Orthokostá Read online

  Orthokostá

  BOOKS BY THANASSIS VALTINOS

  IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION

  Deep Blue Almost Black: Selected Fiction

  Data from the Decade of the Sixties

  Orthokostá

  A Novel

  THANASSIS VALTINOS

  ΟΡΘΟΚΩΣΤÁ

  ΜΥΘΙΣΤΟΡΗΜΑ

  ΘΑΝΑΣΗΣ ΒΑΛΤΙΝΟΣ

  TRANSLATED FROM THE GREEK BY JANE

  ASSIMAKOPOULOS AND STAVROS DELIGIORGIS

  FOREWORD BY STATHIS N. KALYVAS

  The Margellos World Republic of Letters is dedicated to making literary works from around the globe available in English through translation. It brings to the English-speaking world the work of leading poets, novelists, essayists, philosophers, and playwrights from Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to stimulate international discourse and creative exchange.

  English translation copyright © 2016 by Yale University.

  Originally published as ΟΡΘΟΚΩΣΤÁ: ΜΥΘΙΣΤΟΡΗΜΑ. Copyright © 1994, Agra Publications. Copyright © Hestia Publishers and Thanassis Valtinos, 2007, Athens, Greece.

  Maps by Christos Kountouras, 2014; courtesy of Stavros Deligiorgis.

  Foreword by Stathis N. Kalyvas. Introduction by Stavros Deligiorgis.

  All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

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  Printed in the United States of America.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015959235

  ISBN 978-0-300-20999-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992

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  CONTENTS

  Foreword, by Stathis N. Kalyvas

  Introduction, by Stavros Deligiorgis

  Maps

  Orthokostá

  Translators’ Note

  Notes

  FOREWORD Stathis N. Kalyvas

  Thanassis Valtinos’s Orthokostá opens with a brief description of a village in flames. Where are we? Why is this village burning? And why should we care?

  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 Orthokostá take place at yet another critical historical moment, the 1940s.

  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 Orthokostá. 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. Orthokostá showcases two of the most controversial, delicate, and until recently suppressed aspects of World War II in Greece: the dark side of the Resistance and the collaboration’s grassroots dimension. Orthokostá is an account of the vicious internecine Civil War that ravaged Greece during the Occupation, setting neighbors against one another.

  Valtinos’s political and literary credentials among left-leaning intellectuals were such that Orthokostá could not be ignored or dismissed. It attracted considerable attention and critical acclaim. At the same time, however, it also became the target of harsh criticism by a small but vocal minority who accused him of seeking to tarnish the image of the Resistance. The novel’s impact went beyond the literary realm to inform debates about public history and collective memory.

  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 i
nsurgencies.

  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, Orthokostá provides a powerful counterpoint to the much better-known account of a quasi-universal, patriotic resistance against Nazi rule in Greece, and the concomitant description of the repression suffered by the left. Indeed, this is a doubly transgressive account. It sheds light on the dark side of the Greek Resistance, which had been airbrushed to emphasize its heroic dimension, and it brings to the surface the real dimensions of collaboration, and its causes, that had been minimized or even suppressed by both its supporters and foes.

  Indeed, the thorny issue of collaboration stands at the core of Orthokostá. During the first two years of the Occupation, active collaboration with Axis forces was marginal, limited mainly to fascist ideologues, members of previously repressed ethnic minorities, and opportunists of various kinds. This began to change in 1943. The capitulation of Italy, the rapid spread of the Resistance, and the ineffectiveness of a counterinsurgency based on blind, indiscriminate reprisals convinced the occupiers that they were in urgent need of local assistance. It was at this point that a widespread loathing of the Communists and their methods came together with the Germans’ need for local allies, causing the explosive growth of a new kind of grassroots armed collaboration that reached unprecedented levels, comparable to the reach of ELAS.

  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 Orthokostá.

  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 Trípolis 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 Oriá. They hated anyone from Karátoula, 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 Paraskevás who marched our brother Kóstas 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 Pavlákos 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 den
ounce someone who victimized them were later protected in a moment of need by those they had helped. The story of Yiórgos and Yeorghía 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 Orthokostá is by no means one-sided. We find in it extensive descriptions of atrocities committed by the Security Battalions (see, for example, chapters 6 and 33), while several narrators provide many qualifications and counterpoints. However, critics who accuse Valtinos of equating understanding with excusing miss the book’s point, which is to reveal the intricate universe into which all these people moved and to immerse us in it. On that score, Orthokostá is an unmitigated success.

  Does its unrelenting focus on this complex reality make Orthokostá an amoral account? Quite the opposite. I would argue instead that it is deeply moral. Although no attempt is made to apportion responsibility for the atrocities, several stories contain elements of a “moral economy” shared by most narrators, one that privileges an understanding of individual responsibility embedded in its context, as opposed to a general and abstract judgment. In this view, most people are seen as subject to their own passions and the prevailing social norms, victims of the terrible situation in which they found themselves. It is often hard to blame them, for they are hardly masters of their own volition. Nor, obviously, can they be praised. Yet at the same time certain actions are singled out, either positively or negatively: positively, when people transcend their limitations to perform unexpected good deeds (“He wasn’t a die-hard Communist. He would cover for our fellow villagers.”); negatively, when individuals transcend them in the opposite direction to commit random or excess violence, as do militiamen such as the Galaxýdis brothers and Kóstas Kotrótsos, who were trigger-happy, looters, “unprincipled drifter[s],” or simply “animal[s],” or the old man who helped the militiamen set a house on fire: