The return to the Fair Helen Inn in Dilys Powell’s postwar travels to Greece

ABSTRACT

Dilys Powell, one of the most famous British film critics of the mid-twentieth century, recounted her travels in Greece in several books, fusing autobiography, history, and travel writing. In her postwar travelogue, An Affair of the Heart, Powell presents her wanderings and hotel stays in Greece in 1945, 1953, and 1954, during a period of civil conflict and its devastating aftermath. From the officer’s hotel in Salonika to the Fair Helen Inn at Mycenae in 1945, after the liberation and on the eve of the Civil War, Powell views Greece through the imagery of ruins: the ruins in the archaeological excavations of her husband Humfry Payne, who died in Greece in 1936, but also the physical rubbles and shattered lives of war-torn Greece. Revisiting the country after the Civil War, Powell turns her travels into a story about continuity and destruction, memory and forgetting, trauma and healing.

KEYWORDS:

• Dilys Powell
• Greece
• hotels
• Greek Civil War
• women travellers

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Miller’s travelogue, The Colossus of Maroussi, based on his 1939 visit to Greece, after the invitation of Lawrence Durrell, was first published in 1941 [2010] by Colt Press of San Francisco. Powell reviews the first British edition, published by Sacker and Warburg in London, 1942. The Colossus of the book’s title is the Greek writer George Katsimbalis, whom Miller met through Durrell.

2 All further references to An Affair of the Heart are to this edition and pages will be cited parenthetically in the text.

3 I am keeping Powell’s spelling of toponyms rather than the current transliteration in English.

4 The Villa Ariadne, which narrates the story of the house built by Sir Arthur Evans in Knossos from 1906 to the 1970s, differs from An Affair of the Heart in that it is partly biographical (a biography of Evans as well as of John Pendlebury, an archaeologist and war hero, executed by the Nazis during the invasion of Crete), partly autobiographical and partly historical. It also gives the author the opportunity to recount stories from the war and the Resistance in Crete, such as the daring abduction of German General Kreipe by special operations officers, including Patrick Leigh Fermor, in 1944.

5 On Powell’s importance as film critic, see Bell (2011), Selfe (2012), and Hunter (2015).

6 David Roessel includes a brief discussion of An Affair of the Heart in an endnote of his book In Byron’s Shadow: Modern Greece in the English & American Imagination (2002, 336, n.34). He mentions her travelogue as an example of many authors’ (including Patrick Leigh Fermor and Lawrence Durrell) reluctance to deal with politics in their writings on Greece during the Civil War era. Powell is absent from the two volumes analysing women’s writing on Greece published in the past decades, Women Writing Greece (Kolocotroni and Mitsi 2008) and Greece in British Women's Literary Imagination, 1913–2013, (Papargyriou, Assinder, and Holton 2017).

7 Klapaki points out that Miller depoliticises Greece by treating the contemporary dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas (1936–1939) as an insignificant detail which does not disturb his view of the country as “prelapsarian pastoral retreat” (2014, 68).

8 The December events (Dekemvriana) began with the killing of unarmed demonstrators at a rally organised by EAM (the Communist-led National Liberation front) in Syntagma (Constitution) Square in Athens on 3 December 1944, just two months after the withdrawal of German forces and the return of the Greek government from its exile in Cairo. From December 1944 until their defeat in January 1945, EAM and ELAS (the National Popular Liberation Army) forces fought against British troops and Greek government forces in Athens. On Christmas day, Churchill arrived in Athens to preside over a failed conference between representatives of the warring parties. In fact, there was a cancelled plan by the EAM to blow up the Grande Bretagne Hotel in Syntagma, where the British had their headquarters.

9 Powell explains that the use of language in Greece has a political meaning, “the right wing favouring an archaistic, literary tongue, the left wing defiantly writing in the colloquial Greek which everybody speaks” (including the author). Powell concludes the translator “was perhaps using me to express his opposition to EAM” (44). The Greek language question was a very controversial topic in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries until 1976, when the Demotic Greek (what Powell calls the colloquial Greek) was made the official language of the state.

10 In 1937, the British Council funded the Byron Chair at the University of Athens for the teaching of English, and in 1939 the Council opened an institute in Athens offering English language courses. After a gap of over three-years due to the war, it reopened its institutes in Athens and Thessaloniki, establishing also regional offices across Greece. Many British writers and intellectuals were associated with the British Council in Greece during that early period, including Lawrence Durrell, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Robert Liddell, and Terence Spencer. See Mackridge and Ricks (2018).

11 Since the late nineteenth century, The Fair Helen Inn [Belle Helene] hosted not only the archaeologists that excavated Mycenae but also writers, painters and diplomats, featuring in numerous travel accounts. Agamemnon was one of the four sons of Dimitris Dassis, the first owner who was also the foreman in the excavations led by Christos Tsountas following Heinrich Schliemann’s 1876 discovery.

12 On the hotel’s equivocal power of inclusion and exclusion and the ways in which it nuances the notions of mobility, community and hospitality in terms of gender, nation and class, see Despotopoulou, Kolocotroni, and Mitsi (2023).

13 On women and hotels in modernist literature see Matthias (2006), Short (2019), Moore (2021), and Despotopoulou, Kolocotroni, and Mitsi (2023). On the often burdensome hospitality and general curiosity of Greeks about foreigners see Wills (2007, 82–84 and 100–102).

14 The Children’s Cities (Paidopoleis in Greek) were established by Queen Frederika in 1947 through the “Relief Fund for the Northern Provinces of Greece.” Since 1947 evacuation programmes of children took place because of the Civil War, as both sides claimed to rescue children from war and destitution. The Democratic Army (DSE) transported 25,000–28,000 children to Eastern European countries, provoking an immediate reaction from the Government that created institutions in various parts of Greece to shelter distressed, abandoned, or orphaned children, often evacuated by the government forces. About 18,000–25,000 children lived in these cities and, as Powell shows, these practices continued in the 1950s. The evacuations of children were used for political and diplomatic reasons during the Civil War and its aftermath. See Loring M. Danforth and Riki Van Boeschoten (2012), see also Van Steen (2019) on the foreign adoptions of Greek children (some legal and others irregular) mainly to the U.S. as a result of the Civil War and Cold War anticommunism in Greece.

15 On Spender’s definition of the “new philhellenes” and their search for “a place that had no dates, that was outside of time” see Roessel (2002, 259–261). On the Greeks’ “primitive” simplicity and timelessness, see Wills (2007) (especially 95–100).

 

Additional information

Funding

The research for this article was supported by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation under the “First Call for H.F.R.I. Research Projects to Support Faculty Members and Researchers and the Procurement of High-Cost Research Equipment Grant.” The project is entitled “Hotels and the Modern Subject: 1890–1940” (Project Number: 1653).