A preeminent work of modern Greek literature, this provocative novel poses difficult questions about the nation�s Nazi occupation and early Civil War years.
First published in 1994 to a storm of controversy, Thanassis Valtinos�s probing novel
As a transforming work of literature, this book redefined established methods of fiction; as a work of revisionist history, it changed the way Greece understands its own past. Now, through this masterful translation of
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Thanassis Valtinos�s
Here is a book based on a series of oral recollections that are stitched together into a fragmented, potentially confusing narrative. The reader is quickly assaulted by a profusion of personal and place names, and the narrators confuse dates, contest events, and stress ostensibly extraneous details. Indeed, it is this fragmented and multifaceted style that makes the narrative so compelling but at the same time so challenging. Hence the necessity of geographical and historical context.
We quickly find out that we are in the district of Kynouria, one of three in the province of Arcadia, which makes up the core of the Peloponnese in Greece. This large peninsula, at the southern end of the Balkans, carries a powerful historical charge, associated with the famous war between Greek city-states that took place between 431 and 404 B.C.E. and was immortalized by Thucydides as the Peloponnesian War. More recently, in the 1820s, the modern Greek state grew out of an uprising that took place primarily in that region. The events described in
The village in question was destroyed in the summer of 1944, when Greece was undergoing a ruthless occupation. Many mountain villages had been targeted by a brutal counterinsurgency campaign, carried out by German troops along with their local allies, who were generally known as Security Battalions. Opposing them was a Resistance guerrilla army, the Greek Popular Liberation Army (ELAS), the largest such group in Greece and under the control of the Communist Party of Greece, via a front organization known as the National Liberation Front (EAM). As a result of this conflict thousands of innocent peasants died and hundreds of villages went up in flames.
At the center of the book is a village named Kastri, Valtinos�s ancestral village, along with a constellation of smaller neighboring villages: Ayia Sofia, Karatoula, Mesorrahi, Oria, Rouvali, and Eleohori, this last farther away but closely connected to Kastri. A multitude of other places appear, including the town of Tripolis, capital of Arcadia, and Athens.
It soon becomes apparent in the novel that Kastri was destroyed not by German troops, as one might have expected, but by ELAS, which also had set up one of its detention camps for local civilians in a nearby monastery known as Orthokost�. In fact, many of the book�s narrators had been imprisoned and tortured there. The realization that the culprits of these atrocities are Greek Resistance fighters rather than Nazi occupiers comes as a shock and goes a long way toward explaining the book�s impact in Greece�s intellectual circles at the time of its publication in 1994.
Valtinos�s political and literary credentials among left-leaning intellectuals were such that
To understand why this was so, we should start with a key observation: the main events structuring the stories told throughout the book (the formation of the Security Battalions, the destruction of Kastri, and so on) are real, even though their recounting is highly personal, reflecting each narrator�s distinct experience and bias as processed through Valtinos�s unique prose. Indeed, at one point a female narrator tells her husband: �Don�t say anything you shouldn�t.� These events are also broadly representative of a range of similar processes that took place during this period across the Peloponnese and in other regions of Greece, particularly in Macedonia, in northern Greece. In these areas, a grassroots armed movement emerged in 1944 to challenge EAM and ELAS, spurring a bloody civil war that went through a variety of forms and permutations, ending only in 1949.
How did we get there? In April 1941 Greece was overrun by Nazi Germany, after having successfully resisted an Italian invasion that began in October 1940. What followed was a triple occupation of the country by Germany, Italy, and Bulgaria � which effectively became a German occupation after Italy capitulated in the autumn of 1943. As in many other European countries conquered by Germany and its allies (as well as many Asian countries conquered by Japan), the Occupation was both brutal and vigorously contested. As the war went on, and Germany�s prospects began to dim, Resistance groups emerged throughout Greece to challenge the Axis rule. Initially clandestine, urban, and focused on intelligence gathering and sabotage, the Resistance quickly grew into full-fledged rural insurgencies. Britain was instrumental in encouraging them with financial and military assistance. In particular, Greece and Yugoslavia were priority areas for Britain, and the Special Operations Executive (SOE) was tasked with spurring a �partisan� war in both countries. An unintended effect was the spectacular rise of Communist insurgencies.
Relying on Greece�s rough mountain terrain, vigorous patriotic feeling, and tradition of irregular warfare and rural banditry, various guerrilla bands began to emerge starting in 1942. They quickly coalesced into two rival groups, one headed by the Communist Party and the other by demobilized officers of the Greek Army. The Communist-led EAM was more centralized, disciplined, and coordinated than the nationalist bands, and it relied on the strong organizational know-how of its cadres, who had amassed considerable experience through years of clandestine political action. As a result, by the end of 1943, the Communists had destroyed the competition and came to dominate the Resistance. The defeat of the nationalist guerrilla bands in the Peloponnese is recounted by several narrators, most notably in chapters 4, 42, and 44.
The Communist takeover of the Resistance in what was a first instance of civil conflict within the Occupation gave rise to a paradox: villages dominated by a traditionalist, property-owning peasantry found themselves ruled by the Communist Party, a group that had been marginal in Greece�s mountain hinterland until then. This paradox was especially pronounced in the Peloponnese, where many peasants had to be coerced into joining EAM and ELAS. Most complied, but several resisted (see, for example, the accounts in chapters 16 and 26). Thus, a second paradox: the emergence of a resistance against the Resistance.
Communist coercion and the opposition it led to suffuse the bulk of the narratives. In this way,
Indeed, the thorny issue of collaboration stands at the core of
This process was fed by a gradual escalation of violence. The destruction of nationalist guerrilla bands and the ensuing repression by the Communists encouraged a grassroots opposition to EAM and ELAS that remained silent so long as it was unarmed. However, when the Germans began to supply the dissidents with weapons in the spring and summer of 1944, this opposition became both vocal and violent. Now areas that had been ruled by EAM came under the control of the occupiers and their collaborators. But this period was brief; almost immediately the Germans began retreating in anticipation of their departure from Greece. It was then that ELAS returned with a vengeance and destroyed the villages that had been disloyal to it such as Kastri.
Nor did this cycle of violence stop with the end of the Occupation. The Communist insurrection in Athens in December 1944 provided the stage for new atrocities, followed by low-intensity warfare in 1945�46, which was accompanied by the persecution, formal and informal, of real and suspected Communists. The Civil War moved into its final phase, often referred to as �the� Greek Civil War, in 1946. Now, however, the main theater of armed action was northern Greece, which explains why this conflict does not appear very much in
When examining the grassroots collaboration, we cannot help but wonder about individual motives. Why would so many people ally with the Germans, who were at best disliked and at worse hated? Some of the narrators provide straightforward answers:
The Battalions weren�t formed in Tr�polis only. They were in all the towns of the Peloponnese. Those were times of national emergency. No Greek ever liked the Germans. Or wanted to collaborate with them. That�s when the Peloponnese Battalions were created. In the spring of 1944. When it was becoming clear that the Germans were losing the war. And it was also becoming clear how dangerous it would be for anyone who might find himself at the mercy of ELAS after the German collapse. After they cleared out. . EAM and ELAS were the imminent danger. They would wipe us all out. Any of us who didn�t want to or wouldn�t consent to join them. That�s how we saw it � and that�s how it was.
The Battalions were formed later on. As a reaction to everything that had happened. To the arrests and the executions.
Of course these answers only scratch the surface of a complex issue. It is fascinating to explore the multiple drivers of what appear to be straightforward political choices but in reality are multifaceted processes that include everything from personal disputes and local vendettas to concerns about survival and safety by a population caught between two fires:
Take the village of Ori�. They hated anyone from Kar�toula, so much hatred between those two villages.
So I went and enlisted. I owed that time. But that�s what always happens. Where will you get food, where will you sleep? In the barracks. Wherever they give you food. That was the beginning of the enlistments. On both sides. That was one reason to enlist. And the other was safety. In the mountains no one came after you. You went around, you ate, you drank, you got laid. Otherwise you were a reactionary, and you were hounded. You ended up in the Battalions. You found a place to lay your head.
The rebels came here, they said, Leave your houses, all of you. Whoever stays in the village will be executed. And the Germans dropped leaflets. Stay in your homes, no one will harm you.
This was a world dominated by violence, which was both a cause of individual choices and behaviors but also their inevitable consequence, taking endless shapes and forms because �a human life wasn�t worth much then, that�s how things were.� Or as another narrator puts it simply: �Ruthless men.�
Violence could be indiscriminate, but more often it was highly personal. Indeed, this was a highly personalized war, which only made it that much more terrifying. We cannot help but shudder at statements like �It was our cousin Paraskev�s who marched our brother K�stas up along the river� or �An exceptional man, a progressive farmer, among the best in the area. And that splendid young man was taken to the detention camp by his own brothers. Who executed him later on.�
As is often the case, the mechanism that reproduced and escalated violence was revenge, a central feature of many narratives and a powerful driver of violent behavior in general: �We were young then. We wanted revenge.� When it comes to revenge, the narratives that stand out include the terrible first-person description of the ordeal imposed on a rival (�With my brother killed and everything, just like I told you. I was fourteen, fifteen. And that�s why I took care of Pavl�kos later on. I beat him for one whole day and one night.�), or the third-person description of the beating of a Communist by the husband of the pregnant woman he had allegedly condemned to death (�I wish I hadn�t seen all that�). It is also striking how revenge transcends geography: escaping to Athens offered no respite, as revenge-seekers followed their enemies and took advantage of the chaotic situation to target and assassinate them. Inevitably, revenge caused counter-revenge, violence led to more violence. Even after the violence stopped, the memory of it shaped people�s identities and affected their behavior in lasting ways.
Not everything in the novel is bleak, however. There is a flip side to the revenge narratives, for instance, consisting of accounts of positive reciprocity when people who protected others by erasing a few names from a target list, intervening on someone�s behalf, or refusing to denounce someone who victimized them were later protected in a moment of need by those they had helped. The story of Yi�rgos and Yeorgh�a in chapter 2 is particularly moving in this respect.
The violence also has its absurd side. We find it in the story of the young woman who stitched a crown instead of a hammer and sickle on the berets she made for the Communist guerrillas and almost lost her life because of it, the man who was executed by the Germans when they found that the papers he had stuffed into his shoes to blunt the nails holding the soles were EAM leaflets, or the Security Battalion officer who survived many difficult moments only to be assassinated in Athens where he went to pursue his love interest. The pinnacle of absurdity is probably reached when German troops turn out as the liberators of the peasants being held by the guerrillas in the monastery detention camp.
Of course, taking all these complex processes into account does not mean that we need to accept that the choices made by these individuals are morally justified. It is worth stressing here that
Does its unrelenting focus on this complex reality make
And on their way up to the square old Yi�nnis Pr�sinos says, Haven�t you set it ablaze yet? And he took out his flint lighter. They were going to burn it down one way or another. But old Yi�nnis, he gave them his lighter. He tossed it to them from his bench. May God forgive him.
It was God�s wrath, all that, there�s nothing else you can say.
And may all that never happen again.
Notre histoire est noble et tragique
Comme le masque d�un tyran.
When Thanassis Valtinos first began writing, the literary climate in Greece was not particularly auspicious for fiction. Poetry was the dominant medium of expression, and formidable writers like George Seferis, Odysseas Elytis, Andreas Embirikos, and Yannis Ritsos were in the forefront, giving Greek poetry both national and international acclaim. The appearance in 1963 of Valtinos�s novel
Valtinos�s daring new voice in
Valtinos has sandwiched his narrative between two texts, one ascribed to an eighteenth-century cleric named Isaakios, perhaps the last humanist to project the virtues of ancient Arcadia onto the landscape of the southeastern Peloponnese, the Christian monastery in its middle notwithstanding; and the other an epilogue that debunks the good cleric�s utopian opener. Between the extreme sublimation at the outset and the grim realities that have intervened by the end, the novel similarly appears to have two hearts: one beating to the drum taps of the ancient epics, the other to the transport of lyricists like Tyrtaeus, Callinus, and George Seferis.
It would be natural for an explorer of literary texts to want to prospect, upon first leafing through this book, for the presence of any sign promising the joyful experience of poetry � the aspect of any artifact, in other words, that would determine the quality of the time invested in the reading. If the precritical indicators could serve as guides and
Keeping both the content and its organization constantly before the mind�s eye is a balancing act few readers of the prose classics, be they by Montaigne or Tolstoy, manage to maintain.
The book raised a furor when it first appeared in 1994 for presumably favoring one side of the conflict it portrayed over the other. Is it possible that so many of its critics read past the material in any single account (or the ironies inherent in the succession of any two) in an attempt to mine their subject matter for evidence of the author�s � Mr. Thanassis Valtinos of Main Street�s � own predilections? Was the medium of the many narratives so transparent and apparently without texture that they took it for raw, uninflected content? The numerous speaking sections of
There have indeed been the exceptional readers who sensed an �impersonal� air to the book. They recognized Valtinos�s attraction to the slice-of-life, unsentimental folk forms that had informed a large number of his earlier works and to the unself-conscious, unschooled speech patterns of the man in the village coffeehouse, whether in Lesbos (
Gradations of timbre abound. Some sections read like officers� reports to headquarters, others like legal treatises. They are the sections that make use of the purist, katharevousa, idiom by the speakers, who range from schoolteachers to lawyers to Party cadres. Other sections feature the reluctant responses to questions by an unidentified interlocutor. The philosopher Walter Benjamin, in his essay on Nikolai Leskov, observed that survivors of the carnage of World War I, contrary to expectations, were less not more talkative. The chronicler in
The periodic cross-fading of personalities in their relationship to time and the landscape of the Peloponnese underscores Valtinos�s implied insistence that he is dealing in uncoached random reports. Somehow, magically, Valtinos�s wildly variegated statements exhibit an interconnectedness and relevance to one another reminiscent of wind-blown
Once past the prefatory utopia Valtinos sets the tone for the kind of communication that has neither Bishop Isaakios�s euphuism nor the detachment of its modernist retraction in the finale. The page-long first chapter contains a woman�s recollection of the summer wind carrying cinders from houses burning in neighboring villages. She cites the urgency of men�s messages to their families to pick up everything and make themselves scarce because bad things are coming their way. The sense of approaching danger, the rumors of violence spreading facelessly like a contagion, is so gripping that one forgets that this is happening in Arcadia, where such things are not supposed to happen. The unthinkable is becoming real. A local can tell that the smoke is not coming from burning vegetation. Houses that had not been bombed by Germans or blown up by Italians are now being torched, one after the other, with the help of a broomstick set afire by a fellow Greek�s flint lighter. This man, mentioned by name, even exchanges a quip or two with the members of the committee that was carrying out orders as directed by the Party chapter chairwoman.
Like Hawthorne�s �Custom-House� overture to
Speakers in the book are either warned, typically by another speaker, not to mention any names, or they suddenly turn silent with an expression that comes close to a gruff, but ambiguous �I�m done talking.� The concluding reference to much that is unspeakable in Valtinos often assumes the gravity of historical closure (�The rebel insurrection was over. . It was over for good,� the Greek verb in this context being a derivative of
The oft-intuited dilemma in
Valtinos�s speakers come from or go through places that are inseparable from their own and their families� identities. The metaphor, a synecdoche really, is saying, �If you�re looking for �art� it�s out there,� in a territory of narrowly topical and date-bound, often warring, site-specific states. Allusions to places of birth, mixed in with the speakers� relatives and acquaintances, make
Chora can be alarmingly literal as well. In one of the shortest chapters of the book the speaker describes a team of mules loaded with sacks of chestnuts traveling by night. When the animals suddenly freeze in their tracks the muleteer wonders whether they had sensed the macabre past under their hooves. Washington Irving and Balaam�s Ass from the book of Numbers converge upon the reader�s novelized interviewee, who wonders whether it was �the devil playing tricks, or. . the smell of blood � three years since Foti�s was killed there.� The reader has long sensed that the indirection by which so much information is conveyed to the page is intentional and that possibly the blurry contours and the discontinuous nature of its interludes are so many nudges toward the participatory cast of this fiction, the active connecting of lines of thought and the juxtaposing of the varying gradients of truthfulness (or posing) between the book�s two covers. The reader�s co-authoring of
Valtinos does not divulge the information as to how the first-person reports in the novel came into his possession, or the process by which they lined themselves up for the readable, published version. The documents fascinate from the start by their alternating emphases and changing points of view. Some are prodding investigations while others are tableau-like miniatures of pathos. Even bathos. Take the execution of an emaciated old woman who refuses to betray her son�s whereabouts and is killed on the spot. Others read like Norse sagas.
The persona of the non-omniscient narrator whom, for convenience� sake, we can call Valtinos, reappears in later chapters of the book in order to close an epic ring composition and to pose questions that mark him as another local, on intimate terms with various families� histories and, frequently, an acquaintance of the speakers. There are moments when the questions resemble Socrates� maieutic method of facilitating the birthing of a story or Homer�s questioning of his hero. The working assumption in
The chapters are subtly intertwined, and so are the interludes. The withholding, for instance, of a specific detail for hundreds of pages until its significance is made clear in a new, still shifting context affects the reader�s sense of time and disbelief. And it affirms Valtinos�s sense of the dignity of what would have otherwise been trivial facets of the essentially subjective nature of human experience. Valtinos is so fastidious about not overstating a particular mood he often concludes with aphoristic brevity or by the mere restating of his speakers� last words.
This book may help explain the attraction Valtinos�s dry, laconic style holds for his readers. The �intermittency� of the Civil War material with the shorter prose poems, besides serving to return the reader to the life of the senses, reveals a Valtinos constantly on the lookout for the other kinds of life going on even among the ruins. Indeed, there are rich doses of Bakhtinian �novelizing� in
As the short chapters are mounted in the midst of the longer ones they tend to be emblematic of circumstances as well as of states of mind. In a barely four-line section a woman is asked if she remembered the incident of concealing someone inside a storage trunk: �She started to cry. Poor thing, she�s an old lady now, all shriveled up.� The souls, even of the bravest, as in many of Homer�s martial encounters, depart with a whimper. Valtinos�s snapshots function much like the linguist Roman Jakobson�s continuators, both phatic and evocatory.
Whatever else makes up the chapters of the book is suddenly pushed into the background by the awareness that in the midst of untold calamities a young woman can still be romanced and proposed to by a rebel captain passing through, while another can be coveted by a rightist hothead who can find no other way to be near her except by arresting and re-arresting her; trains are somehow still connecting small townships to county seats; while a handful of naked German soldiers take a dip in a stream of mountainous Arcadia. It is these short, compressed tableaus, in the final analysis, that carry the day. When the agonizing of relatives and friends finally subsides, the last image the last chapter leaves the reader with is of a villager�s speculating over a source of fresh water: if his price is not met, the water will be left to lie in its underground resting place. The site of anguish and fear for the reader is relieved by the hint of an element of life ready to gush forth if only the agency of man would not interfere with it. Even the novelist and critic Edward Dahlberg heard, in his essay �Melanctha� from
The cross-layering of human motivations in
By not insinuating any known voice in the master narrative and by not damning either of the fratricidal sides, Valtinos allows scenes of desperate choices to speak for themselves. Even as the Greeks commandeer historic monasteries like Orthokost� and Loukou to �process� future victims, the German occupying forces do their own culling of civilians for the labor camps at home. Does the category of a peasant society whose members are forever enmeshed in the cycles of subsistence farming and the rituals of homemaking explain the violent swings of one group to �liberationist� oppression and of its rival to murderous defensiveness? Through the unfolding of the stories themselves Valtinos distances himself enough to let the reader share in the quizzicality of the events. One woman pretends to be an epileptic � a ploy reminiscent of the Hellenistic romances � in order to avoid deportation to Germany. Only a few chapters later, a group of war-weary individuals volunteers to be taken to camps in Germany in order to escape being exterminated at home! The forces at plague, as James Joyce would have put it, would make idiocy of any attempt at generalizing.
Forty years on, during the writing of the book, many of the bloodstained locales in the Peloponnesus were renamed � some even removed � as if chora had been acting the author: revising, crossing out, and rewording the screed on the ground. In keeping with the fragility and transitoriness of power, as quoted from the book of Psalms in the epigraph of
A novel is the onset of a new creation. During the fourteenth-century Plague in Florence, and a generation before Chaucer, Giovanni Boccaccio arranged for his storytellers� brigade, some of whom are related to each other, just as some of the
Thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter�s vessel.
ISA�KIOS, BISHOP OF RH�ON AND PRAST�S
All day long the wind carried ashes down toward us. But it was quiet. In the evening we sat out in front of the house, and the men saw five people heading out from the Makr�s property and going off. They went down a ways to a clearing, and they saw two of them going into the Ko�ros gorge, and the other three going up toward Masklin�ki Vigla.1 The men came back, they said, Something�s up, we�re clearing out because they�re going to arrest us tonight. They�ll kill us. And they left right then and there. They told us women, Collect your things, get the animals out tomorrow, away from Koub�la, don�t leave anything behind. Because something�s up. They left, and we left in the morning, break of day. Me, the shepherds� wives, and my sister-in-law, Yi�rgos�s wife. Yi�rgos the lawyer. She�d come there from Tr�polis, they had Yi�rgos in the detention camp, they�d arrested him. We gathered up the goats from L�kka. Tsio�los�s widow was there, Lio�.2 She tried to catch some hens to take with her, she had a rooster, it got away from her. She says, Let�s not be too long, because the men told us to leave, I�ll come back and get it tonight. She went back that night, but the rooster wasn�t in the coop. They go out looking, she had her two eldest children with her, ten, eleven years old, they see feathers down on the threshing floor. Lio� says, That brute, he killed our rooster.
The next day they took
��Was Pavl�kos there?
��When I went he wasn�t there yet. The other men were there. Kl�arhos, Velissar�yiannis,3 Mavromantil�s. They were the leaders. At night they got us and took us to Ayiop�tro.4 The girls come in, Anth�no not Anth�, Sotir�a, she brings me a blanket. She puts it right in my hand. And there I was in these sandals. They said they were taking us to Ayiop�tro for questioning. They take us there, they shove us in some cellar dungeon. The next day they move us. They put us in line to send us off to the detention camp. As we�re going there, Pavl�kos comes along. There were about twenty of us. Lygh�tsos�s wife El�ni was there.
��Is El�ni alive?
��She is, she�s in Athens. Pavl�kos comes over, he comes up next to me. He says, When they question you say that you�re willing to work for the Organization.5 That was his advice to me.
��Pavl�kos may have been whatever he was, but he wasn�t a die-hard Communist. He would cover for our fellow villagers. He was the one who helped Kalosyn�tos escape.
��Yes, but let me continue now. And as we were about to get started, Pavl�kos says, Wait, I have to announce something to you. Just this minute, he says, they went to Koub�la to burn down the Makr�s family�s houses, his exact words, and to take in the rest of the family, and they didn�t find anyone. They�d left for M�sklina. They went to the Germans. And Kl�arhos said, Looks like they were traitors.
��Didn�t he say anything to tip you off, all he did was make that announcement?
��That�s why they arrested her. That�s how her brothers left. But she didn�t start it right.
��How my brothers left is another story. I�m telling how they arrested me.
��They arrested you, that�s why they arrested you.
��They took us to the detention camp. We go inside. The balconies are packed full. Yi�rgos Kont�s from Karakovo�ni. M�tsos Kapetan�as, Chr�stos Petr�kos, Nik�las�s brother, D�mos Kokkini�s, Than�sis Grigor�kis, someone named Theodor�poulos from Dolian�, and Panayoto�ros. Let me try and remember them.
��Themistokl�s?
��Themistokl�s and I went to the detention camp together. With his brother Chr�stos.
��They had Chr�stos in the detention camp too?
��They did. They beat him something awful.
��Which Chr�stos?
��Anagnost�kos. Themistokl�s�s brother.
��Did they beat him too?
��They did. Don�t interrupt me, because I�m going to tell it all. He�s dead now. We went there, we go in. I was lost, there were so many people. We lie right down. I lay out the one blanket your sisters had given me. I lie down and pass out. They come in, Get up, Chrysanthe says to me, get up, it�s nighttime. I get up, they take us up to the cells. Going up, on the stairs I see Nik�tas Bra�las with his mother. I start crying. A man named Yiorg�tsis comes in, worked at the detention camp. I don�t know where he was from. Girl, you should have cried those tears for your brothers. For my brothers, so they wouldn�t leave for M�sklina. They take us upstairs, the cells are all full. They take us out on a balcony. Me, Lygh�tsos�s wife El�ni, a couple of women from Ayiasofi�, and one from Teg�a, a young girl. I put the blanket in front of us on the railing. And we waited. Vas�lis T�yias comes by. He tells me.
��T�yias was there?
��He was the camp commander. T�yias from Mesorr�hi. He was killed. And Strat�s Karad�mas. The General, we could say. He came in, he put a fright in me, We�ll cut off your hair, you.6 Why cut off my hair, just put a bullet in me. And T�yias says to me, No, you�re a hostage, we�re holding you because of your brothers. We�ll cut the hair off the other women. Thirty-six days I was a hostage. I wouldn�t eat. They�d give us watery soup with flies in it and a tiny piece of bread. Like a piece of
��To the village of Prast�s?
��To the village of Prast�s.
��They took Themistokl�s there?
��And then they took us up to the mountains. They made Panay�tis, Irakl�s�s brother, play the clarinet. And they danced. Well, anyway. It�s all a muddle.
��And when the Germans came they took you.
��When the Germans came we went and gave ourselves up. But we had got some water earlier. There was a drinking fountain. Look, girls, down there down by the wild pears, one of them said. We got water. Someone, a tall man, says, Who�s that girl, and Vas�lis T�yias said, She and her whole family are in deep with the Security Battalions.8 About me. We took the water, and on the road the man who had asked about me stopped us. He tells us, I�m Al�monos, and he turns to me, he tells me, I killed Ioann�tzis from your village over there. Right there, he says to me. He showed me a hillside. A beautiful hillside. His head is planted under a pear tree. That�s what he said. Then I was really frightened. They took us farther up. It was hot. We tell Panay�tis, Play a song. I told him that. To cheer us up. I will, he says. But first I�ll play a funeral dirge. We all gave a shudder. No, no, Panay�tis, don�t do that. I don�t remember if he played anything. And that night, at twelve o�clock, they killed him. They kept them behind, they sent us away. The men took us there, the rebels, along the way they began to talk. What are you saying, what�s going on? Nothing, stay close to us. It was pitch dark. They took us to those shepherds. I couldn�t reap grain. I didn�t know how. They wouldn�t give me anything to eat. Chrysanthe went and reaped the grain for me. Later we saw the Germans. They were swimming in the stream. We gave ourselves up; they took us back to Orthokost�. Kalabak�yiannis comes in, he tells us, Tonight they killed Bra�las�s mother, and Marask�s, and Themistokl�s. And Panay�tis Pol�tis. They were killing them all night, and that woman from Tr�polis, they smashed in her head with the butt of a gun, left her dead on the spot. I got out safe. From Orthokost� they took us to Leon�dio. I went to the school, the Bo�nis sisters were in there. Prisoners. Alexandra and the other one. They were crying. I ask, What�s wrong with them, someone tells me, They found out their brothers were killed. I felt sorry for them, I went over to them, I say, Don�t cry, girls. I said that like a good Christian, they didn�t answer me. I go outside, I run into Irakl�s Pol�tis. Yeorgh�a, are the Bo�nis girls in there? No, I tell him, and he didn�t go in. He believed me. We went to the seafront. There were people in line waiting to get into the ca�ques. Lots of people. From the Orthokost� detention camp, people the rebels had taken to Xerok�mpi. I found Tas�a Kamb�lis there and Mat�na Lymb�ris, Ch�a�s sister, I found Tas�a�s brother Stam�tis. Irakl�s comes in angry as can be, I could kill you now, Yeorgh�a, in front of your brother, who cares? Just because I hadn�t given away the Bo�nis sisters. Go away, I tell him, get away from me, leave me alone. And then I see those very women, they�re escorting them somewhere. They took them away, and they disappeared among the vegetable plots. They took them. Much later I learned they had executed one of them. From Leon�dio we went to N�fplion. And from N�fplion up to Eleoh�ri. To M�sklina. They come and tell me, They want you. They had taken someone in. My aunt tells me, You�d better go in case it�s someone innocent and they kill him for no reason. I go out into the street, Chrysanthe tells me, It�s that man. The one who told me at the detention camp I should be crying those tears for my brothers. Well, there he was again, right there in front of me. L�gdas says to me, We�re counting on you. L�gdas from the Security Battalions. As we�re talking I hear a voice coming from downstairs at the school. They were holding him in the basement. Hey, Yeorgh�a, it�s me. Who�s that? Yi�rgos, don�t you remember me? Oh, Yi�rgos, it�s you. You�re holding
��Was he in the detention camp?
��He passed through once. A kapet�nios.9 Kapet�n Farm�kis. And he saw me, and he came to Tr�polis looking for me. He found out where I was, got directions, and he came looking for me. To marry me. And he was so insistent. He�d come in one door and I�d be out the other. I�d go to Ary�ris�s place. To Yi�rgos�s, and hide. I can�t, I�d tell them, I just can�t. And there he�d be again. Asking for my hand. He finally gave up.
They burned down Ayiasofi� around harvest time. We were still in Koub�la. We didn�t go up there, how could we go there, but all night long we heard the crackling of the fire. And the smell of the smoke kept coming down to us, making us choke. We found out later that Anghel�s Lamb�ris�s mother had stayed behind. The man with the blacksmith shop. The others had gotten out and gone across from there. The kapetana�oi1 show up. Where is your son, where�s your son? She says, What do you want with him, dear man, an invalid with six children. He was missing an eye. Lost it in Albania.2 He knows how to hide, they say. They pressed her to say where he was but she wouldn�t tell. With the villagers watching from the distance. And as she stood there leaning up against the wall they shot her, and that�s how they found her. Standing, just as she�d been. She didn�t fall down. She was propped up on her cane, she was thin, she didn�t fall down. And they found her there dead.
His brother Kyri�kos was killed that day. They had gone down to St�los to look around. The St�los villages. Most likely his own fault. He had an Italian rifle. He tried to do something, and the rifle went off and killed him. Well, Mih�lis took that loss very personally. On that same day they had brought Ts�gris to Tr�polis. He was a commissioned major, from the Reserves I think. He belonged to ELAS.1 The ELAS Reserves. They arrested him, brought him in, and he was in L�ras�s custody. I worked in L�ras�s office. The 2nd Bureau. L�ras was a captain and a graduate of the Army Cadets Academy; at the time he was chief of Intelligence for the 2nd Gendarmes Corps Headquarters. Under Papad�ngonas,2 that is. The 2nd Gendarmes Corps Headquarters. That was its official title. L�ras was from Ayios Andr�as, or rather from Karakovo�ni. A fellow villager, and among the first to come down. Why I had come there is a different story. At any rate, it was all uncharted waters for me. The Battalions weren�t formed in Tr�polis only. They were in all the towns of the Peloponnese. Those were times of national emergency. No Greek ever liked the Germans. Or wanted to collaborate with them. That�s when the Peloponnese Battalions were created. In the spring of 1944. When it was becoming clear that the Germans were losing the war. And it was also becoming clear how dangerous it would be for anyone who might find himself at the mercy of ELAS after the German collapse. After they cleared out. And that�s precisely where things led for them. Inevitably. The push had started, however, very early on. At a time when no one suspected anything. After the Albanian front had crumbled. The first seeds of doubt were sown. They kept saying that only the reservists had fought. That the commissioned officers were only interested in their stripes. This is all lies, of course. I should know. I served in the critical center of the theater of operations. The 13th Regiment of the 11th Division. I was at the most forward point of the front. Toward Ber�ti. And that�s where we came under the German onslaught. Immediately the 11th Division � ours, that is � and the 13th Regiment where I was serving were issued an urgent order to leave. I was in the 2nd Machine Gun Battery of the 2nd Battalion. Platoon officer. We had to leave urgently and get to Kat�ra to establish a line of defense. To cover the rear of the Epirus Corps. The corps that was already operating in Albania, so as not to be outflanked by the Germans. We arrived at Kat�ra, where we had to set up our line of defense. Just above Metsovo, exactly at Proph�tis Il�as.3 But everyone could already see that it was hopeless. Thousands of soldiers and officers were marching in from western Macedonia toward Yi�nnina. An army in disarray. We were right on that line when the armistice was signed. We stayed in Proph�tis Il�as until Easter. Luftwaffe planes were flying overhead. They bombed Yi�nnina. The armistice was signed there, at Bodon�si. Archbishop Spyr�don arrived, accompanied by Generals B�kos and Tsol�koglou.4 They signed the armistice with the Germans. And I was one of the last to arrive at Kastr�. And that�s how it all ended. And then of course they started saying, The reservists did all the fighting, the COs just looked after their stripes. From that far back. There was Yi�nnis Veliss�ris, who was no leftist and no anarchist either. He was just an objector. To everything. If our group had only trusted him, Kyrel�is and the rest, they would have had him join up. He wouldn�t have ended up where he did. Like so many others whose isolation pushed them over to the opposite side. Yi�nnis was a good man. We were close friends, and I thought it was a terrible misfortune that he was executed. I was now back in the army. A lieutenant at that time and on a manhunt for Aris.5 I was in Tr�kala, with the 1st Tr�kala Battalion of the National Guard. Velouhi�tis was already in disfavor with the KKE.6 He�d had a falling-out with the Central Committee and they expelled him. He had disagreed about the V�rkiza Treaty and all that.7 Well, he was trying to get papers so he could leave for Yugoslavia. He was just hanging around waiting for them. We had a platoon stationed in Kalamb�ka, up in Kourtso�fiani. The platoon leader let us know that Aris, with about forty men, had gone up to Mount K�ziakas. K�ziakas is right next to Tr�kala. At P�li we had another platoon. P�li, at the foot of K�ziakas. The Porta�k�s River runs right by there. It�s about fifteen kilometers away from Tr�kala. We had a platoon over there with a second lieutenant. They had got hold of some firearms, the kind that were easy to get back then. They had formed teams to defend themselves, and also to get back at ELAS. To get even with them. Well, the P�li second lieutenant sent us a message. Second Lieutenant Nikol�ou of the Reserves. He had heard that Aris was spotted at T�rna, a village on the slopes of K�ziakas. This was his message to the Battalion: Am setting out with my platoon in pursuit of Velouhi�tis. Send backup and food. He�s going after Aris. Let him go. Half the National Guardsmen we had then were leftists. They were half-and-half. They were 10 percent, at the very least. They joined up on purpose so they could get arms. At any rate, the base commander sends Nikol�ou a message to turn back. But he was already advancing through the �grafa Mountains. A region where no government had ever set foot. An unwritten law. Since the time of Katsant�nis.8 He had to get back to base because they were all afraid Aris would cut them to pieces. He even sent an officer to P�li, but he didn�t get there in time, and he was reluctant to go on. The base commander sent a second envoy, same story. So at around midnight they come and wake
Take the village of Ori�. They hated anyone from Kar�toula, so much hatred between those two villages. And you know what I think. It�s one thing to have your differences, to have different interests, but to carry things that far, I mean, why? Why to such extremes? It was our cousin Paraskev�s who marched our brother K�stas up along the river. He took him to Ayios P�tros. It was him, it was Vo�lis,1 and he took in Louk�s too. And they beat him. Beat him real bad. Pantel�s told me that. I had him working for me, he did two days. That�s when they rounded them up. They took them to Drag�levo. They tell them, You have to join the Organization. They say, We won�t join. And they gave it to them good. They beat the daylights out of Anton�kos � his legs never healed. They beat them so bad. And then someone says to them, I congratulate you for your strong convictions, but now go join the Security Battalions, there�s no place for you here. They would capture them, then indoctrinate them, try to make them join the Party. My sister Evryd�ki got out, it was Aryir�yiannis who helped her, God rest his soul. Kyriaz�s�s brother-in-law, because he cared for her back then. And he went and got her out, he brought her back. He was killed in Megal�polis. And I had my own narrow escape. They had me make a dozen or so berets. I put the insignia in the front. I was good with my hands then, had been from early on. But with my miserable little brain, I didn�t know much, I put two crossing Greek flags and above them, right in the middle, a crown. And all the men who wore those berets, they didn�t realize that it should have been a hammer and sickle. At some point the rebels come to the school, the head men. And the men from Kar�toula show up too, in their berets, they go over there. As soon as they see them they say, Hey, look at this, who made these berets, who made them? And there I am in the yard. Our men didn�t know what to do, they said, Who knows what will happen now? The priest signals me to leave. He wasn�t a priest then. He says, Get out, go hide. I sneak off and leave. Imagine that. I leave, and the others say, The girl didn�t know, some old women showed her, they didn�t know either. That�s how they covered up, somehow they did it, and it was over. I stitched them a flag with a crown. Those rebels wouldn�t think twice about it, they�d call you a reactionary, and that was the end. And me a fifteen-year-old girl.
