Αsimina Xirogianni was born and raised in Athens. She studied Classics and Theatrology at the University of Athens, as well as Act at the Theatre-Workshop School. She has been honored in various poetry competitions. Ηer poems have been translated in English, French and Spanish. She has translated Carol Ann Daffy, Τed Hughes, Μark Strand, Τseslav Miloz, Bill Collins and a lot of other poets she likes. In 2009 she founded the blog 'varelaki'.
Her books include: Τhe Prophesy of the wind (pοems) [Dodoni, 2009], His body became shadow (novel) [Anatolikos, 2010], Wounds (poems) [Gavrielides, 2011], My age is poetry (poems) [Gavrielides, 2013], 23 days (play) [Gavrielides, 2015], Audition (play) [Vakhikon, 2015], Second Nature [AΩ, 2018]. She is the editor of 2 anthologies The Theater in Poetry [Μomentum 2017] and Monologues of writers [Vakxikon 2015] Her book Μy age is Poetry (Gavrielides 2013), was published in France in 2016 (translated by Michel Volkovitch).
Asimina Xirogiannis spoke to Reading Greece* about what changed and what remained the same in her poetry since her first poetry collection in 2009, as well as about the role language plays in her writings. She comments on the interrelation between poetry and theatre noting that the two arts "have been conversing through the centuries", as well as on the poetry's strong civic awareness and its relation to the world it inhabits. "Poetry must not serve the ideology of a particular party. But it is nice to be inspired by the political and social situation in which the poet creates. […] It is legitimate for poetry to draw its themes from the surrounding environment. I do not know if lyrics can set fire, but they can certainly leave their imprint".
From The Prophesy of the Wind in 2009 to Second Nature in 2018 what has changed and what has remained the same in your poetry?
First of all, during this time, I myself have changed. So, inevitably, my writing has changed as well. However, it is true that I like to experiment. So each of my poetry books is written differently. And their philosophy is different every time. The Prophecy of the Wind has long been exhausted. I especially love my first book because it reminds me of particular aspects of myself. My last book, Second Nature, contains 65 poems (xaikou) that talk about love, time, death, art.
What about language? What role does language play in your writings?
I love the Greek language. I have also studied theatre and classical philology. Greek is a rich language, it offers infinite expressive possibilities. The combination of words and the introduction of new elements, these two factors are among the criteria for Poetry. Thus, as a poet, I use the language to express my thoughts or feelings. I do not like to use sophisticated words just to make an impression. I much focus on the way words are combined to give the meaning I want to give.
Where do theatre and poetry meet? Would you say that they are communicating vessels?
There is a lot to note, but let me mention just a few things. As we all know the theatre was born in ancient Greece! Drama is a kind of poetry, like epic and lyrical poetry. Only in drama there is representation on the scene of the acts described. Our great ancient poets, comic and tragic, filled theatres in the 5th century BC. People went to see works by Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides with the logic that theatre at that time was a school for citizens. Poetry and theatre have been conversing through the centuries.
Poets write on paper, as do playwrights. However, neither of them communicate them to the world orally. Poets may recite their poems live in front of audiences, while theatrical writers animate their works by staging a theatrical performance. However, it is certain that both arts should have specific targets, while they should also have something to say. Still, the poet often wears masks and plays roles in his own poem. Not few are the poets who direct their poems, creating a sense, within them, of a scene or a suggestive direction. A case in point: Cavafy, but not only! Conversely, there are numerous theatrical writers and directors who adopt and impose a poetic atmosphere within their work or performance. Lorca with his poetic theater or Shakespeare or Chekhov are just a few. From directors I cannot fail to mention our own Lefteris Vogiatzis, whose performances were characterized by a peculiar poetic mood and an oblique poetic look.
The poets of The Theatre in Poetry - an anthology of poems for the theatre written by 55 modern Greek poets in which I explore how the two arts are connected - are inspired by the materials and practices of the theatre and are creatively involved with them, bestowing their own indecision with extensions and perspectives regarding the mask, the theatre, the stage, the actor, the classic heroes of the ancient or modern theatre. As a closing remark, let me say that the theatre often comments on the psyche of a person or society as a whole or even a group of people. Poetry reflects on the human condition and the psyche of the person who suffers or creates in a world with which he is often in opposition or rupture.
Your book blog "Varelaki" turns ten this year. Tell us a few things about this venture of yours? What differentiates Varelaki from similar book blogs?
Varelaki is a literary blog. There are many more … It also contains art issues in general. Varelaki has been online for ten years thanks to my personal work and effort and, without the help of permanent collaborators, has managed to create an important literary archive of modern Greek letters and their representatives. This record exists as a deposit for writers, scholars, readers, students. And all this through an easily accessible web site. Let me mention a noticeable difference: on the internet there is a lot of low quality or unreliable material. But in Varelaki, through my personal care, there is quality and reliability in the texts presented. The fact that creators trust me with their work is the proof.
Varelaki has created two anthologies: The Theater in Poetry [Μomentum 2017] and Monologues of writers [Vakxikon 2015]. The basic statement of Varelaki can be summarized in the following: Varelaki investigates, comments, promises, proposes, announces, converses. Inside the crowd there is beauty, as long as you discover it.Varelaki is a collector of beautiful things.
In recent years, there has been an extraordinary burgeoning of poetry in every form: graffiti, blogs, literary magazines, readings in public squares to mention just a few. How is this strong civic awareness to be explained?
Poetry has a social face. The contemporary poet receives many stimuli, he experiences lots of situations that trigger a variety of reactions, thoughts, acts. Social reality affects him in a fatal way. So it is natural for social reality to be often reflected on his work. In general, the artist does not live in a glass tower. He does not have to live in a glass tower! Through art people feel the need to communicate with each other. To share things. To feel things.
You write that "in difficult times, we are not looking for great poetry but for urgent poetry". What is the relationship of poetry to the world it inhabits? What can it mean for poetry to be political, or apolitical, in times of social and economic crisis?
Τhese verses are contained in my book Μy age is Poetry, which was also published in France in 2016, translated by Michel Volkovitch. Poetry can follow the flow of time. The era inspires the poet and leads him to the poem. There is a poetry-era relationship and that's the subject of my book. Poets even in critical moments do not silence. They dictate their presence. They look at the world. They film time in their own way. Poetry must not serve the ideology of a particular party. But it is nice to be inspired by the political and social situation in which the poet creates. In this sense, several poets have written political poetry. When talking about political poetry, the example of Manolis Anagnostakis readily comes to mind. It is legitimate for poetry to draw its themes from the surrounding environment. I do not know if lyrics can set fire, but they can certainly leave their imprint.
Kostas Gavras was born in 1933 in Loutra Iraias, Arcadia. Following his graduation from high school he went to France, where he did film studies at the French national film school, IDHEC. Following work on several films as assistant director, he directed his first feature film, Compartiment Tueurs, in 1965. His 1969 film "Z", a fictionalized account of the events surrounding the assassination of Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis in 1963, won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. This was followed by a series of successful films such as L'Aveu (The Confession, 1970), State of Siege (1972), and Missing(1982), which won an Oscar for Best Screenplay Adaptation and the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. His 1989 film Music Box, another film inspired by real events, won the Golden Bear at the 40th Berlin International Film Festival. His more recent films are "Amen" (2002), "Le Couperet" (2005), "Eden is West" (2009) and "The Capital" (2012). Further to his acclaimed directorial career, Gavras is also President of the Cinémathèque Française and founder of the Gan Foundation.
While shooting his latest film, "Adults in the Room", Kostas Gavras was interviewed by Greek News Agenda and its sister publication Grece Hebdo*. Gavras stressed that what he is mostly interested in his work is a person's place in society and interaction with power and authority. In his long experience as an internationally acclaimed film director and producer, Gavras elaborates on what constitutes a successful national cinema policy, stressing the need for robust and consistent support from the state. Talking about his experience on filming in Greece, Gavras stresses the positive impact of the new incentives for investments in audiovisual productions in Greece, while he refutes the view that there are no experienced film crews in Greece.
You have been described as a political filmmaker. Do you think that this description successfully summarizes your work?
This characterization is one by journalists, it is not my problem. I think that the arts in general and not only cinema have a political function in society - not in an ideological sense, but as in influencing our social behavior. Aristotle has famously said that man is a political animal. Why a political animal? First of all, an animal lives in the company of other animals in a group, like human beings. The difference between animals and human beings is that animals only decide about themselves, while humans try to form societies and face difficulties together. Thus, that's politics for me: what we do in our daily lives and how we interact with power and authority. For me, politics is everywhere; it's not only about political parties and elections, which is of course a very important part of politics. My films are about our place in society and how we use power. I think that all films are political, even comedies, because they offer us pleasurable moments. A moment of pleasure is important in our life, as long as it's not vulgar and degrading.
In your recently published autobiography"Va où il est impossible d'aller" ("Go where it's impossible to go") you describe how you left Greece on account of your family's political history. Which of your films reflects most that period of your life?
My father was labeled a communist, when he was actually only against the monarchy. He had fought in Asia Minor, he saw many of his friends losing their lives, and because he was against the reinstatement of King George at the end of WWII, he was accused of being a communist and repeatedly thrown into jail. He had fought in the Greek resistance with EAM (National Liberation Front) but he didn't belong to the Communist Party and he didn't take part in the Greek Civil War. During that period, I wouldn't have been able to study at a Greek University. The best way for me to study was to escape abroad; as was the case in Greece in 2010, when thousands of young people fled the country. Many went to Australia, others left for the US. I went to France, because it was the only country where I didn't have to pay fees for my studies. My parents had no money to send me, so I had to work to finance myself.
