Elias Venezis’ novel entitled Exodus. The [Chronicle] Book of the Occupation and first published in 1950 narrates the flight, in the winter of 1942, of two families from northern Greece towards the south to escape the violence of the Occupation forces. It comprises three parts: “The Road”, “Cithaeron”, and “Colonus”. The flight unfolds against the intertextual background of the biblical Exodus while intersecting with the “Exodus” from Asian Minor of Greek refugees in 1922 to escape the Turks. When the refugees reach Thebes a far more significant intertextual matrix emerges which reconfigures Sophocles’ Theban plays (Antigone, Oedipus the Tyrant, Oedipus at Colonus) and underlies all three parts of the novel. Venezis enriches the reception of Antigone through a “chorus” (χορός) of Thebans who watch and comment on events and converse with characters. Developments at Thebes create a modern Antigone, who will later be joined by modern Oedipus, a young man born during the flight of his mother from Asia Minor and left as an infant on a shore of Lesbos. A visible effect of the Sophoclean background is that it re-routes the flight of the protagonists after Thebes along a path of tragic descent. This new path takes them first to Sophoclean Mt Cithaeron, where Venezis follows the traces of Oedipus’ tragic story by recreating circumstances analogous to his near-exposure as an infant and inventing a different riddle for modern Oedipus to solve, and eventually to Sophoclean Colonus now freezing and starving during the worst winter of the Occupation.
