford no lasting shelter. The aunt does not dissent from her husband’s determination that the boy and his sister must move on, must be forced to leave the house: there is danger in giving shelter to communists, even to their children, even to an infant. (The boy is knowing, and his eyes know their enemies.) While an ideological disapproval of communism is implied, or taken for granted, the invocation of principle is shown to be far from principled, nor is it even ideologically grounded: “principles” seem to serve rather as masks for cowardice and expediency. At the film’s opening none of the characters has a name, and all but one are hard to label beyond the broadest generalities: the boy, his mother, the infant sister, the policeman, the aunt, her husband, the driver of a cart. These are the persons of Nicoleta, not one of whom is addressed by name, nor refers by name to another. Yet the film’s title is itself a personal name, one acquired by a deliberate action in its course. The boy is asked by his aunt whether his sister has been baptized. The answer (which seems given mutely, as by a sign) we can presume to be negative, as this is the child of a communist. Before sending her sister’s children on their way, the aunt baptizes the infant as Nicoleta: “little victory,” though whose, and of what sort, may be disputed. Thus, the one person with a name—a given name, a name we



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Figure 13.5.  Boy and infant in the setting sun. Nicoleta, a film by Sonia Liza Kenterman.

have heard given—is herself outside the circles of speaking: she is an infant and one who, though sometimes addressed, is not expected to respond, nor to assume the responsibility that answering words bear. Where there is neither address nor utterance a name belongs not to a first person nor to a second, grammatically, but only to a third—as a label, as “Nicoleta” diversely labels both an infant and a film. Some of the tracks traversed by Nicoleta’s brother are unmade by human feet but are natural passages through the rifts and declivities offered by the landscape, and each crossing, each footing, will clarify the course. So paths are customarily made. From the mother’s dwelling to the town where the aunt lives, the movement across the screen is from right to left. After the boy and his sister leave the aunt’s home, and after the baptism, the movement is from left to right, a crossing for the eyes, and a visual and spatial denial of any notion that the journey merely continues. There is no destination, nor any return home. The driver of a horse-drawn wagon offers the boy and his burden a ride, for a sum composed of whatever token was placed in the boy’s hand by his aunt: all these exchanges of small things occur in the dark, or in shadow— as clandestine exchanges generally do—and the wagon moves obliquely into the screen’s depths. Minimal dialogue, minimal event: this is a film in which the static and the kinetic hold each other back, form each other’s burden: civil strife within the cinematic itself. Conversely,  White Sheet shows us a road thoroughly made; the old motorway from Athens to Thebes along which trucks and cars pass at a speed corresponding to the noise they make. The film is shot entirely on location,

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Figure 13.6.  Woman watching motorists taking a break. White Sheet, a film by Sonia Liza Kenterman.

in Thebes, the nature and speed of the traffic quite unscripted. There is sheer contingency in the contiguity; the vehicles pass close by, often with frightening suddenness in unanticipated proximity. As viewers we can put no distance between ourselves and the noise and speed of the traffic, at once visual distraction and narrative context. Frail and fragile on the hard shoulder stands a woman with a bundle of clothes wrapped in a white sheet; the contents are then emptied, spilt and casually arranged by the roadside. The white sheet is both container and label, the name of a film none of whose characters—though there is really only one—has a name. White sheet might be carte blanche or tabula rasa, or the whiteness on which anything may be written, or which might yet render up to obsessive scrutiny some sign already there, as in the chapter of Moby Dick entitled “The Whiteness of the Whale” or Isak Dinesen’s story “The Blank Page.” We do not know this woman’s name, nor at first what she is doing: her actions are an enigma. She leaves a desolate, solitary house near the highway, and carrying her bundle—the white sheet carried as a burden not unlike the infant to be named Nicoleta—walks to the road.  There she stands, attracting attention yet defying it, refusing all offers of a lift or assistance from concerned motorists; these reduce their speed, supposing an accident, a break-down, or other trouble. No less defiantly she ignores whatever insults she might hear from other motorists, those who hardly slow at all, or even veer intimidatingly toward her. Both house and road are shown through the optical obstacles that have held our eyes, controlled our optics: tall grass, the railings of a balcony, pylons, lampposts. These tend to be on the upright rather than, as in Nicoleta, on the horizontal, and during our



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prolonged attentiveness the woman at times also becomes a vertical accent: upright, the form of the human.  There are three encounters, and in this the film has something of the archetypal quality of a legend. A road is of course itself archetypal, not only of a journey but of meetings and decisions. Each encounter is with the occupant or occupants of a vehicle that stops because it seems a convenient spot, not on account of concern for the woman standing by the roadside. First comes a couple, the man talking on his mobile phone about a boat, his boat, it seems, used for fishing, for it is equipped with a speargun, and we learn by overhearing that this boat has been sunk. As we piece together the occasion of the phone call, the effect cinematically is to create a non-contiguous space, offstage and offscreen: while looking at the road, the car rather suddenly coming to a halt, the spoken words take us out to sea on a fishing expedition that has gone wrong. What happens offstage in the theater is simply a consequence of the fact that so much is unrepresentable: a landscape is better described in words than by painted scenery, and a death is often more moving when invoked by words than when enacted by players. Indeed, in Hamlet the death of Ophelia as described by Gertrude stirs our imagination to compose a scene perhaps more vividly to remain in the imagination than any actually observed onstage. In the particular instance of Hamlet we may be assisted by the painting Ophelia by Sir John Millais (1852), an image whose fame may itself attest to the visual superiority of the ekphrastic over the dramatic. Common enough in the theater, the words of ekphrasis to invoke offstage action are relatively rare in the cinema. In White Sheet ekphrasis is made possible and plausible by the mobile phone. A more traditional cinematic device of invoking an elsewhere is that of singing, and we listen to the lone woman’s rendering of the song, well-known in Greece: “step by step, tear by tear, you will find me at the edge.” We have indeed witnessed virtually every step taken by this woman as she goes from her house to the roadside, and as she waits on the verge, occasionally pacing. The two other encounters—instances of elenchus, challenge, confrontation—are with a motorcyclist who stops to relieve himself and with a grandmother and granddaughter taking a break before resuming their journey to Athens. Through her brief and broken utterances, words not quite addressed to strangers, we learn that the clothing in the white sheet had belonged to the woman’s husband whose name was Thanasis. That is all we learn about him. A widow, she is trying to give his belongings to passersby. Nobody accepts any of the items offered, so the woman gathers them up in the white sheet and returns to the desolation of her home. The silence of this woman is part of her pathology; she displays a need to be noticed and addressed but would rather give away the clothes of another

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Figure 13.7.  Woman sitting on protective barrier; grandmother and granddaughter passing by. White Sheet, a film by Sonia Liza Kenterman.

than any words of her own, or even gestures. This “white sheet” is an exercise in communication refused. A woman by the roadside poses an elenchus—a challenge—which passersby can accept or decline. We who view the film are also challenged by the significance of this woman and her white sheet. There is no obvious historical context, though one could think of a white sheet in terms of accountancy, as a balance sheet, or in terms of the projection that

Figure 13.8.  Woman with cigarette in silhouette. White Sheet, a film by Sonia Liza Kenterman.



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whiteness seems always to invite. Make of it what you will. The director might be interested to hear, but the lonely woman continues in the withholding of her purpose and her significance. By contrast to the woman’s silence, in the specific historical context of Nicoleta the minimal dialogue is matched by much sign—and body—language. There the silence is motivated not by an individual’s pathology but by circumstances: during social conflict, not least after a civil war, in an admonitory phrase familiar in Britain during the Second World War, “careless talk costs lives.” The young boy has learnt to be sparing of his speech and trusts with a patter of words only his sister, who is too young to repeat them. In both these films words are voluntarily held back. Both films concern failures of disposal. What one would gladly liberate, consign, release, or abandon, insists on staying put. The infant sister will not be taken in by her aunt, and the brother must resume his burden. None of those who pass by on the highway will take the clothes and so, bundled once more within the white sheet, they are returned to the house. It may well be that we are defined by that which we most desire to be rid of, and yet which refuses to leave us. Such a paradox of loss—loss as failure to lose; loss as what remains one’s own— matches the cinematic characteristic of both films, to obstruct movement and inhibit vision, to restore the still: still with us, still here. As the past is. Sonia Liza Kenterman’s first feature film is to be called The Tailor and is concerned with the vanishing craft once practiced in every part of the inhabited globe but now giving way, even in remote regions, to mechanization. What a tailor does is to cut, and this and related metaphors have long been used to describe and explain the making of films. A cutting-room was found only in a tailor’s shop until c. 1912. The chillingly entitled novel, The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor (whose plot concerns the excising of a character from a film) dates from 1937. Likewise, “splicing”: this term from ropemaking was first used of film remedially (c. 1910), to restore a reel torn in the process of projection, and then (c. 1930) as a purposeful device for asserting discontinuity, or making a pause visible by an extent of whiteness. The ancient craft of the tailor will not disappear without trace—of literary accounts and visuals depictions of tailors there are no ends—but it will be recorded in its latter European years by the defining craft of modern representation, the cinema. Whatever it is that divides the past from the present, the present from the future, here tailor and director share the cut. NOTES 1.  Νικολέτα (Nicoleta, Sonia Liza Kenterman, 2012). 2.  Λευκό σεντόνι (White Sheet, Sonia Liza Kenterman, 2014).

A LITERARY ECHO OF THE REFUGEE CRISIS

Chapter Fourteen

What Are They After, Our Souls, Off the Coast of Lesbos? Reflections on Elias Venezis’ “The Isle of Lios” (1928) Patricia Felisa Barbeito and Vangelis Calotychos “What are they after, our souls, travelling on the decks of decayed ships crowded in with sallow women and crying babies?” asks the poet, George Seferis, in the eighth of twenty-four poems from his landmark modernist collection of free verse, Mythistorema (1935). One imagines the souls pictured in his mind’s eye to be those of his fellow Asia Minor Greeks: “our” souls, presumably male, huddled on boats surrounded by ragged kin escaping the advance of Turkish troops in the summer of 1922. At that watershed moment, a centuries-old Hellenic presence in Asia Minor was effectively coming to an abrupt and tragic end. No wonder, then, that Greeks refer to these events as the Asia Minor Catastrophe. The following year, an unprecedented Exchange of Populations oversaw the transfer of the vast majority of remaining Christian Anatolian Greeks to Greece (even as thousands of Muslims, mostly from northern Greece, were resettled in the newly established Turkish Republic). Christian Greeks flooded into a defeated nation wracked by years of war and with an economy in tatters. Once there, a wary and depleted native population was sometimes reticent, often unable, or too preoccupied with its own subsistence to relate to these newcomers as their own. Yet, while Seferis’ fleeting poetic images of abjection and dispossession might be read as exclusively responding to the suffering and loss at this particular historical moment, and among his own people, his poems have more universal frames of reference. His verses’ recurring evocation of souls “on brine-soaked timbers” moving “from harbor to harbor,” sinking in and out of time and “murmuring broken thoughts from foreign languages” on ships whose keels rip through “this sea or that” reach far back into the depths of mythological and historical time. While decidedly Hellenic in its terms of reference, Seferis’ poem aims to extend its relevance for humanistic 231

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Figure 14.1.  2015. Refugees arriving on Lesbos from Turkey. Courtesy of the photographer Julian Köberer, Lesvos, August 2015.

