Yanni Kotsonis's Reading List

"This is a novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, who is the serious modern Greek novelist. If you’re in Greece on holiday, and you have good lighting at night and no young children, this is the book to read. It’s thought-provoking and rich in descriptions. It recreates the moment of the Cretan revolution, which came later. There was a Muslim population on Crete, all of it Greek speaking, none of whom had ever been to what today we call Turkey. Kazantzakis appreciates that the Greeks have a national cause, but also that the people they’re calling Turks, the Muslims, are very human. Everyone can see what the end is going to be, that these people are going to be expelled. He is writing about people who do not have a future. So it’s heroic and also tragic, both at the same time. The story centers around the friendship of two people—a Greek community leader, who is a sort of bandit, and one of the Ottoman rulers. They had been friends, but slowly the friendship becomes impossible, because they cannot get past these mass mobilizations on both sides. Most people will have heard of Kazantzakis’s novel, Zorba the Gree k, even if they don’t know that he’s the one who wrote it. There are all the taverns named after it, there is the movie—have you seen it? It’s really good. It’s not dumb at all. It’s with Alan Bates, Anthony Quinn and Irina Papas. It’s a serious film in black and white. But Kazantzakis also wrote other books. He had this empathy toward the people who he knew were doomed. He narrated their doom and the victory of the Christians (who now called themselves Greeks). I like that subtlety, that ambiguity. He is describing for a later period what I’m trying to capture for the earlier period. This mix of, ‘Yes, the nation gives us this righteousness. It gives us rights, it gives us immunities, all these things.’ But in this particular circumstance, it came at a tremendous human cost. The nation does both things, it creates and it effaces, and Kazantzakis captured that. It happened all up and down the Balkans and across Anatolia. This process began in the 1820s and spread to the rest of the Balkans and then, later on, to Crete. It was finally resolved by the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, whereby the Christian populations of all these territories rose up against the Ottomans, created independent states that were explicitly Christian, and did away, almost everywhere, with their Muslim populations. They sent them ‘home’ to places they had never been, speaking languages they didn’t know, to what was going to become Turkey. This was the model for all the Balkan states, with some exceptions. Kosovo is still problematic today, as is Sarajevo. There was also a steady stream of Bulgarians leaving and going to Turkey, because they had no place else to go. The big exception was Albania, which some people treat as if it’s not really a model for anything—because of poverty, corruption etc. But it’s the one place in the Balkans that maintained its multi-confessional character: Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Muslims. And it does so to this day, with relative success compared to other models. One should look more carefully at Albania, I think. Later on, in his other books, Kazantzakis has something to say about what happens up north, in Salonica, in what the Greeks call Macedonia. It’s a 100-year process, and it ends with Turkey itself. It’s the Turks who overthrow the archaic Ottoman Empire to create a national republic, modern Turkey. To do this, they used the Greek model of 1821, except in reverse. In 1922, after a failed Greek expedition to capture territory, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk mobilized the Muslim population against the Christians, expelling the Greek army, and forcing a population exchange whereby the Christians all had to leave, including the surviving Armenians, most of whom had already been killed off in 1915 . The terms of this treaty were that if you were a Christian, you had to go, no matter what your role had been. So 1.5 million people left, and there was a smaller number who came in the other direction. That was the big population exchange of 1923. Kazantzakis is describing something that was happening everywhere. As I said, the Turkish Revolution and the Anatolian war of 1922-3 were, in some ways, a culmination of the process begun by the Greeks in 1821—except now they’re the victims. Does that make sense? I’m in a lot of trouble."

"So on this imaginary trip to Greece, if you have young children and you’re mainly on the beach, this is the book to read. You can read a chapter at a time, a page at a time, put it down and pick it up. It’s your classic whodunnit detective story. The protagonist is a detective who is normally investigating a series of murders. His job is to figure out who’s doing it and uncover the context. Nearly every time, it’s something to do with modern Greek society, with its neoliberal elements, that’s uncovered in the process of trying to solve the crimes. Che Committed Suicide is one of his earlier ones and was very successful (‘Che’ refers to Che Guevara). For complicated reasons, a series of highly successful entrepreneurs are forced to commit suicide in public. It’s a form of blackmail, and he doesn’t know why. [SPOILER ALERT]. It turns out that they had all been left-wingers in the 70s. They’d been at the forefront of overthrowing the junta, demonstrating against the police state, etc. Then, through the left, they made their way into the higher echelons of society. They made lots of money, threw away their morals, and sacrificed their comrades and society as a whole in order to gorge on the wealth of Greek society at the expense of everybody else. These former left-wing radicals are now entrepreneurs who eat sushi and things like that. The detective is very Greek and lower middle class. He likes his food. He has a traditional marriage with his wife, with the usual back and forth. He’s completely dedicated to his daughter. With his traditional Greek eye, he uncovers this new society that’s unfolding around him. Later on, Petros Markaris did another series about the economic crisis, which was catastrophic for Greece. All of his books have a tendency to be about uncovering something rotten in the socioeconomics of modern society. In his case, it’s about Greece, but it’s pretty much recognizable to anybody."

