10
Uncle Sam’s Protégé
1949–1974
The decade of violence and bloodshed was over. A six-year civil war, beginning in 1943, had lasted almost twice as long as the foreign occupation that had triggered it. What followed was a victors’ peace. There was to be no accommodation with the losing side. The Communist Party of Greece had been declared an illegal organization at the end of 1947. It would remain banned for the best part of thirty years. Thousands of communist supporters now lived in exile behind the Iron Curtain – many of them concentrated, by the will of the Soviet authorities, in faraway Tashkent. In Greece, those who emerged from prison during the 1950s continued to be subject to surveillance and harassment. Former collaborators with the Nazis found themselves easily rehabilitated, often rewarded with positions of trust and pensions. No such forgiveness would be extended to those who had fought against them, until the 1980s.
Historians today describe Greece during the 1950s as an ‘anti-communist state’ and ‘a client state to the United States’, and with good reason.1 For the first and only time in its history, the nation state that had been created in the nineteenth century out of the dynamics of Great Power politics in Europe now found itself under the direction of a non-European power. It could not be otherwise. The Civil War had been won thanks to American intervention. Once it was over, it was the Americans who held the political reins. After a chaotic start, with no fewer than seven governments and three parliamentary elections in three years, it was American insistence that brought in a new electoral system in 1952, heralding an uninterrupted period of rule by parties of the right until 1963. At the same time a revised constitution gave the vote in national elections to women for the first time. Under the aegis of the United States, Greece joined the NATO alliance, along with Turkey, in October 1951. Both countries would play their part in the next attempt to contain international Communism, sending troops and aircraft to support America and its allies in the Korean peninsula.
The impact of American intervention had a decisive effect on the future shape of the Greek economy. A year after the Truman Doctrine came the Marshall Plan, a four-year programme of massive economic aid to the stricken countries of Europe to help reconstruction after the Second World War. During that period more than one billion dollars were disbursed in aid to Greece, the poorest country in Europe at the time. The sudden influx of American affluence changed the landscape and many aspects of Greek society, just as surely as American weaponry had driven out the communist alternative. In the 1940s the supply of electricity barely reached into the mountains and islands. Three decades later you had to go a long way to come upon a village still unconnected to the network. The long strip of steelworks, oil refineries and shipyards that stretches along the coast of Attica to the west of Athens was developed during this time. Once again, as during the 1930s, attempts were made to turn subsistence agriculture into a profitable business, though with mixed results.
Shipping, which had been a Greek success story since before the Revolution, made a spectacular recovery in the late 1940s and reached new heights thereafter. On shore, the 1950s and 1960s were a boom time for building. Partly reflecting and partly hastening a growing influx of people from villages into the cities, Athens, Piraeus and Salonica grew at a pace and to a size never seen before. Between 1951 and 1971 the population of the capital almost doubled, to reach 2.5 million.2 This was the era of the polykatoikia, the apartment block built of unadorned concrete and typically five or six storeys high. The shape of today’s urban landscape was laid down then. Many rural villages that had been depopulated and destroyed during the fighting never fully recovered. Some were abandoned altogether. Once again, large numbers of young male Greeks chose to leave the country to find work abroad. New destinations this time were Australia, Canada and northern Europe, particularly the industrial dynamo of West Germany. At the same time, the foundations of mass tourism were being laid. The growth of cheap air travel, the package holiday and to some extent also the cruise industry began to make Greece accessible to visitors who could never have afforded the journey before. For the first time mass mobility was not all in the one direction.
Several of these initiatives began with the Americans and were filtered through the mechanisms of the Greek state. But the most pervasive effect of American tutelage on the Greek economy seems to have been to unleash a spirit of entrepreneurism that had once flourished in the late eighteenth century, but during the intervening years had often been eclipsed by the centralizing power of the state. In the 1950s and 1960s it was small family businesses that proved to be the engine of growth, especially in construction, tourism and shipping. Between 1950 and 1973 it has been estimated that growth in Greece was ‘the highest in the capitalist countries of southern Europe and perhaps in the whole western world’, with an increase in Gross Domestic Product that averaged 6.5 per cent per year.3
During the first half of the 1950s, the prospects for the Greek state had never looked better. The Americans were the new Bavarians. It had taken them rather longer, but by their intervention they had put an end to a decade of bloodshed, just as the Bavarians had done in 1833. Bringing with them less cultural baggage, but a political agenda dictated by the Realpolitik of the Cold War, the Americans opened the way to a new era of modernization.
But it was not to be so simple. Despite all the efforts that had been made during the three decades since the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922, the story of the Greek state could still never be the whole story. It was time once again for the nation beyond its borders to assert itself – with consequences that at the time were incalculable and have yet to be fully played out, more than half a century later.
THE NATION REDISCOVERED
The defeat in 1922 had all but collapsed the distinction between the Greek state and the wider Greek nation. But not quite. After the end of the Second World War there were still Orthodox Christian, Greek-speaking communities that had been established for centuries in regions of the eastern Mediterranean that remained outside the frontiers of the Greek state. One of these was the southern part of Albania, often in Greek called contentiously ‘Northern Epiros’. The political divisions of the Cold War ruled out any adjustment there for the foreseeable future. Another was the Dodecanese, consisting of the twelve islands and surrounding islets in the southeastern corner of the Aegean, lying close to the Turkish mainland. The fortunes of war had ended the Italian occupation of these islands, dating back to 1912, in September 1943. After that they had passed to the Germans, then to the British. Nobody had any serious objection in 1946 to the Dodecanese becoming part of Greece. Even the government of Turkey acquiesced, although previous administrations had resisted Greek expansion so close to the Turkish mainland, and the largest of the islands, Rhodes, had and still does have a significant Turkish minority. The twelve islands duly became united with Greece in March 1947.
That left Cyprus. In the case of ‘Northern Epiros’ there had been no chance for the people concerned to have a say. In the Dodecanese, there had been no need. With Cyprus, it was different. Cyprus had passed from Ottoman to British administration in 1878 and since 1925 had been governed as a Crown Colony of Great Britain. Out of a population of some six hundred thousand, 80 per cent were Orthodox Christians who spoke the Cypriot dialect of Greek. This was a significantly higher proportion of Orthodox Greek speakers than had existed in many areas that had become part of the Greek state earlier in the century, notably Crete and much of Macedonia, including the city of Salonica, which had by this time become the ‘co-capital’ of Greece. The Greek Cypriot majority, and many in Greece too, had always assumed that sooner or later the British would allow the island to become part of Greece, as they had once done with the Ionian islands.
This was not a far-fetched proposition. After all, Great Britain had actually offered the island to Greece back in 1915, as a sweetener to the anti-Venizelist government to enter the First World War. Thirty years later, when Archbishop Damaskinos visited London in his capacity as regent, he was urged by the poet and diplomat George Seferis, who was then his private secretary, to add Cyprus to his wish list from the new British Labour government. First responses were not discouraging. Then, in 1947, Britain withdrew from its colonial possessions in the Indian subcontinent, and a month later unilaterally pulled out of Greece, so opening the way to the Truman Doctrine. All the signs were that the old imperial power was in retreat.
Successive governments in Greece had never been keen to push the issue of Cyprus. Britain had been too important an ally to risk alienating by supporting Cypriot claims for Enosis – union with Greece. And of all the regions that had seen movements for Enosis during the past century, Cyprus was much the farthest away. Although the argument seems not to have been publicly articulated, a unified Greek state that included Cyprus might present formidable logistical problems for its defence. Probably for all these reasons, it had been left to the Greek Cypriots themselves to make the running. When they rebelled in October 1931, the prime minister in Greece had been none other than the former champion of the wider nation, Eleftherios Venizelos. But Venizelos at the time had been preoccupied with managing the fallout from Britain’s departure from the gold standard the previous month, and his country’s bankruptcy that followed. Despite some agitation in Greece, the Greeks of Cyprus and their grievances had been held at arm’s length by the Greek state that so many of them seemed eager to join.
Quite why they were still so eager at the end of the 1940s is an open question. The Cypriots had been in a position to observe from a distance the disintegration of that state and its horrific consequences. They themselves had been fortunate to be spared. Cyprus had never come under attack by the Axis, although Cypriots had volunteered for service with British forces during both world wars. But the fact is that they were eager as never before. What nobody could have foreseen, either in Cyprus or in Greece, at the beginning of the 1950s, was what a vicious lash the dying British Empire still had in its tail.
