Robert Holland and Diana Markides
THE BRITISH AND THE HELLENES
Struggles for mastery in the Eastern Mediterranean 1850–1960
280pp. Oxford University Press. £61.
0 19 924996 2
Paschalis Kitromilides, editor
ELEFTHERIOS VENIZELOS
The trials of statesmanship
384pp. Edinburgh University Press. £50.
0 748 62478 3
Elisabeth Kontogiorgi
POPULATION EXCHANGE IN GREEK MACEDONIA
The rural settlement of refugees 1922–1930
394pp. Oxford University Press. £65.
0 199 27896 2
Marina Petrakis
THE METAXAS MYTH
Dictatorship and propaganda in Greece
256pp. I. B. Tauris. £47.50.
1 84511 037 4
Violetta Hionidou
FAMINE AND DEATH IN OCCUPIED GREECE, 1941–1944
282pp. Cambridge University Press. £50.
0 521 82932 1
Bea Lewkowicz
THE JEWISH COMMUNITY OF SALONIKA
History, memory, identity
320pp. Vallentine Mitchell & Co Ltd. Paperback, £20.
0 853 03580 6
Half a century ago, Nikos Svoronos, one of the great panjandrums of the historical profession in Greece, was stripped of his Greek citizenship. His offence was to have published in the Que sais-je? series a (very) slim volume offering a Marxist interpretation of the modern history of Greece, a work that continues to be reverentially regarded by Greek historians on the Left.
Since that time the historiographical climate in Greece has undergone a sea change, a process given a powerful impetus by the Colonels’ coup, the fortieth anniversary of which occurs this year. This prompted historians to examine the forces, historical and other, that had culminated in the establishment of a military dictatorship at once brutal, anachronistic and absurd. The downfall of the junta in 1974 removed the last constraints and taboos in the writing of the modern history of Greece, and since then there has been a remarkable flourishing of historical writing both within Greece and, to a degree, outside the country. A generation ago the publication of a scholarly book in the United Kingdom on the modern history of the Greek world was an infrequent event. The appearance, within the space of a few months, of the six books under review would have been unheard of, and is in itself a measure of the way in which the subject has developed exponentially both inside and outside the country.
Robert Holland and Diana Markides in The British and the Hellenes: Struggles for mastery in the Eastern Mediterranean 1850–1960 look at the close and not infrequently fraught relationship between the British and the Greeks through the prism of four critical junctures in which Britain was particularly entangled in Greek affairs. The first of these was the British protectorate over the notionally independent Ionian Islands between 1815 and 1864, one of the few lasting legacies of which is a taste for tsitsibyri or ginger beer. As demands for the enosis or union of the islands with the Greek kingdom became ever more insistent, William Ewart Gladstone was, in 1858, dispatched to the islands as Extraordinary High Commissioner. As the author of Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age (published by Oxford University Press in the year of his Ionian mission) and honoured with a statue in front of the University of Athens, Gladstone has a secure place in the philhellenic pantheon, even if his spoken Greek could on occasion be mistaken for English. But in reality he had no time for Ionian aspirations. Within fifteen years, however, Britain had agreed to the union of the islands with Greece as a kind of dowry for the Danish prince who assumed the throne as King George I of the Hellenes.
The second occasion was the sending of troops in 1897, alongside those of Italy, France, Russia, Austria and Germany, to maintain peace between Greeks and Turks on the island of Crete, another hotbed of “enosist” agitation. This intervention by an international peacekeeping force interestingly prefigures the dispatch of peacekeepers to the Balkans in the 1990s. Nor did peacekeeping in the 1890s prove to be without cost. On September 6, 1898, seventeen British troops were killed and thirty-nine severely wounded, a greater number of British casualties than was incurred by General Kitchener’s forces at the near-simultaneous Battle of Omdurman.
The third episode was the British military administration of the Dodecanese at the end of the Second World War. This followed Churchill’s misguided attempt to capture Cos, Leros and Samos at the time of the Italian surrender in September 1943. With its echoes of the Gallipoli campaign, this proved a costly fiasco and led Churchill to bestow, unfairly, on “Jumbo” Wilson, the Commander-in-Chief in the Middle East, the epithet the “Wizard of Cos”.
The fourth was the occupation in 1878 and subsequent annexation of Cyprus, a move which Gladstone at the time called, with not a little justification, “an insane covenant”. Here Britain contrived to make an even bigger mess of things than in the Ionian Islands, the consequences of which are still with us and, more to the point, with the Cypriots. Holland and Markides say little about the establishment of the British Sovereign Base Areas under the terms of the 1960 settlement whereby Cyprus became independent. The entry of Cyprus into the EU in 2004 has had the thoroughly anomalous consequence that one EU country, Britain, exercises sovereignty in perpetuity over sizeable chunks of the territory of another EU member in the shape of the two sovereign base areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia.