"William St Clair decided he was going to write about the ‘philhellenes,’ the people who flocked to Greece in order to aid with the Greek Revolution and the war of independence. They usually met with terrible fates, but they’re considered to be heroes both in Greece and in Europe in general. The French, the British, the Germans, the Italians, will all say, ‘Yes, we too contributed to your revolution.’ But as William St Clair began to do his research, he discovered the things I’ve been telling you about: the mass violence, what happened to these poor philhellenes, who arrived thinking they were going to see people in togas and sandals standing for lofty philosophical ideals. What they found it what you’d expect to find—peasants, bandits, landowners, tax collectors, etc. It was pretty prosaic stuff and ugly too. St Clair was outraged by this saying, ‘This is not at all what we were told it was!’ And he describes in graphic detail the violence, the betrayals, the disillusionment. It was a visceral reaction. He was right to write this book. It was on the bookshelf of just about every educated Greek when it came out. It was hardly recognized at all in public but everyone knew it and read it. There’s this tendency to have one public voice and one private voice. My problem is that my private voice became my public voice, but that’s another story. That Greece Might Still Be Free is very good at opening up this view, and it did for me as well. What he wasn’t good at doing—and couldn’t because it was too soon—was to say why. Why did this take place? In his descriptions, what it comes down to is that these were nasty types. OK, maybe they’re not nice people but still, there has to be more of an explanation… I pay tribute to William St Clair with this recommendation. He did a good job at the time, and now we can take it further and ask, ‘How do you explain this?’ It might be a bit heavy for the beach. Don’t read it aloud to your children because they’ll be crying at the end of it. But it’s a very good book."