Political leadership of the majority Greek-speaking community of Cyprus lay with the Orthodox Church. There was no secular alternative, since the British colonial administration had abolished an elected Legislative Council after the disturbances of 1931. Head of the Orthodox Church was the Archbishop of Cyprus. Since the sixteenth century, archbishops had enjoyed the additional title of ‘Ethnarch’. This was an elected office from among the island’s bishops, with tenure for life. But the Ethnarch, by tradition and long-established practice that had begun under the Ottomans, was more than a spiritual leader. He was expected to act as the spokesman, defender and protector of his flock. It was a legacy of the Ottoman system that political power, responsibility and, incidentally, a great deal of wealth had come to be accumulated by the Church of Cyprus. Successive generations of British colonial rulers, brought up to consider Church and state as separate spheres, had never really got the hang of this. In the new circumstances of the 1950s the consequences would prove explosive.
An unofficial referendum of its members was held by the Church of Cyprus in January 1950. Voting took place in churches and was not secret. But historians accept that the response of 96.5 per cent of eligible votes cast in favour of union with Greece was a fair expression of the popular will. Six months later, the eighty-year-old archbishop and ethnarch, Makarios II, died. In October 1950 his successor was elected ‘by a majority claimed to represent 97 per cent of the Greek Cypriot people’.4 Michael Mouskos, son of Christodoulos, had been born into a family of small-scale farmers and pastoralists in the district of Paphos. Later, on entering the Church, he had given up his family name, as is customary, and taken the monastic name of Makarios, meaning ‘blessèd’. As archbishop he became Makarios III. Not quite thirty-seven years old, this third Makarios was one of the youngest to hold the office. And he was not just young. He was a figure of exceptional energy, talent and charisma. During the next two decades Makarios would run rings around British, Greek, Turkish and later Cypriot politicians and diplomats. Makarios remains a towering figure in the political history of the Greek nation during the second half of the twentieth century – indeed literally. At the imposing site of his grave above the Kykkos Monastery in the foothills of the Troodos Mountains, his bronze effigy stands some thirty feet high, still wearing his trademark ecclesiastical robes and enigmatic smile.
The result of the referendum was predictably brushed aside by the British colonial authorities. But the leadership of the Orthodox Church in Cyprus was determined, even before the election of Makarios as archbishop, to maintain momentum and seek support for their cause from outside the island. Their first port of call was Greece. A delegation arrived in Athens in June, bringing with them the bound volumes that held the signatures of the voters in the referendum. Less than a year had passed since the end of the Civil War. The Greek state and its citizens had barely begun to lick the wounds it had inflicted, let alone heal them. And here was a clarion call from beyond their borders that immediately evoked the glory days of 1821 and 1912. Even better (unless you looked too closely at the internal politics of the Greek Cypriots, as most in Greece did not), here was a cause capable of uniting the entire political spectrum: for the right a nationalist struggle along traditional lines, but for the left no less appealing as a stand against imperialism and colonialism. Indeed, as the decade progressed, in Greece it would be the defeated and marginalized left that would most effectively give voice to public opinion in favour of Makarios and Enosis for Cyprus.
Throughout that time, the foreign policy of successive Greek governments would be to varying degrees held hostage by an agenda that was set in Nicosia and driven by Makarios. Despite the pragmatic reluctance of government ministers, in Greece the cause of Enosis quickly took fire in street demonstrations and in the columns of the press. As early as May 1950, sentiments were being voiced in the Greek parliament that would not have been out of place in the 1840s: the government in Athens had a responsibility to ‘the nation as a whole and not just the Greek state in its narrow “politically artificial” borders’. The nation came first. And the nation had ‘never consisted of the citizens of the Greek Kingdom only’.5
It was at the insistence of Makarios that the government led by former Field Marshal Alexandros Papagos made a series of direct appeals to the British to begin negotiations for an orderly transition towards the union of Cyprus with Greece. One of these involved a face-to-face meeting with the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, in 1953. Afterwards, the Greek side considered that Papagos had been gratuitously insulted. The stakes were raised even higher the next year, when a junior minister in the House of Commons went so far as to say that there were certain colonial possessions that for strategic reasons could ‘never’ be allowed to pass out of British sovereignty. The Conservative government that had come to power in Britain in 1951 had rowed back a long way from the tentative openness shown at first by its Labour predecessor in 1945.
These repeated rebuffs by an ally and former ‘protecting power’ only served to inflame public opinion in Greece still further. The Athens government was caught in a pincer movement between Makarios on one side and the British on the other. But Makarios and the Cypriot leadership were not content with putting pressure, via the Greek government, on Great Britain. In parallel, and from the beginning, they had determined on a policy of internationalizing their claim for union, through an appeal to the United Nations. Here the grounds were not the century-old appeal to the Grand Idea of uniting the nation, but rather the principle of self-determination for the majority of Cypriots. The practical problem was that only those who already enjoyed self-determination had the right of appeal to that forum. So once again the hard task fell to the government of Greece – first to lobby the Assembly to be allowed to make the case for the Cypriots, and then to make it sufficiently persuasively. The British went to great lengths to prevent the appeal from reaching the Assembly at all. And despite repeated attempts the case was never accepted by the UN.
What the Cypriot leadership was attempting to do was to repeat the successful tactics of the Greek revolutionaries in the 1820s. But in the new conditions of the 1950s, internationalization brought with it new dangers. Historians based in Greece, though not their counterparts in Cyprus, have seen this in hindsight as a fatal mistake: to bring the issue of self-determination before the United Nations would be to open the door to Turkey, which could be expected to intervene to protect the interests of its own minority in Cyprus.6
In reality, throughout the first half of the 1950s, this risk was much less than it has come to seem in retrospect. The government of Adnan Menderes and the Democratic Party that had been voted into office in Turkey in 1950 was at first committed to maintaining good relations with Greece. The governments of both countries were keen to participate in the NATO alliance. A new ‘treaty of peace and friendship’ was signed between them in February 1953. For the Menderes government, as for those of Atatürk and İnönü before it, Cyprus was simply not on the agenda. The territory of the Turkish nation had been defined by the ‘National Pact’, drawn up at the very beginning of the Turkish national movement, in September 1919. It did not include Cyprus. In the Treaty of Lausanne, in 1923, the Turkish side had abrogated all claims to Cyprus in favour of Great Britain. What would happen if the colonial power were in turn to hand it over to someone else had not been considered at the time. But in the early 1950s the Turkish position was clear and disinterested. The Greek Orthodox leadership in Cyprus and policymakers in Greece could be forgiven for failing to anticipate what happened next. It was not Turkey, the traditional adversary, that first raised the stakes, but Great Britain.
The crunch came in the summer of 1955. Eden’s successor as Foreign Secretary, Harold Macmillan, at short notice invited the governments of both Greece and Turkey to send their foreign ministers to London for a ‘tripartite conference’ on the future of the island. ‘The stronger the position the Turks take at the outset [of the conference] the better it will be for us and for them,’ wrote Macmillan to his officials shortly before it began. Noting that the purpose of the conference was not to bring agreement, but in effect to ‘divide and rule’, one British historian has drawn attention to the ‘high-risk nature of this gambit, and its not entirely respectable character’. Makarios at the time called it ‘crooked’.7 There were of course no representatives from Cyprus present.
By this time, the tone of Menderes and his foreign minister, Fatin Zorlu, had become markedly more populist. Some in the British Foreign Office were already fearful that the fuse had been lit for an explosion that nobody would be able to control. So it would prove. On 5 September, as the conference was nearing its end, Zorlu seems to have thought that the British were about to yield to the demands of the Greek side. If true, this was a complete misreading of the entire nature and purpose of the conference. In a telephone call to Istanbul from London that evening, the Turkish foreign minister is reported to have said that ‘a little activity will be useful’.8 Next day, a mass demonstration gathered in Taksim Square, in the centre of Istanbul. A tide of violence swept through Beyoğlu, the ‘European quarter’ of the city, known in Greek as Pera. All the evidence suggests that it was orchestrated, at the beginning at least.
The violence of 6 and 7 September 1955 in Istanbul and other Turkish cities has been called by Greek commentators and historians a ‘pogrom’. While the police stood by, some seventy Orthodox churches were looted and set on fire, and Greek businesses and homes were ransacked. In only twenty-four hours ancient hatreds burst through the surface to wreck the rapprochement between Greece and Turkey that went back to 1930 and had so recently been cemented through NATO. The events of those two days would set the seal on Greek–Turkish antagonism that has dominated the relationship between the two countries ever since. The Greek Orthodox community of Istanbul, some hundred thousand strong, had been spared forcible removal under the terms of the Lausanne agreement in 1923. Now began a rapid exodus that within a very few years would reduce it to its present-day level of a couple of thousand.
