G e o r g i o s M i c h a l o p o u l o s University of Oxford, United Kingdom
“I COULDN’T WAIT TO GET AWAY FROM
MY VILLAGE” : RE-EXAMINING CHILDTOWNS
IN POSTWAR GREECE
1ABSTRACT
Dozens of thousands Greek children lived in the childtowns in the 1940 and 1950s. Al-though this experience had profound consequences to their lives, there is to this day no serious study of what exactly was the impact of the childtowns on the children’s values and way of life. I interviewed four children and asked them about the diff erences between the childtowns and their villages. Th e key fi nding is that most children fi rst came in touch with – and chose to accept – a modern and urban way of life in the childtowns. Th is suggests that despite the objections about the ideological motivations and use of the childtowns, these insitutions had a profound impact on Modern Greek cultural identity.
1 Th e quote at the title is from Ioannis Galanis (July 9, 2013). Many people off ered help and
sup-port in writing this article. First, I would like to thank Piotr Cichocki and Mariusz Baranowski for their encouragement and support. My father, Dimitris, helped in many ways, which are beyond the gratitude that can be expressed in academic acknowledgements. Stefanos Kavalierakis made valuable suggestions about the bibliography, answered many of my questions and commented on a draft . Kostas Karagiannakidis, Zoe Lefk ofridi and Tasoula Vervenioti helped me generously, when I was still unfamiliar with the world of Greek childtowns. I am also grateful to the staff of the Gennadius Library and especially of the University Club of Athens for their hospitality during the two months of research: Michalis Bereris and Marios Kassotakis off ered as always invaluable help and support. I am also indebted to Victoria Donovan for introducing me to the historical debate on modernity and urbanization and also to oral history. Finally, I would like to thank my informants for their en-thusiasm and trust.
Key words:
Greek orphanage, childtown, Queen Freideriki, Greek Civil War
I argue here that the childtowns (or παιδοπόλεις in Greek) – the network of or-phanages set up during the Greek Civil War – made possible the transition of thousands of children from a rural to an urban environment. Th e children were exposed to a radically new way of life: they learned to wear shoes, use toilets, and play basketball, but more importantly they came to see this new way of life not simply as diff erent but as superior to life in the village. In the villages, the children were badly fed, had their health problems dealt with quackeries, and oft en had to work as manual labourers – in their parents’ farms or in public works – from a young age; it is no wonder, then, that they felt gratitude for what the childtowns off ered them, and most soon came to see their peasant past as something gone forever. Th is transition of the children contributed to the disappearance of habits, customs and traditions, which had survived in the Greek countryside at least since the Ottoman times and their replacement by middle class values such as consum-erism, education, and health care provided by professional doctors.
Unfortunately, the historiography on the childtowns has paid little attention to the transition from a rural to an urban way of life. Greek historians have instead focused on the indoctrination of the children in the Cold War anticommunist ideology of Greek conservatism, and on the way monarchist propaganda used the childtowns to legitimate its role in the Greek society – Queen Freideriki in par-ticular, sought in the childtowns the means to restore the prestige that the Greek royal family had lost aft er their escape from Greece in 1941. Tellingly, the historian Tasoula Vervenioti admits that most of her informants described their time at the childtowns as “the best years of their lives”, but quickly passes over this information to insist that what is really important about the childtowns was that they “aimed to reform and educate the children according to their beliefs”. Unfortunately, Ver-venioti never explains who exactly are “they”, what their beliefs were, and how successful they were in indoctrinating the children. Similarly, Lars Bærentzen ac-cepts at face value the right wing propaganda that the childtowns were set up to save the children from communism and examines them in comparison with the communist practice of evacuating Greek children to communist countries; as a re-sult, he never turns to the actual experience of the children at the childtowns. A recent book by Loring Danforth and Riki van Boeschoten, despite providing the most detailed account of the childtowns we have to this day, suff ers from a similar focus on ideology and propaganda. As a result, although the research now available
gives a good account of how the childtowns were set up, as well as of the offi cial rhetoric of the Greek state, it ignores the wider social context in which the child-towns appeared. Incidentally, the one exception to this rule is the work of the PhD student Nikos Karagiannakidis, who has indeed moved beyond the partisan ap-proach to the childtowns, but a critical appreciation of his work will have to wait until its completion2.