"Yes, and even a bit before. Clogg is a British intellectual and a very good historian. He’s considered the ‘professor father’ of historians of Greece, in Britain and even abroad, including in Greece itself. He’s very well respected and probably deserves even more respect than he gets, particularly in Greece. Clogg has a good feel for Greece without the temples. He writes about daily life and the laboring poor alongside the great historical events. It’s a straightforward, unadorned narration of modern Greek history, with all the major events stopping along the way to consider what it was like to live at that time, depending on what class or region you came from. He has a very good eye for that, and it’s a very enjoyable read. This one I would take to the beach, definitely. It’s very short. This is his concise history. He’s written other histories, but this is the short one. He’s a good historian and it’s a good read. He’s also a very nice man, which sometimes happens. So if you’re in Greece, for the first, second, third time, and you want a general sense of where you are in this place, this book would be the one to read. The basic geopolitical outline is that Greece begins as a little speck which includes what is today the Peloponnese, the area north of it up to around Athens, and then some of the islands. The Ionian islands are British. The rest is Ottoman Empire. That Greece was formed in that spot was an accident. Nobody knew where Greece was supposed to be because the Greeks were everywhere. The Greek Revolution actually began in what is today Romania and failed. It took hold, though, in the south. So most story of what happened to Greece after that, over the next 90 years, would be how it took on its present form as a sort of irredentism. There were diplomatic arrangements that gave them part of central Greece, Thessaly. There was a new king in the 1860s. The British gifted him the Ionian islands, including Corfu, and that became part of Greece as well. Then there were a series of wars. They failed in the 1890s but were successful in 1912-1913 when Greece conquered the territory that it has today, with some minor exceptions that were added later. The other Balkan states also took on their present form, ending up with the big ones like Yugoslavia, Romania and Bulgaria, etc. There were some squabbles over Thrace. This was when the Ottomans were finally expelled from Europe, except for the sliver of land in Thrace near Istanbul. The next big event was the belief among a lot of Greeks and Greek politicians that it shouldn’t stop there and that Hellenism, going back to ancient times, went as far as the Black Sea and all the way towards the Caucasus, including what is today Georgia. After the Ottomans were defeated in World War I, there were a series of diplomatic manoeuvres whereby the British and the French countenanced a Greek presence in what would become Turkey. They marched all the way to Ankara to take over this territory and annex it to Greece. It’s at this point that Mustafa Kemal found a way to mobilize the population into a Turkish nation, expelled the Greeks, and the new borders were then established. That’s called the ‘Great Catastrophe’ here in Greece. Then there was the arrival of the refugees. If you go to any Greek city, you’ll see neighbourhoods called new this and new that—new Smyrna, new Ionia, new Philadelphia. These were all refugee neighborhoods. So the neighborhood surrounding the center of Athens was all refugees. Whenever you see a football team founded around the same period, and they have the two-headed eagle as their emblem, again it’s refugees. Some of them still call themselves the Athletic Union of Constantinople. Nearly every family in Greece has some refugee background. So that was the next wave, assimilating this population as Greeks, and the end of the idea of a greater Greece. The next events were fascism, the Great Depression, and then World War Two, the invasion and occupation of Greece by Germany. After the Greeks defeated Italy, the Germans then came down and occupied the country, which was a time of famine followed by a civil war. There was a continuum of violence from around 1940 until 1949, when the nationalist Greek government defeated the communists and the left, and Greece became capitalist, authoritarian and joined NATO. There was a great burst of economic development that lasted all the way to the 1970s, when Greece went into a slump the way that most of the world did. Greece deindustrializes and becomes this country of tourism, of agriculture and agricultural exports. It joins the EU, and there is massive development. The next big moment, I would say, was the economic crisis of 2015 in particular, which impoverished the country, stripping away about 25% of GDP, and casting 25% of the population into unemployment in the name of…we still don’t know what. We still don’t know why. It was a punishment, but there was no material gain for anybody. The country is still suffering today. We like to come to Greece. We go to the taverns, but take a look at the waiter who’s running around frantically to keep his job serving customers, getting paid a wage that would not be acceptable in Britain. We’re still in that moment now."

"Beaton is another historian of modern Greece. He’s also written about global Greece—Greeks, wherever they might be found. He’s very smart and a very good historian. I think he’s retired now. What surprised me about this book is that there was still more to say about Byron. I couldn’t believe it! I thought, ‘Here we go again, more Byron. As if we didn’t have enough portraits, books, poetry, biographies, etc.’ Beaton did something different. He stripped Byron of our assumptions that he belonged in Greece and would die in Greece for Greek liberty, and asked what he was doing before. I don’t know whether Beaton would agree, but the way I understand what he’s writing, Byron was experiencing some sort of midlife crisis and ennui. Byron’s thinking, ‘I’ve inherited now, I’ve had a very good sex life with both genders. I’ve lived in Italy. I’ve met the Shelleys. My body is not what it used to be. Now what?’ Byron is a certain kind of liberal. He begins to contemplate going to Spain, where there’s a revolution. He thinks about Italy, which also has revolutions going on. He wants adventure. He wants to be alive again. He wants to feel and be seen as vital. In the end, he decides on Greece because of its Classical past. As Beaton says, ancient Greece was always Greece’s trump card. So Byron dons the very colorful uniforms—both European military and Greek traditional, as he understands them—and goes to what will become modern Greece. He begins to fund factions of the revolution as his way of becoming relevant and feeling masculine again. Beaton narrates this very well, both as a historian and as a writer. It’s a very good read. Byron had a lot of money, both his own funds, because he’d inherited his wealth from Scotland, and also money from a loan that had been put together in the London bond market to fund the Greek Revolution. But nobody knew who the Greek government was, because they were all killing each other. So Byron arrived as the emissary and made the decision to give the money to anyone except the Peloponnesian landowners. He funded them with money, which to them was unprecedented, spectacular and unimaginable. They then used this money to hire mercenaries to crush the old elites and tip the balance of the Greek Revolution. Usually, we think that Byron came to help the Greeks. But he decided who the Greeks were and then gave them spectacular sums of money to do it. Then he died, as you would expect from a Romantic poet. That’s what Beaton is getting at. It was something really specific. It wasn’t just Greece, it was that Greece."