Orthokostá

by Thanassis Valtinos

  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 Orthokostá, each additional telling either contradicting an earlier account or shedding new light on the events in question.

  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 Orthokostá was first published, was all the more shocking for having been repressed for fifty years as taboo subject matter.

  In practical terms, Orthokostá is steeped in references to village customs and linguistic constructions which imbue the narratives with both local color and a sense of verisimilitude. In the original this is masterfully done through Valtinos’s frequent citing and trademark cataloguing of local-sounding names that impart an immediate ring of familiarity to the Greek text, as well as an unmistakable affinity with the epic tradition. To the English-speaking reader, however, Greek proper names are anything but familiar. We have resisted Anglicizing these names (Georgia for Yeorghía, for example) in the interest of preserving the Greekness at the core of Orthokostá. We have also tried to make the names and proper names less difficult to pronounce by accenting those that are not already familiar to English-speaking readers and by generally favoring a more phonetic spelling system than that dictated by tradition. Whether phonetic or traditional or a mix of both, individual names are consistently transliterated throughout the novel.

  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 Orthokostá, nicknames, diminutives, compound names, and first or last names with suffixes added are all cases in point. Suffixes added onto names in order to denote ownership (as in “Makréka,” meaning the house, houses, neighborhood, property, or land of the Makrís family) or relationship (as in “Sokrátaina,” meaning the wife, daughter, or mother of Sokrátis) are typical examples of this. We have dealt with these on a case-by-case basis, sometimes through free translation or interpretive interventions in the text itself and sometimes through explanatory notes.

  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 Orthokostá and the equivalent constructions in American English. To this end we have flavored our translation with the occasional recognizably rural but not markedly regional expression meant to transpose some of the more common village speaking patterns of the Greek. At the same time we have been careful not to make the villagers in Orthokostá sound too much like their Midwestern American counterparts, as they must first and foremost come across to the English-speaking reader as Greek villagers living in Greece.

  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 Orthokostá, and indeed of Valtinos’s work in general. To simply index the realist texture of the novel by including excessive biographical or sociopolitical background in the notes would instantly lower the entire work to the status of a poorly researched chronicle. This would be a disservice to the literary dimension of the book and its primary goal of representing the spontaneity and alternating modes of the original accounts: the transcriptions from the Greek killing fields.

  NOTES

  “Prologue”

  1. Mount Malevós: 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, Orthokostá, though dedicated to the Dormition of the Virgin, which is nationally celebrated on August 15, performs its most solemn festivities, or Apódosis, on August 23, nine days later.

  3. Tsakoniá: Area in the southeastern Peloponnese made up of villages such as Sítaina, Prastós, and Leonídio, in which Tsakónikan, 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 vigila) in the village of Másklina; it was probably built between 1205 and 1432 in the Frankish-occupied Peloponnese.

  2. Lioú: The wife of Liás (in this case Liás Tsioúlos). In the provinces masculine first names are often used in their possessive form to denote a man’s wife or mother.

  Chapter 2

  1. Ayiasofiá: Local pronunciation of Ayía Sofía (Saint Sophia), a village in the Arcadia prefecture.

  2. Másklina (also known as Eleohóri): A village near the border between the Arcadia and Argolis prefectures. German troops were stationed there at the time the novel takes place.

  3. Velissaróyiannis: A local variant for the name Yiánnis Velissáris. 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, Kalabakóyiannis for Yiánnis Kalabákas; Stavróyiannis for Yiánnis Stávrou (chap. 6); Mavroyiórghis for Yiórgos Mávros (chap. 7); Mavróyiannis for Yiánnis Mávros (chap. 36); and Havdotóyiannis for Yiánnis Havdótos (chap. 36).

  4. Ayiopétro: Local way of referring to Ayios Pétros (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. Antídoron: 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. Kapetánios, Kapetán (voc.): The equivalent of a captain in the Communist Resistance army.

