Orthokostá (32 page)

It's at a depth of 35 meters. Twenty-five cubic meters every twenty-four hours. At 160 meters' depth, it's 250 cubic meters. But I've had it up to here with those villagers from Másklina. I'm not going to let them in on this. Unless they pay me. If they don't, then let the water lie.

The Orthokostá Monastery is situated on the eastern foothills of Mount Parnon (locally known as Malevós), precisely on the road—until recently a mule path and at present a paved motorway—connecting the Ayios Andréas and the Prastós communities, both belonging to the wider Tsakoniá (southern Kynouría) region. The exact coordinates for the monastery (page titled: Dresthená-Asómatoi, sc. 1:50,000, Army Geographical Service, 1938) are K + 290838, and its earliest archaeological remains date back to the times of the Iconomachy
.
¹
It is dedicated to the Dormition of the Virgin, and its feast is celebrated on August 23 (the Ninth-day Feast), the meaning of the name Orthokostá being unknown to this day. One possible derivation is the mispronunciation of the Tsakónikan place name Órto-Kótsa (the hill on whose northeastern slope it stands). It lies above an impressively steep and narrow ravine, extending from north to south
.

Isaákios's mendacious assertions concerning the expansive alluvial plain of the river Mégas, the sea of Náfplion, and the bright-shining vein of silver and lead ought simply to be taken as the poetic escapism of a repressed existence. Isaákios, the bishop of Rhéon and Prastós (1730–1805), after being impeached by the Ecumenical Patriarchate for heretical beliefs and simony, spent the last twelve years of his life under a restraining order at the Orthokostá Monastery
.

Thanassis Valtinos came onto the literary scene in Greece in the early 1960s with several novella-length prose narratives that heralded a marked shift away from the florid, discursive prose of the fiction of the times toward what was to become a much-imitated and highly respected style of documentary fiction marked by the sparse, unadorned speech of oral accounts. His early works, such as
The Descent of the Nine
(1963),
The Life and Times of Andreas Kordopatis
, Book 1:
America
(1964), and the later
Deep Blue Almost Black
(1985), are all relatively short first-person narratives that simulate the type of spontaneous communication usually heard among ordinary people.

In the 1990s Valtinos began combining similar first-person narratives with letters or documents into longer, polyphonic works and produced what are most certainly his three major works:
Data from the Decade of the Sixties
(1989),
Orthokostá
(1994), and
The Life and Times of Andreas Kordopatis
, Book 2:
The Balkans '22
(2000), to be followed again by shorter titles in the twenty-first century.
Orthokostá
can arguably be called the peak of Valtinos's literary career, coming as it does midway between his other two major works. Indeed, its standing in the critical canon of Greece is undiminished today, more than twenty years since its publication.

The subject of Valtinos's novels is not history itself but the recording of history, the way it is remembered and depicted, orally or in writing, reliably or not. What emerges from the seemingly unedited raw footage of his novels is a poignant re-living of history by its participants on a day-to-day basis, regardless of their social circumstances, level of education, or political orientation.

The numerous narrators, be they participants, victims, or innocent bystanders, recount in hindsight, and from many differing vantage points, the hardships and atrocities of the conflict portrayed in
Orthokostá
, such as the Communist guerrillas' burning of Valtinos's home village of Kastri and smaller villages like Ayia Sofia; their detaining of combatants and civilians alike in the monasteries of Orthokostá and Loukou and in local schools; the torture, forced marches, and executions of many of those detained, and the subsequent revenge killings by rightist and collaborationist Security Battalions. And while both sides engage in extensive looting and stealing, German troops are carrying out their own murderous “clean-up” operations in the region by arresting, torturing, and executing villagers while imposing consecutive blockades on the village of Kastri.

It is in the midst of such contrary tides that the human element begins to emerge. Although the narrators are not clearly identified initially, they gradually come into focus as their families and fortunes are pieced together through their own and others' imperfect recollections of the decades-old events. Certain key incidents are told and retold throughout
Orthokostá
, each additional telling either contradicting an earlier account or shedding new light on the events in question.

In one of the closing chapters of the novel, at the prodding of an unnamed interlocutor, a surviving participant pulls together the different strands of the novel by recounting some of its central executions while also telling of his own travails at the hands first of the German occupying forces and then of the Communist guerrillas, as well as the horrific circumstances of his brother's execution by the latter—the kind of account which today, in 2016, would immediately go viral on the Internet, but which in 1994, when
Orthokostá
was first published, was all the more shocking for having been repressed for fifty years as taboo subject matter.

In practical terms,
Orthokostá
is steeped in references to village customs and linguistic constructions which imbue the narratives with both local color and a sense of verisimilitude. In the original this is masterfully done through Valtinos's frequent citing and trademark cataloguing of local-sounding names that impart an immediate
ring of familiarity to the Greek text, as well as an unmistakable affinity with the epic tradition. To the English-speaking reader, however, Greek proper names are anything but familiar. We have resisted Anglicizing these names (Georgia for Yeorghía, for example) in the interest of preserving the Greekness at the core of
Orthokostá
. We have also tried to make the names and proper names less difficult to pronounce by accenting those that are not already familiar to English-speaking readers and by generally favoring a more phonetic spelling system than that dictated by tradition. Whether phonetic or traditional or a mix of both, individual names are consistently transliterated throughout the novel.

Names and naming, more so than expressions in a specific dialect, are in fact what often distinguishes local parlance in these and other peripheral regions from speech in mainland Greek cities. Whereas oral speech and dialogue are best rendered by equivalents rather than literal translations, names present their own set of problems. In
Orthokostá
, nicknames, diminutives, compound names, and first or last names with suffixes added are all cases in point. Suffixes added onto names in order to denote ownership (as in “Makréka,” meaning the house, houses, neighborhood, property, or land of the Makrís family) or relationship (as in “Sokrátaina,” meaning the wife, daughter, or mother of Sokrátis) are typical examples of this. We have dealt with these on a case-by-case basis, sometimes through free translation or interpretive interventions in the text itself and sometimes through explanatory notes.

