4 ideas
He is drafted into the Ottoman labour battalions in the First World War and escapes. He then serves in the Greek army's 1919–1922 campaign into Anatolia, and after its collapse is captured, escapes again and flees by sea as the Greek presence in Asia Minor is destroyed in the 1922 Catastrophe.
Minority men considered politically unreliable were not armed but conscripted into labour units (amele taburları) building roads and railways under starvation rations, disease and beatings. Hard work, hunger and exposure did the killing. This let the state remove a suspect population while describing it as military service.
The novel argues that Greek and Turkish peasants shared land, trade, festivals and friendships, and had no inherent hatred. Enmity was produced from above by Great Power ambitions, nationalist politicians and profiteers who needed populations to fight. The villagers who paid in blood gained nothing from the war.
Manolis tells the war as a participant in the Greek army, not as a pure victim. He shows Greek soldiers also burning, looting and killing Turkish civilians, and his belief in a liberating mission sours into shame. Seen this way, a 'national' war is a cycle of mutual cruelty, in which each side's atrocities are used to justify the other's.