Yioúra (either in the feminine, hē Yioúra, or in the neuter plural, ta Yioúra) is the name used by the interned, their families, and anyone who had any connection to anyone interned on the island. Its official name is Yáros, which is also the name used by everyone during the last phase of internment there, during the junta. I use both names here: Yioúra largely for the first period of internment and Yáros for the second. It is not entirely clear why the generation of the junta detainees used the official name of the island, but one can determine, with a great degree of certainty, whether a title of an article or a book by one of the actors refers to the first or the second period depending on which name is used. All books that come from the first period use Yioúra, such as the 1950/1951 Yioúra Hypomnema Kratoumenon Pros ton Hypourgo Dikaiosynes tes Kyverneses Plastera (Yioúra Memorandum of the Detainees to the Minister of Justice of the Plasteras Government), sent to the government to expose the conditions of detention on the island; the 1952 Yioúra Matōménē Vivlos (Yioúra Bloodied Bible [or Book]); the 1964 Apagorevetai: To Hēmerológio tēs Yioúras (Forbidden: The Diary of Yioúra), by Andreas Nenedakis; the 2005 Yioúra “To Áparto Kastro” ston Emphýlio kai tēn Junta (Yioúra “The Indomitable Castle” in the Civil War and the Junta), by Demetres Manousos. The 1969 book by Tzavalás Karousos about his detention there during the junta is entitled Yáros, as is the photographic album put together immediately after the fall of the junta.
I can't remember now when I learned who this man, Mr. Kosmás, was, but he continued to come around, once a month, selling books. At some point, though, during the junta, I came to know that Mr. Kosmás, the man selling books, like many other men selling books in the evening, “had been at Yioúra,” where my Uncle Stéphanos also had been. Although at the time we did not really talk about it as a common encounter in our lives (although maybe the adults did), a large number of “non-Leftist but democratically minded families [Ohi aristeroi, alla demokratikon pepoitheseon]” had the same experience. Only later did these bits of knowledge start becoming available and freely offered.
One day, a few years ago, at the house of a new friend, I saw a book that I needed, which my family used to own but which had disappeared from our library. I asked if I could borrow it for a few days.
As Aléka handed it to me, she said, “We had bought this from Mr. Kosmás.” She looked at me intently and added, “You know…”
I said, “from Yáros…” as she nodded, “Yes.”
I am certain that it was probably not the same Mr. Kosmás, but at the moment this was immaterial. Although this was the first time that I had been told openly by someone about the phenomenon of the traveling booksellers, the knowledge of their existence was both widespread and unspoken in the 1960s and 1970s.
I had known about my Uncle Stéphanos for years, around the time that Mr. Kosmás started coming to our house, certainly ever since I was old enough to understand that the whispers and muffled comments, the concealed eye contacts and the sighs of my grandmother held not a tantalizing, juicy secret (like my other uncle's sexual escapades, which also burdened her) but something of a profound sadness, a secret that implicated in different and perplexing ways various strands of my family that had never known or imagined they could be entangled, a skein of relationships whose last strands I was able to pull apart only in the early years of the twenty-first century.
But how can I lay all this open for you, so that you can sense what this thing we call a “civil war [Emphýlios Pólemos]” really means on the ground, for children who are not old enough to understand that there is a realm in their lives called politics (let alone that this politics organizes their lives in brutal and inexplicable ways) and for adults who find themselves in the vortex that produces a political DNA of sorts , which organizes not only their lives but also the lives of generations to come and has been organized by kinship lines that extend into the past? How can I lay out for you the intricacies of meaning in “being a Leftist” (even when simply “democratic”) in Greece of the twentieth century, which have organized the meanings of political being in the twenty-first century? I can only pick a point and call it a beginning.
I have used pseudonyms for all names of persons whom I interviewed except where otherwise noted. In deciding what pseudonyms to use, I have kept in mind class, religious affiliation, and place-of-origin markers. Obviously, as Clifford Geertz has pointed out (in Panourgiá 2002), when people read what we write, people try to match pseudonym with true name, and I have no illusions that no matter how diligently I employ pseudonyms and mix up lines of descent, the identity of some characters will be obvious to their prototypes.
