HYPSIPYLE AND THE FIRE OF MEMORY: KAREN MARTIN’S RECLAMATION OF A SILENCED QUEEN

 

In Hypsipyle and the Curse of Lemnos, Karen Martin reanimates one of antiquity’s most shadowed myths. From the volcanic heart of Lemnos, she draws forth the story of Hypsipyle, the daughter who defied divine decree and human expectation to spare a life and, in so doing, condemned herself to exile. The novella unfolds with the solemn beauty of ritual, simultaneously fierce and meditative, lyrical and restrained. It extends the preoccupations of Martin’s earlier Dancing the Labyrinth, into a landscape where myth and conscience converge.

The opening sequence situates the reader amid celestial vengeance. Aphrodite, humiliated when Hephaestus exposes her union with Ares, seeks retribution upon his sacred island. Her wrath descends through the Erinyes, who hiss her malediction: “Let the hearts of Lemnos’ men turn cold to their wives… and when love’s fire burns for the foreign, may wrath bloom in the hearts of Lemnian women.” The gods are revealed in their familiar cruelty, capricious, immoderate, indifferent to the mortal wreckage they engender. Yet Martin renders this divine conflict with a psychological intimacy that transforms it from spectacle into allegory. The vengeance of Aphrodite becomes a metaphor for the contagion of shame, the humiliation of one woman visited upon an entire sisterhood.

When the narrative descends to the mortal sphere, the prose contracts into human cadence. The women of Lemnos, abandoned for Thracian captives, gather in fury. The elder Pollyx urges action: “Better to scorch the field than let the weeds take root.” The island becomes a forge of resentment, its air heavy with salt and silence. Hypsipyle, daughter of King Thoas, stands apart. She is the moral centre around which the story turns, a figure of compassion surrounded by the din of vengeance. Her choice to save her father: “If I save you, I betray my sisters. If I do nothing, I betray myself,” is the hinge upon which the narrative and her destiny turn. The line, delivered with devastating simplicity, distills the impossible calculus of love and duty that defines both the character and the human condition.

The very name Hypsipyle, meaning She of the High Gate, deepens Martin’s interpretation. It suggests both elevation and threshold: a liminal figure poised between worlds. In Martin’s retelling, the high gate is not a symbol of nobility but of conscience. Hypsipyle stands guard at the passage between vengeance and mercy, between the law of gods and the law of compassion. Her name becomes a quiet prophecy of her role: the keeper of the gate through which humanity must pass if it is to rise above divine cruelty.

The massacre scene, rendered with the austerity of tragedy, spares the reader no truth yet denies the indulgence of spectacle. “Knives sharpened by the men at the request of either their wives or concubines, sliced through flesh and bone.” In this brief and terrible sentence, Martin captures the communal complicity that haunts the act of retribution. The women’s liberation comes at the cost of their innocence, and Hypsipyle’s mercy isolates her from both camps: too tender for the victors, too guilty for the dead. Her coronation in the aftermath is stripped of grandeur. The sea is still, the island mute. Authority becomes penance.

The so-called Lemnian crime has long been a site where patriarchal thought locates the origin of feminine monstrosity. From Herodotus onward, the slaughter of the Lemnian men has been invoked as shorthand for unnatural female violence, a mythic rationale for the containment of women within civic order. Psychoanalytic readings, from Lacan’s notion of the woman as mirror of masculine anxiety to Foucault’s analysis of transgression as the boundary that defines normality, reveal how such narratives have functioned to police the limits of desire and speech. In the classical tradition the crime becomes a moral warning; in Martin’s hands it becomes a field of resistance.

Martin’s retelling dismantles what Derrida called the phallogocentric architecture of myth, the privileging of the male word as law and the female act as excess. By rendering the killings through the women’s collective consciousness rather than through divine or heroic commentary, she reverses the hierarchy of speech and silence. The women of Lemnos are no longer the abject objects of moral discourse but the narrators of its collapse. Their violence, reframed through trauma rather than pathology, exposes the structures that produced it. Hypsipyle’s choice to save Thoas becomes an ethical deviation that restores meaning to compassion within a world governed by vengeance.

Martin thus engages with what Foucault described as the productive nature of transgression, the point at which violation reveals the hidden mechanics of power. The Lemnian crime ceases to be an indictment of women and becomes a mirror held to patriarchal fear itself. Her prose refracts the symbolic order through which myth has long criminalised female autonomy and replaces it with a discourse of responsibility and renewal. In this sense, Martin’s approach also recalls Hélène Cixous’s Castration or Decapitation?, which argues that patriarchal myth severs women from language and authority. By allowing the Lemnian women to speak their crime, Martin restores to them what Cixous calls the right to “speak in tongues,” to reclaim a multiplicity of meaning that resists the singular logic of punishment.

Lemnos, scarred and smouldering, becomes both setting and symbol—the physical manifestation of psychic ash. Through its windswept desolation, the reader feels the weight of moral aftermath. The novella’s rhythm is meditative, shaped by pauses and breaths, its lyricism disciplined by ethical inquiry.

When the Argonauts arrive, the narrative widens again into myth. Jason and his companions, weary from voyage, confront an island ruled by women who have known the extremes of wrath and repentance. Pollyx, ever pragmatic, counsels Hypsipyle to meet violence with reason: “We choose the winners. We set the rules. We give them what they desire, while we take what we need.” Hospitality becomes strategy; seduction becomes statecraft. Martin reinterprets this episode, often trivialised by earlier poets, as a study in negotiation between trauma and renewal. Hypsipyle’s union with Jason, rendered in sparse, elegiac tones, produces twin sons sent away to Thrace, an act that repeats the motif of separation and survival. Every gesture of love in this novella carries an aftertaste of exile.

Martin’s Hypsipyle stands in quiet conversation with her literary foremothers: Antigone, Medea, and Cassandra. Yet unlike them, she does not perish for her defiance nor seek to justify her rage. She endures. This ethical deviation, first embodied in her rescue of Thoas, deepens into a vision of feminine power grounded in conscience rather than revolt.

The novella’s feminist strength lies in its restraint. Martin avoids the declarative didacticism that mars many modern mythic retellings. Instead, she allows moral clarity to emerge through ambiguity, as if the text itself were a ritual of purification. The voice of the Lemnian women is rendered collectively, often in choral refrains: “We gathered. All of us. Not with rage, but with resolve.” Their unity, fragile yet deliberate, speaks to the enduring need for solidarity amid the fractures of guilt.

The prose of Hypsipyle and the Curse of Lemnos is a study in cadence. Each sentence moves with sculpted precision, balanced between fire and restraint. The diction is elemental; sea, ash, flame, wind, and every image serves the architecture of emotion. The style evokes both the austerity of ancient lament and the lucidity of modernist prose poetry.

