Pub Date : 2024-04-30DOI: 10.1353/mgs.2024.a925802
Jay K. Rosengard
<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span> <p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Shaping and Reshaping the Global Monetary Order during the Interwar Period and Beyond: Local Actors in-between the International Institutions</em> ed. by Catherine P. Brégianni and Roser Cussó <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Jay K. Rosengard (bio) </li> </ul> Catherine P. Brégianni and Roser Cussó, editors, <em>Shaping and Reshaping the Global Monetary Order during the Interwar Period and Beyond: Local Actors in-between the International Institutions</em>. History and Historical Theory 3. Athens: Alfeios Editions and TransMonEA Project, Academy of Athens–HFRI, 2023. Pp. 323. Non-commercial publication. <p>This publication is a multifaceted analysis of the global monetary regime's evolution, from the disintegrating impacts of the Great Depression during the interwar period to the often inequitable and destabilizing adaptations of the postwar era. This transformation is investigated via what the authors call a "financial engineering process" generated by interactions between governments and global financial institutions within the context of national and international political economies. The volume is the result of a research project supported by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation and comprises contributions by an extremely diverse and somewhat esoteric group of young Greek scholars, many affiliated with the Hellenic Open University and drawn from the fields of history, philosophy, economics, politics, and demography.</p> <p>The book is a very ambitious endeavor, creative in concept and earnest in execution. It is especially noteworthy that it is a Greek publication written for an international audience, a daring venture into a domain usually dominated by English-speaking academic communities. It has the usual problems of compilations in maintaining coherence of vision and narrative, as well as consistency in level of detail and focus. It is also replete with numerous long, tedious, and often excruciating explanations of research methodologies that divert rather than illuminate. Nevertheless, it provides new perspectives on topics extensively covered by others, including post–World War II debt and currency crises (chapters 8–10) and the impact of the Great Depression in the Weimar Republic from the vantage point of all three levels of government—national, state, and local (chapter 5). It also includes an original exploration of new topics such as both the benign and potentially exploitative impacts of international agency assistance in building national statistical expertise. Examples of such assistance covered in the book are the League of Nations Economic and Financial Section in Turkey (chapter 2), the League of Nations Economic and Financial Organization globally (chapter 4), and the International Agrarian Bureau in Eastern Europe (chapter 3). Another strength of this volume li
以下是内容的简要摘录，以代替摘要：评论者 Shaping and Reshaping the Global Monetary Order during the Interwar Period and Beyond：Catherine P. Brégianni 和 Roser Cussó 编著，《塑造和重塑战时及其后的全球货币秩序：夹在国际机构之间的地方行动者》，Jay K. Rosengard (bio) Catherine P. Brégianni 和 Roser Cussó 编辑：国际机构之间的地方行动者》。历史与历史理论 3》。雅典：Alfeios Editions and TransMonEA Project, Academy of Athens-HFRI, 2023.Pp.323.非商业出版物。本出版物对全球货币体系的演变进行了多方面的分析，从战时大萧条的解体影响到战后往往不公平和不稳定的调整。作者通过各国政府与全球金融机构在国家和国际政治经济背景下的互动所产生的 "金融工程过程 "来研究这一转变。这本书是希腊研究与创新基金会支持的一个研究项目的成果，由一群极其多样且有些神秘的希腊年轻学者撰写，其中许多人隶属于希腊开放大学，来自历史、哲学、经济学、政治学和人口学等领域。该书是一项雄心勃勃的工作，构思新颖，执行认真。尤其值得一提的是，这是一本面向国际读者的希腊语出版物，是对通常由英语学术界主导的领域的一次大胆尝试。该书在保持视野和叙事的连贯性，以及细节和重点的一致性方面，存在着汇编通常会遇到的问题。此外，书中还充斥着大量冗长、乏味，而且往往是令人痛苦的研究方法解释，这些解释只会转移视线，而不会起到启发作用。尽管如此，该书还是对其他著作广泛涉及的主题提供了新的视角，包括二战后的债务和货币危机（第 8-10 章），以及从国家、州和地方三级政府的视角来看大萧条对魏玛共和国的影响（第 5 章）。书中还对一些新课题进行了独创性的探讨，如国际机构援助对国家统计专业知识建设的良性影响和潜在的剥削性影响。书中涉及的此类援助实例包括国际联盟驻土耳其经济和金融科（第 2 章）、国际联盟全球经济和金融组织（第 4 章）以及东欧国际农业局（第 3 章）。本卷的另一个优势在于作者提供了大量数据来支持他们的叙述，所有章节都有详尽的记录和注释。最有趣的章节是以希腊为重点的章节。Lefteris Tsoulfidis 撰写的第 6 章对作者所称的 "战时大萧条"（1920-1939 年）提出了长周期的观点，而不是仅仅讨论大萧条的低谷（1929-1932 年）。报告还超越了美国和其他全球经济大国的范围，详细描述了大萧条向希腊等其他国家的传播，并追溯了随后的国家影响，包括财政（公共债务增加、无力偿还债务、违约、紧缩）、货币（贬值、紧缩）、政治（去全球化、孤立主义、贸易战、民族主义、政变、专制政府）和社会（收入和财富不平等加剧、贫困增加）。在希腊的特殊情况下，本章揭示了国际传播的一个新方面，即希腊通过采取硬德拉克马货币政策加剧了经济萧条--这种政策的基础是，在一个由适得其反的孤立主义和自欺欺人的国家自给自足的追求所主导的全球环境中，对外来援助的期望无法实现。安东尼斯-A-安东尼奥（Antonis A. Antoniou）所著的第 7 章可作为第 6 章的前言来阅读，该章追溯了战时大萧条的前兆，以及希腊金融部门在面临国家违约和全球冲突时的系统性弱点。安东尼奥将重点放在 1897-1912 年期间，全面分析了希腊的宏观经济和财政趋势，包括按部门划分的国内生产总值构成、按来源划分的收入构成、按部门划分的支出分配以及主权债务的结构和流动。本章通过研究潜在的系统性弱点和由此产生的脆弱性，将随后的宏观经济困难置于非常有启发性的历史背景中。本卷的...
