Dido Sotiriou
The Times (London)
September 29, 2004, Wednesday
Dido Sotiriou, writer, was born on February 18, 1909. She died on
September 23, 2004, aged 95.
Writer whose bestselling Farewell Anatolia documented her family’s
expulsion from Turkey in 1922.
THE WRITER Dido Sotiriou was the chronicler of Greece’s turbulent and
often traumatic passage through the 20th century and in her most
famous novel, Farewell Anatolia, acted as the recording angel of the
“catastrophe”, as it is known the expulsion from Turkey in 1922 of
more than a million Greeks, domiciled there for millennia, of whom
she was one.
When Greece achieved independence from the Ottoman Empire in the
mid-19th century, the new kingdom was less than half the size it is
now. The vast territorial gains it made in the North and in the
Aegean in the First Balkan War of 1912 encouraged its nationalist
leader Eleftherios Venizelos to take advantage of the sultanate’s
weakness after 1918 to press ahead with the “Great Idea”, the dream
of uniting all the Greek-speaking regions around the Aegean, notably
on the coast of Asia Minor, where there had been Greek communities
since the time of Homer.
These had largely preserved their identities under the Turks, with
whom they lived in harmony, and in 1919 (prompted in part by vague
assurances from the British Government) Greek forces occupied the
most important of these entrepots, Smyrna (now Izmir). Dido
Sotiriou’s father, a prosperous industrialist, encouraged by the
Greek advance towards Ankara, moved the family there from the hills
near Ephesus, where they had lived previously.
Three years later, however, the teenage Dido and thousands of others
were forced to flee in terror when Kemal Ataturk’s troops
unexpectedly routed the Greek Army and seized back Smyrna. More than
30,000 Christians -Greeks and Armenians were slaughtered in the
ensuing massacre. The Sotirious escaped to Athens, but 12 of their
relations had perished in Smyrna and the family had lost everything.
Dido’s father was reduced to working as a dockhand at Piraeus.
In the subsequent exchange of populations agreed between the two
countries, 380,000 Muslims left Greece for Turkey, while 1.1 million
Ottoman Greeks moved the other way. Their experiences and memories of
their land of lost content, shared by Sotiriou, provided the raw
material for Matomena Chomata (“Bloodied Earth”, available in English
as Farewell Anatolia), which she wrote in 1962. It has since been
republished 65 times and has sold half a million copies in ten
languages, including Turkish.
In common with Sotiriou’s other novels, it reads as loosely
fictionalised fact, taking as its protagonist Manolis Axiotis, a
Greek villager from “Kirkica” (Sotiriou’s native Sirince), caught up
in an increasing spiral of hatred that sets former Turk and Greek
neighbours against each other (the framework, too, for Louis de
Bernieres’ recent Birds Without Wings). “War is Circe for all of us,”
reflects one of the characters. “It turns men into swine.”
The book acts as a receptacle for many dearly held Greek sentiments
about the past, which undoubtedly aided its popularity, but it also
urges reconciliation with Turkey and its objective tone gained
Sotiriou a wide following in her homeland. Perhaps surprisingly, too,
after such a disrupted childhood, Sotiriou devoted much of the rest
of her long life to radical, even revolutionary, politics.
She was born Dido Pappas, a citizen of the Ottoman Empire, at Aydin,
Turkey, in 1909. Her parents died shortly after their enforced
exodus; she was raised in Athens by an aunt, but soon began to
evidence a rebel’s temperament, taking up smoking, riding a
motorcycle and swimming naked. An early marriage to a mathematics
professor, Plato Sotiriou, uncle of the author Alki Zei, freed her
from her family, and soon afterwards she moved to Paris to study
literature at the Sorbonne.
France became almost a second home to her, and in time she came to
know writers such as Andre Malraux, Andre Gide and Louis Aragon. She
had meanwhile begun to espouse the causes both of feminism and the
far Left, and she began her writing career as the French
correspondent for several Greek newspapers and magazines, being one
of the first Greek women to break into journalism. Her rather saintly
husband did her typing for her.
When Greece fell under the dictatorship of Metaxas in the mid-1930s,
she joined the Greek Communist Party (KKE), and during the German
occupation she was active in its underground press and resistance
movement, as was her sister, Elli Pappas.
By 1945 she had become editor of its newspaper, Rizospastis, and that
year she attended the first meeting of the International Democratic
Confederation of Women in Paris.
During Greece’s subsequent civil war between the communists and the
restored conservative Government, however, she was expelled from the
party for voicing criticisms of its actions. Then in 1950, her
sister’s lover, Nikos Beloyiannis, a senior figure in the KKE, was
captured by the Government. The party had been outlawed, and
Beloyiannis was declared a traitor and given a show trial. The grace
with which he conducted himself during this was memorialised in
Picasso’s sketch of him, The Man with the Carnation, but despite
widespread outcry, he was shot in 1952.
Elli Pappas was sentenced to 16 years’ imprisonment, and the couple’s
newborn son, also Nikos, whom Beloyiannis had seen once before his
execution, was brought up by Dido Sotiriou, who had no children of
her own. Before these events, she said, she had no literary
ambitions, but now “I had a duty to society, to tell the truth”.
Her first book, a study of American imperialism in the Mediterranean,
written in 1947, was censored and not published until 1975. She thus
first came to attention with Oi Nekri Perimenoun (The Dead Are
Waiting, 1959), something of a dry run for Farewell Anatolia, which
made her name, though it was banned under the Colonels’ regime from
1967 until 1974. Electra (1961) dealt with her time in the
Resistance, while Entoli (The Command, 1976) was a novelisation of
the Beloyiannis case.
She also wrote two books for children, a last novel, Katedafizometha
(Demolished, 1982), about a man in prison, and a monograph on the
theatre. Several other works, including an autobiography, remain
unpublished.
In 1990, Sotiriou was awarded Greece’s highest honour for a writer,
the prize of the Athens Academy. Some years ago she gave her flat in
Codrington Street, Athens, to the Hellenic Society of Authors to
serve as its offices.
Her nephew survives her.