Author Archive
Some exquisite novels written about Anatolia and The Great Catastrophe
If you mix the backdrops of World Wars, an Ottoman Empire at its sunset–before night—then dawn of the modern state of Turkey, together with a fairly newly liberated nation of Greece redefining itself with strong echoes of its past calling her: Byzantium, idealized cradle of democracy, Constantinople, lands lost… with superpowers playing countries like a chessboard, all this igniting ethnic and religious strife… This and more (a historian would tell you), and you get Smyrna September 13th 1922. Not so long after the Armenian genocide.
Smyrna (now geographically Izmir) was a cosmopolitan city off the coast Asia Minor. Like so much of Anatolia and Ottoman territory, it was multi-ethnic and multi-religious. Many Greeks lived in Asia Minor. Best to read the many books and some pages devoted to what happened on this date–the city was burned, after weeks of about half a million Greeks, and Armenians, huddled on the quay after the Greek army collapsed in its reach East (murder, rape, drowning, forced labor which led to death, suicide by drowning were the lot of these many). It’s referred to in Greek as “The Great Catastrophe”. And the survivors of this tragedy would move on to form a new identity for the modern Greek state together with the forced population exchanges between Turkey and Greece soon after, most of them being Greek. The refugees of Asia Minor brought agrarian skill, middle class professions, worldliness and their own signature to the arts, that would eventually weld itself into a new Greek identity, along, of course with the poverty of uprooted lives. The most famous one you know, is probably Aristotle Onassis.
For The Funeral Singer: Vasili and his sister are refugees from Asia Minor. They both processed what happened and what it means to survive quite differently. Because, yes, one is a man, another a woman. Because of their ages. Because of what they wanted out of life before every day of their lives became Smyrna.
The Funeral Singer the artist’s book in this setting of Smyrna 1922 and Athens 1944, releases September 13th 2022. Order now. The book comes with a silk lapis lazuli book sleeve and a curated reading and arts list bookmark for the themes of this period and culture.
The mirologia, funeral songs, are an old tradition: songs sung at funerals, the singer often retelling tidbits of the deceased life, in the rhythms of grief. They are acts to let OUT the grief. Death and ritual delegated to women’s realm. Our post on the Death Rituals of Rural Greece is a good introduction. As it seems with everything, it is a tradition dying, or thinning out, in practitioners. The songs are similar to those sung in weddings in lyrics, because it is a loss of someone to something else. Desire and death don’t seem a strange pairing, here. See a recent photographer’s journey documenting the last of the remaining funeral singers in Mani with an artistic narrative: “The Truth is in the Soil by Ioanna Sakellaraki is a 5-year exploration of grief as an elegy to her father and the dying tradition of mourning in Greece.” https://
There are the funeral songs native notably to Epirus, sung by all and with instruments. A wonderful recent outsider’s primer is the book Lament from Epirus by Christopher King. It takes you down this vinyl musicologist’s discovery and journey down the traditions of Northern Greece, the almost mystical call of its meter, that also transformed his life (he moved to Greece soon after this work).
Then, there are the “Greek blues” as some call it, rembetiko. So many books to recommend on that one, but they are songs very informed of the harsh life of 19-20th Century Anatolia and Greece. Marked especially by the Great Catastrophe, the burning of Smyrna and forced population exchanges of Greeks and Turks from their homelands. Instead of a book, I can’t recommend enough a viewing of the movie Rembetiko, by Costa Ferris. When I viewed it the first time, so much of my family’s own history and the place of the funeral song made sense. The forbidden music we were not to listen to. So much of an impact the movie had on me: I organized viewings of the movie as an undergrad at the University of Michigan (Ohio State University would mail us the VHS!) along with a lecture. And here I am writing about it, still.
I think a bit of grounding to what the Great Catastrophe is a nice place to end on the grand cultural-historical themes that are contained in The Funeral Singer, in September. There are more themes in the story, of course… but those are for you to discover on your own (and some can only be seen in the entirety of the novel). Order The Funeral Singer.
We’re back in Morningside Bookstore, in the past, as the store doesn’t exist anymore. Time doesn’t stop us at the Janus Point. As for you: that’s what wormholes are for.
Second installment of the historical background of some of the non-fiction books that inform The Funeral Singer, which Janus Point Press is publishing this Fall 2022. The most instrumental find for Stephanie strolling their basement section (was it weekly?) which really was an antique shop of modern Greece (clothing, trinkets, books): the book The Death Rituals of Rural Greece by Loring M. Danforth, photography by Alexander Tsiaras. It helped birth a novel, then a condensed short story.
The book documents many of the traditions in Greek Orthodoxy and its death rituals in rural Greece, published in 1982. You don’t just die and get buried, the end. There is a period where one waits for the flesh to slough off the bones, indicting sins have left the person. This is confirmed after about five years, at an exhumation of the grave. Death is women’s work, as the pages will show you. Enter The Widow in our story, who is preparing for the exhumation of her late husband Mani. She’s more than earned the capital “T” in her title. But back to the dead: the bones are then stored in the village ossuary after the exhumation. If the bones still had flesh though…. it’s a troubling sign. Among other things, it could mean a revenant, the undead, walked the village, causing much trouble.
And what of the funeral song? That will be our third installment, bringing us to the title of our first book: The Funeral Singer.
Janus Point Press’s first publication, The Funeral Singer, touches on an array of themes and layers of modern Greek history that are often overlooked–or skipped, because they are painful, damning and some still are living legacies of its chapters.
Today, and moreso because of recent news in the US that is an affront to women’s rights and lives, we’d like to highlight a press and the woman behind it that is important to The Funeral Singer and the plight and power of women: Thelphini Press and author Eleni Fourtouni. Greek Women in Resistance documents the female freedom fighters who resisted Nazi occupation and fascism during WWII. This act was in itself a form of gender emancipation, but also many of these women were also fighting for a better tomorrow for themselves beyond the German occupation. They were bitterly rewarded with prison, torture and exile after WWII after a civil war and right-wing coup. That’s a different spacetime from the Janus point in The Funeral Singer which stretches from 1922-1944. Enter Zoe, our andartissa. She is 1944.
Art is a powerful tool against oppression and also a natural balm of personal salvation. In Fourtouni’s publications you find poetry. Many of these women were poets, as she was. In testimonies, you find traveling theater groups bringing education and entertainment to remote villages as bullets and starvation ravaged the Greek population.
Finding Thelpini Press is a treasure of two worlds: one, the beautiful singularity of what a small press can do: be fiercely independent, niche, publish silenced voices while also be a platform for self. We hope Janus Point Press can be the same. Two, its a treasure of small independent bookstores with souls. Not the ones that don’t greet you, and who stock the same books as B&N. But the ones like once-ago Morningside Bookstore by the Columbia campus of NYC. They stocked Thelphini Press in the basement section that housed the owner’s dad’s lifetime of Greece. More to come on that, but the store was instrumental in a decade of Stephanie’s early writing.
You can learn more on Eleni Fourtouni’s life on her facebook page from 2012, which includes both a fabulous artist statement and interview of her work and life. Find remaining copies of her books online through a google search—unless of course you are fortunate to find them in a cozy gem of a used bookstore.
The Funeral Singer will be published by Janus Point Press September 2022.