As far as where this period of my life is reflected in my films, I think that in each of my films there is a part of me as a young man who has lived this kind of adventure. This experience has definitely influenced my work and my choice of films, at both a conscious and subconscious level.
You have worked in France, Greece and the US. In which country and which period did you feel you had more artistic liberty?
I've always felt this freedom in France, because the system facilitates those who want to make films. Following the end of the German Occupation in France, a period during which French Cinema was in the hands of the Nazis, all American production of the previous five years entered the French film market and almost wiped out French cinema. The de Gaulle government decided that France had to have national cinema and all subsequent governments continued on the same path, finding solutions to every problem that arose. The advent of television was a threat for French cinema but the state had an answer for that as well. The National Film Centre (CNC) would always find solutions and French cinema enjoys freedom and state support. And support does not only mean money; I'll give you an example. We filmmakers asked television stations to stop screening films on Saturday nights, because they used to air American blockbusters in that time slot. Now there are no films on TV Saturday night and people go out, view films in cinemas or go to restaurants, instead of watching American blockbusters on TV, as was the case before. We also requested for films not to be interrupted by TV commercials, and only one big channel inserts one commercial break. These facilitations help French film production. That is why 200 French films are produced every year, 30 of which are by first-timedirectors. There are also 30 to 40 films by women filmmakers, which is also unique in the world.
Ancient Greek tragedy is recurrent in your films. Your heroes are confronted with Power and Authority in its various forms and they either lose or their victories are hollow. What is the meaning of tragedy for you?
Greece is the birth place of drama. Ancient Greeks introduced tragedy ex novo as a genre and structure. All spectacles in the world follow the rules of Ancient Greek tragedy and follow the same structure as it was defined by Aristotle, having a beginning, middle and end. From the moment we are born, we live with tragedy. The tragedy of life, the tragedy of Greece, which has gone through so many tragedies…then we come to tragedy in drama. For me tragedy is similar to life. Life comprises everything. I don't really understand those who say we should always be happy. What does happiness mean? We are able to relish happiness, because it's not something that we enjoy every day. The contrast between happy and unhappy moments in life makes instances of happiness or unhappiness more intense.
And what about power? Has the meaning of power changed in recent years?
We live under authority since childhood; do this, or don't do that … Power can be positively used, when it is followed by reasoning why something should be done or not. The worst form of exertion of authority for me is when there is no explanation as to why and how. We are endlessly under authority but we also exert authority on other people. This is, as I said before, everyday politics.
In his letter to Igmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa claims that artists reach their creative peak after the age of 80. How do you feel about that?
I don't know... it is true that Kurosawa kept making films after he reached 80, but there are certain prerequisites for this, including good physical condition, because film making is like running the Marathon. I myself I'm 86 and I can tell that what changes with age is experience, the way you look at other people and the way you see life. If physical health and experience coexist, then you can expect things. And Kurosawa had both.
Do you follow developments in Greek cinema?
Yes, I do. At times the state helps cinema, at others it doesn't. Greek filmmakers feel abandoned. It is not enough to have a National Film Centre; constant help and resolve to support Greek Cinema is necessary, because a Greek film can travel the world and say so many things about Greece. It is imperative to have national cinema with solid and continuous state support and the right legal framework: Greek film makers should be facilitated to shoot in Greek archaeological sites; the Greek Film Centre should enable even "difficult" productions, which are more demanding for the audience. Time and again audiences exceed our expectations and the state must generate those conditions of freedom and support that encourage scriptwriters and directors to create. Many years ago, a Minister of Tourism asked me what changes are necessary to attract foreign productions. I offered him my thoughts, but nothing happened.
Currently there are radical changes taking place regarding the new financial and tax incentives which I find very positive. It's important to attract foreign producers, because Greece interests them. I know that from discussions with them. They tell me that things are difficult in Greece. These changes are beginning to make things easier for filmmakers and producers. There has to be an ongoing relationship between the state and the filmmakers. If these changes continue, they will bring vast improvements both for economy in general and for filmmakers themselves.
I have to stress that Greece also has excellent crews and technicians. Working on my new film here in Greece, I work with Greek crews and I am really amazed by the quality of their work. First of all, I'm working with internationally acclaimed Director of Photography, Yiorgos Arvanitis, who has a highly competent crew. The sound unit is also excellent and the same goes for the settings. All of the Greek crews I'm working with speak English; they are always prepared and highly skilled. So, it's not true that there are no skilled film crews and technicians in Greece.
There are small countries with strong national cinemas, such as Sweden or Israel. If smaller countries can do it, why can't we?
In retrospect, do you think that the Golden Era of European Cinema is over? Are you optimistic about contemporary film production?
Film production today is undergoing revolutionary changes, of which we have only seen a fraction, the digital part. The way we think about films, the way we make films and the way films are viewed are changing. The way films are produced is changing. This cuts both ways; the big companies finance films but they impose great limitations to their distribution, in the sense that films can only be available on TV networks. If this continues, the big companies will get more and more power which will escalate to choosing which films are actually produced and which not. We need to fiercely resist this in Europe. Not the system, because the system exists and, from a certain point of view, it has a positive side, in the sense that it offers people living in areas without access to cinemas the ability to watch films in the comfort of their homes. What is negative is that this system can take control of world cinema production, threatening personal and national cinema. But the system does not care about that; it is only interested in the box office. They think they have the recipe for commercially successful films, and this will have bad repercussions on film making.
The notion of National as well as European Cinema must be strongly supported. We frequently appeal to J.-C. Juncker about the actions and steps that need to taken in this direction. Cinema is part of the grand path towards peaceful cooperation that the EU is about. By saying we need to have European cinema I am thinking in terms of financing and a legal framework, because cinema is firstly personal, national and can later become European. Europe must adopt a very positive stance to cinema and we are working a lot in this direction in France.
Would you like to tell us a few things about your work at the Cinémathèque Française?
In the context of film preservation in France, there was an effort to preserve and save silent films (which were never really silent, but this is another issue). Henry Langlois, director of the Cinémathèque, began selecting film and non-film material (scripts etc). Coming to the present, I was asked to become the President of the Cinémathèque with its vast material. We plan to make a European Film Museum and we try to find the necessary funding for that. This project is conducted by the French Cinémathèque but it concerns a European museum, because we have a vast collection in storage which should be exhibited. The young should find out more about cinema history and its educational function in contemporary society. Cinema has helped us come in contact with other cultures, as is the case with Kurosawa, whom you mentioned earlier. When Greek films travel abroad, they inform foreign audiences about the Greek way of life and the Greek way of thinking and this is what makes Greek cinema so important.
Coming back to the purpose of existence of a Cinémathèque, its aim should be to be screening as many films as possible, not only saving them. Every year at the French Cinémathèque we screen about 2.200 films; this means screening four to five films per day. Sometimes we have large audiences, at others we have smaller. That's what the Cinémathèque is for.
One last question; are you afraid that home entertainment may substitute cinema screenings?
There is always that risk, but the same has been said about theatre, which is still here after 2.500 years. Cinema is only 120 years old. I believe it will keep on, for the reasons I explained earlier.
* Interview by Florentia Kiortsi (Greek News Agenda) and Kostas Mavroidis (GreceHebdo).
Vangelis Hatzivassileiou was born in Athens in 1959. He studied Political Science and Regional Economics. He cooperated with the newspapers Proti and Kathimerini as well as with various literary magazines, while he worked as a book reviewer for Avgi (1982-1991) and Eleftherotypia (1991-2010). From 1998 to 2009 he was a member of the editorial team of the "Bibliothiki" section of Eleftherotypia. At present, he cooperates as a book reviewer with Vima tis Kyriakis and is a member of the editorial team of the literary magazine O anagnostis. He is also a regular partner of the literary magazines Βοοks' Journal and Entefktirio and cooperates with the Athens News Agency. His scholarly study titled Η κίνηση του εκκρεμούς: Άτομα και κοινωνία στη νεότερη ελληνική πεζογραφία 1974-2017 [The Move of the Pendulum: Individual and Society in Modern Greek Fiction 1974-2017] was recently published by Polis Editions.
Vangelis Hatzivassileiou spoke to Reading Greece* about his latest writing venture The Move of the Pendulum, a study on Modern Greek fiction that begins in 1974 and extends to the present. He comments on the relationship between the individual and the collective represented in Greek fiction during the period under study, as well as on the major convergences and divergences that are observed in the literary production of the last forty years, noting that "multilateralism is a structural feature of fiction since 1974, and this is exactly where I focus in my book: to show the crossroads and the convergences, but also the variations and heterogeneities of the material available".
Asked about the special emphasis he lays on the historical novel, he explains that from 1974 onwards, the historical novel "attempts to bravely open up to the Other and the notion of otherness", to "the heterogeneous cultural identities and their multiple levels of co-existence, contradiction or interdependence". He concludes that his scholarly study "aspires to act as a historical snapshot: a snapshot which at the same time seeks to move beyond the random, the occasional and the fleeting, recording the literary momentum produced in a specific era".
Υοur latest writing venture The Move of the Pendulum delves into Modern Greek fiction of the last 45 years (1974-2017). Tell us a few things about the book.
