THE BATTLE OF VEVI AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF MEMORY

 

In the early days of April 1941, as German forces advanced through the Florina valley and the narrowing corridors of northern Greece assumed a significance far exceeding their geography, Australian troops took up positions at a constricted defile near the village of Vevi, entering into an engagement that would, in the decades that followed, acquire a commemorative afterlife disproportionate to both its duration and its strategic consequence. The Battle of Vevi has come to occupy, within certain Greek communities in Australia, a symbolic place as evidence of a shared moral struggle; one in which Australians are said to have fought for the freedom of Greece, their presence transfigured into an act of solidarity grounded in principle rather than strategy.

Repeated with conviction by community organisations in commemorative observances, this claim collapses under historical scrutiny, obscuring the operational logic that produced the battle while substituting a narrative that is emotionally satisfying yet structurally incomplete.

The Australian units deployed at Vevi formed part of a composite force under British command, inserted into Greece as a consequence of strategic decisions taken within the command structures of the British Empire, where the priorities of delay, redeployment and preservation of force governed military planning across theatres, and where the Greek landscape was incorporated into a wider calculus that treated its defence as an instrument serving a broader operational objective whose articulation lay elsewhere, with strategic initiative remaining entirely external to the Greek state and operational decisions concerning defence, delay and abandonment determined within British command structures, thereby reducing Greece from a sovereign actor to a passive theatre within a wider imperial war.

Operational directives were explicit in their intent, requiring that the position be held in order to delay the German advance, to facilitate the withdrawal of Greek formations, and to enable the establishment of a secondary defensive line along the Aliakmon River, a formulation that leaves little room for retrospective moralisation, given that the terrain was to be used instrumentally, time was to be purchased at measurable cost, and the force was to be preserved for subsequent operations instead of being expended in a terminal defence of the country in which it found itself. The engagement at Vevi was therefore structured from its inception as a managed withdrawal conducted under fire, rather than as a defence intended to secure the territorial integrity of Greece.

The engagement unfolded under conditions that quickly exposed the fragility of the Allied position, as gaps opened between units, communications failed, and coordinated withdrawal became increasingly difficult to manage, with the result that elements of the Australian force were captured during retreat and equipment abandoned, outcomes that were not aberrations but the predictable consequences of a delaying action conducted within a coalition force whose cohesion had broken down under pressure.

The action at Vevi therefore achieved its intended effect in the narrowest and most technical sense, in that time was gained, withdrawal was effected, and the force was partially preserved, yet when evaluated against any claim that it constituted a defence of Greece, the conclusion that follows is structurally untenable, for the German advance proceeded, the country was occupied, and the engagement did not interrupt that trajectory, serving instead to facilitate an imperial disengagement that left the terrain, and those who inhabited it, exposed to what followed.

The persistence of an alternative narrative within Greek communities in Australia, in which Australians are remembered as having fought for Greek freedom, cannot be explained by reference to the historical event alone, but must instead be understood through an examination of the ways in which memory operates within communities and acquires authority through repetition, regulation and use.

The work of Michel Foucault provides an essential point of departure, for within his account of discourse, what can be said about the past is governed by systems of power that determine not only the content of statements but their legitimacy, and commemoration functions as a disciplinary practice that produces a regime of truth in which certain formulations are normalised and others rendered difficult to articulate, such that deviation from the authorised narrative is experienced as a breach of discursive order carrying the risk of social sanction through its perceived disloyalty to both communal memory and national belonging.

Within this regime, the assertion that Australians fought for Greece circulates with ease, finding expression in commemorative speeches, educational narratives and ritual observances. In such settings, Greek organisations frequently extend the claim further, asserting that the ANZACs fought for “democracy and freedom,” thereby reproducing a set of narrative tropes long embedded within Australian national mythology and sustained within commemorative discourse, even where those tropes no longer correspond to the historical structure of the engagement, their persistence reflecting an attachment to inherited forms of expression that promise recognition within the dominant narrative and offer, however provisionally, the prospect of acceptance. The alternative formulation, that Australian forces executed a delaying action within an imperial withdrawal strategy, despite its evidentiary basis, lacks comparable traction because it disrupts the coherence of the established narrative and therefore remains marginal within the discursive field, while also failing to sustain the ceremonial gravitas associated with engagements such as the Battle of Crete or the Battle of Kalamata.

This asymmetry is neither incidental nor merely rhetorical, for, as Pierre Bourdieu suggests, memory in this context operates as symbolic capital, enabling Greek communities in Australia to align themselves with the moral economy of the host nation by adopting and reproducing its dominant narratives of sacrifice, thereby converting historical interpretation into a resource that secures recognition, legitimacy and social standing within institutional and civic life.

The stakes of this alignment are clarified through post-colonial analysis, for Edward Said demonstrates that imperial power renders territories legible as sites of intervention within a strategic geography defined elsewhere, and Greece in 1941 was situated within precisely such a cartography, while Dipesh Chakrabarty exposes the extent to which narratives centred on allied defence obscure the subordination of local agency to imperial design, a condition that commemorative retelling masks by recasting Greece as the beneficiary of purposeful action rather than as the terrain upon which external strategies were executed.

Crucially, this narrative is not imposed upon Greek communities from the dominant class, but is actively reproduced from within, as Greek organisations themselves adopt and reiterate the dominant interpretative framework in the course of seeking recognition within it. The analysis advanced by George Vassilacopoulos and Toula Nicolacopoulou in From Foreigner to Citizen: Greek Migrants and Social Change in White Australia 1897–2000 becomes indispensable here, for their work identifies the migrant subject within Australia as one who remains structurally positioned as the perpetual foreigner and is required continuously to demonstrate alignment with the values of the dominant society in order to secure conditional acceptance, such that belonging is not achieved but performed under conditions of constraint.

Within this framework, the commemorative framing of the Battle of Vevi must be understood as a compelled act of alignment, through which Greek historical experience is recast in terms already authorised within Australian national mythology, thereby enabling entry into a narrative structure from which the migrant subject would otherwise remain excluded. The persistence of this framing does not arise from historical misapprehension but from the necessity of securing recognition within a field in which legitimacy is contingent, even as that necessity requires the suppression of the battle’s structural reality, with imperial command and the logic of withdrawal receding in favour of a representation that affirms belonging.

The narrative consolidates this alignment by legitimising Greek presence within Australia, elevating Australia within Greek historical consciousness, and obscuring the imperial command structure that determined the battle’s course, acquiring stability through its repetition in commemorative events, educational programmes and public speech, often framed within the familiar language of ANZAC remembrance, and producing thereby a narrative environment in which alternative interpretations recede from view.

This coherence is secured at the expense of historical precision, since the selective emphasis required to sustain belonging within a particular social order necessarily attenuates the structural reality of the event, a process that does not invite condemnation of those who participate in it, given that individuals act within discursive frameworks that precede them, yet nonetheless demands recognition of what is thereby lost, namely the clarity that the battle formed part of a managed imperial withdrawal.

A battle conceived and executed in order to enable retreat has thus been purposely re-constructed as a defence of freedom, and the persistence of this transformation reveals less about the engagement itself than about the conditions under which historical truth is subordinated to the imperatives of acceptance.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 2 May 2026.

LOST IN TRANSLITERATION: WHO GETS TO BE GREEK ON PAPER?

 

My interlocutor relates the anecdote with an ease that borders upon resignation, as though the outcome were always already inscribed within the prejudices of the system he sought to enter. A communications contract at a large corporate conglomerate, a role predicated upon nuance, articulation, and the capacity to mediate between complexity and comprehension. The application is submitted under his legal Greek name. It is declined without ceremony. The identical curriculum vitae, unaltered in substance, untouched in merit, is resubmitted under a truncated, Australianised version of his name. Within thirty minutes, the telephone stirs into life. Interest is immediate, enthusiasm unfeigned, opportunity suddenly abundant.

Such an episode might readily be subsumed within the now familiar literature on implicit bias, wherein names operate as proxies for cultural legibility, rendering the bearer either proximate to or distant from the imagined norms of the dominant order. Within this framework, the Anglicised name functions as a form of symbolic translation, smoothing the friction of difference, permitting entry into what Pierre Bourdieu would describe as the domain of legitimate language, where recognition is contingent upon conformity to established codes. The transformation not merely being phonetic is social, conferring upon its bearer a degree of symbolic capital otherwise withheld.

Yet to confine the analysis to this outward dynamic is to overlook an inobtrusive, more disquieting process unfolding within the Greek-Australian community itself. For there exists, within the pages of Greek language publications in Australia, a reverse operation of naming, whereby individuals of Greek origin, particularly those of the second and third generations, are habitually presented through their Anglicised appellations. The effect is neither incidental nor merely stylistic, constituting, rather, a subtle act of classification, one that inscribes distinctions of belonging within a linguistic space ostensibly dedicated to the preservation of Hellenic continuity.

The evidence is not difficult to locate. Steve Dimopoulos appears as Steve, (albeit also as the odd Στηβ on occasion). Nick Staikos is rendered as Nick, not Νίκος. His Honour Justice Christopher Kourakis retains his English form, rather than Χριστόφορος Κουράκης, even within a Greek textual environment that would permit, indeed invite, such a rendering. Here the argument of necessity or constraint does not apply. Instead, these renderings appear to be conscious editorial choices, repeated with sufficient consistency to suggest an underlying logic, a tacit grammar of inclusion and distance.

A parallel tendency may be observed within Greece itself, where figures of the diaspora are frequently designated by their international names, as though their distance from the national body requires a linguistic marker of differentiation. Maria Callas and Maria Menounos circulate only in English form with a persistence that exceeds mere convention, their global renown intertwined with the retention of a form that signals their emplacement within a broader, non-Greek sphere. The gesture, subtle yet insistent, participates in a form of exoticisation, a rendering of the diasporic subject as at once Greek and other, familiar yet estranged.

Within the Australian context, the implications are more layered, for the practice unfolds within a community that proclaims, with ritual regularity, its commitment to the preservation and transmission of language, culture, and identity. The rhetoric of continuity is omnipresent, articulated in speeches, commemorations, wreath laying ceremonies and institutional discourse, wherein the Greek language is elevated to the status of inheritance, obligation and fetish object. One encounters, within this discourse, an almost liturgical insistence upon the necessity of retention, the safeguarding of a cultural patrimony perceived to be under constant threat of erosion.

And yet, within the very medium through which this patrimony is articulated, a different logic asserts itself. The rendering of Greek names in English, within Greek language publications, introduces a dissonance that cannot be easily dismissed. It compels the question of how Greekness is being conceptualised, mediated, and, crucially, authorised within the diasporic field.

Here, the insights of Bourdieu acquire particular resonance. The Greek language press may be understood as a field in which symbolic capital is distributed and legitimised, wherein the authority to define the terms of Greekness is exercised through ostensibly mundane practices such as naming. To render a name in Greek is to confer a form of recognition, to inscribe the individual within the legitimate linguistic order of the community. To retain the English form, within that same space, is to position the subject at a slight remove, acknowledged yet not fully consecrated within the symbolic economy of Hellenism.

This classificatory logic is not accidental nor is it externally imposed. Drawing upon Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality, one discerns within these practices a form of internal regulation, a mode of communal self-administration through which norms are reproduced without the need for overt coercion. The Greek-Australian community, through its own institutions, curates and disciplines its boundaries, producing a regime of truth about who is to be recognised as fully Greek, and under what conditions. The use of English names within Greek discourse thus emerges as a subtle technology of differentiation, a means by which degrees of belonging are quietly articulated.

