Chapter 4

Cultural Warfare

Chapter 4 engages with the dialectical relationship between culture and politics. As ideological reasons alone do not account for the creation of the Greek student movement, the chapter explores the roots of its cultural background, as well as the ways in which the latter in turn reinforced student combativeness. It examines new trends in cinema, theater, music, aesthetics, and everyday life in an attempt to explain how new cultural identities were shaped. It turns to alternative forms of culture that were created in juxtaposition to the Junta with an interest in how several countercultural elements acquired political significance over time. This section also addresses the role of female students in both the student body in general and in the movement in particular, in an attempt to account for continuities and ruptures with the past. Lastly, references are made to the contested issue of a belated “sexual revolution” and private going public.

Media and Publishing Strategies

Just like any other authoritarian regime the Colonels tried to achieve near complete control of the mass media in order to ensure an informational monopoly. Preventive censorship was in operation up to 1969, and no printed document could circulate without the authorization of the Censorship Office. This created a vacuum of alternative information and intellectual cultivation, as the heavy weight of voicing opposition fell on clandestine papers. Inevitably, the very moment the regime allowed relative freedom of expression, parts of the press began to express a mild critique of its governance, breaking its “information monopoly.”¹

Since 1967, Greek writers had refused to publish anything as a means of demonstrating passive resistance through silence. “Refusing to submit your writings to be examined by the police authorities and the censorship office is after all an issue of self-respect and self-dignity,” said writer Spyros Plaskovitis in talking about this period.² This proved to be a controversial decision that contributed to the lack of the circulation of any alternative and heterodox ideas during the first years of the dictatorship. In fact, Filippos Vlachos, the founder and director of the publishing house Keimena [Texts], appeared extremely critical of this tactic years later concluding that “silence was also convenient … an escape, not resistance.”³

Whereas antiregime artists continued to protest by refusing to write, publish, or exhibit, some journalists devised a range of strategies to counter the effects of censorship. Integral to their creativity in resistance was the fact that repression helps to create new sorts of knowledge and different ways to communicate a message. According to Michel Foucault, “Censorship not only cuts off or blocks communication, it also acts as an incitement to discourse, with silence as an integral part of this discursive activity.”⁴ In this sense, erasure can be enabling as well as delimiting. Comic strip artists, such as Bost, Kyr, and Kostas Mitropoulos, who collaborated with the major dailies of the time, were among those who managed to undermine censorship most successfully through references, allegories, and innuendos that were confusing to the uninitiated but easily discernible to the ones looking for a hidden message.⁵ American writer and Athens resident at the time, Kevin Andrews argued that people who were hastily reading these cartoons in the papers “almost had the sense of participating at the cost of a couple of drachmas, in resistance activity.”⁶

The press was a major factor in the dissemination of information and the development of the awareness of the political situation in Greece under the Junta. In so far as the press fully covered the court-martial trials and published complete trial transcripts, it provided an opportunity for students to learn about resistance efforts. The pleas of the accused offered them the opportunity to defend their actions while condemning the regime and reporting having been tortured. The press also offered detailed, often provocative full coverage of student mobilizations. The Athenian and Salonicean dailies Ta Nea and Thessaloniki dedicated a daily column to student issues (both using as their logos images associated with May ’68), which served as means of constant update on student mobilizations. Minas Papazoglou’s column in Ta Nea, titled “Youth and Its Problems,” promoted the antiregime students’ demands and criticized the appointed student councils during the spring and summer of 1972. The column also published letters of protest by antiregime students. A series of journalists writing for Thessaloniki followed the same pattern in their regular feature “The Students’ Column.” According to a US report, Thessaloniki was an “anti-American [and] anti-regime” publication with “strong influence among younger leftists and students.”⁷ Chrysafis Iordanoglou, a law student in Salonica, emphasizes, “If this communication medium with the journalism it represented had not existed, it is doubtful that the student movement of Salonica would have survived.”⁸ Another typical pattern of Thessaloniki was to present the student unrest in other countries with large headlines, extensive photographic material, and direct allusions to the Greek situation. Typically, a large headline would read “The Militaries Are Panicking” or “The Student Revolt Is Spreading,” and with tiny letters underneath one would read “in Italy” or “in Spain.”⁹ It is not at all surprising that Thessaloniki’s director, Antonis Kourtis, was constantly warned and fined by the regime.¹⁰

Figure 4.1. Headline of the antiregime daily Thessaloniki reading “Freedom … Freedom,” and with small letters in the subtitle “in Spain.” This was a typical strategy of the newspapers during the Junta, testing the boundaries of censorship. (Source: Thessaloniki newspaper)

As was the case with students elsewhere, Greek students read the papers voraciously in order to find out what was going on in the world in a period of dramatic events, from the Vietnam War to the Middle East crisis, and also to read accounts of events in which they themselves had participated, resulting in a rather self-reflexive position. Giannis Kourmoulakis observes: “Messages were coming, even if curtailed, but they found fertile ground and they touched us. And somehow we started as well little by little also to get revolutionized” (Kourmoulakis, interview).

