It was a time of the American War of Independence, the French Revolution, and the coming of the Sick Man of Europe. Hats were being made that would nudge the Greek Revolution forward to freedom or death.

Adamantios Korais, a great philologist, was a witness to the French Revolution, a man who received knowledge and wisdom from Thomas Jefferson on the American Revolution, and a contributor of ideas to the Greek Revolution. When he was buried in the cemetery of Montparnasse, a friend placed a rose and a hat in his coffin. It was 1833. He had left Smyrna for good in 1782 for Montpellier, France, to study medicine. On completion, he left for Paris, the new Athens. As he left Ionia, his father’s advice was to keep his mind acute in the study of Asclepius and Hippocrates and keep his head warm in northern climes. Wear a brimless Pileus, his father said. Although Korais never practiced medicine, he did acquire a hat that he called his Capeli.

Andrew Kape, in his book Karelis the Hatmaker, never discovered how he got it. It is still not fully known. Now I can reveal, in part, the story of the hat. Rubbing shoulders with Thomas Jefferson, the new world’s ambassador to France, they both wondered why they should live in a cold country when they could be in a warm one, and Thomas said they should always wear a hat. The ambassador, as told by Daniel Webster, spoke of the utilitarian purpose of keeping the head warm.

Two crucial sentences from the book are separated by two centuries: I (Kapelis) am a mere hatmaker. I couldn’t think of a better cover for a spy, says the Russian General (1780). Carrying vital information collected by Kapelis, his friend was ambushed by the Ottoman police and publicly executed upside down on a wooden cross. It took him three days to die. The second was that I (Andreas) was exiled for doing my job and beaten senseless. My family was destroyed. I ask, as a former judge, what is that worth? (2000) Many who dared to defy the government were mistreated until their will was broken, but not Andreas. He and thousands more were listed on file, and in 1980, Andrew, the author, wanted to know what the listing meant.

This book that I recommend to my readers is a skillful blend of fact, fictional reality, and the dream of justice. It tells a thrilling story in which many stories can be found: hats between 1780 and 2000, a grandfather’s trials and tribulations, a grandson’s dream of justice, and quite a bit more. It holds many messages on many levels—far too many even for the hat of Aspros to hold. It is a story of false labelling of falsified demographic data to protect and of false witness to condemn. On his visit to Greece at 20, Andrew, its author, born and raised in Australia, is horrified to find out that he is a communist, just like his falsely branded grandfather Andreas. Two statements from my grandfather that I like: always trust good people, and justice is a good advocate to have on your side.

The book took me back to my schooling in Yorkshire. It took me back to my early days in Greece, whose dominant features were a bristling anti-communism and an unconditional commitment to the West. Its societal mindset conflicted between ancient glory and Ottoman trappings against the background of a strong Orthodox Church. As Hats brings out, there was an emphasis on continued persecution of the losers of the Civil War, their exclusion from much of public life, and an exaggerated belief in a communist threat. More recently, a member of the Greek parliament (at age 29) told me of the torture on Makronissos (1952–1953), a small Greek island of exile and isolation. He was treated later in a military hospital. I was not the only one he said!

From the 1920s to the 1970s, Makronisi, a small island in the Aegean Sea, was a notorious site of political prisons. It has been referred to as the island of shame and the Greek Dachau. One of its infamous torturers was a colonel of the Junta in 1967. Another became the Minister of Health and a self-appointed lecturer of public health. The five-time member of the Greek parliament was again severely beaten on the head by police in Syntagma Square while defending women calling for the release of political prisoners and was hospitalised for fifteen days at the then Municipal Hospital, Athens.

When I first arrived in Greece in 1960, I was housed in an asylum (Daphne), where I recall Hans, a German sociologist and leader of my group (Jeurnesse et Reconstruction). I witnessed the monthly mass shave and shearing of all patients and patients chained to beds. I was privileged to make several visits to the inner sanctum, where several political prisoners designated dangerous were held. In chatting with one of them, I felt no fear. I was also taken to a similar facility in Salamina. 25 years later, it became a laughable incident in one of my first lectures on Greek hospitals in the Greek School of Public Health. One somewhat arrogant student, in an utterly disrespectful voice, asked, What do I know about Greek hospitals? I know Daphne, I said, walked towards him threateningly amidst class laughter, stood before him, and continued, but not as a patient.

My entry into the world of Greece came through many ports of call, the first being primary school, where my female teachers imbued me with the glories of ancient Greece: the Acropolis as the most elegant of all structures, Hector of Troy as the far better man than his slayer Achilles, and Pheidipades as the hallmark of loyalty and resilience. Then came history and literature through a teacher who, in between reading extracts from Moonfleet, spoke about the civil war in Spain and Greece.

During the German Occupation, massacres were frequent and happened throughout Greece. The Nazi Occupation was a time of terror and death. Human loss in Greece was about 14% of the population, a loss of 137 per 1000 in three years by execution squads, in the concentration camps of the 3rd Reich, and by the low birth rate as well as by enforced famine. In Athens, approximately 100,000 people died within the winter of 1941–42. The Greek economy contracted considerably. It has been estimated to be more than that suffered by America in the Great Depression.