They arrested us in 1944. At first it was just Chr�stos Kapr�nos, myself, and Stavr�yiannis. It was in June. I don�t remember the date. It was during the big blockade. We were ordered to leave. Word had got out that the Germans were coming, and we had to leave. We went up to Malev�s. Lots of people there. When we got there Dr. Karav�tis ordered us to go fetch a lamb from a certain shepherd. Chr�stos was superstitious. He believed he was going to die. The thought had gotten into his head. He had dreamt that his sister-in-law was getting married. His brother Char�lambos�s wife. He saw her as a bride.1 We went to the shepherd�s as the doctor ordered us to. You fellows from Kastr�? he asked. From Kastr�, we answered. And he began apologizing. Saying he�d done us wrong. It was back in 1922. He had killed Men�laos M�ngos. Men�laos M�ngos was an authorized Singer service dealer, Chr�stos�s first cousin. He used to travel around the villages on Mount Malev�s and repair sewing machines. Spare parts and money in his briefcase. When Chr�stos heard this he tells us, I told you, something�s not right with me. Imagine coming face-to-face with my cousin�s murderer. He slaughtered the lamb, and we took it. Suddenly there was an alarm. The Germans, the Germans. We were at Meg�li L�kka. We went someplace else, we hid the lamb. We piled tree branches on top of it in case we got back in time to recover it. We just took out its liver. We wrapped it up in a kerchief. Meg�li L�kka was all in bloom, the sage plants in bloom. We split up. Our thirst was getting to us. In the evening we went down to the wells at the village of S�taina. We spent the night in a ravine. At daybreak we lit a fire, singed the liver, and ate it. Then we reached the wells. We threw a rock inside. The water level was low, and we had no way of getting any out. I was wearing some Greek Army leg wraps. I took them off, we tied them together, and we tied a kerchief at one end. The one we had wrapped the lamb liver in. We lowered this until it was soaked through, then we wrung it into our mouths. Then Chr�stos remembered he had his wallet with him. I made a ring around the top with twigs, and fastened them with some string. It was like a small bucket. And we�d lower it, we drew up a lot of water, we drank and drank. We were very thirsty. The following day we left there. We came to a clearing. So we wouldn�t be too close together and be an easy target we said we�d follow different footpaths. Some Germans appeared up above coming down from across the way. There would be Greeks with them, for sure. Did they see us? Or didn�t they? They started machine-gunning. They started throwing hand grenades. At which point it was every man for himself. I call out to Stavr�yiannis, we threw ourselves into a ravine. There were some shepherds there. But they didn�t bother with shepherds. After that we lost track of Chr�stos. I think he stayed there during the skirmish. They found him there, killed. Who found him, I don�t know. We looked for a way to escape. We headed for the S�taina woods. West of there were some high rocks; we climbed them. We found two rebels hiding there. With the sun beating down on us all afternoon. And not a drop of water to drink. The four of us agreed, finally, to slip out of there during the night. To look for a way out, to escape from the Germans. But things turned out differently. In the evening, as we were leaving, a patrol heard us. They fired two flares; we hit the ground. We waited. One rebel comes over, he points his pistol at us. You stay right here, he says, or I�ll kill you. So we wouldn�t cause any trouble. They knew their way around. We didn�t. Okay, we�ll stay here. And we spent the night there. We were parched. We would put out our tongues and lick at the rocks to get a little moisture. Day broke; the wells were above us. The Germans had taken possession of them. Yi�nnis and I decided to surrender. We got up, we raised our hands. Luckily for us, they must have been Austrians.
And at some point he gives them the slip. He leaps down a cliff, there was a ravine below, he runs in there, he disappears. They started strafing the area with their machine guns. They come over to us. A brother of yours? A cousin, says one of them to me.
M�rkos had gone. He�d come down from the mountains. Just in time. When he was a student he�d joined an anti-Metax�s1 organization. 1936. The year I first went to Athens. We lived on Ay�ou P�vlou Street in Pat�ssia. The students had started this movement, and the Security Police dressed up as priests and whatnot and they caught them � eight of them. They took in a lot of them, they kept eight. Il�as Vlah�kis, he�s an ophthalmologist now, and our brother M�rkos. They had them at Security Headquarters, near Tos�tsa Street, one street over from K�ningos Square. Stourn�ra. Stourn�ra Street. That�s where they had M�rkos and the others, and I�d go see them. I�d bring them cigarettes and food wrapped in that day�s newspaper, so they could keep up with the news. I don�t remember how long they held them. They took them up on the roof � M�rkos�s hands were swollen like loaves of bread from the beatings. I don�t know if he had to drink castor oil too. Maybe he�s just not telling. Maniad�kis2 would force them to drink castor oil.3 And it tore right through them. The Security Police showed up, they arrested him at his house. He had a sore, a boil, on the back of his neck. Then they took them to the Army Transfer Section. Seven of them and M�rkos eight, to exile them. 1936. I don�t know how I managed it, I�d go and see them. They were covered in lice by then and they would catch them, put them in cigarette boxes and stroll around with them. Then Mavroyi�rghis arrived, on the Feast of the Annunciation, I think. There was someone named Anghel�tos, served on the police force in Kastr�, my father knew him. Because our house was like some kind of monastery, whoever passed through would get a meal, even strangers. Anghel�tos was getting on in years now. A commander. And they pulled it off, in the end M�rkos wasn�t exiled. But his papers stayed at Security Headquarters, the Italians found them. And that�s how our troubles began. We left our house and slept at the Sot�ris place. Seven times we evacuated our house. We�d hear that the Italians were coming to burn us down. We�d go upstairs, collect our clothing, our linens, and off we�d run. Well, anyway, during that period the Germans arrived. From the fire to the frying pan. We hid our things. In those so-called shelters. The Sot�ris family had a storeroom. No. It was Omorfo�la�s winepress behind the wall. We hid our things in there, the whole neighborhood did. Someone gave us away, I don�t know how, and we took them to Old Man Sot�ris�s place. From there, we left a lot behind, we took them to Haro�lis Lengh�ris�s parents� place. Put them in the cistern. And someone told on us again. We were away. Old Glig�ris�s wife Stam�ta took them, with Theod�ti, her sister. K�kkinos�s wife. They took them to their own cistern. Some things, not the whole lot. Again someone gave us away, our auntie Sokr�taina,4 Marin�kos�s wife, took them. Her husband was my mother�s oldest nephew. And her mother-in-law was M�vroyi�rgaina�s sister. And Aunt Margar�ta�s. He was a watchman. A field guard. Auntie had an oakwood chest, and she buried it in her yard. Some blankets and two kilim rugs, one piece each, that we women had woven on our loom. And those were saved. Nothing else. The rest Haro�lis snitched about to someone, I don�t know who. We had a whole suitcaseful. My father had given me quite a few things. I was a good girl. In fact he wanted to take me to S�ra, he used to travel there to stock up. He had given me a gold sovereign. There weren�t any in circulation at that time. And there was also my mother�s gold jewelry. She�d got it from her uncle the doctor. A diamond and other things. And embroideries of mine. Whatever Anna Papayi�nnis had, I had too. We�d been friends from way back then, friends since childhood. Whatever one of us embroidered, the other did too. Some satins � those were taken by the rebels, from shelter to shelter. The sewing machine stayed at home. And I don�t know why, I had taken out Granny�s fur-trimmed jacket. I like saying that: Granny. She�d given it to me, I was named after her. Grandma El�ni. When she married Grandpa M�rkos, the doctor, her father borrowed two thousand gold drachmas. Back then, in 1800 and something. He was a licensed doctor. She was a priest�s daughter. They made her an outfit just like Queen Amalia�s. His brother was a tailor for the palace. Grandpa�s brother. And his other brother a merchant in Venice, he went back and forth. Anyway, he gave me the fur jacket. I kept it in a sturdy cardboard box along with two embroideries. I�d copied the design from Mrs. Manol�poulos. The wife of the justice of the peace. They had come to Kastr� at that time. She was the only daughter with nine brothers, and they gave her everything. A fantastic dowry. Lace from Cyprus and the like. I had those things at home, I�d left them there along with the sewing machine. And they barged in, Galax�dis and the others, and someone, I have no idea who, took those things. That�s when the blockade started, the big blockade. The rebels said whoever stays in their houses we�ll kill. All the men outside. And the Germans said everyone had to stay in their houses. They passed through Vo�rvoura, they found sixty or so men in the woods, they killed them all. Their wives came to Athan�sis�s place to buy black mourning clothes. Four or five women. Ism�ni opened up the shop. Maybe Andr�as was there too. I was astonished, I went in, I asked, Which of your kinfolk did they kill? My husband, my son, and my father, one of them said. On the same day. Then the Security Battalions came. Mih�lis Galax�dis and the others. They found Sp�ros Ro�melis. I think that�s who it was. His shoes had nails in them, and he�d put paper in them so they wouldn�t hurt him. They rounded up everyone. They searched them. The papers in Ro�melis�s shoes were EAM leaflets. They rounded up all those men in the coffee shop, they took them to Tr�polis. And they executed Ro�melis there. They took in St�vros Farmak�dis, just a kid, Yi�rghis5 Kont�s�s nephew. Mih�lis Galax�dis. May God forgive him. And they beat that kid something awful. We were watching from our windows, the square was still unpaved, with all that marble lying there. They kicked him all the way from M�ngas�s house. Just like a ball. Where did he get all that strength? Kicked him all the way to the edge of the square. And there he whacks him one, knocks him down onto M�kraina�s outdoor clay oven. Stood over him and shot him
They said they were bringing them from Orthokost�. I don�t know. Or rather I don�t know where they were taking them. Lots of them. A whole lot of prisoners. I mean, best I can reckon, maybe as many as 150, maybe 200. Maybe more. They took them through Galten�. They had my brother-in-law, Yi�rghis Aryir�ou. The Makr�s sisters told me that they had their brother Nik�las too. Because Nik�las � they had an olive press then and they charged a fee for using it, like a tax.1 The rebels. And they claimed that the Makr�s family had hidden quite a few gallons of olive oil, and they hauled them in for that. Them and the Koutsoyi�nnis family. Because they didn�t obey the orders of EAM. They took everything from us. The goats and the mules too. They didn�t leave us anything. Don�t know where they brought those prisoners from. But they passed through Galten�, they passed through Ayi�rghis. Kapet�n Kl�arhos was with them. He tells Nik�las Makr�s, I don�t want to kill the entire prison camp, but if the Germans force us to we will. Get yourself out of here and go over to Zoub�s�s storehouses. Zoub�s�s storehouses are somewhere in the area round Mesorr�hi. Just down from M�sklina. The area is called Mesorrahi�tika. That�s where Nik�las was going to. So he left and went there and yes, he was saved. But the others were saved too. Because they were bringing the whole campful of prisoners through Ayi�rghis on toward Koub�la and toward Eleoh�ri, and lots of Germans started moving in. Swarms of them. That�s when they killed M�mos. Kost�kis M�mos, the village alderman of M�loi. Had him up on a mule, he couldn�t walk. What should we do with this one, said the two men taking him away. And one of them said to the other, Whatever our superior said to do. The head of the detention camp. In other words, Kapet�n Kl�arhos. And
An�stis Po�lios was a neighbor of ours. A neighbor of our Aunt Anna�s. Anna Mikroli�. My father�s sister. She lived on the outskirts of Mesorr�hi. As children we used to go there and play with our cousins. Aunt Anna was the one who built the Church of the Transfiguration. A chapel, really. She donated her entire property, and she took up a collection. Gave everything she owned. She went out panhandling too. That�s how she built the church. Down there, near Pori�. About five hundred meters from her house. The Church of the Transfiguration. An�stis lived just above us. A leftist, from the very beginning of the rebel uprising. I couldn�t have ended up in worse hands. An�stis Po�lios, Nik�las Pavl�kos, and one of the T�yias men. Vas�lis T�yias. All of them from Mesorr�hi. Papad�ngonas came down to Tr�polis. In March I think. For the precise dates I�d have to ask my brother. K�stas was the head of the 2nd Bureau. He could give out information. And help a lot of people regarding pensions. With those so-called certificates of �Recognition� for services rendered.1 He knows all the details. Regarding Petr�kos and Halo�los, he could provide answers. They were his subordinates. Chr�stos Halo�los was in his office. In the 2nd Bureau. The Intelligence Bureau of the 2nd Gendarmes Corps Headquarters. That was the official designation. And Petr�kos was posted somewhere around there. As sergeant major back then. He was killed in 1946 or �47 during some battle at A�yio, then promoted to second lieutenant post mortem. They say a nephew of his killed him. His sister�s child. He had nephews in A�yio. Or someone who knew him, at any rate. Someone he knew well. An execution, in other words. K�stas had left for Athens in the fall of 1943. Everybody had left. Chr�stos Halo�los, my brother K�stas, the Kyrel�is men. Anyone who had any kind of involvement with the Resistance. To get away from the pressure on them. The pressure to join EAM was unbearable. After the Yiannak�poulos agreement on Mount Taygetus. Chr�stos Halo�los was killed during the December Uprising in Athens.2 We left Tr�polis for Sp�tses with Papad�ngonas. We were disarmed at M�loi3 and we went to Sp�tses. About eight hundred of us had started out, but only about three hundred arrived there. Most had slipped away. We stayed in Sp�tses for three or four weeks. Life was quiet. The Koryal�nios College buildings were our barracks. Kaloyer�poulos was mayor, a son-in-law of the Hasapoyi�nnis family. He came from Astros. He helped us. The local people likewise. They were all right-wing nationalists. The defections continued daily. That�s when Chr�stos left. Some sort of romantic involvement drew him to Athens. We never saw him again after that. He went to live with his sisters in Athens and was killed during the first days of the December Uprising. Before he had time to find his bearings. To join a group for his own protection. There were several organizations. The royalist X,4 for instance, and others. It seems he didn�t pursue that option, maybe he didn�t care to. Love sometimes leads to inertia. I knew the woman in question. We ran into each other some years ago at the L�rissa train station. She recognized me. A little hesitantly. Yi�nnis, she called out. She introduced her four sons to me. Four sons, tall as could be. I named one of them after Chr�stos, she told me. She was the person who�d drawn him to Athens. And I think he just didn�t have the time, or didn�t want to join up. They went and arrested him. They took him away, and after that he disappeared. His body was never even found. His sisters claim they recognized his comb on a cadaver. A decomposing cadaver. That was all. Nothing else was found. And it was the same story with Yi�nnis Pavl�kos. No relation to Nik�las Pavl�kos. Maybe a distant relative. Yi�nnis was a plant pathologist, one of the best in Greece. He did research for the Kanell�poulos Fertilizer Company. He was from Eleoh�ri. He was also a trade unionist. All the workers loved him. A great fellow. He was unmarried, his mother was his only relative. Not married. Another one who went to waste. They went and got him from his house in his pajamas. That was in Athens. His mother went looking for him; she found nothing. Back when they took those men hostage and were dragging them toward the town of Kr�ra. He was in that convoy of hostages. We�d go and search in the town dumpsites. I went with his mother, that is, twice. The stench of decomposing bodies still haunts me. At any rate, Papad�ngonas had gone down to Tr�polis. K�stas had enlisted. No other men from Kastr� had joined yet. K�stas was in the 2nd Bureau. And there were some men from the surrounding area, but not many. There was a Yi�rgos Yeroyi�nnis from Parth�ni, an artillery officer. L�ras was in charge of the 2nd Bureau. I think he was from Astros. An army captain. From the L�ras family. Kan�kis from Vlahokerasi�. A man called Karatz�s, who was later executed, chained up with others, and bound. But I don�t remember any other men from Kastr�. Nik�las Petr�kos, of course. A noncommissioned officer. Chr�stos Halo�los, also an NCO. And the notorious Kotr�tsos, Kotr�tsos the animal. He was a sergeant during the Albanian campaign, Reserve Officers Academy. Picked himself up a uniform, pinned a star on it, who would ever check him? He presented himself in Tr�polis as a noncommissioned officer. And he roared around on his motorcycle. He was K�stas Kotr�tsos, the big shot, the one and only. Who never left anyone alone. Then something happened that stunned us. The Germans were about to execute some people. They had them in jail. There was a schoolgirl among them. During those months two or three schoolgirls had been executed. People were saying, Papano�tsos is responsible for what was happening to the girls. Papano�tsos, the director of the Teachers Academy. They took those people from the jail and stood them up against the wall. The young girl, in patent-leather shoes and white socks, as if she were going to take communion. The Germans had pressed a Greek platoon into escorting the condemned, as an execution squad. Under reservist Varouts�s, the son of Major Varouts�s from Tr�polis. This horrified us. It was one thing for the Germans to do the killing. But not us Greeks. Then something happened that disappointed us beyond words. We would listen to the BBC every day. To get the news. About the expected Allied landing on the coast of the Peloponnese. So one evening we heard that the government in the Middle East had outlawed the Security Battalions. Another great blow to us. One day at about that time Papad�ngonas, whether out of obligation or as a political maneuver, congratulated Hitler on having survived the plot against him. He congratulated him, he sent him a cable. We discussed all this. There was a place, like a club. We all met there. I was sometimes in uniform, sometimes not. I had a uniform; I wore it when I went out. The Germans in the neighborhood knew me. They would salute me, and I�d salute back. I had a woman I used to visit, there were restrictions and a curfew. Somehow I had to obtain the password. The password and counter-password. I would get them from Chr�stos Halo�los. Chr�stos was in charge of codes; he had the files. Chr�stos. A short while later we advanced on Kastr�. But at this point things become blurry. I don�t remember exactly why this happened. They had burned down the village. People from Kastr� had made their way down, and we heard about it. The arson took place on the twenty-third or the twenty-fourth of July. After the Feast of Saint Il�as.5 Right about then. Our houses had been burned down earlier. Probably in May. The first seven of them. But I�m talking about the big fire now. On the following day the Bra�las men went there, a small group. They walked into the village, the walls were standing, still smoldering. They were furious. There was no doubt that atrocities had been committed. At any rate, we finally went up to Kastr�. And we went to Astros. In trucks. And three or four cars. There weren�t many of us. We spent one day in Astros. We went to Manol�kos�s store. A large storehouse. The Manol�kos brothers, Yi�rghis and Grig�ris. They were Dr. Konstant�nos�s brothers-in-law. They had a problem with one of the brothers� children. He had gotten mixed up with the rebel movement. They brought us wine, hard goat cheese, and bread. And we drank. We ate and we drank. Then we left Astros. We didn�t stay in Astros, it was a dangerous place. Wide open on all sides. We went up to Xerok�mpi, to somewhere near Tarm�ri. We posted sentries and spent the night there. There were no Germans with us. There was a detail of theirs in Kastr�. Arrived there before we did. Because I remember that on our way through I went to their doctor. My knee was swollen, I�d hurt it somewhere. He didn�t do anything to me, and of course I couldn�t understand what he was saying. He put some iodine on it, dabbed it with iodine. And then we moved on. We knew that there were rebels in Meligo�. Militia units but commanders too. Veliss�ris, Kl�arhos. So the leadership decided to surround Meligo�. We stopped about one kilometer outside the village and sent two teams to encircle it. To block the village exits. And before they even got there, only five minutes after they started, Mih�lis Galax�dis climbs into his truck with about ten other men, and going full speed, machine guns in hand and horns at full blast, he rides into Meligo�. He went in and he captured it. Of course no one stayed there to wait for us. They had all taken off. We only found a young girl. She was lighting the oil candles6 in the church, or pretending to. She wore a kerchief on her head, and a black skirt, but I recognized her. She saw that I�d seen her. She didn�t say anything. I didn�t either. The girl was innocent. Kl�arhos�s sister. She was arrested later on. They brought her down here. Anton�a, she�s F�nis Grigor�kis�s wife at present. But that�s what was happening then. All sorts of trigger-happy characters would do whatever came into their heads. Mih�lis Galax�dis was one of them. That�s how he killed Ts�gris. Ts�gris was a regular army colonel. Whom the Communists had taken to better staff their forces. Or perhaps as a front. A Greek Army colonel. He was arrested, or rather the poor man surrendered. To us. He found a face-saving solution, he surrendered. It�s well known that this is done. You get yourself arrested so you don�t appear to have surrendered. Ts�gris. Plyt�s, and all the officers from N�fplion. The N�fplion garrison. Instead of ending up in their hands, the arms ended up with the Communists. Due to airdrops by the British on Mount Taygetus, and especially the Z�reia Mountains. Airdrops of arms and gold sovereigns. And of course they dropped boots too. Everything was in their hands. So what could Yiannak�poulos and the rest do? They had nothing. And above all no moral support. What could they do? There were lots of officers. Ts�gris, Lyritz�s. Yes. And my brother K�stas interrogated Ts�gris. On Papad�ngonas�s orders. So he could verify certain things. That was K�stas�s job, interrogations. On that same day a Battalions unit set out for Eleoh�ri-Ayi�rghis. It was a routine sortie. Nothing but saber rattling. Now who could they possibly be chasing down there? Possibly, also, to bring back food. There was a shortage of food. Kyri�kos Galax�dis was in that unit too. A former gendarme. A patrol sergeant I think. And he was about to beat this woman, but he didn�t beat her, he pushed her with his rifle, an Italian carbine. Vangh�lis Faraz�s�s mother. A little old woman. In her house, there was a small staircase leading downstairs. These were quiet people, peaceful as sheep. And Kyri�kos kept pushing that old woman. Where have you hidden the oil, where have you hidden the oil? The poor woman was going down the stairs, probably to show him where. How can you hide oil? Kyri�kos was all worked up, he wanted that oil. And as he was pushing her with his rifle butt, the rifle went off and killed him. They immediately sent a dispatch to Tr�polis. To his brother in Tr�polis. He had stayed in Tr�polis. He was another violent character, like Kotr�tsos. He went around with a revolver, acting like some hotshot. As soon as he hears about this he rushes over to the Intelligence Bureau to kill Ts�gris. To take revenge. And he emptied his pistol at him just as K�stas was interrogating him. One shot, out of all those he fired, hit him. One. That�s how Ts�gris was executed. By now the Germans knew they�d be leaving, and they begin to hand over their heavy weaponry to us. Artillery and mortars. So we could fortify Tr�polis. The Germans. When they saw they were leaving they gave all that to us, plus ammunition. Tr�polis was eventually fortified and mined on all sides. All the way out. In other words its defensive fortification was complete. Mines, mortars, and all thirty-six cannons. We had placed them at the important sites, and we waited. There were just about enough of us to make up one regiment. A lot of people. And many locals had enrolled too. Reservists as well as ordinary citizens. The ELAS troops gradually began surrounding us and threatening us over their megaphones. But each time they stormed us they achieved nothing. We were well secured. One sector was taken by Chr�stos Halo�los with N�kos M�ngos. N�kos M�ngos, a second lieutenant in the Reserves. He joined the Battalions in its final days. Like so many others. For protection. For self-protection. He was from Eleoh�ri, an Ionian Bank employee. An okay fellow. He died in Athens, never married. A very good man. Well, those men had secured their sectors well. Barbed wire, mines, heavy weapons. Why, a rabbit couldn�t get through there, let alone a man. But of course the rebels had their own methods. The method of drafting civilians. Unarmed civilians. At any rate, we kept on waiting. We�d listen to the radio, I�d got hold of a radio. A cousin of mine had bought it somewhere for me. A large one, dry battery cell. At night we�d tune in to the BBC. We were staying at Vangh�lis Psal�das�s house. A true �Kolokotr�nis� style house. It dated back to the siege of Tr�polis.7 It had a stone fence and a wide entrance so oxcarts could go through. Psal�das was in Athens, now a member of EAM. We stayed at his house and filled it with firewood. When we left, we left behind enough firewood to last two years. We went out and hauled firewood. We said we�d spend the winter there. No. We said nothing, we knew nothing. We just hauled firewood. At the time we were waiting for government communiqu�s from overseas. That�s how we learned that Kanell�poulos8 had arrived at K�thira. From the BBC. That he had landed at Kalam�ta. From the BBC and through word of mouth. We heard about Meligal�s,9 we learned about Sto�pas�s death. However you look at it, Meligal�s was one massive execution. An inhuman execution. But Sto�pas fought at Gargali�noi.10 To the last minute. He died with his pistol in his hand. They all died there. Not one of them was left alive. Not one man. Papad�ngonas, in order to protect his units, and he did well, opted to bypass Mystr�s. Where the Sparta Battalion was, that is. The rebels slaughtered them later on. Using cannons they had taken from us. After the capitulation. Kanell�poulos came to Tr�polis accompanied by Tsiklit�ras.11 Kotr�tsos came out on his motorcycle to welcome him. Mih�lis Galax�dis came out in his truck. Tsiklit�ras, a ranking ELAS officer with the PEEA.12 Something like that. A colonel. The bishop was there. They stayed at a hotel. Aris arrived. In the meantime, and before the people began the manifestations, the organized demonstrations, we were instructed to get ready to go to Sp�tses. Those of us who chose to. We boarded trucks. With our arms, with our families and friends. And we went down to Ahlad�kampos, we arrived in M�loi. We were at our wits� end as to how to arrange our trucks into a defensive system. We bolted our machine guns to the hoods. There was nothing else we could do. Nothing. We finally made it to M�loi. A small vessel began ferrying us to the other side. In Sp�tses a British platoon undertook to guard us. The British. In the end they did this and more. They took our pistols away. Officers had the right to carry pistols. Then a group of ELAS rebels arrived by boat from Ermi�ni. They arrived by boat to parade right there in front of us. Provocatively. Then we routed them. We drove them away, they didn�t set foot there again. And that was the excuse for the British to take our pistols away. Then an order came that we would be transferred to a detention camp in Athens. For our own safety. This must have happened around the end of November. I don�t remember the date. I won�t risk guessing. They were afraid that the Communists would wipe us all out. It would have been quite an accomplishment if they killed two hundred officers down there. Beginning with Papad�ngonas. It would have been quite a feather in their cap. I mean in the context of the December Uprising. At the beginning of the Insurgency. They could have pulled it off too. So a minesweeper came. Two minesweepers. And they took us away to Piraeus. About two hundred of us were left. Possibly fewer. The Tavoul�ris brothers, Strav�laimos, a colonel, and some others. Quite a few officers, anyway. By nightfall we reached Piraeus. There they put us on trucks. They took us to Goud�. Escorted, once again, by the British and the state police. At Goud�, the big brass were housed in the Gendarmes Academy. Lower-ranking officers like us and civilians went to Sotir�a Hospital. ELAS rebels were holding Sotir�a. That was the company we kept. Garrison commander of Goud� was Man�lis L�ngourdas. A gendarmes colonel. From Ro�vali. An apathetic sort, no interest in anything. Most of us men were from Kastr�. We were all fellow villagers. He showed no interest at all. Perhaps he couldn�t. He had a small unit with him, very small, unarmed, backed up by about fifteen Brits. Those Brits played soccer all day. And at night they slept. It was more like we were protecting them than them protecting us. That�s when the December Insurgency broke out. We were roused to action. The history of the Uprising is well known. The G�zi district was across from us, and they fired at us daily. Most of all, those tracer bullets and the mortars drove us half crazy. We were still unarmed, like cattle waiting to be slaughtered. At which point we planned an operation, we stormed Sotir�a. In broad daylight. We took them by surprise. We shot a watchman they had posted on a pine tree. A sniper. We took him out. We took control of the Sotir�a building with the help of a group belonging to the 3rd Mountain Brigade. We found arms, we took them. Enough for ourselves and for three hundred more men. We took them. We started distributing them. But the British came and stopped us. They confiscated them � the British, again. And so we dispersed. We began moving down toward the center of Athens. The stream of Ilissus was there, and we followed it down. It was supposed to be out of range of the crossfire. But of course it wasn�t really. Because there was frequent mortar firing down there. At any rate, we kept moving along. We would go to Kolon�ki,13 which was a demilitarized zone. We�d gather information, and we�d give out information. We�d see fellow villagers there, we�d get the news from home. In the evening we�d go back. Some would stay there, if they had the means. Nik�las Makr�s, Nik�las Petr�kos. They stayed near the stadium, at Grigor�ou�s house. Thodor�s Grigor�ou. Yes, that�s where they stayed. I would go back. And the story ended roughly like this. The ELAS troops were pushed back from the greater Athens area, and then the V�rkiza Treaty was signed. We were free. We went to Argos. We couldn�t go any farther. Later on we went to Tr�polis. March came at last. And then we went up to Kastr�.
The dogs turned on the livestock. Almost got their fangs into my wife too. She calls me, I go over. They had mangled two of my ewes. I tell her, Wait. I go up to Atzin�s�s storage sheds, I get my rifle. They were away, but I knew where they kept the key. I went in, I took the rifle, I took cartridges from the cabinet. I go back, and
They kicked him all the way over to the Unknown Soldier. There they walloped him and threw him down into M�kraina�s yard. And they shot him full of bullets. And they threw him in Omorfo�la�s vegetable patch. For three days they said, If anyone goes to bury him, we�ll kill him. We got up, we looked around, no one going there. So I went with Stella, we had a hard time of it, we put him on a ladder. The two of us. And we carried him up to the school. His sisters were waiting there. I don�t remember who else. We took him to the cemetery. I tell them, Do whatever you want, I can�t help you any more. Do whatever you want. And I got up and left. They dug a hole and shoved him in. Like a dog.
And Mih�lis, they killed him down near Ori�, on the same day. Petro� was screaming. Maritsoyi�nnis�s wife went there, and Klar�a went there. Petro� went there herself. I couldn�t bear it. They went there, they found him, and they couldn�t get near him. They washed him there. They tried to put him on the mule to bring him back but they couldn�t. So they buried him down there. Just like that. Mih�lis. Right where they found him. His mother went there, his mother. All that during the big blockade. The village was burned down later. They had taken us in. But before that, before the big blockade. We had put on a play. We�d performed
Her father would get himself drunk in Kastr�. The priest. He�d slipped into a drinker�s apathetic state. And he�d neglected his family. But my aunt had discussed this with the old man, and she�d put him in charge of their affairs. She�d handed things over to him carte blanche. That all happened in 1925, maybe 1926. I can barely remember it. That�s when Stylian�s came from Chicago. Stylian�s Kalam�ris. He was from Kar�toula too. Hard times. People were suffering. Wheat shortages, large families, lots of mouths to feed. People didn�t have enough of anything, not bread, not oil. Not even wine. Anyone in America was considered to be in the promised land. Should anyone show up from over there, everyone wanted him for a son-in-law. So Stylian�s arrived. Someone would approach him, someone else would wine and dine him. He was short and fat, or rather he wasn�t all that short. But he looked short because he was fat. Big belly, no neck at all, his head stuck on his shoulders. The old man started working on him too. Diplomatically. I have a girl for you too, he tells him. From a good family. She�s my niece. Pretty, upstanding, good housewife. But I�m not sure she�ll be interested in you. There was a purpose to all this now. To this manipulative preamble. To lower his hopes as a possible suitor. He talked him up good; in the end he had his way. They arranged for him to come to the house so they could meet each other. His niece was notified accordingly. The old man�s second niece. She came to the house, they pulled out a bolt of cloth. Cloth they used to weave on the loom. They unrolled it to cut a blouse for my mother. That was the pretext. After a while the prospective bridegroom showed up. He came in, said good day, they said good day too. An unusual hour for the old man to be there. The whole thing was a setup. Let me introduce you to my niece. The niece was bending over a plane-smoothed wooden chest to measure the cloth. She didn�t suspect anything. Today she must be eighty or older. Ir�ni. She came here last summer. Stylian�s isn�t alive now. She was plump, heavy. With white hair. But as a young woman she was pretty. At any rate she was thin, and nimble. So let us introduce our niece to you. He doesn�t waste any time. You know, your uncle and aunt here have been having a word with me. Do you know about what? Ir�ni was mortified. He came to the point, that fellow. In medias res. Right to the point. Ir�ni was so mortified that she dropped the scissors and the tape measure, if she even had a tape measure. I can�t remember if she took measurements or if she used a pattern to cut the cloth. Then she found a more convenient place to escape the onslaught. She opened the hatch and disappeared. Stylian�s went over to her and leaned over. The hatch was open. You didn�t answer me, he said to her. She stopped on the third or fourth step. That�s when she realized that a marriage was being arranged for her. Whatever my uncle and aunt say, and my father, she said. The father came last. I agree. He was elated, he considered her response to be, and in fact it was, an acceptance of his proposal. He went out on the balcony � you can still see the bullet marks. He had a pistol on him, he took it out and fired one, two, three, four shots in the air. To proclaim to the world, to noisily trumpet the new-formed alliance. The balcony was covered by a big piece of tin, and he made a hole in it. That son of a gun, said the old man, he shot a hole in the tin cover and now it will leak. And that�s how the marriage was arranged. They had their wedding, went off to America, and had a family. And they lived happily for almost half a century. They had four children. Thanks to the old man�s clever ploy. Thanks to his sharp-minded strategy. To his telling him, I have a fine young lady, but of course she has no dowry, if you insist on one we�ll scrape something together. But I don�t know if she�s going to like you. Because you�re fat, and all that. He wore that poor man down. Broke his morale. Didn�t even tell him they had arranged for him to go to their house, or who the person was. Just told him the person will be at the house, but not who she was. So his curiosity would be aroused. And it certainly was.
That fall in Athens we had a problem just surviving. When we arrived. That�s when we went there � Ary�ris Nikol�poulos from Valt�tsi1 took us there. There was a group of men from Valt�tsi, with Papaoikon�mou and the rest. They cooperated, they all voted for Tourkovas�lis.2 Tourkovas�lis, the head of the Bank of Greece at the time. And we went to see him. We explained the situation to him. Thodor�s, Ary�ris Nikol�poulos said to him. What are we going to do? What�s going to happen? Tourkovas�lis had supported us in the past. He promised us that soon we�d be able to secure arms. So we could form teams in the Ermion�s area. Where there was a sizable EDES3 organization. In the end the only thing he did was sign us up for the employee soup kitchen. All of us from Arcadia, everyone who had left from down there. To get meals there until we were settled somewhere. They had dining rooms in the basement of the central branch, where they cooked food, and we went and ate for free there. Until October 28. Which is why I said I left Kastr� in October. Until October 28. On October 28, Tourkovas�lis was arrested. By the Germans. It happened in the bank�s festivities hall, where a ceremony had been organized in honor of �hi Day.4 The third anniversary. With the approval of the board of directors, of course. But word of the gathering was leaked, and the Germans burst in and nabbed them all. The board of directors, the employees, everyone. Tourkovas�lis was up in his office. He hears about it, he goes downstairs, he says to the Germans, Whatever my employees did was on my order. I�m the only one responsible here. So of course the Germans arrested him. He was court-martialed. They had him in jail in Kallith�a. They cut off his hair. They were going to execute him. And he got off by chance. Because right at that time they killed his brother Yi�rghis Tourkovas�lis. A former officer of the gendarmes, also a member of Parliament. ELAS caught him and they shot him. I think that this contributed to Th�doros�s being let off. He stayed in jail until the Liberation.5 Tourkovas�lis. And later on, when K�rou6 accused him in Parliament of collaborating with the Germans, he reacted in the well-known Tourkovas�lis style. He had been elected a member of Parliament with the help of Maniad�kis. Well, he took care of K�rou, he waylaid him on Anth�mou Gaz� Street in downtown Athens, and he beat the daylights out of him.
��That so-called Recognition for having participated in the Resistance. That�s what I just can�t stomach.
��Never mind the Recognition. Can you tell me about the old lady?
��Yes, I�ll tell you.
��That�s what I want. When they caught her, how they caught her, why they caught her. When you found out that they killed her. How old was the old lady when they butchered her. And did they cut her up or did they shoot her?
��Cut her up. They butchered her.
��When did they arrest her?
��They arrested her some time around February. If I remember correctly.
��Where?
��They arrested her here. Right here.
��The old lady worked as a cobbler?
��Yes.
��And how old was she then?
��Fifty-five. Fifty-six. And they didn�t just arrest her, they looted her things too. They loaded up two cars, anything they could find. In the house and in the cobbler�s shop. They took down the wine and carried it off in goatskins. Loaded up those wineskins.
��Where did the old lady learn the trade?
��From her father. And she made new shoes, all kinds. She was the best cobbler in town.
��Did you learn to cobble from her?
��Yes, from her. And so. They brought her down here. They kept sending us letters to go back.
��Had you gone over to the Battalions?
��We hadn�t gone anywhere at the time they arrested her. That�s the funny part.
��Where were you?
��We were in Athens, that�s all. Trying to protect ourselves, like so many others.
��Yes.
��We were staying there in Athens. The Battalions were formed around March. That is, after things got tough here in the villages. People couldn�t take it. Wherever they went, they were killing people, arresting them, and so on. And those actions led to reaction.
��When did they arrest her?
��Around February.
��They must have arrested her earlier.
��Maybe January. And meanwhile they kept sending us letters up in the village. Be back home by midnight and you have nothing to fear � we won�t do anything to you.
��Who signed them?
��They just sent them like that. Someone would stop you, for example. The Organization gave me this letter, he�d say. In the meantime the so-called Resistance was formed. The Security Battalions were formed, and people went over to them. And that�s when it all happened. The first ten days of June. After the springtime arrests. When the Germans went out on various operations. The big blockade, as we call it. I know that�s when they killed her. During the first ten days of June.
��Were you in the Battalions?
��It was at that time the Battalions were formed.
��Yes.
��But when they arrested her there were no Battalions.
��Who told you, do you remember?
��That they arrested her?
��That they killed her.
��Yes. Word got out. Because at the detention camp there were people from Kastr�. Along with the old lady. And when the Germans closed in on them, they had to break up the camp. And execute the people there. Like Pol�tis, and old Mrs. Bra�las, my mother, and I don�t know how many others. Someone called Marask�s from Ro�vali. Themistokl�s Anagnost�kos. A man from Tr�polis, and a girl. Well, anyway. They killed them. And when they killed that lot the rest of them were scared, they tried to hide. They formed small groups, two here, two there. You know. And those rebels came back up, there was a ravine down below. They say, Just now we executed the traitors. The others all scared out of their wits. They deserved it, they told them. And they were spared.
��You say they arrested her in February.
��Yes.
��Could it have been later?
��No, it was in February.
��But on February 2 the first detention camp was dismantled. They left Orthokost� and went to M�vri Tr�pa.1 On the second of February.
��Ah, the first detention camp.
��And they left. The Germans freed them.
��Yes, right. With the second detention camp.
��Then they arrested her later, not in February.
��Yes, maybe. Maybe around March. Something like that.
��Were you still in Athens?
��Yes, we were in Athens.
��Who else did they capture with her, do you remember?
��From here, Panay�tis Pol�tis. Irakl�s�s brother.
��Yes.
��There were five, six, seven of them. Five of them were executed.
��Did you ever see Kalab�kas, or talk to him?
��Which Kalab�kas?
��Yi�nnis. The one who escaped.
��Oh, yes.
��He says he dropped down. Just in time.
��And that he covered himself with my mother�s skirts. How do you know all that?
��I just do. I heard about it.
