Kalamas and Acheron - Christoforos Milionis

After the Occupation come other disasters. People were scattered, and the country was ruined. Exactly thirty-nine years have gone by...

Thus opens the first of the eleven stores that make up this book - stories which reflect from a variety of perspectives the impact, on the rural population in a mountainous region in north-western Greece, of the Axis Occupation during the Second World War, and the Greek Civil War that followed. The stories are to some extent autobiographical and all but two of them involve a first-person narrator. By turns tender, wistful, ironical, humorous and bitter, they depict not only the sufferings at the time of the conflicts but also the legacy in the lives of the survivors, the wounds to the psyche that never heal - and the occasional joys of life in the midst of horror.