Voglis, Polymeris. 2002. Becoming a Subject: Political Prisoners During the Greek Civil War. New York: Berghan Books.
- Chapter 5. 1946–1949: Emphýlios
- » Poems Were Impaled on the Barbed Wire
Chapter 5. 1946–1949: Emphýlios
Poems Were Impaled on the Barbed Wire
Soldiers started being taken to Makrónisos in January 1947, after being briefly detained in the temporary encampment at Porto Rafti, the port of Markopoulo, to the east of Athens, by the new airport. Makrónisos is better known than Yáros. First of all, it was established by a specific act of Parliament, whereas the establishment of Yáros was unacknowledged and because of that, I would argue, more horrific. It was a secret that everybody knew and no one was at liberty to articulate. Makrónisos has also been more extensively analyzed. Conferences have been organized, papers have been written, dissertations have been directed and defended, and, more importantly, many testimonials, Communist Party publications, and oral histories have been published about Makrónisos. There is no question that Makrónisos had more detainees and lasted longer. While the three camps (Yáros, Makrónisos, and Trikeri) were established simultaneously in 1947, Makrónisos was continuously used until 1958. Until 1950, once they had signed dēlôseis prisoners from Yioúra were taken to Makrónisos, and from there some of them were sent to the front to fight against the Communist army. After 1950, some prisoners from Makrónisos, primarily conscripts who had not signed dēlôseis before the time of their military service was over (so had not been sent to the front) were sent to Yioúra. Yáros was emptied in 1953 and used again briefly in 1954. In 1955 it was reinstituted by a royal decree that reactivated decree 1137/1942, issued during the occupation, and was used for a few exiles in 1958 until 1963, when it was emptied. It was opened again by the junta in 1967 and in 1973 to 1974.
But Makrónisos is also the more spectacular of the camps, with its complexity, its structures, its ruins, its proximity to Athens, and its literary production. What later became post–civil-war literature was initially produced on Makrónisos. Yiannis Ritsos, Aris Alexandrou, Tasos Leivaditis, Titos Patrikios, and Mikis Theodorakis wrote poems there. Often they committed these to memory, but occasionally they scrawled them on paper, which was almost impossible to find, and hid them in bottles or in crevices, trying to save them from the raids of the Military Police. Later, after the camps had been closed down, novelists wrote novels and short stories that, along with the poems, completely changed the literary landscape of Greece.
Makrónisos is a long island, 5 square kilometers in all, 10 kilometers from north to south (hence its name), and 500 meters at its widest point, from east to west. It is located off the coast of Attica, across the water from Lavrion, on the thirty-seventh parallel. Its western flank looks at Athens; its eastern flank looks at Kea (Tzia). Between Makrónisos and Tzia sank the Britannic, sister ship to the Titanic. It is a dry island, although not as dry as Yáros, given that it has two small springs. Its terrain is not as precipitous, even though its highest peak is at 281 meters. It is an island of ravines and slopes, full of poisonous laurels, myrtle bushes, low-lying junipers, and the ubiquitous afánes (“tumbleweed”). It has five natural coves on its western flank, facing Athens, but its eastern flank is completely inaccessible. The two springs are located on this inaccessible eastern flank, which faces the island of Tzia.
In antiquity Makrónisos was named Helene, after Helen of Sparta (or Helen of Troy, depending on one's position in history), because that is where, legend has it, Helen and Paris found refuge after the fall of Troy, as Pausanias mentions in his Attika. The ancient ruins found on the island indicate that in antiquity it was used as a sacred place of worship, without permanent residents. Some itinerant shepherds occasionally brought their goats to the island, and at the end of the First Balkan War, in 1912, a group of Turkish prisoners of war ill with cholera and tuberculosis were abandoned there. Russian and “undesirable” Greek soldiers were brought there in 1922, as were briefly, in 1929, refugees from the Asia Minor expedition. During the war the Germans established watch towers there.
When established as a place of exile and internment in 1947, Makrónisos had a single purpose: to reeducate Greek Leftists into the principles of nationalism (ethnikophosyne) and Christianity and to obtain from them written declarations renouncing communism and submitting to legality, the famous dēlôseis nomimofrosynis. From 1947 to 1958, over one hundred thousand people were deported and tortured on Makrónisos, Yáros, and Trikeri before being transferred to exile on the other “small islands” or dying. As Polymeris Voglis has convincingly argued, the islands constituted a space where new political subjects were systematically produced by the postwar governments Voglis 2002). This process of reformulating political subjects rested upon a form of governmentality convinced that populations (in this case, the population of Greek Leftists and dissidents) could be inscribed and reinscribed, almost ad infinitum, in new subjective positions through a process of reeducation and rehabilitation.
