164 seven Neither Greek nor Indian: Space, Nation, and History in River of Fire and The Mermaid Madonna Sadia Abbas Voices out of the stone out of sleep deeper here where the world darkens, memory of toil rooted in the rhythm beaten upon the earth by feet forgotten. — george seferis, “Mycenae” Those, who scoff at the idea of transfer of population, will do well to study the history of the minority problem, as it arose between Turkey, Greece, and Bulgaria. If they do, they will ind these countries found that the only way of solving the minorities problem lay in exchange of population. The task undertaken by the three countries was by no means a minor operation. It involved the transfer of some 20 million people from one habitat to another. But undaunted, the three shouldered the task and carried it to a successful end because they felt the considerations of communal peace must outweigh every consideration. That the transfer of minorities is the only lasting remedy for communal peace is beyond doubt. —b. r. ambedkar, Pakistan, or The Partition of India Continental Drift Invoking the sectarian divide between Catholics and Protestants as an explanation for the treatment meted out to Greece by the Eurozone at the Summit of July 13, 2015, the French economy minister at the time, former Rothschild banker, and now president, Emmanuel Macron, is reported to have said: “The eurozone is going through a war of religion with a northern Europe that’s Calvinist and that doesn’t want to forgive the sinners, and a Cath- olic Europe in the south that wants to turn the page.” 1 Striking though such a statement is, in its admission of a thriving sectarianism in the heart of secular Europe and in its ap- parent conirmation of T. S. Eliot’s bleak speculation that no civil war ever ends, it is perhaps more signiicant for the way it declares the invisibility of Greece. 2 In so doing, it paradoxi- cally reveals the challenge that Greece (and the many Hellenisms—Pan, Phil, Neo—with 153-73084_ch01_1P.indd 164 12/20/17 3:14 PM UNCORRECTED PROOF NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION