JOURNAL OF MODERN GREEK STUDIES最新文献

{"title":"Shaping and Reshaping the Global Monetary Order during the Interwar Period and Beyond: Local Actors in-between the International Institutions ed. by Catherine P. Brégianni and Roser Cussó (review)","authors":"Jay K. Rosengard","doi":"10.1353/mgs.2024.a925802","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mgs.2024.a925802","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Shaping and Reshaping the Global Monetary Order during the Interwar Period and Beyond: Local Actors in-between the International Institutions</em> ed. by Catherine P. Brégianni and Roser Cussó <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Jay K. Rosengard (bio) </li> </ul> Catherine P. Brégianni and Roser Cussó, editors, <em>Shaping and Reshaping the Global Monetary Order during the Interwar Period and Beyond: Local Actors in-between the International Institutions</em>. History and Historical Theory 3. Athens: Alfeios Editions and TransMonEA Project, Academy of Athens–HFRI, 2023. Pp. 323. Non-commercial publication. <p>This publication is a multifaceted analysis of the global monetary regime's evolution, from the disintegrating impacts of the Great Depression during the interwar period to the often inequitable and destabilizing adaptations of the postwar era. This transformation is investigated via what the authors call a \"financial engineering process\" generated by interactions between governments and global financial institutions within the context of national and international political economies. The volume is the result of a research project supported by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation and comprises contributions by an extremely diverse and somewhat esoteric group of young Greek scholars, many affiliated with the Hellenic Open University and drawn from the fields of history, philosophy, economics, politics, and demography.</p> <p>The book is a very ambitious endeavor, creative in concept and earnest in execution. It is especially noteworthy that it is a Greek publication written for an international audience, a daring venture into a domain usually dominated by English-speaking academic communities. It has the usual problems of compilations in maintaining coherence of vision and narrative, as well as consistency in level of detail and focus. It is also replete with numerous long, tedious, and often excruciating explanations of research methodologies that divert rather than illuminate. Nevertheless, it provides new perspectives on topics extensively covered by others, including post–World War II debt and currency crises (chapters 8–10) and the impact of the Great Depression in the Weimar Republic from the vantage point of all three levels of government—national, state, and local (chapter 5). It also includes an original exploration of new topics such as both the benign and potentially exploitative impacts of international agency assistance in building national statistical expertise. Examples of such assistance covered in the book are the League of Nations Economic and Financial Section in Turkey (chapter 2), the League of Nations Economic and Financial Organization globally (chapter 4), and the International Agrarian Bureau in Eastern Europe (chapter 3). Another strength of this volume li","PeriodicalId":43810,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN GREEK STUDIES","volume":"55 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140828933","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Greek Weird Wave: A Cinema of Biopolitics by Dimitris Papanikolaou (review)","authors":"Lydia Papadimitriou","doi":"10.1353/mgs.2024.a925804","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mgs.2024.a925804","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Greek Weird Wave: A Cinema of Biopolitics</em> by Dimitris Papanikolaou <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Lydia Papadimitriou (bio) </li> </ul> Dimitris Papanikolaou, <em>Greek Weird Wave: A Cinema of Biopolitics</em>. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2021. Pp. xvi + 268. 27 illustrations., Hardback and E-book £90.00, Paperback £19.99. <p>Toward the end of his introduction, Dimitris Papanikolaou writes that \"this is a very personal, very idiosyncratic, very weird history of the Weird Wave\" (24). The book is indeed personal: the author explicitly places (his own) affect center stage, writes about how the films \"touch\" him, and positions \"biopolitical realism\"—the key concept that structures the book—as a \"survival tactic\" (23). The book is idiosyncratic for the very same reasons, as well as for the ways in which its author inflects, adjusts, and expands otherwise familiar concepts such as allegory in new directions—most crucially, here, by introducing the notion of <em>metonymic</em> allegory. And it is weird insofar as it combines a certain degree of playfulness (evident at a glance in some of its subheadings) with intense theoretical engagement while also implicitly acknowledging—just as the Greek Weird Wave filmmakers have done through their films—the \"unease\" of articulating fixed and authoritative interpretations, opting instead to \"reclaim … weirdness … as an analytical position\" (11).