As in Dancing the Labyrinth, Martin’s writing merges archaeological consciousness with psychological excavation. Both works are meditations on the endurance of women through the erosion of time and myth. Yet Hypsipyle and the Curse of Lemnos reaches further into the moral terrain of culpability and grace. In Dancing the Labyrinth, the discovery of the Minoan cave restored a lineage of forgotten women; here, Hypsipyle’s solitary mercy becomes the cave itself, a vision of compassion painted upon the blackened walls of retribution.

The significance of reinterpretation lies in its challenge to the permanence of mythic authority. As Adrienne Rich observed in When We Dead Awaken, revision is an act of survival, the refusal to inhabit stories written against one’s existence. In reclaiming Hypsipyle, Martin participates in a feminist lineage that views the reimagining of myth as both creative and reparative. It is a form of counter-memory that exposes how myth’s sacred aura has served to naturalise systems of domination. The ethical force of Martin’s retelling lies precisely in its refusal to sever the myth from its trauma; she transforms inherited violence into moral insight.

In its scope and sensibility, Hypsipyle and the Curse of Lemnos stands beside the mythic reclamations of Pat Barker, Natalie Haynes, and Madeline Miller. Like Barker’s Silence of the Girls, it strips away the heroic veneer of epic to expose the moral exhaustion beneath conquest; like Haynes’ A Thousand Ships, it restores to the chorus of women the collective dignity of witnesses and survivors; and like Miller’s Circe and The Song of Achilles, it gives lyric voice to those exiled from power yet fluent in endurance. Martin, however, writes from a distinctive vantage as a philhellene whose reverence for the Hellenic world deepens rather than domesticates her critique. Her Lemnos breathes with volcanic immediacy, her moral vision tempered by compassion. Hypsipyle and the Curse of Lemnos is therefore a fierce lyrical reclamation of one woman’s struggle to shape her destiny in the wake of divine retribution, a work that transforms myth into moral meditation and restores to Hypsipyle the autonomy that time and tradition denied her.

The final chapters return to the goddess whose wrath set the cycle in motion. Aphrodite does not reappear; her silence is the most eloquent of verdicts. The absence of divine closure leaves the reader suspended between justice and forgiveness, mirroring Hypsipyle’s own condition. The women of Lemnos rebuild their world without divine sanction, discovering in their own labour the only form of grace the gods will ever grant. The novella closes not upon redemption but upon endurance, the quiet persistence of life after ruin.

Martin’s achievement lies in the precision of her moral imagination. She neither revises myth for modern sensibility nor venerates it as untouchable relic. She listens to it. Through Hypsipyle she teaches the reader to listen to the muted histories that survive in the pauses between epic lines, to the small voices that outlast the roar of heroes. In doing so, she restores to myth its oldest power: the power to reveal the divine within the human act of remembrance.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 15 November 2025

KONSTANTINOS ARGYROS, GARGOYLES AND OUR FUTURE

 

Every year when I would deliver the Pontian Genocide Memorial Lecture, a boy and a girl, invariably chosen for their poise and docility, would be stationed at either side of the podium, dressed in full Pontian costume, to stand motionless throughout my address. For over an hour they would endure my droning in funereal silence, their faces fixed in expressions of exquisite suffering. I used to gauge the length of my lecture by their torment: when their eyes began to glaze and their knees to tremble, I knew it was time to close my mouth. No clock could have kept better time than the quiet desperation of those children.

The scene never failed to remind me of my own initiation into communal life. My childhood memories of Greek functions are a catalogue of pathos and heatstroke: standing in stifling halls while elders intoned patriotic platitudes; lined up in national dress at doxologies; clutching bouquets for visiting dignitaries from Greece who rarely met our gaze, but brushed past us in search of the buffet table. Afterwards, the same organisers would complain bitterly about the apathy of the νεολαία. Given the early damage done to their tarsal and phalangeal bones, it is a wonder that they had any feet left to vote with.

From these small rituals of discomfort, a peculiar pedagogy is born. The first lesson: to be a Greek youth in Australia is to suffer beatifically and in silence. The second: pride is something declared by others while you stand beside them holding a flag, preferably while clad in a foustanella. What we call participation is in fact choreography. The children, if they could give it a name, would call it captivity, and they would be right. We array them like mannequins, exquisite in form and utterly immobile, beautiful but enslaved. They become Caryatids of our self-regard, carved into the architecture of our communal vanity. Their smiles are rehearsed, their presence ornamental. They are our gargoyles, visible, still, and soulless, warding off the evil of indifference even as we manufacture it. Culture, in our hands, has become a test of endurance masquerading as belonging, a silent liturgy in praise of ourselves.

Pierre Bourdieu observed that culture lives through habit, through gestures and rhythms absorbed in the intimacy of life rather than the glare of ceremony. Where such habit fades, culture becomes theatre. Our functions have mastered this art of display: every year the same speeches, the same applause, the same photographs, all confirming that the body of Hellenism still moves, even if the soul has quietly departed. We confuse visibility with vitality. What was once lived has become something performed, and our children, cast as its silent extras, learn early that their heritage exists only for the camera, never for them.

In this theatre of heritage, power also performs. Michel Foucault would recognise in our ceremonies a machinery of discipline: bodies arranged, gestures prescribed, voices contained, all in the service of order. The child becomes the subject of what Jacques Lacan called the paternal law, spoken for and spoken over, yet never permitted to speak. Even the language of tradition is guarded, its meanings circumscribed by those who claim authority over it. Jacques Derrida might say that our proclamations of continuity conceal an unease about control. We repeat ourselves to prove that we exist. In isolating the young, we seek to affirm mastery. In defining their role, we deny their authorship. Preservation becomes possession, and the lineage we claim to defend becomes the cage in which we keep it.

Identity, however, resists preservation. Stuart Hall described it as a process of becoming, a conversation between inheritance and invention. Yet our institutions cling to the fantasy of fixity. They treat Greekness as a finished monument, polished and untouchable. The young approach it reverently, but find no door through which to enter, forced instead to linger in its portico, assuming neo-classical attitudes dictated by others. Reverence soon turns to detachment. When the living are forbidden to add their fingerprints to the marble, they will simply walk away.