Indeed, Vervenioti, Danforth, and Boeschoten exaggerate the importance of offi cial anticommunism. First, anticommunism did not feature in the childtowns more than it did in other contemporary Greek institutions, for instance, schools, the church, and the army. Second, it overemphasizes the ideological character of the childtowns. It is of course self-evident that –similarly to all other state institu-tions – the childtowns abided to anticommunism, which in the late 1940s was becoming the offi cial state ideology. Th ere was nothing special regarding the child-towns: anticommunist speeches were taking place all over Greece, and all the chil-dren I interviewed reported emphatically that the instances of anticommunist ideology were few, that they paid little attention to them at the time, and that in any case they had little impact on their own thinking and ideology. For instance, Ioannis Galanis, son of a peasant exiled for his alleged membership in the Greek Communist Party, reported that far from becoming a right wing anticommunist, he voted for the George Papandreou’s Centre Party, and later for Andreas Papan-dreou’s PASOK, the very party that ended the supremacy of the anticommunist Right in 19813.
By emphasizing the role of the royal family and especially of Queen Freideriki in the childtowns, Greek historians have accepted at face value the claims of Greek monarchy that it was instrumental in bringing about and developing the child-towns. Th e reality, however, was more complex: in order to set up the towns the cooperation of many state institutions was necessary, especially of the Church and the Army. Freideriki appeared oft en to be photographed with the children, and at 2 T. Vervenioti, Th e Children of the Greek Civil War. Saved or Kidnapped?, “Acta Universitatis
Carolinae, Studia Territorialia” 2010, No. 1, pp. 117 – 136, my italics; L. Bærentzen, Th e ‘Paidomazoma’ and the Queen’s Camps (in Greek) [in:] Studies in the History of the Greek Civil War: 1945 – 49,
L. Bærentzen, J. Iatrides, O. Smith (eds.), Copenhagen 1987, pp. 137 – 164, see especially pp. 137 – 138; L. Danforth, R. van Boeschoten, Children of the Greek Civil War: Refugees and the Politics of Memory, Chicago 2012; An unpublished chapter (Childtown ‘Agios Georgios’ at Kavalla: its foundation and fi rst
year of operation: September 1947–September 1948) of N. Karagiannakidis’s PhD can be found at his
page at academia.edu: http://tinyurl.com/kkyp6jd. See also G. Margaritis, History of the Greek Civil
War: 1946 – 49, Athens 2001, Vol. II, pp. 605 – 614.
3 E. Gazi, Fatherland, Religion, Family: the History of a Slogan: 1880 – 1930 (in Greek),
Ath-ens 2011, pp. 310 – 321; G. Voulgaris, Greece from the Metapolitefsi to Globalization (in Greek), Athens 2009, p. 16.
times to grant them personal favours and to adopt some children as her protégés (and indeed among these children one can fi nd to this day her staunchest support-ers), but her role in the actual management of the childtowns was negligible. In short, Greek historiography has seen the childtowns as part of the saga of a di-vided postwar Greece, where the Right had captured the state and imposed restric-tions on the Left . Th is discourse of course contains seeds of truth, but it also con-tains the danger of converting the study of childtowns into another area of sterile confl ict between Left and Right, and of entering a partisan debate about which side committed more atrocities; to my mind, anticommunism is only of secondary importance when dealing with an institution that transformed for good the lives of dozens of thousands children determining their education, professional future and values4.
Finally, the focus on anticommunism underestimates the extent to which the childtowns were necessary for postwar Greece. Far from being set up to serve the ambitions of Greek royalty, childtowns responded to real social needs – it is hard-ly a coincidence that similar childtowns appeared all over Europe aft er World War II. Had the childtowns not been set up, some children would have been accom-modated to the few already existing orphanages, but most would have been doomed to a miserable existence or premature death in the Greek provinces. In this respect, my view could not be further from that of Vervenioti who claims that “‘the protection’ off ered by the combatants [to the children]… was out of touch with the social needs. It rather served their own political aims and aspirations”5.
