LE SYMPOSIUM INTERNATIONAL LE LIVRE. LA ROUMANIE. L ...

276 APOSTOLOS PATELAKIS
After 1981 many autobiographical works appeared, written by
communist leaders, military and even ordinary partisans, who had
participated in the Civil War and had been repatriated to Greece after a long
exile. From an ideological point of view, we find that during 1945–2003,
63% of the books are right-oriented, anticommunist, whereas during 1974–
2003, 79% of the works have a left-oriented, pro-communist character. 1
this proves that in the Greek society the theme of the Civil War is
approached depending on the political orientation of each citizen, that is
why, still today, each new book stirs controversy and debate.
Another feature of the historiography related to Civil War is that until
1981 more papers were published abroad, in english, French and German,
than in Greece, in Greek language.
In the past 15 years, specialists in history, sociology, political science,
economics, literature have looked, more carefully and ideologically
detached, over the Civil War, and their study resulted in numerous works,
some of them being very valuable. new research directions have been
created; there is an interdisciplinary collaboration which yielded good
results.
A particularly important part in studying the Civil War has played “the
network for the research of the Civil Wars”, founded in thessalonica in
2000. this network consists of a group of experts, from various fields,
who are interested in the Greek Civil War. the network has organized 10
symposia so far, which have enjoyed great success.
regarding the documentary material until 1980, researchers had access
only to records in the uSA, england and Germany, and some un reports.
For this reason, the papers published up to that date concerned, particularly
the role of the Great powers in the region. Since 1990 things have changed.
of the first importance is the fact that Greek researchers have access to
documents stored in different repositories, as, for instance, the diplomatic
archives of the Greek Ministry of external Affairs. the Archives of the
Contemporary Social history, which have been working since 1992, preserve
part of the archive of the Greek Communist party and the archives of the
Greek partisans’ radio station “Free Greece”, which started broadcasting
from Belgrade in 1947 and continued from Bucharest in 1949.
In 1999, some documents of the archives from yugoslavia, Bulgaria
and several from russia were published, in Greek. In some works there
1 Γ. Αντωνίου – Ν. Μαραντζίδης, Η εποχή της σύγχυσης, Η δεκαετία του 40 και
η ιστοριογραφία, Βιβλιοπωλείων της Εστίας, Αθήνα, 2008, σ. 31 / ANToNiou, G.,
MArAntzIDIS, n., The time of the Confusions. The 5 th Decade and Historiography
(Athens: estia public house, 2008), p. 31.