The pattern acquires further clarity when one considers its inconsistencies. Figures who occupy prominent roles within the organised Greek-Australian community, regardless of which generation they belong to are far more likely to be designated by their Greek names. In these instances, the act of naming functions as a form of symbolic consecration, affirming their position within the institutional life of the community.

By contrast, those Greek Australians who achieve prominence within the mainstream, yet remain less embedded within communal structures, are frequently presented through their Anglicised names. The distinction, reveals an underlying taxonomy of Greekness, one that is not merely inherited but is mediated through participation, proximity, and recognition. Greekness, in this schema, rather than being a static attribute, is actualy a status conferred within a particular field of relations.

The work of Vassilacopoulos and Nicolacopoulou offers a useful extension of this analysis. If the Greek migrant in Australia is positioned within the national imaginary as a perpetual foreigner, compelled to navigate a space in which full recognition remains elusive, then within the Greek diasporic field a parallel stratification emerges. Degrees of Greekness are differentially acknowledged, authorised, and inscribed, producing a secondary hierarchy in which the criteria of belonging are determined internally, even as the community negotiates its place within the broader society. Here, the subversives are those of the latter generations who would assert their own forms of Greekness challenging the rule and role of a ruling class that has established itself through their quiescence in the dominant groups seizure of the land from its original inhabitants.

One might inquire whether such practices serve to alienate subsequent generations, reinforcing a sense of distance from a linguistic and cultural heritage already experienced as attenuated. The answer, though less dramatic than one might expect, is no less revealing. The audience most directly implicated in these representational practices often lacks the linguistic capital necessary to engage with them. Greek language publications in Australia remain largely inaccessible to those whose competence in the language is limited. The discourse, therefore, circulates within a relatively closed circuit, its classificatory effects largely unchallenged by those it implicitly positions at the margins.

This asymmetry of linguistic capital entrenches the authority of the first generation, whose fluency grants them control over the mechanisms of representation. The capacity to name, to classify, to inscribe identity within the written word, becomes a form of power, exercised with little contestation. In this sense, the practice of rendering names in English within Greek discourse is not simply a reflection of external realities, but an expression of internal hierarchies, sustained by differential access to language itself.

At the same time, the phenomenon resists reduction to a singular logic of exclusion. The persistence of English names within Greek publications may also be read through the lens of Homi Bhabha’s notion of hybridity, wherein identity is constituted within an in between space, neither wholly assimilated nor entirely preserved. The Anglicised name, retained within a Greek textual environment, signals this condition of partial translation, a form that is at once familiar and estranged, bearing the marks of both worlds without collapsing into either.

Such hybridity, far from representing a failure of continuity, reflects the lived reality of a community that has, over generations, adapted to its context, negotiating the demands of integration while sustaining elements of its cultural inheritance. The English name, in this reading, becomes less a marker of loss than a sign of transformation, an acknowledgment, however implicit, that Greekness in Australia has evolved beyond the parameters established by the first generation.

The anecdote with which this reflection commenced returns, at this juncture, with renewed significance. The substitution of a Greek name for an English one in order to secure employment speaks to the external pressures exerted upon minority identities, the necessity of translation in order to access opportunity. The retention of English names within Greek discourse, by contrast, reveals an internal accommodation, a recognition that the boundaries of identity have shifted, that the community itself participates in the reconfiguration of what it means to be Greek.

Between these movements, outward and inward, lies the space in which Greek-Australian identity continues to be fashioned. Names, in this context, are neither incidental nor merely descriptive. They are instruments through which belonging is negotiated, affirmed, and, at times, withheld. They bear witness to a community engaged in an ongoing process of self-definition, one that unfolds in the interstices between languages, generations, and competing imaginaries of what Greekness has been and what it is becoming.