��He pretended to be dead, he smeared himself with blood.
��And later when they burned down the village, what do you remember?
��I think they burned down the village in July. In the month of July. That was the big group fire. But before that they burned some down to set an example. The first fire was seven houses.
��Which houses were the first?
��Ours. Bra�las�s and Galax�dis�s. Who they considered reactionaries. And one or two more in the marketplace. They burned down seven houses in all. To terrorize us, that was.
��And how much later did they burn down the others?
��Much later. Two months, three months. They received an order, the governing committee did. To hold them back you have to set fire to their homes. You have to frighten them. And they went and set fire to the village. A hundred and eighteen houses.
��Don�t you remember when exactly that was?
��I do remember. I remember very well. Because on that day we came to see if we could save them. They�d taken them somewhere else, all those people.
��Somewhere else? Where?
��To Ayios Pantele�monas. From Mesorr�hi, they had taken the whole of Mesorr�hi. Hostages.
��You came from Tr�polis.
��We did.
��You heard they were burning down Kastr�, and you came.
��Yes, that they were burning it down. And we tried to get there in time.
��Before they killed the old lady or afterward?
��The old lady was dead. She was dead. They set those fires, that�s when.
��So who finally burned down the village?
��They say it was Kontal�nis. He got an order from the seven-member committee here. Who knows. He was one of the kapetana�oi.
��What was the seven-member committee?
��I don�t know anything about it. But Kontal�nis himself said to Yi�nnis Makr�s. Who�s now my brother-in-law. I don�t want you talking politics at the factory. He had opened a lumber factory later, and Yi�nnis was a worker there. With those English pounds. He tells him, Find out who was responsible. It wasn�t me. I couldn�t do anything else. Because if I hadn�t burned it down they would have killed me. He told him, Right there, seven of them in your own village. It�s true. Kontal�nis said that. But it doesn�t much matter now. We�re not children. That�s how things were then. I mean you can see how it all works. If the tornado drags you in one direction, they call you a traitor. And you are one. You have to be taken out. To be killed. The Battalions were formed in 1944, end of March. It was the month of March when Papad�ngonas came down to Tr�polis. Who couldn�t tell that the Germans were losing? Who couldn�t see it? But they insisted. You had to be neutralized. To be taken out. To be killed or be labeled a traitor. That�s what it was all about.
��Did they burn down Ayiasofi� before or after Kastr�?
��Before. Long before. And I know one thing for sure about Ayiasofi�. They burned a woman, a mule, and a pig in there. A pig. Right in the house. They wouldn�t let the woman out.
��I�ve been told that it was Tso�kas from Ori� who threw the woman into the fire. She tried to get out, and he threw her back in.
��I don�t know anything about that. I don�t know about that.
��Was it you who found your mother? Did anyone bring her down?
��No one did. We couldn�t. Later on we went there. But they had buried her. They buried her in the bed of a stream, and the stream carried her off in the winter, there was nothing left of her. Some shepherds showed us the place.
��Whereabouts did they execute her?
��Somewhere below Prast�s.
��That�s so vague.
��I only know what the shepherds told us. They wanted money. At a place where two streams met. Right there.
��All because you�d left for Athens.
��Because we�d left. And because of my brother K�stas.
��Is K�stas alive?
��He died last year. In Corinth.
��Alone?
��With Semn�.
��What did they have against K�stas?
��He was in the Organization. And as soon as he left, that�s when they turned against us.
��Hold on a minute. K�stas was in the Organization?
��Yes. As a noncombatant. Not as a rebel. And when they realized that he didn�t want to stay with them, they began turning against us.
��I didn�t know that.
��They took K�stas to perform an execution. They�d brought someone from some other village there, name of Nestor�dis. They took him up to Zyg�s. And then Kapet�n Kl�arhos said to him, Bra�las, let�s see what you�re made of. If you�re a fighter. He had a.45-caliber pistol. Hey, what did you just say, he tells him. Me kill people? What did you say? Is this what our struggle is about? Well, anyway. K�stas got up and left, and they killed that man just like that, those horrid little rebels. He came back and he tells us, Tonight you�re leaving, it�s finished here. You�re leaving tonight. Imagine, telling me to leave that night. With my money, with my store, with my things. You get the picture. And I�ll take you there. He knew his way around and everything. But he stayed behind, in resistance to those rebels to collect some money, to take care of some business. And after that he got up and left. He came and joined us. Two months later. They didn�t manage to turn him into an executioner, and he became their worst nightmare. Because that was their method. To project an image of power, an image of strength. But of course the others did the same, now didn�t they? Absolutely. What else can I tell you?
That was in 1946. Around then. Ten or so men come down here. I hadn�t fixed the house yet, it was just a shack. And right when I moved in there, I hear
��Don�t go naming people and things, Louk�s. It might stir up trouble again.
��Yeah, all right. But that�s the truth.
��It�s the truth, but why should people hear it from you?
��Yep, no reason at all. I�m done talking.
Tz�mis Bo�nis says to me, We have to take part in the Resistance and work for our country. I agreed immediately. The meetings were held in Ayios Vl�sis. Beginning of 1943, in March. I called my friends, we went. Hotblooded men. We went to the country chapel. We asked where to find arms. It�s easy, Mago�lis tells us. Tz�mis Bo�nis and N�kos Mago�lis. Seems they were the ones in charge. We knew they were Communists. But we didn�t know what communism was. They tell us, About the arms, it will all be taken care of. The next evening we went: Than�sis Kosm�s, T�kis Pantaz�s, Mih�lis Tato�lis. Lots of men. So we went, we were mostly concerned about getting arms. They tell us, We�ll take care of that. They�ll bring us arms, there will be drops by the British. On the third night, Tz�mis Bo�nis says, We�ll also be working for the Party. What party, we say. We�ll be working for the Organization. For EAM, says Mago�lis. That�s what we�ll call the Organization. At the time we still hadn�t heard anything about it. And the party meant the Communist Party. We�ll try and bring in as many men as we can. Each of us will bring in two, three, ten men. As many as he can. I listened to this carefully. We left, I was upset. The next night I didn�t go. The other men went. They tell me, Ant�nis, you didn�t come. I tell them, No. I came for the Resistance. Not for the Party. When they took over in Kastr�, when they were in complete control, they arrested me. That was the reason. They came to my house at night. They tell me, We�re going to M�ngas�s place. That�s where they had their headquarters. Langadian�s�s brother was there. There were two of them. I don�t remember the other one. They took me to M�ngas�s place. They already had a lot of men there, from Kastr�. And a few from Ayiasofi�. The next day they marched us over to Ayios P�tros. And from Ayios P�tros to Kast�nitsa. A few men at a time, so we wouldn�t suspect anything. So we wouldn�t put up a fight. From Kast�nitsa to Prast�s. And finally to Orthokost�. To the monastery. And that�s where they interrogated us. The charge had already been prepared. We had been linked to Tr�polis. To the Battalions that were being organized then. In April of 1944. I say to one of them, You�re in control everywhere and you bring us here. Why didn�t you interrogate us in Kastr�? And find us guilty, and hang us from the village plane tree? That�s exactly what I told him. He stood there, a man named T�yias from Mesorr�hi. He gave me a punch on the back of my neck. I�d never fainted before that. Everything went dark. Then he whacks me again in the face. That was all the beating I got. I don�t know about the others. The other prisoners. There were about a hundred of us, maybe more. The camp commander was T�yias. There was someone else from Kastr�, Strat�s Karad�mas. The Bra�las woman�s nephew. Later they said he was the one who killed her. And someone from Ori�, Goudont�nos�s brother. N�kos. They were our guards. Fifteen of them all together. There were also five or six monks, we never saw them, they stayed somewhere separate. For a month they held us there. Then the cleanup operations began on Mount Parnon. They began letting a lot of men go. They freed them a few at a time. They kept us until the end, thirty-two of us. They took us up to the mountains, up near Ayios Vas�leios. Where a battle took place later on, in 1948. With LOK1 troops. They took us up to a riverbed, a closed-in space. Good place for a detention camp. We stayed out there in the countryside for three days. It was summer. We had Panay�tis Pol�tis there with his clarinet. He played for us sometimes. Irakl�s�s brother. We had Bra�las�s mother there, still alive then, we had Marask�s from Ro�vali. We had Themistokl�s Anagnost�kos. They were all executed. We had Than�sis Kosm�s, and Vangh�lis Koutso�mbis. Vangh�lis was a butcher from Ori�, our savior. We stayed there three days, we could hear the gunfire in the distance. The sporadic gunfire of an army on the march. Than�sis had been a cobbler on Mount Parnon. He could speak some Tsak�nikan.2 It was July, ten o�clock at night, we�d gone to bed. We heard footsteps approaching. Army boots. It was Bal�s and Al�monos. Bal�s was a big-name kapet�nios. Al�monos was an executioner. The most fearsome. They called him the Butcher. Did you hear them, Than�sis K�smas says to me. Did you hear them? Whispering to me under the blanket. They were speaking Tsak�nikan. What did they say, Than�sis? They said that the Germans are coming so they�re going to kill us all. That�s what they said. They�ll kill us and they�ll leave. Five minutes later they start shouting, Get your blankets and get up, we�re striking camp. And since you don�t know these parts at all, our men will take you out. Three at a time to slip through the German noose. We were in the front. These men here, says Bal�s. Take them and go down to the ravine. He showed them the place himself. Two rebels take us, me, Than�sis Kosm�s, and Vangh�lis Koutso�mbis. It was dark out, no paths to walk on. They took us down there. They told us to stop. No one said anything. They were very anxious, those two, we could tell. We waited for some time. Finally they tell us, Stay right here. No one�s leaving. We�ll go back and see why the others are taking so long. And they went back. Then Koutso�mbis says, I�m leaving. I�m a butcher, I know every inch of this terrain. There�s no road here. And he got up first. Than�sis got up and followed him. I was still hesitant. Don�t be stupid, they tell me, come with us. And I went. What happened after that we heard from Kalab�kas. He died last year. Yi�nnis Kalab�kas. They said he was Al�monos�s koumb�ros. No one knows. They took two more groups of three men down to the gully. And they began killing them. He dropped down and hid himself under Bra�las�s mother�s skirts, pretended to be dead. Meanwhile, they were counting them up, one, two, three, etc. How many they�d killed. They figured out we were missing. Sons of bitches, their chief says to them, where are the rest of them? And they went looking all over trying to pick up our tracks. All that took place in that ravine, and Kalab�kas told us about it two or three years later. But we had cleared out. Koutso�mbis had taken us somewhere up high. He knew those parts well. Because he bought animals for slaughter from there. We spent our first night just outside of Kast�nitsa, in the potato fields of someone named Kontoyi�nnis. There was a shack in the middle of the fields. Kontoyi�nnis was one of us, Koutso�mbis knew him. We made our way to the shack. We went in, there was a rebel with a gun inside. As soon as he saw us he ran out. They had killed an ox somewhere, and he had a piece of that meat with him. He left it behind and cleared out. A little while later we saw Kontoyi�nnis coming. We went outside. He�d come to water his potatoes. We ask him, Where should we go? He tells us, The Battalions are right above us, they�ve been there three days now. The Sparta Battalions. They had come around looking for a big pot to cook in. Go and find them. And he came with us. Up there to the company of those Security Battalions. It was the administrative division. They had captured fifty men or so and they had them roped together until they could determine whether or not they were rebels. They had captured Sio�tos, Goudont�nos�s brother, with his gun, his beret, all his things. N�kos Sio�tos. Our guard in Orthokost�. And they were going to execute him. The captain takes us in front of him. He tells us, You�re not to speak. He asks him, Do you know these men? Yes I do. Where did you have them? In the detention camp. And why did you have them there? Because they were reactionaries. Then he let us free. They gave us cigarettes, they gave us food. We went off to get some sleep. There was a big rock off to the side, we slept there, like logs. Around three in the morning we hear shots,
The Germans came to Kastr�. They broke into our house. We were in Koub�la, Yeorgh�a stayed there. I left to go see what had happened. They had taken two shaggy bedcovers, they had them up at Xin�s�s place. They were sleeping there too. Then they decided to close up the house. And Pavl�kos went and closed it up. And R�ppas�s old lady was screaming, Not the girls, don�t touch their things. God rest her soul. I arrived in Kastr�. Haro�lis comes over, he tells me, Klar�a, did you hear, they broke into your house, they took two bedcovers from you. But we had a suitcase belonging to Uncle Perikl�s in our house, full of things. And they took that too, the whole suitcase. There was a box from America, a metal box, with jewelry in it. My grandmother had brought it from Amali�da, from the shrines of Saint Dion�sius and Saint Spyr�don. It disappeared. I found one of my dresses, a silk one, left on a fence. It was Diamant�s Evanghel�ou who took the suitcase. Because they were the ones who slept up there. Pavl�kos told them, Who do you think you are, coming here to sleep? But in the meantime the things had been taken. I arrived in Kastr�. They didn�t find the suitcase. Pavl�kos told me all about it. About Evanghel�ou. I tell this to P�tsa. What are you talking about, woman, she tells me, what are you saying? The covers, I tell her, they were ours. Anghelik�, Bisb�s�s wife, cuts in and tells her, They took those things from the Makr�ses� house, they brought them up to your place. And that�s all she said. Haro�lis arrives, he says to me, Klar�a, we have a shelter, get your things and take them there. I didn�t know what sort of person he was yet. I went there, it was a small shelter, just a hole in the wall. I carried whatever things we still had over there. Ir�ni�s sister helped me and we took them there. Two trunks, a chest, just like one we still have. We filled up both trunks. The Halo�los sisters also took some of Old Man Bo�rdas�s things there. And L�mbros took medicine there, and Yi�rgos Yiannak�kos�s wife took clothes. Just about the whole neighborhood did. The shelter was small but we packed it full up with things. And we kept guard there. Later on the Battalions arrived, our brother Yi�nnis arrived, the girls go to him, they tell him, Yi�nnis, let�s open up the shelter, take our things, and divvy them out. And Yi�nnis tells them, What are you saying, you girls, that we should give the hiding place away? Then Har�s gave it away later on. It was Har�s himself who gave it away. Kontal�nis�s division arrived to burn down the village. They started setting the fires. Sotir�a hid in the clay oven to save herself. And when she came out that night she was all black. They had taken the rest of the people to Ayios Pantele�monas. And Yeorgh�a came back from halfway along the road. I don�t know what excuse she found, but she saved her father�s houses. Kontal�nis himself was right there in their yard, and their houses were spared. The other houses were reduced to ashes. Har�s told them where the shelter was and they went and ransacked it. They broke in, they took anything they could. They took the medicines, they took the clothes. They took everything. Yeorgh�a went there, she tells them, Hold on, you men, we have things there too. Bo�ras cuts her off. He�s in an old-age home now in Tr�polis. He says, Kapet�n, she�s with the Security Battalions, she can�t take things. Because her brother-in-law is in Tr�polis. He was talking about Ir�ni�s husband. But Ir�ni had just married Vas�lis and she and her sister weren�t speaking, she and Yeorgh�a. And that�s how Yeorgh�a was able to take a few things and save them. They took everything else. They didn�t burn any of it. They took it all. I don�t want to mention any names, whoever they were, well, anyway. And that Haro�lis who had set up that shelter and told people to put their things in there, he was the one who betrayed them. And M�rkos�s wife went there, and they sent her round every which way to find her clothes, to this village and that village. Her daughters� dowries. They burned the village to ashes. They ransacked the shelter. And the year before last I went into Old Man Yi�nnis�s store � and we talked very specifically. Sp�ros Galax�dis came in. There we were, me, Old Man Yi�nnis, Nik�las Diamant�s, and Kalamar�s from Mesorr�hi. Sp�ros comes over to me, he says, Who set the fire, do you know? No, I tell him, I don�t know. And he says, Yesterday I met with Spyr�poulos, who was the section chief here. And he told me, Tell them in Kastr� it wasn�t me who burned down your village. My village, Bertsov�, was spared, I saved it. It was Yi�nnis Veliss�ris and Haro�lis Lengh�ris, they burned down your village. So don�t let people from Kastr� go blaming anyone else. That�s what he said. Yi�nnis Veliss�ris and Haro�lis Lengh�ris. Veliss�ris was killed. He was court-martialed, they told him to sign a renunciation of his Communist allegiance, he refused. He told all this to L�andros, Ts�tsis�s daughter�s husband. He was the chief guard at the courthouse. Before he came here as a policeman, before he married Anth�. L�andros told him, Yi�nnis, you�ve been betrayed. Impossible, he said. Yi�nnis, you�ve been betrayed, because the others have all signed renunciations. Delivori�s who was the ringleader, and the rest of them. He told him this out of earshot, through the window. They were holding them prisoner in the basement of the courthouse. It�s not possible they betrayed me, Veliss�ris said. To L�andros. Impossible. But even if they did, I�m not signing anything. I�m not having my hair cut off so I can get out. So they killed him. And what about Haro�lis, when
In S�taina they threw people into a pit. They beat them and they threw them in. And you could hear them moaning for days.
��What about K�kotas, Ir�ni?
��K�kotas, well, it�s like this. K�kotas had married a woman from here. From Kastr�, Sel�mos�s daughter. Dion�sius Sel�mos�s daughter. They captured him when the rebel forces were on their last legs. Him, a man named Ili�dis, and a lawyer named Tsang�ris. Ili�dis was a refugee. He had a carpet factory. And they threw them alive into that pit. In 1960 they went down to retrieve their bones, K�kotas�s bones were at the top of the heap. He had climbed up, he tried to get out. And everyone said, Oh, come now, didn�t they realize what was going to happen? A big, strong man like K�kotas, it wouldn�t have taken much for him to get away. In ten days they�d all have been saved.
They captured me in the beginning of 1944. Between the ninth and the thirteenth of January. Back then the only executions that had taken place were of the county prefect and two or three others. Random executions. In H�radros. H�radros is just below Hant�kia. At the bottom of the H�radros River. But I don�t know exactly where. When we passed through there they told us, This is where that traitor the county prefect was executed. All this in the month of January. They arrested me in Eleoh�ri. I had left Kastr�. It was still the olive-gathering season. M�sklina. That�s probably a Slavic place name. Then M�sklina became Eleoh�ri. The detention camp was there before that. The detention camp where seven of the villagers were sent, the first ones. People who had nothing to do with political movements, simple folk, just poor unfortunate people. And they had no quarrel with anyone either. Most likely they took them to intimidate others. We have them here, we�re holding those people. Almost like hostages. Because they�d never been involved in the Resistance or in anti-Communist activities or with the Germans. The Germans were there guarding the railroad lines. They were guarding the bridges, and they would come to the village once in a while when they were off duty to have a drink. And they didn�t do anything at all. It was a small group, there weren�t many of them. Well that�s where they arrested me. At my house. I had a friend, he worked at a bank, a distant cousin, and Iphigenia was grilling some pork chops over charcoal. He was an employee of the National Bank of Tr�polis. It was almost night. I didn�t expect them to arrest me. I wasn�t even afraid. My brother was in Athens, but he wasn�t in the Battalions yet. The Battalions were formed later on. As a reaction to everything that had happened. To the arrests and the executions. Various men who had escaped to Athens, like Halo�los, Nik�las Petr�kos, and the rest, banded together under Papad�ngonas and organized themselves. In Athens. They didn�t come down to Tr�polis until the month of April, early April, or maybe the end of March. I don�t remember. Three men came to arrest me. They were from Mesorr�hi. T�yias and some others. They turned into butchers later on. I could have taken them out, but I didn�t think they would do anything to me. In a hole in the wall under my bed I kept a pistol. I also had a bayonet, a sharp one, behind my coat. They were hanging on the door. I figured I could handle them, they were just a couple of thugs. But I thought of my sister. I was afraid for her. So I went with them. Since I couldn�t take my bayonet, I didn�t take my coat either. And I left in that cold winter weather. In January, without that coat. Without even my army jacket. They took me to Ayi�rghis. We spent the night there. They turned me over to Vangh�lis Faraz�s. Whose house I had stayed at in 1939 for two months. To help combat the olive tree fruit flies. I was working in the area and I stayed at his house. I knew his family, I liked them, and thought highly of them. Look here, Yi�nnis, Vangh�lis says to me. They had put him in charge of me. I know you can get away. I know you know your way around these parts. He didn�t say anything else to me. But of course that was enough for me not to want to get him in trouble. In the morning we headed out on the road to Dolian�. Lower Dolian�. To Louko� Monastery.1 That was their transfer section. In a manner of speaking. They had taken over the monastery. There I first encountered the so-called merry evenings. There was a group of men and women from Dolian�. There was a priest�s daughter there, and a schoolteacher�s daughter. Who had once been a classmate of mine in Tr�polis. Merry evenings, you can say that again. In the monastery we ate lentils. We were twenty-one prisoners in all. They put us in a cell. Not all of us were from Eleoh�ri. I lived in Kastr� too, in two places. M�tsos Karaz�nos from Ayiasofi�. The secretary of the township. The father of Yi�rghis Karaz�nos. There were people from Dolian� too. They would put out one of those big pans for us, filled with lentils. There were twenty-one of us and they had some of us sit and some of us stand around that pan. And they gave us one spoon for all of us to eat with. All twenty-one of us with one spoon. Because that way no one could eat more than the rest. A very fair portioning out. The next day they sent us off to Orthokost�. The Orthokost� Monastery. Located on the other side of Mount Malev�s. On the road from Ayios Andr�as to Prast�s. We passed through Astros, through the outskirts of Astros. On our way, in Karakovo�ni, we met another column. With an armed escort. They were coming from Ko�vli. From R�zes, from Dolian�tika Ch�nia. With Yi�nnis Vas�limis among the prisoners. An exceptional man, a progressive farmer, among the best in the area. And that splendid young man was taken to the detention camp by his own brothers. Who executed him later on. But I only know this through hearsay. We arrived in Orthokost� in the afternoon. The guards opened the gate. There was a sudden sense of alarm. Because there were guards there, and prisoners. They pushed us inside like cattle. They lined us up in the inner courtyard. Then, without letting anyone see he was approaching, Yi�nnis Ko�ts�nos comes over to me. He was from Parth�ni, Tr�polis. I knew him from high school, we were friends in high school. But at that moment, because I was so upset and tense, I didn�t recognize him. I didn�t remember him. I couldn�t put a name to his face. On top of it all he had close-cropped hair and looked scrawny. They had cut everyone�s hair, in fact. He came and stood next to me and he says to me under his breath, You don�t know me and I don�t know you. Don�t talk in here, don�t say anything, don�t trust anyone. In other words, he gave me some advice that truly saved me. I found other people I knew in Orthokost�. Old classmates of mine. N�kos Kolokotr�nis, but he was a rebel. A quiet man, didn�t talk much. How or why he became a rebel is hard to know. There was a waiter there too, Yi�rghis Katsar�s. He served us coffee in Tr�polis, at Anton�kos�s restaurant. Or up in Athanasi�dis�s workshop. Waxworks and Distilleries. He would come over with his round tray2 hanging over his arm. He wasn�t a Communist either. How he became one I don�t know, why he did I can venture a guess. So they split us up, they put nine of us in one cell. Eight of us from Eleoh�ri and M�tsos Karaz�nos. I don�t remember if they gave us anything to eat. They must surely have given us something. In the morning they got us up to collect firewood. Some of our men were reluctant to go. I was more than willing. I wanted to have as little attention as possible paid to me. To get through whatever was in store for me easily. I had heard, and it turned out to be true, that during interrogations they performed what was called the Torture.3 I mean beating you on the feet. They beat the soles of your feet with clubs or knotted rope. Just about crippled you. Well, I took the sharpest saw. They didn�t give us axes, only saws. We might have found other uses for the axes. We climbed high up, we started cutting the wood. Mostly fir trees. We would cut them down, then cut the wood into pieces, some others would carry it away. Up until noon. Then they�d take us farther down to a clearing. And they trained us ideologically there. They also told us that we would remain there to await trial by the rebel tribunal. In the detention camp there were about seventy prisoners, as far as I can figure. From all over Arcadia, but mainly from the prefecture of Kynour�a. Astros and around there. Dolian�. I don�t remember anyone else from Kastr�. But there must have been others. And of course there were the ones from Eleoh�ri I mentioned, those seven. And from Ayiasofi�. From the whole prefecture. We heard there was another detention camp to the north of there. I wasn�t able to learn exactly where. Whether it was in El�na or at the Kary�s Monastery.4 At any rate it�s certain that it existed. Because that whole camp followed ours at the beginning of February. When the Communists learned that the Germans were coming. That they were conducting operations on Mount Parnon, expressly to locate and liberate those two detention camps. Then an order came to move us to the Z�reia area. That happened during the third week of our detention. Up until we went on trial we did nothing. Almost nothing. Just the odd chore. We had nothing, we had no life. We were waiting for the arrival of the rebel judges. Anxiously awaiting them. To condemn us and put us to death in order to thin out the detention camp. Their purpose was not punishment but thinning us out to make room for new lodgers. Around that time I also found out what charges had been made against me. In addition to guilt by association with my brother. They told me that on my name day5 I shouted Long live the Germans. On my name day I was having some wine with Yi�nnis Daskoli�s, who was also celebrating his name day. Daskoli�s was in charge of EAM. We were at his house. As patriots and fellow villagers from Eleoh�ri. Of course he knew, he suspected that I wasn�t a Communist. He knew that my brother was in Athens, for self-protection. And we were talking and discussing things. In fact he had entrusted his heavy pistol to me for a day. He had a heavy Browning pistol, and I had it for almost a whole day. So there we were talking things over. I had no reason not to talk, and he was testing me or something, I don�t know what he was doing. Sounding me out. So this German walked in, drunk, and he started shouting,
We had stayed there, two families. The Makr�s and the Koutsoyi�nnis families. Yeorgh�a had left for Kastr�. Yi�nnis Koutsoyi�nnis went there. Who was the village police sergeant at that time. Now he�s retired. He went to get the sprayer from Vangh�lis Faraz�s. On his way there he finds Themistokl�s Anagnost�kos. Where are you going, Yi�nnis? I�m going to get the sprayer, going to spray. Don�t go get the sprayer, go and tell your family and the Makr�ses to clear out. Because tonight they�re coming to take us all away. Who said so? Mih�lis Siouro�nis. Mih�lis was involved in the Organization back then. Oh, come on, says Yi�nnis, and he keeps going to get the sprayer. You stubborn fool, Themistokl�s shouts. Turn back. You haven�t got time. They�re coming any minute to arrest us. I�m locking up and leaving. But there wasn�t time for him to lock up. He was tying his shoes when the rebels arrived, and they arrested him. The rest of the story goes like this. We hid ourselves anywhere we could find. I mean the men, our men, went and hid. Koutsoyi�nnis came from Ayi�rghis. He says, Get ready to leave because Themistokl�s said such-and-such. There�s two of you, three of us, and the Ary�rises are another two. We had just baked some bread. It was Saturday. Nik�las tells him, Who told Themistokl�s that? And he says, Mih�lis, little Mih�lis. Siouro�nis. He told him, They�re going to arrest you tonight, they�re going to execute you. That�s their plan. They sent a notice from Kastr�. Now who sent the notice, I don�t know. Nik�las says to our mother, Give us a loaf of bread. We�re leaving. They started whispering. And don�t you go talking, no matter who comes here. Of course not, who would we be talking to? Our parents were protecting themselves too. Out here in the wilderness, who would be talking to us? The men left, they went down along the riverbed. They find M��nas there. Where are you men going? To catch us some crabs. They came out at the fenced monastery in Mesorr�hi, they went and hid in some haystacks. From there they sent word, they arrived outside of M�sklina, our relatives came and got them. M��nas goes back to Ayi�rghis. Li�s, he says to Anagnost�kos. Li�s was in charge of Ayi�rghis. Li�s, those sons of bitches got away. Weren�t you on guard? he says to him. And they went up to Kastr� to give them a report. They got away? they asked them in Kastr�. They got away, they said. What do we do now? Burn them down, said Haro�lis. In any case, we knew nothing at all. We were just waiting. They had burned down Ayiasofi�. And as we�re there waiting, the next day M��nas arrives. He had come back from Kastr�. He comes over to us. Do you live down here? We say yes. Yeorgh�a too? What about Yeorgh�a? says our mother. Nothing, nothing, Ma�am. They had captured Yeorgh�a in Kastr� and he knew about that. He says, What are you going to do now? What are we going to do, we�ll stay put. He says, If your men don�t report to us they�ll take you away and burn down your house. They may even kill you. We started shaking. They had burned down Ayiasofi�. Then the Battalions came to Ayi�rghis. That�s when Kyri�kos hit the old lady. He banged the door with the butt of his gun. Tr�fonas arrives at that moment. As soon as they saw the old lady, they said, Where�s your old man? And Kyri�kos gave her a good smack. He pushed her. Why are you hitting the old lady, our brother Nik�las says to him. What has she done? Quiet, he answers. And he smashes in the door with the butt of his gun. The barrel was turned toward him now, it went off, and he fell and died on the spot. In front of Nik�las. Right there in front of him. The others came running, the officer went over, What�s going on, Well, it�s like this. Did someone else kill him? No, he did it himself. He still had his finger on the trigger. They picked him up, and they stole things off him. They took his watch and his ring. And Nik�las said, He had a watch and a ring on his hand, who took them? They had taken those things themselves. In the end they found them. When we heard that someone had been killed in Ayi�rghis we were half crazy. Meantime, two men appear down below. We�re sitting on the threshing floor, down near the mulberry tree. How are you, Auntie, how are you, Tsev�? They say to my sister-in-law. And we don�t even recognize them, we�re so confused. It�s me Auntie, it�s me Tsev�, Sp�ros Yiatr�dis. And I�m Nik�las Petr�kos. Did anyone bother you? No, we say, no one. We didn�t say anything about M��nas. They say, Get ready, your men are coming now, they�re in Ayi�rghis. Soon as they said that Nik�las appeared. I�d hidden the rifle, and I�d hidden the shot and the shells. Yi�nnis suddenly shows up. The rifle, he says to me, where is it? I say, Over there. And the cartridges are there, he lifts up a floorboard, You�ll find them under there. They tell us, Get ready, we�re leaving. And we left everything behind. We got out of there. They brought Kyri�kos, we all went to M�sklina. They�d put him up on the mule. On the mule, like a slaughtered pig. Nik�las put two boards together, they wrapped him in a sheet. And they tied him. We went to M�sklina. Then they say, There�s a fire in Koub�la. You could see smoke, we could see it rising. They�re saying, They burned down the Makr�ses� houses, they burned down the olive press. And they destroyed the mill. What could we do? We went there, we found everything in shambles. We picked up the broken things and threw them away. They had burned down both houses. They had emptied the winepress. They�d taken the oil, as much as they could. They�d taken the cheese. We found one head of white cheese still hanging, that�s what they left. And one earthen jar, it held fifteen ok�s1 of oil. They�d taken it to another house. Those things were saved. The rest were useless except maybe to bathe in. The wine all spilled. We found a puddle of oil up in the olive press. And the barrels up above, with holes in them, the oil spilled on the ground. Whatever they couldn�t carry off. A complete disaster. They took clothes, they took everything. We had some other things, not ours, from the laundering trough.2 Things from Ayiasofi� and Tserv�si. Brand-new blankets and linens for dowries. We�d taken them out, we had them in the lower part of the house. We had a laundering trough at the mill. They told us they�d left them piled up outside on a rock. We didn�t find anything. A woman from Mesorr�hi told us. Yiann�kis Galio�ris�s mother. Yiannak�kis�s3 mother. She told us they were going up and down with lights, all night long. They saw them inside, they saw Yeorgh�a, As�mos�s daughter, coming out all loaded up. Then K�stas Diamant�kos fired a shot. He says, Klar�a, I saw the devastation, I saw what was going on then in there and I fired my rifle. I fired a shot and I said, Germans. With the word Germans they ran off every which way. They left. We found out who burned down our houses, we found out years later. They went to Kastr�. Our cousins were hiding in the vineyard. Down below, in Ay�a Paraskev�. They were hiding from the rebels. Maria and Olga. Sot�ris�s girls. And a group of them comes out of Kamb�lis�s place, with P�tis Lengh�ris at their head. The villagers from Kar�toula ran into them. They were coming from down below. Where are you going, you men? We�re going to burn down Koub�la. And they went and burned it down. That�s what they heard, our cousins. A group of them came out of Kamb�lis�s place, and Kamb�lis was with them, Yi�rgos himself. He admitted it, he didn�t hide it. They took me with them, he said. I did whatever they told me to. He was the one who broke the storage jars. And Kamb�lis�s wife Evanth�a, many years afterward, says to my mother, Konstant�na, I�m going to tell you something but you mustn�t say another word about it. They had brought some heads of cheese from Koub�la and left them in Tso�mas�s basement. And Rigo�la would go there every so often and cut some, and the whole place smelled so good. But why mention their names now? All they left us was that head of white cheese hanging there.
I dreamt about Dim�tris last night. He was laying the foundation for a house with Than�sis Yi�nnaros and Old Man Bako�ris. Right on the road, in front of the Biro�lis property. Poor D�na. In the morning she had Martha ask me to go light the oil candles at the Ayi�nnis church.
��Martha? I say to her.
She started to cry.
��Our Yi�rgos, he�s not well, Marig�.
Her voice kept fading over the telephone. That was the bitter cup destined for poor D�na.
When did they burn down the village? It was on Saint Il�as�s Day. In 1944. In �44 on July 20. They had burned down seven houses before that. Seven houses four months earlier. In the spring. First off they burned down the two Kyrel�is houses. One where Tamb�kis is now and the other was Anna Kyrel�is�s. It was their paternal homestead. Seven houses in all and then in July on Saint Il�as�s Day.
��When is Saint Il�as�s Day?
��July 20. They burned down 170�180 houses.
��Where were you?
��In bed, I was asleep. They came into the house, they broke down the door. Five o�clock in the morning. They took us out and they gathered us at the telephone company. It was an empty lot back then where they kept cars, but there were no cars there, they�d all been requisitioned during the Albanian campaign. Only Galax�dis�s gazogene truck was there. Up above was Old Man Bo�rdas�s house. And right below was M�ngos�s kafene�o. And on the floor above a hotel, none better in all of Greece. They�d set up their machine guns there and crowded us all into that empty lot. All the villagers. At five o�clock in the morning. Five-thirty. The smart ones began slowly sneaking away. Because they saw the machine guns, they could see what the rebels� intentions were. Seven-thirty, eight o�clock. They kept us there in the sun until ten. And then they took us to Ayios Pantele�monas.
��How many of you were there?
��All of Kastr�. And people from Mesorr�hi and from Kar�toula and from Ro�vali. They had gathered all the so-called reactionaries. The reactionaries against the Communist Party. All of them. Under the command of Prekez�s and Kontal�nis. That�s right. They took us to Ayios Pantele�monas, in the middle of a pine wood. But their liaisons and the lookout post saw at about twelve that the Germans were coming from Tr�polis. And they gave a signal. They set up a committee then and started to pick out who had or didn�t have a brother or a father or a relative in the Security Battalions. And whoever didn�t they let go. Meantime the houses were burning, One hundred eighty houses. From five-thirty in the morning. It was six o�clock when they started.
��You mean while they were holding you on the phone company lot?
��First they gathered us there. And first they set fire to Panay�tis H�yios�s house. Used the same broomstick for Str�fas�s house. Then Hora�tis�s place. They burned down M�ngos�s kafene�o. The best hotel in Greece. And from there, with the same broomstick they torched one house after another.
��Were there any local people in their ranks?
��That seven-member committee did quite a job.
��Who was in the seven-member committee?
��Six men and one woman. The most important member was � I hesitate to say.
��Tell me.
��The woman, the one who voted to burn down the village, was El�ni Gag�s. Maiden name El�ni T�lias. She was the one. The others had no say.
��What happened to the others?
��They all died. They were killed.
��Haro�lis?
��Yes.
��Who else?
��From what I was told. Because I was thirteen years old then. Yi�nnis Veliss�ris. Yi�rgos Veliss�ris. I�m not sure about Yi�rgos. One of the two. There were seven in the committee. They�d managed to persuade them, to scare them into voting to burn down Kastr�. But most of the blame was hers.
��Okay, you said that. Do you know about any others?
��Mago�lis, Haro�lis, Veliss�ris, three. El�ni four. I don�t remember the others. It�s been forty years. You start to forget, you say to hell with them.
��Then what happened? After the fire?
��When they burned down the houses. They didn�t leave anything standing. A hundred and eighty houses. And every household had two or three girls. All the houses had two or three dowries. If anyone still remembers such things. Because before the Occupation every girl had to have whatever she needed for the rest of her life. And she had to make it herself by hand. Sheets woven on the loom, blankets, towels, everything. They had to make it all themselves. A thousand and one things. Even a sewing machine. So that some day when they married they�d be ready to set up house. That�s right. Now some had dowries and others didn�t, but I know one thing. From Kastr� all the way to Palaioh�ri, Kynour�a, they had requisitioned all the mules.
��And they�d carry off the dowries.
��Whatever was in the houses. Burned down or not. The houses were looted.
��Did you see the mules leaving from where you were?
��We saw them. After they freed us. Because a signal came that the Germans were coming from Tr�polis. With the local men in the Battalions. That�s when they let us go. But when the Security Battalions got here the houses were nothing but ashes.
��And
��They burned three or four houses. In retaliation. But not the same day. They came back later. To retaliate. Against Veliss�ris, and M�vros.
��Yes.
��Because N�kos M�vros was also a ranking member.
��Kapet�n Fo�rias.
��Kapet�n Fo�rias. The worst, the most barbaric of the lot, here in Kastr�. While the Veliss�ris brothers, we could say by comparison, they were restrained. One was a lawyer, and the other a soft-spoken type, he had actually finished high school, they kept their distance. But not Kapet�n Fo�rias. But the thing I remember is. .
��About the fire?
��About the fire. It�s that complete strangers came here, and they had their informants here, and they showed them where my mother or yours or this one or that one had hidden their things, and they�d tell on them, and they went and opened those so-called shelters and took those things. And that�s the story of the big looting.