From a grammatical point of view, and again in the interest of simplicity and intelligibility, the variously inflected forms of names of men and women in the Greek have been rendered in a rather unflattering masculine nominative singular that is currently the norm in English.

Our priority was to maintain throughout a balance between the nonstandard or village Greek in most of the narratives of
Orthokostá
and the equivalent constructions in American English. To this end we have flavored our translation with the occasional recognizably rural but not markedly regional expression meant to transpose some
of the more common village speaking patterns of the Greek. At the same time we have been careful not to make the villagers in
Orthokostá
sound too much like their Midwestern American counterparts, as they must first and foremost come across to the English-speaking reader as Greek villagers living in Greece.

Valtinos has endeavored to approximate through his punctuation (and frequent, deliberate omission of it) the natural spontaneity of oral speech in Modern Greek. His villagers communicate, for the most part, in short, choppy, sometimes ungrammatical sentences, often interrupting themselves midstream and picking up later on. Like most oral speech, theirs is a mixture of the historical present and the past tense, rendered with great brio and virtuosity in the original. We have tried in our translation to reproduce the effects of Valtinos's prose by adhering as closely as possible to the tense structure and punctuation of the original so as to best reflect its spontaneity within the limits of contemporary English usage.

We have annotated our translation in the minimalist spirit of the novel's author by providing the basic historical data an educated Greek reader would have brought to the book when it first came out in 1994, some fifty years after the events being described. We have also provided the essential backdrop a nonnative Greek reader of the book today would need to make sense of the narratives. This too has been kept to a minimum: too much information would be tantamount to analyzing the individual dots in a pointillist painting whose size, shape, and color are unimportant in and of themselves. It is rather their concentration and distribution that create the overall effect of an impressionist canvas, which is, properly speaking, the aim of
Orthokostá
, and indeed of Valtinos's work in general. To simply index the realist texture of the novel by including excessive biographical or sociopolitical background in the notes would instantly lower the entire work to the status of a poorly researched chronicle. This would be a disservice to the literary dimension of the book and its primary goal of representing the spontaneity and alternating modes of the original accounts: the transcriptions from the Greek killing fields.

1.
Mount Malevós: Another name for Mount Parnon in the southeastern Peloponnese. Much of the action in the book centers on this densely wooded region. During World War II it became a refuge for the Communist Resistance fighters as well as a place where anti-Communist civilians were held hostage.

2.
Ninth-day Feast of the Dormition of the Virgin: Like many Greek monasteries, Orthokostá, though dedicated to the Dormition of the Virgin, which is nationally celebrated on August 15, performs its most solemn festivities, or Apódosis, on August 23, nine days later.

3.
Tsakoniá: Area in the southeastern Peloponnese made up of villages such as Sítaina, Prastós, and Leonídio, in which Tsakónikan, a descendant of Doric Greek, was spoken as late as the 1970s.

1.
Vigla: A place name referring to a watchtower (from the Latin
vigila
) in the village of Másklina; it was probably built between 1205 and 1432 in the Frankish-occupied Peloponnese.

2.
Lioú: The wife of Liás (in this case Liás Tsioúlos). In the provinces masculine first names are often used in their possessive form to denote a man's wife or mother.

1.
Ayiasofiá: Local pronunciation of Ayía Sofía (Saint Sophia), a village in the Arcadia prefecture.

2.
Másklina (also known as Eleohóri): A village near the border between the Arcadia and Argolis prefectures. German troops were stationed there at the time the novel takes place.

3.
Velissaróyiannis: A local variant for the name Yiánnis Velissáris. This type of construction, where the first and last names are compounded in reverse order, is typical of speech in the provinces, particularly the Peloponnese. Similar constructions include, in this chapter, Kalabakóyiannis for Yiánnis Kalabákas; Stavróyiannis for Yiánnis Stávrou (
chap. 6
); Mavroyiórghis for Yiórgos Mávros (
chap. 7
); Mavróyiannis for Yiánnis Mávros (
chap. 36
); and Havdotóyiannis for Yiánnis Havdótos (
chap. 36
).

4.
Ayiopétro: Local way of referring to Ayios Pétros (Saint Peter), a village on Mount Parnon, in the Arcadia prefecture, and the site of detention camps and fierce battles between rebel forces and gendarmes.

5.
The Organization: The Communist Party.

6.
“We'll cut off your hair”: The Communist guerrillas used to cut off the hair of “enemies” to make it difficult for them to hide among the general population.

7.
Antídoron
: A bite-size piece of bread that has been hallowed during a Greek Orthodox mass and is left over from the sacrament of Holy Communion. The officiating priest hands out these morsels to the parishioners as they exit the church.

8.
Security Battalions: Initially named the Evzones Guard of the Unknown Soldier, the Security Battalions were formed in 1943 by official decree, ostensibly to maintain peace in the Greek countryside. The Battalions were armed by and fought alongside the German Occupation troops, suppressing Communist as well as non-Communist insurgents.

9.
Kapetánios, Kapetán (voc.): The equivalent of a captain in the Communist Resistance army.

1.
Kapetanaíoi: Plural of
kapetánios
.

2.
Albania: References to “Albania” by speakers in the novel stand for the campaign of the Greek Army between October 1940 and May 1941 in northwestern Greece and southern Albania to stop fascist Italy from invading Greece. Óhi (No!) Day, October 28, is the annual commemoration of the start of that victorious campaign.