Th e life of the four childtown inmates I interviewed previously to their arrival to the childtown shows that the choice to join the childtown was not ideological. First, Ioannis Galanis (b. 1938). He was from Marathia, a mountainous village in central Greece. His village was under the control of the communist guerrillas al-ready since the German occupation, but in April 1948, the – royalist – Hellenic Army entered the village and reprisals started. Th e soldiers arrested his communist uncle, humiliated him in the village square, and executed him by throwing him from a mountain top. His mother was beaten up and his father exiled to the island of Giaros until 1953 under the accusation of being a communist. Galanis’s life in the village was harsh; he was expectedly impressed when he fi rst heard of the childtowns from three children from his village who had been to the childtown of 4 Cf. Queen Frederica of the Hellenes [=Freideriki], Measure of understanding, London 1971;
L. Danforth, R. Boeschoten, op.cit., pp. 85 – 87.
5 T. Vervenioti, Abducting and/or Saving Children (in Greek) [in:] History of 20th Century
Greece: Reconstruction, Civil War, Restoration, Vol. IV:2, C. Chatziiosif (ed.), Athens 2009, pp. 83 – 107,
Larisa. He joined a childtown in 1949, aft er producing a document arguing that his family lacked the means to sustain him – luckily for him, his father was away at the time: the father disapproved of his son’s decision and would later call him a “janis-sary”, i.e. a traitor. But Galanis remembers that his sole motivation for leaving the village was bad health, undernourishment, and poverty.
Indeed, Galanis was the one among my informants who had the hardest time before arriving to the childtowns:
I was working at the threshing fl oor. I had to make the horses go round and round. I left the work unfi nished [due to exhaustion]… I had chronic malaria, I had a tem-perature of 42 Celsius. I went back home, I had hallucinations, I could see fairies sing… My mother was crying, aft er two or three hours my temperature went down… Th e man who owned the threshing fl oor… had promised me food… and he brought me bean soup. But when he saw the state I was in he left it [and went home]. Aft er two-three hours I recovered and ate the bean soup.
Tellingly, his mother had to borrow the thermometer from a neighbour. Galanis also worked in the construction of a street near his village to buy his fi rst pair of shoes; school had stopped operating while the village was under the com-munists, because the teacher was a conservative; and his malaria was never treat-ed by a doctor6.
Second, Patra Chatziangelou (née Tsakiri). She was born in 1938 in Komotini, spent her childhood in Maroneia, a village not far from the Greek-Turkish frontier. Her father died when she was only four years old, in 1942, from an injury in the Greek Italian War of 1940 – 41; six months later, her mother died too. Her village was destroyed during the Greek Civil War, in August 1947. She left the village with her maternal grandmother and settled in Komotini. Th ere, her family decided to send her to the childtown of Kavalla in July 19487.
Th ird, Antonis Venetis (b.1944). He came from the village Lias, near the Greek-Albanian frontier. Th e – communist – Democratic Army took over his village in November 1947. In September 1948, the guerrillas transferred him, his sister, and his mother to Southern Albania. From there, they travelled for several months until they ended up in Hungary, where they stayed until February 1954. Only then were they able to return to Greece and reunite with the father. In 1955 and upon the request of his father, Venetis joined the childtown of Ziros.
6 Interview with Galanis, July 9, 2013.
Venetis recalls that life in his village was harsh. Th ere was no school, and they had to use the village church for classes; the church was in a poor condition and the rain went through the ceiling. Moreover, for all administrative tasks as well as for shopping they had to go to Filiata, which was forty fi ve kilometres away: Vene-tis recalls that they had to walk six to seven hours to get there8.
Fourth, Th omas Th eologis (b. 1935). He came from a village in the mountainous region of Agrafa, in central Greece. His family had some land and also sheep. But, the break of the Civil War got them in trouble: one of Th omas’s brothers joined the gendarmerie and this meant that the communist guerrillas targeted the family. Th ey visited their house several times, requisited property, and took away the sheep. Moreover, Th eologis had nine brothers and sisters and sustaining such a large family during war must have been extremely diffi cult. Th e young Th eologis heard about the childtowns from two cousins who had been there: “I wanted to escape the village and see the world outside it”. His village was indeed isolated: there was no electricity, and they had to use oil lamps; phones came only in the 1950s. On his own initiative, Th eologis joined the childtown of Larisa in 1948; in 1950 he joined the childtown of Agria, near Volos9.