My study on Modern Greek fiction begins in 1974 and extends to the present; yet, in reality, its time span goes beyond this milestone, covering the entire post-war period: my research comprises the post-war generations of writers, who remained intimately connected to the thorny issues of politics and history and produced a significant part of their works from 1974 onwards. The book attempts to answer a fundamental question in my judgment: how is the relationship between the individual and the collective reflected upon fiction written following the regime change in 1974, which radically changed the pre-dictatorial reality of Greek society?
"The course of Greek literature since 1974 is neither inescapable nor one-way: it rather resembles the movement of the pendulum: from society to the individual and from the individual back to society". How is the relationship between the individual and the collective represented in Greek fiction during the period under study?
Those who began writing immediately after the collapse of the military junta in 1974, hastened to disengage their works from the drama of politics and history and gradually severed ties between the individual and public space. The individual thus loses his identity as a citizen, while his individualism parts ways with his social character. In such a context, these writers will clearly differentiate themselves from the attitudes and choices of their predecessors, when literature was translated into a political act, even if it tried to break free from the suffocation of collective elements, bringing forward instead, in a spirit of opposition and freethinking, the importance of individual identity and independent being.
Freedom, however, in this avant-garde form, will quickly prove, from the early years following the change of regime, an empty word. The individual may have priority now, yet he seems ready to be cast away by his environment, tending to be identified with an immensely discontinuous and meaningless present. It's the time when History loses its timelessness and comes to be experienced as a history of specific events and special circumstances, while literature moves from the collective to the individual, ready to push the collective aside at the first opportunity. What we are seeing is a rather degenerative version of freedom, which will lay the ground -despite the absence of any endogenous relevance whatsoever- for the parody writers of the 1980s, who by means of the depressing irony of their monstrous world will move to a further downgrading of the individual, confining him into a strictly private space.
In contrast, crime and historical fiction move with passionate force towards the collective, as do to a smaller or larger degree other categories of writers of this specific period. Writers, for instance, who depict everyday social life, will portray various aspects of modern collective co-existence without ignoring its social or historical background. A more intense narrative will be produced in this perspective by socio-political writers who by delving into either deep political waters or shallower ones will mark out deeply rooted economic and social frictions. Writers who act as prophets of the future, constitute quite a significant parameter of literature from 1974 onwards, and will go a step further by illustrating an ominous universe both for the present and the future.
Specific social desiderata would be detected among writers of sci-fi literature, while writers of heterotopias (a substantial and active category) would portray their marginal worlds as places where a person's vida nuda is merely a socially manipulated and devalued life, trapped by the absence of the political while also confined in an existential suffocation caused by the dark hierarchies whose will remains unknown.
In the book you attempt to interpret the literary co-existence of many, quite distinct generations, which unfolded during the same period, and expressed different aspects of the same collective experience. Which are the major convergences and divergences that are observed in the literary production of the last forty years?
Literature constitutes the prime framework that brings to light the different perspectives developed in a common environment. Yet, literature itself is not characterized just by the different ways the social environment is being perceived, but also by its wide morphological and thematic variety. I would say that this multilateralism is a structural feature of fiction since 1974, and this is exactly where I focus in my book: to show the crossroads and the convergences, but also the variations and heterogeneities of the material available. It wouldn't be easy to name the major or minor convergences and divergences – and even if we were able to detect them, we wouldn't avoid a schematic presentation. This wide variety doesn't allow for the dominance of certain tendencies over others. If we had to delve into something in this respect, it would be the writers' interest in historical and crime fiction. Both genres have been substantially renewed.
You lay special emphasis on the historical novel, commenting that the renewal of the historical novel inaugurates a turn towards a new collective experience, which will lead to the dominance of the collective in the literature of the crisis. Tell us more.
From 1974 onwards, the historical novel keeps distance from the patriotic triumph and national complacencies that were, to a large degree, its main traits in the 19th and 20th century, attempting bravely to open up to the Other and the notion of otherness. The absence of a coherent self, which was a primary characteristic of a great number of heroes that appeared in the literary production of this period, will find in the historical novel a vital counterbalance: the heterogeneous cultural identities and their multiple levels of co-existence, contradiction or interdependence.
Likewise, although the individual has not moved an inch away from the post-modern fate of his volatility and indefiniteness, and despite having given up on the pursuit of self-efficiency, he nevertheless endeavors to regain citizenship and integrate himself, in line with Herder's old aphorism, into a network of collective commitments. We should of course clarify the obvious: under such conditions, the collective doesn't arise from the intense turmoil of politics and History, but through the memories of civilization, scholarship and culture. As for fiction written during the crisis, it is largely a product of specific political and social circumstances: it has no particular relevance to the historical novel and actually constitutes a different chapter.
This argument is largely a fable, which no way could be applied to Greek fiction, at least not since the 1930s. In Greece we have indeed a strong tradition in short stories extending to the present, but longer forms (with all the narrative, stylist and technical problems entailed) have long been at the forefront of literary processes; the sheer volume of post-war novels, which rose dramatically since 1974, attests to this. In recent years, Greek prose writers have been following closely international literary trends, mainly focusing on the novel – at least in terms of quantity.
Where does the subjectivity of the book reviewer meet the objectivity of the literary scholar in your writings?
A book review constitutes contemporary appraisal par excellence: what is good and what is bad, what went right and what went wrong, what is important and what isn't in a literary book. In contrast, scholarly research needs to be skeptical of such reasoning right from the beginning and not get caught up in zealous reactions. A literary scholar should neither condemn nor praise, but rather talk about the conditions under which literary success or failure occurred within the volume of the works he has singled out. Because a literary scholar, unlike a contemporary book reviewer, does not have to recommend to readers what to read without any reservations and what to ignore at any cost, but to indicate to future, and presumably more dispassionate and thoughtful readers, the context (social, cultural and aesthetic) within which literature won or lost the bet.
As for the history of Greek fiction since 1974, I have tried to follow the rules that govern scholarly research, but to what extent have I managed to avoid value judgments as regards my interpretive and historical framework? My research hasn't dealt with previously classified and ranked material that other researches had already delved into. In such a context, it's highly unlikely to avoid evaluation, i.e., some kind of appraisal drawn from contemporary book reviews. That is where, after all, the literary canon produced by the present scholarly research is based: a canon that is still unstable as far as older writers are concerned, and a regulatory framework that is constantly adjusted and revised in the case of contemporary ones. In this respect, an impartial catalogue or index is not really the solution.
Τhe only option is to trust your intuition and experience once again – and take the risk of your choices, even though you know that a great part of literary production will most probably stay out of the scholarly research that will be carried out later for the same period. My book constitutes research in the making, one that attempts to offer a historical perspective to its material, while it cannot and doesn't want to ignore the structure of feeling of its time nor its evaluative basis. It is a writing not addressed to a remote reader, an unknown person in an unforeseeable future, but to a reader who has experienced things also experienced by the critic who became a scholar. I am talking about scholarly work that is not synonymous to philology but which aspires to act as a historical snapshot: a snapshot which at the same time seeks to move beyond the random, the occasional and the fleeting, recording the literary momentum produced in a specific era.
The Balkan region has long been associated with violent conflict, ethnic unrest and the fragmentation of states. Political scientist Vassilis Maragos' recently published the book «Only of this boast I: that I loved the fatherland». Romantic patriotism and transformations of the fatherland in the case of Grigor Pûrlichev(1830-1893), (Herodotos publications, Athens 2018), sheds light on a historical figure representative of his time, the mid-19th century, which saw the birth and consolidation of nationalist ideals in the Balkans.
Grigor Pûrlichev, also known by his Greek name, Grigorios Stavridhis, was a poet born in the city of Ohrid (part of present-day North Macedonia). He had a Greek education but later espoused pan-Slavic ideals and played a part in the forging of ethnic identity for Slavs and Bulgarians. This switch in languages and identities is illustrative of the volatile nature of ethnic and national consciousness at the time, hence Maragos' interest in his life and thought.
Vassilis Maragos has studied law, international politics and holds a PhD in political science. He has been living in Brussels since 2005, working for the European Commission. He has published a study on the formation of modern Bulgarian identity (Paisii Hilendarski and Sofroni Vrachanski. From Orthodox Ideology to the formation of the Bulgarian identity, in Greek, Athens 2009), a book of poems (Το προσωπείο του χρόνου / The mask of time, Athens 2010), essays on historical and national identity issues and he has translated poetry from Bulgarian and Polish.
Maragos spoke to Greek News Agenda* on the remarkable case of Pûrlichev, the nascence of nationalism in 19th-century Balkans, the fluidity of identities in the region and the way we can benefit from studying these issues today with an open mind.
Who was Grigorios Stavridhis or Grigor Pûrlichev? Why a book about him?
Grigorios Stavridhis or Pûrlichev was a poet in the Balkans in the 19th-century. He wrote poetry mainly in Greek. In 1860, while a student at the Athens University Medical School, he won the first prize at the National Poetry Contest held annually by the University, with his patriotic poem O Armatolos (The Armatole, a Greek mercenary under Ottoman rule). This contest was an institution of major cultural and national significance for Greece at the time. His victory stirred quite a debate in the Press (he was even described as a "modern Homer"!), as did his feud with Professor of Botany and senior prominent poet Theodore Orphanidis, who accused Pûrlichev of being a Bulgarian and an instrument of anti-Greek propaganda having used fraudulent means to win the award. It is quite telling that the Press almost unanimously rose in defense of the "young and virtuous Stavridhis ", given that Bulgarians were considered to be "dear brothers" of the Greek people, who had shed their blood for Greece's freedom in 1821!