In order to gain short-term political advantage and keep control of Cyprus for a few years longer, Macmillan and his policy had unleashed the genie of populist anger in the largest and most powerful of Greece’s neighbours. It could never again be put it back in its bottle. Six years later Menderes and most of his cabinet, including Zorlu, would be hanged after being ousted in a military coup, in part because of their role in instigating these events. But no subsequent Turkish government, of whatever political colour, military or civilian, has ever yet found it possible or expedient to give ground over Cyprus, more than sixty years later.
By the time the tripartite conference took place, on the island itself an armed struggle had already begun. The guerrilla group that took up arms in April 1955 announced itself as the National Organization of Cypriot Combatants, better known by its acronym in Greek, EOKA. Its leader was a former colonel in the Greek armed forces, Georgios Grivas. Originally from Cyprus, Grivas had fought against the Italians in Albania. Towards the end of the Occupation and for a short time afterwards, he had led a militia known by the Greek initial ‘X’, pronounced ‘Chi’, which targeted Greek communists. Far more of a military tactician than a politician, Grivas would evade all efforts by the British security services to hunt him down, just as his political master Makarios equivocated over his support for the armed struggle. While the conflict lasted, Grivas appropriated to himself the name ‘Digenis’, invoking the quintessential hero of a heroic oral tradition shared throughout the Greek-speaking world. Today one of the main thoroughfares in Nicosia is named Grivas-Digenis Avenue.
In the eyes of the British, EOKA was a terrorist organization. To its supporters its members were freedom fighters engaged in a struggle for national liberation. Sabotage and ambushes targeted the military and the police, the very methods that guerrilla groups had used against the Axis occupiers in Greece during the war. Then, British service personnel had aided and abetted them. Now it was the turn of the British to be targeted as the enemy. At the same time, EOKA meted out exemplary punishment to those perceived to be ‘traitors’. It also carried on a subsidiary campaign against members of the Cyprus Communist Party (known by the initials AKEL). These tactics were more reminiscent of the practice of both sides in the Greek Civil War. The EOKA campaign began with a series of explosions and attacks on police stations, more than two hundred of them in the first three months. Soon the British responded by declaring a state of emergency. Under emergency laws anyone caught carrying a weapon would face a mandatory death sentence.
The first executions were carried out under these laws in May 1956. Michael Karaolis, known as Michalakis, was twenty-three at the time of his conviction, Andreas Dimitriou twenty-one. Both were tried by due process, the one for shooting a Greek Cypriot policeman dead in broad daylight in the centre of Nicosia, the other for shooting and wounding an Englishman in Famagusta. But in Greek eyes the trials were flawed because the key witnesses, as well as the prosecutor, were Turkish Cypriots. The executions shocked public opinion throughout Cyprus and Greece. No form of public demonstration was allowed in Cyprus. But in Athens on 9 May news that the men would be executed the next day brought an incensed crowd to Omonoia Square. There they attempted to storm a building that had been cordoned off by armed police. In scenes that must have been alarmingly reminiscent of events in the city’s other main square in December 1944, jittery policemen opened fire. Four people were killed and dozens injured.9
Afterwards, throughout Greece, towns and squares would be officially renamed after the executed men, names that remain in place today and include the street in front of the building that at the time housed the British Embassy in Athens. EOKA responded immediately by killing two British army corporals it had been holding hostage. These men, who had not harmed anybody, are not commemorated anywhere.
All told, the EOKA struggle cost just over five hundred lives lost, with more than twice that number injured. Over half of these casualties, far outnumbering either British military personnel or members of EOKA, were Greek Cypriot civilians. Compared to other anti-colonial struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, the damage was limited.10 As a military conflict, this one was also inconclusive. As had happened so often before in the history of the Greek nation, the solution would be found far away, this time in New York, Zurich and London.
Before that could happen, the British government further alienated the Greeks of both Cyprus and Greece by the arrest of Archbishop Makarios at Nicosia Airport, in March 1956, as he was preparing to board a plane for talks in Athens. Makarios would not reach his destination for another thirteen months. During that time, the Ethnarch was held a virtual prisoner in an even remoter British island dependency, the Seychelles. When Makarios did finally reach Athens, during Orthodox Holy Week on 17 April 1957, he was treated to a hero’s welcome. An American-style motorcade carried him from the airport, with many stops for greetings and speeches from local dignitaries, to the Grande Bretagne Hotel in Syntagma Square. The moment has been aptly called the ‘apogee of his entire career’.11
While Makarios addressed the crowd with an emotional impromptu address from the balcony overlooking the square, there must have been some in the crowd down below who had stood in the same space to hear Venizelos speak from a similar balcony almost half a century earlier, when he had first arrived from Crete to become prime minister of Greece and lead the country into the triumphs of the Balkan wars. Many more would have known of that occasion from their parents or their history lessons. Could it be that, once again, a spirit of renewal was about to sweep in from the wider nation and clear out the cobwebs and frustrations and petty rivalries that beset the Greek state?
But the times were different, and so was the man. There is no evidence that Makarios ever harboured ambitions to rule in Greece. Venizelos in 1910 had been ready to leave his embattled island behind him and pursue a larger vision, which in time would come to encompass the union of his homeland with Greece. Makarios was in Athens only because the British authorities would not let him go home to Cyprus. Venizelos had been invited to the Greek capital because there had been a vacancy at the top. In 1957 there was no vacancy, even if none of the leaders of the political parties could match Makarios in charisma or (probably) popular following in the country. Possibly Makarios missed an opportunity that might have changed the course of the nation’s history. More likely, there was no opportunity.
Whatever the reason, from that moment onwards, the initiative slowly but inexorably began to slide out of Makarios’s hands.
By 1957 the international context had changed. The Anglo-French attempt to seize back the Suez Canal, after the Egyptian leader Abdul Gamal Nasser had nationalized it, had ended in disaster the previous November. The ‘Suez crisis’ was to prove a turning point for the old European colonial powers. In Britain it also ended the political career of Anthony Eden, who had succeeded the ailing Winston Churchill as prime minister the year before, and he resigned in January. The new prime minister was Harold Macmillan, the architect, while he had been Foreign Secretary, of the ill-fated tripartite conference on Cyprus. Political priorities for the British Conservative government were changing too. In the changed climate after Suez, it would no longer be unthinkable to give up Cyprus, provided that Britain could keep its military bases. The Turkish side was now pressing for the island to be partitioned. During 1957 a new possibility began to be canvassed: that Cyprus might instead become an independent state. That way, the two communities might eventually forge for themselves a new national identity as Cypriots.
Just as these ideas were gaining ground in the political arena far away, events in Cyprus took a turn that with hindsight should have been taken as an awful warning. Intercommunal relations in Cyprus had never been marked by the mutual antipathy or outbreaks of reciprocal violence that had been the hallmark of the struggle for Enosis in Crete throughout the nineteenth century. Even after the start of its campaign in April 1955, EOKA does not seem to have targeted its victims as Turks. On the other hand, since Turkish Cypriots were disproportionately represented in the local security forces, they were increasingly exposed to attack. When a senior Turkish Cypriot officer of the police Special Branch was assassinated in November 1957, the event provoked a long-delayed backlash by the Turkish Cypriot community, aided by the government in Ankara.
This took the form of a new insurgency (‘terrorists’ or ‘freedom fighters’, according to perspective). It was called the Turkish Resistance Organization, and known by its initials in Turkish, TMT. The final phase of the EOKA campaign now became a three-way contest, fought throughout 1958. For the first time, the worst of the violence was perpetrated by the two clandestine guerrilla organizations against civilians of the other community. Riots were sparked by Turkish Cypriots in Nicosia in January and June. Victims of the mob were lynched. A convoy of Greek Cypriot prisoners, under British escort, was ambushed in June, and several of the prisoners hacked to death. EOKA now began to strike back against the Turkish Cypriot community. It also used intimidation against its own people, to prevent them moving out of areas where Turkish Cypriots were taking over control. All over Cyprus, houses began to display the national flags of Greece or Turkey – ironically the beginning of a habit that would continue throughout the history of independent Cyprus.
