Petros Charis’ Athens Academy prize 2015

What place can the recurrent crime have in the reality of a long-lasting war, be it a war of liberation or a civil one, a social war or an individual struggle for survival? What is the point of civilians being sacrificed, when these are merely unsuspecting victims of vengeance?

On December 13, 1943, the Germans act in retaliation by machine-gunning all the noncombatant men in Kalavryta. Only the women are left to bury their dead. Marianthi and her daughter Margarita flee the town. In 1955, Margarita’s daughter is born. Now a doctor, Lefki is haunted by that old war crime and lives in the shadow of her grandfather, Athos, Marianthi’s husband, who worked as a forester in the Kalavrita region. Lefki dedicates her life to treating her patients and alleviating their agony, while investigating the Nazi massacre. But could Athos really have been one of the thirteen survivors of that mass execution?

The world of shadow keeps company to the people of this story. It is a world as dark as the forest trails Athos follows, dead or alive ─ a mystery which only the writing act can illuminate. These heroes, prisoners within an unattainable dream, always consider the evil as inseparable from the miracle of beauty, in tragic terms, and maybe even redemptive; war carries peace, death carries the living memory, annihilation carries the sense of freedom. The ghost of revenge is left sterile and blind, with no outlet towards the opposite side.

“Survivor” Athos and the world of shadow and contemplation, through which Lefki has invented him and retells his story, belongs mostly to the internal experience. Athos is the third person, neither a victim nor a perpetrator (he is in struggle with both), neither right-winged nor left-winged; an antihero of a heroic era or simply an all-time hero.

The topic of the war trauma that is passed on to the following generations is pivotal in this story. While History moves on, shifting given facts and principles, and societies are redefined, the ultimate hero is bound to be the everyday man who, thanks to his living memory, knows how to live in peace and justice without abusing his freedom. But also, the magnificence of nature can combat the splendor and valor of war, with a toughness that only fate knows how to have in store for its creatures.

To Rodakio, 2014, 277 p.