Between past and present lies what Homi Bhabha called the third space, a fertile ground where cultures meet and new meanings arise. Our children inhabit this space effortlessly, moving between languages and worlds, forging a Greekness that is supple and creative. Yet our events rarely venture there. We organise them as spectacles for ourselves, not as laboratories for our children’s imagination. We deny them an essential role, as if we deliberately wish to keep them at a distance, fearful that their spontaneity might disturb our polished order. We distrust the in-between. We equate mixture with dilution, experimentation with betrayal. We forget that all culture, at its beginning, was an act of hybridity. Until our gatherings make room for play, art, and creation, we will go on mistaking performance for continuity. In defending purity we deny growth, and in denying growth we prepare extinction.

If Bhabha reveals the space our children could inhabit, Vygotsky shows how they might learn within it. The classroom of culture begins in play. Lev Vygotsky saw in the child’s imagination the seed of learning, the way the world becomes intelligible through movement, touch, and creation. Through play, meaning enters the body. When our communal life forbids play, it forbids comprehension. A child who stands for an hour at a doxology will learn endurance; a child who transforms paper and ink into the image of a saint will learn devotion. Through play, inheritance becomes experience.

Memory, too, requires imagination to survive. Marianne Hirsch’s idea of postmemory describes how descendants inherit the emotional texture of events they never lived, through images re-created in the mind. Our children cannot recall the exodus from Asia Minor or the killing fields of Pontos, yet they can feel their pulse if we invite them to imagine. Instead, we rehearse mourning in tones so formal and stifling (literally: children have fainted at interminable wreath-laying events) that empathy suffocates. The children see sorrow displayed without knowing its cause. Memory becomes performance, and emotion drains away, leaving behind the wax mask of remembrance: flawless, cold, lifeless and completely unrelatable.

Into this malaise comes singer Konstantinos Argyros. With a breathtaking act of vision and sensitivity, he donates $150,000 to the Hellenic Museum for the creation of a Children’s Gallery. In a community awash with self-congratulation, his gesture possesses the quiet audacity of insight. He sees what our committees, with their decades of meetings, fail to see: that the future of Hellenism depends upon restoring the imagination of its children. His philanthropy is a supreme act of pedagogy. Through generosity, he articulates a truth that policy has never managed to formulate; that the child’s curiosity is our only guarantee of continuity.

A Children’s Gallery may appear a modest enterprise, yet its implications are quietly revolutionary. It confirms that the Hellenic Museum is not a mausoleum where the relics of Hellenism are embalmed for occasional inspection, but a living workshop of wonder. The exhibits will cease to be mute witnesses behind glass and will instead become companions in discovery: instruments of play, objects to be touched, stories to be inhabited, riddles to be solved. History will no longer whisper from a distance; it will breathe through the senses. In that space, Hellenism will reveal itself not as an exclusive inheritance to be guarded against parvenus, but as a living language of creation, enacting what Vygotsky understood and Bourdieu only hinted at: that to learn is to participate, and that culture survives only when it is re-experienced anew.

Argyros’ munificence also exposes a wound. Why did it take a visiting artist to discern what was missing from our institutions? Why, among many of our federations and associations, is there no real space dedicated to the active participation of the young? We boast of preserving language and culture, yet where are the plans, the measurements, the evaluations? Who leads, who dreams, who is accountable? We have energy without direction, sentiment without strategy. Our committees meet; our minutes lengthen; our purpose diminishes. The most common phrase in our discourse is “keeping the culture alive,” though few seem willing to define what that life consists of.

If we listen closely, the theorists who mapped the nature of culture whisper warnings directly to us. Bourdieu would remind us that living traditions require the renewal of everyday practice. Hall would insist that identity cannot be embalmed without dying. Bhabha would point to the creative potential of our hybridity. Hirsch would plead for imagination in remembrance. Danforth would urge ritual to evolve or lose meaning. Vygotsky would call for play as the foundation of understanding. Argyros, without citing any of them, has embodied all of their insights in one luminous act. His gallery is their theory made visible.

The implications reach far beyond the museum walls. Argyros’ gesture calls for the transformation of every institution into a place where creation is valued above display. Festivals, schools, and parishes must give children room to build, to question, to interpret for themselves. Numbers and speeches no longer suffice; the true measure of success is the spark of agency in a young mind that dares to shape meaning. Continuity begins when children are trusted with the tools of making, when heritage becomes something they handle rather than admire.

Renewal demands humility. It asks us to confront how often our ceremonies serve pride instead of purpose. The time has come to trade the safety of repetition for the risk of invention. Only through that risk can our heritage regain its dignity. The Greeks of the diaspora have mastered survival; it is time they learned creation.

Every civilisation is revealed by how it treats its children. They are its conscience, its proof of sincerity. For too long we have placed them before us as decorative witnesses to our nostalgia. Argyros’ generosity restores them to their rightful place as collaborators, entrusted with the work of shaping what will follow. If we take his cue, the weary choreography of our communal life may at last move again with purpose and grace.

The next time a boy and a girl stand beside a podium, perhaps they will do so to speak. Perhaps their faces will shine with understanding, not endurance. And when that day comes, we shall have Konstantinos Argyros to thank, for reminding us that the surest way to preserve culture is to give our children the power to recreate it.

For this, Konstantine, our gratitude is profound.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

dean@tooraklaw.com.au

First published in NKEE on Saturday 8 November 2025

KAPETAN MIHALIS AND THE CRISIS OF GREEK CINEMATIC REPRESENTATION

 

To adapt Kapetan Mihalis to the screen is to attempt the impossible. Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel, part epic and part metaphysical treatise, is among the most difficult works of modern Greek literature to transpose into visual language. Its conflict is neither purely historical nor political,  is eminently ontological, the struggle between freedom and necessity, body and spirit, the inhibited and uninhibited self, Eros and Thanatos, an inner drama articulated through external revolt. The 2023 cinematic adaptation directed by Kostas Haralambous, though clearly motivated by reverence for its source, fails to render that interiority visible. What emerges is a lifeless transcription, a film paralysed by its self-conscious devotion to the text.

From its opening sequence, a panoramic sweep of a sunstruck Cretan landscape accompanied by sombre strings, it is evident that the film aspires to solemnity rather than vitality. The mise en scène is composed with painterly care yet devoid of movement or moral tension. The island of Crete, which in Kazantzakis’ prose breathes, trembles and suffers as a living organism, is here a decorative surface. The camera contemplates rather than explores the topography of conflict. In the sense used by André Bazin, who saw film as the ontology of the photographic image, this adaptation confuses representation with revelation. The world is shown yet never truly disclosed.

The problem here is both aesthetic and structural, with the film’s narrative appearing fragmented and curiously static. Dialogues are woodenly declaimed rather than spoken, drained of subtext and rhythmic variation. In one of the central scenes, Mihalis stands before a candle and delivers a solemn reflection on Crete and the meaning of freedom, a passage composed in Kazantzakis’ idiom but not quoted directly from the novel. The moment, intended to be epic, collapses under its own theatrical weight. There is no tension between the man and the idea; only an actor reciting a line. The camera remains reverent, unwilling to question or interpret. In adaptation theory, this constitutes what Linda Hutcheon calls a hermeneutic deficit, a failure to translate not just the content but also the mode of meaning of the original. There are no new insights to be gained here.