As we have seen, the dictatorship’s liberalization experiment proved to be crucial for the development of the student movement, contributing to a significant change in the political and social climate of the country. One major reason for this shift was the production and circulation of books, a defining factor for the enhancement of antiregime consciousness among students. The critical silence-breaking moment in publishing was the publication of the Dekaochto Keimena [Eighteen Texts] (1970), which followed a 1969 dramatic statement by the Nobel Prize–winning poet George Seferis condemning the Junta at the BBC—the first public condemnation from within Greece made by a respected, noncommunist intellectual.¹¹ These eighteen allusive literary texts were written by well-known intellectuals who avoided naming the Greek Junta outright but used, in the words of one of the contributors, “innuendo, transposition and … metaphors which the reader could easily understand, but for which it would be difficult for the authorities to prosecute.”¹² Four short stories, for example, referred to a fictitious Latin American country under dictatorship called “Boliguay.” The experiment was followed by the publication of Nea Keimena [New Texts] and Nea Keimena 2 and the journal I Synecheia [Continuity] by the same circle of intellectuals, including a number of left-wing writers.¹³ In April 1973 one of the contributors to this symbolic rupture, the poet Manolis Anagnostakis, appeared self-critical about the years of artistic silence:

What could be … the picture—if any—that today’s twenty-year-old youths, who were 14 then, might have of the condition of our cultural and political landscape before the April coup? If we talk to them … about the Spring that was about to bloom on our intellectual horizon, what mechanisms of representation do they have to follow us? With what depot of nonexisting experiences would they grasp what the three-year relentless silence meant, and how would they be convinced about the necessity of the intellectual transition to a specific moment in time from speechlessness to direct discourse?¹⁴

The publication of Eighteen Texts coincided with the regime’s decision to open itself up, suspending preventive censorship and abolishing the last blacklist of books in 1970. Up to 1969, the only publishing houses that had been established and whose books became points of reference (Keimena, Kalvos, Stochastis) focused on classical political thought and literature. The softening of censorship led to a spectacular increase in domestic cultural output, however, and publishers found a way out of the previous stagnation.

From late 1970 to late 1971, 150 new publishing houses were opened, and 2,000 new titles were printed in inexpensive paperback editions.¹⁵ This overproduction of publications aimed to encourage critical thinking in young readers, which could help them to understand existing realities. Books were needed that would provide a “practical perspective” or a way out of the political impasse. Publishers believed that through books, they could “ideologically awaken the people against the dictatorial regime,” as they believed that books would be food for the intellectually starving Greeks and a direct means of political acculturation.¹⁶ Some publishers were oriented toward the publication of left-wing books (Odysseas, Praxi) with a program that “covered the range of Marxist and Leninist books” (Synchroni Epochi), the “renewal of official Marxist thought” (Odysseas), the “ideological armament of young people” (Neoi Stochoi), and the “creation of an antiauthoritarian movement in Greece” (Diethnis Vivliothiki).¹⁷

Books like Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber’s The American Challenge, John Kenneth Galbraith’s The New Industrial State, and Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital soon became bestsellers, just as they had abroad.¹⁸ Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Karl Marx, as well as Mikhail Bakunin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Gyorg Lúkacs appeared in bookshop windows. American writer Kevin Andrews observed that “after 1970 some foreigners wondered how Greece could be a dictatorship when the kiosks around Athens University were filled with the works of … Marxists of the Twenties and Thirties, all in paperback.”¹⁹

Other publishing projects aimed to satisfy readers’ need to reexamine phenomena and problems from within the tradition of contemporary Greek philosophical and sociological standard works. Those books introduced a new closer theoretical scrutiny. Publishing was limited at the beginning (1970–1971) but more extensive later on. Andrianos Vanos explained how the slow trickle of books in 1970 and 1971 acted as a catalyst for the dissemination of ideas:

There was something that was very much of help, apart from the illegal books that circulated, which in a way helped everybody: That just before this political explosion took place, political publications started coming out, like those of Kalvos, or others, but which were coming out little by little, since up to that point no books were published. So, everyone read the same books. … A book would come out, and since there was no other, everybody was talking about it. So, we were analyzing from all sides. Same thing when another book would come out. So, in a way we were following some common steps. There was no chaos in information. (Vanos, interview)

