Harakiri: (Notes + Sketches) Averoff Prison 20-7-1969
by Elias Petropoulos
edited and translated by Michael Alexandratos
English
$30.00 (AUD)
ISBN: 978-0-646-89479-9
Hardback with dust jacket. Full colour illustrations. pp. 54
Cycladic Press (2024)
Available from amazon and other online book retailers
“Harakiri” presents the notes and sketches made by Elias Petropoulos while he was incarcerated in Averoff prison in July 1969.
Thirty years later, Petropoulos published an article based on this material, which detailed the practices of self-harm amongst prisoners and urban working class men, dubbed “harakiri” in Greek underworld slang.
Translated into English for the first time, this article is accompanied by full-colour facsimiles of Petropoulos’s sketches, which were sourced from his personal papers archived by the Gennadius Library in Athens.
Elias Petropoulos (1928-2003) was the most controversial Greek writer of the twentieth century. Imprisoned three times during the Junta (1967-1974) and persecuted by Greek judges as late as the 1980s, this “urban folklorist” produced a vast and groundbreaking oeuvre that continues to provoke extreme reactions from readers. The author of some seventy books on topics ranging from prisons, brothels, graveyards, hats, moustaches, homosexual slang and Turkish coffee to rebetic songs, architecture and the plight of Greek Jews during the Second World War, Petropoulos aggressively and rigorously challenged the narrow ways in which Greek culture was perceived. He died in Paris on September 2, 2003.
Michael Alexandratos (b. 1997) is a writer, researcher and publisher based in Sydney, Australia. He runs the small imprint Cycladic Press, which is dedicated to publishing books on Modern Greek literature and culture, as well as the blog and record label Amnesiac Archive, which focuses on his music and recorded sound research. He is currently working on an anthology of Greek outsider writing.
Cycladic Press 