"The enemies' turbans passed/like the flame that burns the straw," reminds us an old military saying, before assuring us that "Greece never dies." However, our own turbans committed many acts during their passage, in cities and villages with a "ethnological composition" very different from what the advocates of the Great Idea claimed. From Giannitsa and Kilkis in 1912-13 to Northern Epirus in 1914 and the hinterland of Asia Minor in 1919-22, the actions of the Greek army and the paramilitary groups that accompanied (or replaced) it were marked by atrocities, not much different from what their opponents committed during the same period. [...]

This recording of the dark side of the wars of the "glorious decade" is the subject of this book. For its writing, mainly diaries and memoirs of Greek soldiers were used, in combination with unpublished or published archival material. In special appendices, issues such as the tragedy of Pontus, the massacres of the Turkokritikoi in 1897, or the victims of the Bulgarian occupation of Eastern Macedonia during the First World War are outlined.