Hey everyone
For Todays episode, I was able to get onto the pod, Dr. Spyros Tsoutsoumpis who is a professor at the University of Manchester, and an author of several articles and books on the Greek civil war.
Dr. TsouTsoumpis…has been studying this topic, for almost 2 decades…20 years. Aside from writing his book : “A history of the Greek resistance in the Second World War: The people’s armies“ He has also read thousands of books, thousands of pages of documents, and he has interviewed hundreds of people whose lives have been either directly or indirectly affected by this conflict. As the conversation progresses, this will become very evident.
The conversation itself was supposed to be mostly on EDES and the infamous shift that Zervas took in 1943 when he changed his stance on the King returning to Greece, something we covered last episode…BUT this event quickly turned into a bigger conversation on the politics and the realities of shifting loyalties and collaboration during the civil war. We talked about the role that political ambition, opportunism, revenge and survival all played in the war, and how these in many cases served as justifications or excuses as to why one person, family, or entire villages decided to go with the left, or the right…with ELAS, or EDES….with the Communists or the Royalists.
We also talked about how this event is interpreted and remembered by the diaspora, versus in Greece, and ways we can responsibly reflect and remember it.
We touched on truly brutal stuff. Typical stuff for the times really... rape, murder, war crimes and that kind of thing, but it hit a little harder this time because the conversation took a turn south, geographically to my ancestral region of Mani.
For the non Greek listeners, or just people that don't speak Greek in general, there will be some phrases and words Dr Tsoutsoumpis and myself use that are not in English.
When I say Mikri Moskve, that means Little Moscow,
Eepourgos means Minister, like a Government Minister
When Dr Tsoutsoumpis says Apo pou eisai he is saying “where are you from?” and when he says Mavro Horio , he means a Black village,
Vassiliki, and Fasistiki mean Royalist or Fascist.
Please support Dr TsouTsoumpis’s work, Buy his book on amazon and read his other great articles he's written on these topics.
https://www.amazon.com/History-Greek-Resistance-Second-World/dp/1784992518
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