My grandmother was suffering because this particular political adventure of Stéphanos was causing immense heartache for her sister, Stéphanos's mother-in-law. My uncle Stéphanos was married to my father's first cousin on his mother's side. My father's mother and Stéphanos's mother-in-law (my great-aunt Eleni) were sisters. Eleni married a man from the Cyclades, a Catholic who had converted to Orthodox Christianity, and they had four children, two boys and two girls: Rosa, Marios, Marinos, and Lucia. My uncle Stéphanos was married to Lucia and had two daughters, roughly my age. There were many children in the neighborhood, all of us cousins of varying degrees, and most of us about the same age. For a detailed account of the naming patterns in Athens, see Panourgiá 1995; on naming patterns in Greece in general, see Herzfeld 1982b.
I do not invoke the notion of DNA lightly. Although a trope, the deployment of a metaphorical DNA as index of the political experience of exclusion ought not to be taken as simply a trope, because it attempts to capture the segmentary classifications, produced in Greece, that separate the “Communists” (and the “Leftists”) from the nationalists within a constructed context of both symbolic and actual kinship. What I mean by this is that the Greek state has, from the beginning of the Leftist movement, articulated a thought about the Left that rests, on the one hand, upon understanding kinship as a purely biological category and, on the other, on a notion that social and political behavior are overdetermined. In other words, the Greek state expressly expected members of families (nuclear and extended) to share social and political ideologies, an expectation that is reflected in all legislation concerning social dissidence from 1871 (the Law on Brigandage) on. It is also reflected in the surprise that was expressed when such expectations did not materialize (as, for example, when the child of a Right-wing family grew to be a Leftist, or the child of a Leftist became Right wing).
Kyriakos Athanasiou, a biologist and the son of a Communist who died in 1948 at the age of 32, having been lynched by the paramilitaries while in government custody during the civil war, has written an account of being the “son of a brigand [Yios Symmoritou].” Athanasiou mentions how, of all the slurs that his neighbor at his village would hurl at him and his brother when they were little boys (“bastards [bástarda],” “criminals [kakoúrgoi],” “dirty Communists [vrōmokommounistés]”), the one that hurt him most was “dirty Communists.” “Maybe because I understood that it hid a truth,” he writes. “I felt it as a heavy curse. Something that you get in your genes. But what nonsense am I saying? 'Genes.' As if one could have heard the term at six years old. Even Watson himself probably did not know it at the time. Maybe it was during those days that he first uttered it. Somewhere at Cambridge. There, where Europe, in the mid-fifties, was entering a new epoch, when humanity in general was entering its new epoch. But not Mavromati [his village]. Not Greece” (Athanassiou 2003: 10).
This medical metaphor, which organizes the experience of his history, recurs in his life. During the junta he was drafted into the army to fulfill his obligation for military service. He was summoned to the Office of Security and Indoctrination (the infamous A2). There, with his file open in front of him, the officer in charge asked questions: What did his mother do? Where was his brother right now? What had he studied? At some point, Athanasiou mentions, he had “optical contact with a particular point in the file… 'Son of a brigand,' 'dead,' or 'executed,' or something of this sort. It's as if you are being told that from birth you carry the microbe of cholera. And that they know it. That was the first time in my life that I realized that each human [ánthropos] is not only what he appears to be, what he thinks he is. You are not only what you have done by yourself for yourself, what they taught you or you have learned in your life… You are always something else. You carry within you some others. Your kin [tous dikous sou]. What they were. What they did or what was done with them. You also carry what happened to them and what they went through… My father's torturers had also killed a part of me… I will always be a constant threat to the security of the country [khōra]. I have always been a miasma, the son of a brigand, the nephew of brigands” (ibid.: 24–25).
If the position of the state has been that Communism is something that is carried within one's line of kinship, the Left has produced a different narrative of itself as a political subjectivity. The Left's position has been that one becomes a Leftist, engaging in a process of becoming and self-inauguration in the Foucauldian sense of subjectification, where the formation of the subject always includes the experience of the body (in other words, the formation of the Leftist as a social and political subject is always already circumscribed by the experience of the violence of the state upon the body of the Leftist). As Dimosthenis Dodos mentioned in a message sent to the Electronic List for the Study of the Civil War in Greece, “one decides to belong to the Left through torturous personal trajectories and positionalities” (February 7, 2007; used with the kind permission of Dodos; my translation).
I do not make the distinction between Leftists and nationalists lightly, recognizing full well that what for the Greek state between the 1920s and the 1980s was axiomatically accepted as truth—namely, that “communist” and “nationalist” were mutually exclusive self-ascriptions—was simply not so for the Communists, who considered themselves to be both internationalists and nationalists. On the meaning of the term dikos (“my own, member of my family, someone beloved, someone with whom I identify”) see Panourgiá 1995.