universality. Multilayered temporalities evince a stylized tragedy playing out time and again on troubled seas, without a cathartic ending. For close to ten years now, the latest instalment of this tragedy has unfolded on these same seas and shores off the Anatolian coast, in the easternmost Aegean. Between Turkey’s Aegean coast and the Greek island of Lesbos (or Mytilene) opposite—and not far from Seferis’ birthplace in Urla, near Izmir—boatloads of migrants make landfall barely alive or dead on arrival. They hail from the Middle East, Africa, and the Indian sub-continent, many of them fleeing war and repression. Their collective desperation immediately leaves its indelible imprint on images on our television screens, newspapers, and cell phones, all readily available to the gaze of Western media and its consumers. Some of this recurring footage is shot by the refugees themselves, a fact in itself that would seem to endow it with the “purported immediacy” that, according to Susan Sontag (2003), “translates compassion into action” when photographing others. And yet, the moral case for bringing this latest refugee crisis home has tragically fallen short. While these precarious, vulnerable souls unlike us have found moral solidarity and succor in many small and steadfast acts of humaneness, too many states at Europe’s core have closed their borders and largely averted their gaze from their plight. A category crisis at Europe’s core tears at its heart, though barely touches its heartstrings, as spasmodic state responses to the crisis de-



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liver unworthy half-solutions in the form of forced deportations, begrudging resettlement, and disciplinary violence. At the hastily constructed facilities or “hotspots” of Moria and Kara Tepe, further inland on the same island of Lesbos, thousands of stranded migrants initially awaited processing of their asylum applications based on claims to particular types of readable identities. However, the statist logics of closure and quotas applied to judge, and most often reject, claims for asylum pale alongside the aspirant humanity still flickering in frayed bodies, some charred by the diesel lapping on the hellishly hot steel hulls of boats reflecting the sun. Europeans have even engineered an agreement between Greece and Turkey to deport those migrants failing in their asylum petitions back to Turkey or, in many cases, back to their countries of origin. Principles of containment, exclusion, and expulsion here—at Europe’s edge—assure freedoms of movement elsewhere, in Europe’s fortress. Meanwhile, reserves of affect and intimacy are running dreadfully low. In early 2016, the Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, warned that everything must be done to prevent these reception centers, and islands like Lesbos, from degenerating into a “warehouse of souls.” Lamentably, this is what they have become. Do we know who these people are? In encountering them, will we empathize with the plight of these subaltern “subjects”? Certainly, the experience of fleeing wars to the east is known to the inhabitants of the eastern Aegean islands, whose own family histories share affinities with these peoples’ plight. After all, family members in living memory themselves fled a blessed place, a garden of bereket—a Turkish word that combines the meaning of abundance and fruitfulness with divine blessing. The original sin of Christians and Muslims alike was to doubt that such mythical plenitude could satisfy everyone’s needs and desires. Now, the experience of exile and homelessness resonates deep in the soul. Indeed, history often bears haunting witness to past traumatic dispossessions and upheavals. A recent bulletin of the UNHCR focused on Ahmed Tarzalakis, a Syrian refugee from Al-Hamidiyah, a town close to Syria’s border with Lebanon originally settled by refugees fleeing from the Greco-Turkish war of 1897. During the course of the current Syrian Civil War, Ahmed crossed with his family over to Lesbos and, eventually, continued his journey to settle on the island of Crete. There, this refugee, with the pleasantly syncretic forename and surname that seamlessly folds the Middle East into Crete, was returning to the home of his ancestors, Greek-speaking Cretan Muslims, who had fled from Crete in 1897 in the aftermath of that earlier Greco-Turkish war. Now returning to the scene of initial trauma, deracination, and displacement, Ahmed’s search for hope and restitution marks the curious, gyre-like returns of history.

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Figure 14.2.  1923. War between Greece and Turkey. Samanli-Dag peninsula. Group of refugees on two ships bounding for a new destination. Courtesy of the ICRC Archives (International Committee of the Red Cross). Photographer unknown.

To reflect on such ironies of history and identity in the present leads us back to a short story that may very well be one of the earliest fictional representations of the refugee experience from 1922. Entitled “To Διoς” (The Isle of Lios), the story first appeared in a collection of five short stories entitled Ο Μανώλης Λέκας κι Άλλα Διηγήματα (Manolis Lekas & Other Short Stories) by the author, Elias Venezis, in 1928. The story is not very well-known given that Venezis went on to write the most celebrated novels about the experience of Christian Greek refugees expulsed from Asia Minor. He knew the area intimately, after all: in his early life, he shuttled across the waters that separate Lesbos from the Anatolian coast. Born in Aivalí, or Ayvalík on the Anatolian coast in 1904, Venezis’ family sought refuge during World War I on the island of Lesbos. At the end of World War I, Venezis returned to Asia Minor, only to experience firsthand the events of 1922 when he was captured by Turkish forces and sent on a forced inland march to a labor camp. Of the three thousand Christians forced on this march, Venezis was one of only twentythree who lived to tell the tale and to be reunited with his family in Mytilene in late 1923. His novel Το Νούμερο 31328 (Number 31328), written in 1931, draws from this firsthand experience and is nowadays acknowledged as a classic from this period. Later novels of his, appearing during a subsequent



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traumatic era, World War II, titled Γαλήνη (Serenity) (1939) and Αιολική Γη (Serene Aeolian Land) (1943) established him as the preeminent storyteller of the refugees’ experience in their new homeland, Greece. Whereas Greek poets had lamented the defeat soon after the events transpired in 1922, and with all due ethnolyricism at that, fiction had lagged well behind. Greek-Turkish entente in the 1930s also discouraged churning up past contempts. As late as 1940, the critic Emilios Hourmouzios bemoaned how Greek culture at large had not truly confronted the experience of its refugees. Moreover, Hourmouzios saw an opportune moment for an emergent “refugee literature” in Greece, as he termed it, to come into its own. Coincidentally, Venezis’ short stories that included “The Isle of Lios” reappeared in a new edition right at this time, in 1941, in an edition bearing a new title, Aegean. Our translation of the story below is based on that later, more readily available, version. Today, there are a number of reasons for translating the story for a wider readership. Elias Venezis’ short story is one of the very first to touch this raw nerve. Indeed, it engages the trauma with all the visceral frisson of fingernails screeching down a history teacher’s blackboard. Memorably, Venezis unflinchingly focuses on a tattoo etched on the amputated arm of his story’s protagonist. The Bat, for this is the nickname the protagonist goes by, has lost his hand to Turkish troops on Lios, a small barren isle with only a lighthouse and some goats nowadays off Lesbos’ coastline. Despite this loss, an unmanning of sorts, he prides himself on the fact that he was the only Greek to survive the incident and defiantly claims that it does not hinder him from doing anything he wishes, even from participating in subsequent compensatory violent acts against Turks. In the story, this ghostly missing hand is the embodiment of, or pivot for, a series of other losses, scarcities, aggressions, for the Bat, originally from Ayvalí, is a refugee on Lesbos. When he and other fishermen are forbidden by the Turks from fishing in the teeming waters of their lost homeland, their poverty drives them to defy the order and court further danger. Like the repetitive piercing of a tattoo, multiple forms of trauma are layered and interimplicated, so that the hand recalls what has been lost and can never be made whole again. Alongside this painful self-inscription and defiant remembrance of trauma comes a moment of recognition that the other, the enemy, has both inflicted and received pain and dispossession. The story stages history’s traumatic return as it inscribes itself in the region, on the seas, among the populations, and on the skin of its inhabitants. The Bat will eventually confront the source of his trauma. The story also dissects the category crisis brought on by the uncanny effect of population exchanges at Europe’s periphery almost one century ago. Muslim Turks

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expulsed from the Greek mainland and now resident in Turkey hold the Bat, a Christian Greek from Turkey now exiled to the Greek island of Mytilene, hostage. Sworn enemies share in mutual dispossession that issues from the same conjoined historical disaster. Their meeting, at which each speaks the others’ language, is staged in the presence of a gun-toting Turkish conscript from the easternmost provinces of Turkey, in Diyarbakir. Not invested in the passions of Greek and Turkish Anatolians, the soldier is reluctantly serving his service far away from home and from family. Yet he is himself from a province we know today to be a capital of Kurdish presence in Turkey, and, in the late nineteenth century, a site of several massacres perpetrated against Armenian and Syriac Christians. Like the equally dull-witted soldier in Kafka’s Penal Colony (1920), he knows only how to carry out his duty, to hold his prisoner captive and follow orders, if necessary to execute a man, even though all he really wants deep down is to go home. How do we remember these fundamental losses, the story asks? Are there ways of moving beyond stories of completion and revenge that provide the imaginative space for empathy, forgiveness, a less fractious sense of humanity and community? What does it mean to witness the pain of the Other? And how are we moved by this pain? This maelstrom of tangled feelings is depicted in the twisted tattoos of struggling, agonizing creatures all over The Bat’s body: lions caught in a stifling serpent’s embrace while a hovering bat gazes impassively on. Do the grating needles decorating the wizened, violated skin reinscribe the pain, or ultimately provide some form of active witnessing or compensation? In Kafka’s tale, the apparatus that metes out justice, enlightenment, and death “has two kinds of needles arranged in multiple patterns. Each long needle has a short one beside it. The long needle does the writing, and the short needle sprays a jet of water to wash away the blood and keep the inscription clear” (1948). As the Turkish soldier stares at The Bat down the barrel of his gun, will he, unlike the younger Bat when confronted with a drowning Turk, pause to reflect upon “what are they after, our souls, off the coast of Lesbos?” Will he turn away from humanity in peril and mix yet more blood into the waters of the Aegean Sea? WORKS CITED Hourmouzios, Emilios. 1940. “H ‘προσφυγική’ λογοτεχνία (Refugee Literature).” Nea Estia 314, 15 January, 106–9. Kafka, Franz, The Penal Colony: Stories and Short Pieces [1920]. Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Schoken Books, 1948. Seferis, George. 1995, Collected Poems: Revised Edition. Translated by E. Keeley and P. Sherrard. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.



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Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Hamish Hamilton. Venezis, Elias. 1928. Ο Μανώλης Λέκας και άλλα διηγήματα. (Manolis Lekas and Other Short Stories). Athens. ———. 1931. Το Νούμερο 31328. (Number 31328). Athens: Estia. ———. 1997. Γαλήνη, Μυθιστόρημα [1939]. (Serenity: A Novel). Athens: Estia. ———. 1943. Αιολική Γη. (Serene Aeolian Land). Athens: Estia.

FURTHER READING Calotychos, Vangelis. 2013. “Limits, Coexistence.” Chapter 5. In The Balkan Prospect: Identity, Culture, and Politics in Greece after 1989. New York: Palgrave, 121–58. Doulis, Thomas. 1977. Disaster and Fiction: Modern Greek Fiction and the Asia Minor Disaster of 1922. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mackridge, Peter. 2008. “The Myth of Asia Minor in Greek Fiction.” In Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange Between Greece and Turkey [2003], edited by Renée Hirschon, 235–46. Studies in Forced Migration, Vol. 12. New York, Oxford: Berghahn. Milioris, Nikos E. 1967. “Η Μικρασιατική Τραγωδία στη Λογοτεχνία και Τέχνη.” (The Asia Minor Tragedy in Literature and Art) Mikrasiatika Hronika 13–14, 338–99. Stroebel, William. 2014. “Distancing Disaster: Trauma, Medium, and Form in the Greco-Turkish War and Population Exchange.” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 32 (2): 253–85. Tolis, Christos. 2018. “Refugee Family Renews Centuries-Old Ties on Crete.” UNHCR, 23 February. http://www.unhcr.org/news/latest/2018/2/5a8ed3314/refugeefamily-renews-century-old-ties-crete.html. Venezis, Elias. 1949. Aeolia. Translated by E.D. Scott-Kilvery; with a preface by Lawrence Durrell. London: William Campion. ———. 1995. Αιγαίο [1941]. (Aegean). Athens: Estia.