And yet a diplomatic solution was found. It came from an unlikely quarter. On the evening of 4 December 1958, on the fringe of a debate in the General Assembly of the United Nations, Zorlu, the Turkish foreign minister, bore down on his Greek counterpart, Evangelos Averof-Tositsa. Why, said Zorlu, should the two of them not sort out their countries’ differences over Cyprus? Effectively, this is what happened. The British government was sidelined. So too were Makarios and the Cypriots. Both foreign ministers found they could agree to Cyprus becoming an independent state. That way, Greece would have to give up the idea of Enosis, Turkey of partition. Great Britain would give up sovereignty but keep its military bases. All sides would be losers. But it mattered more that none would come out a winner. There are echoes, in this deal, of the way in which Greece itself had won its independence in the early 1830s – except in the outcome.
The details were hastily thrashed out among the representatives of Great Britain, Greece and Turkey at conferences in Zurich in December 1958 and at Lancaster House in London the following February. Makarios was brought in only at the last minute. There came a moment of almost unbearable tension at Lancaster House, when under intense pressure from the Greek and British ministers present, Makarios at first refused to sign a final agreement over which he had had no say and which he would now be responsible for implementing. The moment passed, and the independent Republic of Cyprus was signed into being on the afternoon of 19 February 1959.
When Makarios landed at Nicosia airport on 1 March, after an absence of almost exactly three years, he greeted the waiting officials and reporters with a single word. It was the word, in the original ancient Greek, supposed to have been spoken by the first Marathon runner when he brought the news to the Athenians of their victory over the Persians in the battle of 490 BCE: ‘We have won.’ What Makarios privately thought we will never know. He must have known very well that this was no victory. The poet George Seferis, wearing his diplomatic hat, had played a leading part in the negotiations, only to be horrified by the outcome. Foreseeing its likely consequences more accurately than most at the time, Seferis concluded in the privacy of his diary, a year after the agreement had been signed, ‘We [Greeks] aren’t fit for great things.’12 It was the saddest of epitaphs for the old Grand Idea that had been buried in the ruins of Smyrna almost forty years before, but whose lingering memory had still not been fully laid to rest.
The Republic of Cyprus formally became an independent member of the British Commonwealth on 16 August 1960. Elaborate constitutional arrangements had been worked out to ensure that power was shared between the two communities. The president would always be a Greek Cypriot, the vice-president a Turkish Cypriot. Lower offices were assigned more or less proportionally (and were the subject of much haggling, both before and afterwards). The republic was to have both Greek and Turkish as its official languages, and a national flag representing the map of the island on a white background above a pair of olive branches, symbolizing peace. Great Britain retained sovereignty in perpetuity over the military bases of Akrotiri and Dhekelia. By an arrangement reminiscent of Greece in the nineteenth century, the independence of the fledgling republic was to be guaranteed by the three powers that had brought it into being: Britain, Greece and Turkey.
With the future of Cyprus seemingly settled, leadership of the Greek nation had been reasserted by the government in Athens. Relations between Greece and Britain had reached an all-time low while the conflict over Cyprus had lasted. But with nothing much at stake thereafter, they would be quickly repaired. America, Greece’s new patron, had stood by on the sidelines throughout the conflict, watching events with some degree of bafflement, irritation and, at times, consternation. Once the involvement of Turkey had become clear, the priority for the United States was to minimize disruption to the NATO alliance. This necessarily involved some distancing from Greece. The beginning of popular anti-American sentiment among Greeks, which would peak in the 1980s, has been traced to those years. Not coincidentally, in 1959 the Karamanlis government began to seek a new alignment towards the emerging European Economic Community, the EEC, the forerunner of today’s European Union.13
In the meantime, during the 1950s and 1960s, creative spirits in Greece were starting to explore rather different ways to be Greek.
DANCING WITH ZORBA
Going to the cinema, in the 1950s, was an inexpensive way to enjoy an evening out. The new favourable conditions for small, family-run businesses combined with the influence of Hollywood to generate a home-grown film industry. In terms of the number of films made per head of population, productivity in Greece would soon grow to rival Hollywood itself. In the cities and larger towns, electricity had now reached most neighbourhoods. By the end of the decade the number of cinemas in Athens and Piraeus seems to have been not far short of five hundred. Vacant building sites were easily converted into open-air cinemas for the summer months. Annual ticket sales more than doubled between 1956 and their peak in 1968, by which time on average Greeks were going to the cinema once a fortnight, the highest rate in Europe. Between 1944 and 1974 more than fifteen hundred films were released.14
The role of the Greek state is revealing. At this time there were no state subsidies. The enterprise that proved so productive was entirely private. The subsidized Greek art-cinema of more recent times lay way in the future. Censorship, on the other hand, was strict, and maintained throughout the whole period until 1974. No mention of Communism, the Civil War, contemporary politics or anything that might offend foreign tourists or investors was permitted. Nothing but respect must be shown to members of the armed forces or the country’s ancient monuments. It is sometimes suggested that in this way the state did exercise a controlling function. But in practice this was usually done with a light touch, and a great deal of indifference. If storylines could not be based on books by communist writers, there was no ban on actors or musicians who belonged to the far left. Before 1967 it was rare for the censors to have to intervene. Directors had already internalized the agenda for themselves. Like Hollywood or any other popular art form, Greek cinema of the 1950s and 1960s maintained its own taboos.
Films were made on a minimal budget, until the mid-1960s usually shot in black and white, filmed on suburban or rural locations of a type that would be immediately familiar to most cinemagoers, and aimed at a mass audience – all reasons for them to have been largely ignored by historians until our own century. Greek society was changing very rapidly. The films themselves and their huge popularity were part of those changes. Of course the characters and the storylines that appear in them were not true reflections of everyday life, despite their often recognizable settings. But they did cater to some of the hopes and anxieties of a time when record numbers of people were leaving behind their remote villages, moving to hastily built suburbs and coming to terms with the effects of new-found affluence – whether or not they also shared in it.
Out of this ferment of activity emerged some all-time classics. Stella, released in 1955, was only the second film by the young British-educated director from Cyprus, Michael Cacoyannis. It also marked the cinema debut of the future political activist and Minister of Culture, Melina Mercouri. With overtones of classical tragedy and the brutal realities of life in traditional Greek communities, Stella adapts the story made famous by Georges Bizet in the opera Carmen to a working-class suburb of Athens in the 1950s. Mercouri’s character rejects every one of the conventions set by traditional Greek society for female behaviour. She pays the price, as might be expected. Social norms are upheld. But the sheer power of Mercouri’s performance forced audiences to recognize in this macho femme fatale that most cherished of all Greek male values: heroic defiance in the face of impossible odds.
Soon, Greek films were beginning to be noticed at international festivals. Some of the directors were Greek Americans who already had a foothold in the US industry. It was at Cannes that Mercouri, the star of Stella, met the American-born director Jules Dassin, whom she went on to marry. They starred together in Never on a Sunday, which Dassin also directed. Very much a ‘Greek’ film, this was one of the first to be made with English dialogue. It was released in 1960. Dassin plays a young American who on a first visit to Greece is befriended by the Piraeus prostitute Illia, played by Mercouri. Her name is not a real girl’s name in Greek, but sounds like the feminine form of the word for ‘sun’. He is called Homer. At once he decides that Illia must be a ‘symbol’ of the quest that has brought him to Greece. Like Professor Higgins in Shaw’s Pygmalion, Homer takes it upon himself to reform her. Two thousand years ago, he tells her, ‘Greece was the greatest country in the whole world’. ‘It still is!’ retorts Illia. The naiveté of the heart-of-gold good-time girl of Piraeus and the naiveté of the starry-eyed American called Homer (this was long before The Simpsons) both raise smiles from a more knowing audience. The reality of what Greece might actually be, or become, in the new decade of the 1960s floats, elusively, somewhere between and beyond the two of them.
Never on a Sunday won the prize for best actress at the Cannes Film Festival. The Oscar for best original song that year went to Manos Hadjidakis, who had composed the soundtrack. This was something else about these Greek films: they guaranteed the popularity of the other great success story of Greek creativity of the time and eventually helped bring it to the attention of an international audience. This was Greek popular music.
Hadjidakis, along with his contemporary Mikis Theodorakis (both of them born in 1925), had been responsible during the previous decade for launching a new style of music that brought to prominence the bouzouki, until then the quintessential musical instrument of the urban Greek underworld and the rebetika tradition. Based on the characteristic rhythms and some of the tonality of rebetika, this ‘new wave’, as it soon came to be known, also drew on elements of rural Greek folk music and European and American popular song. The result is an exuberant hybrid, at once easier on Western-trained ears than true rebetika or the Middle Eastern modal tradition from which they derive, and melodically as catchy and inventive as nineteenth-century Italian opera.