The English name, printed within the columns of a Greek newspaper, stands as a quiet testament to this transformation. It signals, with a subtlety that borders upon the unconscious, the emergence of a hybrid identity that is neither fully assimilated nor entirely preserved, an identity that the community, through its everyday practices, has already begun to accept, even as it continues to speak, with undiminished fervour, of continuity and preservation.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 25 April 2026

THE LAST DEFENCE OF HONOUR: THE SOULIOTES AT MISSOLONGHI, TWO CENTURIES ON

 

Two hundred years after the Exodus of Missolonghi, the memory of that night persists as more than an episode of military catastrophe, for it presents itself as a moment in which a besieged community, reduced by starvation, fractured by internal tension and abandoned by any realistic expectation of relief, nonetheless asserted a final and deliberate authorship over its own destruction, thereby transforming what might otherwise have been remembered as collapse into an act subsequently interpreted as moral and political self-determination. Within that charged and unstable theatre, the Souliotes emerge as a distinct moral and political force whose presence shaped both the conduct of the siege and its subsequent mythologisation, yet the Souliotes who appear in the contemporary sources are neither uniform nor consistently disciplined, but rather a contingent, frequently volatile aggregation of armed groups whose indispensability to the defence coexisted with a persistent capacity to disrupt the fragile cohesion of the besieged town.

The Souliotes were never a conventional military corps, and any attempt to impose upon them the logic of a centralised and hierarchical army obscures the conditions under which they operated, for they emerged from a highland confederation organised around clans and governed through a shifting synthesis of familial authority, ecclesiastical influence and collective deliberation, a structure which produced fighters capable of rapid mobilisation, effective skirmishing and sustained resistance in difficult terrain, while at the same time ensuring that unity remained contingent upon negotiation, reputation and, most immediately, the distribution of pay and provisions. In practical terms, a Souliote contingent at Missolonghi did not constitute a stable unit but rather a coalition of armed households grouped around leading families such as the Botsaris and Tzavelas clans, each retaining its own internal loyalties and expectations, and each requiring continual management if it were to act in concert with the broader defensive effort.

At Missolonghi, their presence is attested from the earliest phases of conflict, and in the defence of 1822 their numbers were strikingly small, for Thomas Gordon records that the total defending force amounted to approximately three hundred and eighty men, within which only thirty five were Souliotes under the command of Markos Botsaris, a figure which, considered purely in quantitative terms, could not materially alter the balance of forces between besieged and besieger. Yet their significance did not reside in number, since within a defensive system composed of shallow earthworks, inadequate fortifications and limited artillery, the presence of even a small body of experienced irregular fighters functioned as a concentrated source of morale and tactical confidence, reinforcing the willingness of the garrison to resist beyond the point at which surrender might otherwise have appeared inevitable.

By the time of the final siege of 1825 to 1826, their position had altered decisively, for within the prolonged conditions of encirclement, deprivation and political uncertainty they came to be represented, both in contemporary accounts and in later narrative, as forming the core of resistance, not in the sense of numerical dominance, which cannot be securely established from the available sources, but in the sense that their leaders, most prominently Notis Botsaris and Kitsos Tzavelas, repeatedly appear at those points in the record where decisions concerning capitulation, continued resistance and eventual breakout were most acutely contested. When proposals of surrender were advanced, it is recorded that Souliote leaders rejected them with vehemence, at times threatening violence against those who entertained negotiation, thereby converting what might have been a strategic calculation into a moral prohibition, within which surrender was rendered illegitimate regardless of circumstance. This response reflected a deeper political logic, for within a clan based martial society whose authority derived from honour, autonomy and reputation, the act of surrender risked not only military defeat but the dissolution of the very structures that sustained collective identity.

The siege itself imposed conditions that strained every existing structure, as starvation, disease and the progressive exhaustion of supplies transformed Missolonghi into a compressed environment in which distinctions between military, political and civilian life were increasingly difficult to maintain, and within this environment the Souliotes’ dual character became unmistakable. They remained indispensable as fighters, particularly in sorties and in the amphibious engagements of the lagoon, yet contemporary evidence also attests to their volatility, their sensitivity to arrears in pay and their capacity to exert coercive pressure upon the civilian population required to sustain them.