What is more, the only British interest that could be considered, with any degree of plausibility, to have been under threat from Saddam Hussein in 2003 were these same bases. The case of the British bases on Cyprus is a salutary example of the law of unintended consequences. Annexing other people’s territory has indirectly contributed to the miring of Britain in the unmitigated disaster of Iraq. Overall, Holland and Markides make a major contribution to the study of Anglo-Greek relations in a book full of arresting insights.
As these two authors note, probably the most Anglophile of Greek politicians was Eleftherios Venizelos. Although an enthusiastic champion of a Greater Greece, in his anxiety not to embarrass his British patrons he never espoused the cause of the enosis of Cyprus, the so-called Gibraltar of the East, with Greece. It is odd that there is no up-to-date Life, in Greek or, indeed, in any language, of Venizelos, a statesman who placed Greece firmly on the international map and a politician who dominated the politics of Greece during the first third of the last century, attracting in the process adulation and execration in equal measure.
But political biography, as opposed to hagiography, is not a common genre in Greece. No proper Life exists, for instance, of Adamantios Korais, a man of extraordinary intellect, a textual critic accepted as an equal by Porson himself, and a key figure in the Greek national movement. Nor are there adequate biographies of Charilaos Trikoupis and Theodoros Deliyannis, the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of Greek politics in the second half of the nineteenth century, or of their twentieth-century counterparts, Konstantinos Karamanlis and Andreas Papandreou.
Although it is no substitute for a single authored Life, the volume of essays Eleftherios Venizelos: The trials of statesmanship serves a very useful function in making the fruits of recent research on the charismatic (and exceptionally photogenic) Cretan available to the English-reading public. Extensive coverage is given, appropriately, to his native island, where he cut his political teeth in the struggle for enosis with the Greek kingdom and to his rejuvenation of the jaded politics of Athens, the ethniko kentro or “national centre” of the Greek world. Within the space of two years he had introduced fundamental domestic reforms and overseen the virtual doubling of Greece’s territory in the Balkan wars of 1912–13. His intellectual pursuits, including the translation of Thucydides into a modern form of the language, and the notable educational reforms instituted under his aegis, also receive attention.
The standard of the individual chapters is high, although the English in the translated chapters at times reads rather oddly – for example “prefectural agronomers” – while the volume lacks a concluding chapter which would summarize Venizelos’s contribution to the shaping of Greece in modern times.
Venizelos believed profoundly in the civilizing mission of Greece in the East, and, for a brief period after the First World War, it looked as though the irredentist dream of the Megali Idea, or Great Idea of incorporating all areas of compact Greek settlement within the boundaries of a single state, lay within reach, as the Greece of the two continents and the five seas came into existence. But if Venizelos’s achievements between 1910 and 1913, in both foreign and domestic affairs, were extraordinary, his greatest mistake lay in launching, in 1919, the occupation of a large area of Western Asia Minor. This proved to be a disastrous move, albeit one that was continued by Venizelos’s bitter royalist foes, the supposed advocates of a small but honourable Greece, following his surprise defeat in elections in November 1920. For the Greek occupation acted as the catalyst of the Turkish national movement led by Mustafa Kemal (later Atatürk). The adventure ended in catastrophic defeat in 1922. Venizelos, as Greece’s chief negotiator at the Lausanne Conference the following year, was realistic enough to realize that the only outcome likely to keep the peace between the two countries (as it has, even if once or twice only narrowly) was to exchange the Greeks of Asia Minor (many of them Turkish-speaking) for most of the Turks of the Greek kingdom (many of them Greek-speaking).
When he returned to office between 1928 and 1932, Venizelos achieved some notable successes in foreign policy. These included a remarkable rapprochement with Kemal Atatürk, albeit one secured at the cost of abandoning claims for compensation of those caught up in the population exchange. Venizelos even somewhat improbably (and unsuccessfully) nominated Atatürk for the Nobel Peace Prize. But he had lost his old magic, and manifested a marked social conservatism and a cavalier attitude to parliamentary democracy.
The debacle in Asia Minor resulted in a massive influx of refugees, much of it unplanned and chaotic, some of it carried out in a relatively orderly fashion under the terms of the convention on the Exchange of Populations. Most of the refugees, preponderantly women and children, and including a disproportionate number of orphans, were destitute (the grandmother of one of my former Greek students arrived on Greek soil with only one shoe). This tidal wave was joined by refugees from Eastern Thrace, the Caucasus, with its sizeable Greek populations, and from Bulgaria.
