turkish-greek civic dialogue - AEGEE Europe

From the novels of this second period, Dido Sotiriou’s Bloodied Earth (1962),
which had also important impact in Turkey, and Kosmas Politis’ In the
Chatzifrangou Quarter (1963) are distinguished. For Sotiriou, the main guilty
of the disaster was the foreigners: the Germans, that roused the Turks against
“giaur” during the First World War, and then the English and the French, that
pushed Venizelos in a risky expedition - it is implied that they all served their
own interests. This interpretation is absolutely aligned with the traditional
opinion of the Greek Left Wing for the role of foreign dependence in the entire
Modern Greek history. Nevertheless, it does not leave many choices for selfcriticism.
A bolder, almost heretic author is Kosmas Politis. For him, the Greeks are
equally responsible as the foreigners that sent them in Minor Asia. However,
this opinion constitutes a rather individual case in the Greek Literature. The
opinion that Dido Sotiriou expresses is much more characteristic for the new
literary “wave”. A paradoxical phenomenon is the relative rarity and ellipticity
of reports in Greek literature, until recently, in the drama of refugees
from Minor Asia and Eastern Thrace after their installation in Greece. Their
reception from the natives was not always so friendly and patriotic, since
there was remarkable discrimination against them. In the Greek literature,
however, for a lot of decades, all these were probably suppressed. A bigger
exception is Venezis’ novel Tranquillity (1939). Someone may suppose that this
subject did not suit in the ideas of national unanimity or, alternatively, of the
class solidarity, which constituted the two sovereign reasons of that time and
inspired most men of letters.
They dealt with foreigners (or infidels) that were eradicated by Greece and
became refugees even less. However, there is an impressive, early exception:
Pantelis Prevelakis’ book The Chronicle of a Town, since 1938. Prevelakis
dedicate his more shocking pages in the exit of Turkish Cretans after the
agreement of the exchange of populations.
In 1994, the veteran politician Mihalis Papakonstantinou, who was Minister of
Foreign Affairs in various governments, published the book My Aunt Roussa. His
aunt Roussa is a patriot and hates Kemal, but she believes that the “bad Turks”
were the ones left from those parts after the Balkan wars, but those who
remained were good. We have already passed in a new phase, where other types
of sensitivities dominate in the work of Greek writers about the catastrophe of
1922 and, generally, the Greek-Turkish relations. In Rea Galanaki’s novel, The
Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha (1989), she speaks about the drama of a person with
Association des Etats Généraux des Etudiants de L’Europe
mixed identity, which history tends to split. Theodoros Grigoriadis, in his novel
The Waters of the Peninsula (1998), describes a walking English sightseer, his
Greek interpreter and a Muslim seminarist in Thrace (Western and Eastern)
of 1906. He focuses in the deep, at some way, erotic friendship between the
Greek and the Turk. Furthermore, Thanasis Valtinos, from his point of view,
in The Story Book of Andreas Kordopatis, (book second, 2000), reverses two
Greek taboos about the tragedy of Minor Asia. Theodoros Grigoriadis expresses
very beautifully, what these all mean, with an answer that his Greek hero gives
to the English sightseer: “It’s not necessary to be attached in our self picture,
in our self identity”.
BOOKS & WORKS DISCUSSED
Stratis Doukas (1895 – 1983), A Prisoner’s Story (1929)
Ilias Venezis (1904 – 1973), Number 31328 (1931)
Pantelis Prevelakis (1909 – 1986), The Chronicle of a Town (1938)
Ilias Venezis, Tranquillity (1939)
Dido Sotiriou (1909 - ), Bloodied Earth (1962)
Kosmas Politis (1888 – 1974), In The Chatzifrangou Quarter (1963)
Yorgos Ioannou (1927 – 1985), “By the House of Kemal”
(The Only Heritage, 1974)
Rea Galanaki (1947 - ), The Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha (1989)
Mihalis Papakonstantinou (1919 - ), My Aunt Roussa (1994)
Anastassia Karakassidou, Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood (1997)
Theodoros Grigoriadis (1956 - ), The Waters of the Peninsula (1998)
Thanassis Valtinos (1932 - ), The Story Book of Andreas Kordopatis,
Book II (2000)
Population Exchange
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