ABSTRACT
Authors who were themselves exiles refer to the Anafi detainees collectively as the group, omadha, a word which is also used for a military unit or sports team. In this context, however, the word stands for the phrase omadha simviosis, group living a communal life, and so will be translated as ‘commune’. The members are called either fellow exiles, sineksoristi, or comrades, sintrofi (literally ‘mess-mates’), the term used for members of the KKE. The Communist members of the commune are said (by authors such as Bartziotas and Birkas who were themselves members of the Party) to have constituted no more than a third of the total number of exiles at most. Taking the estimate of numbers in the commune on the eve of the Occupation (220) given by Birkas (1966, II: 165), there would have been about seventy Communist Party members within that group. When this category within the commune requires clear specification, terms such as ‘members of the Party’, i.e. the KKE, meli tu Kommatos, or ‘the Party fraction or section’, i kommatiki fraksia, are used (see Bartziotas 1978: 109). Party members are said to have held nearly all the key positions in the commune. This is hardly surprising: the Metaxas exiles arrived to find a collective of thirteen people already there, and most of the first batches of exiles were Communist Party members who seized the initiative in the organisation of the commune which replaced the collective. Ghavriïlidhis mentions in his diary that at its ‘usual monthly meeting’ on 6 September 1936 (i.e. the first such after the arrival of those exiled by the Metaxas dictatorship) a committee, ghrafio, of eleven members was elected, including himself (1997: 79). Arranging the elections for this committee was in the hands of those with experience, and it was the members of the Communist Party who had both the training and the experience (in running meetings and proposing people for offices) to take it. Sometimes authors refer to directives from KKE headquarters about appointments, so maybe the outcome of these elections was a foregone conclusion. In other words, it was key figures in the Communist Party who were the ones to ‘choose’ or ‘elect’ (and could later be blamed for their errors of judgement, just as Bartziotas criticises Siantos for his choice of ‘the Trotskyite and police agent … Dionysatos’, Kousoulas 1966:129).
