Anapoda chronia: syllogikē mnēmē kai historia sto Ziaka Grevenōn (1900-1950) (review)

The last months of 1997 in Greece saw a sudden and rather surprising renewal of public interest in the resistance and civil war, spurred by the successive (and commercially successful) publication of a number of books, almost all of them related to the emblematic figure of the military leader of ELAS, Aris Velouchiotis. There were newspaper articles, television debates, even controversy in Parliament. However, the quality of the books that generated this interest was overall poor. Arguably, the most important book was published by Grigoris Farakos, previously a secretary general of the Greek Communist Party (KKE), now at odds with this party. His book is based on Velouchiotis’s private archive, long thought to be lost, but somehow “retrieved” by Farakos from the KKE archives. Velouchiotis’s papers shed light on his well-known fallout with the KKE leadership following the Varkiza agreements. The dispute was over the continuation of armed struggle, with Velouchiotis arguing (and then deciding despite the party’s wishes) to carry on the armed struggle, a decision that quickly led to his death. However, what could have been a major historical coup was botched by Farakos’s inappropriate use of this unique archival material, since he edited it in a way that violated the fundamental rules of historical research. As for the remaining books on Velouchiotis, these biographies based on secondary materials were informed more by the logic of mythology than the logic of history.

Hence the paradox: although interest about the civil war remains high among the public, and publications abound, our knowledge of it remains sketchy, to say the least. In spite of a good grasp of archival material, particularly American, British, and more recently German, we are still in the dark about fundamental issues. What were the regional and social bases of the competing coalitions that fought the war? What was the role of class, ethnicity, ideology, and culture? How were the political identities that informed the civil war formed? How did political conflict lead to widespread violence? True, fundamental information is absent owing to factors independent of the historians’ will: cold war politics, which discouraged the examination of this issue up to the 1970s; polarized politics, which led to a huge production of heavily biased studies in the 1970s and 1980s; the wholesale destruction of police and related files in 1989; finally the persisting sad state of archival material in Greece.

Totally missing from the recent media frenzy was a new book that contributes more to our understanding of this terrible period than all the recent books on Velouchiotis put together. This is Riki van Boeschoten’s case study of the village of Ziakas in the region of Grevena in Northern Greece during the period 1900–1950. Following in the footsteps of the path-breaking historical work of Yorgos Margaritis and Mark Mazower, van Boeschoten’s gives us a “bottom-up” perspective of the civil war. She makes up for the absence of archival material by cleverly using oral sources, while she also relies on a small but relevant number of written sources. Her “micro-history” of a single village and its surrounding area begins well before the civil war, but really focuses on the crucial decade of the 1940s. It is impossible to summarize in a review a book of such descriptive thickness. Suffice it to say that van Boeschoten provides the kind of perspective that could only be found up to now in literary works (the novels of Kostas Kotzias and Thanasis Valtinos come to mind), or glimpsed from a couple of articles by one or two anthropologists—for example, Stanley Aschenbrenner—who in the course of their anthropological research discovered that the villages they were studying had surprisingly violent histories. Such works give us a taste of the complexity of local and individual interactions during the civil war, but cannot substitute for systematic scholarly research. Van Boeschoten gives us the first systematic local-level study.

Although the book’s empirical richness cannot be conveyed here, its main insights can. By combining anthropology and history, van...