The fame and popularity brought to him by obtaining the laurel at the contest, however, was not enough for the young poet from Ohrid to make a caerer in Greek letters. At the next National Poetic Contest, which took place in 1862 – sponsored by the Odessa Greek merchant Ioannis Voutsinas – Stavridhis submitted a more ambitious poem, Skenderbeis (which was Skanderbeg, a Christian Albanian leader who rebelled against the Ottomans) but he did not manage to win the award. He thus returned to his hometown of Ohrid, and around the mid-1860's he embraced Bulgarian nationalism and put himself at the forefront of the movement for the ecclesiastical and educational autonomy of the Bulgarians.
His ambition to pursue a literary career, writing in Bulgarian, led him to the Principality of Bulgaria, which was founded in 1878, but despite his efforts he never fully mastered the use of literary Bulgarian. Under the influence of pan-Slavic theories of the time, it appears he even tried to invent a pan-Slavic idiom (based on the Bulgarian vernacular) – perhaps inspired by Homer's Greek as well as the Katharevusa Greek which he'd mastered – but after a poorly received attempt to translate Homer's Iliad in this idiom (which he called Bulgarian), he abandoned his plans and returned to Ottoman Macedonia where he continued to work as a teacher in Bulgarian schools. He also left behind an interesting Autobiography in prose, written in Bulgarian, published posthumously.
Whilst not the only example of fluid ethnic consciousness at that time, Pûrlichev was an extraordinary case: originally a member of the Eastern Orthodox community (Rūm millet – Roman or Romaic nation), whose ideology he articulated in his poems, he initially – and perhaps somewhat hesitantly – moved towards a Modern Greek identity, which he probably perceived as compatible with the Bulgarian element of his genealogy and his Slavic local idiom) before moving on to a Bulgarian Slavic identity. This concept of a fluid homeland that we find in Pûrlichev, along with its romantic patriotism, is of immense importance for the understanding of Balkan nationalisms.
Besides, there has not been enough research into the relationship between the weak but culturally and ideologically ambitious Greek state of the mid-19th century with its "irredenta", i.e. the variety of "unredeemed" populations of the Balkan hinterland, who had a complex relationship with Greek culture that had still an important influence in the region. Moreover, the 1860s turned out to be a milestone for the separation of the Christian population into the modern national communities of Greeks and Bulgarians. April 1860 marks the first attempt by the Bulgarian clergy in Constantinople to challenge the Ecumenical Patriarchate, and throughout the decade there were movements in several towns of the Balkan hinterland with a Slavic population defying the Greek metropolitan bishops appointed by the Patriarchate.
In short, this is a personality whose paradigm (and when compared with other figures who, despite their different native languages, did not renounce their Greek culture and identity) takes us back to the question of relations of Hellenic culture and ideology, in the course of the 19th-century with the diverse anthropogeography of the Balkan hinterland, highlighting ties and conflicts but also challenges which, to some extent, still affect us today.
It is also worth noting that Pûrlichev is among those figures which Bulgaria and North Macedonia have recently agreed to honour jointly in the context of good neighborly relations, as part of a recently ratified friendship treaty.
You discuss the national phenomenon in the 19th-century Balkans. At the end of that century, do subject peoples of the collapsing Ottoman Empire put their traditional religious identity first, or do they espouse the supremacy of a national identity?
By the end of the 19th century, this shift was largely completed especially in urban areas, yet the religious identity remained strong and continued to shape the increasingly national consciousness of the various groups. Despite their differences, the emerging new ethnic communities are based on the common framework of their preexisting religious identity. All Christian nations of the Balkans have some common features, since they come from a common melting pot, the Orthodox community. In fact, the severity of ethnic conflicts in the Balkans among Orthodox Christians who were previously united as the great Christian nation of Romaioi or Greeks in the pre-national meaning (the Rūm millet), with its predominantly Greek culture, is akin to a civil war. The partaking of all Orthodox Christians in this wider community is clearly asserted in various writings of the time presenting either the perspective of the Enlightenment, as in Rigas Velestinlis' works (especially the New Political Constitution), or a defensive stance against modern nationalist ideology, as is the case with Historical and critical defense of the clergy of the Eastern Church, published in Pisa in 1815.
Can you elaborate on the subject of fluid national consciousness in the Balkans, allowing for easy moving from one to another, different identity? From what point in time onwards do national identities consolidate?
This fluidity is characteristic of Pûrlichev's generation, especially for the region of Macedonia where we encounter many such examples. Comparisons with some of his fellow Ohrid townsmen – such as jurist Michael Potlis, who served as Minister of Justice under King Otto, and philologist Margaritis Dimitsas, who both chose to remain in Greece and embrace Greek culture – underlines the fluidity of individual and collective consciousness at the time. In fact, Ohrid's "Bulgarisation" (a term used by acclaimed Bulgarian historians to define the process of imposing the use of the Bulgarian language in the city which had played such an important role in Medieval Bulgarian history) was initially challenged by a part of the city's urban population, who wished to maintain their contacts with the Greek merchants of Thessaloniki and of Durrës in Albania. It was a time when the term "merchant" was often perceived to have an "ethnic" character as most merchants were considered to be Greek.
However, after a period of fluidity, national identities crystallized through the creation of state structures and the existence of national institutions meant to consolidate national identity (e.g. schools, national churches and so on).
At this point I would like to emphasise the relationship of the Bulgarians in particular with Greek culture. Until the mid-19th century, many Bulgarian scholars had received a Greek education and had often been taught the concept of the nation in Greek schools, which they later tried to apply to their own nation. Moreover, those who did not renounce Greek culture were assimilated into the Greek "imagined community". They were the ones dubbed "Grecomans" regardless of whether their family or local environment was originally Bulgarian or Slavic-speaking, Albanian or Arvanitic-speaking or even Aromanian-speaking. Stavridhis, however, although having been accused as a "Grecoman", later turned against Greek culture, which he sought to besmirch in various writings he intended either for publication or for teaching. It is in fact interesting that – apparently influenced by the ideas on the continuity of Greek civilisation since the antiquity – he tried to invent a rival Bulgarian tradition originating in antiquite times, centred around historical phenomena of the northern region of Greece and Thrace (Alexander the Macedonian , Orpheus, the Pierian Muses, etc.).
When and why do Slavic-speaking populations diverge from Bulgarian and Serbian nationalism and claim a distinct national identity? Do you consider the ethnicisation process of Slavic-speaking Macedonians to be successful?
This issue is very delicate and of crucial importance for comparative Balkan history, but it is not addressed in my study which focuses on the previous period, when the key issue was the connection between Greek culture and the ethnic emancipation of populations turning to their Slavic vernacular in search of a distinct identity centred on the general concept of a Bulgarian historical nation. It is quite revealing that Pûrlichev wrote initially his speeches (which were intended for rallies) in the local Slavic vernacular of Ohrid, which he calls "Bulgarian", actually using the Greek alphabet. My research highlights Pûrlichev's difficulty in embracing Bulgarian identity, since he was not happy with the way this identity was handled in the newly-founded Bulgarian state. I believe that, though he remained loyal to this identity, he never fully identified with Bulgarian ideology the way it was shaped by a new generation of scholars and politicians in Bulgaria, in the later period of his life.
To address your question, I think that this ethnicisation is the result of historical and political developments in the region, especially in the early 20th century. There is of course a prehistory of distinct cultural or territorial elements on which this effort is being founded. In this context, I think we ought to study, through a new unbiased perspective, the various processes of ethnogenesis so that we can better comprehend – beyond clichés – the identity of our neighbours, with whom we coexist and cooperate in order to meet the challenges facing today's world. This is an issue of substance that can contribute to the modernsation of our Balkan mentality and to the stability of our region, which is a prerequisite for our prosperity and security. I also believe that future cooperation can be inspired from older forms of cultural and social coexistence.
In your opinion, does the agreement on the name of North Macedonia appease or aggravate aggressive nationalistic views today?
The comprehensive and comparative evaluation of the history of nations and national movements in the Balkans shows that these are communicating vessels. Various national movements (in their pursuit of self-determination) have at times tried to appropriate elements of their neighbours' heritage (and Greeks, having the oldest civilisation in the region, have been subject to such appropriation). We have very close bonds with all our neighbours due to our previous coexistence within the community of the Orthodox or Romaioi, but also because of Byzantium, Christian Orthodox culture and the influence of Greek language in the region since antiquity. What is needed today in the Balkans is developing a joint historical consciousness that transcends the limits of each distinct national history, placing the peoples of the region within the broader history of empires and other formations in this part of Europe. After all, every people benefits from a deeper understanding of its neighbours. We enrich ourselves spiritually and we benefit politically when we understand and compare our identity with the identities of others without arrogance and narrow-mindedness. And the generosity of Greek civilisation is undeniable. Let's not forget the enormous contribution of the classical Greek culture (a quintessential part of our identity) to the formation of modern Europe.
My personal view is that the Prespes agreement represents an approach for the conciliatory resolution of historical disputes, which could and should prove to be mutually beneficial by future developments, in the context of a clearly positive perception of interdependence in the region, contributing to regional stability and cooperation, within the framework of European integration. Let us keep in mind that the unification of Europe is principally a peace project, based on compromises and amicable relations and cooperation between neighbouring peoples.