Kazantzakis’ writing burns with ambivalence. Every gesture of faith conceals doubt, every act of heroism contains futility. This film offers certainty in the place of struggle. Its tone remains uniformly exalted, with its visual grammar governed by symmetrical compositions, diffused lighting and choreographed solemnity. The result may be rhetorically grand but at the same time, it is emotionally inert. Battle sequences, intended to evoke the collective sacrifice of Crete, are staged with illustrative literalism, clumsy camera movements, abrupt edits and digitally augmented imagery that adds scale without therequisite emotional immediacy. There is no spatial logic, no sense of danger or contingency. Montage, as Soviet film-maker Sergei Eisenstein taught, should think; here it merely records.

Regrettably, the film’s performances are undermined by an absence of psychological nuance and tonal modulation. The actor portraying Mihalis oscillates between stoic detachment and exaggerated fervour, never quite discovering the inner rhythm of Kazantzakis’ protagonist, that fusion of moral torment and ecstatic defiance. Supporting cast also display a limited emotional palette that remains confined to archetype: the grieving wife, the tragic lover, the zealous priest. The characters function as emblems rather than beings. In semiotic terms, they are signs emptied of referents, images that signify a localised type of Greekness, sacrifice and honour without generating new meaning. The acting is stilted, measured in diction rather than emotive. Even in moments of supposed passion, gestures are rehearsed, gazes fixed and movements appear curiously weightless. There is no sense of inner life beneath the dialogue, no fissure through which humanity might escape. Instead, the viewer is left with posture and arrangement, actors placed before the camera like figures in a static frieze or a tableau vivant. This absence of vitality accords with Vrasidas Karalis’ observation that Greek cinema often oscillates between didacticism and paralysis under the weight of national symbolism, where emotion can lapse into quotation and performance into simulation. The tragedy of such acting lies in its lack of necessity. Nothing in it feels compelled, urgent or true.

This literal approach stems from a misunderstanding of fidelity. Film adaptation is translation across media and across ontologies. As Robert Stam observed, obsession with faithfulness often leads to paralysis, since the film medium must externalise inner states. Kazantzakis’ theological and philosophical meditations, his fusion of Nietzschean struggle and Orthodox asceticism, resist direct visualisation. To reproduce them verbatim annihilates their ambiguity. The director, unwilling to reinterpret, confines himself to reverence. The result honours Kazantzakis’ text while betraying his spirit. Karalis has argued that Greek cinema frequently bears the burden of its own national symbolism to the point of immobility, a pattern confirmed here. Rather than confront the metaphysical audacity of Kazantzakis’ vision, the filmmakers retreat into solemnity, equating stillness with depth. The film’s inertia, physical and emotional, may be symptomatic of a deeper anxiety about interpretation itself, a fear that to reimagine the sacred is to profane it.

This failure belongs to the larger condition of Greek national cinema. Since the decline of the New Greek Cinema of the 1970s, with its daring experimentation and political allegory, contemporary Greek filmmaking has alternated between minimalist existentialism and heritage spectacle. Kapetan Mihalis belongs entirely to the latter. Its imagery, from the meticulously arranged costumes to the sentimental orchestral score, aligns it with the French “tradition of quality” derided by Truffaut and with what contemporary criticism often labels heritage cinema: works that replace artistic inquiry with aesthetic piety. It is a cinema of preservation, not discovery.

Such films arise from a culture that venerates the past yet seldom interrogates it. Greece’s literary and historical inheritance becomes a monument to be maintained, never a dialogue to be renewed. In this sense Kapetan Mihalis exemplifies a broader malaise, a reluctance to risk meaning or to offend the canon in order to transform it. The fear of irreverence produces homages that erase.

Even in technical terms the film reveals such conceptual exhaustion. The editing is languid and the pacing inert. Scenes linger long after their emotional climax, mistaking duration for profundity. The lighting, alternately overexposed and funereal, drains the landscape of vitality. The score, insistently melancholic, dictates emotion rather than accompanying it. There is no space for silence, that essential dimension of cinematic time which allows the viewer to think and to breathe and the overall impression is one of suffocation through absence. As Karalis observed, the Greek screen often mirrors a society exhausted by its own symbols. Kapetan Mihalis becomes such a mirror, a film unable to believe in the reality it depicts.

Gilles Deleuze’s distinction between the movement image and the time image is instructive in understanding the film’s failure of dynamism. Kazantzakis’ novel is movement, a relentless ascent toward spiritual liberation. This film represents time without becoming: motion arrested, meaning immobilised. It is a cinema of repetition rather than revelation.

The tragedy of Kapetan Mihalis lies in its renunciation of struggle, the essence of Kazantzakis’ vision. The novel’s protagonist is consumed by an inner fire, a holy restlessness that defies both God and death. The film, by contrast, is marked by passivity. The camera watches where it should wrestle, venerates where it should question. What could have been an titanic existential confrontation becomes a museum exhibit, polished and silent.

The boredom the film induces arises not so much from pacing as from ontology: the weariness of an art form that no longer believes in its transformative power. Until Greek filmmakers recover the courage to interpret rather than preserve, to risk sacrilege in the service of truth, their images will remain trapped in the endless rehearsal of a history that no longer believes in itself: the art of a nation circling its own reflection, unable to move beyond the echo of what it once was.

Kazantzakis once wrote, “Reach what you cannot” (Askitiki, 1927). This latest adaptation reaches for nothing. In its failure to strive, it exposes a deeper cultural crisis, a society that venerates its past precisely because it has forgotten how to imagine its future, the very negation of Kazantzakis’ Kapetan Mihalis. Nonetheless, as a symbol of a creative cul-de-sac, it is compelling viewing.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 1 November 2025

WILD MOUNTAINS, WILD PEOPLE

Seán Damer’s Wild Mountains, Wild People belongs to a venerable tradition of war novels set in Crete during the Second World War. Its landscapes, haunted by German paratroopers, British commandos, and andartes, are familiar to readers of W Stanley Moss’ Ill Met by Moonlight, George Psychoundakis’ The Cretan Runner, James Aldridge’s The Sea Eagle, and Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Abducting a General. Damer however does not rehearse the tale of aristocratic adventurers operating behind enemy lines. His novel, presented in epistolary form, moves between Scotland in the present and Crete during the occupation, tracing the fraught legacy of wartime choices through the story of Gallagher, a Glasgow commando who vanishes during the war and is later revealed to have lived for decades in Crete with a Cretan wife. The discovery of his journals forces his grandson Andy, a classics professor steeped in Minoan studies yet emotionally adrift, to confront the collapse of his marriage and the uncomfortable inheritance of divided loyalties. Damer situates this intimate narrative within the ruins of public history, binding together the shards of family, politics, and memory into a single mosaic.