The Arrival of the 3 M’s in the Colonels’ Greece

Within the ’68 movements the expression “3 M’s” was a quite common way to refer to the fashionable theoretical triangle between Marx, Mao, and Marcuse. The (re)appearance and large-scale diffusion of a series of basic Marxist texts by Greek and foreign authors through Themelio [Foundation], a traditional left-wing publishing house that had been closed down immediately after the coup spread this expression among Greek students.²⁰ Neoi Stochoi [New Aims] was a Trotskyist publishing house that exercised even greater influence through a series of publications, as well as an eponymous journal. With articles from a whole range of Marxist revolutionaries and writers, Neoi Stochoi made the first attempt to defy the barrier of censorship and test its limits by openly adopting Marxist terminology. Its publications appeared in a pocket-sized format in order to reach a wide readership, rendering so-called alternative Marxist analysis an extremely popular and common point of reference. Nikitas Lionarakis offers a comment on the influence of Neoi Stochoi: “I have studied Marxism through the Neoi Stochoi. My entire generation, that is … This approach of the publishing houses ‘Marxified’ our generation very much. That is, it turned [the] insurrection into a Marxist one” (Lionarakis, interview).

Among the most fashionable topics diffused in these “unorthodox” publications featured so-called center-periphery and third-worldist theories of a global class struggle that would supposedly result from the student periphery, joined by the working classes, closing in on the imperialist pole. As might be expected, the Greek political stalemate was another favorite topic, framing the imposition and maintenance of the dictatorship as a token of US imperialism. The “foreign factor theory” became a permanent element in Greek conceptualizations of politics.

It is noteworthy that some students at the time attributed the re-appearance of Themelio and the circulation of Neoi Stochoi to the police. A common pro-Moscow communist trope held that the police allowed Neoi Stochoi to be published in the hope that the journal’s Trotskyist line would divide and disorient left-wing students. Interestingly, however, followers of the Communist Party were among Neoi Stochoi’s fanatic readers, despite the fact that “instructors” warned the students that it might be a governmental provocation.

These publications spurred on the diffusion of sociological works and the rediscovery of the classics of socialism (Marx, Lenin), as well as social theory (the Frankfurt School, Louis Althusser) and psychosexual theory (Wilhelm Reich). Antonio Gramsci and Regis Debray, “heretical” writers according to the standards of the Old Left, were among the most translated authors. Their works, which challenged Marxist orthodoxy, became fashionable among the New Left and were intellectual landmarks for many students. They tapped into the students’ desire to oppose authoritarianism, revealing a growing demand for revolutionary and subversive texts. Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, “the gospel of ’68” according to student Ilias Triantafyllopoulos, became a guiding book that familiarized the Greek radical readership with the idea that students and disenfranchised social outcasts would be the future carriers of social change, instead of the “compromised” working class. Marcuse’s motto, “The only hope lies with the hopeless,” became a slogan. As Triantafyllopoulos explains: “Through Marcuse I started rather to realize, to rationalize or to interpret the world. Marx came afterward, then came all the other things, but we started with those everyday situations, the elements of lived experience” (Triantafyllopoulos, interview).

The need to be up-to-date with the latest trends in critical theory became part of socialization among student groups. Law student during the Junta years and present-day constitutionalist Nikos Alivizatos notes the impact of the radical French maîtres a penser, stressing that those students who did not possess some basic knowledge of theories, such as structuralism and poststructuralism, were considered uncool: “In terms of readings, France was, of course, the center of the universe and the whole Marxist structuralism with Althusser, Poulantzas, and all the things you can imagine. To put it bluntly, in the post-’68 climate you could not date a woman if you hadn’t read Althusser” (Alivizatos, interview).

Less influential were the Soviet books, such as Leninism and Modern Times, published by Synchroni Epochi [Modern Times], the publishing house affiliated with the Communist Party. Though widely read, these were often perceived as passé. “Books of the Soviet school of thought did not endure over time,” former communist student leader Nikos Bistis remarks, citing as an example “a book on Czechoslovakia, which had come out right after, which justified the invasion with puerile arguments” (Bistis, interview). Nikos Kaplanis, a dentistry student in Salonica and head of the clandestine KNE, argues the opposite, “In terms of Prague, I personally was fooled by KKE’s myth that whatever thing is not ours cannot be revolutionary either” (Kaplanis, interview). The leftist *Pavlos recalls that he and others like him became obsessed with books on Marxism-Leninism in order to address their theoretical deficits, since they did not come from left-wing families. Still, the vast bulk of students joined the orthodox communists, reserving their heretical training for future occasions, as Bistis points out: “It is impressive that although the first books that were circulated were ‘heretical’ books of the Left or the American Left, Marcuse and so on, the great majority of the youth joined the KKE in the end” (Bistis, interview).