*Interview by Costas Mavroidis. Translation by Nefeli Mosaidi. Disclaimer: The views expressed in this interview are strictly personal.
Henriette-Rika Benveniste is Professor of European Medieval History at the Department of History Archaeology and Social Anthropology of the University of Thessaly. She studied History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and completed her doctoral studies in Medieval History at the Université de Sorbonne (Paris I, Panthéon). Her research interests include Historical Anthropology of the Middle Ages and Jewish History and Historiography.
Professor Benveniste has been the Academic Head of the Project: "From Between the Wars to Reconstruction (1930-1960). The Experience of the Jews of Greece in Audio-Visual Testimony". (Database of Greek-Jewish Survivors' Testimonies, University of Thessaly). Her recent book "Those Who Survived: Deportation, Resistance and Return of the Jews of Thessaloniki in the 1940s", (in Greek: Αυτοί που επέζησαν, 2014; in German: Die Überlebenden. Widerstand, Deportation, Rückkehr. Juden aus Thessaloniki in den 1940er Jahren, 2016; English and Hebrew translations forthcoming) received the National Book Award for Promoting Dialogue on Social Issues in 2015.
Rika Benveniste spoke to Rethinking Greece* on the long process of making Greek Jewish communities visible again in Greek history and the Greek public sphere after decades of silence, the need for research on Greek Jewry that challenges Greek exceptionalism and espouses a transnational perspective ― as "the history of the Jews of Greece is a Jewish history, a Greek history, a Mediterranean history and a European history all at the same time". Regarding the social and cultural diversity of the Jewish population of Thessaloniki, she points out that their political beliefs run the whole spectrum; from those who advocated assimilation to Greek language and culture, to Zionists with visions of a national homeland in Palestine, to Liberals and Socialists leading the worker's movement of the city. Benveniste stresses the importance of encouraging complex narratives on the Shoah, instead of simplistic ones that ignore the indifference or the betrayal of collaborators, or moralistic ones that emphasize a generalized abstract "shame", while omitting the fact that some were really guilty, in very precise and concrete ways.
Jews were almost invisible in Greek history, until the 1990s, when we witnessed what you have described as the 'coming out' of Jewish history. Why do you think deliberations on Jewish communities and the Shoah in Greece had been absent in Greek historiography for so long?
In the article you mention, I was pointing to the fact that, for a very long period, Greek historiography had erased Jews from the Greek national entity -considered to be homogeneous. To a reader of Greek history Jews were "invisible". When Jews, occasionally, appeared in the Greek history of the Ottoman period or the Greek nation state, they were perceived as a force disrupting the nation. There was practically no historical research conducted outside the Jewish milieu, and it was conducted mostly outside Greece. On their part, historians of Jewish history were mostly interested in the religious and intellectual aspects of the history of Jewish communities.
The interest in Greek-Jewish history coincides with the breaking of the silence on Shoah. The absence of Jews in the Greek public narratives of the post-war period was determined by a will to silence the destruction of Greek Jewry. However, we should not dismiss the fact that this was by no means a Greek particularity. In the political climate of the Cold War, German atrocities were downplayed, while the scope and the significance of the Holocaust was not understood. The victors of the Second World War were unwilling to realize that the war was not over for the Jewish survivors, whose lives had been saturated by the loss of their families and their communities. In countries like Netherlands and France, the experiences of Jewish victims were subsumed into the narrative of national heroism that pervaded postwar reconstruction. In Germany, deep-seated feelings of resentment towards the post-war political and social environment accompanied oblivion and silence about the crimes and a too quick will to leave the past behind.
In Greece, political persecutions during and after the Civil War were coupled with censorship on the memory and history of the Resistance and the genocide of the Greek Jews. The right-wing victors of the Civil War imposed silence because Greek collaborators of the Nazis were quickly incorporated into the anti-communist state and their crimes remained unpunished. Later on, the 1967-1974 military dictatorship and its slogan "Greece of Christian Greeks" tried to impose the idea of an exclusively Christian Orthodox character of the Greek society. In other words, beyond the moral and material annihilation, the haunting feelings of loss, the pressing demands of rebuilding a "new life", the unwillingness to listen to their sufferings -characteristics which were common to survivors all over the world- Greek Jewish Holocaust survivors faced also the terrorism and censorship exercised by the victors of the Civil War.
The first chronicles of the Occupation and the deportation, at the crossroads between history and testimony, were published by Jews in the first post-war years. However, these first attempts to write the history of the Holocaust in Greece remained locked inside the Jewish community. Again, there was no willingness to hear the Jewish sufferings when the victors of the Civil War had imposed silence. The silence on the destruction of Greek Jewry imposed a silence of the communities' pre-war history as well.
Historiography turned to the study of the destruction of the Greek Jewish communities with a delay. It was as late as 1986, when a book by Hagen Fleischer on the Nazi Occupation ("Im Kreuzschatten der Mächte: Griechenland 1941-1944 -Okkupation, Resistance, Kollaboration", translated as "Στέμμα και σβάστικα" in Greek) devoted detailed chapters to the Holocaust; this was followed in 1993 by Mark Mazower's book "Inside Hitler's Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941-44". In 1996, the Society for the Study of Greek Jewry organized a conference which dealt with the Jews of Greece under the Occupation; its acts were published in 1998, edited by me.
The breaking of the silence on the Shoah on an international level had sparked interest in Greek Jewish communities' past. Moreover, during the 1990's, the voices of Greek Jewish survivors were heard in a new environment dominated by the rise of identity politics. Hesitantly, Greek Jewish communities adopted a policy of cultural presence and turned towards the surrounding society. Projects of collecting and publishing oral and written testimonies were a major aspect of that decade and Fragiski Abatzopoulou's work was an important contribution in this field. In a new space of public history, the collective memory of new comers or older ethnic groups met with official history.
The first international conference on "Jews in Greece. Questions of History in the longue durée" took place in 1991 and its proceedings were published some years later. The conference was held in Salonika and had been organized by the "Society for the Study of Greek Jewry", which remained active for about ten years. The "Society" was run mostly by academics and it had absolutely no institutional basis. This first conference aimed at showing the complexity, the continuities and the ruptures in a long Jewish presence in Greece. It opened the new historiographical era in which the Jewish past became more visible. Up to that time, historians provocatively ignored Salonika's Jewish past. Rena Molho's book on the particularities of the Jewish community of Salonika (Οι Εβραίοι της Θεσσαλονίκης 1856-1919) published in 2001 was the result of the first systematic research on Salonika's Jewish past.
After this "coming out", Jewish history has become more visible in the Greek public sphere, with the proliferation of academic projects and relevant publications. What are the dominant narratives that have emerged and what has been neglected?
It has been demonstrated by Odette Varon-Vassard and other scholars that Jewish presence has become more visible in the public sphere with the erection of monuments, the organization of commemorative events and educational projects. This is partly due to the international conjuncture of the rise of identity politics and memory studies, which has also influenced Greece. It is also true that since 2000, people from various disciplines contributed with their work and queries in mapping the Jewish presence in the Greek past. Publications in the field of history have proliferated and we may even say that Greek Jewish History has gained some legitimacy.
This has been the result of debunking old dominant narratives regarding Greek society as culturally and ethnically homogeneous, of studying antisemitism in historical terms, of revealing differences between various traditions in the Greek Jewish communities, of working on sensitive subjects of the Holocaust such as the Collaboration and so on. Holocaust studies and memory studies prevail. This is an international trend but the hesitation in studying earlier periods is also related -though only in part- to the difficulties of accessing sources composed in different languages and researching archives located in different places.
I believe that it is too early to judge the historical work produced up to now. It is nevertheless necessary to reflect on the current historiographical situation in order to see the research's lacunae, constraints, stakes, and perspectives. The accumulation of historical publications does not necessarily correspond to an advancement of historical knowledge or understanding. Much of this historical work is presented in meetings which stand halfway between academic events and memorial practices, between research and political conformity, between sensibility and the needs of funding an academic career. The quality of the works varies greatly, going from narratives full of platitudes (sometimes erroneous) to deeply researched, original and thought-provoking contributions. Unfortunately, monographs are still rare, but some PhD dissertations, which are now under preparation, will probably make up for this scarcity.
If you ask me what directions research should take, I would insist on the need to encourage monographs that would take into account regional factors, challenge Greek exceptionalism and espouse a national as well as transnational perspective. The history of the Jews of Greece is a Jewish history, a Greek history, a Mediterranean history and a European history, all at the same time. The research should engage with the history of the Sephardic and Romaniote Jews in the Ottoman era (today mostly conducted outside Greece) and the Greek state. A new history of the Jews of Greece under the Occupation should take into account the diversity of the history of the Greek Jewish communities and attempt to integrate it into the context of the European war. Maria Kavala's work on Salonika and the fate of the Jews during the Occupation and in the aftermath goes in this direction. Research would benefit by seeking the continuities and raptures between the Interwar years, the Shoah and the post-war period.
We still lack bottom-up approaches; we still need to appreciate Jewish communities as multi-class entities, composed by men and women, who interacted with each other, with non-Jews and with the state. We have to examine the communities' heterogeneities and the cultural changes they went through. We still have to study the complex Jewish-Christian relations and not only antisemitism, while at the same time we need to historicize it, to avoid a "lachrymose perception" of Jewish history. Archives wait to be researched. We have to keep in mind that research has its own slow rhythms and work has to be carried out less loudly and independently of the mass media's own purposes. Last, but not least, the practice of historical research should go hand in hand with a critical stance towards public history.