In total, some 1.2 million poured into a near-bankrupt and war-weary country, with a population of 5.5 million and few natural resources. In the early 1970s, the arrival in the United Kingdom of 30,000 Ugandan Asians in a country of 55 million was held in certain quarters to presage the end of civilization as we had known it; yet an influx on the Greek scale would have amounted within the space of two or three years to some 11 million incomers.
The resettlement of many of these refugees in the areas of Macedonia annexed by Greece during the Balkan wars is the subject of Elisabeth Kontogiorgi’s Population Exchange in Greek Macedonia: The rural settlement of refugees 1922–1930, a book which makes a valuable addition to the literature on the exchange of populations. Although the resettlement process and eventual integration of the incomers was an extraordinary achievement, it met, as Kontogiorgi demonstrates, with many obstacles. Adequate housing was in short supply; there were no land surveys; fertile land was scarce; competition for jobs was fierce; malaria was endemic; many of the incomers were Turkish-speaking and knew no Greek; others, the Greeks originating in Pontos, spoke a form of Greek that was scarcely intelligible to the natives. Publication in karamanlidika, Turkish printed in Greek characters, continued for the refugees in Greece until the end of the 1920s.
Attempts to resettle refugees from the same community together were not always successful. There was friction, sometimes serious, between natives and incomers, as in the riots in 1924 over land distribution in Küpkoy, the birthplace of Konstantinos Karamanlis, the President of Greece in the early 1980s and 90s. The refugees were criticized as lazy, and referred to derisively as yiaourtovaptismenoi (baptized in yoghurt, a reference to their use of yoghurt in their noticeably better cuisine). Anti-refugee hysteria sometimes assumed extreme forms. One fanatic wanted them to wear yellow armbands so that they could be readily identified. During the Axis Occupation in the Second World War, some of the turcophone and
Pontic Greeks, marginalized in their new homes, proved fertile recruits for anti-Communist and collaborationist bands.
Following the Balkan wars of 1912–13, Greeks were actually in a minority in the newly acquired territories. The arrival of the refugees meant that Greeks became a clear majority in the hitherto ethnically mixed region, diluting the numbers of Slav-Macedonians. Henceforth, Greece became the most ethnically homogeneous country in the Balkans. Kontogiorgi maintains that the incomers shared a national consciousness and national ideals with the natives. But this was not true in all cases. More than half a million of the refugees were settled in Greek Macedonia. At the height of the controversy (still technically unresolved) in the 1990s over the name to be adopted by the newly independent state of Macedonia, there was little sympathy for the Greek case among her European partners. But Greek behaviour over the issue is explained, if not necessarily excused, by the fact that so many Greeks living in the region have parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents whose lives had been turned upside down in the 1920s, and who were naturally alarmed at the prospect of a neighbouring state laying claim to their land, however unlikely that prospect was in reality.
It was the relentless feuding between Venizelists, who enjoyed the electoral support of most of the refugees, and Royalists, that gave Ioannis Metaxas, a general turned leader of a marginal political party, the chance to establish in 1936 an anti-Communist, anti-parliamentary dictatorship, with quasi-fascist trappings. The diminutive, egotistic, uncharismatic (and distinctly unphotogenic) dictator was the very antithesis of Venizelos. As Marina Petrakis records in her The Metaxas Myth: Dictatorship and propaganda in Greece, the British Minister in Athens once described him as short, corpulent and ill-dressed.
Although Petrakis gives little of the context of the establishment of the 4th of August dictatorship, she has unearthed some fascinating and rare material about the way in which Metaxas sought to bolster support for his quasi-fascist regime through the deployment of relatively sophisticated and modern methods of propaganda. These included film, radio, the use of propagandistic slogans as postmarks (“Do not forget that on the 4th August Greece was saved by Ioannis Metaxas”) and on bus tickets, even the superimposition of photographs of the self-anointed “First Peasant”, “First Worker”, and even more improbable “First Athlete”, on light bulbs.
The book constitutes a pioneering piece of research, based on a wide range of sources, although it would have benefited from better copy-editing. Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, for instance, metamorphoses into “Etna Gambler”. It is, moreover, surely an exaggeration to say that Metaxas dominated the political and military scene in Greece for thirty years. He emerged from political obscurity and his domination lasted only for the five years of his dictatorship. This was established solely by force, his attempt to develop a power base through the youth movement, EON, proving a miserable failure.
The one redeeming feature of the Metaxas dictatorship was the way he stood up to Mussolini in October 1940, in the process unleashing a wave of patriotic exaltation. Greece’s repulse of the attempted Italian invasion provided a glimmer of hope during the dark winter of 1940–41, when Greece stood alone with Britain in Europe in offering active resistance to the Axis. But Greece had no hope of resisting the German onslaught in April 1941, which rapidly resulted in a brutal tripartite German, Italian and Bulgarian occupation.