</p> <p>None of the above qualities makes the book problematic; if anything, they signal its methodological and heuristic strengths. Far from being a formalist genre study, <em>Greek Weird Wave: A Cinema of Biopolitics</em> seeks to find connections among form, content, context, and affect within the otherwise rather disparate group of Greek films that emerged in the late 2000s and thrived in the second decade of the twenty-first century. This was a period overdetermined by the Greek financial crisis, which affected not only the conditions of the films' production (if not initially, then certainly by the time the term \"Greek Weird Wave\" was coined by British journalist Steve Rose in 2011) but also the interpretative frames projected onto them—frames that encouraged traditional (i.e., metaphor-based) allegorical readings of the nation in crisis.</p> <p>Triggered by his own emotive and bodily response to the films, Papanikolaou offers an analysis that goes beyond such approaches. He argues that the films' potency lies in their ability to convey \"weirdness\" as a \"structure of feeling\" (12) for the conditions of life in the early twenty-first century as experienced—not only, but with particular intensity—in Greece. Borrowing Foucault's notion of biopolitics, understood as the \"social and political practices that focus on 'disciplining the living being'\" and ultimately subjugating \"'corporeal life into systems of","PeriodicalId":43810,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN GREEK STUDIES","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140828936","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Currency as an Imprint of the Nation-State: Monetary Conditions in the Ottoman Empire at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century and the Transition from Ottoman Currencies to the Phoenix of the Hellenic State (1828)","authors":"Catherine Brégianni","doi":"10.1353/mgs.2023.a908558","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mgs.2023.a908558","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: The economic decline of the Ottoman Empire was fundamental in various ways to the outbreak and progress of the Greek Revolution. The first attempts to create a national currency during the Greek Revolution reflect efforts to craft a modern state, and the eventual introduction of the phoenix by the first governor of the Hellenic State, Ioannis Capodistrias, underscores the shift to a newborn nation-state. The contradictions of Capodistrias’s monetary policy, however, reflected social antagonisms within Greece.","PeriodicalId":43810,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN GREEK STUDIES","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134935211","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Fate of the Properties of the Executed/Escaped Greek Cypriots of July 1821 according to Ottoman Documents","authors":"Güven Dinç","doi":"10.1353/mgs.2023.a908560","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mgs.2023.a908560","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Within a short time, the Greek Revolt of 1821 deeply affected the island of Cyprus. Unlike in the other islands, the rebellion on Cyprus was over before it started owing to the severe measures taken against the rebels by Governor Mehmed Agha, who requested an edict from the sultan listing the names of prominent Greeks to execute. Many Greeks left the island for fear of execution, but some could not. According to Ottoman documents, there were 98 proscribed Cypriots, of whom 75 were executed; the other 23 escaped. In accordance with Ottoman law, the properties of the executed or escaped were first confiscated and then auctioned, with the proceeds transferred to the Public Treasury. But most of the executed or escaped Greeks were not wealthy, and claims by European consuls on the proceeds from the confiscated goods continued for many years.","PeriodicalId":43810,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN GREEK STUDIES","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134935261","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Voices of the Lost Children of Greece: Oral Histories of Cold War International Adoption ed. by Mary Cardaras (review)","authors":"Alexander Kitroeff","doi":"10.1353/mgs.2023.a908565","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mgs.2023.a908565","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Voices of the Lost Children of Greece: Oral Histories of Cold War International Adoption ed. by Mary Cardaras Alexander Kitroeff (bio) Mary Cardaras, editor, Voices of the Lost Children of Greece: Oral Histories of Cold War International Adoption. London and New York: Anthem Press, 2023. Pp. xvi + 192. Hardback $110.00, Paper $35.00, and E-book $35.00. Now that the overall facts of their experience