You have said that "it is very difficult to speak in general terms about the extermination of the Jews of Greece during the Occupation." What were the particular elements of the persecution and extermination of the Jewish community of Thessaloniki?
Nazi ideology was responsible for the Holocaust, but the extermination of European Jews is strongly related to the war's progression, the attitudes of their fellow citizens, the role of the Resistance, the different choices that Jewish groups and communities faced. The deportation and extermination of the Jews was a German project, but without local collaboration the numbers of the deported would have been lower. There are questions which are hard to answer: What information existed and how wasit perceived and evaluated in a universe of fear or hope? What were the possibilities for protest and expression of solidarity on the part of the fellow citizens? In Greece, the three occupation zones (German, Bulgarian and Italian) had determined the temporality of the deportations. When the Germans invaded Greece, the decision to exterminate the Jews had already been taken, and in procedural terms it was formulated in January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference. However, anti-Jewish measures increased only gradually and the deportation of the Jews of Thessaloniki began only in March 1943. At that time the Resistance movement was only in its beginning. Let us recall that Athens' Jews were deported one year later, in March 1944, and the deportation of the last Jews of Greece took place in the summer of 1944, when the Reich had already collapsed.
The case of Thessaloniki, with its large Jewish community and extremely high rate of losses, has -partly rightly- dominated the study of the Holocaust in Greece; it still presents unexplored aspects. The implementation of the German measures was, at every step, relative to the obedience of Jews and non-Jews, the collaboration of the politicians and local authorities, the passive or active support of the Jews' neighbours, the desire of the victims to gain time and their room for action. Institutions, networks, rivalries and solidarity played a dynamic role.
In the introduction of your book "Those who Survived: Deportation, Resistance and Return of the Jews of Thessaloniki in the 1940s" you write that your research is "a methodological proposal for a new history of the extermination of the Jews of Greece". Could you expand on that?
In my book, "Those who survived" as well as in "Louna. An Essay of historical biography", I make some methodological assumptions. When you think about it, survivors' trajectories are always extraordinary. Nothing is normal in the Shoah and every story of survival is exceptional. I don't dismiss the possibility of documenting Holocaust by testimonies, nor the insight provided by a witness's story.
However, to what extent can one accumulate stories that are always exceptional and normal at the same time, each one with its own particular sufferings, cruelty, compassion and accidental encounters? Do we risk falling into the trap of a litany of repeating motives that crushes us? Are we motivated by a residue of positivist illusion that drives us to record all cases exhaustively? How does this influence historical understanding? It seems to me that an answer lies in a historiography that seeks a narrative of a collective history in which we will manage to integrate, in a meaningful way, the stories of cases that diverge.
The modalities and the suffering of deportation are not limited to a single theme with variations. Our understanding depends on our ability to take into account the differences in space and time of the persecution, the need to approach our subject by reducing the scale of observation, only to rethink again on a macroscopic level; a focus that shifts from collective Jewish destiny to the observation of a group that shares a common experience or to individual trajectories (sometimes within the same family) allows us to better understand the spectrum of constraints and risks, dilemmas and choices, while remaining inscribed to a much larger historiographic body. Archival documents, oral archives, private documents: from the administrative bounds to the common experience, from the reconstruction of a collective story to the individual case and then back to the collective. The Holocaust, a German crime conducted on a transnational level, reduced the importance of national borders. If we want to imagine a total history of the Shoah, the postwar traces of a whole generation of Jewish survivors should be taken into account as well.
Thessaloniki's Zionist associations in the 20s and the 30s tried to forge a new Greek-Jewish identity, a "supplementary nationality", sustained by the belief that one could be both "a good Jew and a loyal Greek". However, these efforts were cut short by the WWII and the Shoah. How has Greek-Jewish identity evolved since then?
During the Interwar period Greek governments recognized the Jewish community of Salonica as an institution, accepting its political autonomy and its members' equality before the law. The Jews of Salonika had initiated the process which led to the law that formalized the structure and rights of Jewish communities as religious minorities. Before the war, almost all the Salonika Jews observed the Sabbath and the religious holidays. However, this did not make the Jewish population socially and culturally homogeneous nor did it reduce their self-understanding to religious terms.
Language, for instance, played an important role. The old aristocracy spoke Italian; the educated bourgeoisie had adopted French; the language that united them all, rich and poor, was Judeo-Spanish, the Castilian of the immigrants from the Iberian Peninsula. Proletarians and petty merchants lived in poor neighborhoods, at the 151 and the Regie Vardar, in wooden houses with a common courtyard. Rich merchants lived in imposing edifices at the suburb of Campanias. The community was characterized by cultural variety and social conflicts. There were Jews faithful to tradition but open to modernity, and Jews covering the whole spectrum of political tendencies and currents: those who advocated assimilation to Greek language and culture, Zionists with visions of a national homeland in Palestine as well as Liberals and Socialists leading the worker's movement of the city. All this has been extensively discussed in the works of scholars such as Minna Rozen and Rena Molho.
In other words, Zionism was only one among the different ideological tendencies and cultural associations that characterized the Jews of Thessaloniki. It was formed in communication with the international Zionist movement, in opposition to competitive currents that penetrated the Jewish population, in opposition or in harmony with the new Greek nation-state and responding to the social and economic conditions as they were perceived by its members.
Despite obstacles arising out of political tensions and antisemitism, 1912 paved the way for the emergence of a dynamic Greek Jewish culture in Salonika. The Italian attack of October 1940 brought young Jews fighting with their Christian fellows as brothers in arms against the invader. A trajectory with many conflicts but vivid nonetheless, wastragically cut short at the time of the German occupation, as the overwhelming majority (95%) of the Jews in the city were deported and exterminated in the Nazi camps. In the war's aftermath, the old identities such as Zionists or Socialists took different meanings, became permeable one to the other, interchangeable. They were affected by the traumatic common experience, by the State's policies, by economic needs. Immigration to Israel, for example, was by no means the choice of the Zionists alone. To my opinion, and contrary to K. E. Fleming's argument, the Holocaust did not complete the formation of a Greek Jewish identity; on the contrary, it made it even more complex. After all, the Germans and their collaborators persecuted Greek Jews for being Jews. More than ever, I think, today one can be "a good Jew and a loyal Greek". However, only the second part of the phrase has a clear, literal meaning. Considering myself Jewish, I see many ways of being a "good Jew".
Last year, the mayor of Thessaloniki, Yannis Boutaris, gave a widely acclaimed speech on the occasion National Holocaust Remembrance Day and the inauguration of the project for a Holocaust Memorial Museum in Thessaloniki. The mayor talked about the importance of remembering and honoring Thessaloniki's Jews and the Museum as a symbol of "shame for what happened, for what we did, and especially for what we couldn't or didn't want to do". Would you like to comment?
I cannot but recognize the mayor's courageous role in making the Shoah an issue of public concern in the city. However, as a historian I feel quite unease with the rhetoric of his speech. We often overlook the fact that silence, forgetfulness or concealment are always linked to people and causes; in other words, concrete people forget, omit or conceal for very specific reasons, under specific circumstances. There are variations of silence. I already mentioned the censorship on the history of the genocide imposed by the right-wing victors of the Civil War, the unpunished collaborators of the Nazis who were quickly incorporated into the state machinery.
On the other hand, as we know today, those who survived the Holocaust had not forgotten anything; they had not stopped talking about itand commemorating it inside the Jewish world. It is just as likely that the witnesses of those times remembered as well the Jewish drama, with either indifference or compassion. There were also all those who had economic, political and social interests to keep quiet. The "shame" and the blame should fall on those who deserve it. In other words, in a city like Salonika, the generation of those that witnessed the deportation, knew facts, people and names.
Today Salonika is inhabited by new generations and newcomers. It is therefore time to think historically, to put an end to dominant and complacent narratives of any kind: narratives that ignore the indifference or the betrayal of collaborators, but also, the more recent moralistic rhetoric emphasizing a general "shame" which implies that all were guilty in the same way (all ultimately equals to nobody), while omitting the fact that some were really guilty, for complex reasons (which combine antisemitism and personal interests) perhaps, but in very precise and concrete way. The same goes for the state institutions. Andrew Apostolou's deep historical research on Collaboration goes in this direction, i.e. against simplifying narratives.
I feel equally unease regarding the ambitious project of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Thessaloniki and I certainly don't agree with the mayor's rhetoric statement which decontextualizes (in an almost sacrilegious way) Primo Levi's saying on Auschwitz: "here there is no why". Because, on this specific issue, there must be answers to many questions: Why (another) Museum? Why not another Institution, or the reinforcement of the existing ones? Why so little is known on the planning, on the content, on who and how is taking care of all that? Why the Museum's Institute should be based in Brussels? I think I am not alone in posing these questions.
In conclusion, what can the study of Greek Jewry and the Holocaust tell us for contemporary Greek society and the various political issues it is faced with?
Free from moralizing conformism, the study of Greek Jewry and the Holocaust may positively complexify history writing and nourish a more self-consciously critical stance towards phenomena such as antisemitism, the rise of the extreme right and revisionist trends in politics. In other words, Greek Jewish history may serve as a "referential framework" for developping historical sensibility and a critical mind.
