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CHAPTER 9 – THE GREEK CASE: VENEZIS 
281 
secretary
4
in the local Bishopric. It was in this period that he started his literary 
endeavours. His first published work appeared in 1920 in the periodicals 
Νέα Ζωή
(New Life) of İzmir and 
Λόγος
(Word) of Istanbul with the pen name Lelos Venezis
5
. 
Like many publications of the Greeks in Istanbul and İzmir of the pre-war period, 
these works seem not to have left any impact on the mainstream of Greek literature
6
. 
With the Turkish victory in September 1922 most of the family fled again but Elias 
and his future brother in law failed to do so. Both of them were seized by the Turkish 
authorities and sent to the labour battalions
7
. Venezis was in captivity for fourteen 
months; he was one of twenty three survivors out of three thousand men taken from 
Ayvali
8
. On release at the end of 1923 he was reunited with his family in Mytilini 
and there met Stratis Myrivilis (pen name of Efstratios Stamatopoulos, b. Mytilini 
1892 – d. Athens 1969) and the literary circle of Mytilini known as Λεσβιακή 
Ανοιξη (Lesbian Spring). It was Myrivilis who encouraged him to write about his 
captivity in the Turkish labour battalions for the weekly newspaper, 
Kampana
(Bell) 
which he edited. Serialisation started on 5
th
February 1924 after the concluding 
instalment of Myrivilis’s novel 
Η ζωή εν τάφω
(Life in the Tomb)
9
. With the 
publication of a book of short stories in 1928 and of 
Number 31328
in book form in 
1931, Venezis gained a reputation as an established novelist. In 1932 he moved to 
Athens and started working for the Bank of Greece while continuing to write (at that 
time it was far from universal practice for writers to be professional literateurs; for 
example the other major novelist of Asia Minor, Kosmas Politis, also worked for a 
4
Tenekidis, 97 
5
Karbales, ii 338. Also Valetas, 1974, 106-107 
6
Mackridge 2004, 236 
7
Neyzi 2010, 298, footnote 30 establishment of the labor battalions by the National Assembly in 1920.
8
Karvelis, ii. 336, footnote 4, for a detailed bibliography on Venezis’s capture. 
9
Valetas 1974, 112-114 

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