And our author, unlike Maigret, carries a knife in his heart. He knows that, sooner or later, spite, jealousy, or simple tavern garrulity will triumph over bucolic reserve. But he knows the village folk and their variable rhythms. He discovers that nobody has any interest in raking up the dead past, or the dead. The trained investigator (Gage covered the Mafia and much else for The New York Times) arrives in the sleepy, shifty village. The initial passages of his book are somehow reminiscent of early Maigret. Eclipsing all else, however, is Gage’s extended personal catharsis. There’s also a little of what might be termed Greek-American anthropology – a Hellenic version of Roots. The result is an extraordinary document: part thriller, part forensics, part political tract. She, and the village of Lia near the Albanian border, have been lovingly – almost yearningly – reconstructed. This act of ‘revolutionary justice’ took place in Epirus and the mother, Eleni Gatzoyiannis, is the eponymous figure of this combined memoir and investigation. On August 28, 1948, the local Communist equivalent of the Committee of Public Safety murdered Gage’s mother and his aunt. The memory of the Greek civil war, like those who waged it, dies very hard.įor Nicholas Gage, the Greek civil war is not a memory but a vivid presence.

They had outlasted even the dazed soldiers of Hirohito who had turned themselves in, in the Pacific, a few years before. In 1974, when that junta destroyed itself in an effort to annex the island of Cyprus, two Communist guerrillas emerged from the mountains of Crete to give themselves up. Many of the prisoners it left behind (and the government forces were not famous for taking prisoners) had been detained until the 1960s – some to be reincarcerated when the military junta took power in 1967.

Ever since, it had been unlawful for its members to return. In that war, he had commanded the ‘Democratic Army’, which bore its Communist arms with extreme tenacity until, abandoned by Joseph Stalin and by ‘the people’, it melted over the borders of Bulgaria and Albania. It was the first time that he had left the Soviet Union since the end of the Greek civil war more than a quarter century previously.

ON FRIDAY March 25 this year, the day on which Greeks celebrate their deliverance from the Turks in 1829, General Markos Vafiadis put down at Athens airport.

Eleni by Nicholas Gage