have been established, writes Gonda Van Steen in the introduction to this volume of fourteen short essays, it is time for the voices of the adoptees themselves to be heard. It is Van Steen herself who, in her meticulously researched book-length study Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid pro quo? (2019), uncovered how 3,200 young Greek children were adopted by families in the United States between 1950 and 1962. The story Van Steen tells is one of well-meaning humanitarian motives which were overtaken by practices ranging from mere irregularities to brazenly illegal acts that profited unscrupulous middlemen. When those practices began to be uncovered, several hundred Greek children were already in the process of being adopted. Abetting those underhand practices in the 1950s were Greek government authorities, Greek orphanage officials, and unprepared childless couples in the United States. In several cases, some or all of these participants in the adoption process enabled the middlemen to cut corners. And while it is important to note that many of these adoptions had happy outcomes, others were harmful for the children involved because they were denied knowledge of who their biological parents were and the circumstances of their adoption, making for traumatic discoveries when they tried to retrieve the truth. It is these children who tell their personal stories in this volume. Naturally, the publication of Van Steen’s study sent shock waves among the many adoptees, some of whom were already searching for their biological parents and the truth about their backgrounds. One of these, who decided to take up the cause of her fellow adoptees, was Mary Cardaras, a communications professor at California State University, East Bay. Cardaras proved to be the ideal person to fulfill Van Steen’s wish that the adoptees would follow up her book by telling their own stories. Cardaras and Van Steen appeared together at several book presentations, including those for the Greek translation of Van Steen’s book that was published by the Athens-based Potamos Publishers in 2021. In that same year, Cardaras herself published Ripped at the Root: An Adoption Story, an account of how Dena Poulias was taken as a child from her Greek biological parents in 1958 and found her way back to their village after many years. The book traces how Poulias’s discovery of her origins affected everyone involved—the two families on either side of the Atlantic, the Greek village community, and of course Poulias herself and her loved ones. This new book is [End Page 308] both an ","PeriodicalId":43810,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN GREEK STUDIES","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134935207","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Jerusalem, the Holy Land, and Greekness in Ouranis, Kazantzakis, Sikelianos, and Seferis during the Period of the British Mandate for Palestine","authors":"Ariadne Konstantinou","doi":"10.1353/mgs.2023.a908556","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mgs.2023.a908556","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Representations of Jerusalem and the Holy Land during the time of the British Mandate in Palestine (1918–1948) appear in the works of four modern Greek authors of the interwar period: Ouranis, Kazantzakis, Sikelianos, and Seferis. Their works encompass different genres—travel writing (Ouranis and Kazantzakis), diaries (Sikelianos and Seferis), and poetry (Seferis)—and foreground questions about religion and religiosity, identity, class struggle, and modernization. The landscape of the Holy Land turns out to be different, foreign, sometimes even completely desolate, and this realization initiates a process of remembering which ultimately takes the Greek authors back to the familiar places they apparently call home: the Aegean Sea and the Acropolis.","PeriodicalId":43810,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN GREEK STUDIES","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134935240","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Venizelos: The Making of a Greek Statesman, 1864–1914 by Michael Llewellyn-Smith (review)","authors":"Spyridon G. Ploumidis","doi":"10.1353/mgs.2023.a908564","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mgs.2023.a908564","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Venizelos: The Making of a Greek Statesman, 1864–1914 by Michael Llewellyn-Smith Spyridon G. Ploumidis (bio) Michael Llewellyn-Smith, Venizelos: The Making of a Greek Statesman, 1864– 1914. London: Hurst, 2021. Pp. xx + 516. 