The distance between Makrónisos and Yáros is significant and is made even more so by the roughness of the seas. Communication between detainees in the two places was impossible. The prisoners of Yioúra knew about Makrónisos, so much so that in the Memorandum of 1950/51 Yáros is described as “the largest prison for democratic detainees and the most frightful place of annihilation after Makrónisos.” But the same cannot be said of the detainees of Makrónisos—or, better, the detainees of Makrónisos either knew very little of the conditions on Yioúra (as one of my interlocutors who had spent time on Ikaria, Makrónisos, and Ai-Stratis said when I asked him about this) or those who were sent to Yioúra after 1950 thought of it as “summer camp” (as another of my interlocutors said, a person who had been in exile starting in 1937 under Metaxas, had participated in the Resistance, had been jailed in the Middle East, and had been sent to Makrónisos, from there to Yioúra, and from there to Ai-Stratis before being released in 1963). Whatever Yioúra was, a “summer camp” it was not. The accounts in the Memorandum (Petris 1984), Nenedakis 1964, Mahairas 1999, and in interviews I have conducted with prisoners who were held on Yioúra between 1947 and 1950 all mention a dreaded place where torture was a technology of manufacturing compliance and submission.
1984. Yioúra: Hypomnema Kratoumenon Pros ton Hypourgo Dikaiosynes tes Kyverneseos Plastera. (Yioúra: Memorandum of the Detainees to the Minister of Justice of the Plasteras Government)., ed. Yiorgos Petris Athens: Ekdoseis Gnosi.
Nenedakis, Andreas. 1964. Apagoreuetai: To Hemerologio tes Yiouras (It Is Forbidden: The Yioúra Diary). Athens: Themelio.
Mahairas, Evaggelos. 1999. Piso apo to Galanoleuko Parapetasma: Makrónisos, Yioúra, ki alla Katerga (Behind the Blue-and-White Screens: Makrónisos, Yioúra, and Other Dungeons). Ed. . Introd., ed. Aggelos Sideratos, and Giorgos Petropoulos Athens: Ekdoseis Proskenio.
The composer Mikis Theodorakis, who was detained on Makrónisos, has said that the legendary wind there would pick up the papers on which his poems were written, hurl them around, and impale them on the barbed wire that separated the cage of the incorrigibles from the rest of the prisoners.
When I tried to find out whether anyone in Markopoulo (the main town near Porto Rafti, where the first encampment of detained soldiers was set up before they were moved to Makrónisos) knew anything about this temporary encampment, not only did no one seem to remember, but no one seemed even to know about this fact. It might have been kept a secret by the army (which is doubtful but not impossible), or it might have been erased from local memory (which is possible but not necessary). After repeated inquiries, Stamates Methenites found a trace of memory in someone in Markopoulo and published it in 2007. There was, however, one episode that almost everyone in the town knew and remembered very well (it was also more recent, having happened early in 2000). A bakery had opened on the edge of the town sometime at the beginning of the sixties, owned by a man from the Ionian islands. After a few years, this man opened a second bakery closer to the port at Porto Rafti. “One day,” my friend Kostes said, “there was a big commotion at the first bakery. They had to call the police and then an ambulance because a customer who had gone in to buy bread had seen the owner and had recognized him as 'his AM.' He got so enraged that he beat him to pulp, so bad that he had to be taken away in an ambulance.” “His AM” means his torturer on Makrónisos.
One of the most elaborate projects of a mimesis of antiquity was undertaken on Makrónisos, where the administration of the island required “recovered” soldiers to build small-scale replicas of famous structures of antiquity, such as the Parthenon, the Helakleion, and a number of statues. The high level of craftsmanship that went into this project testifies to the many artists who had been arrested as Communists, Leftists, or suspected Leftists. When one high-ranking visitor to the island commented to Director Vassilopoulos on the quality of the structures, Vassilopoulos replied that “all Greek intelligentsia” had passed through Makrónisos. The weight of antiquity in the modern Greek imaginary cannot be overestimated. It is so great that the declaration issued by the Society of Aesthetic Saboteurs of Antiquities (Syndesmos Aisthitikon Sampoter Archaiotiton) on November 18, 1944, calling for the destruction of the Parthenon, can be taken as only half serious. The declaration stated: “The blowing up and complete razing of the Parthenon is designated as our first act of destruction, because it has, literally, drowned us.” The declaration was signed by Yiorgos Makris, and the society comprised himself and a few of his friends, among whom was the later Minister Anastasios Peponis (quoted in Daloukas 2005: 64). The ruins of the replicas, ruins of ruins, remained on Makrónisos for a few years after the camp had been abandoned, and their foundations can still be seen. On the project of the replicas, see Hamilakis 2002.