However, the book Kapelis the Hatmaker is no less than a down-under gem. This is a book that kept me on my toes, at times wondering, questioning, and confused, only for my doubts to be set aside as I became engrossed by the next interesting incident at the bottom or top of the page. It is a book that returns to the genre of stories with some moral purpose, the kind of story mostly dropped from modern society. Within the story is the story of the storyteller’s revealing relationship with his grandfather.

The nice thing for me about this book is that it started with roses and continued under the Acropolis, by the side of the Erectheon. It came as a great surprise. It was carried from the Grand Bretagne to Athens and given to me in a location where I found that time could stand still for a short while. It is written by a distinguished Australian Barrister who, coming from a cricketing country, pulled off a hat trick with it: Yorker, fast ball, and googlie. Half way through the book, I was prompted to ask him about a personality in it who was a perfect fit for a character I once knew. His answer only heated up my misgivings. In any case, I take my hat off to him. I knew that magicians can pull out many things from the hat, but I did not know that their makers have such tricks under them. Both Barrister and Mr. Roses sat opposite me. To my side sat Pelly, a tribesman from Papua.

The front and back covers of Kapelis the Hatmaker provide good omens and interesting clues for what is revealed between, all on 300+ pages. Its front cover confuses, while the back cover, in its few words, intrigues. The back cover makes use of a quote by Tolstoy saying that the best tales emerge from conflict between good and bad and not between good and bad, while two short statements seem to stand out in sharp relief, namely the creation of an unwelcome state in a land of infinite sunshine and boundless blue sea, which through Ottoman occupation and the Greek revolution has been pitched into a ceaseless struggle to return democracy back to the cradle of its birth.

The front cover, with its portrayal of a graceful female, blindfolded and standing tall to symbolise justice, gives more away. Her colours, blue and white, are those of Greece, and she reminds us of Delacroix and the slaughter on the Island of Chios. Her dainty toes protrude with one foot slightly placed ahead of the other to give a sense of hovering between a dark sky and an earth on fire. The background is Athens burning. Her left hand holds the scales, with the citizen tipping the balance over the state, while the sword of justice stands vertically in her right hand. The photo on the back cover shows one of the several Andrea’s we meet sitting contentedly on his veranda, seemingly oblivious to any drama, which couldn’t be further removed from reality. He is symbolic of all political prisoners everywhere and one literary example of the many Greeks who found themselves shuffled by the Great Powers, divided by Yalta, and trapped in civil conflict, poverty, and infectious diseases.

The unfolding tale refers to Hellas and its modern struggles. It follows the journey of an ordinary family, over and through vacillating circumstances throughout a single generation as well as roughly over 10 generations and multiple time frames to put the reader down close to today. The journey starts in Greece, taking the reader back and forth between Odessa and Athens, on to Australia, and back to Europe. It reminds me of my last visit to Crete in respectful remembrance of the victims of outrageous cruelty in German-occupied Greece. Sentiment ran high both of forgiveness and great solidarity with the German people and of not forgetting Nazi wartime atrocities. I gave a talk on famine in wartime Athens.

A century before the books’ curtain unfurls, a Venetian attack on Ottoman-controlled Athens caused significant destruction, particularly to the Acropolis, which had remained intact for over 2000 years. A Venetian canon ball landed in the Acropolis, which the Turks used for armament storage. On the first page, we meet with the maker of hats, Kostas Kapelis, a maker of hats. It is 1780, and Athens is restless.

Kostas was commissioned by the Sultan and the powerful to make hats for them, which allowed him ease of entry into high places to measure the heads of the high-placed. There, he listened in on the conversations of the powerful. It was curiosity at first until information was revealed that placed his countrymen in jeopardy. His hat-making provided a natural cover to spy by noting information that he would pass on to the Russian military through the shadowy network of Klephts (bandits). In general, a spy could secure rich rewards but run the risk of losing his life and being branded as a traitor. Russia was then at war with the Ottoman Empire, while Greece remained oppressed under the Ottoman yolk for 300 years but was taking deeper breaths towards freedom, which came in 1821. For the first time in history, the majority of informers did so out of a need for freedom.

When Italian forces invaded Greece in late 1940, a ragtag Greek army slowly pushed them back into the sea in what was the greatest ground resistance of any European country and the first allied victory of WWII. In northern Greece, on a high bluff, I read the plaque commemorating several dead, including a British soldier. They were shelled from below by a column of retreating German forces. Close to Thessaloniki, 80 people, mainly the elderly, women, and children, were herded into the local bakery and burned to death in reprisal for one killed German soldier. Before World War II, approximately 80,000 Jews lived in Greece in 31 different communities. As German forces withdrew from Greece in 1944, there were approximately one million fewer Greeks, and only 10,000 Jews survived. The Nazi occupation of Greece was a time of enforced famine, forced hard labour, executions, torture, and disease. The Jewish community was extinguished.

I will end with references to a hat worn by Aspros for 50 years in which was confined an official post-civil war order from the state to judges directing them to break the law in the case of anti-monarchists, the detention of Andreas during the dictatorship when he was told you are a declared communist, no, I am a democrat, for which his clavicle was broken by an officer’s baton, and with a snatch of a conversation between two falsely designated communists, grandson and barrister (Andrew) and grandfather and judge (Andreas at 90), who were terrified as they boarded a flight for justice, I am petrified: Grandfather, the flight will be far less painful than your time on Makronisi.