50 illustrations, 4 maps. Cloth £30.00. Eleftherios Venizelos (1864–1936) was the outstanding Greek statesman of the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Crete and summoned to Athens in 1910 by a group of military officers, Venizelos dominated the Greek political scene and led his country through a turbulent period of reforms and wars that doubled Greece’s territory and population. During the years of the First World War, however, Venizelos’s political career was overshadowed by a showdown with King Constantine, a political polarization known as the National Schism, and self-exile to Paris. After 1915 Venizelos became, for all his charisma, a contested figure and anathema to his monarchist fellow countrymen. Well versed in the teachings of the founders of the French Third Republic (1870–1940) and a profound admirer of French radical leaders Léon Gambetta and Georges Clemenceau, Venizelos attempted to reform Greek politics along the lines of French radicalism and republicanism. His uncompromising patriotism and fervent nationalism bore spectacular results in the Treaty of Sèvres (1920), which brought an end to the Ottoman Empire and shaped his glorified memory. [End Page 304] Sir Michael Llewellyn-Smith, a former British Ambassador in Athens, examines Venizelos’s early years in Cretan politics, his entry onto the center stage of Greek politics, and his gradual development into a renowned statesman. As Llewellyn-Smith notes in the introduction (2–3), his special interest in Venizelos dates back to the late 1960s, when he wrote his widely cited study of Greece’s military campaign and debacle in Asia Minor (1919–1922) (Llewellyn Smith 1998). Llewellyn-Smith’s voluminous biography of Venizelos is well researched, relying on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, and complements existing accounts of the life of the Greek statesman (e.g., Stefanou 1977; Papadakis 2017). The author highlights and offers valuable insights into Venizelos’s charisma and elevated standing on Europe’s political scene. Venizelos was not by any means an ordinary man. As Llewellyn-Smith stresses (6), he pushed Greece’s boat “up against the currents of history” and “without him Greece would be different” and very much worse off. To make this point, the book thoroughly illuminates Venizelos’s political thought and mastery and traces his fateful friendship with David Lloyd George, which stimulated his ambitious foreign policies. A second volume will complete his story with the Great War, the postwar peace settlement, Greece’s Asia Minor campaign, and Venizelos’s later years in the office of prime minister. The book is divided into three parts and forty-three chapters. Part 1 provides the historical background to Venizelos’s early ca","PeriodicalId":43810,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN GREEK STUDIES","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134935204","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"ReFocus: The Films of Antoinetta Angelidi ed. by Penny Bouska and Sotiris Petridis (review)","authors":"Marios Psaras","doi":"10.1353/mgs.2023.a908566","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mgs.2023.a908566","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: ReFocus: The Films of Antoinetta Angelidi ed. by Penny Bouska and Sotiris Petridis Marios Psaras (bio) Penny Bouska and Sotiris Petridis, editors, ReFocus: The Films of Antoinetta Angelidi. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023. Pp. xiii + 238. 25 B&W images. Hardback £90.00. Penny Bouska and Sotiris Petridis’s edited volume The Films of Antoinetta Angelidi is the latest addition to the esteemed ReFocus: The International Directors Series from Edinburgh University Press. The series is dedicated to both renowned and overlooked film directors from world cinema, and its subjects range from Andrei Tarkovsky to Xavier Dolan, François Ozon, and Lucrecia Martel. Antoinetta Angelidi’s work has been discussed and examined in a number of substantial Greek works, including her own essays and interviews and the eponymous publication accompanying a retrospective of her work at the 46th Thessaloniki Film Festival (Theodoraki 2005). The present volume is, however, the first book-length study in English of Angelidi’s oeuvre, and it aims at establishing her within an illustrious lineup of international auteurs while also filling a gap in English-language literature on Greek cinema, which in recent years has mainly focused on the so-called Greek Weird Wave and its main representatives (e.g., Psaras 2016; Papanikolaou 2020; Falvey 2022). Through a fascinating anthology of meditative analyses and interpretations that bring a range of methodological and theoretical approaches to bear on Angelidi’s filmic—and other—work, the volume casts a spotlight on Greek cinema’s perhaps most idiosyncratic voice, one that has, in fact, largely influenced the subversive themes and forms of the Weird Wave. Such attention is only fair, given the rare complexity of the formal experimentation and thematic preoccupations found in Angelidi’s body of work. The book begins with a “Prolegomenon” by Penny Bouska, whose title alone anticipates the collection’s predilection for a deep dive into the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of Angelidi’s oeuvre. In this concise yet dense introduction, Bouska collects rich biographical information from private conversations, interviews, and the filmmaker’s personal archives, shedding