Murder at Plaka Beach

barbara black

The title sounds like that of a thriller, but The Ghosts of Plaka Beach: A True Story of Murder and Retribution in Wartime Greece is an interesting memoir, not fiction.

Finance professor Stylianos Perrakis has written a book about a family tragedy that illuminates an intense period of modern Greek history. His young uncle, Miltis Melissinos, was murdered in a cave in the Peloponnesian countryside by communist partisans in 1944.

Two local men were subsequently tried and convicted and one was executed for the crime. However, Perrakis was unaware of the court case and could find out little about the story from his family, who refused to talk about it.

He did a lot of research into the occupation period in Greece, especially in the Argolida region, where his mother’s family lived. They were middle-class, professional people who owned land that fronted on the sea, the Plaka Beach of the book’s title.

Perrakis concluded that his uncle’s murder was part of a widespread campaign of terror by the KKE, the Greek communist party. Large numbers of people were executed by both left and right during this period —estimates range as high as two per cent of the local population.

Communists and conservatives in the region were involved in the resistance against the German occupiers, but they were also fighting each other over political supremacy in postwar Greece. After liberation, their struggle became a civil war that was won by the conservative side in 1949.

However, as Perrakis notes in his book, the violence in the countryside had other causes besides ideology — class enmity and local quarrels that had nothing to do with politics: “It’s a story with a few villains and no heroes.”

Perrakis attended the University of California, Berkeley from 1964 to 1970, and was actively opposed to the junta of right-wing colonels who ran Greece then. He met his wife, Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis, at Berkeley, and as he says now, his left-wing credentials were excellent.

“I lived in the same rooming house as [Yippy statesman] Jerry Rubin, and had many lively discussions with him and his friends.”

When he went back to Greece on visits, the idealistic young academic often argued about politics with his uncle Takis, a conservative lawyer.

Now he realizes that Takis lived with the knowledge that his younger brother, a cheerful boy who wasn’t much interested in politics, may have been executed because of Takis’s own conservative profile.

Perrakis expects sharp attacks in the press when his book is distributed in Greece, because he feels the politics of the occupation period have never been thoroughly ventilated. He looks forward to the prospect of controversy.

The foreword to Perrakis’s book is by Yale history professor Stathis N. Kalyvas, who hails it as “one of the most insightful books about the Greek Civil War.”

It was written in English and published by U.S. publisher Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, and is distributed in Canada by Scholarly Book Services in Toronto. It will be launched at the National Library of Canada on May 11.