What we know about the provinces, especially in the North of Greece, which was more hard hit by the Civil War, confi rms that the these four cases were not isolated. Th e German occupation and the ensuing Civil War devastated the Greek provinces to a point where “normal” life took years if not decades to be restored. Almost a million Greeks were left homeless during the occupation alone, and, dur-ing the same period, 70,000 Greeks were executed and 300,000 died from the Great Famine, a result of the collapse of the economy, the British blockade of continental Europe and of German food requisitioning. Th e Civil War made things worse: 158,000 people were killed and one million people were relocated. As a result, education at the villages was of low quality if it existed at all: school buildings were everywhere in a poor condition, and most schools were monothesia, meaning that the same teacher taught all the classes of the primary school. Health and nutrition were similarly bad10.
It is then unsurprising, that all the informants agreed that their time in the childtowns was by now a good memory. When asked why this is so, the informants
8 Interviews with Antonis Venetis, August 10 and August 20, 2013. 9 Interviews with Th omas Th eologis, June 16, 2013 and August 19, 2013.
10 M. Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece: the Experience of Occupation: 1941 – 44, New Haven 2001,
p. 155; P. Voglis, Surviving Hunger: Life in the Cities and the Countryside during the Occupation [in:]
Surviving Hitler and Mussolini: Daily Life in Occupied Europe, Gildea et al. (eds.), Oxford 2006,
recall that they no longer had to work in the evenings as they did in the village and that they enjoyed the company of their peers and the care of their instructors at the childtowns. Th is, however, does not mean that they did not feel surprise, and even some fear when they fi rst arrived at the childtowns: childtowns were very diff erent from their places of origin. Galanis says that “the diff erences were huge”; Venetis recalls that upon arrival he wanted to go back to his family; Th eologis tells us that “we found ourselves in a place that was entirely diff erent from what we knew, we were somehow lost”11.
What was then so new for them in the childtowns? I interviewed Sia Daimo-nakou (b.1933), a graduate of the Marasleios Pedagogical Academy, who served as an instructor in the childtown of Larissa, in the late 1950s. As one might have ex-pected, it was the children from remote mountainous areas that were impressed the most with childtowns:
[they] had never seen [electric] light, [and when they saw light bulbs they said] “Wow, this is so luminous, so bright”; and mostly the sea, they had not seen the sea, they sat in front of the sea… and they were amazed, “Wow, how big it is, what a great river” and we told them “it is the sea”. Th ey would have seen the sea only on a map, and of course they could not imagine what the sea was like… [Th ere was also] a lit-tle girl from a village… she had not seen food, I mean a diversity of dishes. At the beginning we suff ered, because she wanted to eat only soaked bread with sugar, it took her time to get used to all the foods… also, once this kid, when we had for food pasta with minced meat, she said, “oh my, are we going to eat worms?”… Th is little girl was seven years old. She was scared to use the shower and to wear underwear… and I tell you this was in 1957, 1958. Some children from remote villages of Epirus did not know chocolate, they did not want even to try it, “what is this black thing?”; also bananas, they were impressed by them, “what is it?”
[Some children from the mountains]… had never seen fi sh. Some day we had her-ring for food, she [=the same girl as above] was very impressed and asked “how do they grow?”, the older ones to make fun of her said “we plant them”, “where?” [she asked], “in the garden”, and they called me later “come see what she did, she went and planted the heads of herring”… Th e girl had believed that if you plant the head, new herring would come out12.
11 Interview with Th eologis, July 3, 2013; with Venetis, August 20, 2013. 12 Interview with Sia Daimonakou, August 3, 2013.