We loaded up the chestnuts. To haul all through the night. We passed Sour�vla, we arrived down outside Ayios P�tros. Was it the devil playing tricks, or was it the smell of blood � three years since Foti�s was killed there, the mules wouldn�t set foot there. We couldn�t see a thing.
They arrested me in place of M�rkos and our uncle the doctor. My uncle had left first. M�rkos later on. Toward the end of November. There�d been a light snow, about two fingers high. In February, the seventh or fourteenth of the month. And it had frozen. Two rebels came by, strangers. Which of you is El�ni? I am. At daybreak. They took me to M�ngas�s house. Old Man D�nos Halo�los was there. Yianno�kos�s father. And Bini�ris I think. And the Bra�las woman. Aunt El�ni Kyrel�is with Kik�. And Kyri�kos Galax�dis. They took us down to Louko� Monastery. Old D�nos had a shaggy wool cover. I don�t remember if I took blankets. I must have taken something. They might have brought me something. At Louko� we found others. El�ni Ro�gas. P�tros�s mother. She was crying all the time, she wouldn�t eat anything. I tell her, Whatever happens to us, we�ll get through it. M�tsos Kapetan�as was there, and Chr�stos Panayoto�ros. From St�los now living in Kastr�. St�los was nearby, they brought them food, they brought meat to those men. They�d grill the meat. As though it were Carnival. One day they let us go out. The rebels were guarding us, and we went outside the stone-fenced yard of the monastery. A sunny February day. I thought about running off. About escaping. But where would I go? My folks were in Kastr�. They had stayed there. Old Mavroyi�rghis and Mavroyi�rgaina. They�d be the ones who would pay for it. In about a week�s time they got us up. At night, it was raining. Get up, we�re going. They didn�t tell us where. They just took us. We passed by Astros. I had on some thin wooden shoes, they came apart, I walked barefoot. My feet were all cut. We reached Orthokost� at daybreak. Fifty or sixty people. Maybe less. We went into the monastery. Instead of asking for some warm water I put my feet in a water trough. And I fell sick. I came down with a fever. We slept on the same mattress, me, Aunt El�ni, and Kik�. A couple of days later my parents send me a basket, or rather a shoulder sack, from Kastr�. Eggs, walnuts, dried figs. But it all had to be inspected. With a fine-tooth comb. The rebels kept half of it, they gave us the other half. They had nothing either. We found out that Penelope Kalo�tsis was leaving, they�d soon be letting her go. So I wrote a letter. I wrote it in front of Kik�. I wrote about how we were doing. I wrote them not to send us things because they kept them. I was planning to give it to Penelope, to hide and take with her. So she could give it to them. But what with my fever and all I forgot in the end. Luckily. They got Penelope in the end. She had a patchwork woolen quilt, they put her up on a mule. And a rebel escorted her. Was it Vas�lis T�yias maybe? I don�t remember. Kik� says to me the next day. Kik� Kyrel�is. See Penelope�s quilt? They�d left it on the stone fence. They�d folded it. We spent our time there in the yard. Walking. Up and down. Kyri�kos Galax�dis was there. Someone named T�las from Tr�polis. Someone else named Kr�gas, old Li�s Kr�gas, from R�zes. Whose house is on the right as you enter the village. And a young fellow named Yi�rgos, I see him in Tr�polis, that fellow. He sells gasoline now, I can�t remember his last name. Everyone took a liking to me. All of them. Kyri�kos Galax�dis would pace back and forth all the time. A nervous man, with a long face. And all he would talk about was his car. About the tires or about one thing or another. Finally he would stop and he�d look outside. Do you see Mount Malev�s? Kastr� is on the other side. When they let us go we�ll cut right through the brush, and we�ll get there. One day the abbot came over to me. The monastery had a few monks. Not too many. They didn�t let them speak to us. Are you Mavroyi�rghis�s daughter? I am. Do you know I�m a friend of your uncle Ayis�laos? Uncle Ayis�laos lived in Astros and rented the land from the monastery. Olives and the like, he worked the land for profit. On the twentieth of March the rebels get us up. We were leaving. For where, no one knew. The abbot calls me to his cell. He gives me six fresh eggs. Make a hole in them, he tells me, and suck on them. There was no food to take with us. The abbot was getting on in years. I would look around his cell. He had a hand made from bone, he had it hanging, a hand with wood, with a handle. What�s that, Father? My child, I have no wife to scratch my back. And that�s what it�s for. I was downright amazed. The rebels got us up. There was a justice of the peace in the detention camp. From Vlahokerasi�. Kik� and I went to see him. He couldn�t stand up. His legs were like barrels, black and blue underneath. They would take him outside the monastery, beat him, and bring him back. They got us up on the twentieth of March, they took us up the mountain. We came to a ravine. The rebels escorting us stopped, they made us stop. And we waited for some liaison. We learned later on that they were waiting for an order, whether to kill us or not. Whether they would kill us all in that ravine. The Germans had learned about our detention camp. They had captured a ca�que from Ayios Andr�as with army boots that were meant for the rebels. And the rebels were afraid that they would come and free us. They didn�t kill us. Night came and went. The next day they took us farther up. We came to a sheep pen. Nothing there but a shed with a small high window. That served as both the window and the door. They put us in there, they cut down some fir trees, they lit a fire. The shed filled up with smoke. There was a prisoner there with us called Beb�ka, just a girl. She was pregnant. But she didn�t look it. Beb�ka was her name, she wasn�t married. There may have also been two boys. I think they were from Louko�. There were about forty of us all told. The shed filled up with smoke, we say, Let�s get out, we�ll suffocate, and they let us out. We went outside, it was snowing. There were fir trees, the snow would fall, by the time it reached the ground it would melt. And there was a hush in the air, a silence. We saw some lights off in the distance, Kik� says to me, That�s Athens. That�s how high up we were. Now I think it was probably Argos. In the morning they gave us half a boiled potato. That�s all they had. We went outside to urinate. Kik� and I went a bit farther out, and we saw some blood. That Beb�ka, her belly gave out. Seems she gave birth to the child in the night and died. Either it was her time or she miscarried, what with all the hardship. I don�t know. A skinny young thing, pretty. Two days later they took us back down to Orthokost�. Outside the yard they had dug out a grave. At the edge of the road. They�d covered it up, the dirt was still fresh, they�d thrown some branches over it so it wouldn�t show. We never saw the justice of the peace again. Then Bro�salis arrived, a lawyer from Bertsov�, and N�kos Delivori�s, I don�t remember the rest. They were the Central Committee for the Peloponnese. They were the head men. They put us in the church of the monastery, they talked to us. They asked us if we�d been treated well. We had no complaints. In other words they�d never beat us, they�d never tortured any of us. Whatever discomfort they had, we had too. The men guarding us. They tell us, The detention camp is being dismantled tomorrow. You�re leaving. I ask, Can we leave today? Anyone who wants to can leave. It was March 27. Or maybe 26. They got ready. Kyri�kos Galax�dis. Old Li�s Kr�gas. T�las and that Yi�rgos. Maybe Bini�ris was with them. Vas�lis. It was probably just those four. It was in the afternoon of March 27 or 26. I tell them, I�m coming with you. They didn�t want to take me. We�ll be sleeping in sheep pens. Then I will too. So I started out. With those four men. We made our way through the brush, we kept pushing forward. When there was a wall they would get hold of my hand and help me over. I was wearing a simple two-piece outfit, made from one of our brother M�rkos�s suits. I�d burned it with the iron, and he�d given it to me. Right between the wild pear trees and the gorse it began to come apart. In the end I grew tired. Night came. I realized I couldn�t go on. I say, Where are we, they tell me, At As�matos. Old Sot�ris K�llias used to spend the winter there. They had olives, they had land. I say, I�ll go and find them. T�las took me part way down. I reached the village easily from there. I found a woman, I asked her. She showed me the house. And I went there. The girls greeted me with tears. We went to sleep. In the morning Vo�la says, We�re leaving. We�re going back to Kastr�. But we can�t put you on the mule. We�re taking the animals, we have things to carry. We got up in the morning. With the ewes tied, with the hens on the mule, it took us thirteen hours to get there. Word had got out they�d cut off my hair. They�d cut off Marina�s hair then, Aunt Ioul�a Veliss�ris�s daughter. The Security Battalions. And Christina would go round the neighborhood crying and saying, They cut off our sister El�ni�s hair. We arrived at the village. They ask me about Penelope Kalo�tsis. Oh no, I tell them. Penelope left twenty days ago. She hadn�t gone to Kastr�. She hadn�t gone to Ayiasofi�. They had homes in both villages. And what were the people from Ayiasofi� anyway? Most of them were from Kar�toula too. And then someone says, Let�s all mourn for Penelope. They understood. Several days went by. It was the time of the Salutations.1 I went to church. I found Aunt El�ni there, I found Kik� Kyrel�is. They had left the detention camp the next morning. After me. Whoever stayed behind, whoever didn�t get out quickly, they kept. The Bra�las woman and some others. Because a new order came not to dismantle the camp. So I saw Aunt El�ni there, I saw Kik�. We were all hugging and kissing, crossing ourselves, lighting candles because we�d made it home. Kik� didn�t tell me a thing. They were planning to run away to Tr�polis and Athens. And they left right after church. Next morning in the square I see rebels, strangers, looking at the house. Watching our house. Intently. They were talking, I think Haro�lis was with them, God forgive him. Well, anyhow. I tell my mother, They�re going to arrest me again. What are you saying, Child? I tell her, I�m leaving. I�m going to Athens. If they come here tell them I�ve gone to our koumb�roi in Perdik�vrisi. To the Nikol�ous. We were their godparents, my father had baptized Dim�tro and Uncle Men�laos had baptized Eratosth�nis. Uncle Men�laos gave them quite some names. He had a fondness for such names. I go up to Athin�s place. Unfortunately for me Rigo�la was there. Haro�lis�s wife. She saw me. Now what do I do? Rigo�la went and told Haro�lis. I put on a kerchief. So, it was them, it was them. They were the ones got our N�kos all worked up. Well, anyhow. I put on a kerchief, I say, Maybe they won�t recognize me. And I walk straight through the square, so as not to arouse any suspicions. With my legs shaking, and me fighting to hold steady so no one could tell. I arrive at Hora�tis�s house in L�kka. There were some trees up above, and it was very windy and they were howling. Mr. Man�lis, sir, God has placed me at your mercy. Hora�tis worked at the bank up until the war. Before it closed. He sends word to Yi�rgos Halo�los. Who had seen me. They�d put him in charge, they were mobilizing at the time. Yi�rgos Halo�los arrives. They were in the dark down there. Two days go by. Then they send a message to Hora�tis to type up a notice that they would give a certain amount of money to whoever could find me. Or tell them where I was. So many millions. That�s what money was worth during the Occupation. They went and put it up in all the kafene�a. Written on his typewriter by Manol�kis himself. I stayed for a week at his house. His girls were there, P�li and N�tsa, and the boys. But I couldn�t stay any longer. We were all in danger. One night Dim�tris Kokkini�s appears, with Ant�nis Kapni�s and Than�sis Voz�kis. Nighttime, midnight. They take me. We crawl along till we reach Kavas�lis�s place. Aret� came out. She gave us a loaf of bread. There was an empty house next to theirs, belonged to El�ni, the sexton�s sister. The widow of Yi�rghis Kosm�s, who was killed in Albania. He had left her with a young daughter, and El�ni was away in Astros. They had the key. Or the house was just empty. There was a big crate there, and on top of it was a mattress, made from burlap, with corn husks for matting. And that�s where I slept. The place was full of rats. I was terrified. It had a fireplace, made from a large tin pail. So the three sons, they kept watch every night. They slept next door to me, in the other half of the house. It belonged to the sexton. And every night they would knock on the wall to see how I was doing. They�d leave me some bread outside, some water. And I stayed in there. All day long. I�d look out the window, I�d see rebels passing by. They would shout, El�ni, to find me. They didn�t know me. I stayed ten days on my own. All alone. I started feeling weak. From hunger and inactivity. And from fear. I say to myself, Let them kill me, and I decided to give myself up. I got up, in the early hours, and went outside. Across the way from Thal�s Kapetan�as�s house was the Chr�nis place. They had a �water-tap� hung out on the balcony, a makeshift washbasin made out of planks. And next to it a carnation plant. It was dawn. I see Panay�tis Chr�nis, he was splashing water on himself, washing himself. He looked at me, he didn�t recognize me. I went to our house. I went straight to the kitchen. My family had gone off, I didn�t know anything. They had gone to Tr�polis. Only my mother was there. She was staying down at old Sot�ris K�llias�s place. The rebels had taken over our house. I went into the kitchen. It was light out, the sun had come up. And then I hear my mother coming. She had a bag with wheat chaff, she had some hens, she was coming to feed them. She comes inside. She sees me. You�re here, my girl? I�m here. Now what will I do with you, what will I do? The whole neighborhood�s awake. Where will I hide you? There are rebels in the house. They were still asleep. I tell her, You won�t hide me. I�m going to turn myself in, let them kill me, I don�t care. But why they wanted me I didn�t know. I walked outside, trembling, I went up to M�ngas�s place. They were all there, with Haro�lis Lengh�ris in charge. I turned myself in. Where were you hiding? In our house, in the basement. I�d asked my mother, Did they search the basement? They hadn�t. In the basement, I tell them. And what did you eat? There was water outside. I had taken two loaves of bread with me. No one knew me. They wouldn�t listen: You were hiding somewhere. I wasn�t hiding, I was at our house. That stayed secret for two years. They let me go free. I found out later what the charges against me were. The Kyrel�is women had left. That night, after the last service of the Salutations. And because they saw us talking in church, they thought I was a liaison. Vas�lis, their eldest son, had gone to Tr�polis and he sent them shoes with Nik�las Balah�mis. Through Ayili�s I think. Nik�las was their relative. They were barefoot, they sent them some boots. We were barefoot too. In that winter weather. Nik�las brought them the boots and they left, walked all night. They went to Tr�polis, Vas�lis was waiting for them. And from Tr�polis they went to Athens. That�s what happened, and that�s why they were after me. Later on they arrested Balah�mis, they sent him to the detention camp. They had all the people who didn�t get away in time, in March. Then the big blockade started. And to get rid of people they killed some of them. That�s when they killed the Bra�las woman. I got out in time, she didn�t. In the month of June. It was June when we found out. On Saint Peter�s Day.2 The neighbors had come to wish us well for our P�tros�s name day.
Pavl�kos was present at the execution of Vas�limis. It was a brother of his who killed Vas�limis. A brother of his, and Boura�mis. Mih�lis Boura�mis, who now receives a pension for being in the Resistance. He killed the man and he�s getting a pension. They captured Yi�nnis Vas�limis, a big, tall man. Nice-looking man, good-looking. With young children, a son and a daughter. They arrested him with his father. His father went over to them. He tells them, Hey, you fellows, what did Yi�nnis ever do to you? Then someone bashed him, we don�t know who, and threw him down in some tall bushes. But the old man lived, he didn�t die. They took Yi�nnis up a ways, to a place they call Spathokomm�noi, it�s farther up, on the road from Ko�vli. It was Ko�vli where they arrested him. His brother, Pavl�kos, and the others. And they killed him in Spathokomm�noi. The old man got himself out of those bushes, he went to his daughter-in-law. Mili�, Mili�, he shouts to her. They killed Yi�nnis, you poor girl, go and collect him. Mili� took my sister-in-law Electra and they went up there and found him. My sister-in-law said he was beaten so bad he�d kicked up a foot�s-length of dirt, that�s what she told me, he was buried in that dirt. Seems he was beaten a lot before he died. I don�t know if they knifed him or not, I don�t know about Pavl�kos, but that other fellow, the one from Galten�, went to prison for quite a few years. They had him in some prison somewhere. And now they say he gets no sleep, that bloodshed still hounds him.
M�rkos came down to Kastr� in 1943. Just after Saint Constantine�s Day.1 He was older than me but we were both named after the same grandfather. He was trying to put together a group. To start up a skeleton organization. The first of the British had parachuted onto Mount Parnon. The first group of the SMA. And he left to meet them. Of course he never came back. It should be noted here that he was always on good terms with the leftists. During the Metax�s dictatorship he was in contact with them. First of all, he hid someone named L�tsis in his house. From Ayios Vas�leios in Kynour�a. Later on he made him his koumb�ros. He had connections to the Communist Party from way back then. He was also working with Pol�vios Isari�tis. That�s not a code name. Pol�vios Isari�tis, a lawyer. They shared the same office. He was a Communist too. M�rkos left the army in 1935. He wasn�t discharged. He resigned. As a first lieutenant, I think. He graduated from the Army Cadet Academy, he studied, he got a degree in law, he got his license to practice law, then he quit. He brought his brothers and sisters to Athens, he set up house there, he started working. He put the girls in school, his sisters, in some vocational school. 1930�1935. Until that time most everybody else stayed in Kastr�. He struggled. He had a sharp mind, he soaked up everything. He spoke good English, good French. He had also reestablished his connection with the Freemasons, and he was rising. Rising fast. An important and prominent person. Extremely cultivated. N�kos Karvo�nis wrote the battle hymn �To Arms, to Arms� at his house. N�kos Karvo�nis, the leftist writer. M�rkos gave him shelter during the early years of the Occupation. He looked after him. He wrote that at M�rkos�s house, and M�rkos�s brother Yi�rgos Ioann�tzis typed it for him. I have firsthand knowledge of this. And also Pol�vios Isari�tis, when he came down to Arcadia to organize EAM, he sent him to me. He stayed at our house, I helped him make his first contacts. In fact he was the first one from EAM to come to Kastr�. He must have come in November. Early November 1941. EAM was formed in September. It was founded in September in Athens. And the cadres of the KKE who joined up straight away were spread over the rest of Greece. Each of them took a prefecture. Pol�vios came to Arcadia. We got to know each other. I knew him from M�rkos�s office. I was a student. He was a short, athletic type. So he came there, he set up his organization, in 1941. The Organization became dormant then but was reactivated in 1943. When the air drops began on Mount Parnon. The first drop took place on May 21, in Meg�li L�kka. That�s where it happened. Then M�rkos came down from Athens. He invited some people for a meal at Halo�los�s taverna. That was his fatal weakness. It sealed his fate. All the EAM activists were there, Mago�lis, Kl�arhos, and the rest. As M�rkos�s guests. He announced that he was going forward, he would form his own cell. A few days later he got up and left. He stayed at our uncle the doctor�s. At Uncle Men�laos�s house. He went up to Mount Parnon. The third, the fourth, or fifth of July 1943. Until recently I didn�t know the circumstances under which he was killed. This past year someone put out a book. One of those self-published books. St�mos Triantaf�llis. He portrays himself as a rebel chieftain. A Reserve second lieutenant during the Albanian campaign. The Old Man of Mount Parnon and all that. About himself. And he says that it was L�tsis who killed Ioann�tzis. Before he met up with the British agents of SMA he met with L�tsis. He tried to convince him to leave EAM, to go over to his organization. This discussion took place on the road. From Platan�ki to Palaioh�ri. Both of them on horseback. Then L�tsis took out his gun and shot him in cold blood, from behind. The rebels escorting them were speechless. In the back of his neck. Why did you stop? L�tsis yelled at them. And they left, they left M�rkos down there. How dependable Triantaf�llis�s information is I don�t know. At any rate, he was there on Mount Parnon. He doesn�t say, I saw it. Some eyewitnesses told this to him. I was in Kastr� at the time. And I�d gone to Vo�rvoura with Nik�las Farmakoul�das. I don�t remember why anymore. On some related business in any case. In the meantime the dispute with EAM was coming to a head. Those bums, Yi�nnis Veliss�ris would say. He�d started out with the opposition. Then he went over to their cell. I knew them all, I was well acquainted with everyone. Al�xis Iatr�dis�s boys. Old Al�xis. His nephews. My brother N�kos. They also had their friends. Sp�ros Ro�melis. All of them casualties. Ro�melis, that was his nickname. Sel�mos. A scrupulous fellow. Ro�melis was his mother�s name. After the village of Ay�a Ro�meli. Which is in Crete. He had no relatives. Just a sister, she�s still living. Someone from V�rvaina married her. Those people had been through a lot. And it showed on their faces. They suffered. And his sister still does, even today. There was another man there. Yi�rgos Stratig�poulos. He was studying law. I was good friends with him too. He wrote poems. He came from Kastr�, on his mother�s side. And Tz�mis Bo�nis also. Another casualty. Killed. So the rebels set up a blockade. I don�t remember the date. They arrested me and Farmakoul�das. In our beds. The others were hiding. They took us to Meligo�. We spent the night there. They left Farmakoul�das there in Meligo�. Seems like the officers were seeing a lot of action. Kyrel�is, Dr�nias, a Reserve officer, Yi�nnis Kouno�fos from Kar�toula, a squadron chief. From our organization. Me, they kept. Because as a student I was a leftist and because I had no clear involvement in it all. They kept me. And I went up to the mountains. With them. They put me in charge of the Justice sector. I already had my law degree. I was also a good public speaker. I was in my element. I stayed there until November 1943. Working for the committee of EAM of East Lacon�a and Kynour�a. With headquarters in Leon�dio. We had the whole area. Up to Yer�ki. The secretary was K�stas Papp�s. A code name. For Yi�nnis Kour�fas, a
That�s how they captured Penelope Kalo�tsis. It was Pikin�s who got her. I�m not all that certain, maybe Yeorgh�a knows better. And someone else. There were two of them. And when he got hold of her she told him, Now listen here, you came here after
��In the detention camp they told me, If you see them taking folks out that door, you know they�re taking them to be executed. The monastery had two doors. They took Penelope out that same door.
��She had the flu, that�s exactly what they said. And Pikin�s got her up out of bed and took her in. Because she might have given shelter to someone there. And they left. They went and burned down the whole village, those rebels. And the people got out, they went across from there.
The old man had become romantically involved with Leon�das Grigor�kis�s daughter. Venets�na. They went to school together, to the junior high school. It was a rare thing in those days for a girl to keep on with her studies beyond the second year, or the third year of primary school. We�re talking about the end of the past century. Around that time. Eighteen ninety-five. At any rate, that childhood romance ended up in a formal engagement. Rings were exchanged. An engagement party was held, right and proper. In the end, due to some whispering, and perhaps some political expediency, the marriage was called off. Leon�das was the mayor. Of what was then the municipality of T�nia and Dolian�. And the Grigor�kis kin had been keeping that office in their family. So the marriage was called off, and not without incident. On Saint Nicholas�s Day,1 after church, the folks from Kar�toula were making their way home. At L�ni the road forks. The old man invited his fianc�e to go to his house. His brother Nik�laos was in America. His only brother. And the bride-to-be was going to make loukoum�des.2 To celebrate his name day. But her mother didn�t let her go. The old man was insulted, he grabbed the girl by the hand and insisted that she follow him. Stubborn as mules, both the groom and the mother-in-law. And Venets�na in the middle. Weak-willed. Finally the rest of her relatives intervened. They attacked the old man. He jumped off the road, down into a vineyard. He took out a pistol from his back pocket, he fired a few shots in the air. His third shot nicked the mayor�s wife�s long woolen vest. Grazed her hip. An entirely superficial wound. At that point Konstant�s Grigor�kis, Kouf�s�s father, threw himself at the old man. Who had just enough time to bash him with the butt of his pistol, he knocked out a few of his teeth. And he kept insisting that his fianc�e follow him to his house. But the girl refused. Look what you�ve done to your house now. Believing the mayor�s wife dead, and seeing the other covered in blood, she thought he�d become a criminal. After what you just did to your home, where will you take me? She refused. The old man got mad, he took out a pocketknife, and he slashed all her clothes. He slashed them and threw them away. Left her half-naked. He was out of control. They said they found her shoes all the way down in Kok�is�s yard. So the engagement was called off once and for all, in spite of the exchange of rings and the much-vaunted announcement of the engagement party, and in spite of the fact that he had made an official trip with his fianc�e to Ro�vali, where they baptized Zagl�ras. Who was a small child then. Not only that, when they passed by the house of my grandfather-to-be, my mother, a young girl then, came out and pinned some basil on them.3 Here, cousin, have a long, happy life together. Cousins, four or five times removed. Cousins. And the old man used to repeat that story. Who could have told me that in two or three years� time the woman you have next to you as your fianc�e will have left you and the woman who wished you well for your wedding would be here instead? That
I went back to Tr�polis and I reported to L�ras. A verbal report on what I saw during my one and only leave of absence. All that sordidness. In Ayios P�tros the men from M�ni and the men from Corinth almost killed each other. We had a battalion of men from Corinth. They�d swiped someone�s watch, and he went and asked for it. He was the uncle or the grandfather of an officer. And he asked for the watch, and the watch was found. In the meantime they began fighting in the main square of Ayios P�tros. With the ELAS rebels right there above us. Right above us. Just looking for a chance to cut us up. I went and explained everything to L�ras. He tells me, All this can you please report it in writing, everything, from the time you went to Astros, whatever you saw? I went and wrote up a report. What the general picture was, the unruliness and the corruption. The sordidness. A situation you couldn�t control. Because of course various other forces were coming into play. A strange group of people, the down-and-out. Some of them embittered, others on the run, others, like the men from M�ni, who have it in their blood, for example. At any rate. The Allied landing came soon afterward, and Kanell�poulos disembarked in the Peloponnese.
How many were we? We hadn�t been issued any arms yet. We were in Tr�polis. And they told us, There are rebels in Vo�rvoura. Well they gave us arms, since we were from Kastr�. Just the basics, to get ourselves to Vo�rvoura. A whole lot of us, I can�t remember. Vas�lis Papayiorgh�ou, me, Petr�kos, Ant�nis Bini�ris, Milti�dis Mant�s, Arap�yiannis.
��Arap�yiannis?
��St�vros. From Ko�trifa. A machine-gun operator. We went to Vo�rvoura. First we went to Ko�trifa. We had information that the rebels had taken Arap�yiannis�s wife. But she had gone into hiding, they didn�t find her. And they burned down his house. From there we went to Vo�rvoura. We spent the night there. We found the rebels inside a small church. I think in Ay�a Paraskev�, across from the village. Some of our men got into position once they went up there. We had some men from Ayios P�tros with us, in our platoon. Someone named Fourto�nis, another man named Lyko�ras.
��Who was your leader?
��Our leader was Nik�las Petr�kos. I think Li�s V�mos was too. As second lieutenant. I don�t remember. But I do remember that I was the machine-gun ammo-belt loader. St�vros Arap�yiannis was the operator.
��How old were you then?
��Eighteen. We got them out of there. Out of the church, but they got away from us. We didn�t get close enough in time to surround them. They heard us coming. Someone fired a shot inside the village, they realized what was up. And they cleared out.
��Were there many of them?
��About eight of them. Ten. But they got away. Then we regrouped, and we went back, back to the village. We left from there. On our way to Kos�na, on the road to Kos�na. Just before Proph�tis Il�as, they were waiting to ambush us. It was at Ko�bas�s Rocks. That�s what they call the place. In Kos�na, way down low. On the border between Vo�rvoura and Kastr�. That�s where they set up their first ambush. They fired at us from high up, they didn�t harm us at all.
��Was it the same men who got away, or were there others?
��We don�t know. In any event, from what became clear later on, there were many rebels in the area. Because on our way to Kastr�, at the mill by the church, they had set up another ambush.
��All the way down there?
��At the church�s mill. But we were moving cautiously. And we pushed them back. Then we went down to the village. That�s when the villagers left Kastr�. Most of them for the Security Battalions. That�s when Papayi�nnis left, that�s when all the men left.
��Which Papayi�nnis?
��The father of Vangh�lis the priest.
��Was he still alive then?
��He was.
��When did
��Before that. As soon as the German blockade was over. They were after me, I couldn�t stay put.
��Did you go down by yourself, or with which others?
��I don�t remember. A lot of us went down.
��And Papad�ngonas was already in Tr�polis?
��He was.
��So you went there in June?
��End of June, something like that.
��The end of June or July? When did they burn down the village? Were you here?
��They burned it down on the eve of Saint Il�as�s Day. Around the twenty-second or twenty-third of the month.
��On Saint Il�as�s Day?
��No, later. Later. Saint Il�as�s Day is July 20.
��Yes.
��The village was burned down on the twenty-third or the twenty-fourth.
��Had you men in Vo�rvoura gone there before or after?
��After. No, you�re right. We�d gone there before. Before the fire. Because when we went back, that�s when our parents left. When we arrived back from Vo�rvoura they left. The house was still intact. They burned it down afterward.
��When they burned it down where were you?
��When they burned it down I had enlisted. So had the others. In the Battalions. We�d been issued arms. At the time I was with a German convoy, escorting them to Meligal�s. That�s where I was. When I came back Nik�las Petr�kos broke the news to me. Gently. He says, Don�t get upset. They burned down your house. Well, I didn�t care all that much. I tell him, What about my family? He says, They�re alive. Well, that�s that, I said. If they burned down the house, then they burned it down. So what. Since no one was killed.
��Was the convoy you were with a transport convoy or a military one?
��We were carrying food at the time. There were also buses to Kalam�ta. We escorted them as far as Meligal�s.
��And you went back?
��We stayed there for a week. We stayed there for backup. Sto�pas was there.
��I think he was in Gargali�noi.
��He went to Gargali�noi later. Gargali�noi and P�los. Because I went there also. On a second mission.
��And then you went back to Tr�polis?
��Then I went back to Tr�polis.
��Which other men from Kastr� were with you?
��Just a few. Because there were a lot of men in the Battalions. A group of us went along with some others from Valt�tsi.
��I mean in Tr�polis. Had all the men from Kastr� gone down there?
��Yes.
��Do you remember any names?
��How can I remember? They were all there, some enlisted, some not. And they left again, they went back.
��Was K�stas Karam�nis enlisted?
��K�stas Karam�nis? No he hadn�t enlisted. He was just part of the group. He went around with us. I don�t remember if he�d enlisted. I don�t remember him being armed. All those men were serving in the 2nd Civilian Intelligence Bureau.
��What do you mean by 2nd Civilian Intelligence Bureau?
��That�s where they worked. They issued orders, they were in constant touch with Papad�ngonas. All those men.
��I see.
��From one bureau to the other. That�s where they did their informing. In that bureau.
��How did Mih�lis kill Ts�gris? Do you know the story?
��Ts�gris was being interrogated at the time.
��Who was Ts�gris?
��A major with the Greek Army. They had forced him to join the rebels.
��From down in Yiannak�poulos, from Taygetus?
��I don�t know. I don�t know about that. At any rate, Ts�gris, when he first came to Kastr�.
��He came to Kastr�?
��He did. He gathered all the men in the town square. We were sitting under the plane tree. And he gave us a beautiful speech, about resistance and liberation.
��Was he by himself?
��There were others, but not many.
��Had he already gone over to ELAS?
��Yes, I think so. At any rate, he came here as part of ELAS. He told us we had to support ELAS and join the rebel movement and all that. He had us men all fired up. And there were a lot of us, not like today. He had us all fired up. So at a certain point he says, Whoever wants to go to the mountains, go stand at the Unknown Soldier�s Monument. On your left. Whoever doesn�t want to go, stay where you are. And we all went over to the Unknown Soldier. Then he tells us, Go to your homes and talk it over with your parents. To see if they agree. In that way he gave us a chance to think about it. To think it over. No one followed him at that time.
��What happened with Mih�lis?
��With Mih�lis. Some men had gone on a raid at the time. To attack the villages down below. Koub�la, Galten�, and the rest.
��And Kyri�kos was killed.
��I don�t know how it happened. At any rate, he was killed. Mih�lis had just found out.
��It was his own fault he was killed.
��Yes. He was banging the butt of his gun against a door. As soon as Mih�lis found out he went up to the 2nd Bureau. Before they even brought his brother to Tr�polis. He knew that Ts�gris was being interrogated there. And he took out his gun and shot him in cold blood. He settled the score.
��Ts�gris, where did they arrest him?
��Ts�gris. At some blockade, I think. But I�m not very certain.
��After that the Germans left. Then came the Liberation.
��Yes.
��And you men stuck around. You stayed in Tr�polis.
��Yes.
��For how many days?
��Not too many.
��Did you go to Sp�tses after that?
��No. I didn�t go. Papad�ngonas told us, Any of you who are with us, who don�t have a questionable record, you can stay. We�ve signed an agreement, they won�t bother you. And I believed what he said, so I stayed.
��Then you were there when Kanell�poulos arrived with Aris.
��Kanell�poulos and Aris. Yes, I was there. They spoke from a hotel, in the main square.
��From the Ma�nalon.
��The Ma�nalon, yes. And me in particular, for a while, until we surrendered our arms and all that, Dr. Panag�kos covered for me. Not only for me, for other men from Kastr� too. He took us to the house of a relative of his. He had left us there. He brought us food until the ELAS men finally arrived. Then a rebel came there, to the house where we were staying. He says, You have to come and surrender your weapons. So the doctor, who�s now deceased, loaded up our weapons. Along with K�stas Yiorghoul�s, also deceased. K�stas was a sergeant.
��How many of you were there?
��About twelve of us. They got our weapons, they took them to the barracks. They surrendered them. But then they asked for us. So the doctor comes back with another rebel. He says, Line up, you�re going to give yourselves up. And we went and gave ourselves up. They put us in a room. Someone from Megal�polis arrived, a kapet�nios. He talked to us. He told us that they could kill us and all that. But ELAS was sparing us, and we should join in the struggle. And so on. So they let us go free.
��And you went back to Kastr�?
��From the barracks I went down to the square. To the square just when Kanell�poulos was speaking. Well, just then Thodor�s Kalam�s arrives. I was sitting on the steps of the courthouse. Thodor�s Kalam�s, from Vo�rvoura, comes over and gets hold of me. Are you Anghelin�ras? I am. Follow me. I followed him. I knew that Kalam�s fellow. He used to sing and play the lute at the fairs. He was in Barb�tsainas�s band of musicians. Before the war, all this. And those same men killed Barb�tsainas. So I followed him. And he was leading me down toward Halal�s�s place. Almost the last house after the grove. But as soon as I saw that I stopped. I ask him, What do you want? Where are you taking me? He says, You�re going to tell me where the Galax�dis brothers have my flock. Let�s go back, I tell him. Because if that�s what this is about I don�t know anything. He scared me for a minute. He grabbed me by the ear. I tell him, Get your hands off me, or you�ll have others to answer to. In the meantime, I had Nikots�ras backing me. I�d seen him in the barracks. I knew he was in Tr�polis.
��Which Nikots�ras?
��My mother�s brother. He was with the rebels. I tell him, You�ll have others to answer to. Like Nikots�ras. Dim�trios Sel�kos was his name. The minute he heard Nikots�ras�s name, he says, How do you know him? Go and ask him, I tell him. That�s exactly what I said. Now I was getting my courage back. Go and ask him and stop bothering me.
��Had the Galax�dis brothers taken his sheep?
��Of course they had. Who took them from him? Was it the Galax�dis brothers? Back during all that unrest, in the middle of all that unrest? Anyone who had the chance would swipe whatever he could. Everyone swiped things from everyone else. I went back. We went back together. And what a coincidence, right there on the steps of the courthouse again, there was Nikots�ras. With Than�sis Foti�s. And as soon as he saw me, he started in. Swearing at me of course. What are you doing with those bums, and on and on he went. I tell him, Now you can explain things to Kapet�n Thodor�s. And he turns to him and tells him, What do you think you�re doing with my nephew? And after that they left me alone. I wanted to come to Kastr� but I was afraid. Nikots�ras gets me, he takes me upstairs. To what used to be the 2nd Civilian Intelligence Bureau. That�s where Aris was stationed now.
��In what building?
��In the courthouse. Inside. He takes me upstairs to the 2nd Bureau. He hands me a permit. They fixed that permit for me, stamped it, and I could circulate freely with it. With that permit I saved Panay�tis Kouro�nis from a beating.
��Where did they capture him?
��In Ho�ria. We were coming down, Vrast�s, my uncle, Nikots�ras�s brother, me, and Kouro�nis. Not the younger one. Not T�kis. Panay�tis. And they mistook him for the other one. As soon as we got to Ho�ria. In Ho�ria there was a guardhouse. As for me, they saw my permit, there was someone, was it Lyritz�s? I don�t remember now. Anyhow, he was from Messin�a. A major. Or something. At any rate. They let me go. They took Kouro�nis upstairs to the old police headquarters. They started in on him. They had taken Vrast�s there too. So I walk into the office, I walk in. I tell them, Who are you beating, Sel�kos? Nikots�ras�s brother. They knew Nikots�ras. They say, How come one�s on our side and the other�s on theirs? And they let Vrast�s go downstairs. Then we hear Panay�tis. They were beating him. They had just started. Nephew, Vrast�s shouts. Go up and explain to them. I go upstairs, I tell them, You�re barking up the wrong tree. The Kouro�nis you�re looking for is someone else. He�s young, he�s my age. See, it�s like this. This one here is a family man, he has children. And with that they finally let him go. And that was the end of it. We went on our way. Continued on foot. I was barefoot. I�d forgotten that. On my way from Tr�polis, just before Ayios S�stis. At the roadside shrine they had a guardhouse. They stopped us, they took my boots away. They asked for my permit. They saw my army boots. They were in good shape, almost new, they tell me, Take them off. And they left me barefoot. After that we came here. They greeted us with insults. The worst ones from El�ni, Karad�mas�s wife. And listen to this. Five years later they brought her to me. Five or six years. Tried to arrange a marriage between us. I said no. More swearing. You bums, you this, you that. We didn�t answer her. My folks were in M�sklina, they hadn�t come back. We went down there with Vrast�s, found our house burned down. We went to the marketplace. Another kind of welcome there. From up on M�ngas�s balcony. ETA1 had taken it over, they hadn�t burned
��Were there any others?
��Mmm, Panay�tis Gag�s. But it�s the other one I remember. Aryir�ou. He spit at us.
