The Bailiff of Kastropyrgos: Resistance Is Not Easy

He is actually a genuinely good fellow, this Michalis Russis, bailiff of Kastropyrgos. He is someone with whom one would happily share a glass or two in better times. Michalis is pragmatic, open-minded, and tolerant -- in short, exactly the sort of person who would never dream of settling any conflict with weapons. The problem is only this: Michalis does not live in better times, but during the Greek War of Independence. At that time, a band of quarrelling patriots set about driving the Turks from the country -- not exclusively out of patriotism, of course, but in order to get as much out of it as possible for themselves. Michalis finds this a little excessive and above all completely unnecessary. Why risk one's life when one has managed perfectly well with the Turks over the past centuries?

Unfortunately the arrangements soon come to an end. Through no fault of his own, Michalis is faced with the choice of losing his faith or his life. But Michalis would not be the pragmatist he is if he did not choose life without too many pangs of conscience. Only too unfortunately, the story does not end there. Again and again he must make decisions that gleefully render every common notion of ethics and morality absurd. Even if his story ultimately ends well, it leaves the reader with the nagging question of how they themselves would have behaved in Michalis's place.

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It is thanks to the genius of the author Dimitrios Rodopoulos that at some point in the course of the book every reader begins to put their own moral convictions to the test: is it really worth suffering torture and death by starvation out of uncompromising adherence to principle, when instead one can survive -- and indeed contribute decisively to victory in the struggle for the fatherland?

What seems to us today fairly hypothetical was the lived reality of Dimitrios Rodopoulos. He was a contemporary witness when the National Socialists flooded his country. Only a few kilometres from his idyllic summer residence at Rapsani, the German Wehrmacht carried out its massacres. While Rodopoulos committed words to paper at his country house, his compatriots were being tortured, imprisoned, and brutally killed. Dimitrios Rodopoulos did not protest. Instead he fashioned from the biography of his ancestor the story of Michalis Russis, who chooses survival.

For those who know Greek history, the prophetic final chapters in particular will leave a bitter aftertaste. In them the author brings two protagonists together who could not be more different: the seemingly cowardly priest, whom Michalis holds responsible for having stirred up the war out of self-interest, and the returned Michalis Russis, who thirsts for revenge for his completely upended life. Somehow the two reach an understanding after all. Life can go on, because Michalis understands that the priest too was driven by circumstances, making in an incomprehensible world the decisions that seemed right to him at the time.

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Reality did not end so harmoniously. After liberation from the National Socialist yoke, the Greek Civil War broke out -- so gladly forgotten today. It cost tens of thousands their lives. Hundreds of thousands fled the country. Dimitrios Rodopoulos was not among them. He remained a critical observer who preferred to write about events rather than to act in them himself.