The twin originators of this movement could not have been more different from one another. But they had one important thing in common. Both were outsiders. Hadjidakis was homosexual at a time when public attitudes to sexuality in Greece were as conservative as they come, Theodorakis a communist who had once been left for dead after a beating during the ‘White Terror’, and had experienced detention without trial and torture during the Civil War. Both men were poles apart from the ‘official’ Greek state in the 1950s and 1960s. Perhaps for that reason, ironically, the ‘new wave’ they introduced into Greek music ‘met with national acceptance and [was] endorsed by left and right alike’.15
All the elements of the new style came together in 1960, when Theodorakis launched his musical setting of eight poems by the communist poet Giannis Ritsos. It was something of a miracle that these songs were allowed to circulate at all. The lyrics came from a poem that Ritsos had published in the communist daily, Rizospastis, shortly before the Metaxas dictatorship. They lament the death of a young tobacco worker, shot dead by police during one of the strikes in 1936 that Metaxas had used as his excuse to seize power. The written word was not subject to censorship at this time, but gramophone records were.
More remarkable still was that Theodorakis would soon enter politics as a member of parliament for the United Democratic Left (EDA), the relatively far-left party that was known to be a front for the banned KKE. He would go on to set more poems by Ritsos, including Romiosyni, which ever since has been one of his best known and most loved compositions. Ritsos’s poem had been written during the ‘White Terror’, between 1945 and 1947. It celebrates a version of Greek identity throughout history as a never-ending revolutionary struggle against an unforgiving environment and predatory outsiders. Ever since the disc was released in 1966, Greeks of all political stripes and none have sung themselves hoarse to keep up with the thrusting drumbeat and clangorous bouzouki, with the words:
When they clench their fists
sunshine’s a sure thing for the world.16
It was not only communist poets whose works became the lyrics of ‘new wave’ music. George Seferis and Odysseus Elytis may well have been helped towards their respective Nobel Prizes for Literature, the one in 1963, the other in 1979, by the popularity of their poems set to music by Theodorakis. Soon every composer was doing it. Most of the major figures in Greek poetry at the time eagerly and willingly worked with them. Texts that had been written to be intellectually challenging on the page acquired new life, and sometimes quite new meanings, transposed into a musical idiom that was at once new and felt to be deeply rooted in popular traditions that were uniquely Greek: rebetika and the even older rhythms and melodies of the mountains and islands.
This remarkable meeting of the popular with ‘high’ literature reached its apogee in another film directed by Cacoyannis and released in 1964. Zorba the Greek is based on the novel written by Nikos Kazantzakis during the Occupation and published shortly afterwards. The film was made in English and uses the catchier title devised for the novel in translation. In this way Kazantzakis’s Life and Opinions of Alexis Zorbas became a fable about the true identity of the modern Greek – even though the title role was taken by the Mexican-American Anthony Quinn and the other male lead was changed from an overly cerebral Greek intellectual to a gormless Englishman, played by Alan Bates. The film was made on location in Crete with local villagers as extras. Theodorakis composed the music. At the climax of the story, after everything has gone wrong, the earthy, vibrant Zorba is asked humbly by his intellectual ‘Boss’ to teach him to dance. In the novel, this is a moment of liberation, a short-lived transcendence of the barriers between soul and body, between intellectual deliberation and spontaneous, joyous emotion. In the film, the two characters start off with the slow ‘butcher’s dance’, the chasapiko that is one of the staples of rebetika, then break into the much faster chasaposerviko, which despite its name is a very different dance, this time from the rural tradition. The result, with Theodorakis’s pulsing, staccato, unforgettable music, has been known ever since as syrtaki – a ‘traditional’ Greek dance that had never existed before.
Two foreign actors capering in an invented, hybrid dance on a Cretan shore, to music written in a new style for new audiences, both at home and abroad – that is the final image of Zorba the Greek. Once again, for good or for ill, the business of being Greek was never going to be a matter for Greeks alone. By 1964 it had entered on an entirely new phase – and one that for once had almost nothing to do with the Greek state or its institutions.
POLITICAL CAR CRASH
Not for the first time in the history of that state, the vitality of its ‘bold pioneers’ in the creative arts was sadly lacking in the political sphere. The stability of right-wing governments elected since 1952 was beginning to break down ten years later. The governing party, at first known as Greek Rally, morphed after the death of its leader, the former Field Marshal Papagos, into the National Radical Union under Konstantinos Karamanlis, who succeeded him in 1955. In the parliamentary election of 1958 the United Democratic Left (EDA) had overtaken its centrist rivals to become the main opposition party, in part thanks to its strong line against concessions by the government over Cyprus. Then in 1961 that role passed to the recently reorganized party of the centre-left known as the Centre Union.
This was the successor to the party formed by Nikolaos Plastiras, veteran plotter and last true adherent of Venizelism, at the end of the Civil War. Briefly, in its earlier incarnation, Plastiras’s party had shared power with the last rump of the old Liberals, led by Venizelos’s son Sophocles. Now the leadership had passed to George Papandreou, who had last held office during the chaotic events of 1944. In October 1961 the Centre Union was narrowly defeated at the polls. Papandreou cried foul: the election had been rigged by the so-called ‘para-state’, a shadowy but not imaginary network of right-wing cronies in the police, the civil service and the armed forces. The actual extent of this interference in the election has never been determined. Probably it had not been enough to determine the outcome. But it did give Papandreou the impetus he needed to declare an ‘Unrelenting Struggle’ for eventual victory.
The first scent of that victory came two years later. By the summer of 1963 the government of the National Radical Union was struggling. Karamanlis fell out with King Paul, the brother of George II, who had died in 1947, not long after his much-contested return to Greece. The murder of a member of parliament for EDA, Grigorios Lambrakis, in Salonica in May, would provide the most vicious proof yet of the existence of the ‘para-state’ – and later be brought to worldwide audiences through the 1967 novel Z by Vasilis Vasilikos and the Costa-Gavras film based on it. In the changed political climate, Papandreou’s Centre Union came first in the parliamentary election held in November. But its majority was too narrow to enable Papandreou to form a government. So he asked the king for a dissolution. A new election was called for February 1964. This time the Centre Union came home triumphant.
Greece had never before had a government that could be called even very moderately left wing. This one would prove cautious in its approach to radical reform. Under Papandreou, opportunities for education were extended, particularly at university level. The government promoted the demotic form of the language – in the teeth of opposition from diehards who since the Civil War had got used to thinking that only the hated communists used demotic Greek in public. But on the issues that still most divided the nation, Communism and the country’s commitment to the NATO alliance, Papandreou was as uncompromising as his predecessors had been. It had been his antipathy to Communism that had recommended Papandreou to the British in 1944. It was no less acceptable to the Americans twenty years later.
As bad luck would have it (and probably it was a matter of chance), the arrival in power of the Centre Union coincided with the collapse of constitutional arrangements in Cyprus. At the end of 1963 the intercommunal conflict that had begun during the last year of the EOKA struggle reasserted itself. While the 1964 election campaign was going on in Greece, a peace conference in London was trying to find a solution. Only three weeks after Papandreou’s victory, a resolution was passed in New York that would bring United Nations peacemakers to the island to oversee the physical separation of the Greek and Turkish communities. War between Greece and Turkey was only avoided in June 1964 by the intervention of the American president, Lyndon Johnson.
A month after that came a new US plan for Cyprus. The ‘Acheson Plan’, so called after the former Secretary of State brought in to draft it, proposed to replace the unwieldy Constitution of 1960 and allow the island to be united with Greece after all. The price was to be the lease to Turkey of a military base in Cyprus, proportional with the size of the Turkish Cypriot population. The Turks would also gain sovereignty of the tiny Greek island of Kastellorizo, the remotest from Greece of the Dodecanese. Papandreou might have signed up to this, but Makarios prevented him. If the issue of Enosis had not gone away, neither had the tussle for control of the initiative over Greek foreign affairs between Athens and Nicosia. Both would have fateful consequences a decade later.
The other piece of bad luck for the Centre Union government was the death of King Paul from cancer just four weeks into its tenure. The late king had proved a much less divisive figure than his brother. King Paul, who had come to the throne in 1947, had done much during his reign to heal what was still left of the old ‘National Schism’, at least within the anti-communist camp. His son came to the throne as Constantine II some months short of his twenty-fourth birthday. Greece had not seen so young a sovereign since the early days of King George I, almost exactly a century before. Within months, the young king and his prime minister, who at seventy-six was more than three times his age, were heading for a clash that would prove almost as destructive as the one between the new king’s grandfather Constantine and Venizelos half a century before.