��And you stayed here.
��Yes, I did. I stayed here. Then they arrested me, they took me to Ayios P�tros. They turned me in, they said I was looting. That I�d taken a sewing machine that belonged to Yfant�s. Nonsense. So they hauled me in for interrogation. Still at M�ngas�s house. It was still their headquarters. There was a man called Yi�nnis Spyr�poulos from Parth�ni. He asked me about the sewing machine. I tell him, I�ve no idea. Since you have no idea you�re going to Ayios P�tros. There was a superior command there. There were still some prisoners there. Three or four rebels come and get us. They take us to Ayios P�tros. Just ten days after we came back. They keep us there for about a month.
��That long?
��Twenty-nine days. They took us outside, we did chores. We had swept the square of Ayios P�tros. Me, Yi�nnis Halo�los, Achill�as Ko�tselas. He�s dead now. We would go for water. Over at their fountain.
��What did they give you to eat?
��Whatever our relatives brought us.
��Did they come every day?
��Every day. I had my grandmother. She came whenever she could. And she would bring me something � what could she bring me? We had nothing. A potato or two, a cabbage. That�s what she brought. Twenty-nine days. Till the twenty-eighth of October.
��That was in the fall of 1944.
��In the fall, yes. It was � I was released that day. My other grandmother came, Nikots�ras�s mother. They would let her in. She says, so the others can�t hear, Listen child, listen here. Your father says to tell you that some pact was signed that�s good for you men. It was the V�rkiza Treaty. That�s when I was released. When the V�rkiza Treaty was signed. They called me upstairs. They asked me some stupid questions. About things I didn�t know. There was someone named Petsalo�das there. From here, from Ayi�rghis. He recognized me. He knew I was Nikots�ras�s nephew. Anghelin�ras, he says to me, okay, go. Yes. He does me that good turn, he says, You can go. And I left. I left as soon as they gave me my permit. My grandmother was still there. I came here. And I stayed here. I left here again in 1948.
��Did you go to Tr�polis?
��I went to Athens. Straight to Athens.
��When did they attack Ayios P�tros? When did they attack the gendarmes?
��That was in 1946. Early on. When the second rebel movement was starting up. Don�t ask me for dates. But yes, I went there, and I went there after Tr�polis. With everyone from Kastr�.
��When they attacked them, how many gendarmes were there?
��They said ten or twelve.
��Who was police chief then?
��I�m not sure.
��Did they attack during the day or at night?
��At dawn. They killed them at dawn.
��Did they kill them all?
��Not all of them. I remember three bodies. Up on R�ppas�s truck. Three bodies on his truck.
��And they�d cut off their privates?
��They�d slashed them there, they didn�t cut anything off. They slashed them up, all around their privates.
��With bayonets.
��With bayonets. Or with knives, I don�t know. Just as they were, in their undershorts.
��In their sleep?
��Yes.
��They caught them asleep?
��They caught them asleep. And if it wasn�t for some man named Kats�s, H�ris Kats�s, from the Battalions, he was right-wing. He gave the signal for the others to leave.
��And they got away.
��They got away and they were saved. Some of them. First of all, their officer. A first sergeant, I think � but people were saying things about him.
��What do you mean?
��That he was the one who�d betrayed them.
��I see.
��The gendarmes. Now how true that is, no one knows.
��And they took the dead men to Tr�polis.
��Yes, we took them there. A lot of us from Kastr� went to Ayios P�tros. And we got them and took them to Tr�polis. Because we were still holding up. So we all went down to Tr�polis.
��And you tore the place up.
��Yes, we went to Tr�polis.
��How many of you went down there?
��A lot of us. Three hundred. Or maybe one hundred.
��Do you remember any names?
��Where should I start. With Yi�rghis R�ppas? With K�stas Go�las? With Vas�lis Papayiorgh�ou? With Yianno�kos Halo�los? All deceased. M�tsos Kokkini�s, K�stas Boutsik�kis? Whose names should I give you? Which ones? Anghelos Katrin�kis. There were so many of us. So many.
��And you went down there with clubs?
��We went down there angry. And we got to where we knew the Communists were. We nabbed someone named Babaki�s at Panayot�poulos�s bakeshop. Up in the attic. Next to Xag�s�s tailor�s shop.
��Down near Ay�a Varv�ra.
��No, at Evanghelism�s. It�s a museum now.
��Yes it is.
��Panayot�poulos�s bakeshop was just behind it. And K�stas Go�las had hidden up in his attic.
��Uh-huh.
��Do you remember Old Man K�stas with the mustache?
��Uh-huh.
��Well, he went up there and grabbed Babaki�s by the hair.
��Where was he from, Babaki�s?
��From Dolian�. He was a captain. A real captain. Not like Kapet�n Th�doros or Kapet�n Nikots�ras.
��Babaki�s.
��That�s right. He grabbed him and dragged him down the stairs. There they started in on him with an automobile crank. There were these imported motorcars back then, they had cranks two meters long. Sarr�s and Dim�tris Pr�sinos went to work on him. They put him through the mill. He couldn�t move for weeks. Mmm, after that I don�t know what happened to him. We were young then. We wanted revenge. After that I left. I came here to the village. I worked until 1948. In �48 I left, on the twenty-eighth of October. A date not easily forgotten, we might say.2
��In the meantime the rebels were wreaking havoc everywhere.
��Wreaking havoc all over. Not so much in the day. They were afraid of Kastr�. But back then we would hide. We didn�t sleep at our houses.
��Where did you hole up at night?
��Outside. I hadn�t slept in my house in years. Not days, years.
��Yes.
��Like animals. We slept in any old hole. We�d fixed up underground hiding places. We had found caves � and we moved around. Right here, behind Houyi�zos�s place there was one. We once had you stay there too.
��Yi�rgos did. I was away.
��Yi�rgos. One of you did. I remember. Usually four of us slept there. Li�s Andrian�kos, and Sofian�s�s cousin, they�re in Australia now; Vas�lis Patsi�s and me. And whenever Li�s didn�t come, Vangh�lis Ko�tselas did. He�s deceased now. There was a hollow rock. We�d squeeze under it like snakes. That kind of thing. There�s no end to the stories. In 1948 I left. I went to Athens. The two girls stayed behind. Maria, born in 1942. In 1948 she was six. And Chryso�la, a little older. Fourteen, fifteen. Yeorgh�a was in Athens, the older girl. Yi�nnis was in Athens, K�stas was in Athens. Our uncle tells us. He had flour mills. He owned the Amyla flour mill. He tells us, his nephews and nieces. We were all working there. He tells us, You left something behind for the rebels too. Their portion of the spoils. He meant Chryso�la. There was no transportation back then. There were no telephones and things. I found someone, and I sent a letter to the old man. I think it was Yianno�kos Halo�los I found. Someone, at any rate. At that time there were trucks that went back and forth between Athens and Kastr�. The Galax�dis trucks. So I wrote that letter to the old man and told him to send Chryso�la to us. By airplane. There was a Dakota at the time that flew between Tr�polis and Athens. You must remember that.
��No, I was away.
��You were away. It was the twenty-fifth of November, the Feast of Saint Catherine. The day the recruits of �47 reported for duty. Everyone was going there, and in Drago�ni the bus stopped. Down near Zo�bas�s fields. The rebels stopped it, they had set up an ambush. And they sent them back. You must know about that.
��No, who was in it?
��All the recruits of �47. From Kastr� there was Li�s Andrian�kos, Grig�ris S�telis, and lots of others. All the recruits in my class. I was away. I was in Athens. I said that. But Chryso�la was on the bus. With all the others. She was going to Tr�polis to catch the airplane. And they sent them back. When they arrived at the square it was covered in snow. Thirty or forty centimeters of snow.
��The twenty-fifth of November?
��The twenty-fifth of November. On the Feast of Saint Catherine. There all the recruits who were able to ran away. R�ppas�s wife took my sister. And she helped her get away. Took her off the bus. Quiet-like.
��All that happened in 1948.
��In �48. R�ppas�s wife knew someone. I don�t know who. And she managed to get her out. In the meantime the bus started out for Ayios P�tros. To take the recruits there. The driver was Mitsouli�s. It arrived in Do�mos. Just before the bridge he runs the bus off the road. Says it skidded on the snow. On the ice. He pretended to be trying to get it out of the ditch, nothing. Get it out, he says to them, and I�ll take you wherever you want. So they took some of the passengers and they left. On foot. Where they went I don�t know. Four days later Chryso�la went to Athens. The old man took her to Tr�polis on foot. And he sent her on the airplane. We came back from Athens in 1949. By then the rebel insurrection was over. April 1949. It was over for good.
Someone from Pl�tanos showed up. He says, Is your name Aryir�ou? In Koub�la again. I say yes. He�d come to see about the shepherds. We had shepherds from Pl�tanos back then. He says, Have anything to do with Kl�arhos Aryir�ou? We�re relatives, I say. You on good terms? We are. I didn�t want to be giving out information to anyone from Pl�tanos. Oh, come on, you�re not on good terms, he tells me. You�re not leveling with me. I am. Say whatever you want, I don�t believe you. I�m sure you�re not on good terms. Kl�arhos was alive then. He died maybe a year or so later. I�m going to tell you something to tell him, he says to me. I�m called Dim�yiorgas. My name�s Dim�yiorgas. If you see him, tell him Dim�yiorgas told you this: I was seventeen and he gave me a pistol, one to me and one to another man, and he told us, Finish your food then go to such and such a house in Koub�la. The key will be under the roof tiles. You�ll empty the house, you�ll take the mules, and you�ll take any men you find there with their women and bring them here to be tried. And have us all killed, in other words. And he was telling me this after so many years. And tell him something else too: When we got here we looked all over, but we didn�t find anything. Just a rooster pecking down on the threshing floor. We gave it a whack, and we killed it, and it rolled way down there, and we went and got it. And we took it to Kapet�n Kl�arhos and he said, So those bastards got away, did they? And that was all � he�d sent us there and that�s all we found. That�s all he said: So those bastards got away, did they?
That�s who arrested me, local men, from here. T�yias and Kl�arhos. Vas�lis T�yias and Kapet�n Kl�arhos. They took me to Kastr�. And then they took me to Louko�.
��To Louko� or Orthokost�?
��To Louko�. They put me down in the basement and started in on me. First they just slapped me around. Confess. Hey, I tell them, I never went in the army. And truth is I was a deserter back then. In 1920. 1922. When they were going to Asia Minor.
��What was your year to enlist?
��1922. And I deserted then and there. When the army came and the central government was back I joined up. That�s when I went and enlisted. I went all the way to Thessalon�ki. So there I was now in Louko�. They put me in the basement, a filthy old basement. The next day they make me lie down, and they loop the strap from one of their rifles around my ankles, with me lying on my back. With my legs up high, bent. And they would beat me with some sticks and say, Confess.
��On the soles of your feet, is that where they beat you?
��Yes, on the soles of my feet. So there at Louko� sometimes they�d give me food and at other times not.
��Who beat you?
��Not local men. They weren�t from here. I didn�t know them. And while I was down like that they would kick me. In the ribs, everywhere, my arm�s been out of whack ever since. They just kept at it. As long as I was still breathing.
��And what did they want you to confess to?
��Who, or which organization I was with. But what could I do, I wasn�t with any? Well, that�s what they wanted. Wanted me to confess. They wanted to make me join against my will, that�s all it was. I told you. I wasn�t about to join the army by force. So I deserted before I even enlisted, in N�fplion, and I came here and loafed around. Until we lost the war in Asia Minor and the others came and formed an army again, and then I enlisted. That�s it.
��How long did they keep you at Louko�?
��For about a month. Then luckily things changed. They heard that the Germans were coming, and they took us away from there. I was half-crippled so they put me up on some mule. They didn�t kill me. They put me on the mule and they took us on a ways toward Ayi�rghis, toward the rocks at M�sklina. Meantime, the Germans were getting closer. Making their way down from Ayiasofi�, and the rebels left us in a ditch, and they all ran away. They knew the trails around there, they disappeared. All of them. Then the Germans got us, they took us to M�sklina. And the next day they put us on the train for Tr�polis.
��And you, they never took you to Orthokost�?
��Nope. Only to Louko�. They had a detention camp there too, but they didn�t take me there. They had men from Sparta there. They had a koumb�ros of mine from Vr�sthena there. But I didn�t see them. They took me to Louko�.
��Who was the chief at Louko�?
��They�re dead now, all of them. Kl�arhos was chief. Kl�arhos was the top man. The head man. He had his brother there, he was killed too. There�s a third one still around, name of Krater�s. That�s all.
��How long did you stay in Tr�polis?
��A long time. I don�t remember. A very long time. I had a brother-in-law there, and I stayed with him. Haral�s. I was still limping, I stayed a long time. Those bastards. Well, one of them was my wife�s first cousin. And T�yias, he and I were koumb�roi. Vas�lis. He was a nasty character, that one. And there were others, too, but those two were in charge. Kl�arhos and T�yias.
��When they burned down Kastr� where were you?
��When they burned down Kastr�. I was here. They burned down Kastr� and they took the villagers to Ayios P�tros. In case the Germans came and found us still here. I was here. In case the Germans came. Well, the kapet�nios here, it was him, Kl�arhos. There was someone else, Ts�tsas, now he�s gone. They tell me his son�s a doctor somewhere, in Ar�hova. He never came back. Their house is here, all rundown, behind the church. Now Sar�fis uses it, ties his mule there. Can I get you something to drink?
��No, nothing.
��They weren�t good for anything, those men. They were worthless. They were controlled by others. And I�ll tell you something else: When they caught me they also caught a certain Has�nis. Remember him?
��Yes.
��M�tsos Has�nis.
��Yes.
��And they caught that Orfan�s fellow. Yi�nnis. You must remember him too.
��Yes.
��And they had them spying on me. Pretending the others were hounding them too. And on and on it went. Get it? When the Germans arrested us, down in Ayiasofi�, they went along with the rebels. So don�t waste any words on them, to hell with them. They�ve done so many things to me here. They killed one of my brothers, he was a secretary in the County Legal Department. They sent someone named Kaloyer�kis, and he stabbed him right in the middle of the street.
��When was that?
��Back in 1943. Or �44. And that�s not all. They poisoned my mules, they did all kinds of things to me. They took me to the detention camp, they made a cripple out of me. And I never did anything to anyone, never. I say, the Lord be praised, a clear conscience is everything. If your conscience reproves you, forget it. So, my friend, that�s it. And may God forgive them. It wasn�t their fault. It was others higher up who were to blame. And I didn�t tell you the most important thing. One of Kl�arhos�s sisters, who was married to my wife�s cousin, she had left town. Yes, and they had appointed me the village alderman, since they couldn�t find anyone better than me here in the village. They appointed me village alderman, and a paper came directing me to transfer the property of any Communists, etc., to the town. Well, Kl�arhos�s sister also came here. And I let her, she sold her fields, in Zyg�s. Someone from down below bought them, from the lower villages. But she did do one good thing for us; she let us keep the water. The big fountain up there, if you know it. She willed it to the town. That one thing. At any rate, I never bothered them, never harmed any of them. That�s about it. As much as I can remember.
The Battalions were advancing toward Astros. Some kind of reconnaissance, something like that. L�ras tells me, You�re going with them. The only time I saw action outside the Bureau. He tells me, You�ll go with the Battalion. My mission was to bring in Paraskev�s Den�zos. Paraskev�s was a lawyer, a member of ELAS, they�d put him in charge of ETA. The Rebel Commissary. I think he was Tr�mbalis�s brother-in-law. Tr�mbalis, manufactured ice and spaghetti. In Tr�polis. At any rate, they were related somehow. Distant relatives through marriage. And we had to get him out of there, away from the Organization. L�ras tells me, You�ll go down there, you�ll get Den�zos. He�s been notified. He�ll go with you. And I had to transport him safely to Tr�polis. It was a way out, that, a setup so there wouldn�t be any retaliation. So he could appear not to be going with them voluntarily. We went to Kastr�. We passed through Kastr�. The Battalions, hordes of them, were grabbing whatever they could. Kastr� was already burned down, of course. We went to Ayios P�tros. Same thing there. We went down to Ayi�nnis, and from there to Mes�yeio, Astros. And all of them barging into homes and looting. As though they were in enemy territory. In a foreign country. I never imagined it could be like that. We went back, we spent the night at Koulour�s�s inn. For our own safety. The next day we went back up to Ayi�nnis. Paraskev�s was there with his sister. They came over to me. I took them along. Vo�la Papayi�nnis, K�stas Vasil�poulos�s wife, decided to come with us. K�stas and I were colleagues, he was also a schoolteacher. But he was involved with EAM. Vo�la came with us to try to somehow make up for her husband�s forced participation in EAM. Of her own accord. We met at her brother�s house. Ast�ris Papayi�nnis. Ada was there too. It was summer when that raid was carried out. They�d come up from Mes�yeio. They were spending the summer there. Vo�la came with us. They knew us, we were neighbors. She was a colleague�s wife. I had her sit in the front seat of the car. Mih�lis Galax�dis was driving the car. And he wouldn�t stop hounding her. We went to Tr�polis. L�ras took Den�zos, he took him to Tr�mbalis. Vo�la was staying somewhere else in the beginning. Another man from Astros had come with us, name of Kont�kos. A few days later they sent for Vo�la, then she went and stayed at Tr�mbalis�s house. Mih�lis Galax�dis would keep arresting her, hauling her in to the police station. He�d arrest her and lock her up, put her in jail. Because supposedly her husband was with EAM. They sent word to me. I went over and found him, and I had words with him. I told him, What�s going on here? I brought this woman to Astros, she came here with me. Under my protection. And she came here to safeguard her husband, to justify his forced participation in EAM. I would arrange to get her out of the police station, L�ras would give an order, they�d let her go. Then Mih�lis would arrest her again. He was threatening to turn her over to the Germans. Vo�la was staying at Tr�mbalis�s place, I was at the Hotel Gr�tsi. One afternoon she called me over to the fence. There was an open space between us. She says, What shall I do, how long will this go on? She was upset. And rightly so. I tell her, You�re not in danger. As long as L�ras is there I�ll take care of things any time you�re there. But I couldn�t figure out why he was so steamed up, so obsessed with her. And then she told me why herself. A lover�s frustration. He wanted her. Even before she was married. And she wouldn�t look twice at him. That kind of insane passion was fairly widespread. I just want to point out what sort of thing one was up against then. But we shouldn�t speak about that. Vo�la was both a fellow villager and the wife of a colleague. May God rest her soul.
I remember everything. They got me from here. They took me to Ayios P�tros. Along with Chr�stos Kokkini�s. From Ayios P�tros they took us to Kast�nitsa. They had Mar�nos�s brothers there. They killed Themistokl�s. Mih�lis died last year.
��And Mar�nos?
��Mar�nos was in Athens. That�s why they caught us. I had D�na and the boy, they were little.
��Yi�rgos?
��Not Yi�rgos. I had him later. Yi�rgos and Themistokl�s.
��Which children did you have then?
��D�na and Dim�tris. D�na�s almost fifty. She�s married to a miller, in As�a. Dim�tris is in Tr�polis. Working for the telephone company.
��Themistokl�s is in Tr�polis too.
��Yes, but Themistokl�s came later, I had him later.
��Dim�tris and D�na, how old were they then?
��Let me think. They must have been four or five.
��And they stayed here when they arrested you?
��My mother took them. My mother married a Perent�s. You remember M�tsos Perent�s?
��No.
��You�re not very old, you. How old were you back then?
��In the Occupation I was seven.
��You�re not old.
��Says who I�m not? I�m fifty-two.
��Then you�re older. My children were three or four years old. The girl was born first. Worried herself sick. Bleeding from her ears, you know. And Dim�tris started saying, Light all gone, Grandma. Looked at that oil lamp and kept saying, Our light all gone, Grandma. He was so young, I mean he could barely speak. Maybe he was two. And the girl was three. About that age.
��Who took you from here?
��Lengh�ris.
��P�tis?
��One of the two. Maybe it was Har�s.
��And they took you to M�ngas�s house.
��Yes. And to Ayios P�tros � Kast�nitsa. We were covered in lice, tons of them. Such filth. In Orthokost� we found that poor Bra�las woman. They had arrested her earlier. Along with Mar�nos. I was the one got Mar�nos out. All innocent-like. I went and saw him.
��In Louko�?
��No, in Ayi�nnis. At V�rvaina grade school. They�d taken them there. I tell him pretend-like, What are you doing here? We�ve got work to do, why are you still here? Oh, what we went through, he�d say later. And he left for Athens.
��That happened in February, right?
��It was winter. Maybe March. February or March. They arrested me in May. We were still making cheese. Here at my mother�s place. With Chr�stos Pr�zas. They came and took me, with my shoes still pressed under my heels. Like slippers. Yes. They were killing me, those raggedy old shoes � when I got to the prison camp my feet were all cut up. In Orthokost� there were lots of people. People I knew. I would cross myself day and night. There were mothers with young children. Day and night, so grateful they didn�t arrest me with my children. The children in the camp would gather on the stairs and play. Old stone steps worn smooth by footsteps. And when they said, Come and eat, what did the little ones get? They gave us peas, just pea soup. Except when someone brought us something from outside. Efthym�a was there, my cousin Than�sis�s sister-in-law. Than�sis Samartz�s. She was getting married. She married some older man from down there. And I met him back then. In �39. I was engaged. I got engaged too that day. The same day. They were relatives of my husband, we went to the wedding, and we met them. And he would bring me food. Or send me some.
��Was he from Ayi�nnis?
��From Ayios Andr�as. Really, he�d send food. To Orthokost�. And not a word to him from anyone.
��How long did you stay there?
��A month. One whole month. And if the Germans hadn�t come they would�ve killed us. They took us out to the mountains.
��Wait a minute. Yeorgh�a Makr�s was there.
��We were together. The two of us. We slept together. All the women did. There was another woman from Ayiasofi�.
��Did they interrogate you?
��No. Nothing. But they did take us out to the mountains. We woke up one morning, they knew the Germans were coming. We saw T�yias, he had a hand grenade strapped to his waist. A hand grenade. Something�s going on, the others were saying. The men. Poor Panay�tis Pezo�lis. They killed him. Irakl�s�s uncle. Chrysanthe, he says to me. We were cousins. Second cousins. He had a dream that night. It�s a good dream, I tell him. He was gathering lentils by the handful and throwing them in front of him. It�s a good dream, I tell him, what could I say to him? They tortured those two, him and Irakl�s. They didn�t kill them, they didn�t execute them. Just put them through hell. Before the Germans came. And Themistokl�s, God rest his soul, could barely move. I went and took him fresh-cut grass. It was May, near summer. Fresh grass to put under him. They�d beat him real bad. To cushion up his body. His back all bruises from top to bottom. That grass gave out warmth, it took away his pain. Chrysanthe, how did you think of that? he said. To ease the pain just a bit, Themistokl�s. So you�re not flat against cement. Piled-up grass keeps in the heat. Like we used to say about mowed hay that it �heated up.� And his back soaked up that warmth, caught that heat. He was seething all over from so many beatings. Then they got us up, they took us out to the mountains. They took us out of Orthokost� when they realized that the Germans were coming. We had all slept together that night. They took us up the mountain, there was a ravine, it could hold us. A hundred, hundred fifty people. As soon as it got dark they separated us and they took us to a shepherd. His son took us there. About ten of us, all women. He says, Father, take care of these girls. All right, says the old man. O-o-o-o-kay, goes his son. O-o-o-o-kay, answers the father from under his cape. The son says, Take care of the girls, I�ll take care of them. In the morning at daybreak the father went off a ways. I say to the others, Shall we leave? Shall we just go, I tell them. What are you talking about, they answer me, They�ll kill us. They all said that. They were younger than me. Better if they kill us. Shoot us from behind so we don�t see them. And we left. We go along some more, down a hill. We see the Germans.
��How old were you then?
��Thirty? Maybe not even.
��Do you remember when you were born?
��I was born in 1912. Twelve from forty-four, thirty, thirty-one years old. And I took those girls, I helped them escape. The Germans saw our white kerchiefs, and they didn�t bother us. Back then we all wore head scarves. I told them to. Get a stick and tie your kerchiefs on it, all of you. We tied them on, and we got going. We kept moving toward them. We had to go down a gorge to get across. We meet an Italian man. A deserter. Like someone just stepped out of a washtub, that�s how he looked. Covered in sweat. We ask him, Where you headed? he says, Germans. Germans coming. He spoke a little Greek. He was afraid of the Germans now. And we were on our way to find them. We walked on down, a good lot of kilometers, there was a small stream. We found the Germans there, they were washing their feet. They�d captured two rebels. They asked us, Who are these men? Talking with their hands. What could we say? They had them in the sun, and they were beating them. Beating them with canes long as Easter candles. Those rebels had made my life hell, but I felt sorry for them. We left that place. We never saw those rebels again. We went back to Orthokost�. The Germans were advancing. We got away from those Germans there, they let us go free. We decided to go back to our homes. To go up to Malev�s, to come back here. They tell us, Rebels ahead, where are you going? So we split up. I left for Galten�. My sister was there. She�d married someone called Kambylafk�s. Panay�tis Kambylafk�s. We walked all day. All day with a woman from Ayiasofi�. Named Lambr�tsa. She�s married now, down in M�loi. We got ourselves to Galten�. They bedded us down out on the terrace. We fell right asleep. My sister, her mother-in-law, and the girls. She had six girls. At night I hear dogs. I hear the dogs, They�re coming for me, I say. I drag my covers inside. Nonsense, they�re not coming for you, says my sister. The rebels are coming for me, I tell her. I get up next morning, no one came. I get up and put on her mother-in-law�s clothes. Those old-fashioned dresses. I bundle myself up in her scarf. So they won�t recognize me. Where will you go? To Kastr�. I bring myself up here. My mother sees me. You back, my jewel? Come, sit down. I can�t, Mama. They�ll catch me. What are you talking about, child? I take my girl by the hand, a loaf of bread and the boy on my back. And I go to M�sklina. Mar�nos was there. But I had stamina back then, I was strong. A loaf of bread, the boy on my back, and the girl, I�d have her by the hand, then I�d let her move free for a while. I got myself down there, I found Mar�nos. After eight months apart. We stayed there. Then we left the place, we went to Tr�polis. And that�s how we got away. Tr�polis was the end.
��How did they kill Themistokl�s?
��They took us somewhere else, I told you. No one knows, we never found out. Ruthless men. My mother-in-law went and found him afterward. Two years later. They�d buried him under stones. She found the bones. Was it him, or someone else, well, who knows? So much happened. You get all emotional just talking about it. From M�sklina to Tr�polis. Terrible years. Especially for me. Bad. Very bad. After the Liberation, I came back here. I wanted to come here. Mar�nos stayed. I came here. I found nothing. Everything had been leveled. The house burned down. The house here, and the house in Ayi�rghis. We had homes in two places. When they set fire to our village Petr�kos told us. Chr�stos Petr�kos. That they burned down the houses one by one. This house here, that house there. And I was left with nothing but the clothes on my back, I swear. We had that shelter, just a hole, we�d hidden our things there. To keep them safe from the Germans. We�d hidden them because of the Germans and the other side took them. They knew the shelter. But now I have shoes. They don�t cut into my feet and make me bleed. Back then I�d stamped them down right here. I was setting the cheese to curdle, they didn�t let me go inside to change. Thank the Lord.
��All that�s over.
��It�s over. And later I had children, nice kids with good jobs. I�m not just saying that �cause they�re mine. Everyone thinks so.
��I know Yi�rghis.
��Yi�rghis � and the others are nice kids too, very nice.
��I�ve seen Themistokl�s once, in Tr�polis.
��He�s named after his late uncle. We gave him that name.
That�s the way things were. Nothing you could do about it. We�d hear the dog barking at night and we�d tremble. In the spring we�d go outside and sleep five hundred meters from the storage shed. A thousand meters, in any old hole. My old man was afraid someone would come and arrest him. Mostly he was afraid of that Vas�lis T�yias. He was mean as they come. A diehard Communist. Some time later on they got him from Mesorr�hi and took him to Kastr�. To M�ngas�s place. For an interrogation, they told him. Anyone went there for an interrogation never came back. They got him and took him to M�ngas�s place. Veliss�ris was there, and Mavromantil�s. Vas�lis, what are you doing here? Vas�lis was older by then. Maybe forty-five. He pointed at T�yias. The kapet�nios brought me here, he says. You? Yes, me. Go to Do�mos�s place, and we�ll let you know when you can leave. They sent him to Do�mos�s place so the others wouldn�t see him hanging around the square. Okay, I�ll leave, but I want a permit. To be away for a month. They gave him the permit and he left. Mavromantil�s and Veliss�ris, they arranged all that. He went to Athens, he stayed there for a while, and avoided all the trouble. My brother-in-law Yi�nnis was there too. Kalosyn�tos. Yi�nnis, not Yi�rgos. They arrested Yi�rgos later � in place of the others. T�yias himself. He was the one that took our animals. He brought them right through the square here. To feed the rebels. I�m taking them to Malev�s, he said. He�d take them there and they�d eat. Our mules too, everything we had, food, everything. Everything. They came and took stock, wrote everything down in case we hid anything. They took my mother-in-law to Ayios P�tros, an old woman, eighty years old. Just because Yi�nnis and Vas�lis had left. That�s when they caught Yi�rgos. Yi�nnis left because he had English pounds, or so they said. And he should have handed them over for the cause. One five-pound note, that was all he had, poor man. And I know that from Vas�lis. Like I said, Pavl�kos had a bit of decency in him. The Ary�ris family had been kind to him. At night when they were about to take in Kalosyn�tos, Vas�lis walked past them. Nik�las Pavl�kos and the rest of them. And right away they stopped talking. Good evening, Good evening to you, too. Nothing else. My old man realized that they were on their way to arrest Yi�nnis. He hurried past them and went to warn him. By the time he got there, Pavl�kos had already been there. He left the others, saying he had to go take a leak. And he went and told him, Yi�nnis, get out, they�re coming to arrest you tonight. And he upped and left, he went to Kots�ni, walked all night to save his life. And that�s how Kalosyn�tos left and went to Athens. That was how they forced them, one by one, into leaving. He wasn�t with his second wife yet. He had no children from his first wife. He had children later on. And the one he�s with now is his third wife. I�m telling you that some people were forced into things, then they�d find themselves in over their heads, and once the current pulls you downstream that�s it. There�s no going back. And later on, much later, when my children were in Athens, going to school there, and Pavl�kos got out of prison, he found out that Vas�lis was there and he went to see him. Nik�las, why are you staying here, why don�t you come to the village? I�d gladly come, Vas�lis, he said, but what will I live on? Here I can keep myself fed. If I come down to the village, I�ll just fill up on beatings. That�s why he never went back. I�m not sticking up for Pavl�kos, whatever happened happened, but he wasn�t all that mean.
The men from Kar�toula joined the Battalions in 1944. The December Uprising in Athens took place that same year. Because we weren�t here for Christmas.
��Don�t say anything you shouldn�t.
��No, stop it. In 1944 the Germans arrived. In June. The rebels came here, they said, Leave your houses, all of you. Whoever stays in the village will be executed. And the Germans dropped leaflets. Stay in your homes, no one will harm you. We had no choice but to leave. We went to Xerok�mpi. All the women and children were there. In Samartz�s�s storage shed. In Kokk�ni. And we were harvesting wheat. The Germans came and arrested us. They brought us to Kastr�. At Kastr� they picked out some men they wanted and let the rest of us go free. Because of the rebels we couldn�t find shelter. We went down to Tr�polis.
��It was that long before you went to Tr�polis?
��Yes, it was 1944. In November the Germans left. They had also come here in June. For the big blockade. There was all that time in between. We went down to the Battalions. Then the head men, Anton�kos and D�nos Yi�nnaros, sent us away. They say, Go to the village, we�ll be coming to form a company there. We came back. We wake up one morning. We hear gunfire. From Ayios Nik�laos. We get up and head for Kastr�, we look around, M�vros�s house was in flames. The rebels had set fires, they were burning down the village. Then they come down to Kar�toula. Right here to Kar�toula. They burn down three houses. Nik�las Konstant�los�s house, Sokr�tis Marin�kos�s and Alkivi�dis Marin�kos�s houses. They were in the Battalions, those men, it was for revenge. They didn�t burn down Chrysoy�nis�s place. They looted it. Took everything and left. The next day Pavl�kos shows up. I had gone to Ori� with our men. Pavl�kos arrests me and sends me to Ayios P�tros, escorted by Vo�lis Paraskevoul�kos. Vo�lis takes me there, they put me in jail. I find four other men from Kar�toula there. Vas�lis Logoth�tis, M�tsos Panayoto�ros, Vas�lis Kouno�fos, Yi�nnis Chrysoy�nis. In the morning someone comes and shouts, Dou�nis. I say, Here. He says, Interrogation room. They take me for interrogation. They ask me to hand over my machine gun to them. I say, I don�t have a machine gun. They tell me, On the night the rebels went to burn down Kastr�, men from your village were firing at us. We had two old.45 revolvers. We�d make hansa cartridges for them. We�d cut off the tip of the bullet so it would fit into the cylinder, to make it work. And that�s what we fired with. It was Vas�lis Konstant�los who was doing that. We were together. Vas�lis Logoth�tis, Panay�tis�s son, me, and Mih�lis Marin�kos. And also Vas�lis Pantel�s. In the end I never gave anyone away. I tell the interrogator, The Germans captured us, they took us to Tr�polis, to the Security Battalions. And we escaped, we came back. We had a little too much wine, we started shooting. That�s all. In the end they sent me back to the detention room. The other men from Kar�toula were going to leave. They were setting them free. I tell them, Hey, you men, why don�t you help me out too? They couldn�t be bothered. The next day they bring Kyri�kos Bako�ris from Ayiasofi�. He was wearing a Battalions band on his arm. He had sheep, he�d graze them, and when the Germans saw that armband they wouldn�t bother you. The rebels arrested him, with his wife and their two children. And they brought him in. They brought someone else in too, man named Thodor�s Lamb�ris. They took them for interrogation. Someone named Nik�las Farmas�nis comes to see them, a fellow villager. Nik�las, what about my children, Kyri�kos says. And Nik�las tells him, You made your bed, now lie in it. That�s exactly what he said. Two days later they take us to be executed. They marched us toward the bridge. On the way we meet P�tros Lagoumitz�s. From Ayios P�tros. He sees me there with the others, he says, This one�s a goner. And he spread the word that they�d killed me there. A little further along a kapet�nios from P�rgos starts hollering. What has this poor man done, what has he done? Talking about me. I don�t remember his name. I can�t remember it. But the man who was in charge then was Mavr�yiannis. In the end they sent me back. That was on September 13. The night before the Feast of the Elevation of the True Cross.1 We leave at night for Kaltez�s. The entire rebel battalion. They took me with them. Next morning another kapet�nios sees me. He was taken aback. He asks, Why wasn�t he executed? And he got into a fight with Mavr�yiannis. Then they take me and they send me straight to Stemn�tsa. They hand me over to the militia. And they had me free to move about. There was a taverna, the men from the Organization ate there. The taverna was run by an old man. He asks me, Where you from? From Kastr�, I tell him, from Kar�toula. What�s your name? Dou�nis. Are you by any chance old man K�stas�s son? Yes, I tell him. I used to tin-plate copper pots and pans, I used to go there. I knew your father. His son comes in. He was in charge of Stemn�tsa. He tells him, Take good care of this fellow, he�s the son of a friend. The next day Li�s Dr�nis shows up. A cousin of the Pantel�s family. Kapet�n Li�s arrives with some men from Ori�. The Sio�tos brothers and some others. He sees me. He tells me, Who in hell�s name did you take after? Your brother�s a good man. He was talking about T�ssos. I didn�t say a word to him. And I haven�t forgotten that. He goes over to the garrison headquarters, he briefs them. Li�s was out to get me. They grab me the next day and send me to Chrysov�tsi. They lock me up in the detention camp. Chrysov�tsi had a detention camp. A couple of days go by. One of the rebels says, Who�s from Kastr�? I say, I am. A company of volunteers is on their way here right now. They had us outside in the yard. It was about five o�clock in the afternoon, the time we were supposed to bring up the food. They prepared it down at some sawmill. Then we hear them down below, singing as they came. It was someone else�s turn to do chores. I tell him, Let me go instead, some men from my village are coming. And he did. I take two large tin cans, with the rebel right beside me, we go down a ways. I see a group of men from Ori�. I see Nik�las Ro�ssos. Hey, Nik�las, I tell him, no answer. Yi�rgos Kont�s, same thing. Vangh�lis Kyriaz�s, the priest�s brother-in-law, same thing again. They pay no attention. You�d think I was a leper. I leave the cans. I walk on a ways. I find K�stas Logoth�tis. I find L�tzos. I find Vas�lis Marin�kos. I find Thodor�s Kouno�fos. I find Yiann�kis D�skalos. Where you been, they ask me. Here, I tell them, in Chrysov�tsi. The rebel had lost sight of me, he comes up behind me, he gives me a good kick. Asshole, I�ve been looking for you. He kicks me again. The others start yelling at him. They had no weapons. None of them. The men from Ori� were volunteers. The men from Kar�toula had been drafted. Forcibly. And they still had no weapons. I take the food, and I went back up. In the morning they call me. Dou�nis, go to the interrogation room. The men had talked to Vangh�lis Kyriaz�s. They approached him. And he did take an interest in the end. I walk into the interrogation room, I didn�t know a thing. What�s your relation to Vangh�lis Kyriaz�s, someone says to me. I got scared. None, I say. He�s from another village, near mine. How near? We live across from each other. We talk from our balconies. I�m from Kar�toula, he�s from Ori�. Right this minute, they tell me, you�re leaving with an escort to go to Vyt�na. And you�ll report for duty to the company of men from Kastr�. That was that. One of the rebels went with me and took me to Vyt�na. He took me to the company and handed me over. The company officer was someone named Kolov�s, from Tr�polis. He�d also been drafted. Later on I found out he was killed in Ahlad�kampos. In Koloso�rtis. In 1949 or 1950. He was in the service, a Reservist. A small tank overturned and crushed him. One of those small personnel carriers. The open type. He played right midfielder for Pan-Arkadik�s. So he took me there, to the company. The next day they took us back. From Vyt�na to Chrysov�tsi. We had to be enlisted. To be formally divided into units. K�stas Logoth�tis goes and writes in as sick. And he left. L�tzos goes and does the same. And he left too. I go and write in as sick. The men from Ori� jump up. He was in the detention camp, and we brought him here. We let him out of there so he would come with us. In the end we stayed. Me, Thodor�s Kouno�fos, Yiann�kis D�skalos, V�sios Marin�kos. V�sios. So they took us away, they gave us a mule. One mule for each of us. They took Yiann�kis D�skalos to another company. The three of us who were left stayed together. With one mule each, close together. They took us down to Tr�polis. The Germans had left. They take us to Meligal�s. They�d wiped it out. They take us to Gargali�noi. They fought the villagers there. They wiped them out. Sto�pas was there, he defended himself to the end. From there we go back to Tr�polis. Tr�polis surrenders, the Security Battalions. They signed treaties. They take us down to Argos, from Argos they take us to Isthmia. Unarmed, with the mules close together. From Isthmia they take us back to Argos. In Argos my only chance was to run into people I knew. People from Kastr�. I go and find Panar�tis. Vangheli�s husband. She was married there, Vangheli�, Yi�nnis Lymb�ris�s daughter. I find Yi�rghis Tsoulouh�s. He tells me, They�re taking you to Athens. There�s going to be war in Athens. I had decided to escape. I tell V�sios, I tell Thodor�s, I tell Yiann�kis D�skalos. They say Okay. We arrange to meet that night at Panar�tis�s place. Yiann�kis doesn�t show up. D�skalos didn�t show. We stayed behind too. We were scared and we stayed. The next day I find him. He says, Listen, I�d like to take a blanket or something along. I tell him, Forget the blanket. They�ll kill us in Athens. They�re taking us to be killed. The next day he showed up. We left, I knew the terrain there. We used to work as gleaners there in the summer. Folks were poor. We head out from Argos toward Kefal�ri. From Kefal�ri we go up to Kalam�ki. From Kalam�ki we come to Plat�na. It was a six- or seven-hour walk. V�sios�s sister and five other girls were there in Plat�na. Gathering olives. For a daily wage. We knock on the door at night, they opened for us. They made us food and we ate. We come to the village. We say, Let�s not tell anyone we ran away. We�ll say we�re on leave. A week goes by. V�sios tells us, Let�s go hunting. We go to Xerok�mpi, we shoot four hares. We go back. The next day the rebels show up, looking for us. They go to Yi�rghis L�tzos�s house, the brother of one of our men. He advises us to look out for ourselves. I manage to hide just in time. My brother T�ssos comes to see me. I tell him, I can�t stay here. Go to your brother-in-law and get an identity card from him. It was Panay�tis Lagan�s, he was the one arranged all those things. And Yi�nnis Kapet�ris. T�ssos went there, they gave him the papers. I get up at night, I leave for Argol�s. I reach Kefal�ri. I find Sophia married there. Vangheli�s sister. Sophia Kef�las, that was her husband�s name. She says, You can stay at our house. They had a mill, in Ner�. I stayed on my guard. One day her son comes running home from there. Rebels, he tells me. From Kastr�. It was Yi�rghis Kont�s and Vangh�lis Foti�s. They were hunting men down. Looking for Anton�kos, looking for Yi�nnaros. Full of hate. I go to Sophia�s, she shoves me into a trunk. They came inside, they saw the things. They didn�t see anyone. They left, I get out of the trunk. If I�d stayed in there any longer I�d have been asphyxiated. I left Kefal�ri. I had a brother in Kouts�, Left�ris. The old man had spread us out. He had him doing menial work, earning his keep. I go to Kouts�. What are you doing here, Left�ris says to me. This is their hornet�s nest. Right here. Get out, he says, go to Kof�ni, to Yi�nnis. That�s my other brother. There was a big plot of land there. The owners had gone off to Athens. They were hiding out there, to stay in the clear. There were five or six dogs on that plot of land. Yi�nnis takes me inside. There was a big storeroom, with some sheets of tin lying around. I made a kind of shelter there. As soon as I heard the dogs barking I�d hide. After a few days Yi�nnis tells me, I�m going to N�fplion. Yi�nnis was hard of hearing and he lived there all alone. I tell him, Bring me a newspaper. I wanted to find out what was going on. It was January. The December Uprising had already taken place, but I didn�t know about it. Finally Yi�nnis comes back. He went and sold some oranges and he came back. He says, The British are in N�fplion. I tell him, Cut it out, it was rebels you saw. But he knew the Brits. He hid them on his property in 1941 when they were leaving. With their short trousers. He gives me a paper, they had actually marked off a zone up to M�loi. The British up to M�loi. And beyond there the rebels. Then I say, I have to get out of here. I asked Yi�nnis to give me a sack of wheat. Ten ok�s or so. So as not to go back empty-handed. He wouldn�t give me any. The crop isn�t mine, he said. I look around and I see some barley in a corner. I grab some and take it with me. And I�m off. I arrive all loaded up at Dalaman�ra. At Dalaman�ra I run into Havdot�yiannis, riding a mule. He gets off the mule, he starts crying when he sees me. He throws his arms around me. We don�t know which of our men we�ve lost, I tell him. Clear out, he tells me, head for Argos. Go to Gon�is�s inn, you�ll find everyone there. I go to Argos. I go to Gon�is�s inn. And it was true, they were all gathered there. The Pantel�s brothers. Har�s Lymb�ris, Anton�kos, and the rest, all the men from Kar�toula. They were all in there. And we stayed there until the rebels had completely cleared out. By then it was March. Then we went to Corinth and worked. Until Easter when we came back here. There were no more rebels from ELAS, they were gone. And may all that never happen again.
