 The topic of my research study was the return and repatriation of political refugees. My supervisor, Hans Vermeulen, told me that in this particular village the percentage of 1940s refugees was as high as 90%. I stayed in the village from 3 October until 14 November 1983. I interviewed 87 villagers, some only briefly, others more frequent and in-depth. In addition, I collected a lot of data from the population
registry. I wrote a report and passed the field work test.
Going over my notes and listening to the interviews on tape, once again I am amazed by the eagerness of the villagers to talk open-heartedly about their lives. If the language had not presented such a problem, getting acquainted with the people in Ζιάκας might have resulted in a book on how people in a small community cope with the impact of war and civil war. I wrote a book on transmigration in Indonesia instead.
There are several reasons why I did not write my graduate thesis on Ζιάκας. First of all, language had proven an unbridgeable barrier. My command of Greek wasn't very good and most villagers didn't speak Greek at all but, let's say, χωριάτικη (as in χωριάτικη σαλάτα, Greek salad). Therefore I had not been able to collect sufficient and reliable data. Another reason was the sensibility of the topic itself. During my stay in the village I was warned about tensions between "left" and "right"
burning underneath the surface - as if, one day soon, war could start all over just like that. I got the impression that the balance between the two ("right" being there, "left" coming back in mounting numbers) was checked on a daily basis. The most important consideration, however, was reluctance on my part to "use" these people and their stories to get my thesis done.
 Perhaps I had, already before going to the field, recognised how biased I was. After all, I participated in demonstrations in Amsterdam against the military junta and still get goose bumps each time I hear Pablo Neruda's "Canto General" being performed in the Athens stadium in August 1974. The military junta in Greece gone, Pinochet taking power in Chile. That incredible moment-in-time captured by Μίκης
Θεοδωράκης, Πέτρος Πανδής, Μαρία Φαραντούρη and the audience in the stadium.
I was convinced of the inevitability of taking side with the (former) partisans. Because they had fought and beaten the Italians at the Albanian front, they had resisted the Axis occupation of their country, they had struggled
for a more righteous society. Reducing these people who had been willing to be interviewed about their traumatic experiences into footnotes in a graduate thesis I considered an insult.
Perhaps, after being in the field, I realised how biased "science" is. I used to say that in Ζιάκας I became an anthropologist. It is probably more accurate to say that in Ζιάκας I learned to be an anthropologist without behaving like one.
 Shortly after my return I had a meeting with Riki van Boeschoten. She studied folk and partisan music and had also ended up in Ζιάκας. Supervisor Hans Vermeulen had given her my field report. What she hoped to get from me was the information from the population registry. I didn't feel comfortable with that and told her how I acquired the data. Without the data I would have more or less returned a failure, so I had
pressured the secretary to grant me access. Only a few days before I left, we spent the entire
afternoon in his office. I wrote down for all 1,125 entrants (giving them numbers instead of names) the year of birth, gender, family composition, where they lived in exile and current place of residency. He asked me several times why I needed all these data and what I intended to do with it. Then he told me the next day we would burn all the pages containing the information in the oven where we also roasted chestnuts. I sat up all night copying the data into another notebook.
Perhaps the field report and my account have in some way encouraged Riki to return to the village. Searching the internet - keyword "Ziaka" - I recently learned that she has lived many months in Ζιάκας over the period 1987-1996, talking about the "civil war", the παιδομάζωμα, the years of exile and repatriation. I discovered familiar names popping up in footnotes in publications on e.g. "the archeology of memory". Interesting
stuff, somewhat theoretical, but after all she has become a professor herself (associate professor of social anthropology and oral history at the University of Thessaly). The important thing is that she did what I omitted to do: she gave the floor to villagers of Ζιάκας...
Her latest publication is "Children of the Greek Civil War: Refugees and the Politics of Memory" (with Loring M. Danforth), The University of Chicago Press, 2012: 321 pp. |
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