Eighteen Texts

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An overnight sellout when it was first published in Athens in the summer of 1970, Eighteen Texts was a publishing milestone in Greece. It consciously signaled the resumption, under an oppressive regime, of the cultural ferment that paralleled the political liberalization of Greece in the early sixties. The military regime had recently lifted preventive censorship, and although it was still very dangerous to challenge the policies regarding freedom of thought and freedom of the press, these authors took advantage of the purported relaxation of censorship to produce this volume.

The lifting of preventive censorship, they state in their Prologue, does not emancipate the intellectual life of a country if areas of creativity continue to be surrounded by barriers that hinder unconditional presentation of ideas and make their full evaluation impossible. The right to free artistic and intellectual creation is bound to the dignity of man.

This volume, then, unlike other protest literature, is a testimony from within. It was designed to operate publicly and directly under the thumb of an oppressive system, instead of privately or abroad.