Ida Rae Egli, Writer

2006, by Ida Rae Egli

In 1940, when Mussolini's swaggering army marches into Northern Greece and is instantly repelled by fierce Greek ground units, Hitler is furious. He must revenge the Axis army's first defeat. He reroutes his seasoned 12th Army, adding advance air bombardment and tank support, and by April of 1941 German and Italian troops are drinking champagne at the Acropolis.

Anthi Skambilis, a young mother of two, watches German Wehrmacht divisions high-step through Athens' Plaka district near her home, wondering if her husband Yorgoes is one of the thousands rumored to be dead, his body bloating on the muddy battlefields of the North. Whether or not Yorgoes lives, Anthi knows by the sound of the pavement-pounding boots that her life will never again be what it was.

Winter brings the starvation of 50,000 Athenians, and the loss of the child Anthi carried, the stillborn baby sacrificed to malnutrition. Months later, passing through a checkpoint, Anthi is confronted by a German lieutenant both attracted to her spunky beauty and repelled by her "fallen race." When she outwits him, the lieutenant promises to hunt her down and

have his revenge. Days after, Anthi spots her pursuer at the outdoor market, hears him asking about her, and she knows she must flee the city within hours.

With her widowed mother and children, Anthi Skambilis narrowly escapes by ferry to the island of Rhodes and the village of Lindos where two childhood friends, Maria Metallis and Kalliope Petaluthas, take her into their protection. But the war that ravages Europe eventually takes aim at the strategic islands in the Dodecanese, in particular the largest, Rhodes. The unmerciful Germans wrestle command from the less objectionable Italians and the result is a reign of terror, starvation winters, confiscation of crops and pillage. Women are raped or simply disappear. Polio breaks out. Anthi, Maria, and Kalliope live in constant fear and want, barely staving off disaster. Finally, at a panegyric held in the mountains at Agios Soulos celebrating what seemed the approaching liberation of Rhodes by British troops, Anthi comes face to face with the fate she has tried so hard to outrun. The German lieutenant spots her, and what ensues becomes an unspeakable horror buried in memory for the next forty years.

Echoes from a Grecian Urn: a Novel of Women and War, based in large part on the true stories of women and men who lived to tell about the war in Athens and on Rhodes, takes you deep into the lives of three strong and determined women and their families, who learn by way of death and war the meaning of commitment, family, and love.

Read a review by James Minahan, author of Stateless Nations and Miniature Empires

Winner of Best Fiction Award at Mendocino Coast Writer's Conference (2004). Conference judge John Dufresne, noted that "Here is a writer with a graceful and lyrical prose style, a brave heart, and a remarkable gift for metaphor. I admired [her addressing] the role of writing and storytelling in honoring those we have loved and keeping them alive."

Micra Poulakia: Little Birds, A Collection of Contemporary Greek Stories

2003, by Ida Rae Egli

Table of Contents:

The Age Old Story

A middle-aged Rhodian businessman, driving friends through the old Turkish quarters just off Rhodes' harbor region, remembers an elderly Turkish couple who lived across the street when he was a child, and the rite of passage he experienced by way of realizing these people were not like the people of his family. More....