Within the canon of Cretan war literature, Damer’s novel both acknowledges and departs from its predecessors. Moss’ Ill Met by Moonlight celebrated the kidnapping of General Kreipe, casting the Cretan resistance as a picturesque backdrop to British chivalric heroism. Psychoundakis’ The Cretan Runner, though rooted in lived experience, reached readers through the mediation of British publication, while Aldridge’s The Sea Eagle privileged the ingenuity of special operations. Leigh Fermor’s later memoir, Abducting a General, returned to the episode of the Kreipe kidnapping from the vantage point of reflective recollection, shaped by his own cultivated prose and self-fashioning. Damer’s narrative alters the vantage point altogether. The epistolary form allows the reader to inhabit Gallagher’s words. His political sympathies with ELAS, his accidental killing of an SOE officer, and his decision to vanish into the Cretan underground are revealed through testimony. This is the story of a working-class Glaswegian whose socialist background disposes him to see the partisans as comrades. His vision contrasts with the upper-class officers of the Special Operations Executive who refuse to arm ELAS, branding it communist. In this way Damer challenges the orientalist tendency of earlier works, which often romanticised the Cretans as noble primitives whose bravery derived from ancient vendettas rather than from ideological conviction. Gallagher, though foreign, attempts solidarity across class lines, reading the resistance as a continuation of proletarian struggle.

The question arises whether Damer’s Cretans exist as independent characters or merely as scenery for the Gallagher family drama. Here the evidence is mixed. Figures such as Kostas Sfakianakis, the partisan guide killed during an airdrop, or Yorgos, the teenage runner who risks everything for the cause, are vividly sketched in the early chapters. Their courage and resilience are palpable and their sacrifices frame Gallagher’s own decisions. Maria Sfakianakis, the widow with whom Andy finds companionship in the present, provides continuity across generations. Nonetheless, the Cretans often appear through the filter of the British gaze. Kostas is noble in death, Yorgos legendary in endurance, Maria a vehicle for Andy’s redemption. The novel does not grant them sustained interiority. Their voices emerge through the mediated words of Gallagher’s journals or Andy’s encounters. War novels often use the local population as backdrop, against which the foreign protagonist negotiates his own crises of loyalty and survival. Damer’s work, for all its sympathy, does not entirely escape this gravitational pull. The Cretans are present, brave, and indispensable, yet their complexity is necessarily subordinated to the Gallagher family’s narrative arc.

What distinguishes Wild Mountains, Wild People most strongly from the earlier tradition is its acute attention to class. Gallagher is not an Old Etonian adventurer. He is the son of Glasgow socialists, a joiner by trade, formed by the culture of Red Clydeside. His sympathy for ELAS emerges from political kinship. The conflict between Gallagher and his English superiors dramatises the gulf between working class internationalism and the suspicions of an imperial military hierarchy. The accidental killing of an officer, which seals Gallagher’s fate, symbolises the irreconcilability of fraternal solidarity with partisans and the rigid demands of the British establishment. His subsequent withdrawal into the Cretan underground is transfigured into an act of ideological constancy, a refusal to betray conviction. In that gesture he renounces the institutions of the West which denounce comradeship as subversion, and seeks instead in the symbolic “East” a realm where political and moral commitments can be authentically enacted.

This theme of turning away from the West towards the East has a long literary lineage. In T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the desert becomes a place where Western identity dissolves and an alternative self is discovered. In E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, the encounter with the subcontinent unsettles imperial categories and forces a confrontation with other modes of being. In Nikos Kazantzakis’ Freedom or Death, Crete itself is the crucible in which European values are tested and transformed. Gallagher’s embrace of the Cretan underground participates in this trope. He refuses to act as the agent of empire and instead finds comradeship among mountain fighters whose struggles mirror those of his own class at home. The trope risks exoticising the East as a site of authenticity, yet in Gallagher’s case it is framed through class rather than romance, which tempers the danger of orientalism.

Andy, the protagonist’s grandson, embodies a later stage of class displacement. Though descended from working class stock, he has become an academic specialist in Minoan script, comfortable within the university yet emotionally adrift. His inability to sustain his marriage mirrors his difficulty in interpreting his grandfather’s legacy. Redemption comes only through his confrontation with the Cretan mountains and with Maria, suggesting that class identity, when transfigured into abstraction, requires re-grounding in lived struggle. The novel therefore stages a double movement. Gallagher embraces the East as the arena where his class convictions achieve embodiment. Andy, estranged from both class roots and family ties, rediscovers authenticity only in Crete, through a belated encounter with the land where his grandfather chose to remain.

The novel’s title, derived from the proverb that wild mountains breed wild people, points to the delicate balance it maintains between solidarity and orientalism. There is always the risk that Crete may be cast as a theatre of vendetta, passion, and fatalism, yet Damer’s narrative largely avoids such reduction. Gallagher sees the Cretans as comrades bound by shared struggle rather than as enigmas. The novel also highlights the political fractures within the resistance and situates them within global ideological conflict rather than attributing them to timeless tribalism. Images of the sublime mountains and of Maria as a striking Mediterranean figure recall familiar literary conventions, yet here they function less as distortions than as devices to heighten atmosphere, leaving intact the authenticity of the work’s sympathies.

A distinctive feature of Wild Mountains, Wild People is its reliance on epistolary structure. Gallagher’s letters to his fiancée Maeve, his journals from the war, and the contemporary correspondence that summons Andy to Crete create a fragmented narrative. War literature often emphasises the incompleteness of testimony. As Paul Fussell has argued, the form of war writing is inseparable from its fractured content. Damer embraces this incompleteness, and the reader must reconstruct events from scattered papers. The censored blandness of Gallagher’s official letters contrasts with the intensity of his hidden journals. This juxtaposition exposes the distance between public discourse and lived reality. The device also underscores the fracture between generations: Andy reads his grandfather’s words as a stranger, alienated from their immediacy, much as he is estranged from his own family.

The epistolary form conveys both authenticity and disorientation. Its danger lies in loss of narrative momentum. At times one longs for immersion in Gallagher’s experiences rather than piecemeal reconstruction. Yet the very incompleteness is the point. As Samuel Hynes observed, war leaves only fragments, and descendants must interpret them as best they can. The device therefore functions as a thematic necessity, a formal acknowledgement of the limits of testimony.

Damer’s narrative closes without the reassurance of reconciliation. Gallagher’s decision to remain in Crete emerges as the creation of a new belonging that unsettles conventional lines between victor and vanquished, native and foreigner. Andy’s belated attempt to interpret that choice reveals how memory resists domestication and remains jagged, like the mountains themselves. In this sense the novel enlarges the canon of Cretan war literature by reminding us that occupation was never a mere episode in a distant campaign but a crucible of identities contested across generations.

The wild mountains do not simply house wild people. They guard the restless echoes of history, which, as Edward Said might remind us, are never innocent of power, and which demand to be heard long after the last shot has been fired.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 18 October 2025

GREECE UNCONQUERED: KATINA AMONG THE RUINS

 

Among the many narratives to emerge from the tumult of the Second World War, few possess the quiet intensity and symbolic magnitude of Roald Dahl’s Katina. First published in March 1944 in Ladies’ Home Journal, while the world still reeled from conflict, the story was inspired by Dahl’s experiences as a Royal Air Force pilot stationed in Greece during the spring of 1941. It was a moment of profound despair and dislocation. The German invasion had shattered Greek resistance, the government had fled into exile, and British and Commonwealth forces were in chaotic retreat. Out of this landscape of devastation Dahl forged a story that transcends military history. At its centre stands a child, a little orphaned girl named Katina, whose raised fist towards the heavens amidst the ruins encapsulates the unbroken soul of an entire people.

Dahl’s fiction is often celebrated for its mordant humour, its dark ironies and its playfulness, yet Katina belongs to another register entirely. It is a serious, elegiac work, suffused with an admiration that is both personal and profound. Its origins lie deep within Dahl’s wartime service. In the spring of 1941 he flew with No. 80 Squadron RAF in embattled Greece, taking part in air operations that culminated in the Battle of Athens on 20 April. He witnessed the catastrophic bombing of Piraeus, the swift collapse of Greek defences and the desperate withdrawal that followed. During this time he encountered the people of Greece less as remote and subordinate allies than as valiant comrades enduring a shared ordeal. It was this encounter that inspired Katina, a fictionalised narrative that seeks to capture the essence of a people who, though overrun and bereft, refused to incline their heads before their conquerors.

The plot appears deceptively simple. A squadron of RAF pilots stationed at a forward base in Greece encounters a very young girl, perhaps eight or nine years old, wandering alone near their encampment. She is barefoot, ragged and dazed. Her village has been bombed, her family annihilated, and she has no one left in the world. The men, stirred by compassion, take her in. They feed her, clothe her and offer her shelter. They attempt, in their halting and awkward way, to provide comfort and protection. Katina speaks only a few words, enough to communicate simple thoughts, but it is her presence rather than her speech that binds them to her. She follows them around the base, observes their labours and listens intently to their conversations. Gradually she becomes their constant companion and, more importantly, the moral centre of their world.

The pivotal moment of the story arrives during a German air raid. As bombs descend and the men rush to their stations, Katina steps out into the open air, diminutive and unarmed, and raises her fist skyward. She shouts, though the words themselves are unimportant. What matters is the raw, physical defiance of the gesture. It is the act of a child who has lost everything and yet refuses to surrender. It proclaims that the enemy may possess overwhelming might, yet the will of those they seek to subjugate remains forever beyond their reach.

At this instant Katina ceases to function merely as a character and assumes the dimensions of a symbol. Dahl’s prose makes this transformation luminous. The pilots, with all their training and technology, are powerless to halt the enemy’s advance. They cannot prevent the fall of Greece. They cannot even assure their own survival. Their gestures of protection, though sincere, are ultimately inconsequential. Here Dahl enacts a striking reversal of imperial narrative. These men are representatives of a global empire that governs vast territories and presumes to shape the destinies of other peoples. Yet on this desolate Greek airfield their power counts for nothing. They are stripped of agency, unable to defend the land they have come to aid or even to secure their own safety. The imperial mission collapses into impotence before the ferocity of fascist assault and, more significantly, before the unwavering resolve of those they believed themselves destined to save.

It is Katina, dispossessed and powerless in every material sense, who embodies the only form of power that endures: the power of refusal. Her raised fist reorders the entire moral landscape of the story. The imperial force that once claimed to protect becomes an impotent spectator, while the colonised subject rises from the rubble as the bearer of history. Through this inversion Dahl anticipates the death of imperial paternalism, revealing that the true agents of historical change are the so-called “little people” those who endure, resist and refuse annihilation even when abandoned by the machinery of empire.

Critics have long noted the recurrent use of the female child as a narrative device in literature that deals with war. She is frequently portrayed as the embodiment of innocence violated by conflict, a figure designed to evoke pity and serve as a mirror for masculine heroism. Katina overturns this tradition. Katina is neither a helpless victim nor a symbol of lost purity. She is a force of nature, the vessel of a collective will to endure. She does not require rescue because she represents a people who refuse annihilation. In her small frame and defiant gesture Dahl distils the essence of a civilisation that has survived invasion, enslavement and catastrophe over millennia.

This reading acquires deeper resonance when placed within the wider continuum of Greek history. Time and again Greece has stood against overwhelming odds: during the Persian invasions of antiquity, throughout the long centuries of Ottoman domination, in the ashes of the Asia Minor Catastrophe and in the midst of famine and terror during the Axis occupation. In each case the material power of the aggressor was beyond question. Yet the Hellenic response was consistently characterised by endurance, stubbornness and an unwavering refusal to submit. Katina’s clenched fist is the continuation of the same impulse that inspired the defenders of Missolonghi, the insurgents of Souli and the partisans of EAM ELAS. Dahl, perhaps unconsciously, captures this historical continuum in a single, unforgettable image.

What renders Katina so singular is its conscious avoidance of the orientalist tropes that disfigure much Western writing about Greece and the Balkans. There is no trace of patronising exoticism, no suggestion of a backward land requiring British guidance. Greece is not a backdrop for imperial heroism but the true protagonist of the narrative. The British pilots are secondary figures, witnesses to a drama whose depth they can only partially comprehend. They cannot save Greece, and they cannot save themselves. Their presence, once emblematic of imperial assurance, is rendered irrelevant by the magnitude of events and by the elemental resilience of the people they came to defend.

This inversion allows Dahl to enact a subtle but profound act of narrative justice. The child, and through her, Greece, is never infantilised. She is not depicted as a helpless object awaiting deliverance. Rather, she embodies agency and resistance, while imperial power is shown to be hollow, stripped of the illusions of control and destiny that once underpinned it. The image of Katina shaking her fist at the bombers is more potent than any weapon the RAF can deploy. It represents the one force the enemy cannot obliterate: the spirit of defiance.