Marxist indoctrination was so widespread that even conservative professors who had outlived the purges of the Junta were aware of it. Angeliki Xydi goes so far as to maintain that these professors even adopted an apologetic stance toward the Marxist students:

I remember that we had a philosophy professor at the university, Mr. Moutsopoulos, who entered at the second year of the department where I was, and he knew that the things he would say would seem to us rubbish, even if we wouldn’t tell him that they were rubbish. And he would tell us, “Alright, I apologize to the Marxists.” Yes, and these things right in the middle of the Junta. (Xydi, interview)

Alkis Rigos, meanwhile, reconstructs students’ tendency to use their theoretical arsenal to confront the Junta’s professors:

We had many Junta professors in the university, namely, ministers of the Junta. Our professor of sociology was Tsakonas, who was minister of the presidency, that is, of propaganda of the dictatorship, and who was offering some supposedly free seminars, and, after we argued with each other on whether to take them or not, we decided that we should participate, but in order to tear them apart. We would show off how left-wing we were, but with arguments. One couldn’t use the empty political rhetoric that we had right after the Metapolitefsi. One talked about the substance. (Rigos, interview)

The distinction that Rigos draws between the fruitfulness of discourses and theoretical explorations, both during the time of the Junta and the period of the democratic transition, is present in most recollections.

In the first years of the 1970s, the publication of any book of critical thinking, including literary works, could be assessed as political resistance against the authoritarian regime, and almost every book could be considered political.²¹ Dissident figures such as the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet and Chilean poet Pablo Neruda were translated repeatedly during the dictatorship and read in a heroic light. Ioanna Karystiani stresses the importance of poetry in the training of the students. In her view, poetry’s contribution was literal rather than ideological, though for her own part she argues for a self-sacrificial romantic determination: “This is how I tuned in, by reading poems, having read Ritsos, Dostoyevsky, by reciting Mayakovsky, and these were … ideological equipment in the full sense” (Karystiani, interview).

It seems that publishers who sympathized with the student movement often exploited young people’s eagerness for new ideas. An article that appeared in 1973 in the literary journal I Synecheia condemned the fashion of “transferring the foreign problematization which emerge[d] from a different reality [and] translating it into Greek without any introduction or even warning about the different conditions.”²² In many cases, the introductory sections of the books seem entirely out of place, trying to establish connections with the Greek case no matter how different the paradigm was, while the quality of the translations was often very poor.²³ In another issue of I Synecheia, a literary critic concluded, “We had forgotten that enlightenment needs enlightened people.”²⁴ Others felt, however, that the uncontextualized appearance of such literature in Greek could serve as a useful intellectual exercise. Myrsini Zorba remarks: “I fell onto Gramsci and there I started having more complex thoughts, but this is how you realized that you could interpret any text and any thought on the basis of your own needs and your own experience. Radicalize it, orient it toward a different direction” (Zorba, interview). Michalis Sabatakakis, on the other hand, is firm in his conviction that publishers paid too little attention to Italian and French Euro-Communism:

There was a suffocating absence of books about the stream of thought which in that period was blossoming in Europe within the environment of the communist Left and was called Euro-Communism. … In reality, we did not systematically follow all this stream of thought, whether this was the Italian Euro-Communist school around the PCI, the Italian Communist Party, or the French one, let’s say, with the characteristic case of Poulantzas. Only too occasionally. This was our contact with the political book” (Sabatakakis, interview).

Andrianos Vanos stressed the fact that readings created cohesiveness, due to the pressing need to put new ideas into action. In his view, this process produced people with a firm theoretical background: “People with a solid theoretical training emerged, who had read, who had discussed, who had exchanged conflicting views, without a theoretical aim, an exercise on paper, but with the intention of applying all this” (Vanos, interview). Panos Theodoridis, on the other hand, points out that all these heterogeneous and fragmented readings often created intellectual chaos: “We were reading chunks from Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, the anarchists, all the time; our education was full of things like that. We were continuously reading French intellectuals and monopoly capitalisms … , things that we half understood, but half of which we didn’t understand a word.”²⁵