{"title":"Shaping and Reshaping the Global Monetary Order during the Interwar Period and Beyond: Local Actors in-between the International Institutions ed. by Catherine P. Brégianni and Roser Cussó (review)","authors":"Jay K. Rosengard","doi":"10.1353/mgs.2024.a925802","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mgs.2024.a925802","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Shaping and Reshaping the Global Monetary Order during the Interwar Period and Beyond: Local Actors in-between the International Institutions</em> ed. by Catherine P. Brégianni and Roser Cussó <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Jay K. Rosengard (bio) </li> </ul> Catherine P. Brégianni and Roser Cussó, editors, <em>Shaping and Reshaping the Global Monetary Order during the Interwar Period and Beyond: Local Actors in-between the International Institutions</em>. History and Historical Theory 3. Athens: Alfeios Editions and TransMonEA Project, Academy of Athens–HFRI, 2023. Pp. 323. Non-commercial publication. <p>This publication is a multifaceted analysis of the global monetary regime's evolution, from the disintegrating impacts of the Great Depression during the interwar period to the often inequitable and destabilizing adaptations of the postwar era. This transformation is investigated via what the authors call a \"financial engineering process\" generated by interactions between governments and global financial institutions within the context of national and international political economies. The volume is the result of a research project supported by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation and comprises contributions by an extremely diverse and somewhat esoteric group of young Greek scholars, many affiliated with the Hellenic Open University and drawn from the fields of history, philosophy, economics, politics, and demography.</p> <p>The book is a very ambitious endeavor, creative in concept and earnest in execution. It is especially noteworthy that it is a Greek publication written for an international audience, a daring venture into a domain usually dominated by English-speaking academic communities. It has the usual problems of compilations in maintaining coherence of vision and narrative, as well as consistency in level of detail and focus. It is also replete with numerous long, tedious, and often excruciating explanations of research methodologies that divert rather than illuminate. Nevertheless, it provides new perspectives on topics extensively covered by others, including post–World War II debt and currency crises (chapters 8–10) and the impact of the Great Depression in the Weimar Republic from the vantage point of all three levels of government—national, state, and local (chapter 5). It also includes an original exploration of new topics such as both the benign and potentially exploitative impacts of international agency assistance in building national statistical expertise. Examples of such assistance covered in the book are the League of Nations Economic and Financial Section in Turkey (chapter 2), the League of Nations Economic and Financial Organization globally (chapter 4), and the International Agrarian Bureau in Eastern Europe (chapter 3). Another strength of this volume li","PeriodicalId":43810,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN GREEK STUDIES","volume":"55 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140828933","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-04-30DOI: 10.1353/mgs.2024.a925804
Lydia Papadimitriou
<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span> <p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Greek Weird Wave: A Cinema of Biopolitics</em> by Dimitris Papanikolaou <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Lydia Papadimitriou (bio) </li> </ul> Dimitris Papanikolaou, <em>Greek Weird Wave: A Cinema of Biopolitics</em>. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2021. Pp. xvi + 268. 27 illustrations., Hardback and E-book £90.00, Paperback £19.99. <p>Toward the end of his introduction, Dimitris Papanikolaou writes that "this is a very personal, very idiosyncratic, very weird history of the Weird Wave" (24). The book is indeed personal: the author explicitly places (his own) affect center stage, writes about how the films "touch" him, and positions "biopolitical realism"—the key concept that structures the book—as a "survival tactic" (23). The book is idiosyncratic for the very same reasons, as well as for the ways in which its author inflects, adjusts, and expands otherwise familiar concepts such as allegory in new directions—most crucially, here, by introducing the notion of <em>metonymic</em> allegory. And it is weird insofar as it combines a certain degree of playfulness (evident at a glance in some of its subheadings) with intense theoretical engagement while also implicitly acknowledging—just as the Greek Weird Wave filmmakers have done through their films—the "unease" of articulating fixed and authoritative interpretations, opting instead to "reclaim … weirdness … as an analytical position" (11).</p> <p>None of the above qualities makes the book problematic; if anything, they signal its methodological and heuristic strengths. Far from being a formalist genre study, <em>Greek Weird Wave: A Cinema of Biopolitics</em> seeks to find connections among form, content, context, and affect within the otherwise rather disparate group of Greek films that emerged in the late 2000s and thrived in the second decade of the twenty-first century. This was a period overdetermined by the Greek financial crisis, which affected not only the conditions of the films' production (if not initially, then certainly by the time the term "Greek Weird Wave" was coined by British journalist Steve Rose in 2011) but also the interpretative frames projected onto them—frames that encouraged traditional (i.e., metaphor-based) allegorical readings of the nation in crisis.</p> <p>Triggered by his own emotive and bodily response to the films, Papanikolaou offers an analysis that goes beyond such approaches. He argues that the films' potency lies in their ability to convey "weirdness" as a "structure of feeling" (12) for the conditions of life in the early twenty-first century as experienced—not only, but with particular intensity—in Greece. Borrowing Foucault's notion of biopolitics, understood as the "social and political practices that focus on 'disciplining the living being'" and ultimately subjugating "'corporeal life into systems of