The correspondence associated with Lord Byron, together with the accounts preserved by William Parry and Thomas Moore, indicates that Souliote troops in Byron’s pay, some of whom functioned as his immediate guard, repeatedly refused to act in the absence of payment, and that delays in remuneration produced episodes approaching mutiny, including a documented instance in February 1824 in which Souliote fighters threatened to abandon their positions unless arrears were settled, while Moore records Byron’s observation that the inhabitants of Missolonghi resented the Souliotes even as they were compelled to sustain them financially. In this light, the Souliotes cannot be understood solely as heroic defenders, for within the daily life of the besieged community they also constituted an armed presence whose demands, rivalries and periodic insubordination complicated the maintenance of order, so that the same qualities which rendered them effective in combat also rendered them difficult to govern within a confined and resource depleted urban environment.

The Battle of Klisova provides a concentrated illustration of their operational significance, for in March 1826 a small defensive force occupying the islet, initially numbering approximately one hundred men, resisted repeated assaults by Ottoman and Egyptian forces, and was subsequently reinforced, bringing the total number of defenders to roughly three hundred and fifty, within which Souliote fighters played a prominent role in both reinforcement and sustained resistance, and the engagement, later represented as an instance of heroic disparity between a small defending force and a vastly larger attacking army, reflects a pattern in which Souliote participation became associated with high risk engagements requiring both familiarity with difficult terrain and a willingness to engage under conditions of numerical disadvantage.

The culmination of the siege, in the decision for the exodus of 10 April 1826, reveals their role in its most structurally explicit form, for the surviving operational plan assigns to Souliote leaders specific and critical functions within the execution of the breakout, including the use of Notis Botsaris’ position as a navigational reference point for advancing columns and the designation of Kitsos Tzavelas as commander of the rearguard, responsible for maintaining cohesion among withdrawing forces and for collecting those unable to move at the initial signal. This allocation of responsibility reflects a recognition, shared among the defenders, that in the moment at which coordinated retreat risked dissolving into uncontrolled flight, authority would need to be exercised by those capable of enforcing movement under conditions of extreme pressure, and that Souliote leaders, by virtue of their standing within their own contingents, possessed that capacity to a degree not easily replicated within the more diffuse structures of the broader force.

The exodus itself, however, demonstrates the limits of even the most carefully constructed plan, for contemporary accounts describe the breakdown of coordination as enemy forces penetrated the town, civilians misinterpreted signals and reversed direction, and the intended columns dissolved into a series of fragmented and localised engagements, within which the distinction between organised withdrawal and general collapse became increasingly difficult to sustain, and in such circumstances the assignment of the rearguard to Tzavelas places Souliote forces at the point of greatest exposure, where the attempt to maintain order intersected directly with the advancing enemy and the disintegration of the defensive structure.

A purely military account of these events remains insufficient, since the significance of the Souliotes extends beyond their tactical role and into the domain of representation, where their actions were reframed within broader narratives that endowed them with a symbolic function. The concept of symbolic capital, as articulated by Pierre Bourdieu, provides one means of understanding this process, for the Souliotes possessed, in addition to their military capacity, a recognised status within both Greek and European imaginaries as exemplars of martial virtue, a status which amplified their influence within the besieged community and rendered their refusal of capitulation not merely a tactical position but a form of moral pressure exerted upon the collective.

At the same time, Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined communities assists in explaining how the events of Missolonghi were transmitted beyond their immediate context, for through newspapers, correspondence and artistic representation the Souliotes were transformed from historically situated actors into symbolic figures, their actions abstracted into a narrative of resistance and sacrifice that could circulate within a broader European discourse. This transformation is particularly evident in literature and visual culture, where the poetry of Victor Hugo and the wider philhellenic corpus reframed Missolonghi as a site of moral drama, while the paintings of Eugène Delacroix and Theodoros Vryzakis rendered the exodus within a visual language that combined allegory with theological suggestion, elevating the historical event into a scene of national martyrdom.