A critical stance coming from historical sensibility, i.e. the ability to recognize and interpret phenomena from the past may help us on decide how to react on various issues. For instance, to resist the racist and antisemitic discourse that spreads through many channels and in various areas of social life, disseminating poisonous prejudices. In Greece these prejudices often pertain to ideas on order and security, which justify exclusion and violence -against refugees for example. There are also conceptions of society imagined in terms of health and illness, conceptions that are discriminatory and destructive. There are stereotypes of Jews pulling the strings behind the bankers or/and behind the Left, working together for the destruction of the Greek nation. In all these fantasies, in all these discourses -coming sometimes from official lips- we recognize the language of fascism and antisemitism. This is extremely dangerous; Golden Dawn is just the top of the iceberg.
For about forty years after World War Two, no respectable scholar or public figure would have thought to attempt a rehabilitation of fascism and antisemitism. Today, the normalization of revisionist discourse is shocking: for example, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's national conservatism claims to reconnect Hungary with the so-called 'natural course of events' and to stigmatize the Left as supporters of a hated history; the ultra-nationalist Polish right is engaged in a policy which aims to conceal the antisemitic dark past of Poland. No doubt, critical alert against historical and political revisionism is much needed today.


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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
:: Percussion musical instrument - Daira
Percussion musical instrument - Daira
Daira is an ancient Georgian percussion instrument that represents a wooden arch (1) with stretched leather (2). Within the hoop there are hanged clanging things – slim and round small plates and bells (3). The ratio of height of the arch and the diameter of the sounding surface is 1/5. The hoop is encrusted by white and black bone. In many cases Rich families and good players decorated some Dairas with different kinds of ornaments.
In Tusheti there has been used sheep's skin for Daira and on the hoop have been hanged moneys, but in Kakheti there has been hanged sheep's belly.
Daira
It seems that Daira was a very popular instrument that is reflected in the poem (of XII A.D.) "Amirandarejaniani" and Shota Rustaveli's immortal poem "Knight in the Panther's Skin". This kind of instrument is rarely found in mountain regions as mountain inhabitants used clapping instead of it.
Daira was widely used at weddings, holidays and in merriments. It is widely spread in the regions of East Georgia, Tusheti, Samegrelo and Racha. There is no great difference between the types of Daira in different regions. While playing Daira is kept with both hands. The hoop is reclined on the thumb fingers and other fingers lay on the membrane and with these fingers sound is produced. The left hand's fingers mostly are motionless and Daira is played by right hand's fingers. When playing, they hit the center of sonorous surface or on the arch by four fingers or by a hand and shaking it, jingle sounds fill the melody.
Percussion musical instrument - Daira (with jingles)
The function of the instrument is to accompany dances and to emphasize rhythm. Generally Daira is played by women during dancing. More than one Daira is not used during performance. Daira was often accompanied with multipipe wind instrument Soinari in the region of Samegrelo. In the region of Kakheti, it was accompanied with Panduri and Duduki. In Racha Daira is played during the play "Tskhenkatsoba": two or three boys are playing, one of them bestrides and all of them are walking in the village and playing Daira.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Pension Neutrality: New Hampshire
Pensions Policy
The state should ensure that pension systems are neutral, uniformly increasing pension wealth with each additional year of work.
National Council on Teacher Quality. (2015). Pension Neutrality: New Hampshire results. State Teacher Policy Database. [Data set].
Retrieved from: https://www.nctq.org/yearbook/state/NH-Pension-Neutrality-74
Analysis of New Hampshire's policies
New Hampshire's pension system is based on a benefit formula that is not neutral, meaning that each year of work does not accrue pension wealth in a uniform way until teachers reach conventional retirement age, such as that associated with Social Security.
Teachers' retirement wealth is determined by their monthly payments and the length of time they expect to receive those payments. Monthly payments are usually calculated as final average salary multiplied by years of service multiplied by a set multiplier (such as 1.5 percent). Higher salary, more years of service or a greater multiplier increases monthly payments and results in greater pension wealth. Earlier retirement eligibility with unreduced benefits also increases pension wealth, because more payments will be received.
To qualify as neutral, a pension formula must utilize a constant benefit multiplier and an eligibility timetable based solely on age, rather than years of service. Basing eligibility for retirement on years of service creates unnecessary and often unfair peaks in pension wealth, while allowing unreduced retirement at a young age creates incentives to retire early. Plans that change their multipliers for various years of service do not value each year of teaching equally. Therefore, plans with a constant multiplier and that base retirement on an age in line with Social Security are likely to create the most uniform accrual of wealth.
New Hampshire's pension plan is commended for utilizing a constant benefit multiplier of 1/66 (or 1.52 percent) and for basing retirement eligibility on age, rather than years of service. It ceased using two different multipliers for different periods of service.
The state bases unreduced retirement benefits on age, rather than years of service. All teachers who entered the system on or after July 1, 2011 may not retire with unreduced benefits until age 65, which is almost aligned with Social Security's normal retirement age of 67. The state's timetable for early retirement with reduced benefits, however, is based on years of service, causing unequal treatment of teachers. Only teachers with 30 years of service may apply for early retirement. These policies may encourage effective teachers to retire earlier than they might otherwise, and they also fail to treat equally those teachers who enter the system at a later age and give the same amount of service.
New Hampshire Retirement System, Group I (Employee and Teacher) Member Benefits, revised September 2013
Recommendations for New Hampshire
End early retirement eligibility based on years of service.
New Hampshire should change its practice of only allowing teachers with certain years of service to retire early with reduced benefits. If retirement at an earlier age is offered to some teachers with reduced benefits, it should be offered to all teachers equally regardless of years of service.
Align eligibility for retirement with unreduced benefits with Social Security retirement age.
New Hampshire allows teachers to retire before conventional retirement age. As life expectancies continue to increase, teachers may draw out of the system for many more years than they contributed. This is not compatible with a financially sustainable system (see pension sustainability goal).
New Hampshire noted that it is important to distinguish between normal and early retirement eligibility.
Pension Transparency
Delivering Well Prepared Teachers
Admission into Teacher Preparation
Elementary Teacher Preparation in Reading Instruction
Elementary Teacher Preparation in Mathematics
Middle School Teacher Preparation
Secondary Teacher Preparation in Science and Social Studies
Special Education Preparation in Reading
Assessing Professional Knowledge
Teacher Preparation Program Accountability
Expanding the Pool of Teachers
Alternate Route Eligibility
Alternate Route Preparation
Alternate Route Usage and Providers
Part-Time Teaching Licenses
Identifying Effective Teachers
State Data Systems
Evaluation of Effectiveness
Frequency of Evaluations
New Teacher Induction
Pay Scales and Performance Pay
Differential Pay
Compensation for Prior Work Experience
Exiting Ineffective Teachers
Extended Emergency Licenses
Dismissal for Poor Performance
Reductions in Force
Pension Flexibility
Pension Sustainability
Pension Neutrality
It is unfair to all teachers when pension wealth does not accumulate in a uniform way.
In addition to the ways defined benefit pension systems disadvantage teachers described in Goal 4-G, the way pension wealth accumulates in some systems further compounds the inequity. All pension systems use a multiplier to calculate the benefits an individual is entitled to receive based on salary levels and years of service. For example, a pension system may have a multiplier of 2.0. In such case, pension benefits are determined by multiplying average final annual salary by years of service and then multiplying the product by 2.0. Thus, someone working fewer years with a lower final salary would appropriately receive less in benefits than someone with more years of service and/or a higher final salary. However, the multiplier in many pension systems is not fixed; it increases as years of service increase. When a higher multiplier is used, teachers receive even more generous benefits.
Another way that pension benefits are awarded unfairly is through the common policy of setting retirement eligibility at different ages and years of service. For example, in a given state, a teacher with 30 years of service may retire at age 55, while teachers with fewer years of service may not retire until age 62. This means that a teacher who started teaching in this state at age 25 would reach 30 years of service at age 55 and receive seven additional years of full retirement benefits beyond what a teacher that started at age 32 and cannot retire with full benefits until age 62 would receive. A fair system would set a standard retirement age for all participants, without factoring in years of service.
Pension systems affect when teachers decide to retire as they look to maximize their pension wealth.
The year teachers reach retirement eligibility by age and/or years of service, their pension wealth peaks; pension wealth then declines for each year they work beyond retirement age. Plans that allow retirement based on years of service create unnecessary peaks, and plans that allow a low retirement age create an incentive to retire earlier in one's career than may be necessary. For every year teachers continue to work beyond their eligibility for unreduced retirement benefits, they lose that year of pension benefits, thus decreasing their overall pension wealth.
Although their yearly pension benefits would continue to rise as they earn additional service credit, it would only be at a small percentage per year, which would not make up for the loss of each year of benefits.
To try to balance this incentive to retire, some states have created DROP (Deferred Retirement Option Plan) programs. DROP programs allow participants to place their monthly pension benefits in a private investment account while still teaching and earning a salary, thus retaining those benefits. These teachers are, in effect, earning their pension and salary at the same time, and often at a relatively young age.
