A Lost Aegean Paradise
Sofka Zinovieff is enchanted by a profound Greek classic given a new lease of life in translation
Ilias Venezis, translated by Therese Sellers, Land of Aeolia. Limni, Evia: Denise Harvey. 2020. Pp. 262. £16.90. ISBN 9789607120434
Ilias Venezis published Land of Aeolia during the Nazi occupation of Greece, during which time he narrowly escaped execution after being arrested by the SS. Given that the book looks back to his Asia Minor childhood, devastatingly disrupted by war and the 1922 ‘Catastrophe,’ one might have expected something dark. Instead, the 39-nine-year-old wrote a beautiful, lyrical novel based on summers at his grandparents’ farm. An immediate bestseller, it offered the elegiac warmth of a lost Aegean paradise to war-shattered Greeks and confirmed Venezis as one of the most important Greek writers of the 20th century. Now in its 69th edition in Greece, there have also been many foreign publications and this excellent latest English translation by Therese Sellers is a joy. Supplemented by illuminating endnotes, it brings a fresh eye to a marvellous classic.
Young Petros (the author’s alter ego) and his sisters play and roam with freedoms unknown to children today. Staying by the Kimindenia mountains behind Aivali (now Turkish Aivalik), their lives are deeply connected to the land: eagles and bears, hoopoes and tortoises, and trips to the cave where the wild boar go to die. Every evening their grandparents sit on a bench under the oak tree, mostly in tender silence, but sometimes raking over a lifetime of memories. Then the patriarch locks up the great door of the farmstead and the jackals start to howl. ‘That is how I learned in time to love that land, where peace had dropped anchor.’ As Lawrence Durrell wrote in the preface to the first (1949) English edition, ‘The world it describes is strangely archaic; it is nearer to the pastoral world of Hesiod and Homer than it is to our own.’
The continuum between humans, storytelling, animals and the overwhelming power of nature is unbroken. Venezis is unafraid to give waves emotions, to allow oak trees to speak to the mountains, or to describe the salamander’s thoughts as he is carried off by a hawk. Remarkably, the passages where nature is personified were entirely cut in the earlier English translation. Sellers writes, ‘Whoever eliminated these passages didn’t believe readers of English would tolerate such nonsense.’
True, this was before the magical realism of writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and before scientists revealed the complex communications within tree communities. Venezis didn’t know about mychorrhizal networks or the ‘wood-wide web,’ as do contemporary writers such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning Richard Powers, with The Overstory. However, when old Uncle Joseph grafts trees, he teaches Petros the sanctity of the relationship, ‘the secret life of trees,’ and how to listen before cutting. Everywhere are illustrations of ‘the profound bond between man and the sun, the earth and water,’ and the novel is deeply rooted in earth. Indeed, the Greek title can be translated as Aeolian Earth, poignantly underlined when, fleeing war and leaving his ancestral homeland, Grandfather takes a kerchief of soil with him on the boat.
The book regularly spins off into stories told by the grandparents, the ploughmen or the many passing travellers who were always offered a bed and food. ‘There were Jews, Armenians, Turks and Christians, poor people, noblemen, peddlers and the sick.’ The children learn of brigands’ raids, smugglers’ blood feuds, and the tragedy of Ali, one of the many camel drivers, now roaming only with a little donkey, endlessly searching for his beloved white-headed camel. In these rich, strange fables, Venezis returns the reader to a child-like innocence, as if we sit alongside Petros or his sisters as they beg their grandparents for another tale.
And yet, childhood passions run high; tears and blood seep into the earth. Petros nearly dies trying to capture a baby eagle for Doris, the fearless, golden-haired Scot, who has married an Aivali grandee. Just as powerful and hopeless an infatuation is that of Petros’s sister Artemis with Doris’s handsome, ruthless hunter; Artemis is devastated after Doris and the hunter dismiss her when they are out on horseback. But adult eroticism is only implied. Instead, the great journey of love is that completed by eels in the Jackal River – their skins silvering into ‘wedding clothes’, falling ‘sweetly’ in love and waiting quietly for the children that would come.
Neither Petros nor his illiterate grandparents understand why trouble in Sarajevo is relevant, or why this spark will light a fire throughout the world. August 1914 marks the end of an era, but the encroaching tragedy, with villagers fleeing slaughter, appears almost like a natural disaster. No blame or anti-Turkish sentiment is expressed. In his first, earlier book, Number 31328, Venezis had written about his horrific experiences of hard labour as an 18-year-old prisoner of Turkish forces after 1922. Of 3,000 men taken from Aivali, only 23 survived. Encouraged by Stratis Myrivilis on Mytilene, the book launched Venezis (whose real surname was Mellos) into the ‘generation of the ‘30s’, alongside Greek intellectuals, artists and writers of that era, including the Nobel Prize-winning poets George Seferis and Odysseas Elytis.
The ‘sister’ book to Number 31328 was The Ten Day Diary, written decades later by Venezis’s sister, Agapi Moliviatis Venezis. She described the terrors of war after her brother’s arrest and her remarkable rescue by an ‘enemy’ Turk.
Venezis eventually settled in Athens and followed his first book with a brilliant but bleak novel about the refugee experience. Serenity follows the struggles of a boatload of refugees establishing a new life on a barren piece of land at Anavyssos, near Sounion. This too, has been recently published in another wonderful English translation by Joshua Barley (Aiora 2019).
According to Bruce Clark’s eloquent prologue to Land of Aeolia, Venezis ‘broke the silence’ of the Asia Minor refugees, after 20 years of life ‘in varying degrees of destitution and misery.’ Despite being designated ‘Greek’ in the population exchange with Turkey, they were confronted by prejudice in Greece, as described by Clark in Twice a Stranger and by the anthropologist Renée Hirschon in Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe. Venezis gave the refugees ‘permission to celebrate and to mourn’ what to him and many others looked like a lost Eden of multi-cultural richness and a way of life established over millennia.
Today, in the 100th anniversary year of the 1922 ‘Catastrophe,’ this sparkling translation of Land of Aeolia resonates powerfully. Refugees are still fleeing war and disaster, and Venezis shows how telling one individual’s story can offer humanity and dignity to an entire community. Just as powerful is the author’s sensitivity to the environment, a subject which could hardly be more relevant given our worsening planetary catastrophe.
This enchanting book deserves new readers and while the life it describes can seem almost mythical, the Aegean still ‘calls and beckons.’ As Venezis writes, ‘The Aegean isn’t only light and sea. It enters men’s hearts.’