The Isle of Lios by Elias Venezis Translated from the Greek by Patricia Felisa Barbeito and Vangelis Calotychos From the collection Aegean (1941) [earlier version published in the collection Manolis Lekas and Other Stories, 1928]

Once there were three fishermen, young men all, and an old man. They were sitting under a plane tree in Thérmi, on the shores of Lesbos, untangling their fishing nets. This is tedious work that ought to be done as soon as the fishing comes to an end and the nets are hauled in from the sea. Long centipede-like worms were dangling from the untouched bait, their pale red surface stinging like nettles to the touch. But they are harmful in other ways, too, for they ruin the bait by clinging to it and leaving no room for the fish to bite. The fishermen retrieve the hooks one-by-one from this damp tangled clump as it lies in the crates and they clean the lines—the tippets, that is—and the hooks before spreading them out over the crates’ cork bottoms. The two fishermen untangling the fishing nets under the plane tree in Thérmi were the Fotiadis brothers. The other two, father and son, were refugees from across the way, from the town of Aivalí in Asia Minor. “Well, how did you make out today, Dimitró?” asked the old man of one of the brothers drying his hands on his breeches in order to roll a cigarette. He was happy to answer the question. “Two crates of red mullet in the nets and five breams,” he said. “How about you?” The old man shrugged. “You know the old story by now, don’t you? Two panfuls of sargus and an okka of sea bream, if that.”

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“What do you expect, Old Man Andreas? If you don’t hustle nowadays you won’t make ends meet! We’re telling you: let Bat come with us to Lios on your boat. Let him come, won’t you? Ah, but you don’t listen! You just don’t listen!” “No, no, my friend,” the old man protested vehemently as if to prove that he would not be swayed. “We are a big family, and poorer than most. If they catch us and take away our boat, what will we do? We’re done for. No, I can’t let that happen!” A handful of fishermen would set out to the East to fish, right there, near the islet of Lios. It was, you see, a few years after the Catastrophe, the Asia Minor Catastrophe. From Thérmi, Lios is only about ten miles away, a barren isle located just outside Aivalí’s bay, its waters teeming with fish. For a short time right after the Asia Minor Catastrophe, no-one from the shores of Lesbos, not one of the local fishermen or the refugee fishermen for that matter, would set sail in the direction of Lios. But not long after, some of the lads said enough is enough. Mytilene had been flooded by such multitudes of people who lived off the sea that what was the poor sea to do? She gave and gave and she gave some more until she had no more fish to give. For a while after that, they resorted to using dynamite, but the contraband patrol made the rounds of all the beaches and, soon enough, that door slammed shut too. So, what next? A few men steeled themselves and set forth one night towards the blessed waters of Lios. The next morning, they returned with crates brimming with fish. So they went again. All good. Then again. And again. But the day soon came when it all turned sour for them. The Turk got wind of their activity. After all, Lios was a border zone, a strictly forbidden area, and the Turks had an old gas boat patrolling the barren islands all around. Finally, sure enough, what the Thérmi fishermen most feared came to pass: the Turks captured one of their boats. In the fishing hamlets of Thérmi they waited for the boat to return from Lios; patiently they waited, one, two, three days: neither hide nor hair. Two weeks later, a passing Turkish caique delivered a note from the crew sent from the prisons in Aivalí, explaining that the Turks had taken their boat and their nets, and asking for ten lira in Turkish bank notes so that they might be set free. For a while, the fishing community of Thérmi was plunged in terror. Noone dared go back to Lios again. But soon enough, they felt the pinch of scarcity and the fishermen, emboldened once again, ventured back to Lios. Again the Turks seized one of their boats; again they cowered with fear; and again were spurred by necessity. Their hard lives, their grim scarcity, the isle of Lios and its bountiful fish, all tightened around them in a ring of alternating fear and hope, of fitful joy and tears.



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Old Man Andreas watched the crates of fish brought back from Lios by the hardy few who were still willing to gamble with their boats and nets. He watched and yearned and bit his lip until he drew blood so as to withstand the temptation. “No! No, my son,” he murmured. “We’ll be ruined.” “Okay, baba,” the son replied begrudgingly. “But this is no life. What are we supposed to do with ten grams of sea bream? Someday I won’t be able to take it any longer. I’ll cut out and leave. And may the cards fall wherever.” “He’s right!” one of the two brothers who sailed to Lios interrupted as he chewed on a piece of grilled octopus. “You, old Man Andreas, are carrying on like a weeping Virgin. Let him come with us, go on. It’s all about luck. Do or die, what do you say?” Andreas’s white head shook obdurately, fearfully, as if warding off a danger as clear and inexorable as fate itself. “No! No!” Time passed. And each time, until the return of the boats that left for Lios under the cover of darkness, countless pairs of eyes—the eyes of the children, wives, and mothers of the men putting their lives on the line—would stare out to sea in anguish. The other fishermen, those who would make do with the sargus and bream drawn from the safety of Lesbos’s waters, spoke peevishly about the brave young lads of Lios. “Oh, brother . . . they’re asking for trouble and their children will pay for their folly. What’s their problem? As if we don’t understand, we have families too, you know.” These were the only moments they squarely confronted the temptations of Lios, because amidst everyone else’s anguish their feet felt firm on the dock, awash as they were in the wild satisfaction of safety. As they sold their catch, the fishermen would sit together and chat. The braver souls among them would tell stories about Lios: how they had made out and such. The others, the cautious bunch, nodded their heads without the least desire to change their minds. It was the same thing in the evenings at the fish tavern by the shore: Lios this, Lios that. The name tripped off their tongues with emotion, fear, amazement, hatred, as if the island had done them both harm and good. It unsettled them and they cursed it, as one does with anything out of the ordinary in this life. Man’s fate works in mysterious ways, however. Old Man Andreas kept plodding along steadily, humbly, in his God-fearing way. No Lios, no red mullet, no trouble. He ought to have known that his peaceful home would be wracked

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by some violent disturbance, for it seems that God cannot resist dipping his hand even in a crate filled only with sargus and bream. One morning, Uncle Andreas and his son returned from fishing, their heads bowed, crates empty of nets. The sea had taken them, and there they stayed, entangled in the rocks on the sea floor, resting peacefully. The family had to go into debt to buy new hooks and line for netting. They were floundering under this debt and paying it off required huge sacrifices, big decisions, bold throws of the dice. The old fisherman shook his white head with complete conviction only a few more times. Soon, though, this gesture became less frequent and less assured, as his sleepless eyes begrudgingly accepted the grim reality. He didn’t say “yes” outright, but his tremulous hand patted his son on the back very gently, even though he could not look him in the face. The young man felt the blood coursing in his veins suddenly warm with vitality and his face set intently. He was a twenty-five-year-old lad, with only one hand. The other arm was severed at the wrist, but it was as if nothing was missing and did not hinder him in any way. The story of his hand goes back ten years: During the first European war, the English had captured about a hundred men and put them on another one of the deserted islands—on Gymnos, outside the bay of Ayvali. If you so much as whisper on Ayvali’s coastline, you will be heard in Gymnos—that is how close it is. By deploying this rebel force so close to the Turkish shore, the English aimed to keep an eye on the Turks. The men were hand-picked from among the brave lads of Ayvali who had fled as refugees to Lesbos. In effect, though, the English demand that they stay on Gymnos was tantamount to a death sentence, and they were the only men in a position to make this sacrifice. After all, they were the last in line of a proud race that would be extinguished with their demise. They had spent their entire lives dealing in contraband, drinking wine, and exacting revenge on anyone who dared the least slight to their honor or offense to a friend of theirs. They conducted themselves with an air of pride and humility, and when they drank they were taciturn and quiet as if observing liturgy. When they rose to dance, tabors resounded with ringing austerity, and their gestures as they danced were equally austere and spare, measured to the solemn cadences of a religious rite. Everything about them was subject to the power of ceremony, their individuality tempered by the dictates of tradition. It was plain to see how for these hot-blooded, volatile men, the ritual of dance relieved their hearts—the same deep desire that every man harbors to lose himself in the moment and disappear in the consciousness of collectivity. On Gymnos, these young men had no other protection from the open thoroughfare of the sea save for their weapons. Every ten days, a small Allied ship



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stopped by with food and supplies before continuing on its way. Alone again, the rebels trained their eyes on Anatolia’s mainland, every inch of which they knew so well. Oftentimes, mournfully, they sang songs of exile. When the skies were clear and the winds still, they could clearly make out the enemy sentries on the opposite shore. They fired a shot in the air to let the sentries know they had been spotted, and then from over there, they responded in kind. At night, they listened to the songs from across the way. When a Turk sings, it is as if the entire East pervades the air, and the rebels of Gymnos would silently gather on the island’s very brim to listen to the man singing on the nearby shore. It was a rainy winter night. That morning an Allied boat had delivered tobacco and wine to the rebels on Gymnos, and they had spent the day drinking and drinking. By late that night they were all blind drunk. Even the men manning the sentry posts had indulged. And so the Turks, on tugboats approaching from three different directions, made a landing on Gymnos. By the time the drowsy sentries took notice, it was too late. All through the night until dawn, one by one, these men were lost: drunkenly battling in a darkness frightful with anguished cries, they expired. A number of days later, when the Allied boat returned to Gymnos, the stench from their mud-caked, blood-soaked corpses could be smelled from a distance. Only a smooth-faced, fifteen-year old lad, who had accompanied one of the rebels, his uncle, had managed to escape by hiding in a cave, his hand pierced by a bullet. They found the limp, pale boy disfigured by terror, trembling among the corpses. This lad was the young fisherman, Petros, also known as the Bat. His hand had become putrid with infection and they had had to amputate it. Because of the story of his hand, he had become famous all over Lesbos. There was not a soul on the island who had not gone to hear from his very own lips the story of the end of Gymnos. Pointing to his amputated arm, he would lay out all the details, his own bit part in the story, always the same each time, without embellishments or variation, as it had become rote from so many retellings. And from that time on, his life was eclipsed by this constant retelling of the horror on Gymnos, by the rebels, the tugboats, the terror of the attack, the blood, the frightful game of war and death. Using gunpowder and incense, a renowned tattooist had used all his skill to etch an intricate scene on the young man’s chest. It was a terrifying allegorical composition: a tree with a lion under its branches. Coiled tightly all around its torso, a snake was crushing the breath out of the lion. In the clutches of this terrible embrace, the lion had fallen to its knees, head reared back in agony. A second, thicker snake was approaching from the opposite direction. A real monster, it too seemed to be crushing the young fisherman’s

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torso, its tail sinking into his bellybutton while the head looked up at the kneeling lion, mouth agape as if a ball had been rammed down its throat. In a corner next to the tree leaves hovered a bat, a half-moon by its side. The strangest element in the entire composition was this bat, and so everyone began referring to the young fisherman as the Bat. At first, the nickname bothered him, but then he became used to it, as he did to the snakes and lions that girdled him. After all, they saw each other every day, along with the smiling mermaid etched on his good arm. Taken together—the snakes, the kneeling lion, the bat, the mermaid, the blood of Gymnos— formed a small heart, a clump of mud that had set so completely there was no way of reshaping it. The Bat’s first trip to Lios, the “do or die trip” was marked with all due ceremony. On the eve of the trip, the family gathered for an early dinner around the low table: the parents, two daughters, a younger son, and The Bat. They ate in silence, their heads bowed. When they finished, there was a measure of fuss and bustle as they cleared away the table, but then they subsided into silence again. Unable to stand it any longer, the Bat burst out angrily: “Have you all gone dumb? Well, what is it?” He really had no sense of fear. Yet, even though, he did not fear for his own skin, he knew what it would mean to his family if their boat were seized by the Turks. The burden of responsibility lay like a heavy chain around his heart. Instead of helping him this evening and giving him courage, damn it, everyone had gone quiet as if in the presence of a corpse. It upset him. “I’m going to lie down,” he told his mother. “Make my bed!” Soon after, they all trailed one by one to their beds. In the darkness, the silence deepened. After an hour had passed, a stirring came from old man Andreas’s direction. “Hey, old man!” the Bat hissed to see if he was up. He too replied with a hiss: “Eh!” “Are you up?” “I’m up.” Then, silence again as they tried to sleep. The Bat had to get up at around midnight for his trip. The old man had not slept a wink, so he rose and shuffled towards his son, but the young fisherman sat up, preempting him. “Didn’t you sleep?” old man Andreas asked in alarm. “Yes! Yes! I slept!” he insisted. The entire family was now up on its feet, all staring at him in the eyes. The Bat realized that they were trying to give him courage. He bowed his