Within this representational field, the Souliote becomes less an individual actor than a typological figure, defined by resistance, endurance and refusal, while the internal tensions, disputes over pay and episodes of indiscipline recorded in contemporary sources recede from view, displaced by an image of unity that serves the narrative requirements of both philhellenic advocacy and later national commemoration.

A feminist reading introduces a further layer of complexity, for the figure of the Souliotissa, as represented in philhellenic imagery such as the works of Ary Scheffer, appears as a recurring image of sacrificial femininity, frequently positioned at the moment of self destruction and thereby incorporated into a narrative in which female agency is expressed through the acceptance of death rather than through participation in survival, and such representations may be understood as part of a broader visual and literary tradition in which the suffering female body becomes a vehicle for the articulation of national trauma, while the historical experiences of women within the siege, including labour, endurance and, in some cases, armed resistance, are subsumed within an aesthetic framework that privileges symbolic meaning over material reality.

Two centuries on, the Souliotes at Missolonghi stand at the intersection of history and memory, as figures who operated within a specific and unstable set of material conditions, yet who have been reconstituted within an enduring narrative that privileges clarity over ambiguity and unity over fracture, and whose continued resonance depends upon the capacity of that narrative to maintain its authority even as the historical record complicates it.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 18 April 2026

APPROACHING USE BY DATE

 

The protagonist is a senior marketing manager for clothing for a large commercial entity and this, apparently, for Woolworths makes her an expert on Greek Orthodox culture. The occasion is the company’s Easter promotional catalogue, a seasonal lift-out in which recipes and imagery are assembled to evoke a version of cultural celebration. The lift out checks all the required boxes of diversity, yet the culture it purports to honour is treated as vestige rather than presence, something relegated to the yiayia, who appears to be the only figure capable of plausibly observing the Lenten fast.

The rest of us hover somewhere between costume and consumption. We are wheeled out in calibrated doses, our icons flattened into patterns, our rituals translated into textures that can be folded, discounted, and cleared from racks by season’s end. Greek Orthodoxy is rendered as aesthetic rather than ontology, a palette of Pascal reds and golds suggestive of incense yet never permitting a discussion of its deeper meaning. Here, the fasting body is replaced by the curated body, sustained by visibility rather than abstinence.

Within this frame, Lent is reduced to a narrative device, a gesture towards gravity in a spread otherwise indistinguishable from any other. The yiayia is invoked as a guarantor of authenticity, her hands dusted with flour, her faith rendered immutable precisely because it is never taken seriously enough to threaten the dominant narrative. She is safely contained, her world bounded by the kitchen and her beliefs preserved through distance and exhibition rather than via engagement.

It is no incidental detail that the entire tableau in the promotional material is inhabited exclusively by women. Yiayia presides with serene, unselfconscious authority, a younger woman remains close at hand in practised assistance, while a child is ushered into the small disciplines of repetition. No male presence disturbs this pre-arrangement. Their absence of course, is not in any way neutral. Evidently, the ethnic Greek-Australian household of 2026 is imagined as a feminised space, sustained by women and confined to them, while men, (and with them long established stereotypes about the positioning and function of authority, intellect, and public agency), are displaced beyond the frame. The scene resolves into a decontextualised household, set apart from the social world in which it actually exists, and made to stand as representative of the culture as a whole. In that isolation, no structures of thought, leadership, or participation in the public sphere are permitted to appear, not because they are absent, but because they fall outside the terms of representation.

Accordingly, the ethnic woman, even as her ‘professional’ credentials are noted, is situated within a frame that permits no development. The domestic sphere is not simply her setting. It becomes her horizon. Authority remains bounded by the kitchen and its matriarchs, while identity is aligned with continuity, care, and inherited custom that is never subjected to change. The ethnic woman, of all generations is held at a single point in time, required to stand in for a past that must be preserved rather than reworked. Culture, in turn, is rendered static, its capacity for evolution set aside in favour of recognisable repetition.

