Hello everyone.  RAISE YOUR SOUL! is my new book which I am taking the liberty of presenting to you. It is unlike anything I have written before. Setting aside high theory, it is the story of five women who, over of a hundred years, resisted fascism, authoritarianism and chauvinism. It is, I believe, a universal story of five remarkable women who taught me how to resist bullies, bigots and chauvinists, as well as the sense of futility that threatens to overwhelm us.

Why should you want to hear the voices of these five women? Because, at a time when the air stinks, again, of fascism and war; chauvinism and xenophobia, their voices, are the best remedy for hopelessness. So, allow me to read you the preface of the new book and the first few pages of the introductory chapter, which features the first of the five women who has much to teach us on how to raise our souls.

TO THE FEARLESS WOMEN

WHO TURN WHISPERS 

INTO

SOUL-RAISING ROARS

 

PROLOGUE

The year 2024 was marked by an unrelenting personal slump. The darkness didn’t just loom – it consumed. It stretched endlessly across my horizon, not a gentle twilight that comes with the setting sun, but a deeper, more insidious gloom that seeped into the very fabric of existence.

Fascism was in the air – a sour, metallic taste that clung to the back of my throat. Somewhere to the north of our island home, the killing fields of Ukraine devoured lives with a ruthless, mechanical precision. Woman, Life, Freedom, the campaign by Kurdish heroines, had been trampled by the manosphere’s unyielding juggernaut, lost, as though the three little words had never been whispered at all. And from Palestine, the acrid stench of genocide drifted on the wind across the eastern Mediterranean, which grimly confirmed to me the fragility of humanity’s most solemn promises to itself.

Authoritarianism was entrenching itself as the new world order. My political struggles against it had met with three consecutive electoral defeats in the space of one year, making me feel like a doomed character in some twisted simulation.

And then came the violence, the thugs who broke my face in front of my wife and friends. It was the anguish in their eyes that haunted me, their expressions of pained helplessness that cut far deeper than the ringleader’s iron fist ever could.

For the first time, I felt my age, the gravity of my sixty-plus years a remorseless force that weighed me down like a stone, cold, heavy and inevitable. I was in injury time now and, all around, the world seemed to shudder, the grapes of wrath swelling, heavy and black, ready for yet another cruel harvest.

It was then that I turned to the five women who had shaped me, whose incredible stories I carried like a secret flame. I would write them down, I decided, not to escape the darkness but to confront it, to let their strength, their love, lift me as my mother used to. She had always known how to find the light even in the deepest dark. And so, I would save their stories from oblivion, not for glory or for gain, but for the simple, stubborn hope of rising again.

It proved one of my better decisions. Recording their lives opened a portal to something far greater: it revealed the origins of our current predicament, and it linked Europe and America to north Africa and the Near East. Every word I wrote raised my soul a little.

This book belongs to the tradition of fictionalised history, an earnest attempt to bridge the gaps between the available facts and what I remember, while keeping at bay the urge to colonise the past with my myths. In writing it, I had an advantage: unlike historians studying distant subjects, I was deeply involved in the lives of the protagonists. Besides my vivid memories of them, I was also aided by the sources that had been lying around the house I was born and raised in: letters, diaries, photo albums, one of them dating to 1920s Egypt, as well as thirty-seven 8mm home movies made by my father, which I keep in an orange box by my desk.

Throughout, every time I put words into someone’s mouth, it is because I’ve been told it is something they said, or because it is something they could plausibly have said, judging by conversations I witnessed over the years. And whenever there is dialogue, I have tried to capture the essence of the person I knew – their voice, their spirit.

Two younger women appear fleetingly in these pages – my sister and my daughter – yet it is for them too that I wrote this book, hoping that they will see themselves in its marrow, that they too will recognise their heritage. It is also my solemn hope that in immersing yourself in the worlds of Eleni, Anna, Trisevgeni, Georgia and Danaë, you too, dear reader, might rediscover your resolve to resist authoritarianism, fascism and chauvinism, and feel your soul growing lighter, even if just a little.

Yanis Varoufakis, April 2025

THE FIVE WOMEN FEATURED IN THIS BOOK’S FIVE PARTS (And listen to me talk about them on BBC Radio 4’s START THE WEEK here)

PART 1 – ELENI (1929-2008) 

PART 2 – ANNA (1905-1953)

PART 3 – TRISEVGENI (1899-1983)

PART 4 – GEORGIA (1923-2011)

PART 5 – DANAË (1964-)

PART ONE – Eleni

Chapter 1 – Hotel Pefkakia

Eleni’s lips stiffened as the taxi set us down at the entrance of the boutique hotel in Drosia, a leafy northern suburb of Athens. Before we got out, she put her arm around me and whispered, ‘Raise your soul, my son,’ into my ear. The shuttered windows and lifeless façade were the first signal that something was amiss. The second was the two fierce men standing on the pavement, adorned in military police uniforms emblazoned with the logo of ESA, our version of the Gestapo.

