This paper explores how Byzantine iconoclasm is depicted in the Modern Greek fiction of the past 150 years. It focuses mainly on the novels Pope Joan by E. Roidis and Sergios and Bakchos by M. Karagatsis and a crime fiction series by P. Agapitos, but it also takes into account short stories (A. Papadopoulou, Z. Papantoniou). It argues that the authors chose three types of approaches respectively: a romantic one, a satiric one, and one which combines historical fidelity with contemporary characters.
By the end of the Greek Civil War (1946–1949), about 50,000 Greeks had fled to Eastern Europe. The complex conditions of this massive exodus have been thoroughly discussed by historians and social scientists. However, much less is known about the conditions under which a large number of political refugees eventually returned to Greece. The few available studies on the repatriation of such refugees have shown that returning home was a more complicated and demanding process than adjusting to a "host" country. Repatriation was the primary desire of the majority of Greek refugees. However, as the years in Czechoslovakia passed, the hopes of free repatriation diminished. What the refugees were most fearful of was dying in a foreign country, away from their homeland and relatives, something they considered to be a "double death". Thus, some refugees expressed a "last wish" that at least their bones would be taken back home. The work I present here concerns the difficulties that this kind of repatriation faced. I attend to the meanings as well as the hopes and fears attached to the notion of "home" as a place of origin to which one yearns to return.