On the surface it was about control of the armed forces. Rumours of conspiracies had been coming and going for years. A group of extreme-right officers known by the acronym IDEA (which means the same in Greek as it does in English) had been around since the 1940s. Newly discovered, and far more disturbing to the king, to the right-wing opposition and to the whole anti-communist apparatus of the ‘para-state’, was a new one called ASPIDA (the acronym means ‘shield’). Not only were these left-wing officers plotting to destabilize the armed forces and the state, it was also alleged that among their number was the prime minister’s own son.
Andreas Papandreou was at this time in his mid-forties. Not long before, he had given up a promising career as an academic economist in the United States to join his father’s government as an adviser. Politically well to the left of the elder Papandreou, it was Andreas, the ‘firebrand’ (and ever afterwards known in Greece by his first name), who really struck terror into his father’s political enemies. In the climate of mutual suspicion that had built up by the summer of 1965, the question of control over the armed forces had become toxic. ASPIDA was probably no more subversive, or perhaps even real, than the Philorthodox Society that had allegedly plotted to oust King Otto in the first years of the Greek kingdom. One American former diplomat, who had been in Athens at the time, later concluded, ‘What the ASPIDA officers were trying to do was thwart a rightist military coup against the Papandreou government.’17
In July, believing that his position was being undermined by his Minister of Defence, Papandreou sacked him and proposed to take on the portfolio himself. There were plenty of precedents for both actions in Greek parliamentary history. But the king trusted the ousted minister more than he trusted Papandreou. He refused to allow the prime minister to become also Minister of Defence, on the grounds that Andreas Papandreou was under investigation for subversive activity. When Papandreou repeated the (not very successful) tactic of Venizelos exactly fifty years before and offered his resignation, Constantine promptly called his bluff and accepted it. This provoked a constitutional crisis. ‘Who governs Greece?’ demanded Papandreou. ‘The King or the people?’18
The king now resorted to the same tactic that in the hands of his uncle George II had opened the way for Metaxas. Once again it would lead to a dictatorship, though this time not immediately. Constantine called on one member of parliament after another to form a government. He was successful on his third attempt, and only after a sufficient number of members from the ruling Centre Union had been induced (it is sometimes alleged bribed) to enter into a coalition with the centre-right opposition to defeat their own party in a vote of confidence. The government of Stephanos Stephanopoulos and the ‘apostates’, as they were called, took office in September 1965 and held on precariously for fifteen months.
As soon as Papandreou’s resignation became known, violence once more spilled out onto the streets of Athens, soon to be dubbed the ‘July events’. While the ‘apostate’ government lasted, life in the cities was continually disrupted by mass demonstrations and politically motivated strikes. The polarization of the Civil War appeared to be returning. The right feared a takeover by the left and the banned communists. The left feared the collapse of the parliamentary system and a right-wing dictatorship. Rumours of an imminent coup d’état flew back and forth. The names of so many plots and potential plotters were bandied about that the one that was actually hatching escaped the notice of everyone – probably even of the American Central Intelligence Agency, which many Greeks have never ceased to believe masterminded it.
After more fractious politicking, a date was finally set for a new parliamentary election: Sunday 28 May 1967. Papandreou’s Centre Union party was the favourite to win. A surge in support for the far-left EDA was also a distinct possibility. Parliament was dissolved on 15 April. Three days later a group of middle-ranking army officers met at the house of the most senior among them, Brigadier Stylianos Pattakos. Among their number were Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos and several others who had worked for the Greek secret service. These men had access to the details of a contingency plan that had been drawn up by NATO to secure the country in the event of war with the communist bloc, and known by the codename ‘Prometheus’. In the early hours of Friday 21 April, without the knowledge of the king, of the army High Command, or of the Americans whose plan it was, the Prometheus Plan went into action.
Armoured units moved out of their barracks and took up positions throughout the capital. Tanks surrounded the king’s country estate at Tatoï on the northern outskirts. Armed soldiers took over the central telephone exchange and the national radio station. Athenians woke up that morning to find the streets empty except for tanks and uniformed soldiers, their telephones dead and the radio blasting out military marches alternating with traditional folk-dance music associated with patriotic anniversaries. Only a few newspapers reached the streets. In those days there were no social media or private radio stations. Television was still in its infancy in Greece, and of course another state monopoly. Most senior politicians who could be found at home were taken into custody. So were officers in the armed forces senior to the plotters, until they had demonstrated their loyalty to the new regime. A round-up of known leftists targeted not just communists but suspected sympathizers and the family members of anyone associated with them. Before long, several thousand would be imprisoned, placed under house arrest, or exiled to the notorious prison islands in the Aegean that were quickly brought back into use for the purpose. The dictatorship of the ‘Colonels’, also known in Greek by the Spanish term junta, had arrived.
STRAPPED IN PLASTER
The first edicts of the new regime sounded all too like a repeat of 1936. Constitutional rights were immediately suspended, including the right of assembly. Strict censorship was imposed, and lists drawn up of forbidden books (including some ancient Greek classics) and forbidden music (anything by the communist Theodorakis, Greece’s most popular composer by this time). Long hair on men and miniskirts on girls were prohibited – and this at the height of the ‘swinging Sixties’! Everyone was told to go to church. Not even the ‘Colonels’ could quite repeat the rhetoric of the ‘Third Greek Civilization’, with its overt echo of the Third Reich. But they came close with the slogan, first heard almost a year after the coup and ubiquitous thereafter: Hellas of Christian Hellenes. The leaders (or their backroom ideologues) had benefited from an education more limited than had Metaxas; their rhetoric has been much mocked, both at the time and in retrospect. Here is Papadopoulos, the ‘strongman’ of the regime, the former colonel who over six years would accumulate the offices of regent (later president), prime minister, defence minister and foreign minister, addressing students of Greece’s second university, in Salonica, on 29 March 1968:
We are by inheritance and by tradition the chosen people, which has enlightened mankind with the wonders of the most perfect civilization … Hellenes, then, according to our racial origin and national consciousness, and Christians according to the contents of our faith: these make up the diptych that, with its richness of knowledge, traditions, and the facts of history, describes the ideal for us, for the individuals of this country, for the Hellenes of our Nation.
Behold then the ideal, to which we must return. Christian Hellenes we must become once more …19
The ‘Colonels’ also followed Metaxas in using economic policy to keep large sections of Greek society compliant. Until 1973 the construction boom in cities continued strongly, with easier access for entrepreneurs to capital than before. In 1968 agricultural debts were cancelled, relieving a long-standing source of grievance in rural communities. The regime presided over an impressive expansion of the networks of roads, the telephone system and television into parts of the country where they had never reached before. Characteristically, Greece’s second TV channel, introduced in 1968, was called the ‘Information Service of the Armed Forces’. Along with much-needed development in communications went control over them. For most of its seven years of usurped power, the new dictatorship would prove easily as efficient as the Metaxas machine had been at detecting and forestalling opposition.
But in other ways the two dictatorships were very different. Metaxas had acted in concert with his king. In 1967, King Constantine found himself an unwilling accomplice to a coup that had been carried out without his knowledge. Later in the year, when new fears of war with Turkey over Cyprus seemed to have opened up a rift within the armed forces, the king tried to assert himself and overthrow the regime. In the conditions of the 1930s it had been the monarch, not the dictator, to whom the armed services would ultimately owe their loyalty. Not so in the 1960s. The king’s counter-coup, on 13 December 1967, was a dismal failure. King Constantine fled the country, never to return as sovereign. So completely had the old fault line shifted that neither the monarchy itself nor the person of the monarch still roused the passions of earlier years. Throughout the Greek military in the late 1960s, anti-Communism trumped every other allegiance.
The other great difference lay in the role of the armed forces. In practice, during the seven years that the ‘Colonels’ ruled, this always meant the army. The much smaller and traditionally elite services, the navy and the air force, were little involved. Unlike any other period in the country’s history, these seven years brought the army out of its barracks, onto the streets and into positions of control over every aspect of public life. True, the ‘Colonels’ and their superior, Brigadier Pattakos, all resigned their commissions early on. But their mentality and their proclamations remained those of the military. A poster campaign all over the country proclaimed ‘Long live the Revolution of 21 April 1967’. Huge billboards and fixed metal placards carried the image of an armed soldier in full combat gear, silhouetted against the mythological symbol of the phoenix rising from the fire. The grip of the army was ubiquitous, and everywhere to see. For those who transgressed, or were suspected of transgressing, it could also be brutal.