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head, made a quick gesture with his hand as if waving goodbye, and disappeared into the night. They set sail, and the cooling night breeze swept over him, flooding his heart with its balsam. The Bat was relieved—in closed quarters his thoughts echoed and multiplied. He began to whistle. But in the gentleness of the breeze, his thoughts started turning again in his mind. His whistling became asthmatic, stifled as he momentarily forgot the familiar tune and struggled to regain it, and in the attempt to recapture the fleeting tune, the troubled thoughts that accompanied his whistling disappeared for a short while. He truly was not scared. Something else had him in its clutches, a feeling that had him shuddering from head to toe and would not allow him to sit still at the rudder as if he were standing on burning coals. It was the first time since the horror on Gymnos that he was venturing on their lands and there was a chance he might come face-to-face again with the Turk, his childhood foe. When the war ended in 1919 and he returned with other Asia Minor Greeks to their homes in Anatolia, the Bat had not encountered a single Turk in his country. They had all fled. Later, during the Catastrophe of 1922, the Bat had embarked on a ship for Mytilene before the Turks reached his village, Ayvali. For this reason, in anticipation of setting foot on Turkish soil, it was all coming back to him: Gymnos, the disembarking troops, the dark night of slaughter, the amputated hand, the tattoo, expatriation, Christian blood, and the terrible burden of responsibility for his family. It all blended into one peculiar note, a whistling that burned deep inside of him. The two boats—the one manned by the Fotiadis brothers on their regular trip to Lios and the other manned by the Bat—sailed side by side, a mere 20 meters distance between them. The young fisherman heard singing from the other boat. Behind him, the rudder’s churning wake twinkled until the waves covered its green phosphorescent eyes. “Hey, Bat!” Dimitros called out from the nearby boat, abandoning his song. “You afraid?” The whistling stopped. “Who, me, afraid? Why, my friend?” “Just because. I thought I’d ask!” “Ah!” Then suddenly, after all these years, it all came back to him! Turning his eyes away from the sea so as not to look at her, he cast them down into the hold like more ballast and remembered: After the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922, the Bat left Aivalí with his family and disembarked at Plomári, on Mytilene. Every day, ship after ship

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disgorged wretched, rebellious soldiers who had barely escaped with their lives from the hell and tragedy they left behind. Other ships flying American flags covered the wharves with their rotting cargo of women and children borne from Anatolia. At the time, three local Turks were found in Plomári. When our own maddened people caught wind of them, they raised a tremendous hue and cry for their blood. Prodding with their rifle butts they led them to the long ladder at the end of the pier. They attached a plank at the top of the ladder and shoved the first Turk towards its edge. Down below, the sea was at least twelve feet deep. The hapless Turk, a landlubber in his forties, had never set foot in the sea. In order to frighten him, our people took aim with their rifles and the crowds flooding the nearby shores broke into manic cheers. A frenzied mob, they were gesticulating wildly and shrieking, urging the Turk to fall. “Go! Go! Go on already, you dirty dog!” The Turk froze, dumbfounded. The thick, suffocating stream of the mob’s cries washed over him, wave after wave, pushing him forward. And the rifles’ dark holes were there, too, turned insistently on him. “Go! Get a move on!” He took a step on the plank, one, then two, before he stumbled. One of his legs buckled back and forth jarringly and he fell into the water flat on his back in comical clumsiness. The mob was short-breathed with excitement, with anticipation. The other two Turks looked on—it was their turn next. They threw one into the water because, begging for mercy, he refused to budge. The third and last one, however, knew how to swim. As soon as he hit the water, he began to paddle desperately towards the ladder. The crowd charged; someone began by throwing a stone, and then a multitude of hands began casting rocks as if in competition with each other. Swallowing water, the condemned struggled to stay afloat with steely eyes. The Bat too picked up a large stone, aimed carefully and threw it with all his strength at the wet face wracked by despair. On impact, the blood flowed but it was quickly washed away by the sea—as if trying to hide her filth. * “Hey Bat!” he heard them calling him from the other boat. “Are you scared?” “Me, Dimitro? Why?” he replied. When they reached Lios, they cast their fishing nets and dropped anchor behind a low bluff that hid them from view. “Let’s see whether you’ll be our lucky charm and they catch us on your first trip!” remarked one of the brothers from the other boat.



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Overcome by misgiving, the young fisherman made a great effort not to lose his resolve and break down like a woman at the eleventh hour. “Oh brother!” he cried, “And then, what?” What happened then was that Lios was relieved of several crates of fish. The Bat’s eyes welled up with emotion. Five more runs like this and his family’s debt would be wiped out! They were preparing to leave. The brothers’ boat was the first to raise its sails. After that, the story unfolded very quickly: by the time he knew what had befallen him, the Bat was caught in the trap. The Turks came from the eastern side of the bluff and blocked his path. “Dur! Halt!” The brothers’ boat had managed to slip away and was already about two hundred meters away, so the Turks did not give chase. The Turkish boat was not a patrol boat, but a fishing boat with a crew of fishermen and a lone soldier sent to keep an eye on Lios. They disembarked onto dry land. The Turkish fishermen were Cretan refugees. When the Bat realized that they were talking in Greek, his heart gladdened, but then almost at the same time he remembered that word was that the Cretans were the most fanatic of all the millets. He turned to the soldier, who looked wild, enraged. Shouting, cursing, striking out against the still air of Lios, he was, at that moment, lord and master of all he surveyed on the bare island. “And whose fault is it?” the Cretan fishermen were addressing the Christian. “You, little brother, are all gouging out your eyes with your own hands. What do you expect us to do? Sit with our hands crossed! Now it is time to pay for your sins!” The Bat quickly came to his senses. So much so, he could take pride in the fact that when the critical moment came, he was prepared, his heart resolute, or rather, his heart struggling mightily to stay resolute and stop pounding. For this reason, words evaded him. He did not want to plead with them and offer explanations, that it was all because of the nets snagged on the ocean floor, or the debt, or his father’s white hair, or the family waiting back home. No, he answered their questions bluntly and briefly, his dignity intact. “We were in need,” is all he said and bowed his head. They sat on the sandy beach. The morning was bright and calm, gleaming waves surging in front of them. The soldier took out some tobacco and rolled a cigarette, then he passed the pouch to the other Cretan fishermen. He hesitated a little before handing it to the hostage to roll one as well. “Well, you can have one, too, I suppose,” he huffed condescendingly.

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The Bat hesitated and the soldier suddenly realized that the Bat was missing a hand. “Are you a cripple, oglun?” The Bat took the tobacco pouch and nodded. The soldier looked him over with a sneaking suspicion in his eyes. “From the war?” “Yes, the war.” “Our men did this?” “Your men.” “Really!” the Turk hastened to exclaim proudly. “And whose fault was that? You asked for it! You pigs!” The Bat returned the tobacco pouch without having opened it. “Ah! You can’t roll a cigarette with one hand, can you?” the soldier exclaimed, more softly this time. “Roll it for him!” he motioned to one of the Cretans. They rolled a cigarette for him, and for a short while, they sat there smoking in silence. The breeze took the smoke, dispersed it, turned it into light blue sky. Then, it occurred to the soldier that the prisoner had spoken to him in Turkish. Where had he learnt Turkish? “I am an Anatolian,” the Christian replied. “Have you come here before? Do you know this place?” “I am from this area, I’m an Aivaliótis.” “Ah, so we are in your neck of the woods!” the soldier surmised, as if he had arrived at some great insight. About half a mile from the shore, a dolphin was passing through the open waters off Lios. Every now and then, its back curved up out of the sea, and then back down it would go, always at the same regular pace, the same distance, indomitably, dispassionately, almost ceremonially. The conversation turned and the soldier instructed the Cretan fishermen to speak in Turkish so that he might understand them as well. “Well then, how do you get along with the Greeks?” the fishermen asked their captive. “We are refugees; we have a difficult life,” the Bat replied. “We, on the other hand, lived very well on Crete before the war,” said the Cretan. “What? You reckon we weren’t happy living in our homes before the war?” The Cretans started a meandering conversation about the pleasures of daily life on their island before the war, before they had to leave with the population exchange: the olive trees, the sea, the people. They even remembered that a Christian had built the mosque in their village, because all the native Turks were poor and did not have the means to provide shelter for their prophet.



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Gone was the morning’s early crispness and the glaring sunlight dissipated every haziness, called forth every hidden line. In this barren little corner of Lios where these men had sat themselves down, the conversation that began with hard and bitter words gradually mellowed out. The fishermen from Crete were elderly; they had seen out more than three quarters of their life. Theirs had been stable and quiet lives, shorn of ups and downs, and despite the fact that now, in their twilight years, they were facing hardship, their hearts were still full, buoyed by the good old days—those first three quarters of their lives. “Yes, yes!” one of them concluded. “The suffering that both you and we have experienced cannot be God’s will. It’s the devil’s work.” “Nothing happens that is not the will of the Prophet, oglun,” the soldier protested categorically. “You’re right! But tell me, has such chaos been visited on our world before? Doesn’t that tell you that it’s the devil’s work?” The soldier was a simpleton, a naïve Anatolian hick. One of those gullible bovine types whose understanding of life is reducible to the fact that the sun rises in the morning, that Allah is One, and that far away from this sea-bound land, somewhere near Diyarbakir, a hut, a woman, and two children are waiting for him. “The world is like a hoop and happy is the man who makes it spin,” he replied with a Turkish proverb. The hapless fisherman from Crete had an old, beat-up hoop on his island; nonetheless he spun it here and spun it there; in short, he tried as much as was possible with it. And now? Well, now, others lounge around taking their time, holding forth about hoops . . . “Brother,” he remarked with bitterness to the soldier. “It seems to me that you traveled on a different boat to this world down here. You definitely have nothing haunting your memory.” The soldier spun around abruptly and looked him full in the face. “How do you know that, oglun?” “Hmm! I see it, brother! This Greek with his severed arm right in front there, you captured him on land that was his. And as you can see, we also came from an island that we cannot forget. You, however . . .” The soldier trimmed his voice, as if doling it out in small, quiet and solemn doses. “Really! That’s what you think, is it? You think I wouldn’t want to be back home, oglun, that I don’t have something to remember? You reckon, I don’t have a family, too . . .” Truth be told, how could a man his age, the head of a family, be a soldier? Sure enough he had done a runner during the war. It was a dog’s life back then. They would hunt deserters down and hang them to send a message to

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the rest. It was such an ordeal to be a soldier then—no food, no clothing— that some chose to risk hanging rather than go to the army. When the war ended and both deserters and unconscripted men came down from the mountains, old accounts were settled and they were given a reprieve on condition that they served their time. It was the mildest of punishments. So he had had to leave them again—his wife, the children—at the moment when they needed him most. Little by little, the commanding soldier softened his voice, let his brows droop. Overcome by bitterness, he had completely forgotten that a Christian was sitting before him, listening to what he was saying. Yes, down there in Diyarbakir, there is a hut. . . . But the story left the Bat cold, unmoved. He had prepared long and hard to get to this point in his short life. The blood of Gymnos does not wash off easily. Right under his eyes, his severed arm rested on his breast. At Plomári, a head with wide open eyes plunged furiously into the sea. Blood! Blood! Silently, he puffed on his cigarette. They were all silent. “You know we should be leaving,” one of the Cretans said at some point. “We have work waiting for us at Moschonisia!” Suddenly coming to, the soldier looked up. “Right! We should be going!” “Right, let’s make it snappy!” The Bat felt his heart pounding as if it would come out of his chest. The time had come: This is it, this is the end, my son. The soldier looked at him closely and nodded his head: “Let’s go!” He stood up, but the Cretan fishermen did not stir. One scratched his head as if wanting to say something, as if mulling it over. The conversation’s warm friendliness was still heavy in the air. Finally, the Cretan made up his mind. “Hemşehri,” he told the soldier. “Hemşehri.” But, the soldier cut him off, and impassively paced a couple of times in place to stretch his benumbed legs. “What is it? “Hemşehri . . .” the Turkish fisherman repeated, plucking up some courage. “He is just a poor guy, a cripple. What do you say?” What? No! No! He is a soldier and is bound to do his duty. He is the one in charge. He shakes his head. “No! I understand what you are trying to say, comrade. But no, this cannot happen!” “A good deed finds its reward in heaven,” the Cretan beseeched him. “May your homecoming be a happy one, brother. Let him be!” The soldier continued to protest.