The story’s conclusion is deliberately unresolved. As German forces close in, the RAF squadron is ordered to evacuate. They are unable to take Katina with them. She chooses to remain behind in her homeland, and the men, devastated and powerless, depart without her. Dahl offers no sentimental epilogue, no assurances of safety or contentment. Yet the absence of closure magnifies the story’s power. The point is not the fate of Katina but what she represents. Her raised fist lingers in the reader’s imagination long after the final page, a symbol of a spirit that cannot be extinguished by bombs or armies.

In the decades that followed, Katina slipped from public consciousness, overshadowed by Dahl’s later and more famous works for children. Yet it remains one of the most profound literary tributes to the Greek wartime experience ever penned in English. It is a testament to the enduring power of narrative to articulate truths that official histories often overlook. Further, it is also a reminder that the most potent symbols of defiance sometimes emerge not from generals or statesmen but from the smallest and most vulnerable among us.

Katina’s defiance is therefore more than a story from a vanished war. It is a summons. It calls us to vigilance, to endurance, to the defence of what is precious in ourselves and in the world. It insists that even amid ruin and despair, humanity can still rise and speak its own name. And it leaves us with the final, indelible truth: Greece, battered and bloodied, remains unconquered, and so too does the human will to be free.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

first published in NKEE on Saturday 11 October 2025

TRADITION AND SOUL: ARETI KETIME IN MELBOURNE

 

On 5 October, as part of the Third Zeibekiko Festival of Australia, an initiative of Sofia Ventouri, Melbourne witnessed one of its most memorable cultural events of recent years. Ivanhoe Grammar School hosted a remarkable concert by renowned vocalist Areti Ketime, whose rare ability to bridge the past with the present has established her as one of the most significant interpreters of Greek music today. Accompanied by accomplished violinist Dimitris Stefopoulos, she presented a rich and thoughtful program that combined historical memory with contemporary artistic expression, holding the audience spellbound from the first note to the last.

Ketime’s repertoire drew deeply from the Smyrnaic and rebetiko traditions, musical forms that remain foundational to modern Greek identity. With careful curation and interpretive sensitivity, she reintroduced the audience to the emotional depth and cultural power of these genres. Her performance of “Synnefiasmeni Kyriaki” was particularly powerful, blending restraint with intensity and creating a shared sense of collective emotion that swept through the auditorium. The response from the diverse audience, spanning generations and backgrounds, was enthusiastic and heartfelt, demonstrating the enduring resonance of this music.

Ketime’s stage presence was magnetic without being ostentatious. Warmth, authenticity and humility shaped her connection with the audience, while her vocal technique revealed an extraordinary range and precision. Moving seamlessly from soft, whispered phrases to moments of dramatic intensity, she infused each song with narrative force. Her performances transformed each piece into a story, carrying with it fragments of memory and shared cultural heritage.

The concert was also a celebration of collaboration and community. Ketime chose to share the stage with several leading figures from Melbourne’s vibrant Greek music scene, including Iakovos Papadopoulos, Sifis Tsompanopoulos, Wayne Simmons, Paddy Montgomery and Maria Antara-Dalamanga. Their joint performances illustrated that the Greek musical tradition in Melbourne is not a distant echo of the homeland but a living, evolving art form. That two of the musicians who sang in Greek were not of Greek background further highlighted how this tradition has transcended its ethnic roots to become a universal language.

The educational aspect of the evening was equally significant. Students from the Nestoras Greek School Band joined Ketime on stage, earning warm applause and demonstrating how tradition can inspire and be renewed through younger generations. Meanwhile, the dance groups of the Greek Orthodox Community of Melbourne, “Aristotelis” and “Pegasus,” offered dynamic interpretations of traditional dances throughout the evening, blending movement and music into a unified expression of cultural identity.

More than a concert, the event became a multifaceted celebration of heritage and creativity. Ketime’s artistry reminded the audience that tradition is so much more than a relic to be preserved in isolation. It is a living force that can adapt, evolve and speak to the present. Through music, dance and collaboration, the evening affirmed the vitality of Greek culture in Australia and its capacity to inspire pride, continuity and shared belonging. Events of such artistic depth and cultural resonance are rare in Australia, and this one left a lasting impression, a testament to both the enduring power of Greek music to unite, move and empower but also to the vibrancy of our own community.

RECOGNISING STATEHOOD: GREECE AND PALESTINE

 

The birth of a state is rarely the work of armed struggle alone. Insurgents may raise banners, proclaim constitutions, and shed blood, but without recognition sovereignty remains suspended between aspiration and reality. Recognition is both juridical and performative: it does not simply acknowledge existence but contributes to its creation. To recognise is to render visible, to inscribe a community into the language of international law, and to situate it within the order of nations.

The Greek Revolution of 1821 illustrates this aptly. For the rebels, independence was proclaimed with conviction, conceived as destiny after centuries of subjugation. However, proclamations remained fragile without acknowledgment from others. Recognition by foreign powers, whether symbolic solidarity or diplomatic and military intervention, proved decisive in transforming insurgency into sovereignty. Two centuries later, Australia’s recognition of a Palestinian state echoes that earlier story, reminding us that sovereignty is never merely declared; it is conferred and sustained by those who acknowledge it, typically powers stronger than the community whose aspirations they affirm.

The position of the Greek insurgents in the 1820s was tenuous when measured against the criteria of early modern jurists such as Hugo Grotius and Emer de Vattel, who laid foundational principles for international law. Grotius introduced the idea that sovereign states have rights and duties grounded in natural law, including just war and respect for sovereignty. Vattel emphasized that a state must have defined territory, effective government, and the capacity for diplomatic relations to qualify as sovereign, and that states are juridical equals deserving noninterference. Against these standards, the Greeks lacked stable territory and cohesive governance. Nevertheless, recognition arrived, demonstrating the performative power of sovereignty.

In 1822, Haiti, newly sovereign but fragile, extended solidarity, its president Jean Pierre Boyer addressing revolutionaries groping toward coherence rather than a central government. Recognition was thus afforded to a movement, not a state, acknowledging a political subject that did not yet meet the standard conditions of sovereignty. It was an anticipatory act, projecting into existence a future state.

The implications for Palestine are immediate. Its sovereignty remains fractured by occupation, borders contested, and institutions split between Gaza and the West Bank. By the Montevideo Convention’s 1933 formula—people, territory, government, and capacity for relations—it would appear deficient. Yet recognitions such as Australia’s evoke precisely that Haitian gesture to the Greeks. Palestinians are treated as participants in the international order, acknowledged as subjects of international law even before material consolidation. Recognition in this anticipatory mode creates rather than merely confirms sovereignty.