What the above passages suggest is that we should not underestimate what a transformative experience the childtowns were. Th e children came in touch with a diff erent world, they literally learned to live and experience in a diff erent way. Some of them must have been surprised by the new hygiene rules – Galanis, for instance, recalls that the instructors supervised them while taking a shower, since the children had never taken a shower before; similarly, Th eologis remembers that showers were a novelty: “my mother used to put us in a tub. Th ere was no running water in the village”. Th e children were similarly supervised during sleep and there were also inspections for their beds and clothes. While at the childtown, the chil-dren were almost never left without supervision13.
Even when it came to animals, the children came in touch with what they must have seen as a superior form of knowledge. Galanis recalls that the people in his village, although in constant contact with animals, did not know how to name them “properly”: “we did not know what it meant for two things to be same… we called them all animals”. Galanis says that villagers were unable to classify them into bi-ceps, quadribi-ceps, mammals, and birds, they only saw them as things to be used, and lacked a theoretical understanding of them. Such instances of “ignorance” confi rmed to the minds of the children – which soon enough must have felt supe-rior to their oft en illiterate parents – that the world of the village was a backward one, doomed to stagnation, whereas the childtown represented a superior form of civilization, since it understood the world of the villagers better than the villagers could understand it themselves14.
One of the main things that convinced the children to choose urban over rural values was healthcare. Chatziangelou recalls that she had scabies, and when she arrived on the childtown they put on her an ointment (“it smelled like brimstone and was yellow”) – before arriving there she had not received a treatment.
Th e case of Galanis was the most impressive:
[When I arrived to the childtown] they noticed that I was yellow, and they asked me, “What’s wrong with you?” “Fever” [θέρμη], [I said] this is how they had ex-plained it to me [at the village]; I had seen a doctor, but he was a General Practi-tioner, for this problem [=the malaria] I had never seen the doctor, I had only gone to the doctor because I peed myself, I had never received medicine…
13 Interview with Galanis, July 9, 2013; Interview with Th eologis, July 3, 2013; M. Dalianis,
M. Mazower, Children in Turmoil during the Civil War: Today’s adults (in Greek) [in:] Aft er the War
was Over: Reconstructing the Family, Nation and State in Greece: 1943 – 60, M. Mazower, Athens 2003
(Princeton 2000), pp. 105 – 119, here 113.
On the third day, I had a temperature of forty Celsius, they grabbed me… took me to the sanitarium [of the childtown], they left me stark naked, and wrapped me in a bed sheet… they started giving me quinine pills: one in the morning, two at noon, every six hours, I took fi ve hundred sixty in total. My ears bumbled a lot and every two-three hours I became soaked with sweat, my sweat stank, the nurses came and wrapped me again in the bed sheet and put me on a diff erent bed.
One might think that Galanis found this experience painful, but this was not the case: “I felt great security… It was way better than the village”. Similarly, Galanis, Chatziangelou, and Th eologis recall that they were taught to brush their teeth, and other hygienic practices that require a daily routine. In childtowns there was a variety of activities (studying, eating, listening to fairytales, excur-sions, going to the cinema, theatre) and each had its own assigned timeslot. In general, time in the childtowns was more structured than in the village, where the day was usually divided between school and work – tellingly, Galanis did not know how to read a watch until he left his village and spent some time in the town of Karpenisi15.
Coming in contact with people outside the geographical confi nes of the world of the village was also part of becoming modern. Greek provinces were backward and good streets were absent. Until going to the childtown, the informants – with the exception of Venetis – had little contact with the outside world. At the child-towns, children came for the fi rst time in touch with children from all over Greece. Th e children soon learned to take diff erences as something normal rather than as something that they should made fun of: Th eologis recalls that diff erences in speech and manners left him unimpressed. Chatziangelou, on the other hand, re-calls expressing her surprise at the accent of some girls, and being consequently bullied by them. She also noticed that the girls from Epirus and also the girls with origin from the Pontus danced and sang diff erent songs, which she found rather annoying. For the fi rst time in her life, Chatziangelou became aware of multiple versions of Greekness – diff erent dialects, customs and dances16.
