In Search of Victor: Transnationalism, Emotion, and War

In October 1949, in the closing month of the Greek Civil War, a young soldier named Pandelis Klinkatsis was killed stepping on a landmine in Northern Greece. Pandelis was my uncle. The announcement of his death devastated his immediate family including my mother Sophia. I focus this chapter on the individual story of the loss of my uncle and my mother’s grief to cast a wider canvas on the emotions of war and their enduring legacies. This story explores the repercussions of war such as migration, the impact on sibling and romantic love, absence and separation during and after war. It examines the implications of these displacements in writing an emotional history of war. Such a history is typically conveyed through oral storytelling, and oral history forms the basis of the narrative. But there are two other ways in which the memory and emotion of war experience are kept alive in a transnational world. The first expression is in the form of photography, the second is the role grave sites play in the nexus between mourning and memory over time. Pandelis’s story takes us to Greece, Austria, America, and Australia. I argue that it encapsulates the complex geographical and emotional fragments created by war, which are manifest in love and death, mourning and memory, in a transnational context across four countries. Both the Second World War and the Greek Civil War created a landscape of emotions—the legacies of which are indelible—and continue to the present day.