The novel of the Greek civil war in the twenty-first century: (post)memory and the weight of the past (original) (raw)
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Old Interpretations and New Approaches in the Historiography of the Greek Civil War
Thetis, 2013
The Greek civil war was one of the most important “small wars” of the twentieth century. It was the result of the bitter divisions and violence that engulfed Greece in the interwar years and in the first half of the 1940s. It was also determined by external geopolitical factors, for this civil war was the first crucial episode of the Cold War and a critical turning point in the shaping of America’s containment policy.
The Deafening Silence of the Unburied Dead: The Greek Civil War and Historical Trauma
2020
While World War II was still raging in Europe and the Pacific, the onset of the Greek Civil War in December 1944 marked the beginning of the Cold War. For the people of Greece, the civil war would continue the devastation that the Italian, German, and Bulgarian occupations had initiated. The civil war's catastrophic cleavages in Greek society are still part of contemporary social and political life. For my family, the civil war's barbarity is manifest in the brutal execution of my great-uncle Yiorgos (George) Kasidakos, a partisan of ELAS who was imprisoned in Gytheio following the Treaty of Varkiza. On March 21st, 1947, George and 31 other political prisoners were brutally executed by a monarcho-fascist gang comprised of members of EAOK, X, and local paramilitaries under the leadership of Kostas Bathrelos. Following the formal ending of hostilities, my family experienced repression, harassment, and for some, exile. Most of the family would emigrate in the 1950s and 1960s to...
Book Review: Children of the Greek Civil War: Refugees and the Politics of Memory
Genocide Studies and Prevention
The book ‘Children of the Greek Civil War’ makes several key steps forward in analyzing the politics and emotions surrounding the 47,000 child refugees of the Greek Civil War. Although the war was between the right-wing Greek Government and the left-wing Greek Communist Party, it drew in a large portion of the ethnic Macedonian population of northern Greece who had been promised greater freedom and ethnic recognition by the communists. Among the book’s key steps forward are its side-by-side and even-handed analysis of how the war affected both the Greek and Macedonian children, its discussion and comparison of the government-backed orphanages set up by Queen Frederica and the evacuation program to Eastern bloc countries and children’s homes by the Greek Communist Party, the reliability of its statistics about the children from both sides of the conflict, and the comparison of the education, training, and lifestyle of the children in both sets of institutions. There is also a ground breaking discussion of the claims of genocide by organizations representing both sides of the war. This review also highlights areas where more work is needed to investigate potential acts of genocide by the Greek Government against the Macedonian children.
The article examines aspects of the long history of a major field of public debate in the second half of the twentieth century, that of the Greek 1940s, taking as its starting point the recent “history war” in Greece. It attempts to trace histories and memories from the immediate postwar years and to place them within a broader process: the historisation of the Second World War in Europe. In that context, the article begins by exploring one part of the initial efforts to form a European history of the resistance, from the perspective of the Greek case. Then, the focus is transferred to Greece, and to the mapping of a constellation of different memory and history communities, and the practices of history of the same period: the activities of veteran partisans and eye-witnesses with regard to their contribution to the formation of the first narratives on the war is a core issue at this level. Last, by following the developments in the academy and the politics of history during the Metapolitefsi, the focus returns to the current discussion, attempting a first approach to the subject through the strings that connect it with the past and, at the same time, as a debate of the twenty-first century.
In the 1970s, the phenomenon of armed violence (more commonly referred to as 'terrorism') proliferated across Western Europe. For Italy, the late 1960s heralded over a decade of unrest, with bombings, armed robberies, political kidnappings and assassinations, and hundreds of casualties left in the wake of far-right and far-left clashes and onslaughts (Petsa 153-62). The most harrowing period in the country's history since the Second World War, the Italian 'Years of Lead' (Anni di Piombo) are also evocatively characterized as a 'low intensity civil war' (albeit problematically so; 254), which speaks to the traumatic scope of these events in collective memory. In Greece, the military dictatorship of 1967-74 triggered the emergence of several armed anti-regime groups (mostly of the left and the centre; 55-56), while the uneven transition to democracy set in motion in 1974 saw the appearance of new anarchist and far-left militant organizations -the most notorious of which was the Revolutionary Organisation of 17 November (17 N). Active for almost three decades (until 2002), 17N's repertoire of violence concentrated on political assassinations, which targeted the torturers of the fallen Junta, to Greek politicians and foreign diplomats, with numerous instances of bombings and robberies also (58-60). It is the memories of these events that Vassiliki Petsa's monograph sets out to investigate, with a focus on the thematization of armed violence deployed by organizations of the far-left in Greek and Italian prose.
The experience of the civil war (1946-49) in a Greek village
Thetis, 2002
This paper examines the experience of the civil war (1946-49) in the village of Agia Triada in central Greece. The civil war in this area, and generally in the countryside, is only now beginning to attract the attention it deserves. Yet a study of the war on a local and rural level would be interesting for three basic reasons. Firstly, because during the occupation Evrytania, the province to which Agia Triada belongs, was the main stronghold of the Left resistance organisation National Liberation Front (EAM), and its powerful military wing ELAS (National People's Liberation Army). However, after the battle for Athens in December 1944, in which EAM/ELAS units fought against the government and British troops, and were defeated, the tide turned suddenly and decisively against the Left and Evrytania became for five years the target of a powerful conglomeration of anticommunist state and paramilitary forces. Secondly, because the consequences of the civil war in Evrytania were disastrous; estimates indicate that more than 10% of the population were killed either in action or after arrest and execution. Hundreds of people were prosecuted, imprisoned, exiled, and left homeless and unemployed. Many families were split and children were forced to live in an atmosphere of fear, anticipated arrest, and forced separation. Beyond the human losses and suffering, the material and economic devastation was no less appalling. Private houses and public buildings were destroyed, villages were evacuated, and fields and flocks were abandoned. Karpenisi, the administrative capital, became early in 1949 a battlefield between government and guerrilla forces. The third reason for the study of a specific community relates to new methodological approaches to the history of the 1940s. With the ending of the Cold War the entire debate on the Greek civil war has come to seem a little dated. While in the previous decades the conception was basically political, the mode diplomatic history (the war simply as a question of political strategies and policy-making), the perspective national and international (policy-making taking place in Athens, London and Washington) and the scope apologetic (who was responsible, the communists or the Greek rightists and the British), the 1990s signalled the opening up of the possibility of quite different avenues of enquiry: gender relations, village life, themes of crisis, trauma and violence, and the ethnic dimension, for example. A generation of younger historians has been exploring new interesting and exciting ways of doing history, using local studies, oral history and anthropological methods in conjunction with more conventional forms of social and political history to get at the kind of questions ignored by earlier scholars. As Mark Mazower points out, emphasis on ‘local perspectives serve to underscore the decisive importance of local politics and show how national political loyalties and struggles were filtered through a dense layer of village and regional concerns and interests’.
From Theo Angelopoulos's emblematic O Thiasos/The Traveling Players (1974) to Nikos Tzimas's O Anthropos me to Garyfalo/The Man with the Carnation (1980) and up to Alexis Damianos's Iniohos/The Charioteer (1995), the genealogy of films regarding the Greek civil conflict fulfilled to a great extent the function of substituting the very absence of historical work on a very contentious issue. From the 2000s onwards, however, a reversal of this trend seems to have taken place: the boom of historical studies on the Civil War had no parallel in terms of cinema. Interestingly, it was only after the unprecedented riots of 2008 and the onset of the economic crisis in 2009 that the civil conflict started attracting cinematographers again. This article deals with two such recent representations of the civil conflict. Pantelis Voulgaris's Psyhi Vathia/A Soul so Deep (2009) is a large production aiming to provide the new national narrative, while, Kostas Charalambous's Demeni Kokkini Klosti/Tied Red Thread , an independent and controversial production trying to undermine it. The paper aims to trace the aforementioned relationship between film and historiographic production, and the way in which the theme of the Civil War and violence taps in -through cinema -to the general political reconfiguration of Greece in times of crisis.