Nicolas Gage is often asked by his American literary friends why modern Greece has produced many more poets than prose writers noting that Greeks have been citing poetry for 3000 years. The country's two Nobel Laureates Giorgos Seferis and Odysseas Elytis, both wrote poetry.
Greece has produced many personalities like Alexandros Papadiamantis, Nikos Kazantzakis, Stratis Myrivilis, and Thanasis Papathanasiou for example.
From now on, however, I will add to the distinguished list the name of Sotiris Dimitriou. His new book "Ouranos apo ton topo sou" (Sky from your land) has become a best seller. It has been given attention including the time and the place it has been set, the village of Morgana in the mountains of Epirus in the 1940s and those of us who remember its identity can marvel at his achievement. But, most of today's readers have to put in some effort to comprehend. But if Dimitriou is painting in words he has captured the personal life in the Epirus mountains in the middle of the last century in his book as vividly as Pietro Bruegel did in his personal life in the Low Countries for a long time in his paintings.
The setting of this tragic story of Dimitriou tells us of his native village of Pavla but remains Ambelonas in recent times. It borders with Albania along the timberline of Morgana and near the village of Lia.
The men of Pavla are mostly illiterate tinkers sometimes away from home for months at a time. The women were mostly illiterate serfs who did what they were told by their fathers, their husbands, and mothers-in-law. They only found comfort in their children, their religion, and each other.
Until the middle of the last century life in Pavla and all the villages of the Morgana range was as primitive as anywhere in Europe. The village had a priest and a schoolteacher but no doctor. There were no roads and no electricity. no running water nor amenities.
Meat, sugar, and coffee were luxuries and their existence was governed by fear, superstition, and suspicion.
The Second World War made things even worse in Pavla and the surrounding villages the civil war that made things unimaginably harsh, Most of the men fled the village to avoid conscription. Communist guerrillas who occupied them in the fall of 1947.
Young women were dragged into the Democratic Army and young children were taken to concentration camps and suffered terribly from the fascist Italians and the nazi Germans. I wish to commemorate our Jewish compatriots who were murdered as Auswich by the nazis may they rest in peace.
After the occupation by the Italians and the Germsns Greece became a free land!
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