Overal History and Political Science

ι luuu Hlchard. A Short History of Modern Greece (1979) and Greece in the 80s (U183). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. If you haven’t the time for lioth, pick the short history, a 200-page distillation of salient events since 1454.

I Imit tiny W A ., et al. A Short History of Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge University I’m·νι, 1965. More middle-of-road than Clogg, less emphasis on postin- i li’i>»ndence events and more on pre-Byzantine, but slightly out of date. Good nin|m show shifts in ethnic and linguistic groups during this century.

World War II and its Aftermath (1940-49)

Million I ii iniinique. The Kapetanios: Partisans and Civil War in Greece, 1943-1949. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972. French Maoist’s perspective on

how/why Stalinists of the Greek Communist Party bungled the victory won by the popular resistance army.

Gage, Nicholas. Eleni. New York: Random House, 1983. Controversial account of a Greek-American journalist who returns to Ipiros to avenge the death of his mother, condemned by a communist tribunal in 1948.

Sarafis, Marion. Greece: From Resistance to Civil War. Nottingham: Spokesman, 1980. Former military adversaries confront each other in the halls of academe, in these never-dull proceedings of a 1978 conference on the Greek 1940s.

The Junta Years (1967-74)

Andrews, Kevin. Greece in the Dark. Amsterdam: Adolf Hakkert, 1980. The experiences of the author and his acquaintances living under the dictatorship, liberally interspersed with footnotes and citations from public documents.

Clogg, Richard and G. Yannopoulos, eds. Greece Under Military Rule. New York: Basic Books, 1972. O.P. Dated but still useful analysis of the junta “program,” its antecedents and backers.

Falacci, Oriana. A Man. New York: Pocket Books, 1981. The famous interviewer turns participant when she becomes involved with Alekos Panagoulis, the political activist who attempted to assassinate Colonel Papadhopoulos in 1968. Gripping, by turns depressing and inadvertently humorous.

Holden, David. Greece Without Columns. London: Faber & Faber, 1972. O.P. Pessimistic interpretive history and Greek national character analysis which clarifies more than it glosses over despite a mild projunta bias.

Byzantine & Athonite Studies

Byron, Robert. The Station. London: Century Books, 1984. The author of the classic Road to Oxiana actually made his debut, at the age of 24, with this account of a season on Athos.

Cavarnos, Constantine. Anchored in God. Belmont: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1975. As the subtitle says, “an inside account of life, art, and thought on the Holy Mountain.” Plain, almost catechismic style makes it a good introduction to Athos.

Loch, Sidney. Athos: The Holy Mountain. London: Lutterworth, 1957, orThessaloniki: Librairie Molho, 1971. The male half of a missionary couple which dwelt in Ouranopoli tower from 1928 onward recounts his hikes on the mountain. Good source for recent Athonite history and the legends surrounding various ikons and monasteries; uneven style because edited posthumously.

Sherrard, Philip. Byzantium. New York: Time-Life Books, 1966. Well-written over­view, part of the “Great Ages of Man” series, features Constantine Manos’ noted photo-essay on Olymbos, Karpathos and plates of surviving Byzantine mosaics.

 

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