Feminist and postcolonial scholarship has long observed this manoeuvre. As Chandra Talpade Mohanty has shown, the non-Western woman is repeatedly produced as a stable figure, bound to tradition and stripped of internal differentiation, while Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak identifies the manner in which such figures are spoken for within dominant discourses, appearing only in forms that confirm their subordination. The tableau in the promotional material conforms to this logic, with representation not merely depicting but actively constructing a narrative in which certain features are selected as legible, others excluded as irrelevant, producing a version of culture that can be recognised only in its most domesticated form.

Significantly, the effect is not produced by marketers alone. It is sustained by the participation of those being represented. Ethnic subjects often step into these roles willingly, often with a sense of pride, because the invitation is received as recognition rather than as framing. There is no need to question the good faith of the participants or the genuineness of their intentions. The form it takes, however, is decidedly not neutral, aligning instead with expectations of the dominant class already in place, in which ethnic culture appears in domesticated, familiar, and non-disruptive terms. The alignment of these participants is rarely conscious, reflecting instead something more deeply absorbed. Having been born and raised within an Anglophone order, ethnic communities internalise what will be accepted and what will not, and adjust accordingly. Expression is moderated, elements that might appear excessive or unintelligible are set aside, and culture is presented in a form that will be received the most palatably, without friction. Rather than presenting itself as constraint, it passes as appropriateness, as the natural way in which such a culture should comport itself in public.

In the process, the authority to interpret culture is displaced, so that meaning, rather than being generated within practice, becomes performance, assigned according to what can be recognised from outside it. Consequently, internal variation is flattened, with differences of region, class, theology, and practice collapsing into a single intelligible form. Crucially however, what is being reproduced are limits that have not been set by those who inhabit the culture itself. As George Vassilacopoulos and Toula Nicolacopoulou has argued, the migrant remains positioned as an eternal stranger and a subversive. Mainstream acceptance is extended within bounds and conditions, and it is often through these acts of accommodation that those bounds are preserved.

The promotional insert makes much of the yiayia’s cookbook, lovingly annotated and translated into English, as though the very act of translation were one of cultural rescue. To those of us inhabiting the culture, her barely literate scrawl and misspelled words are highly emotive and relatable, causing us to identify with her immediately. In the process, we run the risk of forgetting that Greek in this curated sphere, is permitted its afterlife only in glossaries and explanatory brackets, tolerated as opacity that must be clarified rather than inhabited. It is assumed to belong to those who arrived bearing it, carried across borders and relinquished upon settlement. The possibility that it persists, that it remains a living medium of thought among those born here, or indeed that it has a future is dismissed, or in the best case, left unconsidered.

There is a reason for this. Greek must remain confined to the first generation because its continuation unsettles the terms on which multiculturalism is extended. The presence of a living, transmitted language introduces into an Anglophone order a parallel system of meaning that does not require translation and a mode of thought that exceeds the linguistic monopoly through which that order understands itself. In this sense, Greek is not merely different. It is subversive, with evidence of its persistence suggesting that assimilation is neither complete nor inevitable, that another linguistic and cultural continuity can endure without yielding to the dominant one. Such continuity cannot be openly rejected, yet neither can it be encouraged. It is instead contained. Languages that do not circulate within the dominant economy are recoded as sentimental rather than functional, their value located in nostalgia. Within this framework, multiculturalism operates as toleration with an endpoint. Expression is permitted so long as it signals transition. Continuity beyond the migrant generation disrupts that expectation and is therefore recast as excess, as a failure to integrate. The language is accepted only on condition that it is in the process of disappearing.

Thus the Lenten fast, with all its discipline and defiance, becomes unintelligible within the frame that seeks to display it. It lingers on the margins of glossy pages, untranslated and therefore unthreatening, waiting patiently for a world that no longer expects to be changed by it. But by all means believe them when they tell you that the twists of the koulourakia, described helpfully as braided shapes, signify eternity. Of such explanations are myths sustained, and of such myths, cultures elegantly concluded.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 11 April 2026