And just as today wrestled with yesterday, the ferryboat on its schedule was transformed. First it became a galley, then it became a sailboat, then it became a ship with angry chimneys. And we, the human figures on the decks, became passengers on this endless exchange. The strait was a journey back in time.

Soloúp, Aivali, p. 404

 

Soloúp’s graphic novel Aivali: A Story of Greeks and Turks in 1922 is a profoundly human meditation on memory, displacement and cultural entanglement through the lens of the Greco-Turkish War (1919-22). Published in Greek in 2014 and translated into English in 2019, it is the story of over a million refugees making the journey between Mytilene on the island of Lesbos and the Turkish town Ayvalık (Αϊβαλί/Κυδωνίες in Greek), when Greek and Turkish governments agreed to a large-scale population exchange at the end of the war. Aivali captures differing views of those troubled and traumatic years in black and white and greyscale chapters, drawing on the stories left behind by the historical figures and writers Fotis Kontoglou, Elias Venezis, Agapi Venezi-Molyviati, and Ahmet Yorulmaz. These main chapters—Fotis, Elias, Agapi-Zehra, and Hasan respectively—are framed by the story of a present-day encounter between a Greek visitor (Andonis, Soloúp’s alter ego) to Aivali and a Turkish Family, titled ‘Zeibekiko’, which refers to a Greek folk dance similar to the Turkish folk dance ‘Zeybek’. Operating at the intersection of personal testimony and historical witness, Aivali centres the complex cultural-historic entanglements and the far-reaching consequences of competing ideas of national homogeneity, identity and belonging. While not strictly autobiographical, it nevertheless channels personal voices and cultural memory into a hybrid historical-visual form. Aivali “required its own excavation and set of magnifying glasses” (Soloúp 404), pointing to the very individual and tailored approach Soloúp took to assemble this multi-narrative in graphic form. Indeed, the main chapters come into focus as if under a magnifying glass: the reader ‘zooms in’ from a distant or birds-eye view (or pans from a detail into a tumultuous scene) and zooms out of the final picture at the end of the respective stories. Soloúp’s method of combining archival research, testimonial fragments, and art aligns with what Martha Kuhlman (2017) identifies as the genre’s strength: its ability to visualize contested memory, foreground subjectivity, and challenge simplistic historical binaries. 

^{A map depicting Greece, Türkiye, and the Aegean Sea (Soloúp 2019: 10). Translated by
Tom Papademetriou. © Soloúp. Reproduced with kind permission of the author.}

 

^{An officer’s hands reaching for a young man (Soloúp 2019: 142–143). Translated by
Tom Papademetriou. © Soloúp. Reproduced with kind permission of the author.}

Tasked with a creative response to Soloúp’s Aivali for Kristina Gedgaudaitė’s seminar “Auto/bio/historio/graphics: Graphic Novel in Contemporary Greece” at the Department of Byzantine Studies and Modern Greek Studies (University of Vienna), I considered different ways of bringing together aesthetic, narrative and historical aspects prevalent in the graphic novel in a series of images. While I had sketched and painted for as long as I can remember, I was somewhat tentative to attempt something in the style of a graphic novel or comic—which is why I opted to create three single images, albeit part of a connected panel. “A Greek who travels to Aivali today”, writes Bruce Clark in his foreword to the graphic novel in 2019, “is bombarded with contradictory impressions” (11). Soloúp visually underscores contradictions and historical attitudes of radical opposition between Greeks and Turks through his choice of stark black and white contrasts while crucially undermining the surface simplicity of binary constructions by creating a multi-layered narrative that weaves together diverse perspectives and lived experiences. Brainstorming ideas, I knew that I wanted, firstly, to stick with Soloúp’s choice of a black/white and greyscale drawing style, opting for fine liners, felt pens and pencils. Secondly, I was particularly intrigued by the versatile role of the hand, which appears in Aivali multiple times, often larger-than-life, shielding, as in the story of Elias, a flickering match in the dark of a prison where Greeks are waiting to be deported, or outstretched, reaching threateningly into the picture, about to grasp the protagonist. It reminds one of the hand that writes and draws, signalling, as Kuhlman observes, the author’s subjectivity and participation in the narrative (112). Hands are the medium through which ideas are translated, graphically rendering an expression of lived experience (125). By drawing attention to the creative process and the constructed nature of the story, such a technique further points to the fact that history—and its documentation—are equally subject to distortions, simplifications and subjective interpretations, and graphic novels are particularly well suited to problematising assumptions of objectiveness through visual and narrative layering. Despite the first-person stories of Fotis, Elias, Agapi-Zehra, and Hasan being fictional(ised), they are a powerful artistic means “for resisting the hegemony of history” (Gedgaudaitė 98). 

^{Creative response to Soloúp’s Aivali © Olivia Scarr. Reproduced with kind permission of the author}

Taking my cue from Soloúp’s animated sketches in the graphic novel, as well as the map of Greece and Türkiye preceding the foreword, I wanted to simulate the stylistic characteristics while translating conflicting emotions around identity and belonging in the context of the Greco-Turkish War into a panel of three images, each of which I sketched out on an A3 sheet of drawing paper. I put felt pen to paper without any previous pencil work (although a few early attempts ended up in the wastepaper basket) hoping to render the hands ‘alive’ while echoing the lines and contrasts so characteristic of lino- and woodcuts (as they are referenced in the graphic novel as well). The pair of hands reaching into the image from the gutter signals the formative potential of authors in reshaping the way we read and experience history and abstracts ideas of possession and belonging: Are they a tool for taking and (dis)placing? Are these hands reaching for home? Are they reaching towards each other? While in the first image the hands are stable, bounded and distinct in their appearance, they begin to fragment, gradually disintegrating to become the diverse geography that is Greece and Türkiye, scattered with stars and music in reference to the framing of the four main stories by a ‘Prelude’ and a ‘Fugue’ and the universal condition of being human under the same stars. Aivali connects the past and present, inviting readers to reckon with shared histories that have long been sidelined by nationalistic narratives and to appreciate and engage in the multiplicity of memory and identity that contribute to a symphony of many thousands of individual stories. The creative response, then, was an attempt to tie into questions of recounting history, grappling with how it can be remembered, drawn and narrated.

 

WORKS CITED

Clark, Bruce. 2019. “Foreword” In: Soloúp. Aivali: A Story of Greeks and Turks in 1922 (trans. T. Papademetriou), Somerset Hall Press.

Gedgaudaitė, Kristina. 2022. “Comics, Memory and Migration: Through the Mirror Maze of Soloúp’s Aivali”. Journal of Greek Media & Culture 6.1, 91-116.

Kuhlman, Martha. 2017. “The Autobiographical and Biographical Graphic Novel”. The Cambridge Companion to the Graphic Novel (Ed. Stephen E. Tabachnick). Cambridge University Press, 113-129.

Soloúp. 2019. Aivali: A Story of Greeks and Turks in 1922 (trans. T. Papademetriou), Somerset Hall Press.