The regime’s own favoured metaphor for what it was doing was drawn from surgery. Papadopoulos himself explained it, during his first appearance before the representatives of the world’s press, six days after the coup, with characteristic clumsiness:
Do not forget, gentlemen, that we find ourselves in front of a patient on the operating table, whom if the surgeon does not strap him down for the duration of surgery and anaesthesia upon the operating table, there is a probability that instead of surgery bringing about the restoration of his health, it will lead to his death.
The more famous metaphor of the plaster cast was an elaboration of this basic idea: ‘We have a patient. We have strapped him in plaster. We test him to see whether he can walk without the plaster.’20 In a short story published in 1970, as part of a collective effort by writers to test, in turn, the limits of changing censorship laws, the novelist Thanasis Valtinos took this metaphor to its absurd and grotesque conclusion. In Valtinos’s story, the hapless patient, strapped down, watches in increasing horror as more and more of his body is encased in plaster. Just at the moment when the wet substance is forced into his mouth, shutting him up for ever, he realizes that he has seen the surgeon before. It is the same man who had earlier tripped him up and caused his accident.21
In the real world, the years passed, but the patient was never quite ready to be released from the plaster cast. Then, in the summer of 1973, Papadopoulos judged that he could risk a limited experiment. In July a referendum was held on a new republican constitution. In the circumstances, a ‘yes’ vote was predictable. Even so, a quarter of voters risked prosecution by abstaining. Papadopoulos made some attempt to woo former politicians, but only one responded. On 1 October 1973 the formation of a new government was announced. Papadopoulos was confirmed as president. The sole politician became prime minister, and began to talk of a general election to be held on 10 February. It remained to be seen how far the plaster cast might be eased before then, or whether other reputable politicians would agree to take part.
But Papadopoulos had overreached himself. Visible signs of discontent came from quarters where the dictatorship was already most deeply resented. Relative relaxation brought them to the surface. A mutiny by naval officers was quickly put down in May 1973. But more persistent trouble was emerging in universities. For six years students had been denied the right to elect their own representatives to student unions, traditionally a highly active component of Greek university life. From the start of the year, a series of occupations of faculty buildings by students had begun to bring public attention to the issue. On 4 November many took to the streets in central Athens. More than thirty students were arrested after clashes with police. Scenes such as these had been an almost daily occurrence during the years immediately before the coup. Now, after six years of absence, they had returned. Nine days later students began massing at the Athens Polytechnic.
Those were the visible signs. Unseen, but in its effect more deadly for the regime, was reaction among many of the original plotters of the 1967 coup. That was the trouble with taking off the plaster cast. Papadopoulos might or might not deliver what he now seemed to be promising. But from the point of view of those who had never had any intention of handing back power to civilian politicians anyway, the recent signs of unrest were all the proof they needed that the new president had gone too far. Papadopoulos’s days in office were already numbered, even while the courtyard and lecture halls of the Polytechnic were filling up with young people chanting ‘Bread – Education – Liberty!’
Over three days, beginning on the morning of Wednesday 14 November, the lecture halls and quadrangles of the Athens Polytechnic became the focus for spontaneous mass action. Students from other faculties that had been closed by their governing bodies for fear of trouble all found their way to the Polytechnic. No one was in control – although before long an ad hoc ‘Coordinating Committee of Occupation’ emerged to maintain a remarkable degree of cohesion and order. At various times during the three days the occupation was swelled by sympathizers who included many school pupils, disaffected workers, self-styled anarchists and, by most accounts, provocateurs from both political extremes. By Thursday a crowd estimated at ten thousand had gathered in the wide street outside the wrought-iron railings of the Polytechnic campus and was chanting in support of the students. The next day their number had swelled to anything between double that and a scarcely plausible hundred thousand. Still, after three days, the government sat on its hands.
An extraordinary wave of euphoria and sense of empowerment swept through the young people who had barricaded themselves inside the Polytechnic and their supporters massed outside. Using makeshift equipment scavenged from the occupied laboratories, and their own technical skills, the organizing committee set up a short-wave radio station. From the early hours of Thursday, the call sign ‘Polytechnic here’ was heard in households all over Athens. The breathless, excited voices of the youthful announcers began to call for political change. Nothing like it had been heard on air for six and a half years. ‘Fascism dies tonight’ was one of many slogans repeated, along with denunciations of the ‘junta’ – so named in public for the first time. A manifesto, also broadcast, called for the overthrow of the regime and a return to ‘national independence and popular sovereignty’.22
For many who later recalled these events, it was a time when everything seemed possible. ‘We really thought we had the POWER at this moment,’ said one. In the words of another, the future novelist Ioanna Karystiani, who in 2018 would be nominated as a candidate for President of the Republic:
everyone was determined, no matter how mad it seems to you, it was transcendence … We had taken off, this did not touch us any longer … Without knowing consciously that history was being written at this moment.23
Meanwhile, in the street outside the Polytechnic and in other parts of the city centre the mood was turning ugly. There were several clashes between demonstrators and police during Friday afternoon. Tear gas began to be fired about 5 p.m. An hour later firearms were being issued to police guarding the Ministry of Public Order. Shooting started around 7.30, when some of the crowd forced their way into the building. By 8 p.m. the Chief of the Athens Police had to concede that ‘the violence was beyond his control’.24
The decision to bring in the army had already been taken – it seems on the authority of Papadopoulos alone. The order to the troops was given shortly after 11 p.m. Violence was continuing in the street outside the Polytechnic and around the Ministry of Public Order a few blocks away. Police marksmen were firing from positions on top of buildings. Victims of bullet wounds were being carried inside the Polytechnic. The student radio began appealing urgently for doctors and medical supplies. Official media claimed that armed ‘anarchists’ were slaughtering policemen. There were indeed some casualties among the police, but none from firearms.
Between 1 and 2 a.m. on the morning of Saturday 17 November three tanks moved into position facing the outer gate of the Polytechnic grounds. Representatives of the students made a brave and dignified attempt to negotiate an orderly evacuation. There was no question of resistance. Those who stood on the low wall, clinging to the railings that faced the street, and their comrades massed behind them, were waving the blue-and-white national flag and singing the national anthem. The claim that this was a communist insurgency was never going to be credible (even if the most prominent of the students did belong to banned far-left groups). Almost immediately the leading tank began to move slowly forward against the locked double wrought-iron gates. A car that had been parked against them as a barricade was crushed flat, along with the gates and the legs of a girl student. This happened at 3 a.m. The student radio had kept up a running commentary on the violence outside and the movements of the tanks. Now it fell silent.
Marines with fixed bayonets charged through the flattened gates and began forcibly evicting the students. Those leaving were savagely beaten by the waiting police as soon as they reached the street. Many hundreds were arrested. What has remained in popular memory from that night is the image of the tank pushing forward against the gate and the spectacle of the nation’s armed forces being turned against its own youth. But it seems that it was the police, not the army, who killed people that night: twenty-four of them, in the streets near the Polytechnic.25
Martial law was declared. For several days the army remained on the streets. Sporadic violence continued. It was the turn of the soldiers, mostly snipers on rooftops, to use lethal force. As many as another twenty civilians may have been shot dead between 17 and 20 November. Extraordinarily for a European country in the late twentieth century, it has never proved possible to establish with certainty how many were killed and injured. Families covered up for lost loved ones when they could, for fear of further persecution. In all, by the start of the following week, official figures gave the number of those arrested at almost three thousand. Unofficial estimates come close to three times that number. Many more went into hiding.
Yet for all the drama and horror of those events, it was not the student revolt at the Athens Polytechnic that brought down the regime of Georgios Papadopoulos. On Sunday 25 November, just over a week after the storming of the Polytechnic, the tanks were back on the streets throughout Greece. In a faultlessly executed and bloodless coup, hardliners within the military put into effect the plans they had been laying for several months. Papadopoulos and his fig-leaf civilian government were dismissed. The new figurehead and head of state was a uniformed general whom few had previously heard of, Phaidon Gizikis. His prime minister was an even more obscure figure, and for the sake of appearances a civilian. The Athenian rumour mill quickly established that the real power behind the new junta was one of the original architects of the 1967 coup. A former colonel and latterly brigadier-general, Dimitrios Ioannidis was head of the dreaded Military Police (ESA). Although he held no office in the government, either under Papadopoulos or under Gizikis, it was Ioannidis who now held the reins of power in Greece. Far from being the first dawn of liberation, the student revolt of November 1973 was destined to be buried beneath an even deeper layer of plaster than before.