A DROP program is a band-aid on the problem; it does not fix what is structurally wrong: retirement at an early age without reduction of benefits. For example, the hypothetical teacher above decides to forgo retiring at age 47 in order to wait and qualify for her state's DROP program at age 55. She now has 33 years of service and has reached a pension equal to 66 percent of her salary. She remains in DROP for the maximum allowable five years. During that time, her five years of lost pension benefits plus her five years of mandatory employee pension contribution have been deposited in a private investment account. Upon retiring at age 60, she would receive the total of that private account plus a lifetime pension benefit annually of 66 percent of her final salary. With the lump-sum payment of her DROP account and monthly pension benefit, she will receive 100 percent of her final average salary for at least 10 years, and, depending on the state, she may also receive Social Security benefits. This generous guaranteed payout would be hard to find in any other profession.
DROP programs do create an incentive for some teachers to remain past their eligible retirement age, but at a high cost. DROP programs mean that districts still must find the funds to pay pension benefits to teachers at a relatively young age when those dollars could be more effectively spent.
Pension Neutrality: Supporting Research
NCTQ's analysis of the financial sustainability of state pension system is based on actuarial benchmarks promulgated by government and private accounting standards boards. For more information see U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2007, 30 and Government Accounting Standards Board Statement No. 25.
For an overview of the current state of teacher pensions, the various incentives they create, and suggested solutions, see Robert Costrell and Michael Podgursky. " Reforming K-12 Educator Pensions: A Labor Market Perspective." TIAA-CREF Institute (2011).
For evidence that retirement incentives do have a statistically significant effect on retirement decisions, see Joshua Furgeson, Robert P. Strauss, and William B. Vogt. " The Effects of Defined Benefit Pension Incentives and Working Conditions on Teacher Retirement Decisions", Education Finance and Policy (Summer, 2006).
For examples of how teacher pension systems inhibit teacher mobility, see Robert Costrell and Michael Podgursky, " Golden Handcuffs," Education Next, (Winter, 2010).
For additional information on state pension systems, see Susanna Loeb, and Luke Miller. " State Teacher Policies: What Are They, What Are Their Effects, and What Are Their Implications for School Finance?" Stanford University: Institute for Research on Education Policy and Practice (2006); and Janet Hansen, "Teacher Pensions: A Background Paper", published through the Committee for Economic Development (May, 2008).
For further evidence supporting NCTQ's teacher pension standards, see "Public Employees' Retirement System of the State of Nevada: Analysis and Comparison of Defined Benefit and Defined Contribution Retirement Plans." The Segal Group (2010).


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Our wine reference database can be viewed below. Please click on each country to view the amount of reference samples we have from each country.
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Many of the common types of wine fraud can be detected by isotopic testing. Here are the current tests that Agroisolab offers:
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Additionally, Agroisolab are able to determine whether the source of carbon dioxide in sparkling wines is natural or not. We are also able to determine the sources of fermentation in spirits and wine vinegars.
For a brief overview of the science involved in these tests, please see below.
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What is the EU wine databank?
The EU wine databank was established in 1991 to protect the reputation of EU wine and minimise fraud, such as the additions of sugar and extra water in wine, by enabling laboratories to perform authenticity analyses. It has played a fundamental role in helping the EU Member States to develop the scientific and technical competences needed to carry out isotopic analysis of wine.
Agroisolab founder Professor Förstel originally developed the stable isotope method to determine the origin of wine, and played a crucial role in creating the EU wine databank.
Participating wine producers submit samples of their produce annually to the databank. As a result, it is possible for stable isotope laboratories to authenticate claims of geographic origin on bottles of wine sold at retail to a high level of accuracy.
How does origin analyses of wine work with isotopes?
In Europe, there are distinct regions that can be defined by the isotopic composition of their groundwater. The groundwater in some of these regions has more heavy oxygen present (18O), and some has less heavy oxygen.
As a result, grapes grown in the regional groundwater will absorb the oxygen isotope signature of their region.
Since wine is made from fermented grapes, it is possible to determine the geographic origin of a wine by examining the oxygen isotope ratios in the water fraction of the wine.
Further work has been carried out to isolate and analyse the isotope ratios of other components of wine. Analysing the isotopic composition of the alcohol (ethanol) in wine can help determine if sugar has been added to the wine, or can further enhance geographic origin interpretation.
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The Science of SIRA


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Amnesty urges Ronaldo to speak out over human rights in Saudi Arabia
Ronaldo has joined Al Nassr for reported £177m a year
Amnesty says signing follows pattern of sportswashing
Cristiano Ronaldo's praise for Saudi Arabia – calling his new hosts an "amazing country" – on arrival at his new club Al Nassr has prompted Amnesty International to call on the former Manchester United player to use his celebrity to highlight the kingdom's "appalling" human rights record.
The 37-year-old arrived in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday after signing a deal reportedly worth £177m a year until 2025, making him the highest-paid footballer in history.
Ronaldo said: "I had many opportunities … many clubs tried to sign me but I gave my word to this club to develop not only the football but other parts of this amazing country. I want to give a different vision of this club and country. This is why I took this opportunity."
Amnesty's Middle East researcher Dana Ahmed said: "Al Nassr's signing of Cristiano Ronaldo fits into a wider pattern of sportswashing in Saudi Arabia. It is highly likely that the Saudi authorities will promote Ronaldo's presence in the country as a means of distracting from the country's appalling human rights record.
"Instead of offering uncritical praise of Saudi Arabia, Ronaldo should use his considerable public platform to draw attention to human rights issues in the country. Saudi Arabia regularly executes people for crimes including murder, rape and drug smuggling.
"Cristiano Ronaldo shouldn't allow his fame and celebrity status to become a tool of Saudi sportswashing – he should use his time at Al Nassr to speak out about the myriad human rights issues in the country."


There is a lot to be said for complaints about certain ages being 'difficult to buy for'. Teenagers suffer from over-specific likes that only a parent can (attempt to) satisfy. Children can be frustratingly under-appreciative. But those who've just reached full adulthood are refreshingly simple - they have their feet on the ground and know that it's the thought that counts.
Getting a birthday gift for a 20 year old isn't easy in every aspect - they still hold onto many teenage passions and clothing can remain a risky area. That said, this unique age group has access to everything that an adult can do, but hasn't got anything to do it with. Have they mentioned going on holiday anywhere? Is their birthday in the summer or the winter? Give this a brief thought before heading to the shops. A summer boy might lack for sunglasses, or some board shorts. A winter girl can never have too many scarves. Birthday gifts are more successful as accessories to clothing than the main parts - this leaves the image-conscious 20 year old to incorporate the accessory into their look, rather than form their look around your gift.
Children and often teenagers suffer from being picky eaters. This is genetically built into us as a safety mechanism. But as their life opportunities become free, so do their taste buds. A gift idea for a 20 year old man might come in the shape of foods they once rejected - nutty foods are often a victim of this. Personalized M&Ms, with their face, or name, printed on are a gift that goes down very well. These could be incorporated in or around a homemade birthday cake - but make sure you liaise with the lucky boy's closest family as you don't want to outshine their cake.
If legal at 20, drink never fails to disappoint. Even if the birthday girl doesn't drink, her friends likely will, and she can use it to supplement a good birthday night. Personalised wine - with an inscription on the cork or a user-designed label around the bottle - will score marks for effort. If they're a fan of Game of Thrones (and let's face it, what 20 year old isn't?), make it red wine and adorn the label with Westeros references, but make sure to include them in it.
However you choose to spoil your 20 year old, any gift goes down well with an explanation. It could be the most random gift idea going, but so long as you explain the thought process it'll become a cherished memory and something to laugh about. Playing edible Scrabble with alphabet-M&Ms won't be forgotten too soon.


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Джон Турбервіль Нідгем, член Королівського товариства (; , Лондон — , Брюссель) — англійський біолог і римсько-католицький священник.

Вперше зацікавився філософією природи під час навчання в семінарській школі, а пізніше опублікував статтю (хоча її предметом була переважно геологія), яка описувала механіку запилювання і отримала визнання в спільноті ботаніків.

Нідгем проводив експерименти з соусом, а пізніше з пшеницею, в контейнерах. Він експериментував зі самозародженням, оскільки на той час це було актуальним. Експерименти складалися з короткого кип'ятіння суміші бульйону і охолодження суміші у відкритій ємності до кімнатної температури. Пізніше колби запечатувались, і мікроби виростали через кілька днів. Ці експерименти, здавалося, показували, що існувала життєва сила, що призводила до самозародження. Сьогодні відомо, що часу кипіння було недостатньо для знищення будь-яких ендоспор мікробів, а охолодження відкритих колб на повітрі може викликати мікробне забруднення. Також можна встановити, що Нідгем не використовував належну стерильну техніку. Пізніше його експерименти оскаржив і повторив італієць Ладзаро Спалланцані. Використовуючи дещо інший протокол (з тривалішим часом кипіння), Спалланцані не отримав жодних мікробів, що росли б у його запечатаних колбах, що суперечило висновкам Нідгема.

Те, що його вважають ірландським єзуїтом — міф, який був створений Вольтером під час сварки з приводу самозародження, в якому Вольтер був проти Нідгема і його теорій.

Він був першим католицьким священником членом Лондонського королівського товариства (1747 рік).

Експерименти Нідгема із самозародженням життя були процитовані французьким філософом Просвітництва Поль Анрі Гольбахом у атеїстичній роботі — Система природи.

Примітки

Англійські біологи
Природознавці
Члени Лондонського королівського товариства
Персоналії:Англія
Персоналії:Велика Британія

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