Haiti’s act, however moving, was too distant to shape realities in Greece. More tangible was the intervention of British finance. In 1824 and 1825, agreements in London furnished loans to the revolutionaries, tacitly underwritten by government approval. Douglas Dakin called these loans “premature recognition,” presuming an authority able to borrow on behalf of a sovereign community. Much of the capital was dissipated by incapacity, corruption, and factionalism. Still, the act of borrowing itself was transformative: contracting debt signalled Greece existed as a subject of law.

Karl Marx’s observation that the world market mediates political existence appears vividly here. Greece was admitted into finance before diplomacy. However, admission came at a price. Heavy borrowing guaranteed that sovereignty would be tied to external creditors and their interests. For Palestine, the warning is stark. States recognised through finance and aid often find themselves bound to donor preferences. Palestine’s reliance on subsidies and external goodwill foreshadows the same paradox the Greeks experienced, setting them up for bankruptcy.

Diplomatic recognition by the great powers followed later and under duress. London, Paris, and St Petersburg hesitated. The Vienna settlement of 1815 had sought to preserve Ottoman integrity as part of the balance of power. To grant Greek independence risked provoking Poles, Italians, and Hungarians in their nationalist aspirations. Nonetheless, sentiment in Europe, compounded by strategic interest, eroded resistance. Russia advanced itself as defender of Orthodoxy; Britain recalculated to protect Mediterranean routes; France refused to be excluded. Recognition thus became strategic, not simply philhellenic.

The Treaty of London in 1827 marked the turning point. By placing the Greeks on equal footing with the Sultan as parties to mediation, the powers elevated them into international diplomacy. The Sultan’s refusal escalated matters to Navarino, where the Ottoman Egyptian fleet was destroyed. By 1830, through the second Treaty of London, Greece was declared sovereign. Recognition here created sovereignty: the state existed because the great powers willed it, not because material or legal criteria had been fulfilled.

This recognition carried costs. The Bavarian prince Otto was imposed as monarch, a ruler chosen abroad rather than within Greece. Loans that had protected the insurgents became enduring burdens, tying the new polity to European financiers. Independence was real but conditioned, sovereignty shadowed by supervision. Hegel’s dialectic of recognition, that autonomy requires acknowledgment by another, was realised here, but so too was Koskenniemi’s claim that international law is a vocabulary of power. Sovereignty was defined by others, framed within interests not the Greeks’ own.

Recognition was not the only Western import. Nationalism itself was a European construct, born of Enlightenment rationality and Romantic imagination, projected onto peoples who had long lived under imperial and communal frameworks. For Greece, adopting nationalism promised liberation but also tethered the new state to the irredentist dream of the Great Idea. Nationalism demanded borders be expanded to encompass all Greeks, leading to recurrent wars against the Ottomans and Bulgarians and culminating in the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922. Freedom thus came entwined with destruction and sacrifice. Equally, the borders of what is to be a Palestinian state remain unclear. Just as the world powers once failed to endow Greece with frontiers corresponding to where its people actually lived, condemning it to cycles of conflict until as late as 1975, so too Palestine faces the peril that imposed or ambiguous boundaries may sow discord long after recognition. Their nakba came at the very beginning, dispossession the founding fact of their history. The question remains how far the Western model of recognition, with its rigid nation state template, can be reconciled with Arab traditions of governance that emphasised looser confederations, tribal and religious leadership, and negotiated communal autonomy. To impose a Western grammar of nationalism risks repeating Greece’s pattern: sovereignty modelled on Europe’s terms, demanding borders alien to Arab realities, and possibly precipitating new cycles of conflict.

Palestinian aspirations today confront this paradox. Recognition abounds: in 2012 the UN General Assembly accorded them non member observer state status, and over 140 states recognise Palestinian sovereignty. Still, effective independence remains elusive. Territory is fragmented, governance divided, and decisive powers withhold endorsement or condition its legitimacy. Palestine occupies what Giorgio Agamben calls a state of exception: acknowledged in law but denied fulfilment in fact.

Australia’s act of 2025 added to their legitimacy. It cannot redraw borders or impose peace, but its affirmation matters. Like Haiti’s gesture to Greece, it sustains inclusion in a moral and legal discourse where exclusion would be devastating. Recognition affirms identity, strengthens claims, and binds aspirations into legitimacy. Yet Greece’s example shows recognition is rarely unconditional. Symbolism may open the door, but recognition through finance, military patronage, or diplomatic partnership imposes obligations that endure. Palestine must reckon with the likelihood independence may arrive hedged with conditions and tethered to external interests.

The Greek example warns that recognition can deliver a state not fully its own. Debt, monarchy chosen abroad, and strategic alignment dictated by patrons defined its early reality. Independence became entangled with manipulation by powers more concerned with balance than self determination. Palestine risks a comparable fate. If sovereignty is finalised by international fiat, borders drawn externally and institutions dependent on donors, the paradox of conditional independence will recur. The peril is that sovereignty may secure only the symbols of statehood while compromising its substance, leaving Palestine subject to oversight, aid, and conditions that dilute genuine autonomy.

For jurists, Carl Schmitt’s dictum that sovereignty lies in deciding on the exception is unsettled here. Palestine demonstrates such a decision, unless validated externally, remains void. Agamben’s description of suspension captures their condition: recognised in law, unrealised in practice. Greece too inhabited this liminality, neither Ottoman province nor sovereign until Europe declared it. Incremental recognitions accumulated, but sovereignty crystallised only when others pronounced it.

The lesson is that recognition can constitute rather than follow fact. However, what is granted is never free. Greece entered existence as a creature of European tutelage. Palestine may likewise attain sovereignty only as a state conditioned by others. Recognition is not benign; it binds as much as it liberates.

To recognise is to legislate the future. International law does not mirror reality; it shapes it. Affirming sovereignty not yet achieved legislates a world to come. The crucial question is whose terms determine that order. Greece shows recognition bestowed by patrons creates a state interlaced with dependency. For Palestine, jubilation must be tempered with caution. Independence may mask subordination if imposed from abroad. A flag may rise and an anthem be sung, but if borders are determined elsewhere and autonomy constrained, the result may only approximate sovereignty.

Recognition embodies both promise and peril. It grants visibility and legitimacy, yet also enables external power to intrude, shaping a state not wholly by its own will but by others’ designs. For Palestine, as for Greece, the question is not just whether sovereignty will come, but how deeply it may be compromised when it does.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE On Saturday, 4 October 2025