Description
Facts of a History of two centuries: Most of which we do not know, some we learned in summary. In our schools we heard almost nothing about bankruptcies and crises other than what our parents and grandparents said. Most of the wars were glorious – even when we lost them. The others were unjust and unequal to our detriment – that is why we lost them. We forgot the first of the civil wars in the enthusiasm for the achievements of the heroes of 1821. We pushed the second into a single event, the assassination of Kapodistrias. We learned little about the killings he wanted to end at the cost of his own life. We named the third civil war “Division” even though it divided Greece into two states, even if the Church cursed the country’s prime minister at a rally, even though the country later had several thousand dead in rallies – and in pogroms – in the neighborhoods of Athens. The victors of the fourth civil war called it a “gang war” and the losers made it a flag of revenge. If Greek citizens were aware of the mistakes that led to our first six bankruptcies, we would have avoided the seventh. If our leaders knew how we got to the first three civil wars in our history, they would have renounced civil war demagogy. These are the simple things I wanted to say in this book.