Dialects are of particular interest here: all my informants spoke standard Greek, and in this respect, childtowns arguably played a role in the quick disappearance of dialects in postwar Greece. Tellingly, the two areas were Greek dialects survive to this day are two islands that were untouched by the Civil War: Cyprus and Crete. Daimonakou recalls that many children spoke dialectic Greek upon their arrival,
15 Interview with Galanis, July 9, 2013.
but they soon learned to speak Modern Greek. No coercion was necessary: peer pressure, and the allure of modernity were enough to alter the children’s accent17.
Th e children also got used to the idea of holidays, and especially the king of holidays, Christmas. Chatziangelou recalls that she had never celebrated Christmas before. In the village they celebrated Easter – albeit in a simple manner – but Christmas was a minor holiday that went unnoticed. In the childtown, there was a “pandemonium” at Christmas: Santa Claus would come and distribute presents, and they ate meat to mark the holiday as something special. Christmas served as an introduction to consumerist practices which were unheard of before: Greek villagers still strived for self-suffi ciency and ate and consumed mostly what they produced themselves18.
Th eologis and Galanis were the ones who were the most impressed by the clothes of the childtowns. Th eologis recalls that a diff erent way of life also meant diff erent clothes: “the clothes of the village were rough… the clothes of the child-town were diff erent. I had never before worn thin underpants. Th ey gave us un-dershirts, shirts, they took care of us”. Galanis also enjoyed the boy scout like uni-form he was given19.
But, together with healthcare, the one thing that impressed children the most was food. For Galanis, the change was truly dramatic: “[at the village] my food was potatoes and eggs. My mother had a couple of chickens. In the morning a boiled egg, two boiled eggs in the evening, and at noon – on the good days – an egg with potatoes”. As a result, Galanis was undernourished and his growth was delayed. Th is turned to be an advantage at the childtowns: “they all loved me because I was cute and small in size… Our breakfast was cocoa or milk and bread with butter or honey. Th e cook adored me, she [normally] put a small spoonful of cocoa, but for me she used a glass”. Food, healthcare, superior education – children went to the high school of the nearest town, and in general the care they were surrounded with gained their trust and made them embrace the new way of life that the childtowns stood for20.
Th e children themselves are convinced that these experiences improved their lives. Chatziangelou comments that “had the childtown not been there, I do not
17 N. Nicholas, Th e Story of Pu: Th e Grammaticalisation in Space and Time of a Modern Greek
Complementiser. December 1998, unpublished PhD Th esis (University of Melbourne), http://www. tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/Work/thesis.html, p. 481.
18 Interview with Chatziangelou, July 11, 2013.
19 Interview with Galanis July 9, 2013; with Th eologis June 16, 2013. 20 Interview with Th eologis, July 3, 2013; interview with Galanis, July 9, 2013.
know, I had no place [to go], I would probably go back to the village with the rest of the people who returned there in 1949, when the village started being rebuilt, I would have been like the other kids of the village, a primary school graduate, they would find for me someone to get married to. Who knows… there were no prospects”21.
Venetis thinks he would almost certainly have to go to the ecclesiastical orphan-age of Paramithia, something his father – albeit being a priest – did not like, as he thought that the childtowns were “more secular, liberal, open”. Th eologis similarly thinks that “had I not gone to the childtown, many things would have been diff er-ent… I would probably have spent my life like my brothers with the animals and the land, without having the opportunity to study”22.
Th e children who stayed at the village agreed that those at the childtowns had an unfair advantage. Th e two groups rarely came in contact, except for the time of the summer camp: at this opportunity, the villagers gathered outside the camp at the time of siesta and threw stones to wake up the childtown inmates – siesta was a rare luxury at the time in Greek villages. Similarly, a female villager complained to Daimonakou about the sudden appearance of so many appealing young women: “Ah, you came here and our men have lost their minds”. But apart from such ges-tures of dissatisfaction there was nothing the villagers could do against the social transformation that was taking place. Daimonakou recalls that most of the children who spent their summer vacations back to the village with their parents instead of the childtown summer camp, actually regretted it, and said they would rather not return to the village23.
Aft er graduating from the childtown, my four informants sooner or later turned to the cities for a living. Th eologis studied political science in Switzerland and worked in the tourist industry; Galanis became a turner and now lives in a block of fl ats of his ownership in Perissos, a suburb of Athens; Venetis went to the pres-tigious Law School of Athens, and made a career as a lawyer; Chatziangelou went to the Finishing School and returned to the childtowns as an instructor. None of my informants returned to his village outside vacations24.
