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CHAPTER 9 – THE GREEK CASE: VENEZIS 
282 
succession of banks under his real name, Paraskevas Tavoudelis, and the great poet, 
George Seferis, was a diplomat who in that capacity used his real surname, 
Seferiadis). In 1939, almost a year before the involvement of Greece in the Second 
World War, he wrote 
Γαλήνη 
(Serenity) which, in dealing with the settlement of the 
refugees in Greece, is a sort of sequel to 
Number 31328.
In 1943 he faced death 
again after arrest by the German occupation authorities and narrowly escaped 
execution only as a result of an energetic campaign by the intellectual elite of Athens 
and Archbishop Damaskinos. At the end of that year he published 
Αιολική Γή
(Aeolian Earth) whose background is peacetime Anatolia and which was the first 
instance of the “lost paradise” genre. The limited wartime edition sold out in a 
fortnight but on republication after the war became his best known work and was 
translated into fifteen languages. The Second World War and the German occupation 
gave a fresh impetus to his work. His imprisonment by the Nazis was the inspiration 
for the play
 Block C
of 1946. He produced, as will be discussed in greater detail 
below, a reworking of 
Number 31328
and an experimental novel, Έ
ξοδος 
(Exodus) 
which tried to capture the surreally random violence of the occupation. He continued 
to be an active writer, branching out into travel writing, biography and even a history 
of the Bank of Greece, until his death from cancer in 1973
10
. He is among the most 
important representatives of the innovative literary movement known as “the 
generation of the thirties”
11
. 
The Early Greek Literature of the Asia Minor Disaster 
10
Valetas 1974: 95-125. A detailed review of his life in conjunction with his work
11
Beaton 1994: 131 

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