Abstract
Reviewed by: K. E. Fleming, New York University, USA
Sheila Lecoeur’s book on Syros under Italian occupation is a superb addition to a gradually growing body of literature on the World War II experience of the Italian, rather than German, occupation of Greece. The Italians have long had the reputation of being the ‘kinder, gentler’ occupier (not, it should perhaps dare to be said, entirely without reason), and as a consequence many of the more devastating, complex, and problematic effects of their presence in Greece during the War have been overlooked or left untreated.
And in Syros, the effects were indeed devastating and complex. Lecoeur’s study of the island, Mussolini’s Greek Island: Fascism and the Occupation of Syros in World War II, gives us one of the most nuanced and multidimensional local histories of the topic to date. It is certainly the most detailed and sustained. Through an international range of sources – most significant among them a local archive from Syros, along with several interviews – the author is able to show not simply the policies and attitudes of the occupier, but also, to a fair extent, the ways in which the local population reacted to the experience of occupation. It demonstrates the multifarious and complicated ways in which society was frayed almost beyond repair as a consequence of the Italian occupiers’ policies.
At the most basic level, Lecoeur has essayed a history ‘from below’, or locally told – or at least, as much from below as from above. Lecoeur’s primary interest is in ‘the social and economic impact of occupation in a local context and how its outcome measured up to Italy’s foreign policy objectives’ (5). That is, she wants not simply to show the specifics of the occupation as it played out in Syros (though she does this, in great detail), but also to illuminate the broader goals that Italy had during the occupation. She successfully reveals the extent of Mussolini’s vision for Mediterranean dominion and the complicated bureaucratic stratagems that underlay it. It is the presence of these two halves of the story together – the local level where the impact of the policy was felt, coupled with an exposition of the Fascist goals for the region and how they played out – that makes this such a fine book.
The case of Syros is used as a way to unfold the complicated components of Italian policy in the Cycladic Islands. The centrepiece of this was ‘distacco’, or ‘detachment’ – the policy of administratively cutting the Cyclades off from the mainland and instead placing them under the administrative jurisdiction of the Dodecanese, which had been under Italian control since the Treaty of Lausanne. The distacco policy certainly expressed Italy’s desire to expand its Mediterranean imperial holdings, creating their own Aegean sphere of influence and control, but it also showed a remarkable lack of awareness of the vital and ineradicable links between the Cyclades and the Greek mainland. It also in many ways ran contrary to Italy’s own goals and hopes in the region. The distacco policy involved monetary and trade dimensions; exports were banned, and the region was expected to meet its own food needs. But this, of course, ‘clashed with the occupiers’ own interest in extracting local produce and minerals for the benefit of Rhodes and Italy’ (34).
At the local level, the results were devastating. As Lecoeur shows, famine rapidly set in and the local population suffered immensely. The local Italian leadership appropriated money from wealthy local citizens ‘more or less coercively’ (35), and overestimated their ability to manage the crisis – which only spun further out of control with time. By spring 1942, one third of the island’s population was dependent on Italian food distributions in soup kitchens. Lecoeur points out that Italian mishandling of the famine wasn’t due to ‘callous indifference’ but to a total lack of financial expertise (192), although of course this was of little matter in a context in which so many people were at risk of dying of starvation.
Lecoeur’s context, Syros, was fascinatingly complex to begin with. Until the foundation of the Greek nation in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the island was almost entirely Catholic (it is about half Catholic today). Its port, Ermoupoli, was one of the most significant in the region, and although over the course of the nineteenth century it had been outpaced by Piraeus, it is clear why the Italians regarded it as a key holding in their imagined future empire. The island had a history of wealth, culture and great regional significance. This book about the ways in which the ‘Italy’s Imperial experiment’ ultimately proved to be ‘an economic failure and a political illusion’ (194) is an important regional history, to be sure, but also a major contribution to our understanding of the broader dynamics of Italian fascism and of occupation.