Defixiones, Will and Testament

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At the center of "Defixiones, Will and Testament" lies the Armenian, Anatolian, Hellenic, and Greek genocide which took place, for the most part, under the cloak of the First World War (1914-1917). The Ottoman Empire, now the Republic of Turkey, used various means of destruction to enact an ethnic cleansing policy.  The goal was not to simply kill, but to erase all cultural evidence of these people's existance. 

Many view April 24, 1915, as one of the darkest days of the 20th century.  To quote from www.theforgotten.org:

April 24th, 1915.
The world commemorates this as the beginning of the 20th Century's first genocide.  The beginning of a campaign of annihilation launched by the words of Talaat Pasha, Ottoman Turkish leader, "Kill every Armenian woman, child and man without concern for anything."

For a chronological list of events, we invite you to go here.

For more information on "Defixiones, Will and Testament", please select a topic from the menu at the top of this page.

All of the material in this area was selected by Ms. Galás.

His wings are numbered
with the flowers of our land,
with all the days of all the years,
with pebbles and the merest stones.

Like you, my phoenix,
he survived our hunger,
and his mercy feeds us.

Dying with his wings outspread,
he gathered all who buried him in ashes
and became, like you,
the sprint and fire of our agony.

Go now, my sweet bird,
show me the road I'll follow.

Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said)

"He who hides his madman dies voiceless"

Henri Michaux

"To me it is a calamity to let the Greeks have anything in this part of the world. The greek is about the worst race in the Near East."

Admiral Mark L. Bristol
U.S. High Commissioner of  Constantinople
1919

"I should like to see any power of the world destroy this race, this small tribe of unimportant people whose history is ended, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, whose literature is unread, whose music is unheard, whose prayers are no longer uttered. Go ahead, destroy this race. Let us say that it is again 1915; there is war in the world. Destroy Armenia. See if you can do it. Send them from their homes into the desert. Let them have neither bread nor water. Burn their houses and their churches. See if they will not live again. See if they will not laugh again. See if you can stop them from mocking the big ideas of the world. You sons of bitches. Go ahead, try to destroy them."

William Saroyan

"A man's throat is slit in Paris, it is called 'Murder,'  but when a man's throat is slit in the Middle East, it's called a 'question.' "

Victor Hugo

THE GRAVES OF OUR ANCESTORS

We should guard our dead and their power, lest at some hour our opponents disinter them and take them away. And then, without their protection, we will be running a double risk. How will we live any more without our houses, our furniture, our fields, especially without the graves of our ancestors, the warriors and the wise? Let us remember how the Spartans stole the bones of Orestes form Tegea. Our enemies must never know where we have them buried. But how will we ever know who our enemies are or when and from where they appear? No, therefore, no grand monuments, no showy ornaments--such things arouse attention and malice. Our dead have no such needs--temperate, modest, and now silent, they are indifferent to the hydromels, the votive offerings, the vain honors. Better one bare stone and a pot of germaniums, a secret sign, or even nothing.  To be more certain, we may hold them within us, if we can, and better still if even we don't know where they lie. The way things are in our times-who knows-- we ourselves may disinter them, one day we ourselves may throw them away.

Yannis Ritsos 
March 20,1968

"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice."

Albert Einstein

We passed through neighborhoods which had been burned, Some of the victims still had not been removed; the corpses had already begun to stink. My father bent down at one of the doorways and picked up a small stone all splattered with blood.

"Keep it," he said to me.

I had at last begun to understand why my father behaved in this ferocious way. He did not apply the methods of New Pedagogy; he followed the age-old, merciless method which is alone capable of preserving the race. This is how the wolf trains its favorite cub, the firstborn-it teaches it to hunt and to kill, and by means of trickery or valor to escape from traps. To my father's ferocious pedagogy I owe the endurance and obstinacy which have always stood by me in times of difficulty. To this ferocity I also owe all the indomitable thoughts which govern me now at the end of my life and which do not condescend to accept comforting from either God or the devil.

MASSACRE (in Crete) chapter Ten
REPORT TO GRECO NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS 1965