They brought those boys from Tserv�si up here. Brought them here, and that was that. One was Nikol�ou�s, the other Christof�lis�s. They killed them somewhere in Ayili�s. In Ayili�s. First they had them at H�yios�s place, they were holding them there. At P�nos H�yios�s place. And Lengh�ris saw them and he said, Why are you holding them here, why are you holding them? And a short while later they got them and they took them to some ravine in Ayili�s. Dakour�lis was there, he saw them. And he climbed a tree and hid. Klar�a, who still had all her marbles then � she does now too, but she tells such lies now � she�s hard of hearing now, and she tells lies, too. She told me that El�ni, Ky�mos�s wife, M�tsos�s sister, was in tight with some kapet�nios, and he told Vangh�lis, Kassian�s husband, he would give him a shirt. And when Vangh�lis saw it, he recognized it, it belonged to one of the boys. It had been washed but they hadn�t got all the blood out. And he wouldn�t take it, poor man, even though he had nothing to his name back then. Yi�nnis Christof�lis and K�stas Nikol�ou. They killed those boys. The next day those poor women from Tserv�si went up there and had a hard struggle getting their bodies up the hill, using a blanket. Up to the top so they could bury them. It was God�s wrath, all that, there�s nothing else you can say.
��A human life wasn�t worth much then, that�s how things were.
K�stas Kirk�s was my grandfather�s brother. On my mother�s side of the family. He died before I was born. A gruff sort of character. He was married, had no children. He was infertile. Could be that�s what made him like that. Always angry. He was a hard worker. Even though he had no kids, he struggled with the land. A desperate struggle, one that often pitted him against his brother. They would quarrel over the land. They had plots of land in Mel�ssi, in Ayi�rghis, and across from Galten�. And in Xerok�mpi. And they were suspicious of each other. Well, at any rate, each of them thought the other was moving the boundaries. That he was moving it a meter or two in his favor. The problem was in dividing up the land of their forefathers. And what land are we talking about? Just strips of dirt. And every tiny ledge in that confined space was important. But in most cases it was stubbornness that drove people to extremes. To beat others or to murder them. Stubbornness more than self-interest. They divided up the land on the spot, strip by strip, drawing lots. Instead of appraising it as a whole and each one taking something from here or from there. So they could save time. The so-called land redistribution is calculated that way today. So the cultivated land is all in one piece to increase productivity. At any rate. They quarreled, and for most of the year they didn�t speak to each other. Once in a while this sorry state would give way to enthusiasm, and then they would go out and eat and drink and shed a few tears together, only to start in again with their suspicions and complaints the following year. Or with violence and threats. So they decided to define the boundaries once and for all. And to do this by sworn oath. Their mutual suspicion finally led them to resort to divine intervention: �Ready are we to be dragged through fire and to swear by the gods,� as the ancient tragic playwright1 says. So my grandfather set out with his brother. And they took my mother along with them. With a holy icon in a shoulder sack, a piece of bread, and two onions. They started out on friendly terms, of course, even though they had quarreled in the past. They made what the law calls a kind of compromise, a mutual promise that by a mutually sworn oath they would delineate and define the boundaries, so that the cause of their differences would disappear. They would mark off the boundaries with stones. They would dig a small ditch and place a rock in it, a long, narrow rock in three or four spots. So that the ends formed a straight line. But that didn�t prevent either of them from going and moving them in winter or at night or when the other one was working somewhere far away. Just to gain half a meter. It was precisely to rule out such a possibility that they decided to settle things by sworn oath. Religious sentiment was much stronger in those days than it is today. People were respectful and God-fearing. Afraid of divine retribution. So on they went. They went to Ayi�rghis. They went to Mel�ssi, with my mother beside them with her shoulder sack. At every disputed spot they would stop. The boundary�s here, no it�s there. They�d take out the icon and swear on it, one or the other of them, depending. By noon they reached Galten�. Across from there, I think the place is called Kramp�tsa. It�s all in ruins now. They were going to leave Xerok�mpi for the next day. My mother had stayed behind. They passed by a small watering hole, she sat down to drink. Dying of hunger, exhausted from the heat, she fell asleep. She must have been what, then, about twelve years old? All that was before 1907. In 1907 she was married at the age of sixteen. Before 1905. At the beginning of the century. Poor little thing, my grandfather said. And he wanted to go back. Let�s finish first, his brother says. We don�t have the icon. We haven�t got it. He picks up a rock and puts it on his shoulder. That was another way of taking an oath. That meant he was telling the truth. Otherwise, if he was lying, the weight of that rock would eternally weigh on his soul. They finished. They went back, they found my mother. That night each of them thought he�d been wronged by the other. Both were thinking the same thing. And they didn�t continue with the settlement. They didn�t go to Xerok�mpi. I don�t know if they ever divided up their inheritance definitively. In 1923 my grandfather�s brother retired to Athens. He came down with partial paralysis there. At any rate, up until his death they were sometimes on good terms and sometimes not.
They set the big fire on July 24. During the first fire they only burned down a few houses. Then came the blockade, in June. And then the big fire. On July 24. More than one hundred houses. In the morning. And in the afternoon the Security Battalions came. Some hotheaded men, and they burned down about ten leftist houses in revenge. Hotheads all of them. The Galax�dis brothers. Old Yiann�kos Pr�sinos. Old Man Yiann�kos. He gave them a light so they could burn down the doctor�s house. M�vros�s house. Why should that one be spared, he said. So he gave his flint lighter to someone. R�ppas came. R�ppas in his truck. He brought them there. All this after the so-called blockade. The Germans had masterminded a plan for operations on Mount Parnon and Mount Taygetus. At the same time, but mainly on Mount Parnon. Mount Parnon could provide cover for troops. And that�s what happened during the Civil War. It�s a soft wooded mountain. A female mountain. The Germans decided to sweep it clean. But their plan was leaked to ELAS. It was stolen from their headquarters in Corinth. Or so we heard. By the time the Germans arrived here the active corps of the rebels had moved to Mount Taygetus. Without a shot being fired. The Germans arrived there from Plat�na, from Astros, from Drago�ni. And from Vo�rvoura. From every direction, converging at the main bulk of the mountain. It was a well-planned operation. One division took part in its execution. Along with some auxiliary weapons. In the end a Battalion arrived here. They came and set up camp here. With three tanks in the yard of the elementary school. I was in Kar�toula. I just happened to be at the mill. With my old man and Ary�ris. On the first day we hid in a small cave just above the mill. Above our vineyard. The cave was safe from attack. Nothing could reach us there, neither cannons nor mortars. We could see what was happening from there. We could see the Germans across from there, at Atzin�s�s chestnut tree. They had a machine gun set up there. Permanently. For twenty or thirty hours. And they kept firing. They were shooting into the dense shrubbery on our left. But most of their fire was toward Stefan�kia and beyond. Mainly toward Kavalari� P�tra. Their bullets were well aimed. But there was no one there. At night Ary�ris and I left. The old man stayed at the mill. We arrived at Xerok�mpi, at L�ros�s Hole just behind there. In Lang�da. We found a lot of people from Kar�toula there. And some from Ro�vali. At eleven in the morning we saw two Germans passing by. Just across from us, on the other side of the stream. A hundred meters. That stream runs down from high up. It narrows sharply. And L�ros�s Hole is on the left side. It�s twenty meters deep. With a big opening. The Germans walked right by but they didn�t see it. There was a maple tree nearby, and by a stroke of luck its shadow hid the entrance from view. Eleven o�clock. The two Germans walked by and kept going toward the mountaintop. We saw them come out at the top. We put a little mirror over to one side, belonging to one of the girls. Marin�kos�s sisters were there. We set up that mirror, and we could keep an eye on things on both sides. We made sure the Germans had left. Then we decided to come out. To give ourselves up. Someone arrived there and told us that they were letting everyone go free. I had my doubts. I listened but wasn�t convinced. And I didn�t follow the rest of them. I left with Ary�ris and five or six men from Ro�vali. We went down to the Lang�da riverbed. T�ssos Kirk�s, and Yi�rgos, Marina�s husband. I don�t remember who the others were. Kyri�kos L�ngourdas left first with the people from Kar�toula. Then he came back to us. Stupid of him. But we didn�t know what was happening yet. We kept moving along. I had a blanket over my shoulder. An old blanket to sleep on. The riverbed was hard to walk on, it had small, dried-up waterfalls we had to climb down on all fours. The men from Ro�vali knew we�d find some watering holes there. And we found them in the end. Stagnant water, with a film of dust on the surface. We sat down to eat. As evening came on we heard some garbled chatter coming from up above us. The gorge there picked it up and turned it into a kind of echo, and we couldn�t understand what if anything was happening. At night I tell the others, I�m going to the mill. Someone has to come with me. So we can find out what�s going on. Because the uncertainty was getting to us. Not knowing what was happening. In the end someone came with me, I think it was Kyri�kos. It was impossible to go down through the watering holes. The trail was cut off by a smooth high rock. So we climbed up along the edge and climbed back down again, and came out on the road to Pr�dromos. We arrived at the mill. The old man was there. What�s going on, Father? He didn�t know much. Germans had passed by on their way to Pr�dromos Monastery. And a convoy had passed by with packhorses loaded with ammunition, going from Dragato�ra to Yerak�na. We left. We took some hardtack with us, and a little cheese, and we left to go back to the others. To give them news, to see what we should do. The uncertain information that had reached L�ros�s Hole about the Germans freeing everyone they�d captured was never confirmed. We went back to the watering holes. In the morning we heard the tramping of feet on the road to Xerok�mpi that comes down from the so-called Red Threshing Floors. Sheep and people and bells. All mixed up. And the next day at about eleven my sister Marig� started shouting from up above. K�-o-ost-a-a-as. And her voice echoed as it bounced from rock to rock. K�-o-ost-a-a-as. It was terrible. Come out, wherever you are. I recognized her voice, it wasn�t distorted by the echo, but I had a feeling she was doing that under pressure. That they had got hold of her and were making her shout like that to trick us into giving ourselves up. As for the tramping of feet we�d heard the day before, we�d taken it to be prisoners marching to their execution. It was nothing of the sort. Finally we left at dusk. We went to the mill. There the old man told us that Panay�tis Lev�ntis and D�mos Ko�tsis, P�tsa�s husband, had been killed in Xerok�mpi. They were harvesting wheat, and they saw the Germans passing by. And they raised their scythes to greet them. As a friendly gesture. But the Germans took it differently. And they fired on them from a distance and killed them. Some men from the village went to retrieve them. They had remained where they fell for two days under the sun. We buried them on the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul. July 29, the patron saints of the village. A service was held, but the usual yearly festival was not. We buried them, and I went off to the mill again. The others had to go up to Kastr�. By order of the Germans. They forced them to, and of course they had arrested a lot of them. There were women they found in their storage huts in Xerok�mpi, there were people who�d given themselves up of their own accord. They gathered them in Kastr�, in Ayios Nik�laos. Now who are you, and you, and you? They made their selections. That�s when they arrested T�ssos Kirk�s. After a tip-off of course. They had also arrested Anni�, Ary�ris�s wife. And who are you? Ary�ris K�keris�s wife. You can go, Chr�stos Halo�los tells her. Then all of a sudden the Germans left. Just like that. And everyone followed them en masse. The noncombatants. People were scared. They had heard about Bra�las�s mother and the others. Irakl�s had found them. And he said they were still warm. Everyone took off for Tr�polis. Ary�ris put some soft myz�thra cheese and half a head of hard cheese in his shoulder sack. I tell him, I�m not going with you. I call Li�s Atzin�s so we can put our heads together. He had a good mind. He�d been taken sick in Athens. And he had a paper from Dr. Proest�poulos. He and about ten other men from Kastr�. The paper was in German.
I saw Sophia in the summer. She came to her nephew�s wedding. She came from Kefal�ri, by herself. I tell her, Do you remember it all, do you remember when you hid Louk�s in the trunk? And she started to cry. Poor thing, she�s an old lady now, all shriveled up.
Rebels had come here to Xerok�mpi. And some people from the village went and gave them a list of seventeen people to execute. From Perdik�vrisi. An uncle of mine had married a woman from M�nesi. He was also named Nikol�ou, a field watchman. Nicknamed �The King.� One day he goes to his wife�s village, P�vlos Bouzi�nis was there. All of this back in 1944. Bouzi�nis tells him, Come here. We have a list here to execute some people from Perdik�vrisi. Perdik�vrisi, used to be called Tserv�si. Should they be executed, he says to him, or is it unjust? And the King, the field watchman, tells him, No, it�s unjust to do that. Among the seventeen were two brothers of Christof�lis, my father, and me. The King comes back, he tells us this. We leave immediately then. We go to Eleoh�ri. The Battalions were there. In 1944 I was twenty, twenty-two years old. Just married. I was born in 1922. My wife was pregnant. I left her behind. We left for Eleoh�ri. The rebels come down, as they had planned. They come down to the village, they don�t find us seventeen men there. They find Christof�lis�s brother Yi�nnis. Yi�nnis had been drafted in 1941. And they find a first cousin of mine, K�stas Nikol�ou. Also about twenty years old. They didn�t find me and my father, they set fire to our house. Ours and someone named Bazi�nos�s. Burned them down. In the meantime they took my cousin and Christof�lis to K�tronas. Two rebels from somewhere else, strangers. In K�tronas they found a stream. They were good souls, those rebels. They left the others and sat down to wash their feet. Our men could have gotten away, but they didn�t. My cousin had a brother-in-law, a man called Kakavi�s. From Ayios Yi�nnis, he was a kapet�nios. A Party cadre. He felt safe.
My brother told him, Let�s go, K�stas. My brother realized they were going to kill them. Those two rebels were strangers. Men we didn�t know. They sat down there by the stream and took off their shoes. As if they were telling them, Make a run for it. But they didn�t leave. And they brought them to Kastr�. Haro�lis Lengh�ris went there and said, Why are you keeping those vermin? And they took them the next day and executed them. Later two men from our village went there, Nikol�ou�s brother-in-law and a neighbor, Diamant�s Diamant�kos, and they found them in some sinkhole on Do�mos�s land.
��In a ditch.
��In Ayili�s. They found them there, they�d left them stripped bare. Taken their clothes. The others got them out, they hoisted them over their shoulders. One each. With rebels all around there, and in Kastr� the villagers scared they too would be killed. They carried them up to Ayili�s, they dug out a space right in front of the sanctuary, they put them in. And they came back to the village.
��They had shot them. And Nikol�ou, they�d put a bullet in his head.
��An act of mercy.
��Then we men from Eleoh�ri, my father, a man named Bazi�nos, and another named Kar�bakas, went to Tr�polis. When the Security Battalions were breaking up. And the rebels arrived and arrested us. They took me to the First Police Precinct. Someone named Karam�tzas came in, he�s a lawyer now in K�ningos Square, downtown Athens. Yi�nnis Karam�tzas from Perdik�vrisi. Same age as me. His father was with ELAS. He came there as a commander, he says, Kill that one, he was with the Gestapo. About me. But they let me go. They put my father and some others in jail.
��They didn�t leave for Sp�tses, that was their mistake.
��Then they took them to be killed. Tied their hands together, about twelve men. They had tied my father to Papah�lias, the priest. From Ro�vali, N�a H�ra. They took them out a ways, to a small pine grove. The priest keeled over, he couldn�t take all the walking. And they beat him with their rifle butts. Then they received a new order, and they brought them back. They didn�t execute them. They put them back in jail. In the meantime the Red Cross arrived. And my father was the interpreter. He had spent a few years in America as an immigrant, he knew English. Then B�rlas�s wife brought them a pot of boiled wheat. B�rlas was from Bertsov�. A lawyer. A good lawyer. His wife took them the boiled wheat, they didn�t inspect it at the entrance. And she bent a blade from a metal saw around the inside of the pot. That night they cut through the window bars and left. B�rlas, a fellow villager named Ko�ts�nos, and some others. All of them lifers, they were going to butcher them. Right after they leave the rebels get my father and the priest and beat them to a pulp. Because they hadn�t told on the others. Then the V�rkiza Treaty was signed, and things changed. We went back to the village. Our house burned down, Bazi�nos�s house too. And Kar�bakas�s house.
��They didn�t burn down our house. It was jointly owned by my father and an uncle of mine, so they didn�t burn it down. But they looted it, didn�t leave us a thing. Some men from Drag�levo came, and they took everything. Sewing machines, my sisters� dowry linens and clothes, everything. Even wires and the nails in the walls. They didn�t leave a thing.
��And there was a kapet�nios there from Ayi�rghis.
��Sot�ris, our old friend.
��He was the one who told my cousin, You�re going to be executed. K�stas didn�t believe him. He�d put his trust in his brother-in-law Kakavi�s.
��They rounded them up right in front of our house. The priest was there too. Yi�nnis climbed up a mulberry tree. Just before that. Someone saw him there, he was a smoker. Since they�d seen him he climbed down and asked for cigarettes. And that�s how they caught him. They brought him to the group in front of our house. That�s where they took him from.
��They arrested him because he supposedly talked about Papad�ngonas.
��Unfounded accusations. It was because of my other brother. During the big blockade he made himself scarce. He wound up in Xerok�mpi. Like all the others. The Germans and the Security Battalions left, and the rebels came in. They took everything the others had left behind, cheese and all that. At our house only me, my little sister, and my mother were left. And my brother�s wife, she was pregnant. The rebels would leave, and he would come to see how we were doing. He runs into two of them. Where are you going, Vas�lis, you traitor, and they began firing at him with their pistols. Vas�lis got out of there, he arrived at the village in a fright. He says, We�re leaving for M�sklina. And he took his wife and went to M�sklina. The Battalions were in M�sklina. In Eleoh�ri, that is. Instead of him they arrested Yi�nnis. Right in front of our house. They brought the priest there too. He was trembling, the priest. He was not from our village but he performed services there. Now he�s in N�fplion, Douk�kis. He says, Tell me, Priest, should traitors be executed? What could the priest say? I was very young then but I remember it all. Should the traitors be punished, should they be hanged? They should, the priest says. He was very shaken, he�d gone pale with fear. So they got the men and they took them away. The next day we found out they�d killed them. Yes, it was the next day. Some people from Kastr� came and told us. Then they wouldn�t let us bury them. So we sent one of our relatives, with a cousin of K�stas Nikol�ou and one of the Bazi�nos lot, and they took them up to the church in Ayili�s. And they buried them. Without a proper funeral ceremony. We had goats, and we�d hired a young shepherd, the same day we heard the news they went to our sheepfold, they stole two goats. They�d been sent there by Nik�las Pavl�kos and a man from our village. They brought them down, they slaughtered them. Right below our house. And they were dancing and singing.
��To make them suffer even more.
��They gave away the liver of one of the slaughtered animals, and someone gave it to my father. Someone. How could he eat anything, my father? With one son killed and his house looted. That Pavl�kos comes round, he asks, Where�s the other liver? They say, We gave it to the old man. He calls my father. Okay, where�s the liver? Comrade, the old man says to him. Your men gave it to us. We didn�t eat it. I�ll tell them to bring it. Pavl�kos gives him a slap. The old man goes tottering and hits himself on an acacia tree we had outside. I remember it, I was young. With my brother killed and everything, just like I told you. I was fourteen, fifteen. And that�s why I took care of Pavl�kos later on. I beat him for one whole day and one night.
��And word got out that An�stis Po�lios was also at the execution.
��No. An�stis and someone called Bal�tsas. Both from Mesorr�hi. They didn�t take part in the execution. But they were there. They watched. And they were the ones took their clothes, so it seems. Because later on I spoke to someone called Sar�ntos. Then I went to Tr�polis. Two years later. During the second insurgency. I had started beating people. I couldn�t control myself. And I left. They would have killed me. Because I was a documented victim of the insurgency. Well, we were eating one day at Anton�kos�s place, and that Dakour�lis comes in. He sits down there. He says, I have to tell you something. And you have to do it. I say, Tell me. He says, Your brother was killed by a man named K�stas Harb�s from Psyl� Vr�si. I don�t waste a minute, I go straight to the public prosecutor. For even the smallest complaint he was obliged to prosecute. And initiate legal action. I told him everything � the whole story in great detail. Dakour�lis climbed up a tree, the rebels went past, he saw them, they didn�t see him. And he saw the whole execution from up there. How they killed them and what happened. My brother fell with the first shot, he fell over. Died on the spot. The first shot didn�t kill Nikol�ou, and he was dragging himself along. And one of them went and finished him off with his pistol. That�s exactly what happened. We went to N�fplion a few weeks later. The trial date had been set, but Dakour�lis went back on his story. He says, It�s the first time I see that man. Seems they paid him off. And that was the end of that.
��But we�d beat them to it. We�d tried them ourselves.
��Not them. We didn�t know them.
��First we caught An�stis.
��We caught Bal�tsas first. Stylian�s. From Mesorr�hi. Bal�tsas was his nickname. Everyone called him that.
��Tyrovol�s was his name. Stylian�s Tyrovol�s.
��But he was in prison.
��Well, I used to go to some land we had for grazing sheep. We call the place Bouzouri�. Down in Koub�la. There someone named Fot�poulos tells me, Look up there. Isn�t that Bal�tsas? We thought he was in prison. I tell him, What are you talking about? I go to the sheepfolds. I had the mules with me, I left them with some shepherds. I go back to the village. I get four or five men and we go there at night and we catch him.
��That was in 1946.
��1946 or �48.
��Not in �48. I was in the army in �48.
��Anyway, 1946. I got the men together, we went straight to his house. We knock on the door, they wouldn�t open. We break it down. His wife runs out, she started shouting. Stylian�s isn�t here. He�s not here. She was shouting. Even though she could have said that more softly. I tell the others, He�s hiding somewhere. Either at Souro�pis�s place or at Marko�lis�s. By shouting she was signaling him to clear out. We run over to Souro�pis�s place, he wasn�t inside. We go down to Marko�lis�s place. What was his name?
��Kambylafk�s.
��He was from Galten�. He�d married someone from Mesorr�hi and was living there. He opens the door. I tell him, Where�s Bal�tsas? He says, I don�t know. Soon as he says I don�t know I smack him. Listen, I don�t know, he says again and motions upstairs with his eyes. He had a very small attic � and that�s where Bal�tsas was hiding. Hey listen, I don�t know. And he motioned upstairs with his eyes. I think to myself, he�s here. I shout, Come down, Bal�tsas. He comes down. He�d taken out his release papers and he was showing them to me. His release from prison. I take them and I tear them up, I bash him with my rifle butt. And with that my rifle goes off, I could have been killed. We take him outside. I tell the others, Leave him to me. Because I was the one had a beef with him. And then I started beating him. I beat him like an octopus, until the same time the next day. He�d been in prison, stayed there for a year or so, maybe less. And then he got out, when they were ordered to reduce the number of prisoners. We took him down to Perdik�vrisi. I tell him, Where�s Po�lios? An�stis Po�lios. He says, You�ll find him at K�stas Tyrovol�s�s place.
��In Mesorr�hi.
��We put him in the cellar, tied and bound, and we left. We went home, we all had something to eat, and then we went after Po�lios. And we caught him. I started beating him. Then Karel�na threw a rock at me. An old lady, a relative of his. From up behind a wall. Almost killed me. I go back and I give her two swift kicks. We got An�stis, we took him off to Tserv�si.
��On the way were some vineyards, they�d fenced them off with pear trees and gorse. We�d pull some up and beat him over the head.
��He could barely walk at that point.
��We take him to the village, I take some scissors, I cut off his ear.
��His ear, his hair. His hair, his scalp, I cut it all. We dump him in a corner. And in comes K�stas Nikol�ou�s sister with an ax handle. Nikol�ou who they�d executed in Ayili�s. Tel�silla. She starts beating him with it. On the head. Trying to break his head open. We carry him out of there. We go to a deserted house. That lawyer Karam�tzas�s house. We throw him in the cellar. There was an empty barrel there. The top was missing. We shove An�stis in there, head first. We tie his hands behind him and pull down his pants. So he can�t walk. And we leave him there. Now if you mention An�stis and the barrel in Kastr� they�ll tell you all kinds of stories. Like that we screwed him. That�s not true. We left him there. Half dead from the beatings. And what did he do? He came round little by little. Now they say that a cousin of Kar�bakas, a woman whose brothers were kapetana�oi, went there and let him out. And he jumped over some terraces, got as far as K�tronas, and someone named Fot�poulos untied him. Soon after that we caught him again. We took him to N�fplion, and they kept him in custody awaiting trial. Then I left for America. I was discharged from the army, I left in 1951. In June. I had that right. My father was an American citizen. Twenty-eight years. 1951�1979. The year before last I was at the bus depot in Tr�polis. I was waiting for my daughter, she�s married, in Corinth. I see An�stis. An old man now. He comes right up to me, he doesn�t recognize me. He asks, Has the bus from Kastr� arrived yet? I pretended to be American. I say in English, I don�t understand Greek. Because I thought to myself, maybe he was looking to get me into trouble again. And last year I saw him again. Again I was on a bus and the bus stopped in Mesorr�hi. He was waiting there with a man named Panay�tis Ts�kis.
��They�re first cousins.
��First cousins, and they were going to get chestnuts. It was October. The bus stopped, I was in the front seat, he put out his hand so I could help him up. He couldn�t get up, he was an old wreck by then. I pretended not to see him. And he got up by himself, with Ts�kis pushing him from behind. Well, hello there Nikol�ou, he says. Hello, An�stis, I say. And I thought, now that we�re about to leave this life, why did we do all that? For revenge, that�s why.
��Revenge, yes. Then from Eleoh�ri they sent word to us to go after someone named Math�s. An important Party cadre. We left and went to Ayiasofi�, traveled all night. At the railroad tracks Anton�kos the doctor was waiting for us. He got us and took us back to Sam�ni. He was an important cadre, that Math�s. I don�t know how that man stayed alive. There were seven men from M�sklina and us. He was a murderer. A murderer. Just like those other men who are getting pensions today. Who took part in the Resistance and are getting pensions. Murderers� Resistance.
And that�s how the wife of the justice of the peace lost her things. Manol�poulos was the justice of the peace in Kastr�. Pavl�kos let it slip somewhere that they were going to arrest him. Vas�lis goes and tells him, Take your wife and get out. I don�t remember if they had children, they were both young. They were staying at Hora�tis�s place. Did I hear you right, Manol�poulos says to him. Don�t ask me anything else, Vas�lis says, I can�t talk to you. They�re following me. You didn�t dare talk to anyone back then. The court clerk lived right above our house. Konstantin�dis. He had a sister named Vasilik�. Manol�poulos�s wife called her and said, Come and pack up the house if you can. And I�m leaving a present for you on the table. Take it, I�m leaving. She told her that and she left. She and her husband left at night. She went the next morning, she tidied up the house, and she took a very lovely nightgown the other woman had left for her. She supposedly closed up the house and left. A few days later they supposedly got her things and took them to some shelter. Then Har�s arranged things the way he wanted. And later, when he would quarrel with Kouro�nis, every time they had a spat, he�d say: You took those things and you sold them in Megal�polis. All Manol�poulos�s wife�s clothes.
��Who said that to whom?
��Kouro�nis said that to Har�s. Because it was Har�s who was going and selling them.
Our legislature provides for the mutual exacting of oaths. As do all legislatures. A person may establish the truth of all his allegations by the negative process of challenging his opponent to take an oath. I say, You owe me a hundred. You say, I don�t owe you anything, because I never borrowed anything. I enter a sworn statement against you. Legally, you can either take an oath or exact one from your opponent. The tug-of-war ends there. No further challenges are allowed. And then, of course, come the penalties for perjury. The process is called the mutual exacting of oaths. It is exacted by one litigant of another, the judge being obligated to administer it. But only in certain kinds of disputes. In trials regarding marital disagreements, for example, the exacting of oaths does not apply. In trials that tend toward the breakup or annulment of the marriage, oaths cannot be exacted for the simple reason that there is a lack of material evidence. In the old days cases of this sort were frequently heard by the Supreme Court. Suddenly the question arose as to whether the fact of
��I want you to tell me that story.
��No. You ask and I�ll answer.
��Fine. When did they arrest you?
��Okay, they arrested me in February. Not February. They arrested me in 1944.
��Do you remember what month?
��That�s easy. They arrested me in October. In November to be precise.
��In 1944?
��In 1944. They arrested me in Astros, Kynour�a.
��Had the Germans left?
��The Germans had left. I wanted to get out of the country. To go to the Middle East.
��Hold on a minute.
��I wanted to leave.
��Wait a minute.
��So. Triantaf�llis tells me. And Matsi�las. Matsi�las the colonel. And Yi�nnis the air pilot, Yi�nnis Logoth�tis.
��No, Yi�nnis Konstant�los.
��Oh yes, Konstant�los. They tell me, Stay put and see if you can help us, so we can all leave on the
��When was that?
��In 1944, in the month of October.
��No, it must have been earlier. In October 1944 the Germans were gone. You wouldn�t have left then.
��The Germans had left. They�d gone, because they had to leave. The rebels were in control of everything. The Germans left on October 12. They left on October 12.
��Yes.
��Exactly. And the authorities agreed to say it happened on the seventeenth. But they left on October 12.
��All right.
��They left straight from Tr�polis.
��Right. And where were you then?
��I was here. I�d gone up to Mount Taygetus. Then I came back, and I was in Tr�polis in 1944. But it was before I went to Tr�polis � on February 2, the Day of the Presentation at the Temple.
��In 1943?
��In �44. It was in 1944 on February 2 that the Germans arrested us in M�vri Tr�pa. Two hundred fifty-eight prisoners we were.
��In hiding?
��No. Prisoners.
��Tell me about that.
��Yes. Prisoners. But before that I sent those officers out of the country. To the Middle East. I went to Fokian�s. In Leon�dio. Very rough sea there. The
��Was all that before then?
��Yes, I told you, before.
��They left before 1944.
��They left in �43. In 1943.
��In October?
��Yes. In 1943 I was still on Mount Taygetus. And in 1944 we mounted our major operation. So to speak.
��Wait, you�re confusing me. When did they kill your brother?
��On July 29 of 1944.
��In 1944.
��July 29.
��Where were you then?
��The Germans were still here.
��Yes.
��July 29.
��Yes. Where were you?
��I was in Meligo�.
��I see.
��We�d gone on a raid, I was freed in February, on February 2.
��Had they captured you before that?
��Of course, before that. They captured me before that.
��Tell it to me from the beginning. Tell me. It began in 1943. No. It began in 1940. Did you see action in Albania?
��Of course.
��Where did you fight in Albania?
��In all the theaters of operations of the Second Front.
��The Second Front.
��All the way to the lake in Ochr�da. To the lake there. That�s how far I went.
��And on your retreat?
��On our retreat I was last. The very last one.
��And you came to Kastr�?
��We got ourselves to Corinth. They took my car, outside Thebes. The Germans.
��Were you a driver?
��Yes.
��And you were coming by car?
��I was coming down � and I was bringing some soldiers with me. Strat�s Perent�s, Yi�rghis, Kyri�kos Do�mos�s boy, Leon�das M�ngos, God rest his soul. Poly�nthi�s son Yi�rghis, and Tsarn�kos. The Germans made them get out. We started out from Korits�. I wanted to get my brother, and Vas�lis M�ghris, and someone named Ilio�poulos from Keras�tsa. They didn�t come with me. I tell them, I�m the last one, the last car. They wouldn�t come along, they were blowing up bridges. I picked up a girl from northern Epirus, I took her to Yi�nnina. In the front, with me and the captain. The captain didn�t want us to take her. At any rate, the bottom line is that we took her. I arrived in Lidor�ki. In �mfissa. And from �mfissa I went to Thebes. There the Germans requisitioned my car. Then we went across to Perah�ra. In Loutr�ki. We took the train. It took us an hour and a half to get there. We got off at Eleoh�ri. From Eleoh�ri we came to Kastr�. I brought my rifle here from Albania. My automatic rifle.
��What month was it when you arrived in Kastr�?
��April.
��April.