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“No!” No. But somewhere faraway, near Dyarbakir, there is a small hut . . . Completely lost, the Bat just stood there. The scene was beyond belief. “Yes, yes,” said the Cretan as he approached the captive and ushered him on his way while staring into the eyes of the soldier as if trying to divine the game playing out in his heart. Instinctively the commanding soldier looked around to make sure that no one was watching. They were in the middle of nowhere. He stood still for a moment, deathly still. Then he took a deep breath, Diyarbakir! Diyarbakir! Spinning around halfway, he slammed his hand with great force into the ground. “Ai sichtir!” he groaned, wishing to conceal his weakness. After all, everyone wants to hide their vulnerability. “Get out of here! Quick! Quick!” the Cretan barked at the Bat, giving him a hard shove. Completely dumbfounded, his mind a blur, the Bat leapt into his boat, lifted the scantling, and raised the sail. “Hey!” the Cretan howled from dry land. “Listen, cripple, never step on this land! Allah Simarlantik!” “Allah Simarlantik!” the Christian fisherman replied with an angry cry. The wind gusted heartily. Amidst the splash of waves breaking against the boat, the Bat heard a gunshot. Were they shooting at him? No, about a hundred meters to his right, a seagull was scuttling over the waves as if kissing their crests. The gunshot hurled it sideways a short distance; it tried to soar up but struggling in vain, it suddenly plummeted into the waves and disappeared. On the island, the soldier lowered his gun. He tried to make up an excuse for shooting the sea-gull. Why had he done it? There are times when one cannot answer such questions, not even to oneself. He felt only sadness, rage, an inner upheaval, that is all he knew. Staring absently at the spot where the sea-gull had gone down, he caught a glimpse of a floating white wing. “Ai sichtir,” he cursed again. The Bat sailed out into the open seas. The waves dashed against the prow of his small fishing boat and sprayed him, but his mind was still clouded. He made a great effort to put his thoughts in order, but it was impossible. His joy was suffocating. It was as if a huge wave had broken over him. He was struggling to explain it to himself, but his entire life prohibited him from accepting such an explanation. After all, he could only judge this event on his own terms. What would he have done had he been the one in command? He was at a loss, he simply did not know. What had transpired in Lios, the behavior was like nothing he knew: it was neither bravery nor weakness, not

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even kindness, nothing. It remained suspended before eyes tearful with joy that could only gaze out in wonder and incredulity. The return to Lesvos seemed endless. As if they had been stretched out on purpose, the hours would not come to an end. Gradually, after talking out loud to himself and constantly turning over the events from Lios, he began to get used to them. Soon they no longer surprised him. His cries of joy became intermittent, then fewer and further between, before dying out completely He remained lost in thought over the Aegean waves that glimmered like molten silver under the dazzling sun. When he dropped anchor in Thérmi late in the day, there was an uproar in the fishing village. The brothers’ boat had returned with the terrible news about the Bat. That is why people could not believe their eyes when they saw him mooring. He, too, did not know where to begin, how to talk about what had befallen him. Completely puzzled, the fishermen listened to the strange ins and outs of his story, staring in disbelief. Some time passed, he sold the fish, and then walked to his cottage. He still could not quite believe it, find peace with it, and it shook him from head to toe. But his resistance was like that of a fish weakly sputtering in its last throes on the deck of a ship. He went to walk alone by the shore. There was a coffee-house where many young couples from Mytilini came to enjoy the sea and their love. He watched a young couple kiss under the shade of a tree. The boy was dark-skinned and brown-eyed, the girl blonde with long hair cascading over her shoulders. On their table a plate with two large mullets from Lios awaited them. The two abandoned mullets lay there bathed in the waning light, while the boy and the girl, the young couple in love, hovered above them. How strange to see in that tranquil spot the fish from Lios lying there serenely. The night was soft and sweet, and the Bat felt as if a burden was lifting, and that he too was becoming one with the tranquility enveloping him. Whistling, he returned to the fishermen’s café at Thérmi. Some local kids who worked on the trawler nets were sitting under the plane-tree. They were trying to tattoo Hanos’ son’s arm. One of them, the tattooist, was dipping the stick with the fine needles into the smoky incense doused in rakí and etching over the design previously sketched in pencil on the skin of Hanos’s son’s arm. “Hey there, Bat!” “Hello! What are you doing?” he asked and approached to take a look. “Mermaids?” “This here is going to be a heart,” the tattooist replied earnestly. “But I don’t know if I ought to put a cross or a knife on top.” “Why not a grasshopper? It would be a perfect match!” the Bat teased.



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He sat and watched what was happening with keen interest. Night was falling; the leaves in the plane trees trembled as if aroused by the caress of the breeze; the seaweed emitted a pungent smell. Every now and then, when the pain was too much for him, Hanos’s young son let off a shriek that he immediately stifled so as to pretend that he was not afraid. “Remind me now, what else have you got besides the snakes and the bat?” the tattooist asked the young fisherman, trying to remember. “On my arm, you mean?” “Yeah.” “I got a mermaid.” “Let me see!” The Bat pulled up his shirt sleeve: a wild, crudely-drawn, human face, neither masculine nor feminine, with two leaden eyes like hollow sockets. The bottom part of the figure was a fish tail. “Man, this is a real ghost!” the tattooist scoffed. “You see, there’s an art to everything, Bat. Well, wait until I tattoo a mermaid for you—then you’ll really see something! Like Big Stratos, by God!” “What are you talking about?” said the Bat ironically, so as to irritate him. “By God! By God, I tell you!” the other defended his skills. “Like you don’t believe me, like you don’t believe I can do it!” The Bat was in such high spirits that he felt the need to buoy this young man’s, too. “What do you say, boys?” he laughingly questioned the group. “Are we going to buy all this?” The others goaded him on. “Go on, man! We want to see it! Let’s see it!” “Alright,” said the Bat, shaking his head with a smile. “Come on, then!” He started to turn up the sleeve over his good arm, then paused. A sudden, amusing thought occurred to him. No, there was a mermaid on his good arm already. He ought to tattoo the other one, the severed one. He smiled. Yes, the other arm. He always had it wrapped, as if swaddled. First, he loosened the ties and then unbound them: a lump of flesh like a dead thing, a nothing; the cut was a mass of puckers and wrinkles, like the skin on an ancient face. “Come on!” he nodded to the boy, the tattoo artist. But the startled boy was staring, hesitating. “There?” he faltered. “On the wounded arm?” “Yes. Why?” “No, nothing.” He wet his pen.

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“Well? Is it going to be a mermaid then?” The Bat thought it over. Why a mermaid? He already had one on the other arm. “Wait a second, boys. Why a mermaid?” he asked. “I would like it to be a mermaid so I can show you all!” the tattooist declared. “But it can be whatever you want, really. What have you got in mind, brother?” “Well, hell if I know,” the Bat asked himself, trying to come up with something. “Let’s make it . . . to hell with it, all this trouble we got ourselves into!” He smiled. “What about a battleship . . . No, not a battleship! . . .” “A deer!” suggested one of the boys. “No, no,” repeated the Bat. Suddenly it came to him. “What about some kind of bird! Are you up to it, boy? Yes! We are seamen, after all . . . Let’s make it . . . let’s make it a seagull!” He almost choked on his words, struggled to get them out, but he did in the end. The others stared at him, surprised: the snakes, the bat, and now a seagull! Oh, brother! Ashamed, he lowered his glowing eyes to the ground, like a girl. The blood from the needles trickled into the fine folds of flesh that made his wound resemble a small, wizened face. And there appeared a seagull, or something like that—a few thick, crass lines, mingled with trickling blood, the soot of incense and rakí. From now on, the snakes, the mermaid, the bat, and the lion would have another frightened companion: a bird. The Bat—he did not show any pain. He was happy; he did not feel a thing, for he was whistling.

HISTORY FROM THE STORYTELLER’S VIEWPOINT

Chapter Fifteen

Four Hundred Pleats A short story by Amanda Michalopoulou Translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich

Βy the end of my studies I was acting like a true Brit. I ate baked beans for breakfast, called my roommate “my lovely,” and every Saturday would go to Harrods’s and buy some small, useless object. The olives I had bought in a fit of nostalgia rotted in their glass jar in the dorm’s refrigerator, behind a label that read Authentic Greek Olives. After I turned in my master’s thesis, I returned home. My parents both worked—to put me through college, as they often reminded me—at an advertising agency. Thanks to the agency, they had got wrapped up in the upcoming Olympics. The house was full of hats and mugs bearing the Olympic logo. They came home at night so tired they would forget words. “Have you seen the whatsit?” they’d say. My father had given up football. My mother even forgot my birthday. It was July when I first saw him. On my way home I passed by the Parliament, dragging my feet, eyes on the ground. So I saw his shoes first, with their funny pompoms. Then the white leggings of his summer uniform, the pleats of his skirt—the traditional foustanela, blindingly white in the sun—his bayonet, his well-polished gun. His chest was wide and strong under his fermeli. His face was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen: eyes as green as the olives I had left to rot, a long, thin nose, velvety lips, and a vein in his left temple that bulged as if it were carved from stone. His eyes met mine with that harsh, severe look they must learn during basic training. It was love at first sight for us both. I passed whole days in front of Parliament, living on water and koulouria I bought from street vendors, like the backpack-laden tourists. Eventually I learned his shifts. Three times a day, for five hours at a time, he would stand straight-backed and motionless under his awning, and on the half-hour would dance his peculiar dance. Morning, noon, and night I watched those slapping 257

