The Epta-etea or junta or the Colonels

What follows reads rather like a political fantasy. Knowing that Papandreou and his party would win the elections, King Constantine prepared some of his generals for a coup, to happen ten days before the elections. Instead, some unknown ‘colonels’ beat him to it, staging a coup in early April, a coup was backed by the CIA. Knuckling under, the king swore in the colonels, though he later tried to stage a coup to unseat them, quite unsuccessfully. The colonels presented their fascist regime as the ‘Revival of Greek Orthodoxy’ in the face of ‘corrupting influences’ from the west. Papadopoulos was known for his illiterate speeches, much in the manner that President Bush is caricaturized today. He and his colonels banned trade unions, all political activity, censored the press heavily enough so that many stopped publishing of their own accord, and arrested, imprisoned and tortured thousands of alleged ‘Communists’, maiming many either physically or psychologically for life. Both Yorgos Papandreou and his son Andreas were persecuted, as well as the famous composer Mikis Theodhorakis, and the actress Melina Mercouri, whose citizenship they revoked from afar (she was out of the country, and thousands of important Greek figures joined her in exile. Their censorship even involved bans on folk instruments such as the ‘tsambouna’ (island bagpipe) on the island of Mykonos, deemed primitive by the rulers, and they even banned the Classical tragedies. Though the majority of Greeks opposed them (though why anyone would not is a mystery, and some Greeks protested from the beginning from outside of the country ), and they were barred from the Council of Europe, the U.S. presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon extended generous amounts of aid and support, and sold them military technology. Demonstrations finally erupted in 1974, a full six years after the colonels had seized power, something fully understandable given the silencing tactics of imprisonment and torture, and the infiltration of their secret police into resistance groups. On the 17th of November in that year (a day made afterward into a national holiday of remembrance), the students of the Athens Polytechnic occupied the university buildings, broadcasting from underground radio to the public from within. Tanks stormed the buildings, with at least twenty students killed (though noone knows to this day how many, and some says hundreds) with many others injured. Eight days later Papadopoulos was outsted by the head of his secret police, Ioannidhis, who then took over.

The fascist regime of the junta ended with a fiasco bizarrely reminiscent of the ‘Katastrofi’ of 1922, in that it was motivated in part by the old ‘Megali Idhea’ (the Grand Idea) of annexing territory with large Greek populations that still lay outside of Greek borders after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. The plan was to force union of Cyprus with Greece by assassinating the president installed by the British, Makarios. Unfortunately for them, Makarios found out what was up and got way. The colonels responded by sticking a former EOKA leader in his place and the Turks invaded the island, occupying the upper northern third, and driving some 200,000 Greek Cypriots out of their homes and fleeing for the south. Some 1700 Greek Cypriot men disappeared and were never found again, assumed to have been executed by the Turks. The Greek army mutinied, and Karamanlis invited back from his exile in Paris to take office again, and he and his Nea Dimokratia Party (ND) won easily in the elections. Though he negotiated a ceasefire in Cyprus, there was little more he could do in that situation; he withdrew Greece from NATO temporarily (though it was soon back in) and stated that U.S. bases would have to be shut down except where they were of specific benefit to Greece (but they remained). He lifted the ban on communist parties, legitimizing the KKE for the first time, and Andreas Papandreou formed PASOK party (the Panhellenic Socialist Union). Karamanlis returned the country to democracy and stability, and held a referendum on the monarchy, in which the Greek majority turned thumbs down on the return of Constantine II. Karamanlis proceeded to set up a French style presidency, occupying that post from 1980 to 1985, and from 1990 to 1995. Karamanlis is credited with the entry of Greece into the European Community (now the EU) in 1981, though many Greeks these days do not seem at all happy with EU membership, and especially with the rise in the cost of living that has come with the Euro. Karamanlis did little to stop inflation, which was around 25% in 1981, or to stop massive tax evasion, which removed about one third of the funds needed for the annual budget.