“This Land Doesn’t Die […] It Lives on Like This. Like a Fairy-Tale”

Topography, Identity and Recovery through the Fantastic in Elias Venezis’s Aeolian Earth

Abstract

Elias Venezis’s 1943 historical novel Aeolian Earth (Αιολική Γη) represents Kimintenia, an area in Ayvalik, Asia Minor, as it was before the forcible expulsion of its Greek populations in the early twentieth century through literary devices that stretch reality. While not a fantasy work as such, Aeolian Earth features numerous stories by and about characters that span the speculative spectrum, including folktales, a creation myth, and retold fairy-tales. As Alison Cadbury observes, many of these stories fall under “magic realist animist cosmology” (28). They are also associated with exile, foreshadowing the Greek populations’ forcible relocation and allowing for the fantastic to be retrospectively interpreted as an attempt to recover the lost homeland (27). Throughout the narrative, Greece is both lovingly mythologised by locals and exoticized as a mythical land by non-Greek characters: these two fantasy discourses within the novel act as a counterpoint to one another, exploring how fantasy is used by Anglocentric and non-Anglocentric perspectives when applied to a country and culture that lies outside the Anglosphere. Using concepts from J. R. R. Tolkien’s essay On Fairy-Stories, this paper studies manifestations of the fantastic in Aeolian Earth, considering the national identities and geopolitical conditions that created them. When analysing the novel’s metatextual fantastic tales as fairy stories, trends begin to emerge regarding the extent to which these Greek tales function as Recovery, Escape, or Consolation—and for whom. While Tolkien’s essay helps illuminate the ways in which the fantastic allows Greek characters in the novel to recover the lost homeland or cope with the harsh realities associated with life in the titular Aeolian Earth, Escape is not depicted as desirable for those who will eventually be exiled from their native home. Rather, Escape in fairy stories is mostly associated with non-Greek characters who consume, appropriate, or produce speculative metatexts about Greece, often ignoring the country’s geopolitical nuances.