Books on the history of the Greek Left focusing on the 1940s, the resistance, and the civil war were another point of reference for students. These were very popular at the time, since students liked to think of their own struggle as the continuation of the mythical, albeit defeated, Greek Left, just as the dictatorship was the natural outcome of decades of arbitrary right-wing rule. In contrast to Italy and the critique of the Resistenza by the ’68ers, student activists in Greece in the 1970s did not attack this sacred shibboleth of the Left. Instead, they idealized the wartime communist resistance and its revolutionary tradition. Les Kapetanios (Paris, 1970), a book by the French author Dominique Eudes, provided a romanticized version of the Greek partisans and became a best-selling vehicle of instruction, as for Greek students up to that point “there was a gap, a void, a black page” concerning this period (Tsaras, interview). The old partisan songs likewise reemerged as an emotional form of entertainment and a “transfer” of the revolutionary spirit of history. In terms of aesthetics, the “wild bearded men” of Greece in the early 1970s were strongly reminiscent of the communist guerrillas. Giorgos Kotanidis recalls fantasizing about “the revolutionaries with the red flags going down Alexandras Avenue,” an inescapable reference to EAM/ELAS; “My dreams were deep red,” he reminisces, stressing the revolutionary color of his imaginary projections.²⁶

In addition, the publication of a series of protest magazines promoting “critical thinking” (Prosanatolismoi, Protoporia, Politika Themata, Anti) and a series of underground magazines that focused on avant-garde art (Lotos, Tram, Kouros, Panderma)²⁷ caused a considerable stir with the authorities.²⁸ There followed a series of translations of basic texts on student uprisings abroad, which provided the theoretical toolkit for student revolt. The collective volume Student Power is a major example (1973). According to its introduction, “Just as the liberation movements of the Third World have long ago decided not to wait for the liberation of their countries as a consequence of the socialist revolution in the imperial metropolis, so students today refuse to wait for some external deliverance from their condition.”²⁹ Fred Halliday’s chapter from the volume had been published separately a year earlier under the title The History of Student Movements Worldwide (thus modifying the original title “Students of the World Unite”). According to Trotskyist militant Giannis Felekis, this little booklet on Argentina, Vietnam, and Palestine, was priceless as it introduced multiple revolts from which one could draw valuable conclusions (Felekis, interview).

All these readings were a precious resource for the circulation of information on theoretical matters connected to the movement, as well as on international developments. In the foreword to Student Power, the Greek editor issues the warning that although “the assimilation of the experience of others is necessary, at the same time the mechanistic transfer of models of thought and action which were shaped under entirely different conditions would be unrealistic.” Nonetheless, that book would provide Greek readers a chance “to approach the questioning, the demands and the methods of students beyond Greece.”³⁰ Often, the Spanish model was evoked as one to emulate, as in Fred Halliday’s remarks, reproduced in the student journal Protoporia: “The Spanish students succeeded. They created reaction in the illiberal regime of the Caudillo, proving that student forces can act under conditions of fierce repression.”³¹

The ritual whereby left-wing books were acquired is also worthy of consideration: they could be purchased at left-wing bookshops or at street vendors. Some of the bookshops became meeting places for discussions, such as Manolis Anagnostakis’s and Kaiti Saketa’s bookshops in Salonica and Manolis Glezos’s bookshop in Athens, which were attacked by extreme right-wingers on more than one occasion. Saketa remembers that when a new book was published and ordered from Athens, her shop would put its cover in the bookshop window for students to see. “Such was the longing of the people” (Saketa, interview). One student bookshop in Athens with a fanatic readership was called The Clockwork Orange, a classic reference to a film that had acquired a cult status despite its being banned. The bookshops also became meeting points where hard-core political analysis took place. As sociologist Hank Johnston argues, “When political opportunities are severely constricted, much of the doing of contentious politics is talking about it.”³² Paraphrasing Primo Moroni and Bruna Miorelli, one could say that in 1970s Greece the old eighteenth-century idea of the bookshop as a place of culture was combined with the modern one of the market opening onto the street.³³ Rena Theologidou’s recollections are evocative of the depth and fervor of the students’ dialogue at their bookshop meetings:

We were going to Kaiti Saketa’s [bookshop] and we gathered there, she was KKE-Esoterikou. She had a basement down there. And we were saying, “What is the revolution like?” “Is it this way?” “Is it that way?” “Should we publish Avgi clandestinely?” “Should we not?” (Theologidou, interview)

Many students immersed themselves fully in this climate of intellectual overproduction and became manic consumers of the printed word. The Guardian pointed out in 1972, “The security authorities have long been worried about the effect these [books] might have among students as, with the news media comparatively muzzled, they are making increasing use of the wave of left-wing books which have been appearing.”³⁴ Thereafter, the new list of “discouraged books” included books by Marcuse, Garaudy, Sartre, and Brecht, which were, however, already sold and circulating in massive numbers. As publisher Loukas Axelos suggests, “Regardless of the quality of the responses [these books] gave to the present and the future, they were literally sucked in by the already awaiting, and at this point reading, public … mainly by the students which were its basic body.”³⁵

Political books undoubtedly contributed to the creation of a critical stance and to the shaping of an alternative political position on behalf of the students. Book consumption and the circulation of journals helped create a common style and transmit a universal and direct message by the encouragement of creative reading.