It was early September 1969. Hotel Pefkakia had been commandeered by ESA and converted into a temporary holding gaol for the regime’s most embarrassing political prisoners. One of them was Panayis – Eleni’s older brother, my favourite uncle, whom we had come to visit. Heavily pregnant with my sister, Eleni struggled out of the taxi and swayed unsteadily towards the entrance. I still treasure the memory of her leaning on me for support.

Sat down in front of what used to be the quaint reception, we waited, dread and expectation drawn on Eleni’s face. Before long, a rigid man in a dusty brown suit arrived with a gang of uniformed henchmen in tow. As he passed us, he stopped and expressionlessly peered down, first at me, then at Eleni. Furious that she would not make eye contact, he grabbed her jaw violently, forcing her gaze, and slapped her across the face yelling: ‘When I look at you, you look at me. Got it, whore?’ Satisfied, he turned towards me, grinned widely and, with the same hand, patted my head saying, ‘That’s a good boy,’ before receding into the hotel’s interior. Eleni looked at me. ‘Remember what I said?’ she said, squeezing my left hand. ‘Keep your soul up high, let it soar above the filth.’

I cannot remember how long we waited before we were eventually ushered by one of the guards into the room in which Panayis was being held. Even though it was morning, the closed shutters kept the room dark, concealing his state after weeks of relentless interrogation and torture. Long before my eyes had adjusted to make out his features, I heard his distinctive voice, and felt his gentle embrace. He showered me with questions about school, jokes about Eleni and lashes of almost grotesque exuberance which, nonetheless, made me giggle. Eleni looked on while her brother and her son pretended to be somewhere else.

Panayis then said: ‘I’ve got something for you, to make amends for being such a terrible godfather.’ He reached under his bed and pulled out a model aeroplane, which, thanks to his considerable engineering skills, he had fashioned out of matchsticks, cigarette paper and carton. As Eleni and Panayis chatted in muted voices, I sat on the bed, mesmerised by the plane which, courtesy of the countless war movies I had watched, I recognised instantly. It was a Stuka, a Junker Ju-87 to be precise, with black iron crosses and Swastikas that Panayis had somehow painted on its wings and tail, eerily resembling the infamous Luftwaffe dive bomber that had terrorised populations across Europe and north Africa.

When the guard terminated our brief reunion, Panayis hugged us and made sure I did not leave my gift behind. ‘A Nazi plane? Really?’ Eleni asked disapprovingly. ‘Of course, this they may let him keep – as good Nazis, they ought to appreciate it,’ he replied, smiling mischievously. He was not wrong. Once we were out in corridor, a passing petty officer spotted my Stuka and smirked with approval. At reception, where Eleni was frisked before collecting her identity card, a couple of ESA nasties spotted my plane. ‘What’s this?’ the taller of the two asked in a menacing voice feigning intrigue. ‘He made you a Stuka, did he now? Let me see. Does it fly?’ Before I could protest, he snatched it from me and launched it violently against the wall. It was his way of provoking Eleni, seeking a confrontation. But Eleni did not bite. She quietly picked up the broken Stuka from the carpeted floor, took my hand and, looking straight ahead, led me to the fresh air outside.

We walked for what felt like ages, never looking back, until Eleni hailed a taxi. Despite its crash, my Stuka was in relatively good nick. Nothing a little glue couldn’t fix. I could not wait to show my dad, Yorgo, my new toy at home.

It all looked promising, at first. Yorgo welcomed us at the front door with a generous smile and the three of us strolled into the kitchen. Eleni took my Stuka and gave it to Yorgo, who placed it on the kitchen table, without either of them exchanging a word, leading me to believe that they had telepathically communicated with one another about how to fix it. But to my horror, instead of mending it, they cut its fuselage in half, and carefully retrieved a tiny piece of paper, on which Panayis had written a message to his comrades on how to coordinate their testimonies during their forthcoming court martial.

My model plane was a ruse. Nevertheless, once lovingly repaired, it remained a prized possession, until sometime in the late 1990s when its fragile materials succumbed to the sands of time. To this day, when I think of my little Stuka, my heart fills with unalloyed delight.

****

To order the book from Bookshop.org click here, for the Waterstone’s site here, and here for the AUDIOBOOK (which I have read out myself!). Oh, and here is Penguin’s official site.