In conclusion, time in childtowns had three major eff ects on the children. First, it impacted on their future profession. Second, it off ered them more and better
21 Interview with Chatziangelou, August 20, 2013. 22 Interview with Th eologis, August 19, 2013. 23 Interview with Daimonakou, August 3, 2013.
24 Interview with Th eologis, August 19, 2013; with Chatziangelou, August 20, 2013; with Galanis,
education than what was available at the villages. Th ird, it changed their habits and values, and gave them a new way of life.
Critics can still argue that this came at a high price, namely the loss of a diver-sity of local traditions. What I think is impossible to argue is that the children were passive victims or that they were submitted to cruelty. If we examine – as we should – the childtowns in the context of contemporary standards it is clear that punish-ments there were less severe than outside them: when Galanis was punished cor-porally at the high school outside the childtown, the instructors of the childtown took his side and complained about the teacher’s behaviour; all informants agreed that there was no instances of corporal punishment inside the childtowns, which if true, is quite remarkable, given how widespread corporal punishment and in general violence were in Greece at the time. Th e lack of violence speaks volumes about the attraction of consumerism for children: the children became the converts of a diff erent civilization.
One plausible objection to my research would be that my research suff ers from a selection bias. It could well be the case that the people who chose to give inter-views were precisely the ones who had good memories. Still, as I mentioned in the introduction, Vervenioti had noticed – albeit with surprise – that her inform-ants too had a good memory of the childtowns. Th e one group of children which might have had signifi cantly diff erent experiences from the rest are Slav-Macedo-nians: their diff erent ethnic background might have singled them out for diff erent treatment; it is also good to remember that a good 30% of the communist Demo-cratic Army was composed of Slav-Macedonians, and that many of them wished Macedonia to secede from Greece. Despite my eff orts, I was unable to fi nd people from this group for research, but this is indeed of the most promising directions for future research.
Still, I think it is clear that the childtowns were not the restrictive and oppressive institutions that partisan historiography has made of them: in their eff orts to com-bat the anticommunist stereotypes of postwar Greece, left wing historians retold the same story, with the only diff erence that they assigned diff erent people to the role of the good and the bad. Th eir story, like the one told by anticommunist au-thors, is one that sets the childtowns as part of a gigantic struggle between two ideologies, and where individuals can be heroes, victims, traitors or criminals but never complex human beings. Th is criticism does not, however, mean that we should give up entirely the study of childtowns as institutions; rather I would argue that instead of focusing on childtowns as the creations of anticommunist ideology, we should examine them as disciplinary institutions. Th ey are a good example of Foucault’s “gentle punishment” aimed at creating docile bodies. Th e lack of violence
and cruelty, in the end, testifi es to the success of the childtowns: there was no need to resort to such measures. Th is is another interesting line that future research – free from the suff ocating emphasis on ideology – may follow25.
In the fi nal analysis, the one thing I would like the reader to take from the above is that childtowns are indeed worthy of more and better research. History classes in Greek schools are dominated by Ancient Greek and Byzantine history and post-war Greek history is left completely out of the picture. Th is is nothing short of a disaster as school graduates take with them the lesson that the Battle of Marathon or Manzikert are more relevant to their present realities than the social transforma-tions that happened in postwar Greece, to the point that they imagine themselves more as descendants of Aristotle and Basil the Bulgarian Slayer than as descend-ants of poor and oft en illiterate Balkan peasdescend-ants; I let the reader decide which of the two is closer to reality. Historians then have the task not only to carry out more research on the childtowns – which together with schools, the Army and the Church, served as the midwives of Modern Greece – but also to disseminate this research among the public.
R E F E R E N C E S
Interviews:Chatziangelou, Patra: July 11, 2013; August 20, 2013. Daimonakou, Sia: August 3, 2013.
Galanis, Ioannis: July 9, 2013.
Th eologis, Th omas: June 16, 2013; July 3, 2013; August 19, 2013. Venetis, Antonis: August 10, 2013; August 20, 2013.
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