On the literary production of and on Makrónisos, see Papatheodorou 2000 and Argyriou 2000.
“Makrónisos (ancient Helene or Kranae) Island belongs to the township of Korresia, of the Kea island, of the prefecture of Cyclades. Its 38 inhabitants of the 1928 census, the 32 of the 1940 census, and the 12 of the 1961 census refer to the shepherds seasonally established there from neighboring Kea, or fishermen, i.e. non-permanent residents. At the 1951 census it numbered 4,484 residents, still non-permanent ones. At a certain time it had reached the number of 10,000, primarily detainees and confined soldiers and civilians” (Greek edition of Papyros-Larousse, 1964).
Approaching Makrónisos. On the slope to the right is the open-air church of Hagios Antonios. The long white building in the center of the photograph is the main bakery of the camp. The occasion of the visit was a two-day concert of the music of Mikis Theodorakis on the poetry of Yiannis Ritsos. Ritsos and Theodorakis were detained on Makrónisos for a year (1949–50), within months of each other. Theodorakis was brought to Makrónisos from exile on the island of Ikaria, Ritsos from exile on the island of Lemnos. Theodorakis was so brutally tortured on Makrónisos that he had to be taken to Military Hospital 401 in Athens. He suffered broken bones throughout his body and a dislocated jaw. After several weeks at the hospital, he was sent back to Makrónisos. After more torture (and the collapse of DSE on August 29, 1949) his father managed to have him released and took him to Crete. For ten years after Makrónisos, he would wake up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat and shivering. In the summer of 2004, at an interview given to the Greek newspaper , he mentioned that Makrónisos still sends shivers down his spine. I watched as the police helped him leave the theater after the recital, amidst red revolving police lights and a convoy of police cars. I wondered how he must have felt at that moment, his first time back on Makrónisos since 1950, being taken away from the island again by the police. The question was answered the next day when a photograph of him taken during the recital was published in the newspapers—the face of a person in deep pain. The concert was organized by the Athens Festival and took place at various sites throughout Greece, including the exile islands Samos, Lemnos, Ai-Stratis, Lesvos, Leros, and Ikaria. The Athens Festival had arranged for transport buses from the small harbor of the cove of the First Battalion, where the ferry docked, to the theater of the Second Battalion. These are the buses visible in the photograph. Photograph by the author.
Part of the classical structures on Makrónisos, or, better said, of what was thought to be classical. The only connection to classicism that this bas relief has is through the classical sensibilities of fascist and Nazi aesthetics. At the top of the photograph is a watch tower. Photograph by the author.
The exterior of the sanctuary of the chapel of Aghios Georgios of the Second Battalion. The church was built by the detainees with whatever materials could be found, produced, and engineered on the island. Both the exterior and the interior of the church are plastered and whitewashed. Whitewashing requires fiber to stay on the plaster, but fiber could not be found on the island. The evening of the recital a tall Makronisiotes, sitting on the bench next to me, patted his still-thick hair and said, “Do you see this hair? When we needed hair for the whitewash and none could be found, the lieutenant ordered us all shorn and used our hair for binding.” Photograph by the author.
Part of the Second Battalion structures. Some of these structures were first erected for the Turkish POWs in 1912. Photograph by the author.
Looking up the hill toward the main road that connected all the battalions and coves. The low vegetation is afàna (akin to sagebrush). The detainees had to clear out the area by hand and level the slope in order to build the structures or fix their tents. Without interference from humans, afàna takes over parts of the island. Photograph by the author.
One of the arched entrances to the Second Battalion. Photograph by the author.
The ruined administrative buildings of the Second Battalion. All the buildings on Makrónisos had wooden beams and roofs, but the wood was plundered after the camp was abandoned. The photograph is taken at the end of the recital, August 30, 2003.
The authors of the “Memorandum” coined a new word to denote Yáros and Makrónisos as places of existence: exontōtêrion. It conjures up the horror of the total annihilation of the other on the level of existence as being (ōn) (Petris 1984: 66 [18]).