Greek Australian journalist Phil Kafcaloudes talks about a Greek-Australian war hero and... Homer

A seminar on Phil Kafcaloudes grandmother’s story, his research, and the storytelling methodologies used. Phil talked to SBS Greek about his grandparents' story, last October and during the Greek Film Festival.

Journalism lecturer at RMIT, Phil Kafcaloudes. Source: Greek Community of Melbourne / Facebook: Phil Kafkaloudes

This seminar comes at the end of Phil Kafcaloudes’s PhD, which is on the writing of a play based on his maternal grandmother, who was a spy in Greece during World War II. 

"She was a resistance fighter, rescuing Australian, British and New Zealand airmen caught behind enemy lines in central, western and northern Greece" as he told SBS Greek during the opening of last year's Greek Film Festival in Melbourne. 

He was invited to talk about the story of his grandfather, who was one of the 200 Greeks communists who were executed at the firing range of the Athens suburb of Kaisariani by the Nazi occupation authorities on the 1st of May 1944. The execution was the reprisal for the killing of a German general by Greek Resistance forces.

Phil grandmother’s story was published as a novel "Someone Else’s War" in 2011 and was translated in Greek as well. He is preparing a theatrical play which is an adaptation of this novel.

In late 2017 Phil carried out an extensive research trip in Greece where he may have found his grandmother’s resistance cell and how she operated. This new information was used in the writing of the play.

Phil did a research in Greece as part of his PhD about his grandmother Olga who was a spy in Greece in WW2. Source: Facebook: Phil Kafcaloudes

His thesis compares his storytelling method with that of Homer’s Odyssey, noting similarities not only in storytelling modalities, but with the methods of presenting plays in Ancient Greece, and thus has a focus on the telling of true stories in a fictional context.

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