Cinema as a Gun

Jean-Luc Godard has famously argued that film is “a gun that can shoot twenty-four frames per second.” It was precisely this capacity of cinema to impregnate people’s minds with ideas and to radicalize its spectators that was internalized by the militant student audiences of the time. The large-scale diffusion of the journal Synchronos Kinimatografos [Contemporary Cinema], which became a standard point of reference, encouraged the generally enthusiastic reception of the French and American avant-gardes and the trend in Greek political cinema known as “New Greek Cinema.” The journal—the Greek equivalent of the French Cahiers du Cinéma—was concerned not only with cinema but also with general theoretical discussions and debates, usually seeking connections to politics.³⁶ It was the successor to the influential Ellinikos Kinimatografos [Greek Cinema], which had published five issues before the coup, including articles by the French critic André Bazin on “how film as a medium was difficult to read for clear cut messages.”³⁷ Beginning in the late 1960s, New Greek Cinema followed this rule by adopting indirect codes of expression in order to communicate sociopolitical messages. In the face of strict censorship, the filmmakers of New Greek Cinema began using a cryptic visual language that could elude the censor’s eye. This was done through metaphors, allusions, and elliptic filmic language. In Pandelis Voulgaris’s movie The Matchmaking of Anna [To Proxenio tis Annas] (1972), for example, the restriction on female subjectivity, personalized by a thirty-year-old domestic servant working for a middle-class family in a world dominated by male power relations,³⁸ offers a strong critique of social relations in early 1970s Greece while it also seems to refer to the country’s suppression under the domination of the Colonels or the United States. This kind of cinema was occasionally rejected by young politicized spectators, however, and in 1971 there was already criticism of the “students and liberals who fill the cinema Alkyonis and all at once praise often insignificant films, just because they were ‘transmitting a message.’”³⁹

The New Greek Cinema also sought a return to an authentic Greek rural spirit, symbolized in The Matchmaking of Anna by the maid from the provinces and the “real,” “authentic” culture that she represents, which comes across as a liberating force. In a similar manner, Theo Angelopoulos’s Reconstruction [Anaparastasi] (1970), about a murder in the Greek countryside, was filmed in a remote village that led him to “discover” the traditional rural spirit: “This was the image that was representative for me. I, a man of asphalt, pollution, Athens, suddenly came to know a part of Greece, I came to know Greece, the middle Greece, the unknown Greece.”⁴⁰ This rediscovery of Greek “roots” and of rural tradition also became conceptualized as a pole of resistance in terms of music, as will be shown later. However, *Katerina remembers a discussion at EKIN following a screening of Reconstruction, in which she was irritated by Angelopoulos’s “folklorist mannerisms” (*Katerina, interview).

More than Reconstruction, Angelopoulos’s direct indictment of the Junta came in 1972 with his film Days of ’36 [Meres tou ’36]. This was a film that chronicled the coming of the dictatorship of General Metaxas in 1936: clearly speaking about one military regime in the context of another was too direct a message to be missed. As for the film’s cryptic mode of expression, the filmmaker himself is quite revealing: “The dictatorship is embodied in the formal structure of the film. Imposed silence was one of the conditions under which we worked. The film is made in such a way that the spectator realizes that censorship is involved.”⁴¹

The new manner of filmmaking led to a rift with mainstream Greek cinema productions, which consisted of farces, war epics, and melodramas—formulas that had proven commercially successful. Because mainstream Greek cinema was endorsed by the dictators, they were viewed as a major cultural weapon aimed at imposing a “stupefying sentimentalism,” according to film critic Giannis Soldatos.⁴² The New Greek Cinema film productions, by contrast, were characterized by social sensibility and a direct and unsentimentalized approach to everyday stories with neo-realist and Brechtian characteristics.⁴³ Even films with no blatant political characteristics, such as Giorgos Stamboulopoulos’s Open Letter [Anoichti Epistoli] (1968), a film about a disoriented young man and his constant mental references to the Occupation period (which was nevertheless butchered by censorship), or Angelopoulos’s Reconstruction, were consumed and received by antiregime actors as purely political. In other words, spectators of a general antiregime disposition were reading the political into everything.

