The Legasy of Civil War in Greek Society (original) (raw)
Related papers
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’.
In 34th International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE). Geneva, 27-30 June 2012., 2012
Our presentation at this conference concerns one of the most tragic pages in the history of the Greek Civil War; the mass evacuation of the "warhandicapped" children, which had been well known in Greece as “Paidomazoma” (child abduction) or “Paidofylagma” (child guarding), a tipping point for the anti-communist or, respectively, the anti-government propaganda campaings and, at the same time, one of the main causes of division in Greek society for decades in the postwar period. An infinite valley of tears, raping of childhood innocence, violent rupture of family ties, children taken by force from their parents became representations promoted by both the sides, the right-wing governments and the leftist rebels. However, above and beyond the communicative management of the subject, that unprecedented and unrepeatable tragedy has marked the personal memory of the children who experienced the events and the family memories of the later generations as well. Without any exaggeration, the Greek civil war was associated with a humanitarian crisis which could be seen as one of the worst nightmares in recent Greek history. Political and social polarization had seeped into society as a whole. The armed violence enacted among small communities, like in villages, the massive deaths of innocent citizens, the imprisonments and the executions of thousands of people are only some of the aspects of the violence. Confronting a complex context of social, political and economic problems, postwar Greece formed the concept of social justice, in relation to the implications of the civil war. Both sides intended to provide social justice, in order to constitute conditions for social mobility. A type of social justice which also should be connected with the reprioritization of the crucial family and local ties of devotion interpreted completely differently by the two sides: in the frame of the supreme values of nationalism, on the one hand, and communism, on the other hand.
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...
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.
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.
It may be heard paradoxical but is absolutely true: the rich, otherwise, literature on the decade of 1940s is quite poor on the issue of the occupation famine. It will be even more impressive, if we take into account that this is the last important in terms of mortality European famine. The limited presence of the topic in historical research connected, at least, to three factors: a) the difficulty to be identified reliable and systematic demographic data, b) the dominance of political history towards social history, which resulted in many studies focused mainly on political issues over the period and c) the profound impact of the civil war that marked Greek society since the years of occupation, thus absorbing much of the historical interest.Chionidou (2006: 30 – 31) refers in a characteristic way to the following: the Greek Famine has received little attention in the famine and other academic literatures. Furthermore “there is a complete absence of reference to the food crisis of the occupation years in the collective memory of the Greek population, no collective of even official memory of the famine, let alone collective trauma such as that realating to the Irish Famine”. According to the author, the absence is justified because of the Civil war during the years 1943-1949 and the injuries it left to the Greek society, civil injuries predominated over all others. In any case Occupation Famine is a very important part of the Modern Greek History which is based on more or less obvious causes and has affected the Greek society on many levels causing multidimesional consequences on the population mainly in big cities. The famine can not be detached from the general problem of the foreign conquest and its impact on the Greek population. It is also connected directly to social and economic situation of the different social classes of the years 1940 – 1942, since its impact seems to have caused new realities within the society of the time and influenced the attitudes of individuals and groups during the Occupation years and the civil conflict with the end of the war. Therefore it is necessary any new attempt researching on the Great Greek Famine or approaching critically any other previous research on the topic. As for as the specific paper is concerned, I chose a critical approach to the topic commenting and analysing on the historical events going beyond the official bibliographical references and attempting to answer questions, revealing the fragmentation of the economic, social and political structures of the Greek society during the Famine and the reformation of them after the Famine, reshaping new realities directly connected to the Great Greek Resistance Movement and the following civil conflict.
The Greek Society during the period of crisis
As the beginning of the 21 st cenutury, Greece has been caught in the vortex of great economic, social, cultural and political turbulence, which has upturned its smooth European course and has brought about radical changes in the attitude, ideology and economic situation of the Greek citizens. Under these new circumstances, a new reality is emerging in the theatre as well, which is greatly differentiated from any previous ones and creates a new physiognomy, still at birth. Therefore, any conclusions made can be but simply initial observations, in need of further documentation.