light on the events and people who influenced Angelidi to become a pioneer of political avant-garde cinema and visual arts in Greece. From her politically [End Page 310] engaged parents, to the turbulent sociopolitical context of her student years, to her self-exile—to avoid arrest by the Greek junta regime—to France, where she was able to study alongside Christian Metz and Thierry Kuntzel, Angelidi’s formative years were characterized by an amalgam of theoretical, political, and artistic influences which established her as a unique artist and intellectual. Bouska pays attention to Angelidi’s theoretical work insofar as it illuminates the concepts that underlie her artistic output, especially her preoccupations with the formalist mechanism of de","PeriodicalId":43810,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN GREEK STUDIES","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134933716","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Redirecting Ethnic Singularity: Italian Americans and Greek Americans in Conversation ed. by Yiorgos Anagnostou, Yiorgos Kalogeras and Theodora Patrona (review)","authors":"Carla A. Simonini","doi":"10.1353/mgs.2023.a908568","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mgs.2023.a908568","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43810,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN GREEK STUDIES","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134934006","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Improbable Heroine: Lela Karayanni and the British Secret Services in World War II Greece by Stylianos Perrakis (review)","authors":"Stathis N. Kalyvas","doi":"10.1353/mgs.2023.a908563","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mgs.2023.a908563","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Improbable Heroine: Lela Karayanni and the British Secret Services in World War II Greece by Stylianos Perrakis Stathis N. Kalyvas (bio) Stylianos Perrakis, The Improbable Heroine: Lela Karayanni and the British Secret Services in World War II Greece. Munich: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2022. Pp. xix + 368. 17 illustrations. Hardcover €99.95. Perhaps the single greatest general misperception about the Greek resistance against the Axis occupation between 1941 and 1944 (and it is a scholarly misperception as well) is that it came in a single form, namely guerrilla war in the countryside—the Andartiko. Indeed, the expression “going up the mountain” has become a synonym for joining the resistance. Moreover, in popular and media discourse, and increasingly in collective memory as well, the wartime resistance is equated with the communist-controlled Greek Popular Liberation Army, or ELAS, and with its bearded leaders, the kapetanii. Of course, ELAS was the biggest guerrilla group, but it was just one among several. More importantly, however, resistance activity went beyond guerrilla warfare in the countryside in at least two ways. First, an initially spontaneous, unarmed, mass urban social movement sprang up, primarily in Athens. Although extremely important, it has now taken a back seat to the rural guerrillas. Second, a significant number of small groups emerged, acting in close liaison with British secret services in the Middle East and their Greek agents. Their activity was clandestine, their political orientation was either non-communist or anti-communist, their size was small, and their effect was out of proportion to their size. Today, these groups are all but forgotten—which is why Stylianos Perrakis’s biography of Lela Karayanni is so critical and timely. But who was Lela Karayanni? Here is the most striking fact about her: there was no way to tell, prior to the occupation, that this 43-year-old solidly middle-class wife of a successful Athenian pharmaceuticals and cosmetics merchant, mother of seven children with ages between four and twenty-four, would transform herself into the fearless leader of a spy network, willing to put her life, and that of her family, on the line. Perrakis ventures a plausible explanation for this astonishing transformation, but obviously there is no way to be totally certain about what caused it. Once Karayanni was engaged in the resistance, however, there was no turning back. She began by sheltering straggling British soldiers who were left behind during the hurried evacuation of the British army in April–May 1941 and helping them escape to the Middle East—the feat for which she is chiefly known today. As Perrakis documents, however, this was far from her main achievement. Nor was her main achievement her work, which stemmed from her experience with the British fugitives, in helping Greek Jews escape arrest and deportation—even though, thanks to Perrakis’s research and efforts, Karayanni is now recogni","PeriodicalId":43810,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN GREEK STUDIES","volume":"153 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134935015","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}