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steps with his funny shoes, the sleight of hand with his bayonet. The rest of the time he was forbidden from moving—but there was no way they could control the movements of his eyes. Then one evening everything changed. The sky was as blue as in touristy postcards from the islands. It was August 15—the Assumption of Mary, day of miracles—and a north wind was blowing. The branches of the trees on Vassilisis Sophia bent gently but firmly toward the pavement. “I’m in love with you,” I told my evzone. “What kind of a man are you, anyway?” “I’m not a man right now. I’m not a hundred percent man,” my evzone whispered. “I’m an idea.” “Bullshit.” “My foustanela has four hundred pleats. One for each year of the Ottoman Occupation.” “So you’re still afraid of the Turks? Jesus, can’t you live without enemies?” “Right now you’re my worst enemy,” he said sadly. “So leave your post for once. Make your famous idea more human.” “Find a bike.” “What?” “A bike, I said. A motorcycle.” I stood in the middle of Vassilisis Sophias and pulled a girl off her motorbike. She fought back. I jerked her hair, bit her arm. I whistled to my evzone. He hopped onto the seat, and I hung on behind him. There were two police cars right on our tail, but my evzone, in a single, graceful movement, pulled out his bayonet and slashed their tires. He ran all the red lights and we ducked into the narrow sidestreets of Plaka. It smelled of fried cod. When he turned off the engine we could hear the police sirens more clearly. “You’re crazy.” He said: “There’s just something I want to show you.” We pushed the motorbike into a little yard off a quiet lane in Anafiotika. We rolled it behind a staircase and moved a few oil drums potted with basil to hide it. With his bayonet he cut the rope off a wooden swing and shoved it under his vest. His tights had got dirty. As for the four hundred pleats, they had got completely squashed. “So much for the Ottoman Empire,” I chuckled. My evzone shot me a stern glance, then nodded for me to follow him. When we reached the base of the Holy Rock he took the rope out of his vest, tied it to the tip of his bayonet, made a few knots, and we started our upward climb. He would stick the bayonet into crevices in the rock, we’d step on the knots to climb up, then search for jutting rocks to stand on while he pulled



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out the bayonet and wedged it in a little higher. By the time we reached the Parthenon the sun was gone from the sky. The columns were lit up at night like the teeth of some mythic beast. My evzone had ripped his dress on the climb, but he was more beautiful and angrier than ever. “What did you want to show me?” He took one of my cigarettes, lit it, and sat down cross-legged at the edge of the rock. “See there, in the distance? That’s where I live. See that lighted window? Not that building, with the pool on the terrace—what kind of family do you think we are? A little to the left, in that apartment building. My parents must be eating. They fight over which channel to watch; they don’t have money for a second TV.” “We have three. Want one of ours?” “They wouldn’t accept. My mother may go to the market with an empty wallet, but she never leaves the house without lipstick. As for my father . . . ” “What?” “He’s aged. He doesn’t see well anymore. He holds his newspaper upsidedown.” He opened his arms and I burrowed into his embrace. It was a large white embrace that smelled of green soap and mothballs. I tried to pull off his shoes and tights. I tugged at his foustanela. My evzone didn’t resist. On the contrary, he encouraged me, taking my face in his hands and kissing it gently with his frozen lips. But the fabrics were very stiff, like marble, and seemed stuck to his skin. I grabbed hold of his bayonet, I fondled him through his tights—all I felt was the cold wind of history.

Chapter Sixteen

Think Before You Learn Excerpt from The Scapegoat by Sophia Nikolaidou Translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich

1948–2010: BEFORE AND AFTER Nikiforos Dinopoulos, Lawyer for Manolis Gris I don’t underestimate power. I don’t judge anyone for having it. What troubles people—and rightly so, if you ask me—is how a nation’s leaders shirk their responsibilities. They insist on blaming outside forces for the country’s woes rather than their own decisions. They refuse to acknowledge their own failures. Justice means each individual getting what he deserves. And virtue is the pursuit of justice. At least that’s what Aristotle tells us. It sounds old-fashioned, doesn’t it? Today’s lawmakers are less strict about such things, more willing to water their wine. Legislation has a responsibility to be neutral, they all say. It has no right to convert, or to try to force good on anyone. Virtue isn’t about coercion. Justice, above all, implies freedom of choice. All sorts of things were said about the case, which most people separated into lies and truths. The reporters who got involved never considered what we might call inexactitudes. The ignorant fools couldn’t tell the difference. Whereas the lawyers’ evasions clearly demonstrate respect for the law. They took care to package the evidence well, to keep up pretenses to the very end. Sometimes they departed from the law, other times they took refuge in legal actions, or interpreted the law in a particular manner. But they never flew in the face of the law, they always paid tribute to the obligation to remain honest. They maintained their professional dignity. They made their decisions. And since the situation demanded it, they moved forward into action. Hindsight is always twenty-twenty, and it’s easy 261

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for people to pass moral judgment. But those involved in the case never acted outside the law. They simply behaved like people who would. Please don’t return to the issue of truth. If you think carrying a law book around ensures that justice will be served, I’m sorry, but you’re being naïve. Life is so much more complicated than that. As for the evidence you refer to, I can’t help but laugh. I lived through two wars and witnessed plenty of military tribunals, and the idea that reality is single and undeniable amuses me. Reality is the ultimate construction—just ask the lawyers and journalists, whose careers rest on that construction. Other people have trouble understanding that. What they summarily call truth is rarely sufficient. Even more rarely does it offer any kind of solution. The dictatorship of the truth. The tyranny of good intentions. There’s nothing more dangerous for a family or a country. Historians show up after the fact. They rummage through locked drawers, discover forgotten papers, conduct their research, pass judgment. When precisely did the Gris case begin? With the murder of Talas, or with the decisions that were made behind closed doors? In history there is no such thing as progress, change, advancing toward the good or sinking into the abyss. I don’t care what the survivors say. Before and after. That’s all there is. And between, a chasm. Anyone who investigates the Gris affair needs to understand one thing: no one made any decisions without agonizing over them first. But everyone felt that the country’s future was at stake. The greatest good for the greatest number, that’s the basic rule of governance. You weigh the options and settle on the least of all evils. Words rarely help. They can’t separate right from wrong. In situations like these everything is a matter of diplomacy. Intentions often have some degree of dignity. Documents don’t. That, perhaps, is the fundamental difference between the two. It would surprise you how easily a piece of evidence can disappear, a signature can be forgotten. The Gris case: Res ipsa loquitur. Marinos Soukiouroglou Marinos Soukiouroglou hated the school. He felt an instinctive disgust for all educational systems, and for the Greek one in particular. He considered it spirit-crushing, obsessive and megalomaniacal. He despised its shallow formalism. The classes in ancient Greek language and culture—which the overwhelming majority considered the crown jewel of the humanities— primarily served, according to his more rarified understanding, to bolster national pride. What dismayed him most was how history was taught. Students learned to think in a static manner, as if issues had a diachronic, unchanging character.



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For the Greek school system historicity was a theoretical concept, essentially unknowable. Meanwhile, most people Souk knew, particularly his colleagues but others as well, had received some reflected version of the European reception of ancient Greek glory and invested it with existential meaning, rather than trying to understand it as a historical construction. A sense of humor about such things was high treason. False modesty oppressed everything. He suspected that the root of all this was an unmentionable—yet systematically cultivated—puritanism that wanted knowledge to hurt. To be unmixed with pleasure or joy. Even more annoying was the school’s simplistic notion of competition, as something limited to final grades. The holy ritual of the Panhellenic Exams gave an official form to the ambitions of students and parents alike. How you scored determined everything, or so most people believed. For Soukiouroglou the exams were just a hazing ritual, a humiliation students had to endure in order to be initiated into the next stage of life. These days the average person on the street was fully convinced that the only option for a bright kid with a desire and ability to learn was to go to university, that anything else would result in certain disaster. Reality, however, didn’t correspond to that collective figment of everyone’s imagination—and when that dawned on members of the entering class, they ended up spending their days at the cafés on the edge of campus. A combination of Greek provincialism and nationalistic narcissism sustained the vicious cycle of the Greek educational system—which, rather than opening up toward the outside, systematically closed in on itself. Kids were raised in a corral where knowledge was kept separate from empirical observation, and where learning was presented as a kind of torture, rather than an exciting or pleasurable adventure. They were taught to have an uncritical respect for textbooks and for a teacher’s authority. Any impulse toward independent thinking was crushed before it ever raised its head. That was why Minas had rebelled. His other teachers called it adolescent anti-conformism. And they had another, easy psychological explanation, which Souk more or less agreed with, though he knew there was more to it than that: they’d all seen Teta in action and had an inkling of how much pressure she put on Minas. For most of them a single conversation with her was enough to make them shake their heads and exchange meaningful looks of despair with their colleagues. Teta had staked her life on her son, as was clear to anyone who had experience dealing with parents. But Souk knew there were deeper roots to Minas’s violent reaction to the institutional framework of education. Sure, Teta was annoying, but that wasn’t a sufficient explanation. Minas had taken on the system itself, and was sure to get what was coming to him. His response was irrational, physical, and absolute.

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No matter how hard Souk tried to approach Minas calmly and neutrally, there was always a note of exasperation in his voice. Even he, who seemed on the surface to have made peace with his decisions and had learned to limit his intellectual ambitions to this sheepfold of a school, continued to be enraged by the idea of failure. He wanted Minas to succeed. He’d have forced him if he could. Souk knew argumentation would have no effect whatsoever, so he tried to get Minas emotionally involved in a case that was a lost cause from the start. Most people considered Soukiouroglou distant and detached. None of them could have imagined how he caught fire in the classroom. It wasn’t just his sardonic wit, his cautious cynicism, or his emphatic precision, the combination of a strict literalism and the most unexpected metaphors. It was above all the way he drew, sometimes in an almost punishing manner, on the emotions—his audience’s but also his own. He knew how to touch a chord, always at precisely the right moment. He managed to mine those emotions the students tried so hard to hide behind their silly grins and stupid comments. He ruled his class like an enlightened despot—which is to say with an oppressive hand disguised as something else. After a year in his class, students had difficulty accepting a different teacher. Of course he hadn’t lived his own life nearly enough. He’d shielded himself from the experiences that had burned so many others his age. But in the classroom he could finally be himself, become the person he believed himself to be. Most of his students were entranced by this transformation, swept up and carried off by the wave of his performance. Yet when the bell rang they were left hanging. The teacher’s thinking and rhetoric may have been the creations of an austere geometry, but the tsunami of his explosions—part performance and part collective psychotherapy—elicited their admiration while also striking them dumb. They set out on the path he carved for them and didn’t dare raise their heads. Very few ever refused to dance to the beat of his drum. Minas was one of them. And it was strange, because Minas lived and breathed for Souk’s sake. Yet he kept his core well protected, didn’t let it be crushed by external pressures. Minas’s strength had been a continual surprise to the teacher, from his first year of middle school until today. Yet Minas also annoyed Souk to no end, precisely because his defenses were impossible to break through. Minas was destined from the crib to be every teacher’s favorite. He knew how to learn from others, from real-life situations. Souk tried to explain to the others what Minas already knew well, because he’d been taught it at home: in learning a book isn’t enough, you need a mind, too. A mind to distil information, to bring things together, to settle on a point of view. There’s no need for students to become carbon copies of their teachers, Souk repeated at



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every opportunity. He used Plato and Aristotle as his example. He loved telling the kids at school—who listened carefully, though who knows how much they understood—that Plato’s absolute idealism, which denied the senses all rights, had been overturned by his student, Aristotle. Sensory grounding, that was Aristotle’s upending of Platonic thought. Minas listened in silence. A flammable adolescent but worthy interlocutor, he was intellectually tolerant yet obsessive about his ideas. Soukiouroglou loved him, but also found him hard to bear. The Things that Happened Before and After, and the Things the Others Never Learned There are good endings and bad ones. In books, that is. In real life, things aren’t so simple, and the victims never get to say their piece. Yet those who judge shall also be judged. History is a boat whose hull is deep under water, and when it capsizes, everything is overturned. That’s what Soukiouroglou struggled to show them, with examples and radical claims. When a top student who was considering military academy said something about the brutality of the Turks, calling on sources and eyewitness accounts, Souk—a third-generation refugee from Asia Minor with first-hand experience of victimization and loss, who certainly could have told his own stories of Turkish brutality, yet judged it a good opportunity for a stern lecture about objectivity, the chimera of so many historians—let loose on the boy. —Let’s take the familiar case of an airspace violation, Souk said, and the students in the front row nodded. The other day, for instance. It was the third story on the news. The Greek minister made some statements, et cetera et cetera, he continued, feigning boredom. But if you spoke Turkish and could read Turkish newspapers, you’d see that their approach to the situation was different. They spoke about the obstruction of military drills, illegal infringement, and so on. Souk himself spoke Turkish fluently—he’d learned from his grandmother—and so he quoted a few headlines with perfect pronunciation. That small bit of showing off made it all more enjoyable for him, like a peacock fanning its tail. —So, he continued, not breaking stride, let’s say fifty or a hundred years from now a Belgian historian decides to write about the incident, and has those sources at his disposal. What objective reality can he offer? —That the sky exists. And that maybe some airplanes flew through it. Minas had spoken without raising his hand, a bad habit he’d had since middle school. Souk had chastised him for it countless times. Then last year Minas withdrew to the very back row and stopped speaking at all, and the

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class had lost its thrill for the teacher, became boring, even. But Soukiouroglou couldn’t encourage that kind of behavior. He ignored Minas’s comment and offered yet another example: how Greeks talk about the fall of Constantinople and the Turks about its conquest. Ever since the fateful day of the presentation (which Minas considered a debacle and Soukiouroglou a teachable moment, while Evelina’s and Minas’s mothers agreed that it had been a huge waste of time), Minas had been an absent presence at school. Not that things had been much better before. So much precious time wasted, Teta complained to Evthalia, the child’s energies spent on useless things, people shouldn’t play those kinds of games with a graduating senior. Evthalia didn’t have much to say in response—Teta was right, in a way, but then again the boy showed everyone what stuff he was made of, as Nikiforos had said. He stood his ground at a moment that would have destroyed so many others, even adults. They all had their degrees, and Minas was just a poor little eighteen-year-old in a General Education class. Which is to say, a nonentity.