{"title":"Greek Weird Wave: A Cinema of Biopolitics by Dimitris Papanikolaou (review)","authors":"Lydia Papadimitriou","doi":"10.1353/mgs.2024.a925804","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mgs.2024.a925804","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Greek Weird Wave: A Cinema of Biopolitics</em> by Dimitris Papanikolaou <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Lydia Papadimitriou (bio) </li> </ul> Dimitris Papanikolaou, <em>Greek Weird Wave: A Cinema of Biopolitics</em>. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2021. Pp. xvi + 268. 27 illustrations., Hardback and E-book £90.00, Paperback £19.99. <p>Toward the end of his introduction, Dimitris Papanikolaou writes that \"this is a very personal, very idiosyncratic, very weird history of the Weird Wave\" (24). The book is indeed personal: the author explicitly places (his own) affect center stage, writes about how the films \"touch\" him, and positions \"biopolitical realism\"—the key concept that structures the book—as a \"survival tactic\" (23). The book is idiosyncratic for the very same reasons, as well as for the ways in which its author inflects, adjusts, and expands otherwise familiar concepts such as allegory in new directions—most crucially, here, by introducing the notion of <em>metonymic</em> allegory. And it is weird insofar as it combines a certain degree of playfulness (evident at a glance in some of its subheadings) with intense theoretical engagement while also implicitly acknowledging—just as the Greek Weird Wave filmmakers have done through their films—the \"unease\" of articulating fixed and authoritative interpretations, opting instead to \"reclaim … weirdness … as an analytical position\" (11).</p> <p>None of the above qualities makes the book problematic; if anything, they signal its methodological and heuristic strengths. Far from being a formalist genre study, <em>Greek Weird Wave: A Cinema of Biopolitics</em> seeks to find connections among form, content, context, and affect within the otherwise rather disparate group of Greek films that emerged in the late 2000s and thrived in the second decade of the twenty-first century. This was a period overdetermined by the Greek financial crisis, which affected not only the conditions of the films' production (if not initially, then certainly by the time the term \"Greek Weird Wave\" was coined by British journalist Steve Rose in 2011) but also the interpretative frames projected onto them—frames that encouraged traditional (i.e., metaphor-based) allegorical readings of the nation in crisis.</p> <p>Triggered by his own emotive and bodily response to the films, Papanikolaou offers an analysis that goes beyond such approaches. He argues that the films' potency lies in their ability to convey \"weirdness\" as a \"structure of feeling\" (12) for the conditions of life in the early twenty-first century as experienced—not only, but with particular intensity—in Greece. Borrowing Foucault's notion of biopolitics, understood as the \"social and political practices that focus on 'disciplining the living being'\" and ultimately subjugating \"'corporeal life into systems of","PeriodicalId":43810,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN GREEK STUDIES","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140828936","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1353/mgs.2023.a908558
Catherine Brégianni
Abstract: The economic decline of the Ottoman Empire was fundamental in various ways to the outbreak and progress of the Greek Revolution. The first attempts to create a national currency during the Greek Revolution reflect efforts to craft a modern state, and the eventual introduction of the phoenix by the first governor of the Hellenic State, Ioannis Capodistrias, underscores the shift to a newborn nation-state. The contradictions of Capodistrias’s monetary policy, however, reflected social antagonisms within Greece.
{"title":"Currency as an Imprint of the Nation-State: Monetary Conditions in the Ottoman Empire at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century and the Transition from Ottoman Currencies to the Phoenix of the Hellenic State (1828)","authors":"Catherine Brégianni","doi":"10.1353/mgs.2023.a908558","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mgs.2023.a908558","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: The economic decline of the Ottoman Empire was fundamental in various ways to the outbreak and progress of the Greek Revolution. The first attempts to create a national currency during the Greek Revolution reflect efforts to craft a modern state, and the eventual introduction of the phoenix by the first governor of the Hellenic State, Ioannis Capodistrias, underscores the shift to a newborn nation-state. The contradictions of Capodistrias’s monetary policy, however, reflected social antagonisms within Greece.","PeriodicalId":43810,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN GREEK STUDIES","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134935211","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1353/mgs.2023.a908560
Güven Dinç
Abstract: Within a short time, the Greek Revolt of 1821 deeply affected the island of Cyprus. Unlike in the other islands, the rebellion on Cyprus was over before it started owing to the severe measures taken against the rebels by Governor Mehmed Agha, who requested an edict from the sultan listing the names of prominent Greeks to execute. Many Greeks left the island for fear of execution, but some could not. According to Ottoman documents, there were 98 proscribed Cypriots, of whom 75 were executed; the other 23 escaped. In accordance with Ottoman law, the properties of the executed or escaped were first confiscated and then auctioned, with the proceeds transferred to the Public Treasury. But most of the executed or escaped Greeks were not wealthy, and claims by European consuls on the proceeds from the confiscated goods continued for many years.