Cinema became extremely significant not only in terms of its form, content, symbolism, and reception but also as a point of meeting and recognition. The discussions that necessarily followed the screenings were of vital importance: “[I remember] the terrible explosions in the discussion of Alkyonis following the movies,” Myrsini Zorba recalls, “where the hard-core ideological confrontation lurked once again as soon as the lights were turned on” (Zorba, interview). In Salonica, a law student, Vangelis Kargoudis, took the initiative to organize a cinema club, which ended up having four thousand registered members. The club soon became an important meeting point, attempting to bring students closer to the spirit of the movies of the time. Political cinema was the most popular genre, including films such as Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Spider’s Stratagem and The Conformist (1970), both about the rise of Italian Fascism. Such screenings were often linked to political provocation: “We searched and found Melville’s movie, The Stool Pigeon, and we put big posters around the city, ‘The Stool Pigeon!,’ ‘The Stool Pigeon!’” (laughter) (Kargoudis, interview).

In the cinema club, too, the movies were followed by a three-hour discussion directed by Kargoudis himself. This practice focused on the dynamic aspects of collective viewing and the communal experience of watching and debating about a film, juxtaposed with the solitary practice of reading books and the “passive” viewing of television. The debates following the screenings, which were also attended by policemen in civilian clothes, reinforced the quite popular idea of the active and reflexive spectator. Students soon became real film buffs. Vourekas remarks:

The cinema club was in reality a forum for political discussion. It was a context which legalized politics, ideological discussions, and confrontations within the Left and its streams. So it happened. We all got registered of course in the cinema club, with ID cards and everything. Naturally, the police watched [the movies] too, and there were screenings of Italian neorealism but also more recent movies, for example Godard—hermetic, difficult, but it looked as if he was trying to say something. (Vourekas, interview)

The club’s organizer, Kargoudis, was the one to pay the price for any sort of revolutionary exaltation during the discussions: “I got beaten black and blue for any nonsense that the PPSP and EKKE people said. This had become standard; screening on Sunday, on Monday I was arrested at home” (Kargoudis, interview). Kargoudis recalls with emotion the cinema club’s last session:

At some point we realized that this was the last Sunday and that they were going to hit us. … Around 9, 9:30 in the morning there came two riot vehicles, which were brand new, they were received in ’72. And they blocked Pallas cinema in a vertical fashion, one from here and one from there, and there was a big gathering, according to the more modest calculations 700 to 800 persons. And the whole thing turned into a demonstration, and the respective beatings took place too. (Kargoudis, interview)

Although the Maoist organizations were, alongside a handful of anarchists, the most faithful carriers of the spirit of the ’68 uprisings, they often opposed culture of all sorts. This attitude was probably inspired by the general destructive mania of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which rejected all artifacts as products of bourgeois decadence. Greek Maoists’ rejection of the aesthetics of most ’68 movements as “bourgeois” was reinforced by the conviction that art could only be engaged with, since its main task was to generate an oppositional political consciousness. Panos Theodoridis recalls that in 1973, at the invitation of the appointed student council, the composer Manos Hadjidakis came to Salonica with the filmmaker Pandelis Voulgaris in order to present Magnus Eroticus [O Megalos Erotikos] (1973) at the city’s Film Festival. Voulgaris’s film was inspired by and based on Hadjidakis’s eponymous LP. Left-wingers were furious, Theodoridis says, though “deep inside we were all Hadjidakean.” Similarly, Vourekas explains that to young people like him it seemed utterly inappropriate to produce an artistic creation that disregarded the political situation:

It seemed to me quite extreme to release Magnus Eroticus during the Junta. It broke my nerve, I couldn’t … this thing seemed unbearable to me. … I was an enemy of his music precisely because he could not express what all the rest were feeling. Expression for us was action, political struggle, anti-Junta, antidictatorship action, what could the Magnus Eroticus say to us? We considered it an irony at least. A man, a petit bourgeois, closed inside his world, “Here the world is falling apart and the whore is washing her hair.” Precisely this, this was the sensation. And we snubbed him and despised him. (Vourekas, interview)

Panos Theodoridis still regrets this attitude today: “To have in the midst of the years of the Junta and all this turmoil … two sensitive persons talking about erotic discourse was for us the most insulting thing, so we went into the dress circle and booed Magnus Eroticus. This is one of the deeds of which I will be ashamed for the rest of my life.”⁴⁴ His sentence clearly represents the abyss of temporal and semantic distance between past and present self.

