A Prisoner of War’s Story

Translated by Petro Alexiou
With an Afterword by Dimitris Tziovas

Smyrna, September 1922: A young Anatolian Greek is taken prisoner at the end of the Greek–Turkish war and marched off into the interior. He recounts his escape and heart-stopping journey through the familiar landscape of his lost homeland, where his ability to pass as a Muslim Turk reveals the common culture shared by the different communities of the crumbling Ottoman empire.A classic tale of survival in a time of nationalist conflict, A Prisoner of War’s Story is a beautifully crafted and pithy narrative. Affirming the common humanity of peoples, it earns its place among Europe’s finest anti-war literature of the post–world war I period.