The ‘heroes of the Polytechnic’, as they are remembered today in names of streets and squares all over Greece, had achieved precisely nothing by their bravery, optimism and defiance. On the other hand, they would give their name to a ‘Polytechnic generation’ that in Greece is the equivalent of the ‘Generation of May ’68’ in France. Nothing that has happened in Greek politics since that time makes sense without reference to those days of 1973 and the ways in which they would later become seared into public memory. That is the true legacy of ‘the Polytechnic’.
As 1973 gave way to a grim start to 1974, the endgame was still some months off. As had happened so often before, it would be played out in a far corner of the Greek nation – and its victims would not be citizens of the Greek state.
Relations between the governments of Cyprus and Greece had been poisonous since the coup of 1967. Despite surface cordiality, by the summer of 1973 Makarios had already survived two attempts by the Greek junta to have him assassinated. A bomb attempt that narrowly failed to kill Papadopoulos in his car in an Athens suburb in 1968 turned out to have been inspired by maverick supporters of Makarios in Cyprus. While Greece remained encased in ‘plaster’, with parliament and the democratic process suspended, Makarios went on to win landslide majorities in 1968 and 1973. The tables had been turned on the long-cherished notion of Enosis. Cyprus was now the last bastion of democratic freedom in the Greek-speaking world. For as long as the junta lasted, few Greek Cypriots wanted to be united with it.
The junta had other ideas.
The Cypriot National Guard had been established after the disturbances of 1964. It was largely a conscript army, made up of local Greek Cypriots. But its officers were seconded from Greece. In 1971 the elderly Colonel Grivas, the former leader of EOKA in its struggle against the British in the 1950s, returned secretly to Cyprus from Athens. A new clandestine organization began to operate in the island, known as EOKA-B. The National Guard was known to be cooperating with Grivas. Unable to rely on the nominal armed force of his own government, Makarios began recruiting a ‘Reserve Corps’ made up of loyalists. He also raised the stakes by making overtures to the communist bloc, playing on the non-aligned status of his fledgling republic. In an earlier age this might have been smart politics. But in the conditions of the early 1970s it thoroughly alarmed the American administration of Richard Nixon, and particularly its hawkish Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. When a supply of arms arrived in Cyprus from communist Czechoslovakia, the two Greek Cypriot armed forces fought a pitched battle to take possession of them. From late 1971 until the summer of 1973 a state of virtual undeclared civil war existed among the Greeks of Cyprus – while the Turkish Cypriots kept to their enclaves and had withdrawn from participation in the island’s political life.
All this came to a head in July 1974. Grivas had died in January, and been given a hero’s funeral in Athens. Then in June, at a NATO summit, an agreement between the foreign ministers of Greece and Turkey was deliberately torpedoed by the Athens junta, seemingly on the orders of the all-powerful Ioannidis. Three Greek ministers resigned immediately, recognizing that their country was provoking a war it was in a poor position to win. At the beginning of July, Makarios addressed a long letter to the military government in Athens. Soon its contents would be leaked to the newspapers in Cyprus. Insisting that he was ‘the elected leader of a large section of Hellenism’, Makarios demanded an end to the activities of EOKA-B and the withdrawal of the Greek officers from the National Guard.26
The only answer he ever received came on the morning of Monday 15 July. Armoured vehicles of the National Guard moved into strategic positions and began shelling the presidential palace in Nicosia, where Makarios had just arrived. At eleven o’clock, Cyprus state radio, now under control of the military, began to broadcast the news that Makarios was dead. Nikos Sampson, a former EOKA guerrilla fighter with no political experience and with close links to the Greek junta, was named president in his stead.
The Sampson coup was fiercely resisted by Greek Cypriots – a fact that has ever since been overshadowed by subsequent events. But for four days that July, Cyprus was gripped by all-out civil war. It is by no means certain that the junta could have imposed its will on Cyprus, even if there had been no outside intervention. It was Greek Cypriots, the overwhelming majority of them still loyal to their elected president, Makarios, who fought back against the short-lived Sampson regime, and resisted the unilateral declaration of Enosis that in the event was never made.
From the point of view of the plotters, everything went wrong that possibly could. Makarios, with great personal courage and the help of devoted associates, escaped alive from the gutted presidential palace. Thanks to his old adversaries, the British, he was flown out of the sovereign base of Akrotiri on an RAF plane and arrived in London two days later. There he found the prime minister of Turkey already lobbying the British government to take a hand in Cyprus. The coup had been a flagrant violation of the treaty guaranteeing the island’s independence. Britain, Greece and Turkey were all signatories. It should have been possible for the three NATO allies, with their common patron the United States, to sink their differences in an agreed solution. If that had happened it might even have brought Greece back to civilian rule without bloodshed in Cyprus.
One reason it did not is that the governments of all three allies were deeply insecure at this time. In Britain, the Labour Party led by Harold Wilson had been elected in February but lacked an overall majority and would go to the polls again in October. In Turkey, the newly elected centre-left government of Bülent Ecevit was dependent on an unstable coalition and would prove almost as short-lived. That left the United States. There, the administration had been paralysed for months by the Watergate scandal that would soon put an end to Richard Nixon’s presidency. During those weeks the American government was as close to leaderless as it probably ever has been. So it is hardly surprising that no common course of action was agreed in London. Faced with the refusal of British ministers to act, Ecevit determined to intervene unilaterally. Turkey launched an invasion of the north coast of Cyprus by sea and air during the night of 19–20 July 1974. The divided Greek Cypriots stood no chance.
In Greece, it was the moment that the junta seemed to have been waiting for. Within hours Greek state radio announced general mobilization. All reservists throughout the country were called to report to their units. But the Greek armed forces, despite having absorbed the lion’s share of government expenditure for seven years, were in no condition to take on an external enemy. All their efforts had been expended on repression at home. The few attempts made by Athens, during the first twenty-four hours of the Turkish invasion, to send reinforcements to Cyprus were half-hearted and ended ignominiously.
At a news conference on 22 July the American Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, announced that a ceasefire had been brokered in Cyprus. It took effect that afternoon. With little thanks due to the Greek military or the country’s leaders, Greece had been saved from the immediate prospect of war. The fate of Cyprus was to be decided by international negotiations, to be held in Geneva over the coming weeks. That only left the junta in Athens, now wholly discredited, to unravel, as it did over the next thirty-six hours. The most senior among the military now sidelined Ioannidis and closeted themselves in the office of President Gizikis to hammer out a face-saving solution. On the afternoon of 23 July it was announced that military rule was at an end. A civilian government would be sworn in the next day. Jubilant crowds thronged every public space. In Syntagma Square in Athens all traffic came to a halt. The square and the surrounding streets filled with people waving the national flag, singing songs by the banned composer Theodorakis, and cheering. Everywhere the emblems of the regime were torn down and trampled.
As darkness fell a new slogan began to swell among the crowd: ‘E-e-erchetai’ (‘He is coming’). ‘He’ was Konstantinos Karamanlis, the former leader of the centre-right National Radical Union who had served as prime minister for eight years before going into voluntary exile in Paris. Karamanlis was met by jubilant supporters at Athens airport at 2 a.m. on the morning of 24 July. Much remained to be done before Greece’s transition to democracy could be assured. But the rule of the ‘Colonels’ was over.
It was the people of Cyprus who paid, both Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots. By mid-August two rounds of negotiations in Geneva had failed to produce a political solution. In the United States, Richard Nixon had resigned on 9 August. Foreign policy was in the hands of Kissinger, to whom the fate of Cyprus was not the highest priority. On 14 August the Turkish army began a new offensive. In three days it advanced to a line that brought some 37 per cent of the island’s land area under its control. A second ceasefire was brokered three days later. Centuries of intercommunal living were obliterated, as tens of thousands of Greek Cypriots fled south before the advance of the Turkish army, while Turkish Cypriots abandoned their homes to flee in the opposite direction. One-quarter of the entire population of Cyprus was displaced at this time. Tens of thousands were killed, including twenty thousand ‘missing’ whose fate remains unknown.
More than forty years later, no peace terms have ever been agreed or a peace treaty signed. The line that has divided Cyprus since August 1974 is not an international frontier. It marks the limit of conquest by the Turkish army that was reached on that August day. Much has been said and written, during those forty-plus years, about the legality of Turkish actions. The simple truth is that international law did justify the first offensive, to the extent that its aim might have been the restoration of the status quo before the Sampson coup. Nothing justified the second.27
This was the price for the return of democracy to Greece. For Greece itself, July 1974 marked the end of an aberration, but also of an era of bitter division that went all the way back to the early years of the century. The Greek word metapolitefsi, meaning ‘change of political system’, is today applied not just to the moment and its immediate aftermath, but to the whole period of political maturity and prosperity that began in 1974 and would last for more than thirty years.