Index

Page references for figures are italicized Acropolis, 13, 14, 15, 215 Aivalí, or Ayvalík, 234, 239, 240 Albania, 68–70, 74, 78n5, 79n28, 214 Amaraggi, Maurice, 32–33, 35 Americanism, 58–59; Americanization, 55 Anafiotika, 258 Ananiadis, Jordan, 168 ancient past/antiquity, 1, 4, 13–14, 104, 105, 111, 120, 176, 208, 210 Andrews, Thomas, 57 Angelopoulos, Theo, 188 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 56 Aristotle, 261, 265 Arta (Greek town), 17, 22, 23, 24, 88 Asia Minor Catastrophe, 7, 32, 188, 231–36, 240, 245; Asia Minor Greeks, 17, 23, 30, 55, 126, 245, 265; Exchange of Populations, 7, 77, 126, 231 Atatürk, Kemal, 39 Atzakas, Yannis, 88, 90–92, 91, 94–96 authoritarianism, 2, 188, 208 Avdeliodis, Dimos, 186 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 169 Balkans, 103–4

Barbeito, Patricia Felisa, 123, 131n28 Barratier, Christophe, 185 Benigni, Roberto, 185 Benmayor, Jacky, 37 Benveniste, Rika, 36, 43n14 Bergman, Ingmar, 185 bilingual, 17 borderland, 56–58 Bostantzoglou, Mentis, 143 Boudouris, Vasilis, 186 Boulmetis, Tassos, 186 Boutaris, Giannis, 31 Boutos, Vassilis, 88–90, 92–94, 95–96, 98n16 Bretonne, Rétif de la, 109 Brody, Jennifer DeVere, 59 Carrington, Blake, 174 Cavafy, Constantine P., 13 Chania, Crete, 20–21, 24 child-abduction (παιδομάζωμα), 86–87 children evacuees, 85, 87–88, 90, 92, 96 childtowns, 85–98 Christians: Ottoman period, 17, 21, 23, 233–34, 236 Chouliaras, Yiorgos, 118 Chronopoulou, Elissavet, 186 267

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Index

cinema, 6, 185, 193; Greek, 185ff, 193, 197; “Greek Weird Wave,” 167; New Greek, 185, 187–88, 190–91; Old Greek, 195–96 coexistence, 22, 24, 119, 153, 197 Communist Party of Greece (KKE), 8n2, 39, 85–88 communists, 2, 74, 87, 127, 217, 222 companionship, 105–7, 109–11 Corraface, Georges, 193 Crete, 17, 20, 49, 50, 56, 233; Cretan Muslims in, 10, 233, 247–51; Syrian refugees in, 233 crisis (Greek), 3, 6, 25, 74, 112, 117–19, 125, 129, 135, 138, 143–44, 165, 167, 170, 214 crisis (refugees), 6, 7, 138, 204, 232 Cucinotta, Maria Grazia, 196 cultural field, 53–54, 60

Europeanization, 24, 103 Exarchou, Sofia, 211, 212–213 Fellini, Federico, 186, 191 Fitzpatrick, Kathleen, 118 Florentin, Oscar, 33, 38 forgiveness, 93–96 Foucault, Michel, 62 French Revolution, 106, 109

Davvetas, Nikos, 36 Demertzis, Nikolas, 93 Derrida, Jaques, 29 Diakos, Athanasios, 135–45 Dictatorship of the Colonels, 31, 86, 119–20, 168, 176, 188–92, 194, 197 Dimas, Christos, 186 Dimopoulos, Dinos, 37 Dinesen, Isak, 224 Diyarbakir, 236, 249–251 Douka, Maro, 17, 20, 21, 22 Duke, Philip, 60 Dynasty (series), 174

Gage, Nicholas, 87 Galanaki, Rhea, 18, 117 Galt, Rosalind, 185–86 gender, 3, 6, 139, 158, 168, 173, 192–93 Graikós, 105 Greek-American, 53–54, 59 Greek Civil War, 3–4, 6, 85–87, 89–90, 93, 95–96, 126–27, 176, 187–88, 197 Greek educational system, 1, 129, 262–63 Greek television, 151–61; animation, 165–78; cohabitation comedies, 152; MEGA channel, 151–53, 165, 177; sitcom, 3, 6, 169, 173 Greek War of Independence, 4, 103, 108, 135, 139, 145, 176 Georganta, Konstantina, 69 Georgiadis, Vassilis, 196 Glykofridis, Panos, 191 Golden Dawn, 136, 214 graphic novel, 38 Great Idea, 55 Grigoriadis, Theodoros, 18, 20

earthquake diplomacy, 16 Edison, Thomas, 195 Enlightenment, 6, 25, 104, 109, 110–12; Greek (Neo-Hellenic), 4, 104, 105, 106, 108, 111–12 Epirus, 17, 221 Erdogan, Recep, 14 European identity, 105, 110, 111, 112; Europeanness, 111, 139, 143 European Union, 25, 67, 78, 120, 121, 154–55

Hallström, Lasse, 185 Hamlet, 225 Hanink, Johanna, 7n1 Hasiotis, Loukianos, 97n9 Hason, Vidal, 38 Hatzivasileiou, Vangelis, 119–20, 124 Hatzopoulos, Takis, 31 Haviaras, Stratis, 87 Hellene, 105 Herzfeld, Michael, 16 Hikmet, Nazim, 39



Hislop, Patricia, 36 historiography: Greek, 16, 24, 103 Holocaust, 30, 34–35, 41 Hooch, Pieter de, 221 Hourmouzios, Emilios, 235 identity, 1, 2, 52–56, 58–59, 61, 159; Greekness, 15, 16, 25, 67, 153, 156, 158, 160–61, 166, 168, 176 Iliou, Maria, 187 Imaret (institution), 22 immigrant, 50, 58–59, 61, 67–68, 140; immigration, 5, 62n5 injustice, 29, 56–57, 76 intimacy, 14, 15, 18, 20, 23, 24; cultural, 16 In-yer-face theater, 142–44 Ioannou, Giorgos, 30, 33, 38 Ionesco, Eugene, 191 Izmir, 232 Jews, 5, 29–45; Ottoman period, 17; Sephardic, 29, 33 journey, 6 Junta. See Dictatorship of the Colonels jus sanguinis, 67, 74, 214 jus soli, 67, 74, 80n37, 214 justice, 124–25, 261–62 Kafka, Franz, 236 Kalpouzos, Yiannis, 17, 21 Kapakas, Costas, 186 Karaghiozis, 165 Karaiskou, Vicky, 174 Karamanlis, Costas, 14 Karantinakis, Grigoris, 186 Karatzas, Ioannis, 110 Karayiannis, Makis, 119 Kartalou, Athena, 185 Karypidis, Giorgos, 186 Kastelorizo, 122–23 Katsouridis, Dinos, 191 Keeley, Edmund, 25n6 Kenterman, Sonia Liza, 219–27 Kitsopoulou, Lena, 135–45, 141

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Klein, Kerwin Lee, 187–88 Knight, Daniel, 178n2 Koepnick, Lutz, 196 Kokkinos, Antonis, 186 Kolokotronis, Theodoros, 176 Kotzia, Elisavet, 119 Koutelidakis, Nikos, 152 Koutras, Panos, 214, 215–16 Koutsiambasakos, Petros, 99n26 Kurds, 236 Kusturica, Emir, 185 Ladino, 33, 37, 39 Lambrakis, Grigoris, 198n19 Lanzmann, Claude, 34 Lesbos (or Mytilene), 232–36; 239–43, 245; Gymnos (isle), 242–43, 244, 245, 250; Kara Tepe camp, 233; Moria camp, 233; Plomari, 245–46, 250; refugees in, 231–37; 239–43 Liakos, Antonis, 17 Libro D’Oro, 107 Loules, Vasilis, 33–34, 35 Lucian, 165, 195 Ludlow, Colorado, 49–50, 53; massacre, 49 Maastricht treaty, 154 Macedonia, 17, 18, 176 Mackridge, Peter, 119, 235 malakas, 171, 174–75; political party, 171–72, 172 Manousakis, Manousos, 37 Maragos, Thodoros, 168 Marcovic, Goran, 185 Markaris, Petros, 68, 78n5, 117, 123–24 Mazower, Mark, 29, 41 memory, 187–88, 195, 197 Menillo, Angelo, 38, 40 Metaxas dictatorship, 187, 209 Michalopoulou, Amanda, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 25n1, 120–21 Millais, John, 225 Millas, Iraklis, 16 Mitsotakis, Konstantinos, 155

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Index

Moby Dick, 224 modernization, 17, 103, 120–21, 194 MTV Greece, 169 Muler, Herbert, 41 multiculturalism, 24 Münster, Sebastian (Cosmographia), 106, 109 Muslims: Cretan, 20; Ottoman period, 18, 21, 22, 23 Myrivilis, Stratis, 87 Naar, Devin, 33 Nar, Leon A., 38 narratives: grand (or master), 7, 29, 50; national, 13, 14, 15, 17, 23–24, 53, 55, 60 national-mindedness (εθνικοφροσύνη), 95 Nemeas, Vasilis, 152 Neohellene, 6, 146n8, 151–62, 166, 168, 170, 173, 175–76, 177–78 New Democracy, 8n2, 155, 158–59, 172 Nikolaidou, Sophia, 125–29, 131n32 Nisaris, Elias, 122 nostalgia, 4, 185–86, 194–95, 257 oblivion, 29, 41, 188 Olympics, 13, 120–21, 208, 209, 211, 212, 257 Omikron Project, 169 oriental, 25 other, the, 13, 16–18, 23–24, 69; Muslim, 18, 23; national, 20, 24 Ottoman past or legacy, 3, 13, 15–25, 103–4, 105, 107, 176, 258 Paganelis, Spyridon, 22 Panayotopoulou, Penny, 186 Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK), 86, 120, 126, 155, 158– 59, 172–74, 176 Panousis, Tzimis, 162n10 Papadopoulos: George, 172, 176, 189, 191; Yiannis, 55

