Microsoft Word 1 Arif thesis cover final doc

CHAPTER 9 – THE GREEK CASE: VENEZIS 
294 
The third example comes from a passage in the 1924 version, a part of which 
corresponds to a scene in chapter 6 of the book. Common to both is a scene more 
horribly depicted in the original: the sight of a Christian woman in tatters having 
suffered multiple rape with the disgusting remains of the dead child which she had 
been forced to give birth to in the fields. In the book the rape is merely suggested, 
and the decomposing remains of the baby are omitted.
48
. Furthermore, omitted 
altogether from the book is the narrator’s reference in the 1924 original to the visible 
signs of death and devastation. The book also leaves out the tale of his companion, a 
former soldier in the Greek army, who tells the narrator not only that in the retreat 
Greek soldiers had burnt everything in sight but that he personally had poured petrol 
on to a woman and set her alight and in a previous attack had torn out the veins of a 
sick captive
49
. 
In terms of narrative content the changes between successive versions can be 
summarised as follows. A specific Greek atrocity graphically narrated by its 
perpetrator is omitted in the reworking of chapter 6 of the book. The image of the 
priesthood in chapter 7 of the book is upgraded in two stages from the contemptible 
to the merely pitiable. The story of the watchmaker is more complex. A simple tale 
of violence and venality in which the watchmaker’s family are the only victims is 
turned by the book into a tale of retaliatory but indiscriminate violence in which each 
48
Venezis 2008, 102. 
49
Kampana, 
51, 4 March 1924 

---

CHAPTER 9 – THE GREEK CASE: VENEZIS 
295 
side perpetrates crimes on the other
50
, foiled by a flashback to an idyllic time of 
coexistence before the war. 
In terms of stylistic changes the ruminative nature of the original version fitted the 
aims of the newspaper
. Kampana
was a newspaper with a distinct political line. It 
was in favour of the Plastiras ‘revolution’ and consequently Venizelist in political 
affiliation while severely critical of party politics. It was also a crusading newspaper. 
One of its causes was quite specifically the interests of ex-servicemen and political 
hostages whose individual interests the Greek state served in the newspaper’s 
opinion only by the criterion of party political advantage.
51
. Indeed, on 4 March 
1924 
Kampana 
carried on its front page with a banner headline an open letter from 
Venezis himself to Myrivilis on the issue of hostages, that is people who were still in 
the same position as Venezis had been. Venezis does not refer to his own experience, 
but gives a general account of the neglect and indifference, which allows extensive 
mistreatment of a large number of persons to go unremarked. Regardless of 
Venezis’s literary merits, when there were still men who had not returned from 
Turkish captivity, it made perfect sense for the newspaper 
Kampana
to commission 
Venezis to recount “his impressions of the living hell of slavery through which he 
passed in the hope that we will see finally an ‘artistic expression’ of this terrible life 
which many thousands – alas – of Greeks had the dark fortune to undergo but which 
no one was able up to now to recount”.
52
. For this purpose a more internal account 
of the slave’s reflections on his sufferings made sense. This was stressed in the 
50
Kastrinaki (1999, 165-174) observes the way in which the references to the Greek reprisals in Bergama are 
toned down in successive editions of the book. 
51
Matthaiou 1985, 213-232. 
52
Kampana
, 47, 5 February 1924 

---