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CHAPTER 9 – THE GREEK CASE: VENEZIS 
297 
his country and that he found that almost no changes were needed. The remarkable 
thing is that the book continues to be a best seller in Greece with annual reprints after 
more than sixty years of peace. I would suggest that literary merit alone does not 
account for the enduring popularity of 
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in its book form; the work 
reflects and reinforces a self image which because of the horrors presented readers 
find rather consoling. The victim is one of 
us 
and his experiences epitomise those of 
our side. His sufferings are appalling and he did absolutely nothing to deserve them. 
He is broad minded enough to rise above petty nationalism, to acknowledge the 
occasional kindness from the individual Turk but his story, particularly as reworked 
in the book, does not go as far as to threaten our perception of ourselves with any too 
specific picture of violence perpetrated by our side.

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CHAPTER 10 – CONCLUSION 
298 
My aim has been to sketch the emergence of the early works and to attempt to 
identify the features which have made them enduringly popular in their own country.
In this respect the study has presented a particular case of a general condition that 
affects Greco-Turkish relations to this day: the enduring hold of quite divergent 
narratives concerning events which constitute the cardinal moment of both nations’ 
twentieth century history and in which their fates were conjoined. In my opinion the 
most important features of these narratives concern the image of the self, which has 
been relatively neglected by scholars, rather than the image of the “other”, a matter 
to which a certain amount of attention has been paid
1
. This self is in both cases 
presented as the victim with victimhood epitomised by the sufferings of innocent 
inhabitants of Anatolia, the scene and purpose of the war. Each nation’s selection of 
victimhood explains the choice of background: in the Turkish case the peasantry 
during the Greek invasion, in the Greek case the captives and refugees after the 
Turkish victory. Also explained by this is the continuity in the Turkish case between 
writing during the war itself and the writing after and the discontinuity in the Greek 
case after it.
1
See, for instance, Millas 2001, in which the author traces the image of the ‘other’ through a long list of works; 
see also Millas 2004 for a discussion of the ‘other’ in Greek and Turkish literature respectively.

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