Papandreou: Andreas, 155, 173; Giorgos, 122–23 Papanikolas, Zeese, 51, 52 Parthenon, 259 Passerini, Luisa, 110 Petropoulos, Elias, 31 Pheidas, Giorgos, 165, 177 Plato, 265 Politopoulou, Marlena, 87–88 Polk, George, 127 Poloni, Paolo, 33 popular culture, 1, 3, 54, 151, 153, 156, 161, 166, 173–74, 195–96, 203 postmodernism, 4, 118, 125–26, 129 poststructuralism, 4 Pratt, Hugo, 39 Psykou, Elina, 208, 209–11 public history, 30, 37, 86, 103–4, 111–12 Queen Frederica, of Hanover, 85–87, 89, 94, 95, 190 queen’s camps. See childtowns reconciliation: national, 8n2, 25, 180n31; with the past, 86, 92, 94, 96 refugees, 7, 68, 71, 75, 233–35, 239, 242, 247, 248, 265 Repousi, Maria, 17 resistance, 58 Robespierre, 106–7, 109 romaios, 63n19 Rouvas, Angelos, 167, 169 Royal Welfare Fund, 85 Sakellarios, Alekos, 196 Sari, George, 186 security battalions, 86 Seferis, George (Giorgios), 13–14, 119, 130n12, 231–32; Μυθιστόρημα (Mythistorema), 14, 231; Urla, birthplace, 232 self, 13, 18, 19, 23, 51; -colonization, 105, 111; -criticism, 6; -damage, 15; -destruction, 15; European, 11;



Index 271

Greek, 16, 173; -hatred, 15; -image, 13; national, 24, 67, 103, 112, 160; -sacrifice, 35, 145 sentimental fiction, 109, 110 Simpsons (series), 169 Skambardonis, Giorgos, 36, 37 Skopetea, Elli, 105 Skroumbelos, Thanassis, 89–90, 92, 94–96, 98n22 Sofianopoulos, Dimitris, 32 Sontag, Susan, 232 Sophocles, 176 Sotiropoulou, Ersi, 120 South Park (series), 165, 169, 178 Spyrou, Dimitris, 186 Staël, Madame de, 111 Staktopoulos, Gregorios, 131n32 Stamboulis, Electra, 38–39, 40 Stamboulopoulos, Yiorgos, 187 Stanton-Ife, Anne-Marie, 68, 70, 78n9 Stassinopoulou, Maria, 32 Stegner, Wallace, 51 stereotypes, 6, 16, 21, 168 Stroebel, William, 235 Suleiman the Magnificent (TV series), 23 Tarzalakis, Ahmed, 233 testimony, 6, 34 Themelis, Nikos, 104, 110–12 Theodorakis, Mikis, 191 Tikas, Louis, 49–62, 72 Tornatore, Giuseppe, 185 Tourkokratia, 16, 23; called Othomanokratia, 23 trauma, 2, 4–6, 15–16, 29–32, 34–35, 41, 86, 88, 90–96, 111, 185, 188, 190, 192–93, 202, 204, 233–35 truth: historical, 187, 261–62; others’, 17

Tsakalotos, Thrasyvoulos, 93 Tsemberopoulos, Yorgos, 186 Tsipras, Alexis, 233 Tsitsanis: Giorgos, 36; Vasilis, 36 Tsitsonis, Yiannis, 165, 174, 177 tsoliás, 14, 15, 16 Tsoucalas, Constantine, 118 Turkey, 5, 17, 23, 25, 39, 236; agreement (EU and Greece), 233; tension with Greece, 176, 232 Tziovas, Dimitris, 7n1 über-Greek (Eλληνάρας), 139 United Mine Workers of America, 49, 57 Vafeiadis, Markos, 93 Valoukos, Stathis, 152, 155 Van Boeschoten, Riki, 89–90 Van Dormael, Jaco, 185 Vassilikos, Vassilis, 31 Velestinlis, Rigas Feraios, 107–10 Velouchiotis, Aris, 176 Venezis, Elias, 5, 231–54 Vengos, Thanassis, 191–92 Venizelos, Eleftherios, 17 Verne, Jules, 195 Vizyenos, Georgios, 18 Vogli, Elpida, 76 “Waiting for the Barbarians” (poem), 13 White, Hayden, 41 Yannakakis, Eleni, 119 Yeats, W. B., 19 Zachariadis, Nikos, 39 Zei, Alki, 186 zone of contact, 56

About the Contributors

Georgia Aitaki works as a research associate for the Department of Journalism, Media and Communication at the University of Gothenburg. Her doctoral dissertation entitled “The private life of a nation in crisis: A study on the politics in/of Greek television fiction” offers in-depth studies of the fictional reconstruction and negotiation of moments of heightened societal tension in Greek television fiction since 1989 (University of Gothenburg, 2018). Her work has been published in journals such as Media, Culture & Society, Critical Studies in Television, and Social Semiotics. Maria Akritidou has a PhD in modern Greek studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research focuses on the interplay of history and literature, fictional poetics, and ideology. She is preparing her thesis for publication under the provisional title The Modality of the Past of Modern Greece in the Contemporary Novel: Aspects of Historical Poetics. She is also involved in the development of digital humanities projects as part of her secondment to the Centre for the Greek Language (Thessaloniki), with a focus on digital textual editing. Yiorgos Anagnostou is professor of modern Greek studies in the Modern Greek Program at The Ohio State University. He is the author of Contours of White Ethnicity: Popular Ethnography and the Making of Usable Pasts in Greek America (2009). He edits the online magazine Ergon: Greek/American Arts and Letters. His research interests include Greek transnational studies and American ethnic studies. Patricia Felisa Barbeito has a PhD in comparative literature from Harvard University. She is professor of American literatures at the Rhode Island School of Design and a translator of Greek fiction and poetry. In addition 273

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to her publications on African American literature and Mediterranean noir, her translations include Menis Koumandareas’s Their Smell Makes Me Want to Cry (2004); Elias Maglinis’s The Interrogation (2013), which was short-listed for the 2014 Greek National Translation Award and granted the 2013 Modern Greek Studies Association’s Constantinides Memorial Translation Prize; and, most recently, Averoff: Portrait of the Politician as a Young Man (2018). Vangelis Calotychos is visiting associate professor of comparative literature at Brown University. He has published widely on Greek culture; cultural studies and politics; and questions of identity and representation in Southeastern Europe and Cyprus. His book Modern Greece: A Cultural Poetics (2004) discusses the nature of modernity in Greece from just before the founding of the nation-state down to the present. His later book, The Balkan Prospect: Identity, Culture, and Politics in Greece After 1989 (2013), an interdisciplinary analysis of Greece’s position within and without the Balkans and Europe after the Cold War, was awarded the Edmund Keeley Book Prize. Currently, his research focuses on Greek film: he co-edited a special issue of The Journal of Greek Media and Culture (2:2, 2016) on the Greek Weird Wave & Beyond and is now working on a book about spectacular performances of resistance in Greek film. Maria Chalkou holds an MA in film and art theory (University of Kent) and a PhD in film theory and history (University of Glasgow), sponsored by the Greek State Scholarships Foundation (I.K.Y.). Her research interests focus on Greek cinema, film cultures of the 1960s, contemporary European cinema, film censorship, and cinematic representations of the past. She is also the principal editor of the online academic journal Filmicon: Journal of Greek Film Studies. Currently, she teaches film history and theory at the Department of Audio & Visual Arts of Ionian University. Karen Emmerich is associate professor of comparative literature at Princeton University and a translator of Greek poetry and prose. Her book Literary Translation and the Making of Originals was published in 2017. Constantina Georgiadi is an assistant researcher in the Department of Theatre History at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies of the Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas in Crete. She is the editor and co-editor of three collective volumes. She has participated in national and international conferences, and her papers have been published in several national and international peer-reviewed journals.



About the Contributors 275

Vassiliki Kaisidou is a PhD candidate in modern Greek studies at the University of Birmingham. She holds an M.St in modern languages (Greek) from the University of Oxford (2016) and a BA in modern Greek philology from the University of Athens (2015). Her doctoral project looks at the cultural memory of the Greek Civil War after the transition to democracy (1974) through the lens of generational change and the interplay of literary and nonliterary discourses. Her research interests include memory studies, modern Greek history, contemporary Greek fiction, and their intersections with Spanish history and culture. Gerasimus Katsan is associate professor and coordinator of the Modern Greek Program at Queens College, City University of New York. He is the author of History and National Ideology in Greek Postmodernist Fiction (2013). His research interests include contemporary culture, fiction, and film. Sonia Liza Kenterman is a Greek-German film director and writer. She has studied sociology at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences and film directing at Hellenic Cinema and Television School Stavrakos, and she was awarded a master’s degree in filmmaking with distinction at the London Film School. Her first short film, Nicoleta, won fourteen awards and was entered in thirty-six festivals around the world. She was then selected by the Greek Film Center to write and direct a short film, White Sheet, which was screened around the festival circuit. She is now working on her first feature film, Tailor, a Greek-German-Belgian coproduction, which is funded also by Media and Eurimages. Tailor will be shot in various areas of Athens in April 2019. Kostis Kornetis is Santander Fellow in Iberian Studies at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. He has taught history at Brown University and New York University and has been CONEX-Marie Skłodowska Curie Experienced Fellow at the Universidad Carlos III, Madrid. He has published, among others, Children of the Dictatorship. Student Resistance, Cultural Politics and the “Long 1960s” in Greece (2013), and he has co-edited Consumption and Gender in Southern Europe since the “Long 1960s” (2015). He is currently working on a monograph on the generational memory of the transition to democracy in Southern Europe and Latin America. Jessica Kourniakti received her DPhil from the sub-faculty of Byzantine and modern Greek at the University of Oxford. Her doctoral research project focused on the receptions of classical antiquity under the Greek military dictatorship of 1967 to 1974. She holds a BA in ancient history from the University

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About the Contributors

of Bristol (2010) and an MA in reception of the classical world from UCL (2011). Her research interests include modern Greek history, classical reception studies, cultural studies, and popular culture. Charles Lock is the professor of English literature at the University of Copenhagen. Educated at Oxford, and until 1996 professor of English at the University of Toronto, he is the editor of the Powys Journal and works extensively in literature, literary theory, and the visual arts.  Amanda Michalopoulou is the author of eight novels and three short story collections. She has been a contributing editor at Kathimerini in Greece and Tagesspiegel in Berlin. She has been awarded the Academy of Athens Prize for her short story collection Bright Day (2013). Her book of interlinked short stories I’d Like (2005) won the NEA International Literature Prize in the United States and the Liberis Liber Prize of the Independent Catalan Publishers. Her stories and essays have been translated into fifteen languages. Her story “Mesopotamia” was selected for “Best European Fiction 2018” (Dalkey Archive). Sophia Nikolaidou has published collections of short stories, novels, essays, translations, and pedagogy. Her novel Tonight We Have No Friends (2010) was awarded the Athens Prize for Literature and has been translated into Hebrew. Another novel, The Elephants Dance (2012), was translated into English and published in the United States as The Scapegoat (Melville House, 2015). Her book Still Well Today (2015) about her experience with cancer was awarded the State Prize for authors, which promotes dialogue on sensitive social issues. Her most recent novel, In the End I Prevail (2017) closes her trilogy about Thessaloniki’s past and present. She teaches creative writing at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and teaches literature in secondary school. Trine Stauning Willert is honorary research fellow at the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham. She teaches Greek history and culture at the University of Lund and the extension courses of Aarhus University. She was assistant professor in modern Greek studies at the University of Copenhagen until the program was terminated due to budget cuts in 2016. Her publications include two edited volumes on Greek Orthodoxy and the new role of religion in the European public sphere, and the monographs New Voices in Greek Orthodox Thought: Untying the Bond between Nation and Religion (2014) and The New Ottoman Greece in History and Fiction (2018).