��After the Tsol�koglou capitulation agreement was signed we came here. On April 20, something like that. The twentieth or the twenty-second. I don�t remember. In any case, it was April. I arrived in the village. We came back. I�d served about thirty-nine months since I was drafted. And another six or seven in Albania. I arrived in the village in April. I stayed in the village. I didn�t stay long. I worked here and there. I was working in the Polychron�poulos warehouse. With fertilizers and whatnot. With Sot�ris Tsourap�los.
��Where was the warehouse?
��Just above Kas�mos�s house. I was working there. One day N�kos M�vros arrives, he takes me downstairs He says, Kapet�n Zahari�s wants you.
��When was that?
��In �44. No. It was before the Germans even came to Kastr�. But there were Germans all around.
��You mean in �43.
��Yes, about then. In �44 the Germans were there, not in �43.
��In �43.
��Yes but in �44 they came to the village. They set up the blockade.
��Were you here until then?
��I was here.
��When did you join the Battalions?
��I joined in February. No, in March. It was March when the Battalions were formed in Tr�polis.
��Yes, I know.
��In March.
��In March of 1944?
��Yes. N�kos M�vros arrives, he takes me with him. Down to Ay�a Paraskev�. Kapet�n Zahari�s was there, with about ten men from Vo�rvoura. They were there. He says, I�ll knock your block off. But why, Kapet�n? What did I do wrong? Will you become a rebel or not? I tell him, I can�t join. I can�t join the rebels. He says, You�ll join, all right, and you�ll do it gladly too. Or I�ll knock your block off. Well, I tell him. There are eight of us. And two older folks. Ten altogether. I�m working. I�m earning fifty drachmas a day, enough to buy bread. He says, Will you give us bread? I tell him, I have no bread. I have a little wheat at home, I�ll give that to you. And they sent some men and took a truckload of wheat from me. Then N�kos Mago�lis takes me down to Paraskev�s taverna. It belonged to N�kos Konstant�los back then. Before they killed him. Takes me down to the cellar. To buy me a drink. He says, I�m paying. Okay, Mr. N�kos, I tell him. Don�t call me Mr. N�kos, don�t call me that. Call me Comrade. I tell him, What does that mean? He says, We�re part of the struggle. I ask him, What struggle, Mr. N�kos?�� I called him that again. I can�t join the struggle. There are eight children in my family. My father was ill. Back then I was earning sixty drachmas. One thousand eight hundred a month. Driving Galax�dis�s truck.
��Mih�lis Galax�dis�s truck.
��No, Kyri�kos�s.
��Mih�lis�s brother Kyri�kos.
��Mih�lis�s brother.
��They killed him.
��He was killed in Ayi�rghis. We were on a raid and he was killed. We brought him back dead to Tr�polis. And that�s when Mih�lis killed Ts�gris. L�ras was interrogating him. They heard shots, a German comes running in. What�s going on? Nothing, Some bastard got killed, L�ras said. L�ras was from Karakovo�ni, an army captain. And that was that, it was over.
��What was Ts�gris?
��He was an officer. An officer in ELAS. We had all agreed in 1943, Ts�gris, Vaza�os, and me, and we had gone to Pyram�da, just above Ellinik�. When we left Mount Taygetus. I�m talking about 1943 now. When we left there.
��Which of you left?
��Me, Petr�kos, T�kis Dr�nis, and that M�lis fellow from Kar�toula.
��Did you go with Vrett�kos?
��We went under the command of Colonel Yiannak�poulos. That rat who sold us out.
��I see.
��He finished us. He�s the one who finished us off.
��When did you go with Yiannak�poulos?
��In 1943.
��What time of year, what month?
��Summertime. Yiannak�poulos was out in the mountains.
��Wait a minute, one thing at a time. You were working here, and Mago�lis took you downstairs.
��Yes.
��Tell me one thing at a time.
��He took me downstairs. We ate.
��And he told you all those things.
��Yes. And I tell him, I can�t. And then I tell him, This meal�s on me, Mr. N�kos. He wouldn�t let me. He paid for everything. I tell him, I won�t go to the mountains, I won�t. He tells me, You won�t go to the mountains, but you�ll help. I say, What help can I be, I�m as good as dead? With a family of ten, I earn sixty drachmas a day. He says, You�ll help us out, and he gave me a note to take to Tr�polis. To someone named Nikit�poulos. A cobbler, across from Glin�s�s shop. Glin�s was a shoemaker. And just across from there Nikit�poulos was working in a basement. I take him the note. The Italians were in Tr�polis. So I find him, he cuts open a watermelon, he puts a pistol in it. He says, Take it. I tell him, Where should I take it, I�ll get caught. He says, You�ll take it. And he put it in the watermelon. He had more watermelons. I take a few eggs, and I took them to that bastard Bruno. At the outpost. To that Italian. And I got through.
��The Italians had an outpost?
��Yes, at the train station. And they did searches. I gave the eggs to Bruno, I got through with my car. Pavl�kos comes over. Did you bring anything from Tr�polis? I say, I brought a watermelon. Oh, I see. I brought the pistol that one time. And after that they were constantly on my back. I say, I�m leaving. Then I went to Kyv�ri, on foot. I�d taken some fresh green beans with me, to take to Athens. I got on the train. Some fresh green beans for the black market. I went to Leon�das Vrett�kos, the cavalry captain�s brother. I tell him, Here�s what happened. What should we do? So he took us in hand, he gave us a hundred and ten rifles.
��In Athens?
��Yes. Leon�das Vrett�kos. Tel�mahos the cavalry captain�s brother. Rifles to bring to Kastr�.
��Yes.
��We brought them. But M�rkos didn�t listen to me. Where did he want to unload them? Down at Vatomour�kos�s place, God rest his soul. He says, Let�s take them there. I tell him, What are you saying? What are you talking about, M�rkos? That�s how I talked to him. We had loaded some wheat, loose wheat, and we put in the weapons and brought them here. A hundred and ten rifles.
��You brought them to Kastr�?
��And M�rkos wanted to unload them at his cousin�s. At N�kos M�vros�s place. I tell him, What are you saying, we can�t do that. I say, I�ll take them. My responsibility. We had him in Ayili�s in a shack. M�rkos Ioann�tzis. In a shack that belonged to Yi�nnis Basko�tos. In Ayili�s. Four or five days later he comes down to Halo�los�s restaurant. He had invited everyone from EAM there. He pulls out his pistol, he says, Long live the revolution against communism. And
��Had you unloaded the weapons?
��At the warehouse. We laid out the rifles. Put loose wheat on top, and in Tr�polis the Italian poked around with the iron rod, but what could he find? It would just hit the floor. We took the weapons, we handed them out. Vangh�lis M�lis took some, we all took some. Well, all right. Nik�las Petr�kis, someone named Sakellar�ou, a sergeant major from Vyt�na. A sergeant major. Yiannak�poulos was done for, he signed the pact with ELAS.
��Did you go to Mount Taygetus?
��We did. We went. And after we went there we split up.
��But you�re not telling me everything. When you left, when and how you left from here. Did you go with M�rkos?
��M�rkos fired his pistol: Long live the revolution.
��Yes.
��And then he says, I�m going to meet L�tsis, my koumb�ros.
��Yes.
��On Mount Parnon. So, when he went up there he confided his plans to them. There were three of them on the road with him. Three rebels escorting him. I don�t know the spot where they hit him. Where they slaughtered him. They didn�t shoot M�rkos. They stabbed him from behind, with a knife. His koumb�ros tells him, Keep going till you meet the other men farther down. The three of them escorting him. One of them stayed behind to take a leak, and as they were talking off to the side, they stabbed him. At that time we couldn�t get through. We couldn�t leave. We wanted to leave. Yiannak�poulos had signed the agreement. Not to attack each other. But we couldn�t do any recruiting, none at all. We weren�t allowed to. And they gathered us all at Proph�tis Il�as, on Mount Taygetus. Just above Gor�noi.
��What time of year did you leave from here?
��In the summer, I told you.
��And how long did you stay with Yiannak�poulos?
��Two months. Two and a half.
��Did ELAS attack you after that?
��No. They couldn�t attack us. But the English were making drops. They would drop things, and the others would get them. They�d drop arms and automatic weapons, and knapsacks full of sovereigns. The kapetana�oi pocketed them. We went to catch a ca�que in Kalam�ta, to leave. Later on we fought the rebels. In Raho�la. Vrett�kos the cavalry captain was there. We split up, to leave. And they got him.
��To leave for where?
��To finally leave the country. Tsir�go,1 Crete, Africa. Where could we go? And that son of a bitch the boat captain sinks the ca�que and leaves us stranded. We got our bearings. We got ourselves to Kaltez�s. From there we came to Vlahokerasi�, and we joined the others. Vaza�os and Ts�gris. Vaza�os was in charge at Artem�sion. With two of the Kokkini�s brothers. Officers in the Greek Army.
��Where were they?
��In Pyram�da. Just above Ellinik�. Not the Ellinik� in Astros. I�m talking about Kefal�ri.
��In Argos?
��In Argos. High up on the left. Some distance away. It�s the border, at Pyram�da. So the Kokkini�s brothers were there, both of them. Ts�gris was there.
��Ts�gris, the one Mih�lis killed?
��Yes, him. And he says, Clear out or I�ll order them to fire.
��Order them to what?
��To fire.
��Ts�gris told you that.
��Yes.
��Why?
��Because we broke the agreement. Because we wanted to fight. We went there to see what we could do and he told us to clear out. If you don�t clear out, I�ll order them to fire. I ask Sakellar�ou, What should we do, St�this? What should we do?
��How many of you were there?
��There were about fifty of us. What do we do now? Yiannak�poulos had agreed that we should work together.
��And he�d sent you there?
��No, we went by ourselves. M�lis stayed behind. With no shoes. They kept him. Then Sakellar�ou says. Sakellar�ou from Vyt�na. Whoever wants to can stay with me.
��On Mount Taygetus all this?
��Yes, because they had us surrounded. They would have wiped us all out. They would have taken us prisoner.
��Yiannak�poulos?
��Yiannak�poulos was there. Then he left, I don�t know where the devil he went. He went over to ELAS, he sold us out. With the agreement he made. He betrayed us. That�s why we had to join the others. In Artem�sion. And the others were even worse. He had sent word to them. We arrived, they wouldn�t have us. Wouldn�t have
��What time of year was it there?
��It was fall. Fall was just coming on. And we went down on foot, me, Sakellar�ou, and four or five others. We would tell people we were butchers. Animal traders. We went down to St�rna, above Argos. We got to Koutsop�di. And there we split up. Poor Sakellar�ou stayed behind. I came back here. We all split up.
��And you came to Kastr�?
��I came to Kastr�. I came and all this happened. Let me finish, the Germans were still around, after 1944, the Germans were there.
��Wait a minute. You came to the village.
��Yes.
��It�s still 1943.
��1943.
��And what did you do when you got to the village?
��What did I do, I went to my car.
��To your car.
��But I was under surveillance. One day they say, Take the car. M�vros�s car, God rest his soul.
��The doctor?
��Yes. K�stas Tsourap�los and the doctor had a car. A Fark�.2 A truck.
��M�vros the doctor.
��Yes, the doctor.
��Jointly owned?
��Yes. A Fark�. A truck. They come down to Halo�los�s taverna and give me an order. To go to Ar�hova and bring back a dead rebel. I tell Tsourap�los, K�stas, what are we going to do?
��How would you go to Ar�hova? Through Vo�rvoura?
��Through Tr�polis. Tr�polis. They would give us passes.
��Yes.
��K�stas, what are we going to do? He tells me, I don�t know what we�ll do. I tell him, We�re not going. The way things are now, they�ll burn our car. He says, Let them burn it. They didn�t burn it. We�re going. We went and brought back the dead man. And the next day we abandoned our homes. We got up and left, on foot. Finally in March the Security Battalions came. And on February 2, the Day of the Presentation at the Temple, I was freed.
��From where?
��From M�vri Tr�pa. There were 258 prisoners there.
��Hold on. The Battalions were formed in March.
��In March. They were formed in March.
��Okay, you were in the Battalions, you joined the Battalions.
��I joined as soon as they were formed. Before that I was with X. From the day I was freed on February 2. In X with Konstantak�poulos, who they called Ts�keris. He had an office in Kolokotr�ni Square. With Th�mis Iatro�. On the lower side of Kolokotr�ni Square, where the pharmacy is today. And they gave me a pistol. A pistol with one bullet.
��The men from X?
��Konstantak�poulos or Ts�keris. But I was half-dead from the detention camp.
��When did they arrest your brother?
��They killed him on July 29.
��In 1944.
��Yes.
��They killed him on July 29. When did they arrest him?
��Five days before. Ten. Something like that.
��When did you join the Battalions in Tr�polis?
��As soon as they were formed. I went first. In March. On February 2 I was freed from the detention camp. The evening before, when the sun went down, just after that, the Germans surrounded us. They arrested us all.
��When did the rebels take you prisoner?
��In November.
��In �43.
��In �44.
��But you said you were freed on February 2, 1944.
��Yes. October, November, December. They took me prisoner in November. I stayed in the detention camp for three months.
��In �43.
��Listen.
��In �43. November, December.
��Hang on. ELAS arrested me in November in Par�lio, Astros.
��Yes.
��They took me there.
��Tell me one thing: When did they arrest you in Par�lio, Astros?
��Three months, two and a half months exactly before February.
��Did they kill your brother before that or later on?
��Later on.
��So they arrested you in 1943.
��They killed Panay�tis in 1944.
��In the summer.
��In the summer, on July 29.
��So they arrested you in 1943 then.
��They arrested me � how many months are there before February? In 1944.
��It was after February of 1944. Since it was July when they killed Panay�tis.
��It was me in February, it was February when I was freed. On February 2.
��Before they arrested Panay�tis.
��Before they arrested Panay�tis. They arrested Panay�tis instead of me.
��So they arrested you in 1943 then, in Astros.
��It couldn�t be 1943.
��It was �43. And in February 1944 you were freed. How did they arrest you in Astros?
��How they arrested me?
��Yes.
��It was � I went to that fellow Katerini�s. The father of N�kos the fishmonger.
��Yes.
��Because I came back half-dead, I�d been shut in a cave without food for eight days. When the officers left. When we left Artem�sion.
��Yes.
��I went to that cave, back toward N�fplion. I was tired and barefoot. I went to some house to get bread and had a quarrel. They were sleeping. I quarreled with them. And I got on the ca�que to leave.
��To go where?
��To N�fplion. Katerini�s, God rest his soul. At any rate, he was with them. Hanging around with them.
��With the men from ELAS?
��Yes, I tell him. I tell N�kos the fishmonger�s father.
��Yes.
��I tell him, Take me to N�fplion. The ca�que was at the far pier. And on the other side, at Koutrouyi�rghis�s bakeshop, Pep�nias and Vampr�kos had set up a machine gun.
��I see.
��They fire a burst, and they tell the ca�que to turn back. I tell him, Keep going, Katerini�s. Nothing doing. He turned round right there. Then they arrested me and took me to the detention camp. I threw my pistol in the sea. If I�d killed Katerini�s I�d have made it to N�fplion. I knew how to take the ca�que there. But it never crossed my mind to kill him. Or to threaten him. I knew how to get the motor started. I�d have taken it there. Taken it to N�fplion. And my troubles would never have started.
��Pep�nias and Vampr�kos were the ones who arrested you.
��Vampr�kos and Pep�nias. And Kapet�n Mavromantil�s.
��Mavromantil�s.
��Mih�lis. He was down there. Mavromantil�s, Pep�nias, and Vampr�kos. And Kapet�n P�vlos Bouzi�nis. From M�nesi. He had a brother-in-law in Tr�polis, in Dala�na. Who was hanging around with the Italians. His daughters were. He had stolen lots of money from people. He was a big businessman, general foodstuffs. It was down there that they arrested me. They took me to the school in Meligo�. And in Meligo� they tied me up. Tied my feet � my knees and my ankles. And my hands. Kapet�n P�vlos Bouzi�nis arrives and hits me with the butt of his rifle. I fall down, with half my teeth knocked out. I tell him, Why are you hitting me? He says, You�re a goddamn traitor. I say, Who did I betray? I went after the Italians, I fought them. You�re a traitor. Tell us what officers you were keeping company with. I say, I don�t know any officers, I don�t remember.
��On Mount Taygetus?
��Yes. The officers I kept company with. I don�t remember. You don�t remember? And then they gave it to me. They put the rifle through the ropes on my legs, and they turned my legs with the soles facing up. And they started. Thirty lashes with a metal cable.
��At the school in Meligo�.
��In Meligo�. From there they take me to Louko�.
��Were there other men there?
��Lots of them. They killed a boy, P�tra�s boy. P�tra of all people. Such a well-respected lady. Cleopatra�s boy. He had a Martelli, a small bouzouki, and he used to play. He�d go begging, have himself a drink. And they killed him.
��In Louko�?
��Outside Louko�. They put me in the next day. I slept tied up in ropes. I slept on a board. We didn�t all fit in Louko�. Nikol�ou was there, Dr�nias was there.
��Yi�nnis?
��Yi�nnis. That son of a bitch The�ktistos was there. The deacon. He calls me a traitor and spits at me. Does the same to Ast�ris Papayi�nnis�s sister. Ada. I spit on you, you traitoress. Why am I a traitor, Father? I only just now got back from Albania. At any rate. Then they made me dig my grave. In the yard of the monastery. In the corner. I dug it out with a pickax and a shovel.
��With your feet all swollen?
��My feet still swollen. Open and oozing. At any rate. They put me in, they throw me in there alive. Someone comes over.
��Who came over?
��Someone named K�liaris. Thodor�s K�liaris. He worked for the Tr�polis Electric Company. Down below, at the railroad tracks. Thodor�s K�liaris. And a man from some island. And Vas�lis T�yias from Mesorr�hi. They threw me in, they buried me up to my neck. Will you become a rebel? No. Why not, you traitor? And then he hits me with his rifle butt right here, and knocks out the rest of my teeth. My lips were all cut up.
��K�liaris?
��T�yias. He hit me with his rifle butt, while I was half-buried. He hit me right here. That was it. They got me out. They gave me a good thrashing. With that metal cable. On my sides, on my kidneys. It was thick. They made it into a club. My skin welted up, they beat me black and blue. Nikol�ou and Has�nis, God rest his soul. They tell me, Be patient, Irakl�s. Those bastards, they wouldn�t just shoot me. I tell T�yias, Why don�t you shoot me, why are you torturing me? What have I done to you? I won�t become a rebel. That�s it. They take us, and we go to Karakovo�ni.
��From Louko�.
��From Louko�. On my knees most of the way. So we went up there. Yi�nnis Vas�limis was there. The brother of Kapet�n Vas�limis, K�stas�s brother. And Arist�dis. The one who went crazy and died recently. And Lyko�rgos. The father of Yi�rghis Vas�limis, who had the stables over in Ko�vli, with the calves. Yi�nnis�s wife Mili� came there. She brought her husband squash patties. But me, they wouldn�t let me eat.
��What month was that?
��Now it was winter. In February I was freed. Twenty centimeters of snow outside. They had me cutting wood in my bare feet. But no, I couldn�t eat. Keep going, Yi�nnis tells me, take my army coat and put it on. Inside his coat he had four patties, squash patties. Vas�limis. I ate them, like medicine. Someone saw me do that, he starts yelling. Hey, you, what were you eating? I say, Nothing. What did you hide in your pocket and eat? I didn�t hide anything. And so a few days later Nikit�kis arrives, Dim�tris Nikit�kis himself, a dairy farmer from Sparta. He brings about sixty prisoners with him. All from Lacon�a. He brings them, and they join the two detention camps. Ours was under the command of Kapet�n Kl�arhos Aryir�ou. Under his administration.
��Kl�arhos was there?
��Of course.
��Now you were all in Orthokost�.
��In Orthokost�. They beat me again there. A lot. M�tsos Nikit�kis calls me. The dairy farmer. Who later on had a shop in Ay�a Paraskev�, at the main intersection. In Athens. M�tsos�s story is very long. He escaped from a group of men the Germans shot in Monod�ndri, and he went and joined the rebels. With two twelve-year-old children and his wife. He had his children with him. But he was a good man. A very good man. And he�s the one that helped us escape from M�vri Tr�pa. We were slow getting out, the Germans arrived, we couldn�t get away in time, there was an order to execute us. He got us out.
��So Nikit�kis calls you over.
��Yes. He tells me, Come here. Are you hungry? I am. He gives me a piece of pork. A thick piece. Do you have cigarettes? I didn�t have any. Money? I had a little money. He went and brought me cigarettes. Then he tells me. Or rather he told them, Don�t beat this prisoner any more. And he asked me why I wouldn�t join. I tell him, It�s like this. What could I say to him? Where you from? From Kastr�, Kynour�a. Don�t beat this prisoner again. If anyone lays a hand on you, you tell me. All right. What could I do, as soon as he left they�d beat me senseless. They�d already done the worst torture on me. And they�d just finish me off. Like when they locked me in the monastery. Lying on a big table. My feet were bound and freezing underneath. And they had a fire and nails and they�d burn them.
��Who was there. Do you remember?
��I remember the names. That scoundrel from the islands. A serious criminal. His name was Yiorg�poulos. Not the kapet�nios, someone else. Not the kapet�nios. And there was that nasty old T�yias, Vas�lis. And that rotten K�liaris. But he wasn�t there during my ordeal. T�yias was there. My feet were tied, tied up to the knees, and my hands like this. They burned them with metal nails. They pierced them. The pain was God awful. They sent us away from there. The Germans were coming, and they sent us away. They brought us to H�radros. To the school. They had killed the prefect at H�radros. With a pickax. They broke his shins in front. He died like that. They left him there writhing on the ground. And in one day he died. The village priest went to the rebel chiefs. He said, Please, I beg you. Put a bullet in the poor man. And one of them hits the priest with the back of his hand, knocks his cap off. Shut up, you nasty old priest, or you�ll get the same.
��All this in the school.
��In a ravine farther down. I knew that place. Years later H�yias the lawyer came there with the prefect�s daughter. Ant�nis. She wanted to exhume her father. She would pay for it. I tell her, If you don�t find someone with broken shins it�s not your father. I don�t know if she found him. I never heard from Ant�nis again. That�s what happened. They took us to H�radros. They took us to the school. There was a teacher there from Merkovo�ni. Dimoy�rontas. He�s still alive. Andr�as Dimoy�rontas. He was a schoolteacher there. After a while they bring down about thirty more prisoners. From our area. That�s when they brought Kapet�n Yio�lis, poor man. Old M�mis Mitrom�ras, from Dolian�. Veliss�ris tells him, come here, Yio�lis. They would tease him for laughs.
��Yi�rghis?
��Yi�nnis Veliss�ris. Why did you kill the rebels in your house? Mago�lis was pacing around in the yard. And Kl�arhos Aryir�ou. He had a red kerchief, Kl�arhos, he had his hat and his shepherd�s crook from M�lana. A staff, not a crook. A shepherd�s staff. And Yi�rghis Babaki�s was there too. From Dolian�. They were pacing around. Veliss�ris says, Why did you kill the rebels? Why you jackass, Yio�lis answers. You filthy bastard. Those poor men from Sparta didn�t know what to think. They didn�t know he was half off his rocker. Now you listen here, President, he tells Kl�arhos. And he goes over to the wall of the school. Hello. Is this Germany? He starts phoning. Call Hitler for me. The men from Sparta and the other prisoners were scared out of their minds. They�re thinking, Now they�ll kill us all. Listen, Hitler. At the school in H�radros, Kynour�a, there are about three hundred of us prisoners. Being held by the greatest bastards on earth, complete jackasses. Please send troops to free us immediately. Was it a stroke of genius, luck, or what, I don�t know. Not half an hour had passed and the Germans arrived. A division had left from Corinth. And they were pressing in on us. Some from Z�vitsa, others from Dago�ni coming down toward Doumin�. They take us away immediately. They take us through the M�ntis family storage sheds. They take us to Galten�. Down by Perdikon�ri there were a hundred Germans. And because it was dark they didn�t shoot at us. They saw us. They would have killed us all. Kapet�n Kl�arhos shouts, Quick, the Battalion is coming through. And there were Germans. There were Germans down there.
��And you, how did you walk?
��On my knees. I�d drag myself along. I had a shirt, I folded it and wrapped it in some old rags from the olive press in H�radros. I tied them together. And I�d drag myself along from side to side. On my knees. We came to Galten�. Dim�trios B�ris brings an order from Kapet�n Achill�as. From Zisi�dis. That no-good Bulgarian.3
��Zisi�dis?
��Yes. He was an engineer at the Agricultural Bank. In Tr�polis. The order was to execute the whole detention camp. Both camps. They brought the order at eleven at night. Anyone who can�t keep pace with us, step outside. Then Nikol�ou comes over. He says, Irakl�s, they�re going to kill us. They had beaten him badly too. On his legs. M�tsos Has�nis comes over. He says, Don�t say you can�t go along. Then I go outside. Kl�arhos and I were relatives of sorts, koumb�roi. Through Man�lis, God rest his soul. Man�lis Aryir�ou. In 1936, when Kl�arhos was out and reporting regularly to the police. Under Metax�s. I had taken care of things for him then. In 1937 I joined the army. And he was still reporting to the police. In Galten� I tell him, Listen, koumb�ros.
��Was Kl�arhos Man�lis�s brother?
��No, his cousin. Kl�arhos�s brothers were K�stas, who they called Krater�s, and Panay�tis. Koumb�ros, I tell him in Galten�. He tells me, If you can�t walk, have a look at this. He pulls a French double-edged knife on me. He tells me, I�m not wasting any bullets on you. With a silver handle. I have it at home.
��How did you get it?
��He threw it away in M�vri Tr�pa. Or he dropped it, I don�t know. I found it. As soon as the order came they sent us to Galten�. They take us to Ayi�rghis. In Ayi�rghis I was dying of thirst. St�vros Koutsoyi�nnis comes over. I say, Old fellow, give me a little water. He gave me a pitcher of wine, and I drank it without realizing it was wine. That�s how parched I was. I didn�t realize what it was. And I went off a way and sat down. And it hit me.
��Was Yi�nnis Dr�nias with you there?
��He was with us. Yi�nnis Dr�nias, Xin�s, Hayi�zos, and Chr�stos Bek�ris.
��Which Xin�s?
��The one from Eleoh�ri. He died. And Chr�stos Mo�ntros. He died too.
��Because Dr�nias doesn�t remember you.
��No, Dr�nias didn�t come with us. When we went to Eleoh�ri. When the Germans arrested us. He was in hiding. He stayed behind, and he went into hiding. We gave ourselves up to the Germans. Me and Li�s Karz�s and another man from Dolian� who works at the hospital now. In the psychiatric ward.
��Were there any women with you, someone named Al�ki from Tr�polis?
��No, Al�ki came later. They had the dye shop, I forget their last name. They had the dye shop down on the way to the barracks, on the right. Next to Kampo�ris�s pharmacy. Al�ki was going out with my brother Panay�tis. She thought he died, and it drove her insane. When they killed the others up there. Panay�tis, Themistokl�s Anagnost�kos, Marask�s, Bra�las�s mother. I forget that girl�s last name. The Germans found her, and she was half out of her mind. And she still is, she�s alive and half crazy. She doesn�t understand anything, she doesn�t remember anything.
��Did they take you to Ayi�rghis?
��They did. I went to take a leak. They were boiling up beans for the evening. Two rebels get hold of me. M�tsos Nikit�kis says to them, Where are you taking him? To take a leak. We�re escorting him. For Chrissakes, you bastards. He tells them, He�s half dead. Can he run away? Go and take a leak, man. I went and took a leak, I came back. They gave out the beans. I threw them out, they were full of flies. So we start out from there. In the afternoon. They take us along a road with rocks all around. They had the village alderman of M�loi up on a mule. He was wearing a leather jacket with no sleeves. With his legs hanging down, they�d given him quite a beating. But the mule wouldn�t go forward. Fot�poulos�s daughter Th�mia from Ro�vali was pulling it along, Yi�nnis Kaliako�dis�s mother. Poor woman had been pressed into service. She says, Kapet�n Kl�arhos, the mule won�t go forward. Carry out my orders, then send the mule back. Vas�lis Sk�ros from St�los shoots him with his rifle. My cousin.
��Were you there?
��I was, right there. He fired his rifle at him, hit him up high. The village alderman fell down dead, down among those rocks. Kost�kis M�mos. And he went and pulled off his leather jacket and wore it himself. He took it off that same minute, the man hadn�t even started bleeding. He must still have it, that bastard. I tell him, Listen, Vas�lis. Because he realized the Germans were coming. Listen, Vas�lis, let�s hide here in Nera�dor�hi. He tells me, Keep going. Keep going, God damn you, or the same will happen to you. And I kept going. We reached M�vri Tr�pa. As soon as we got there � Nikol�ou, they brought Nik�las over. He was also on a mule. He starts crying. This is the end, Irakl�s. Listen, Nik�las, I tell him, they�re going to kill us, what else would they do? It was getting dark out. Then I see a German with an automatic rifle. He was coming from the road, from the brambles, from the river of Eleoh�ri. In the blink of an eye, before we could say boo, there were three hundred flares in the sky. It was dark now. I shout, We�re prisoners. When I was in school I knew a little French. I remembered the word
��Was Maha�ras a rebel?
��A rebel. A kapet�nios.
��And he wanted to make fake IDs?
��To get them approved. So they could come down. But I caught on to him.
��Vangh�lis Maha�ras the lawyer?
��No, Maha�ras is dead. He died. Kapet�n Maha�ras. Vangh�lis was from Bertsov�. The other man was from Str�ngos. A kapet�nios. Maha�ras was his code name. Just like our Kapet�n Fo�rias. I arrest him down at the Pall�dio. There was once a gas station there, belonged to Zo�zoulas. So I find him there. I recognize him. I arrest him, I was ready to kill him of course.
��And he left.
��He didn�t leave. I had one bullet, I fired it, it didn�t go off. I shout, Shoot him, to Konstantak�poulos. They start chasing him, he goes into Papad�kos�s pharmacy. In the back, where the National Bank is now. It was a basement.
��Yes.
��So he hides in there, they went and killed him. And they found the identity cards on him.
��Did you know him?
��I knew him. He was in the detention camp with us. A kapet�nios.
��I see.
��And when I saw him in Tr�polis I almost fell over. A big hulk of a man. I grab him, I couldn�t hold onto him. He gets away from me. I could hardly stand � could barely stand on my feet. M�mis Athanasi�dis had given me a pair of sandals, with holes. With rubber underneath. I couldn�t wear anything else.
��What time of year was it then, April?
��Not April. Almost March. And in March, on March 15, the Battalions were formed. I went and joined up. I found Yi�nnis Theodor�los. And Ko�ts�nos. And someone called Bat�ris, last name Yiannoul�poulos. And we went around together, we had our little group.
��Theodor�los from Tr�polis?
��A native of Leon�dio. They had killed all his brothers. All of them. Yi�nnis Theodor�los. He�s alive today, he married a woman from Dolian�. His house was burned down, he was from Leon�dio. Those men were always on the run. We had our little group and we trusted each other. And we still do. I arrest someone called Kapet�n Tr�kas from Tsipian�. At Kamb�s�s factory. In the plains of Mili�. They�d gone to sleep drunk. Him, someone named K�kkinos, and another man from Tsipian�. The three of them. Some old lady told me about them.
��Were they armed?
��They were armed. When I see him, that Tr�kas tells me, Do you have my gun? I tell him, I have it, you son of a bitch. Kapet�n Yi�rghis Tr�kas. A handsome fellow, he�s back and forth to America now. He lives in Tsipian� and he has land in Spili�. He�s bought lots of land.
��But you captured them then.
��We captured them. I hit the ground. I couldn�t alert my men.
��Were there other rebels there?
��No. My men were spread out, I couldn�t call them. There was a pear tree and they�d had so much ouzo they were out cold. An old woman tells me, Look down there, boy, there are the rebels. Where? I ask her. Down there, in that ditch. Go and hide. I tell her, What are you talking about? Well, I couldn�t call out. And as they lay there asleep, I go up quietly with my knife and cut the strap of the automatic rifle. He had a German Steyr, Kapet�n Tr�kas. I take it, I take the other man�s gun too. I start kicking them. Kicking them so they�ll wake up. That�s how drunk they were. We brought them to Tr�polis tied up. All tied up. And Tr�kas kept telling me, Please save me and you�ll see how grateful I�ll be. I got him off. And I had him with me after that. And we were friends from then on. The other one, K�kkinos, was a die-hard Communist. But somehow he got off too, he made it up until the Liberation. And he was court-martialed later on. Behr�kis was the judge. Same judge who pronounced about Krater�s, Veliss�ris, and the rest. Behr�kis. And Yi�rghis Stasin�poulos. Military judges. There was no chance they�d give them anything but the death penalty. No reason not to. And he wouldn�t have gotten off leniently, he had too much against him. But he didn�t say a word. I gambled, Your Honor, and I lost. Now I have to pay. That�s all. And we went on from there. And on the fifteenth, no the twelfth of October, when the Germans left, they sent me to Sp�tses. Toward the end.
��Of October.
��Yes.
��When did they arrest Panay�tis?
��In May or in June. I don�t remember. They arrested him because of me. Because I was active in the Battalions. And on July 29 they killed him. I told you that before.
��Who found him?
��I did. I went up there. Found him dead. We put him up on the mule, in some sacks. And we brought him back.
��Who sent word to you?
��We were there. We�d been on a raid. We�d come out on the top side of Ayi�nnis. We were walking up ahead. Six or seven of us. We sat down near a ravine, we had a smoke. I drank some water.
��At night?
��At night. I drank some water, I had some pills the Germans had given us for thirst. We started off. We went up there. A young shepherd tells us, They just killed six men. Right there. We had heard the rifle shots. Hey, I tell him, where was that? In the ravine. In T�urkos. Across from Ayios Vas�leios.
��Were you in Ayios Vas�leios?
��No, we were going through Ayi�nnis.
��And where did you go?
��We got as far as Kary�s, just outside.
��Just outside Kary�s.
��Kary�s. At the monastery. At Ayios Nik�laos. We go there, we find the well. Here�s where they had them, he tells us.
��At the monastery?
��No. Some ways from there. An hour away. Near the mountains of To�rkos. If we hadn�t stopped for a smoke we would have got there when they were still alive. That�s how unlucky I was. So we went up there. The shepherd tells us, There, in the ravine. We go down to the ravine, on the left side, nothing. We keep going on the other side. And we find them right where the ravine ends and branches out. Dead.
��How many of them were there?
��Six. My brother Panay�tis, and Marask�s, two. Themistokl�s Anagnost�kos, Bra�las�s mother, and a man from Tr�polis.
��Had Kalab�kas left?
��He had.
��He got away.
��Yes, he got away.
��How did Kalab�kas get away?
��He must have made some dirty deal. To get away like that. He hid under the Bra�las woman�s skirts, what nonsense. Such things don�t happen. It�s not possible.
��Did they kill them with a rifle?
��They killed Panay�tis with a knife. He must have fought back. He was a big strapping man.
��They killed them at night.
��Yes, at night. They had drawn some water for them from the well. Panay�tis was playing the clarinet before that. That�s what they told me. Yeorgh�a Makr�s. And then they killed them. They took them down to the ravine. We put him in some sacks and brought him back. Loaded onto the mule.
��Why in sacks?
��They had cut off his head. They�d cut off his feet, they�d cut off his hands. His torso was a separate piece. So how could we take him? We put him in two sacks. We loaded him into two sacks. Not right after it happened. Three or four days later we went and got him. I didn�t do any loading. I couldn�t do anything. Then someone told me. I found Yi�nnis Makr�s, I found K�stas Karayi�nnis.
��Where was K�stas?
��Poor man had disappeared. Then I ran into him. I almost killed him. He escaped by a hair. Hey, Irakl�s, Koumb�ros. It�s me, K�stas.
��Was he a prisoner too?
��He was hiding of course.
��A prisoner? From the detention camp?
��No, he left the village. They sent them away. Because of the blockade. And he hid up there. K�stas, Chr�stos Papadim�tris and Yi�nnis Makr�s.
��And then they came to Tr�polis?
��All of them. With me. K�stas, God rest his soul. We went and tore through all of Z�reia, we went through all of Nem�a. We went down to P�tras. Yes. We did.
Ah, those villagers from Ts�veri!1 If a lemon tree wouldn�t come up, they�d go plant onions.
I knew Athens. For four years, while M�rkos was a student, I would come there often. I would go to my uncle K�stas Ver�tsos, my father�s first cousin. He had a shop at 93 Ai�lou Street. He sold men�s clothing. Socks and the like. He says, Where�s your uncle the doctor? My uncle the doctor had left. He says, Go to the Red Cross, where they told you to go. I went to the Red Cross. They put us in a school in Pl�ka.1 All of us girls who�d been in Ha�d�ri. We each had a cot. They would give us milk, hot chocolate. They�d give us bread. Bread in those days. We�d go outside, and they�d offer us a sovereign for each loaf of bread. I left Pl�ka after a few days. I went to my aunt, Yianno�la Ioann�tzis. At 18 Notar� Street. Or was it 20? I stayed there, I�d help my cousin Christina. I knew about men�s shirts. I�d unstitched one of M�rkos�s shirts and made a pattern from it. I didn�t know much but I learned. Louk�a was working at Kaloyi�nnis�s shop. On the corner of Emmanuel Ben�ki and Stad�ou Streets, back then. We�d go there and pick up a dress or two in the latest style. Christina was an accomplished seamstress. And I was pretty good at it too. I started sewing in people�s homes. The woman from Xyl�kastro I was with in Ha�d�ri � her sister. She�d been adopted by an aunt, a rich aunt. She lived near the museum, on Bouboul�nas Street. They�d have me at their house to sew something for them, and my wages were two cans of food. That lady wore her hair high in a bun, and rings on her hands, and she had got her adopted daughter engaged to a naval officer. I was impressed by his uniform, I�d seen it hanging in the closet. Back then he really stood out because there was no navy. I�d work in people�s homes, and in the evening I�d go back to Aunt Yianno�la�s. But it had already become like a barracks. Rod�pi Ioann�tzis had come, and L�tsa, and maybe Lo�rdos�s wife Evyen�a was there too. So many people. And they went through a lot, those folks. Take Lo�rdos himself. He had brought oil from Astros. And that was quite something, but we all slept crowded one next to the other. The apartment was on the ground floor. It belonged to Zonar�s,2 and that artist Alex lived above it. He had married Zonar�s daughter, and there was also an M.P. living there. They had a piece of property on Sp�rou Dont� Street. Not anything much, I mean, just an abandoned old room. It had a bathroom, it had once been used as a small kafene�o. I don�t remember if it had a kitchen. We found Andr�as Athanas�ou, he was staying at his aunt Aspas�a�s in Kolon�ki. His father�s first cousin, from Epirus. And Ism�ni. They were living there, and we�d meet. Every day at noon we�d go to a taverna called Ano�si. The owner was from Ayios P�tros. Andr�as would bring a sausage, I�d bring my food from Pl�ka, I was still getting rations, and we�d eat. M�rkos too. So let me tell you. M�rkos says, Let�s go live at Io�nnou�s place. Io�nnou was the one who had the property on Sp�rou Dont� Street. He let us stay there free of charge. So I took the cot I was sleeping on at the shelter, at the school. I took it on my shoulders and I carried it to Sp�rou Dont� Street. Off Makriyi�nni Street, after Syngro� Avenue. At the Makriyi�nni gendarmes station, just below it. I took two cots. One for each end of the room. With the door in between. M�rkos and I slept there. I went to Notar� Street, to Christina�s, four times a day. On foot. I went and helped her with her sewing, she paid me. And I�d go back there, and we�d sleep. And we had a kerosene lamp, a gas burner, and Andr�as gave us a can of olive oil. He owed it to us at any rate, and he gave it to us. Up until December. When the December Uprising started I was at Aunt Yianno�la�s. On a Saturday, I think. Or Sunday. M�rkos had come down from Kifisi� to listen to Papandr�ou speak at Syntagma Square.3 And he comes and tells me, There�s an uprising. We took � or rather I�d taken � two or three loaves of bread from the shelter. I left one at Aunt Yianno�la�s. Back then we had net bags, not plastic ones. I put the two loaves in the net bag, and we left. To go to Sp�rou Dont� Street, to spend the night. By the time we reached Stourn�ra Street the gunfire was under way. And I�d keep my hands held high, with the net bag visible, hands up high, keep them up. And the net bag swinging, back and forth like this. I�d press myself against one wall after another, and how I escaped being shot, I don�t know. We went into a basement, through a trapdoor. From there we went to the cathedral. But we couldn�t get through. They had started fighting on Makriyi�nni Street. I don�t remember if we went back. Or if we got there. But we stayed on there, in that room, until M�rkos left. They drafted him. He left, and I was left alone. There was a family from Ile�a living next door. The Papakonstant�nous. A mother and two sons. There was no father. Both lawyers. The two sons. The younger one had a motorcycle. He was a wintertime bather. He�d go swimming and come back. On his motorcycle. Someone who made car upholsteries lived across from me. L�los. The house is still there. Small world. I asked a koumb�ra of my husband�s niece about them last year. At any rate. She knows them, they�re still there. At night alarms would go off, mortar shells would fall, and all of us, the whole neighborhood, would go to his basement. There were no apartment buildings yet. I was there alone, M�rkos had been drafted then, but I knew where he was. So I�d take some bean soup, and Ism�ni would come with me, and we�d go and find him. Once we met him on Akomin�tou Street. I saw houses that had been broken into there, with furniture and various household utensils scattered about upstairs. Imagine if the army were to get in there. At Christmastime, I don�t know why, there was a cease-fire every day around noon. Twelve to two. I�d managed to get myself five or six passes. There were passes in those days. Back then Ma�ri Iatr�dis, M�tsos Iatr�dis�s sister, was still alive. She used to come and vacation in the summer at Kastr�. We�d go together to Christina�s, we were apprenticing as seamstresses. I had gotten a pass for her neighborhood. A pass for Pl�ka and one for Ex�rheia.4 I don�t know how I managed it, maybe the police looked on us with a kind eye. I don�t know. I�d be stocking up on food. Stocking up wherever I could, and I�d go to M�rkos�s place and he�d give us a dab of margarine, and some hard-baked bread. I�d go with Ism�ni. On Christmas Day Aunt Yianno�la called me � Yi�rgos Ioann�tzis had been drafted too. M�rkos Ioann�tzis�s brother. He�d been drafted and he was a guard on Her�dou Attiko� Street at the palace. I went and saw him and he gave me a can of food. He was an officer. What did I take him? He gave me a can with potatoes, beans, and a piece of meat. I don�t remember if I took him something or what it was. He told me, You�re too thin. Maybe I took him matches because he smoked a pipe. I was tall and slim. Too thin. I remember him. Maybe I went to see him twice. He gave me that can of food and I took it to Mrs. Papakonstant�nou, the lady with the two sons, and we ate it together. On New Year�s Day I stayed in. I was in a bad mood, and I�d had a terrible fright the night before. Next to me was another door with the same little stairs, three steps that led up to a two-story apartment. Some Greeks were living upstairs, and British soldiers would come and play cards with them. The Brits would come, and that night they knocked on my door. Maybe they were drunk, or made a mistake. I was shaking. I didn�t open the door, but it had a glass pane on the upper half, a pane of glass. And I signaled to them, go next door, next door. They got what they came for, and they left. In the morning I told L�los about it. He had one son and one daughter. He tells me, If you have an old blanket, bring it, and we�ll give it to them, and they�ll give you a new one. Trade-offs like that happened, that sort of exchange. I took him an old blanket, and he gave me a new one, a wonderful khaki one. I don�t remember the dates, I don�t remember when I left that room. I couldn�t go to Notar� Street to Aunt Yianno�la�s. There were too many people crammed in. So I went to Kifisi�. I had nothing warm to wear. Christina tells me, a different Christina that one, another cousin, a Mengl�nas. She says, Let�s dye this blanket and make it into a nice coat. I had taken it to Kifisi�, and Aunt Magd�lo had a tub, and we dyed it brown. A nice soft brown color. But I didn�t make it into a coat, I made a suit. People got by like that then. We had the Red Cross, and we had UNRRA.5 I think. And there was the Athens Archdiocese. They gave out different things, clothes and shoes � hand-me-downs. All those registered with the Red Cross could get one suit apiece. I made that suit, there was a piece of woolen material left at the shop, and Christina from Notar� Street made a flared Tyrolean skirt from it. I�d found a silk dress at UNRRA, an evening dress with a cigarette burn just below the waist. And I cut it, made it into a blouse, and embroidered it. I�d wear all those things, and now I was going to get war victims� assistance. Why you smashing young thing, you, Yi�rgos Ioann�tzis would tell me. You smashing young thing. You look like you just stepped out of a fashion house. I had a handkerchief here in my pocket, I was slim, I was at the height of my youth and beauty. At any rate. I was living in Kif�sia, I�d begun to sew. The T�mbaris family had a koumb�ra who was one of the best shirt makers. And she recommended me to various households. People would have new clothes made but mainly they would do alterations. I was good at that, too. I went to a villa in Kefal�ri,6 with velvet wallpaper, it was just like being in a movie theater. Impressive-looking furniture � and all that just when I started making money. But I left. There was the problem of what would become of my brother and sister, Pha�dros and Stella. They had gotten out of prison, they�d survived, and they�d gone to Kastr�. And something had to be done. How stupid of me, I should have stayed in Athens. Instead of that I began to go back and forth, from Athens to Tr�polis to Kastr�. In Tr�polis the Sal�veros family put me up. Maria was there, we�d become very close friends. And I sewed different things for them, and they were thrilled. I also sewed for the Athanasi�dis family. And for Mavroyi�rghis. They had stood by his side ungrudgingly. They tell me, Come and live in Tr�polis, we�ll help you. And stupidly, I did. I moved in September, so the younger ones could go to school. Stella had finished but she was studying English. Pha�dros was attending the eight-year junior high school. He was going to enroll in fifth grade. Fifth grade, I think. I went to Tr�polis. I couldn�t find a house. I had no money. My father had sold some barrel staves, he got 350 drachmas for them. He gave me the money. Vo�la Vasil�poulos was in Tr�polis, she was pregnant with Maria. Ada Papayi�nnis was there. All the men from the Battalions had come down there, Yi�nnis Dr�nias, Iphigenia. They were there then. I don�t know why they had moved house again. The Kavas�lis girls were there. It was a nightmare finding a room, but I found one that fit us. The woman renting it to us had TB, we didn�t know it. We stayed there, it had a smaller side room. It was September when we moved in. After that they brought those gendarmes back dead from Ayios P�tros, in their undershirts. I don�t remember when that happened. The Galax�dis brothers came down, they wanted to arrest us again. In Orthokost� they�d taken me as a hostage because of M�rkos and my uncle the doctor. They had gone to Athens. I�d been in prison, I�d been in Ha�d�ri. And now they wanted to arrest me again. They didn�t let them. I�ve forgiven them all. But that Mih�lis Galax�dis, there was a time when I was ready to throw a grenade under his car. Back when Pha�dros was rejected from the Air Force Academy. He was about to become a squadron leader. I was really indignant. Pha�dros left for Canada. He made a success of himself there, he has children. We stayed in Tr�polis. Our atelier was doing well. I�d go up to Athens every once in a while. I always stayed with Ir�ni Koutso�mbis. She lived on Z�nonos Street, around there. It was convenient because the terminal for the bus from Tr�polis was on Ay�ou Konstant�nou Street in the center of Athens. So she let me stay there. She had moved to Athens. From Corinth to Athens. Daphne and the younger sister went overseas, they emigrated. One went to Chicago, and the other I don�t know where. When Ir�ni�s brother Yi�nnis died I was in Tr�polis. I heard about it after the funeral. But I went to the forty-day memorial service. Ir�ni invited some people for a meal. Around 1955. Or was it in the sixties? She had guests, that Miha�l fellow from Ayios P�tros. Who had a sister called X�ko. Short for Xakoust�. Miha�l Manous�kis. He had dealerships in Tr�polis. And another man from Kosm�s, a microbiologist, Ma�stros the microbiologist, at 40 Karne�dou Street. They were talking, and they said something. Ma�stros did. She�s Spade-and-Shovel�s cousin. About me. Kind of allegorically. And I thought they were being sarcastic. I say, What�s up, you guys? Miha�l says, He�s talking about M�rkos Ioann�tzis. I tell them, Now look. And they talked about my brother M�rkos too. I tell them, M�rkos M�vros may be my brother, but M�rkos Ioann�tzis was twice as much a brother to me. I won�t allow any remarks from you. Ma�stros was from Kosm�s. His father was a doctor too, a friend of our N�kos. I tell him, You men must know his story � and how it all happened. Because certain people had spread the word that N�kos had finished him off. He stopped eating. He tells me, I only know what my godmother has told me. M�rkos Ioann�tzis left our house, and he asked her for a towel and a knife. Al�monos came and got him. This was on June 3. He came and got him from our house. I was just a kid, but I know where they buried him. I say, Go and tell all that to Yi�rgos Ioann�tzis. Because this is what happened to our family: N�kos got carried away by his ideas, and he made the mistake of writing things against M�rkos to Yi�rgos. Back then. And Yi�rgos told me that very bitterly. I tell Ma�stros: Please go and tell all that to Ioann�tzis. I think M�rkos had also left a letter there. At that house. Ma�stros knew the true Ioann�tzis story. And then our Christina said, Since that�s how it is, let�s tell the girls and go all together and help them dig up their brother�s bones. But they didn�t agree. They said they hadn�t the courage. They hadn�t worn black for ten years. For ten years they believed that M�rkos was in the Middle East. Because the BBC had said something like that back then. M�rkos was betrayed by Kontal�nis. He spoke English, and he told the officers, their headquarters liaisons, to stop air dropping supplies to the Communists. He told them, They�ll turn against us and against you. And Kontal�nis betrayed him. I think that�s why they killed him. I was twenty-two years old at the time.
It�s at a depth of 35 meters. Twenty-five cubic meters every twenty-four hours. At 160 meters� depth, it�s 250 cubic meters. But I�ve had it up to here with those villagers from M�sklina. I�m not going to let them in on this. Unless they pay me. If they don�t, then let the water lie.
Thanassis Valtinos came onto the literary scene in Greece in the early 1960s with several novella-length prose narratives that heralded a marked shift away from the florid, discursive prose of the fiction of the times toward what was to become a much-imitated and highly respected style of documentary fiction marked by the sparse, unadorned speech of oral accounts. His early works, such as
In the 1990s Valtinos began combining similar first-person narratives with letters or documents into longer, polyphonic works and produced what are most certainly his three major works:
The subject of Valtinos�s novels is not history itself but the recording of history, the way it is remembered and depicted, orally or in writing, reliably or not. What emerges from the seemingly unedited raw footage of his novels is a poignant re-living of history by its participants on a day-to-day basis, regardless of their social circumstances, level of education, or political orientation.
The numerous narrators, be they participants, victims, or innocent bystanders, recount in hindsight, and from many differing vantage points, the hardships and atrocities of the conflict portrayed in
It is in the midst of such contrary tides that the human element begins to emerge. Although the narrators are not clearly identified initially, they gradually come into focus as their families and fortunes are pieced together through their own and others� imperfect recollections of the decades-old events. Certain key incidents are told and retold throughout
In one of the closing chapters of the novel, at the prodding of an unnamed interlocutor, a surviving participant pulls together the different strands of the novel by recounting some of its central executions while also telling of his own travails at the hands first of the German occupying forces and then of the Communist guerrillas, as well as the horrific circumstances of his brother�s execution by the latter � the kind of account which today, in 2016, would immediately go viral on the Internet, but which in 1994, when
In practical terms,
Names and naming, more so than expressions in a specific dialect, are in fact what often distinguishes local parlance in these and other peripheral regions from speech in mainland Greek cities. Whereas oral speech and dialogue are best rendered by equivalents rather than literal translations, names present their own set of problems. In
From a grammatical point of view, and again in the interest of simplicity and intelligibility, the variously inflected forms of names of men and women in the Greek have been rendered in a rather unflattering masculine nominative singular that is currently the norm in English.
Our priority was to maintain throughout a balance between the nonstandard or village Greek in most of the narratives of
Valtinos has endeavored to approximate through his punctuation (and frequent, deliberate omission of it) the natural spontaneity of oral speech in Modern Greek. His villagers communicate, for the most part, in short, choppy, sometimes ungrammatical sentences, often interrupting themselves midstream and picking up later on. Like most oral speech, theirs is a mixture of the historical present and the past tense, rendered with great brio and virtuosity in the original. We have tried in our translation to reproduce the effects of Valtinos�s prose by adhering as closely as possible to the tense structure and punctuation of the original so as to best reflect its spontaneity within the limits of contemporary English usage.
We have annotated our translation in the minimalist spirit of the novel�s author by providing the basic historical data an educated Greek reader would have brought to the book when it first came out in 1994, some fifty years after the events being described. We have also provided the essential backdrop a nonnative Greek reader of the book today would need to make sense of the narratives. This too has been kept to a minimum: too much information would be tantamount to analyzing the individual dots in a pointillist painting whose size, shape, and color are unimportant in and of themselves. It is rather their concentration and distribution that create the overall effect of an impressionist canvas, which is, properly speaking, the aim of
�Prologue�
1.
Mount Malev�s: Another name for Mount Parnon in the southeastern Peloponnese. Much of the action in the book centers on this densely wooded region. During World War II it became a refuge for the Communist Resistance fighters as well as a place where anti-Communist civilians were held hostage.
2.
Ninth-day Feast of the Dormition of the Virgin: Like many Greek monasteries, Orthokost�, though dedicated to the Dormition of the Virgin, which is nationally celebrated on August 15, performs its most solemn festivities, or Ap�dosis, on August 23, nine days later.
3.
Tsakoni�: Area in the southeastern Peloponnese made up of villages such as S�taina, Prast�s, and Leon�dio, in which Tsak�nikan, a descendant of Doric Greek, was spoken as late as the 1970s.
Chapter 1
1.
Vigla: A place name referring to a watchtower (from the Latin
) in the village of M�sklina; it was probably built between 1205 and 1432 in the Frankish-occupied Peloponnese.
2.
Lio�: The wife of Li�s (in this case Li�s Tsio�los). In the provinces masculine first names are often used in their possessive form to denote a man�s wife or mother.
Chapter 2
1.
Ayiasofi�: Local pronunciation of Ay�a Sof�a (Saint Sophia), a village in the Arcadia prefecture.
2.
M�sklina (also known as Eleoh�ri): A village near the border between the Arcadia and Argolis prefectures. German troops were stationed there at the time the novel takes place.
3.
Velissar�yiannis: A local variant for the name Yi�nnis Veliss�ris. This type of construction, where the first and last names are compounded in reverse order, is typical of speech in the provinces, particularly the Peloponnese. Similar constructions include, in this chapter, Kalabak�yiannis for Yi�nnis Kalab�kas; Stavr�yiannis for Yi�nnis St�vrou (
chap. 6
); Mavroyi�rghis for Yi�rgos M�vros (
chap. 7
); Mavr�yiannis for Yi�nnis M�vros (
chap. 36
); and Havdot�yiannis for Yi�nnis Havd�tos (
chap. 36
).
4.
Ayiop�tro: Local way of referring to Ayios P�tros (Saint Peter), a village on Mount Parnon, in the Arcadia prefecture, and the site of detention camps and fierce battles between rebel forces and gendarmes.
5.
The Organization: The Communist Party.
6.
�We�ll cut off your hair�: The Communist guerrillas used to cut off the hair of �enemies� to make it difficult for them to hide among the general population.
7.
: A bite-size piece of bread that has been hallowed during a Greek Orthodox mass and is left over from the sacrament of Holy Communion. The officiating priest hands out these morsels to the parishioners as they exit the church.
8.
Security Battalions: Initially named the Evzones Guard of the Unknown Soldier, the Security Battalions were formed in 1943 by official decree, ostensibly to maintain peace in the Greek countryside. The Battalions were armed by and fought alongside the German Occupation troops, suppressing Communist as well as non-Communist insurgents.
9.
Kapet�nios, Kapet�n (voc.): The equivalent of a captain in the Communist Resistance army.
Chapter 3
1.
Kapetana�oi: Plural of
.
2.
Albania: References to �Albania� by speakers in the novel stand for the campaign of the Greek Army between October 1940 and May 1941 in northwestern Greece and southern Albania to stop fascist Italy from invading Greece. �hi (No!) Day, October 28, is the annual commemoration of the start of that victorious campaign.
Chapter 4
1.
ELAS: Ελληνικός Λαϊκός Απελευθερωτικός Στρατός (Greek Popular Liberation Army), founded on February 16, 1942, as a special branch of the Communist EAM (Εθνικό Απελευθερωτικό Μέτωπο, the National Liberation Front). Founded on September 27, 1941, EAM was the military arm of the Communist Party, created to resist the Occupation during World War II.
2.
Dion�sius Papad�ngonas (1888�1944): A politically conservative major general in charge of the Security Battalions in the Peloponnese.
3.
Proph�tis Il�as: A hill in northern Greece near the Albanian border named after the prophet Elijah and made famous during the 1940�41 Greco-Italian war. The battle that took place there on November 2, 1940, marked the first victory of the Greek Army against the onslaught of two Italian mountain divisions that had recently invaded Greek territory.
4.
George Tsol�koglou (1886�1948): A general in the Greek Army who signed the armistice agreement in which Greece capitulated to the German and Italian forces in April 1941. Pressed into assuming the premiership of Greece, Tsol�koglou appointed Major General George B�kos (1892�1945) minister of military affairs.
5.
Aris Velouhi�tis (1905�1945): Born Than�sis Kl�ras, he was the leader of the ELAS forces during the Occupation.
6.
KKE: The Greek Communist Party (Κομμουνιστικό Κόμμα Ελλάδας), founded in 1918.
7.
V�rkiza Treaty: On February 12, 1945, representatives of the Nik�laos Plast�ras government and EAM-ELAS representatives of the Communist Party of Greece met in the coastal town of V�rkiza, south of Athens, and signed a nine-point agreement, chief among which was the disarming of the EAM-ELAS guerrillas and their withdrawal from the cities of Athens and Thessalon�ki.
8.
Ant�nis Katsant�nis (1785�1808): A legendary guerrilla leader who fought against Turkish occupation of prerevolutionary Greece.
9.
Grig�ris So�rlas: The organizer of armed anti-Communist farmer bands in central Greece during the Civil War.
10.
Plebiscite: On September 1, 1946, the government of Constantine Tsald�ris conducted a plebiscite to determine whether King George II, who had left Greece during the Occupation, could be reinstated to the throne of Greece; 69 percent of the voters favored the restoration.
11.
Lit�choro and Pontokerasi�: On March 30, 1946, thirty-three leftists attacked a gendarmes station in the town of Lit�choro in the prefecture of Pier�a. On June 5 another group attacked a Greek Army company in the town of Pontokerasi� in Kilk�s. These two incidents are generally considered the beginning of the Greek Civil War.
12.
Haro�lis: Diminutive of Har�s.
13.
Napol�on Z�rvas (1891�1957): A retired lieutenant colonel and the founder in September 1941 of the right-wing Resistance group EDES (Εθνικός Δημοκρατικός Ελληνικός Σύνδεσμος, Greek National Democratic Union), committed to fighting against German, Italian. and Bulgarian Occupation forces. An anti-Communist, Z�rvas openly accused EAM-ELAS of striving to impose a Soviet-style government in Greece following the end of the Occupation.
14.
Athan�sios Yiannak�poulos: An infantry colonel who, along with army officers Tel�mahos Vrett�kos, Panay�tis Katsar�as, and St�mos Triantaf�llis, formed a Resistance group that eventually ceded power to ELAS; an agreement to this effect was signed by Yiannak�poulos.
15.
SMA: Στρατηγείο Μέσης Ανατολής, the Near East Command Headquarters, which was established in Cairo, Egypt, by the British Expeditionary Forces under Colonels Eddie Myers and Christopher Woodhouse. Their liaisons in Greece pressured right-wing Resistance groups into submitting to mostly leftist ELAS leadership.
16.
Metaxourghe�o: A poor neighborhood in south-central Athens.
17.
OPLA: Οργάνωση Προστασίας Λαϊκών Αγωνιστών (Organization to Protect People�s Fighters). The OPLA operatives, commissioned in late spring 1943 and active until 1947, were charged with the protection of KKE members and the extermination of suspected anti-Communists and their relatives.
Chapter 5
1.
Vo�lis: Short form of Paraskevo�lis, the diminutive of Paraskev�s.
Chapter 6
1.
�He saw her as a bride�: Dreaming of a bride is considered a bad omen in Greek folklore.
2.
Panay�tis Sto�pas (1894�1944): Army major and commander of anti-Communist Security Battalion units.
3.
Ayi�rghis: Local way of referring to the village of Ayios Yi�rghios (Saint George) in the Argolis prefecture.
4.
Ga�do�ras: Nickname derived from
, a she-donkey, a jenny.
5.
: Plural of
(m.) or
(f.), a person one has close ties with by having been mutual best men or maids of honor at each other�s weddings;
also denotes people who were godparents at each other�s children�s christenings.
Chapter 7
1.
Io�nnis Metax�s (1871�1941): A lieutenant general in the Greek Army who was appointed premier of Greece in 1936, and soon assumed wider dictatorial powers, which brought about strong popular opposition. He is best remembered for the efficient preparation of Greek land defenses and for rejecting Italy�s ultimatum on October 28, 1940.
2.
Konstantinos Maniad�kis (1893�1973): Chief of the State Security Police under Io�nnis Metax�s.
3.
Castor oil: Castor oil was used to torture prisoners; it causes diarrhea and rapid dehydration.
4.
Sokr�taina: In local parlance, the wife of Sokr�tis. Similar constructions where the suffix �-aina� is added to the root of a masculine name to denote a female relative are typical in the provinces. See also in this chapter Mavroyi�rgaina (the wife of Mavroyi�rghis) and M�kraina (a female member of the Makr�s family), and K�staina (the wife of K�stas) in
chapter 11
.
5.
Yi�rghis: A variant of the common first name Yi�rgos.
6.
Petro�: The wife of P�tros (P�tros Tato�lis, father of Mih�lis).
7.
Saint Paraskev�: A widely venerated second-century martyr and saint of the Greek Orthodox Church. Numerous locations, urban and rural, are named after her. Her feast is celebrated on July 28.
8.
Ayi�nnis: Local variant for Ayios Yi�nnis (Saint John), a village in the Argolis prefecture. �Ap�no� designates a community built on a higher elevation than the village.
9.
The Feast of the Virgin: A religious and national holiday celebrated on August 15 and preceded by a fifteen-day fast.
10.
M�loi: District on the western outskirts of Athens whose name suggests industrial grain mills.
11.
L�la Karayi�nnis (1898�1944): Leader of a resistance movement who as early as 1941 and until her arrest and execution ran a network of anti-Axis saboteurs. She is also commemorated in Israel as one of the Righteous Among the Nations.
12.
Kifisi�: Verdant, posh suburb north of Athens.
13.
: From the Italian verb
, �to leap�: typically an agile teenager who leaped on the backs of occupation supply trucks and emptied them of their contents.
Chapter 8
1.
�Like a tax�: The owners of an olive press usually withheld one-tenth of any amount of oil it pressed as a fee for the pressing. This payment in kind allowed the press owners to accumulate quantities of oil they could use to speculate, buy property, bribe officials, and so on.
Chapter 9
1.
Certificates of �Recognition�: In 1982 the Greek government offered pensions to tens of thousands of persons who claimed they had fought against the German, Italian, and Bulgarian occupation armies during World War II.
2.
The December Uprising: Known in Greek as Τα Δεκεμβριανά, the term refers to the period between December 1944 and January 1945 during which EAM-ELAS Resistance fighters, on one side, and the British-backed Greek Army, metropolitan police, gendarmes, and the royalist �X� faction on the other, engaged in street fighting in Athens and Piraeus, with thousands of combatant and noncombatant casualties.
3.
M�loi: A seaside town in the Argolis prefecture, not to be confused with the district in Athens.
4.
X: A royalist-backed military organization founded in June 1941 by Colonel George Gr�vas of the Greek Army. Its name was changed to X, the Greek chi (pronounced �hee�) in March 1943. The new name was emblematized by the crossing of two Greek capital gammas, one standing for King George II of Greece and one for Gr�vas himself. Those wearing the X insignia on their berets or armbands were called He�tes.
5.
The Feast of Saint Il�as: Celebration for the prophet Elijah (�Il�as� in Greek) held on July 20. Early in the history of Eastern Christianity Elijah, from the book of Kings in the Hebrew Bible, was proclaimed the patron saint of mountaintops and venerated in small churches, often erected on the foundations of former shrines to Zeus.
6.
Lighting the oil candles: A service often performed by women in small neighborhood churches that have no sexton. Since the Greek culture has no tradition of a book of prayers, asking someone to light the oil candles (a floating wick in a glass of oil, typically hung in front of holy icons) amounts to asking for extended prayer.
7.
Siege of Tr�polis: When the flourishing multi-ethnic town of Tr�polis was under Turkish administration in the nineteenth century, it was besieged by Greek forces under The�doros Kolokotr�nis. The siege lasted from the beginning of June until September 23, 1821, and became the subject of a well-known Greek folksong.
8.
Panay�tis Kanell�poulos (1902�1986): A statesman and historian of ideas who was a member of the Greek government-in-exile during the Axis Occupation. He served briefly as minister of defense and minister of reconstruction, and twice as prime minister. He spent seven years under house arrest during the Colonels� Junta in 1967�74. Kanell�poulos�s landing in the southern Peloponnese in 1944 marked the return of the government-in-exile to power.
9.
Meligal�s: A town in the southern Peloponnese where a well-known battle took place on September 13 and 14, 1944, between ELAS forces, which prevailed, and the Security Battalions.
10.
Gargali�noi: Locality in the southern Peloponnese in which ELAS troops were victorious in the September 21�23, 1944, battle against the Security Battalions under Major Panay�tis Sto�pas.
11.
Sp�ros Tsiklit�ras: ELAS division commander in Lacon�a, in the southern Peloponnese.
12.
PEEA: Πολιτική Επιτροπή Εθνικής Απελευθέρωσης, the Political Committee for National Liberation, active from March to November 1944; a mostly EAM group created to administer the regions of Greece recently vacated by German Occupation troops.
13.
Kolon�ki: Upscale residential neighborhood near the center of Athens.
Chapter 11
1.
: A pastoral romance in five acts by Spyr�don Peresi�dis (1854�1918) that was a staple of Greek amateur acting companies and a perennial favorite of audiences.
Chapter 13
1.
Valt�tsi: A mountain village in the Prefecture of Arcadia, the site of important events during the 1821 Greek Revolution.
2.
The�doros Tourkovas�lis (1891�1976): A nationalist parliamentarian, cofounder of the Populist Party, minister of education, and founder of teachers academies. As head of the Bank of Greece during the Axis Occupation, Tourkovas�lis was jailed by the Germans. Thodor�s and Th�doros are colloquial variants for the name The�doros.
3.
EDES: Εθνικός Δημοκρατικός Ελληνικός Σύνδεσμος, Greek National Democratic Union, a rightist coalition founded in September 1941 by Napol�on Z�rvas to fight against German, Italian, and Bulgarian occupation forces.
4.
�hi Day: National holiday celebrated annually to commemorate October 28, 1940, when Prime Minister Io�nnis Metax�s famously responded no (
) to Italy�s ultimatum to Greece, thus sparking Greece�s entry into World War II.
5.
The Liberation: The withdrawal of German occupation forces from Greece in October 1944.
6.
�donis K�rou (1923�1985): an influential left-wing activist, son of Achill�as K�rou, owner of the conservative Athens daily
.
Chapter 14
1.
M�vri Tr�pa: A village in Arcadia known since antiquity for its deep geological crevasses. It has since been officially renamed �Tr�pi.�
Chapter 16
1.
LOK: Λόχοι Ορεινών Καταδρομών (Alpine Assault Companies) were special army units trained to engage the Communist guerrillas active in the mountainous terrain of Greece during the 1947�49 Civil War.
2.
Tsak�nikan: See note 3 to the �Prologue.�
Chapter 19
1.
Louko�: A monastery near the town of Astros, in the Peloponnese. It is dedicated to Christ of the Transfiguration, its foundation probably dating to the sixth century. Like Orthokost�, Louko� was used by the guerrillas as a detention camp and as a center of military operations during the Civil War.
2.
Tray: A Greek kafene�o tray, typically of tin or brass, with a handle attached to the rim by three long thin metal strips.
3.
The Torture: This practice, known in Greek as
(the rod), became particularly prevalent during the 1960s and 1970s when Greece was ruled by a military junta. Allusions to it would still resonate with readers when the novel first appeared in 1994.
4.
The Kary�s Monastery: Located on Mount Parnon, it is dedicated to the Virgin Mary.
5.
Name day: Greeks traditionally celebrate not their birthdays but the feast day of the saint they were named after � in this case Saint John, January 7.
6.
: Italian word for �partisan,� widely used in Greece to denote Communist Resistance fighter.
7.
M�vri Tr�pa: Literally, �Black Hole.� See note 1 to
chapter 14
.
Chapter 20
1.
Ok�s: An ok� is a measure of weight equaling 1,280 grams or 45 ounces.
2.
Laundering trough: Water mills � to this day, when they are not grinding grains � launder heavy fabrics, blankets, rugs, etc., which the mill will also store for the clients.
3.
Yiann�kis: Variant of the common first name Yi�nnis. Other variants include Yiannak�kis, Yianno�kos, and Yiann�kos.
Chapter 24
1.
The Salutations: The Salutations of the Virgin Mary, sung during the vespers of the first five Lenten Fridays of the Greek Orthodox Church.
2.
Saint Peter�s Day: June 29.
Chapter 26
1.
Saints Constantine and Helen are jointly celebrated on May 21.
2.
: A made-up word, from the three initial
s in Τηλέφωνο, Ταχυδρομείο, Τηλέγραφος. He was a Telephone, Mail, and Telegraph Service employee.
3.
EPON: Ενιαία Πανελλαδική Οργάνωση Νέων (Unified Panhellenic Youth Organization), an extension of EAM. EPON was founded on February 23, 1943.
4.
Ilis�s: A neighborhood in central Athens named after the stream Ilissus (see
chapter 9
) that used to run through it.
5.
ΚΟΒΑ: Κομματική Οργάνωση Βάσης (Local Party Chapter), a neighborhood-based office of the Greek Communist Party.
6.
Palai� An�ktora: Old Royal Palace, the present-day Parliament building, in the center of Athens.
7.
Goud�: District to the northeast of Athens that served over the years as a base for military and gendarmes.
Chapter 28
1.
Saint Nicholas�s Day: December 6.
2.
Loukoum�des: A traditional Greek sweet. Spoonfuls of white flour dough are deep fried until golden brown and served with honey and a pinch of cinnamon.
3.
�Pinned some basil on them�: Pinning basil on a couple was a sign of public approval of their relationship.
4.
�He had no sisters�: It was customary for a man to find husbands for his sisters before getting married himself.
5.
Fez: A red fez is part of the popular Greek costume worn by National Guards, or Evzones.
6.
Foustan�lla: A man�s white pleated skirt. Part of Greek popular costume worn by Evzones.
7.
�State of mourning�: A year-long period during which no weddings could be performed in the village.
8.
Kathar�vousa: The purist, archaizing idiom in which all official documents of the Greek state were written. It was also the formal spoken language of conservative politicians, army officers, and educated clergy, among others.
9.
Stremmata: Plural of
, an area of measurement equaling one thousand square meters or a quarter of an acre.
10.
�Protopapad�kis�s notorious law�: P�tros Protopapad�kis (1860�1922) was a minister of finance who devalued the state currency in 1919�22 to meet the expenditures for Greece�s disastrous military campaign in Asia Minor.
11.
Brooklyds: From �Brooklyn,� financially successful emigrants returning from the United States.
12.
Elefth�rios Veniz�los (1864�1936): An important Greek statesman, supporter of the Entente Cordiale, and opponent of the policies of the Greek palace. A charismatic leader who also encountered fierce personal and political opposition, Veniz�los was elected no fewer than seven times to the premiership of Greece in his lifetime. It was during Greece�s military campaign in Asia Minor (1919�22) that the Greek Parliament decided to withdraw its support for the campaign and hold elections in November 1920. Veniz�los lost and chose to leave Greece. He was elected prime minister again and served from 1928 to 1932.
13.
Agrarian Reform Law: Premier Io�nnis Metax�s instituted the Agrarian Reform Law in 1936, whereby large landholdings were redistributed to benefit poor rural populations.
14.
Alexandros Sv�los (1892�1956): A Greek academic and parliamentarian active � primarily as finance minister � both during the Occupation of Greece and immediately afterward. Sv�los is mostly remembered for his 1944 legislation that drastically devalued stock issued by Greek banks from fifty drachmas to one.
Chapter 30
1.
ETA: Επιμελητεία του Αντάρτη (Revolutionaries� Commissary).
2.
�A date not easily forgotten�: October 28 is �hi Day. See note 4 of
chapter 13
.
Chapter 36
1.
The Feast of the Elevation of the True Cross: High holy day celebrated on September 14.
Chapter 38
1.
The ancient tragic playwright: The quotation is from Sophocles�
.
Chapter 39
1.
Turks: Derogatory term used for Communist guerrillas.
2.
Drob�litsa: Folk pronunciation of Tr�polis.
3.
Megalo�polis: Colloquial variant of Megal�polis.
Chapter 44
1.
Tsir�go: In country parlance, another name for the island of K�thira.
2.
Fark�: Mispronunciation of �Fargo,� a vehicle originally manufactured by the Fargo Motor Car Company and produced, under different ownership, until 1972.
3.
Bulgarian: Like �Turk,� �Bulgarian� was part of the anti-Communist vocabulary to designate a die-hard Communist.
Chapter 45
1.
Tsiv�ri: Local variant for the village of Kyv�ri.
Chapter 46
1.
Pl�ka: A picturesque neighborhood on the eastern slopes of the Acropolis in Athens.
2.
Zonar�s: A fashionable caf� in the center of Athens, established by the Greek-American businessman K�rolos Zonar�s in 1939.
3.
Syntagma Square: Also known as Constitution Square, it is the central square in Athens, across from the Parliament, and was often the site of demonstrations.
4.
Ex�rheia: A middle-class neighborhood near the center of Athens.
5.
UNRRA: The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, founded in 1943, was especially active in 1945 and 1946. Forty-four countries contributed to funding, supplying, and staffing the agency, of which the United States was the chief donor.
6.
Kefal�ri: Central square in Kifisi�, a well-to-do northern suburb of Athens.
�Epilogue�
1.
Iconomachy: A period of theological and political strife that divided eastern Christendom, from 726 to 842, into icon worshippers and iconoclasts. It ended with the restoration of the icons in public worship and in church decoration.
THANASSIS VALTINOS was born in Kastri, Kynourias, in the Peloponnese. He has written novels, novellas, short stories, and film scripts and translated ancient Greek tragedies for the theater. His work has been translated into many languages and has earned him numerous awards, including Best Film Script for
JANE ASSIMAKOPOULOS is an American writer and translator living in Ioannina, Greece. Her translations from the Greek and French include novels by award-winning writers as well as poems and stories in literary journals and anthologies in the United States and in England. She is currently employed by a Greek publisher as translation editor in charge of a series of books by Philip Roth.
STAVROS DELIGIORGIS is a University of Iowa professor emeritus in English and Comparative Literature. He holds degrees from the National University of Athens, Yale University, and the University of California at Berkeley. His publications include books and articles in literary theory as well as poetry and prose translations from the Greek and Romanian.
STATHIS N. KALYVAS is Arnold Wolfers Professor of Political Science at Yale. He is the author of, among other books,