Confession and Time: The Subject in Papadiamantes's The Merchants of the Nations

Abstract

Alexandros Papadiamantes's importance for modern Greek letters is enormous. His short stories and novellas exhibited the first signs of a mature Greek prose following the emancipation from the Otto- man empire in the nineteenth century. They captured a whole era's socio-political upheavals, and they inaugurated Greek modernism in the twentieth century. 1 Here I will concentrate on one of Papa- diamantes's juvenalia, The Merchants of the Nations (Oι έμποροι των eθνών, 1882-83), one of his most neglected works. The story unfolds in the thirteenth century and it is set in the Mediterranean. There are three main characters. Markos Sanoutos is a Venetian nobleman. The story begins when Sanoutos is saved from pirates by the prince of Naxos, Ioannis Mouchras. Mouchras offers hospitality to Sanoutos, who seduces his host's wife, Augousta. After a hiatus, we encounter the three heroes again under different circumstances. Augousta has aban- doned Sanoutos, changed her name to Agape and joined a monastery in Patmos. Ioannis Mouchras has disguised his real identity under the name Vendikis in order to seek revenge from his former wife and her lover. The novel concludes with the three characters meeting again when Sanoutos leads a Venetian fleet on a mission to the Cyclades and lays siege on the castle of Naxos, during which the object of the love triangle, Augousta or Agape, perishes. Papadiamantes's second novel is largely contrived in terms of plot development, too obviously modelled on the European adventure novels Papadiamantes was trans- lating into Greek. Nevertheless, The Merchants of the Nations presents