Collective Memory and Political Mythologies: Eleftherios Venizelos in Greek Postwar Historiography, 1945–1967

Abstract

During the first decades after the Second World War, Greek society had to deal with a vast array of issues, including its relationship with the past. In this context, Eleftherios Venizelos, a great statesman of the early twentieth century, was frequently used both as a symbol in contemporary political debates and as a metonymy in various attempts to contextualise the history of the first half of the century. An important part of these attempts was the corpus of public narratives produced about Venizelos and his era, either as historiographical accounts or autobiographical texts. These narratives, published in newspapers and books, were not, for the most part, academic; their authors were usually journalists, retired military officers, or politicians, who formed a political-historical nexus and who produced a new discourse on a historical period which had hitherto received little or no historiographical attention. In fact, this discourse left its mark on Greek political and historical culture for decades to come.