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Interview by Zdravka Mihaylova

Exclusively for GRReporter

Ismini Kapandai was born in Athens in 1939. She was married to the sculptor Vassos Kapandais (1924-1990) and they have one son. She has been professionally engaged in ceramics since 1966. Her first book Seven Times the Ring, published in June 1989, had a very good feedback from literary criticism and has been repeatedly reprinted in the next years. Then follow her novels About Epirots and Turks, The Story of Iole, Alas There’s No More Time, At the Monastery School (for children), Floria of the Waters, The Salt of the Earth, We, we Have Ourselves, A Cynical Story, With a View to Life. Her books have been translated into English, Serbian, Bulgarian, Italian. She is also the author of the albums Ionia (the Greeks in Asia Minor) and The Churches of Constantinople, she has published stories in various literary journals and has written scripts for television documentaries.

According to the academician Alkis Angelou, the seven novels which comprise Seven Times the Ring represent a bold experiment. He describes the author as a mature and rich word-painting talent that often follows the game of a “light-heeled” camera, and her literary work as daring, as “she does not hesitate to confront an uneven bibliography going through the difficult and unexplored territories of four hundred years of the most disadvantaged of the three major periods of our historical past, including ancient and modern history – the one from the Fall of Constantinople to the Asia Minor catastrophe. The author says that she has studied for many years the history of Ottoman rule in Greece and has dived so deeply into its atmosphere that she feels quite at ease with this dark period. That is how the seven unrelated stories of her first book Seven Times the Ring have been written united by a ring that accidentally and consistently ends up in the hands of one of the characters.
The chronological framework of each of the stories is one of the countless uprisings of the Greeks against the oppressors. These moments inspire awe and respect and the task of those who try to "touch" them is extremely difficult. Not aiming to present the entire epic canvass of each of these uprisings, Kapandai describes only merely human moments and stories of everyday life. Without being a historian, what interests the author, because in her school years - as she says – not sufficient light was shed on the period of Ottoman rule in Greece -, is to comprehend how through historic developments modern Greek identity has been consolidated. In these quests of hers she concludes that generally people "are entrapped" into their own historical roles.

QUESTION: On the occasion of the Independence Day of Greece celebrated on 25 March, you were invited by the Sofia branch of the Hellenic Foundation for Culture for the opening of an exhibit of Greek award-winning books at the National Library there. You had an informal meeting with students at the Department of Modern Greek Studies at Sofia University. Would you share impressions of the three days you spent in Sofia, the people you met and the events you attended?

KAPANDAI: I met the students earlier in the same afternoon that preceded the opening of the book exhibition. I was astounded by the fact that a fair number of young Bulgarians study today Modern Greek and speak it fluently, astounded and very, very glad at the same time. I spent two hours at the University talking with the students, Prof. Dragomira Valtcheva and Dr. Georgia Katselou.

This was my first visit to Bulgaria (hope it will not be my last), and it strengthened my belief that we, the people of the Balkan peninsula who share centuries of a common historical past, in a way “belong” to each other. Walking in the streets of Sofia and watching passers-by around, a feeling of affinity prevailed in me. A notion that was enhanced later, at the opening of the exhibition, hearing people like the Director of the National Library Boriana Hristova, the Director of the Hellenic Foundation for Culture Demetrius Roumbos, the well known writer Kiril Topalov and others speak.

QUESTION: How would you give in a nutshell the main trends and traits of modern Greek literature?

KAPANDAI: I think that a proper answer to this question could only be given years later, by literary critics who would study the aforementioned trends and traits and issue their “verdicts”. 

QUESTION: It’s a well-known fact that nation-state building on the Balkans had hindered to a great extent the free unprejudiced communication between the peoples in the region bringing to the fore for decades a stereotype image of the neighbour making almost all Balkan nations phobic of each other. Do you believe communicating through literature and arts, in a wider sense, could overcome age-long embedded stereotypes? 

KAPANDAI: I think communicating is the “key” word, either through literature and arts or in any other way. Free communication destroys stereotypes; if not the only way, it nevertheless is a sure one, and one should try it. Let’s not forget that we, the people of our century, have been given in our hands a very powerful “tool”, and I mean, of course, the Internet, so it is up to us to search for the truth trying to figure out the real image of our neighbour in order to overcome our phobias.

QUESTION: Like Nobel Prize-winning writer Ivo Andric most of whose novels chronicle his native Bosnia’s history you are preoccupied with Greek history, describing life of a region in which East and West have for centuries clashed with their interests and influences, a region whose population is composed of different nationalities and religions. Is there a dominant trait inherent to Balkan literature? Could one in your understanding consider the existence of an anthropological type that could be called Homo Balkanicus?

KAPANDAI: If there is such an anthropological type it is up to the anthropologists to reply your question. For my part I would repeat what I already said and firmly believe, in short that we share centuries of a common, troubled and sometimes really tragic historical past, the study of which on one hand will help to have a better insight of ourselves and on the other, according to my way of thinking, should make us all, people of the Balkan peninsula, have a more profound understanding of each other and be more benevolent towards all our neighbours.

QUESTION: Your historical novel Απειρωτάν και Τούρκων (About Epirots and Turks, 1990) was awarded with the Christian Letters Award and the Ouranis Award of the Athens Academy (1992). Do you consider it your best book?

KAPANDAI: I could not really say. I look upon my work as a whole and find merits and demerits in all my books.

QUESTION: Being married to the well-renowned Greek sculptor Vassos Kapandais you were sharing common spiritual values. In 2007 the Benaki Museum hosted a retrospective exhibit of all his works. Would you elaborate more on his artistic quests?

KAPANADAI: Vassos Kapandais was, - and this is not the personal opinion of his wife -, a great “passionate” sculptor. You must allow me though not to elaborate more on his work. The catalogue of the retrospective exhibit of his work, published by the Benaki Museum and ‘Agra Publications’, Athens (2007), might shed more light on his oeuvre and give the public a more specific answer to this question.

QUESTION: Your book Seven Times the Ring comprised of seven short novels loosely connected by the story of a ring handed from generation to generation bearing historical memories from the Sack of Constantinople to the Greek Revolution of 1821 has been translated into Bulgarian (Balkani Publishers, Sofia, 2005), and English (Mc Gill University Press, Montreal,1994). Is the book Eight Times the Ring that came out in 2008 a ‘sequel’ of it? What is its plot, is it a string of stories related to each other in the same inventive way as the ones in Seven Times the Ring?

KAPANDAI: Seven Times the Ring was first published by Hestia Publishers in 1989. Eight Times the Ring came out by Kastaniotis almost ten years later. It is not a sequel of the first book. It is actually the same book but it also contains one more - the eighth story -, that takes place in the present day in Cyprus, after the occupation of the island. The new book title was derived from it.

QUESTION: Your last novel With a View to Life (Με θέα τη ζωή, 2009) was marked by literary reviews as a prophetical book. The crisis and decline of modern society and its protagonists sound a familiar everyday reality. In all your historical novels you as a writer more or less introduce your own views on events and the surrounding reality without though being autobiographical. In another interview you say that modern society is crippled by stereotypes, everyone wants to be young, beautiful and rich. People deny the individuality of their personality and when this happens it leads to a catastrophe, thus you detect in it an element of the social twilight we are witnessing. Do you think destruction might bring a decaying social fabric to a productive revival?

KAPANDAI: Yes, I do. It is a well known fact to those who study history that only through wars or great catastrophies societies in decline like the ones of our own times may be in a way reborn. It is a thought that gives me strength and helps me overcome the “would be terrors” of our near future, we are bombarded with ‘for free’ on a daily basis by mass media.