JAMES HENAGE
The shortest history of Greece
trans.: Andreas Pappas,
editor Pataki, 2023, p. 344

One can only think that the most apt books about her Greek history foreign authors have been signing them for years. There will be many objections, but let’s quickly think of Mark Mazauer and his titanic work from 1821, the full testimony of Roderick Beaton, the early memoirs of Jacques Lacarière, the way Bruce Clark focused on ancient Athens, or even the way Kevin Ovenden tried to analyze the “SYRIZA phenomenon “Seven years ago…

Maybe it matters that they have a cooler look? What are they, fatally, on the sidelines? That they do their research without being influenced by family influences and ideologies?

The thing is, we’re lucky, as more often than not they deliver excellent books, always sounding scientific or literary, and usually to the point, accurate, and extremely helpful.

But he’s coming now James Heneage And already from the name itself suggests: “The Shortest History of Greece”The cover promises, and the content lives up to the promise: less than eight inches tall and with just 320 useful pages of content.

The book was written specifically for those who do not even know the basics: short chapters, short reports, photographs, tables, graphs, limited sentimentality.

The interested reader, for obvious reasons, will ask the question: what story is the author covering? Ancient Greek? Byzantine? Stormy 19th century? The latest history of the country? No, Henage decides to tell… everything: from mythology and the twelve gods to the condemnation of the Golden Dawn.

“But is it possible? This means that each page covers an average of 9 years of history!” – would be a reasonable response? And yet it is so! And to be precise… 9.4 years on the page!

The 65-year-old English author has no academic background. There is no doubt that he loves books (in 1987 he co-founded the Ottakar’s bookstore chain, which twenty years later was absorbed by the famous Waterstone’s chain), loves history (he was the initiator of the Chalke Valley Festival, the largest festival dedicated to history, which takes country in Great Britain) and he also loves… us, as he has not only already written a tetralogy of novels set in Byzantium and a short story about 1824 and the Greek Revolution, but also lives for six months of the year in his house in Kardamyli !

But is this enough to write a history book in 2023? Historians would not even deign to answer this insulting question. However, unfortunately or fortunately, in 2023, another “complete” 700-page volume that will shed light on an important 50 years may be missing from the shelves of history books in bookstores in 2023. Conversely, for a TikTok-influenced audience that communicates with slogans, that reads news only by headlines, and chooses social media to stay in the loop, maybe the Story needs to be made “smaller” so that it doesn’t initially seem boring and unorthodox. . put.

From a purely commercial point of view, determining Henage’s target audience is not easy. At home, many are interested in the history of Greece? How many in our country would accept condensed History lessons from a foreigner without parchments and even without a multi-page bibliography?

Yet for the former, Heneage explains that “Greeks, as the only people with experience in both indirect and direct democracy, can contribute directly to the process of renewing and redefining democracy,” while adding that “Western civilization’s duty to was not justified to the Greeks”, an opinion, of course, which would become a reason for strong disagreements in many groups of our compatriots.

But as for the latter, Henage apparently understands that there is an entire generation that, for better or for worse, knows little, perhaps even the basics. And the book is written specifically for them: short chapters, short reports, photographs, tables, graphs, limited sentimentality. As they wrote abroad, “from alpha to omega and from Socrates to SYRIZA, here is everything you want to know about Greece”!

Sincerely, the author

Do we need The Shortest History of Greece? Probably no. Is it any wonder that this is a book that, having taken it in hand out of curiosity, is already difficult to put down? Clearly.

Reject it if you think you have nothing to learn or even memorize. But let’s not detract from another writer’s respect and admiration for a people who, as Roderick Beaton wrote, “always adapted to disruptive change and found new ways to survive and make their mark on the world around them.”