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CHAPTER 9 – THE GREEK CASE: VENEZIS 
284 
Αφηγήματα των Σφαγών της Νικομήδειας. 
(These are the Turks. The narrative of the 
Massacres of Nicomedia). But unlike the Turkish case there was no continuity 
between this kind of publication and the subsequent literature of the Asia Minor 
Disaster.
Doukas, Myrivilis and Venezis each achieved literary celebrity through a single 
work, respectively 
Η Ιστορία Ενός Αιχμαλώτου
(A Prisoner’s Story) (1928), 
Η Ζωή 
εν Τάφω
(Life in the Tomb) (1930) and 
Το Νούμερο 31328
(Number 31328) (1931). 
Retouched by the authors’ hand in successive editions they have remained in print 
ever since. The earlier serialised versions of 
Life in the Tomb
and 
Number 31328
had 
been edited by Myrivilis himself in 1923/4 and 1924 respectively. While Myrivilis 
and Venezis enhanced their celebrity by a substantial subsequent output, Doukas in 
the eyes of the public at least remained known only for his first book. 
Doukas’s book presents itself as the record of what the author heard from a Greek 
who had escaped from Turkey after the end of the war pretending to be a Turk. 
Venezis’s is an account of his own experience in the Turkish labour battalions in 
1922/3. Myrivilis’s is more overtly fictional but with the narrative form of a diary 
purportedly left by a sergeant killed in 1918. The historical background to the novel 
is not that of the Greco-Turkish war of 1919-22; but the historical background counts 
for little in the novel and its exploration of life confined in pointless death could use 
any war as background. Myrivilis turned to the aftermath of the Greco-Turkish war 
in his next novel 
Η Δασκάλα με τα Χρυσά Μάτια
(The Schoolmistress with the 
Golden Eyes,1933). The protagonist is a returning soldier from the war and the 
persistent theme is the psychological scars the war had left on him. 

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