Within a matter of weeks serious food shortages developed into a horrifying famine, the last major famine, in terms of mortality, to take place in Europe. Some 5 per cent of the population died of starvation, and there were as many as 450,000 deaths between May 1941 and April 1943.
Considering its seriousness, there has been surprisingly little research on the famine and its consequences, as historians have concentrated on the resistance and the role of the powers in Greek affairs. This lacuna is now filled by Violetta Hionidou’s impressive and exhaustively researched Famine and Death in Occupied Greece, 1941–1944. Extrapolating from the situation on the islands of Chios, Syros and Mykonos, where accurate records continued to be kept amid the chaos of Occupation, Hionidou produces a detailed anatomy of the famine and its demographic consequences; the functioning of the economy and markets, including the ubiquitous black market, which she considers on the whole not to have been as negative as often supposed; and the effects of the famine on fertility as well as on mortality. Severe food shortages actually led to measurable levels of stunted growth among those born in this period. Hionidou also considers the organization of welfare and relief in a society in which there was no tradition of state provision, a process in which the Swedish and Swiss Red Cross were heavily involved. The Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, which after the war metamorphosed into Oxfam, had its origins in raising funds for the alleviation of famine in Greece.
One of Hionidou’s revisionist findings is that the extent of requisitioning of food by the Occupation authorities has been “hugely exaggerated” by historians (myself included) in writing about the famine. Requisitions seemingly did not have a major effect on the local availability of food. Indeed, Hionidou records that on Chios the German Occupation authorities took active steps to alleviate food shortages, even permitting locals to forage for food supplies in neighbouring Turkey.
Famine was not the only disaster to befall occupied Greece. The civilian population was not only at risk of death from starvation, but as a result of the savage punishments meted out by the Occupation authorities in reprisal for acts of resistance, while the country experienced one of the worst inflations in recorded history. The cost-of-living index rose from 11,686 to 198,630,000,000 between May 1943 and October 1944. Greece’s Jewish community, consisting principally of the Spanish-speaking Sephardim of Thessaloniki, once known as the Jerusalem of the Balkans, was virtually wiped out. The community numbered some 53,000 at the beginning of the 1940s, of which some 48,000 were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Of the total Jewish population in Greece, approximately 75,000, only 8,000 survived the Occupation. Most of these survivors emigrated to Israel, with fewer than 2,000 living in Thessaloniki after the end of the war.
The destruction of Greek Jewry at the hands of the Nazis is, like the famine, an under-researched topic. As Bea Lewkowicz points out in The Jewish Community of Salonika: History, memory, identity, it is only relatively recently that attention has been paid to a community that, as late as the early 1940s, constituted some 20 per cent of the population of the city, and this in spite of the huge inflow of refugees to the city in the 1920s. The community is principally descended from Jews expelled from Spain in 1492: only in the 1970s did Greek replace Ladino, essentially fifteenth-century Spanish, in the recording of the community’s affairs. Only relatively recently has the Greek state formally recognized the extent of the tragedy that befell Greek Jewry during the Second World War. It took until 1997 for a monument to the Holocaust to be erected in the city, and only in 2001 was a Jewish Museum opened. Although recent years have seen the publication of a number of memoirs of survivors and a number of scholarly studies, even now the city’s Jewish heritage is little known at a popular level, as Lewkowicz demonstrates.
Bea Lewkowicz’s book, based on thorough field work, has two strands: an interpretation of the horrific experiences of the 1940s through interviews with the now very elderly survivors of the Holocaust and how this is remembered; and a study of younger members of the now very small Jewish community in the city and how they perceive themselves as part of a minority group in a society which tends to regard only those of the Orthodox faith as being fully “Greek”. In an interesting passage she records the differing reactions to an incident at community camp in the late 1980s when an “American-Israeli” rabbi hoisted the Israeli flag. Some thought the move totally out of order. Some thought the reaction against the raising of the Israeli flag reflected a “weak” Jewish identity. One threat to the cohesion of the community is inter-marriage: a consequence of the introduction of civil marriage in 1982 by Andreas Papandreou’s PASOK party has been to remove the need for the non-Jewish partner to convert. The book is accompanied by some interesting, although poorly reproduced, photographs.
The six books afford a good insight into the way in which the study of the modern history and society of Greece has in recent years been expanded, enriched and in many respects transformed.
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Richard Clogg is an Emeritus Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford. His recent books include I kath'imas Anatoli: Studies in Ottoman Greek history, 2004, and Greece, 1940–1949: Occupation, resistance, civil war – A documentary history, 2002.