{"title":"The Fate of the Properties of the Executed/Escaped Greek Cypriots of July 1821 according to Ottoman Documents","authors":"Güven Dinç","doi":"10.1353/mgs.2023.a908560","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mgs.2023.a908560","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Within a short time, the Greek Revolt of 1821 deeply affected the island of Cyprus. Unlike in the other islands, the rebellion on Cyprus was over before it started owing to the severe measures taken against the rebels by Governor Mehmed Agha, who requested an edict from the sultan listing the names of prominent Greeks to execute. Many Greeks left the island for fear of execution, but some could not. According to Ottoman documents, there were 98 proscribed Cypriots, of whom 75 were executed; the other 23 escaped. In accordance with Ottoman law, the properties of the executed or escaped were first confiscated and then auctioned, with the proceeds transferred to the Public Treasury. But most of the executed or escaped Greeks were not wealthy, and claims by European consuls on the proceeds from the confiscated goods continued for many years.","PeriodicalId":43810,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN GREEK STUDIES","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134935261","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1353/mgs.2023.a908565
Alexander Kitroeff
Reviewed by: Voices of the Lost Children of Greece: Oral Histories of Cold War International Adoption ed. by Mary Cardaras Alexander Kitroeff (bio) Mary Cardaras, editor, Voices of the Lost Children of Greece: Oral Histories of Cold War International Adoption. London and New York: Anthem Press, 2023. Pp. xvi + 192. Hardback $110.00, Paper $35.00, and E-book $35.00. Now that the overall facts of their experience have been established, writes Gonda Van Steen in the introduction to this volume of fourteen short essays, it is time for the voices of the adoptees themselves to be heard. It is Van Steen herself who, in her meticulously researched book-length study Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid pro quo? (2019), uncovered how 3,200 young Greek children were adopted by families in the United States between 1950 and 1962. The story Van Steen tells is one of well-meaning humanitarian motives which were overtaken by practices ranging from mere irregularities to brazenly illegal acts that profited unscrupulous middlemen. When those practices began to be uncovered, several hundred Greek children were already in the process of being adopted. Abetting those underhand practices in the 1950s were Greek government authorities, Greek orphanage officials, and unprepared childless couples in the United States. In several cases, some or all of these participants in the adoption process enabled the middlemen to cut corners. And while it is important to note that many of these adoptions had happy outcomes, others were harmful for the children involved because they were denied knowledge of who their biological parents were and the circumstances of their adoption, making for traumatic discoveries when they tried to retrieve the truth. It is these children who tell their personal stories in this volume. Naturally, the publication of Van Steen’s study sent shock waves among the many adoptees, some of whom were already searching for their biological parents and the truth about their backgrounds. One of these, who decided to take up the cause of her fellow adoptees, was Mary Cardaras, a communications professor at California State University, East Bay. Cardaras proved to be the ideal person to fulfill Van Steen’s wish that the adoptees would follow up her book by telling their own stories. Cardaras and Van Steen appeared together at several book presentations, including those for the Greek translation of Van Steen’s book that was published by the Athens-based Potamos Publishers in 2021. In that same year, Cardaras herself published Ripped at the Root: An Adoption Story, an account of how Dena Poulias was taken as a child from her Greek biological parents in 1958 and found her way back to their village after many years. The book traces how Poulias’s discovery of her origins affected everyone involved—the two families on either side of the Atlantic, the Greek village community, and of course Poulias herself and her loved ones. This new book is [End Page 308] both an
《希腊失散儿童之声:冷战时期国际收养的口述历史》编辑:玛丽·卡达拉斯。伦敦和纽约:Anthem Press, 2023。第16 + 192页。精装本$110.00，纸质$35.00，电子书$35.00。冈达·范·斯蒂恩在这本由14篇短文组成的书的前言中写道，既然他们经历的全部事实已经确立，现在是时候让人们听到被收养者自己的声音了。正是范·斯蒂恩本人，在她精心研究的书籍长度的研究中，收养、记忆和冷战时期的希腊:孩子的交换条件?(2019)，揭示了3200名希腊儿童是如何在1950年至1962年间被美国家庭收养的。范·斯蒂恩讲述的故事是一个善意的人道主义动机，但却被从纯粹的违规行为到肆无忌惮的不法行为所取代，这些行为使不择手段的中间人获利。当这些做法开始被揭露时，数百名希腊儿童已经在被收养的过程中。在20世纪50年代，希腊政府当局、希腊孤儿院官员和美国没有准备的无子女夫妇教唆了这些不正当的做法。在一些情况下，收养过程中的部分或全部参与者使中间商偷工减料。值得注意的是，许多这样的收养都有幸福的结果，但也有一些收养对孩子是有害的，因为他们不知道自己的亲生父母是谁，也不知道收养的情况，当他们试图找回真相时，他们会发现创伤。正是这些孩子在这本书中讲述了他们的个人故事。自然，范·斯蒂恩的研究成果的发表在许多被收养者中引起了冲击波，其中一些人已经在寻找他们的亲生父母和他们的真实背景了。加州州立大学东湾分校(California State University, East Bay)的传播学教授玛丽·卡达拉斯(Mary Cardaras)就是其中之一，她决定为其他被收养者的事业做贡献。事实证明，卡达拉斯是实现范·斯蒂恩愿望的理想人选，她希望被收养的孩子们能在她的书之后讲述自己的故事。Cardaras和Van Steen一起出现在几次图书发布会上，包括2021年由雅典Potamos出版社出版的Van Steen的书的希腊语翻译。同一年，卡达拉斯自己出版了《连根拔起:一个收养的故事》，讲述了1958年，还是个孩子的迪娜·波利亚斯如何从她的希腊亲生父母身边被带走，并在多年后找到了回到他们村庄的路。这本书追溯了普丽亚斯发现自己的起源是如何影响到每一个相关的人的——大西洋两岸的两个家庭，希腊村庄社区，当然还有普丽亚斯自己和她所爱的人。这本新书既是Poulias的故事的产物，正如Cardaras所指出的那样，正是这个故事激发了她出版这本被收养者(包括她自己)的故事集，从某种意义上说，也是Van Steen在20世纪50年代对收养的学术研究的伙伴。在这里无法总结所有感人的描述，这些描述揭示了每个被收养者所经历的全部经历。然而，这些描述的本质在安德鲁·莫辛(Andrew Mossin)的前言中得到了很好的总结。莫辛是一位在费城天普大学(Temple University)任教的作家，他自己也是一位被收养的希腊人。(书中也使用了他的原名安东尼奥·萨卡斯(antonio Sakkas)。)莫辛已经在一本名为《山子》的书中讲述了自己的故事，书中详细描述了他在冷战时期从希腊被收养的经历以及随后的童年。在这本新文集的前言中，莫辛提供了一些作者描述的经历的小插曲，其中许多是情感上的痛苦，很难读懂。莫辛写道，每一个故事都是一种挥之不去的后记忆，通过被收养者找到的文件和其他数据构建而成，并试图从……
{"title":"Voices of the Lost Children of Greece: Oral Histories of Cold War International Adoption ed. by Mary Cardaras (review)","authors":"Alexander Kitroeff","doi":"10.1353/mgs.2023.a908565","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mgs.2023.a908565","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Voices of the Lost Children of Greece: Oral Histories of Cold War International Adoption ed. by Mary Cardaras Alexander Kitroeff (bio) Mary Cardaras, editor, Voices of the Lost Children of Greece: Oral Histories of Cold War International Adoption. London and New York: Anthem Press, 2023. Pp. xvi + 192. Hardback $110.00, Paper $35.00, and E-book $35.00. Now that the overall facts of their experience have been established, writes Gonda Van Steen in the introduction to this volume of fourteen short essays, it is time for the voices of the adoptees themselves to be heard. It is Van Steen herself who, in her meticulously researched book-length study Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid pro quo? (2019), uncovered how 3,200 young Greek children were adopted by families in the United States between 1950 and 1962. The story Van Steen tells is one of well-meaning humanitarian motives which were overtaken by practices ranging from mere irregularities to brazenly illegal acts that profited