  Chapter 3

  1. Kapetanaíoi: Plural of kapetánios.

  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. Óhi (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. Dionýsius Papadóngonas (1888–1944): A politically conservative major general in charge of the Security Battalions in the Peloponnese.

  3. Prophítis Ilías: 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 Tsolákoglou (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, Tsolákoglou appointed Major General George Bákos (1892–1945) minister of military affairs.

  5. Aris Velouhiótis (1905–1945): Born Thanásis Kláras, he was the leader of the ELAS forces during the Occupation.

  6. KKE: The Greek Communist Party (Κομμουνιστικό Κόμμα Ελλάδας), founded in 1918.

  7. Várkiza Treaty: On February 12, 1945, representatives of the Nikólaos Plastíras government and EAM-ELAS representatives of the Communist Party of Greece met in the coastal town of Várkiza, 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 Thessaloníki.

  8. Antónis Katsantónis (1785–1808): A legendary guerrilla leader who fought against Turkish occupation of prerevolutionary Greece.

  9. Grigóris Soúrlas: 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 Tsaldáris 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. Litóchoro and Pontokerasiá: On March 30, 1946, thirty-three leftists attacked a gendarmes station in the town of Litóchoro in the prefecture of Piería. On June 5 another group attacked a Greek Army company in the town of Pontokerasiá in Kilkís. These two incidents are generally considered the beginning of the Greek Civil War.

  12. Haroúlis: Diminutive of Harís.

  13. Napoléon Zérvas (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, Zérvas openly accused EAM-ELAS of striving to impose a Soviet-style government in Greece following the end of the Occupation.

  14. Athanásios Yiannakópoulos: An infantry colonel who, along with army officers Telémahos Vrettákos, Panayótis Katsaréas, and Stámos Triantafýllis, formed a Resistance group that eventually ceded power to ELAS; an agreement to this effect was signed by Yiannakópoulos.

  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. Metaxourgheío: 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. Voúlis: Short form of Paraskevoúlis, the diminutive of Paraskevás.

  Chapter 6

  1. “He saw her as a bride”: Dreaming of a bride is considered a bad omen in Greek folklore.

  2. Panayótis Stoúpas (1894–1944): Army major and commander of anti-Communist Security Battalion units.

  3. Ayiórghis: Local way of referring to the village of Ayios Yiórghios (Saint George) in the Argolis prefecture.

  4. Gaïdoúras: Nickname derived from gaïdoúra, a she-donkey, a jenny.

  5. Koumbároi: Plural of koumbáros (m.) or koumbára (f.), a person one has close ties with by having been mutual best men or maids of honor at each other’s weddings; koumbároi also denotes people who were godparents at each other’s children’s christenings.

  Chapter 7

  1. Ioánnis Metaxás (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 Maniadákis (1893–1973): Chief of the State Security Police under Ioánnis Metaxás.

  3. Castor oil: Castor oil was used to torture prisoners; it causes diarrhea and rapid dehydration.

  4. Sokrátaina: In local parlance, the wife of Sokrátis. 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 Mavroyiórgaina (the wife of Mavroyiórghis) and Mákraina (a female member of the Makrís family), and Kóstaina (the wife of Kóstas) in chapter 11.

  5. Yiórghis: A variant of the common first name Yiórgos.

  6. Petroú: The wife of Pétros (Pétros Tatoúlis, father of Mihális).

  7. Saint Paraskeví: 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. Ayiánnis: Local variant for Ayios Yiánnis (Saint John), a village in the Argolis prefecture. “Apáno” 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. Mýloi: District on the western outskirts of Athens whose name suggests industrial grain mills.

  11. Léla Karayiánnis (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. Kifisiá: Verdant, posh suburb north of Athens.

  13. Saltadórissa: From the Italian verb saltare, “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 a
ny 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. Mýloi: 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 Grívas 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 Grívas himself. Those wearing the X insignia on their berets or armbands were called Heétes.