unscrupulous middlemen. When those practices began to be uncovered, several hundred Greek children were already in the process of being adopted. Abetting those underhand practices in the 1950s were Greek government authorities, Greek orphanage officials, and unprepared childless couples in the United States. In several cases, some or all of these participants in the adoption process enabled the middlemen to cut corners. And while it is important to note that many of these adoptions had happy outcomes, others were harmful for the children involved because they were denied knowledge of who their biological parents were and the circumstances of their adoption, making for traumatic discoveries when they tried to retrieve the truth. It is these children who tell their personal stories in this volume. Naturally, the publication of Van Steen’s study sent shock waves among the many adoptees, some of whom were already searching for their biological parents and the truth about their backgrounds. One of these, who decided to take up the cause of her fellow adoptees, was Mary Cardaras, a communications professor at California State University, East Bay. Cardaras proved to be the ideal person to fulfill Van Steen’s wish that the adoptees would follow up her book by telling their own stories. Cardaras and Van Steen appeared together at several book presentations, including those for the Greek translation of Van Steen’s book that was published by the Athens-based Potamos Publishers in 2021. In that same year, Cardaras herself published Ripped at the Root: An Adoption Story, an account of how Dena Poulias was taken as a child from her Greek biological parents in 1958 and found her way back to their village after many years. The book traces how Poulias’s discovery of her origins affected everyone involved—the two families on either side of the Atlantic, the Greek village community, and of course Poulias herself and her loved ones. This new book is [End Page 308] both an ","PeriodicalId":43810,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN GREEK STUDIES","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134935207","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1353/mgs.2023.a908556
Ariadne Konstantinou
Abstract: Representations of Jerusalem and the Holy Land during the time of the British Mandate in Palestine (1918–1948) appear in the works of four modern Greek authors of the interwar period: Ouranis, Kazantzakis, Sikelianos, and Seferis. Their works encompass different genres—travel writing (Ouranis and Kazantzakis), diaries (Sikelianos and Seferis), and poetry (Seferis)—and foreground questions about religion and religiosity, identity, class struggle, and modernization. The landscape of the Holy Land turns out to be different, foreign, sometimes even completely desolate, and this realization initiates a process of remembering which ultimately takes the Greek authors back to the familiar places they apparently call home: the Aegean Sea and the Acropolis.
{"title":"Jerusalem, the Holy Land, and Greekness in Ouranis, Kazantzakis, Sikelianos, and Seferis during the Period of the British Mandate for Palestine","authors":"Ariadne Konstantinou","doi":"10.1353/mgs.2023.a908556","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mgs.2023.a908556","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Representations of Jerusalem and the Holy Land during the time of the British Mandate in Palestine (1918–1948) appear in the works of four modern Greek authors of the interwar period: Ouranis, Kazantzakis, Sikelianos, and Seferis. Their works encompass different genres—travel writing (Ouranis and Kazantzakis), diaries (Sikelianos and Seferis), and poetry (Seferis)—and foreground questions about religion and religiosity, identity, class struggle, and modernization. The landscape of the Holy Land turns out to be different, foreign, sometimes even completely desolate, and this realization initiates a process of remembering which ultimately takes the Greek authors back to the familiar places they apparently call home: the Aegean Sea and the Acropolis.","PeriodicalId":43810,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN GREEK STUDIES","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134935240","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1353/mgs.2023.a908564
Spyridon G. Ploumidis
Reviewed by: Venizelos: The Making of a Greek Statesman, 1864–1914 by Michael Llewellyn-Smith Spyridon G. Ploumidis (bio) Michael Llewellyn-Smith, Venizelos: The Making of a Greek Statesman, 1864– 1914. London: Hurst, 2021. Pp. xx + 516. 50 illustrations, 4 maps. Cloth £30.00. Eleftherios Venizelos (1864–1936) was the outstanding Greek statesman of the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Crete and summoned to Athens in 1910 by a group of military officers, Venizelos dominated the Greek political scene and led his country through a turbulent period of reforms and wars that doubled Greece’s territory and population. During the years of the First World War, however, Venizelos’s political career was overshadowed by a showdown with King Constantine, a political polarization known as the National Schism, and self-exile to Paris. After 1915 Venizelos became, for all his charisma, a contested figure and anathema to his monarchist fellow countrymen. Well versed in the teachings of the founders of the French Third Republic (1870–1940) and a profound admirer of French radical leaders Léon Gambetta and Georges Clemenceau, Venizelos attempted to reform Greek politics along the lines of French radicalism and republicanism. His uncompromising patriotism and fervent nationalism bore spectacular results in the Treaty of Sèvres (1920), which brought an end to the Ottoman Empire and shaped his glorified memory. [End Page 304] Sir Michael Llewellyn-Smith, a former British Ambassador in Athens, examines Venizelos’s early years in Cretan politics, his entry onto the center stage of Greek politics, and his gradual development into a renowned statesman. As Llewellyn-Smith notes in the introduction (2–3), his special interest in Venizelos dates back to the late 1960s, when he wrote his widely cited study of Greece’s military campaign and debacle in Asia Minor (1919–1922) (Llewellyn Smith 1998). Llewellyn-Smith’s voluminous biography of Venizelos is well researched, relying on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, and complements existing accounts of the life of the Greek statesman (e.g., Stefanou 1977; Papadakis 2017). The author highlights and offers valuable insights into Venizelos’s charisma and elevated standing on Europe’s political scene. Venizelos was not by any means an ordinary man. As Llewellyn-Smith stresses (6), he pushed Greece’s boat “up against the currents of history” and “without him Greece would be different” and very much worse off. To make this point, the book thoroughly illuminates Venizelos’s political thought and mastery and traces his fateful friendship with David Lloyd George, which stimulated his ambitious foreign policies. A second volume will complete his story with the Great War, the postwar peace settlement, Greece’s Asia Minor campaign, and Venizelos’s later years in the office of prime minister. The book is divided into three parts and forty-three chapters. Part 1 provides the historical background to Venizelos’s early ca
《韦尼泽洛斯:一个希腊政治家的形成，1864 - 1914》，作者:迈克尔·卢埃林-史密斯。伦敦:赫斯特，2021。Pp. xx + 516。50张插图，4张地图。布£30.00。埃莱夫塞里奥斯·韦尼泽洛斯(1864-1936)是二十世纪上半叶杰出的希腊政治家。韦尼泽洛斯出生于克里特岛，1910年被一群军官召集到雅典，他统治了希腊的政治舞台，带领他的国家度过了改革和战争的动荡时期，希腊的领土和人口翻了一番。然而，在第一次世界大战期间，韦尼泽洛斯的政治生涯因与君士坦丁国王的对决、被称为国家分裂的政治两极分化以及自我流放到巴黎而蒙上了阴影。1915年之后，尽管维尼泽洛斯魅力非凡，但他成为了一个有争议的人物，成为了他的君主主义同胞们的诅咒。韦尼泽洛斯深谙法兰西第三共和国(1870-1940)创始人的教义，也是法国激进领袖甘贝塔(lsamon Gambetta)和克莱门梭(Georges Clemenceau)的深刻崇拜者，他试图按照法国激进主义和共和主义的路线改革希腊政治。他毫不妥协的爱国主义和狂热的民族主义在1920年签订的《苏尔特弗尔条约》(Treaty of s vres)中取得了惊人的成果，终结了奥斯曼帝国，塑造了他的光辉记忆。迈克尔·卢埃林-史密斯爵士，前英国驻雅典大使，考察了韦尼泽洛斯早年在克里特岛的政治生涯，他进入希腊政治的中心舞台，以及他逐渐发展成为一位著名的政治家。正如Llewellyn-Smith在引言(2-3)中指出的那样，他对韦尼泽洛斯的特殊兴趣可以追溯到20世纪60年代末，当时他撰写了被广泛引用的关于希腊在小亚细亚的军事行动和溃败(1919-1922)的研究(Llewellyn Smith 1998)。卢埃林-史密斯(Llewellyn-Smith)的韦尼泽洛斯(Venizelos)大部头传记研究得很好，依赖于广泛的第一手和第二手资料，并补充了对这位希腊政治家生活的现有描述(例如，Stefanou 1977;Papadakis 2017)。作者对韦尼泽洛斯的个人魅力和他在欧洲政治舞台上的崇高地位进行了强调，并提供了宝贵的见解。韦尼泽洛斯绝不是一个普通人。正如卢埃林-史密斯所强调的(6)，他推动希腊的船“逆历史潮流而上”，“没有他，希腊将会是另一个样子”，而且情况会糟糕得多。为了说明这一点，这本书彻底地阐明了韦尼泽洛斯的政治思想和掌握能力，并追溯了他与大卫·劳埃德·乔治(David Lloyd George)的重要友谊，正是这种友谊激发了他雄心勃勃的外交政策。第二卷将从第一次世界大战、战后和平协议、希腊的小亚细亚战役以及维尼泽洛斯担任总理的晚年等方面完成他的故事。全书分为三部分，共四十三章。第一部分提供了韦尼泽洛斯早期在克里特岛政治生涯的历史背景。韦尼泽洛斯的家族史、在雅典大学的学习、在法律和新闻领域的学徒经历、爱情生活和婚姻是他参与家乡岛屿政治事务的背景。1898年，在希腊乔治王子(Prince George of Greece)的统治下，该岛成为自治岛屿。民族主义政治和伊诺西斯(克里特岛与希腊的联盟)运动是韦尼泽洛斯建立公众形象和政治使命的主要手段。他参与了1897年和1905年的阿克罗蒂里和特里索斯起义，这使他成为了一流的民族英雄和所有希腊人的捍卫者。除了与奥斯曼帝国的暴力对抗外，韦尼泽洛斯的名声也因他坚持不懈的反君主主义而大大增强。作者指出，特里索斯的“革命”不仅是对王子“专制”的打击，而且是一项外交成就，因为它将克里特岛的保护权与促进与希腊联合的进程联系在一起(161页)。1906年9月，乔治王子被逐出克里特岛，这是威尼斯激进政策的又一次胜利。正如卢埃林-史密斯所指出的，“(韦尼泽洛斯)正在成为年轻激进分子的英雄，相应地，他也成为了王室及其追随者的恐惧对象”(163页)。他与希腊王室的一个重要成员(乔治一世国王的次子)的不和预示着……
{"title":"Venizelos: The Making of a Greek Statesman, 1864–1914 by Michael Llewellyn-Smith (review)","authors":"Spyridon G. Ploumidis","doi":"10.1353/mgs.2023.a908564","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mgs.2023.a908564","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Venizelos: The Making of a Greek Statesman, 1864–1914 by Michael Llewellyn-Smith Spyridon G. Ploumidis (bio) Michael Llewellyn-Smith, Venizelos: The Making of a Greek Statesman, 1864– 1914. London: Hurst, 2021. Pp. xx + 516. 50 illustrations, 4 maps. Cloth £30.00. Eleftherios Venizelos (1864–1936) was the outstanding Greek statesman of the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Crete and summoned to Athens in 1910 by a group of military officers, Venizelos dominated the Greek political scene and led his country through a turbulent period of reforms and wars that doubled Greece’s territory and population. During the years of the First World War, however, Venizelos’s political career was overshadowed by a showdown with King Constantine, a political polarization known as the National Schism, and self-exile to Paris. After 1915 Venizelos became, for all his charisma, a contested figure and anathema to his monarchist fellow countrymen. Well versed in the teachings of the founders of the French Third Republic (1870–1940) and a profound admirer of French radical leaders Léon Gambetta and Georges Clemenceau, Venizelos attempted to reform Greek politics along the lines of French radicalism and republicanism. His uncompromising patriotism and fervent nationalism bore spectacular results in the Treaty of Sèvres (1920), which brought an end to the Ottoman Empire and shaped his glorified memory. [End Page 304] Sir Michael Llewellyn-Smith, a former British Ambassador in Athens, examines Venizelos’s early years in Cretan politics, his entry onto the center stage of Greek politics, and his gradual development into a renowned statesman. As Llewellyn-Smith notes in the introduction (2–3), his special interest in Venizelos dates back to the late 1960s, when he wrote his widely cited study of Greece’s military campaign and debacle in Asia Minor (1919–1922) (Llewellyn Smith 1998). Llewellyn-Smith’s voluminous biography of Venizelos is well researched, relying on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, and complements existing accounts of the life of the Greek statesman (e.g., Stefanou 1977; Papadakis 2017). The author highlights and offers valuable insights into Venizelos’s charisma and elevated standing on Europe’s political scene. Venizelos was not by any means an ordinary man. As Llewellyn-Smith stresses (6), he pushed Greece’s boat “up against the currents of history” and “without him Greece would be different” and very much worse off. To make this point, the book thoroughly illuminates Venizelos’s political thought and mastery and traces his fateful friendship with David Lloyd George, which stimulated his ambitious foreign policies. A second volume will complete his story with the Great War, the postwar peace settlement, Greece’s Asia Minor campaign, and Venizelos’s later years in the office of prime minister. The book is divided into three parts and forty-three chapters. Part 1 provides the historical background to Venizelos’s early ca","PeriodicalId":43810,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN GREEK STUDIES","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134935204","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1353/mgs.2023.a908566
Marios Psaras
Reviewed by: ReFocus: The Films of Antoinetta Angelidi ed. by Penny Bouska and Sotiris Petridis Marios Psaras (bio) Penny Bouska and Sotiris Petridis, editors, ReFocus: The Films of Antoinetta Angelidi. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023. Pp. xiii + 238. 25 B&W images. Hardback £90.00. Penny Bouska and Sotiris Petridis’s edited volume The Films of Antoinetta Angelidi is the latest addition to the esteemed ReFocus: The International Directors Series from Edinburgh University Press. The series is dedicated to both renowned and overlooked film directors from world cinema, and its subjects range from Andrei Tarkovsky to Xavier Dolan, François Ozon, and Lucrecia Martel. Antoinetta Angelidi’s work has been discussed and examined in a number of substantial Greek works, including her own essays and interviews and the eponymous publication accompanying a retrospective of her work at the 46th Thessaloniki Film Festival (Theodoraki 2005). The present volume is, however, the first book-length study in English of Angelidi’s oeuvre, and it aims at establishing her within an illustrious lineup of international auteurs while also filling a gap in English-language literature on Greek cinema, which in recent years has mainly focused on the so-called Greek Weird Wave and its main representatives (e.g., Psaras 2016; Papanikolaou 2020; Falvey 2022). Through a fascinating anthology of meditative analyses and interpretations that bring a range of methodological and theoretical approaches to bear on Angelidi’s filmic—and other—work, the volume casts a spotlight on Greek cinema’s perhaps most idiosyncratic voice, one that has, in fact, largely influenced the subversive themes and forms of the Weird Wave. Such attention is only fair, given the rare complexity of the formal experimentation and thematic preoccupations found in Angelidi’s body of work. The book begins with a “Prolegomenon” by Penny Bouska, whose title alone anticipates the collection’s predilection for a deep dive into the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of Angelidi’s oeuvre. In this concise yet dense introduction, Bouska collects rich biographical information from private conversations, interviews, and the filmmaker’s personal archives, shedding light on the events and people who influenced Angelidi to become a pioneer of political avant-garde cinema and visual arts in Greece. From her politically [End Page 310] engaged parents, to the turbulent sociopolitical context of her student years, to her self-exile—to avoid arrest by the Greek junta regime—to France, where she was able to study alongside Christian Metz and Thierry Kuntzel, Angelidi’s formative years were characterized by an amalgam of theoretical, political, and artistic influences which established her as a unique artist and intellectual. Bouska pays attention to Angelidi’s theoretical work insofar as it illuminates the concepts that underlie her artistic output, especially her preoccupations with the formalist mechanism of de
{"title":"ReFocus: The Films of Antoinetta Angelidi ed. by Penny Bouska and Sotiris Petridis (review)","authors":"Marios Psaras","doi":"10.1353/mgs.2023.a908566","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mgs.2023.a908566","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: ReFocus: The Films of Antoinetta Angelidi ed. by Penny Bouska and Sotiris Petridis Marios Psaras (bio) Penny Bouska and Sotiris Petridis, editors, ReFocus: The Films of Antoinetta Angelidi. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023. Pp. xiii + 238. 25 B&W images. Hardback £90.00. Penny Bouska and Sotiris Petridis’s edited volume The Films of Antoinetta Angelidi is the latest addition to the esteemed ReFocus: The International Directors Series from Edinburgh University Press. The series is dedicated to both renowned and overlooked film directors from world cinema, and its subjects range from Andrei Tarkovsky to Xavier Dolan, François Ozon, and Lucrecia Martel. Antoinetta Angelidi’s work has been discussed and examined in a number of substantial Greek works, including her own essays and interviews and the eponymous publication accompanying a retrospective of her work at the 46th Thessaloniki Film Festival (Theodoraki 2005). The present volume is, however, the first book-length study in English of Angelidi’s oeuvre, and it aims at establishing her within an illustrious lineup of international auteurs while also filling a gap in English-language literature on Greek cinema, which in recent years has mainly focused on the so-called Greek Weird Wave and its main representatives (e.g., Psaras 2016; Papanikolaou 2020; Falvey 2022). Through a fascinating anthology of meditative analyses and interpretations that bring a range of methodological and theoretical approaches to bear on Angelidi’s filmic—and other—work, the volume casts a spotlight on Greek cinema’s perhaps most idiosyncratic voice, one that has, in fact, largely influenced the subversive themes and forms of the Weird Wave. Such attention is only fair, given the rare complexity of the formal experimentation and thematic preoccupations found in Angelidi’s body of work. The book begins with a “Prolegomenon” by Penny Bouska, whose title alone anticipates the collection’s predilection for a deep dive into the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of Angelidi’s oeuvre. In this concise yet dense introduction, Bouska collects rich biographical information from private conversations, interviews, and the filmmaker’s personal archives, shedding light on the events and people who influenced Angelidi to become a pioneer of political avant-garde cinema and visual arts in Greece. From her politically [End Page 310] engaged parents, to the turbulent sociopolitical context of her student years, to her self-exile—to avoid arrest by the Greek junta regime—to France, where she was able to study alongside Christian Metz and Thierry Kuntzel, Angelidi’s formative years were characterized by an amalgam of theoretical, political, and artistic influences which established her as a unique artist and intellectual. Bouska pays attention to Angelidi’s theoretical work insofar as it illuminates the concepts that underlie her artistic output, especially her preoccupations with the formalist mechanism of de","PeriodicalId":43810,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN GREEK STUDIES","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134933716","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1353/mgs.2023.a908568
Carla A. Simonini
{"title":"Redirecting Ethnic Singularity: Italian Americans and Greek Americans in Conversation ed. by Yiorgos Anagnostou, Yiorgos Kalogeras and Theodora Patrona (review)","authors":"Carla A. Simonini","doi":"10.1353/mgs.2023.a908568","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mgs.2023.a908568","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43810,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN GREEK STUDIES","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134934006","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1353/mgs.2023.a908563
Stathis N. Kalyvas
Reviewed by: The Improbable Heroine: Lela Karayanni and the British Secret Services in World War II Greece by Stylianos Perrakis Stathis N. Kalyvas (bio) Stylianos Perrakis, The Improbable Heroine: Lela Karayanni and the British Secret Services in World War II Greece. Munich: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2022. Pp. xix + 368. 17 illustrations. Hardcover €99.95. Perhaps the single greatest general misperception about the Greek resistance against the Axis occupation between 1941 and 1944 (and it is a scholarly misperception as well) is that it came in a single form, namely guerrilla war in the countryside—the Andartiko. Indeed, the expression “going up the mountain” has become a synonym for joining the resistance. Moreover, in popular and media discourse, and increasingly in collective memory as well, the wartime resistance is equated with the communist-controlled Greek Popular Liberation Army, or ELAS, and with its bearded leaders, the kapetanii. Of course, ELAS was the biggest guerrilla group, but it was just one among several. More importantly, however, resistance activity went beyond guerrilla warfare in the countryside in at least two ways. First, an initially spontaneous, unarmed, mass urban social movement sprang up, primarily in Athens. Although extremely important, it has now taken a back seat to the rural guerrillas. Second, a significant number of small groups emerged, acting in close liaison with British secret services in the Middle East and their Greek agents. Their activity was clandestine, their political orientation was either non-communist or anti-communist, their size was small, and their effect was out of proportion to their size. Today, these groups are all but forgotten—which is why Stylianos Perrakis’s biography of Lela Karayanni is so critical and timely. But who was Lela Karayanni? Here is the most striking fact about her: there was no way to tell, prior to the occupation, that this 43-year-old solidly middle-class wife of a successful Athenian pharmaceuticals and cosmetics merchant, mother of seven children with ages between four and twenty-four, would transform herself into the fearless leader of a spy network, willing to put her life, and that of her family, on the line. Perrakis ventures a plausible explanation for this astonishing transformation, but obviously there is no way to be totally certain about what caused it. Once Karayanni was engaged in the resistance, however, there was no turning back. She began by sheltering straggling British soldiers who were left behind during the hurried evacuation of the British army in April–May 1941 and helping them escape to the Middle East—the feat for which she is chiefly known today. As Perrakis documents, however, this was far from her main achievement. Nor was her main achievement her work, which stemmed from her experience with the British fugitives, in helping Greek Jews escape arrest and deportation—even though, thanks to Perrakis’s research and efforts, Karayanni is now recogni
{"title":"The Improbable Heroine: Lela Karayanni and the British Secret Services in World War II Greece by Stylianos Perrakis (review)","authors":"Stathis N. Kalyvas","doi":"10.1353/mgs.2023.a908563","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mgs.2023.a908563","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Improbable Heroine: Lela Karayanni and the British Secret Services in World War II Greece by Stylianos Perrakis Stathis N. Kalyvas (bio) Stylianos Perrakis, The Improbable Heroine: Lela Karayanni and the British Secret Services in World War II Greece. Munich: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2022. Pp. xix + 368. 17 illustrations. Hardcover €99.95. Perhaps the single greatest general misperception about the Greek resistance against the Axis occupation between 1941 and 1944 (and it is a scholarly misperception as well) is that it came in a single form, namely guerrilla war in the countryside—the Andartiko. Indeed, the expression “going up the mountain” has become a synonym for joining the resistance. Moreover, in popular and media discourse, and increasingly in collective memory as well, the wartime resistance is equated with the communist-controlled Greek Popular Liberation Army, or ELAS, and with its bearded leaders, the kapetanii. Of course, ELAS was the biggest guerrilla group, but it was just one among several. More importantly, however, resistance activity went beyond guerrilla warfare in the countryside in at least two ways. First, an initially spontaneous, unarmed, mass urban social movement sprang up, primarily in Athens. Although extremely important, it has now taken a back seat to the rural guerrillas. Second, a significant number of small groups emerged, acting in close liaison with British secret services in the Middle East and their Greek agents. Their activity was clandestine, their political orientation was either non-communist or anti-communist, their size was small, and their effect was out of proportion to their size. Today, these groups are all but forgotten—which is why Stylianos Perrakis’s biography of Lela Karayanni is so critical and timely. But who was Lela Karayanni? Here is the most striking fact about her: there was no way to tell, prior to the occupation, that this 43-year-old solidly middle-class wife of a successful Athenian pharmaceuticals and cosmetics merchant, mother of seven children with ages between four and twenty-four, would transform herself into the fearless leader of a spy network, willing to put her life, and that of her family, on the line. Perrakis ventures a plausible explanation for this astonishing transformation, but obviously there is no way to be totally certain about what caused it. Once Karayanni was engaged in the resistance, however, there was no turning back. She began by sheltering straggling British soldiers who were left behind during the hurried evacuation of the British army in April–May 1941 and helping them escape to the Middle East—the feat for which she is chiefly known today. As Perrakis documents, however, this was far from her main achievement. Nor was her main achievement her work, which stemmed from her experience with the British fugitives, in helping Greek Jews escape arrest and deportation—even though, thanks to Perrakis’s research and efforts, Karayanni is now recogni","PeriodicalId":43810,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN GREEK STUDIES","volume":"153 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134935015","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：