Similarly, in a characteristic discussion following the projection of Theo Angelopoulos’s Reconstruction, at which he was present, a hard-core group of Maoists attacked the up-and-coming filmmaker and the most charismatic exponent of New Cinema in Greece, as petit-bourgeois. Andrianos Vanos, a Maoist student himself, vividly remembered Angelopoulos’s screening, though in a very different way. In his recollection, these screenings were the point at which the conflict went public:

Clashes took place, no matter which movie was coming to the cinema club. But the people in charge brought Angelopoulos, they brought him and he made a speech. Another hundred policemen gathered, and we couldn’t get in anymore, and a conflict started in the city. In the open. Not introverted, within a cinema. So, everything was going outdoors. (Vanos, interview)

Even though Vanos mentions the cinema club, in reality his description is of the screening of Reconstruction at the State Theater during the Film Festival, where it won the award for best film of the year (1970). Angelopoulos himself recalled that a demonstration started immediately after the ceremony, with students cheering at him in exaltation since “at any opportunity that was given there was an attempt to do something against the dictatorship.” He described a screening of the film at the University of Patras that same year, 1970, as a poignant moment that characterized the cryptic communication between artists of the time and their audiences. During the discussion that followed the film because policemen were present in civilian dress, Angelopoulos recalled that students asked questions in a hidden manner, and he gave affirmative answers. Angelopoulos characterized such peculiar communication “between the lines” as a form of magic, as it was denser than any detailed explanation.⁴⁵

In its attempt to censor movies, the dictatorial regime constricted itself to a naive handling of film topics, searching for messages only on the surface (slogans, songs, and labels), so that movies with indirect social implications and political dimensions escaped the censor’s eye. From the early 1970s onward, however, amid the softening of censorship and the rise of general radicalism, the politicization of Greek directors became blatant. This shift is apparent, for instance, in Thanasis Rentzis and Nikos Zervos’s film Black-White [Mavro-Aspro] (1973), which contained direct references with footage of a “cinéma-verité” kind to the rising student movement and castigated social apathy. Even “conformist” directors chose to use words like “democracy” and “weapon” in their titles in order to attract an audience with vague references to politics and revolution.⁴⁶

Figure 4.2. Scene from Thanasis Rentzis and Nikos Zervos’s movie Black-White, 1973. The student protagonist enters a record store in Athens and stares at a poster of Frank Zappa, while in the background one can hear a song by Deep Purple. The film shows the extent of familiarization with Western pop culture, including progressive rock. It also contains direct references of a “cinéma-verité” kind to the rising student movement. (Courtesy Thanasis Rentzis)

A Window on the World

Greek students discovered Soviet and Eastern European cinema—first and foremost Sergei Eisenstein and the legendary Hungarian Milos Jancso—and were equally attracted to the innovations and experimentations of the French Nouvelle Vague; as Antonis Liakos aptly put it they were “the bastards of Hollywood, Eisenstein and nouvelle vague.”⁴⁷ They were also seduced by the liberating energy of films such as Paul Williams’s Out of It, which treated the subject of rebellious youth in the United States; angered by the injustice committed against Sacco and Vanzetti in Giuliano Montaldo’s eponymous film; and blown away by the hippie hit Easy Rider.⁴⁸ The opening credits, which featured Steppenwolf’s hymn “Born to Be Wild” and offered a positive depiction of hippie communal life and sexual freedom, were strongly imprinted on the minds of Greek youth. Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point was another hit, with its different handling of the same topic and its aggressive depiction of youthful rebellion. The film’s musical score familiarized the students with the sound of the Grateful Dead and the experimental rock of Pink Floyd.

In addition to being a means of drawing people closer together, films also encouraged reaching out to others. Cinema acted as a universal code and a means of “transmitting experiences”—the very experiences that Greek students were lacking. Angeliki Xydi remembers that the global repertoire of youthful defiance struck her through the documentary on the festival of Woodstock rather than through the reporting of the ’68 events, which for some reason passed unnoticed for her:

Various things that were taking place abroad reached me of course, but these too came through in strange ways, not very clearly. I do not remember, that is, being intrigued by May ’68. I should not lie about that, I discovered it later on. But I remember that I was impressed by Woodstock and that I saw the movie three times and that once I also dragged my mother. I wanted to bring her to the cinema and make her watch as well and understand what incredible things were taking place outside Greece. (Xydi, interview)

As Xydi’s remarks suggest, movies depicting the countercultural hippie scene of US youth and its political awareness incited an emotive response in the youthful Greek audience. In some instances, they generated instantaneous antiregime reflexes and were banned shortly after their release, thus acquiring legendary status. According to newspaper reports, screenings of American movies focusing on the rebellious youth were often followed by staged performances of the films’ subject matter in the streets. Roger Miliex, the director of the French Institute in Greece, recalls in his diaries: “Yesterday [30 November 1970], on their way out of a screening of the film Woodstock, which presents American youth pop festivals, two thousand young Athenians demonstrated in the center of the capital, shouting slogans against the police, while engaging in a confrontation with them.”⁴⁹ This was an interesting phenomenon of reenactment and mimesis, whereby imitation became active interpellation.⁵⁰

Leonidas Kallivretakis, a lower-school student during this period, recalls that the police ordered the closing of the doors before the Woodstock screening started, when the cinema was still half-empty. The result was that three thousand youths broke the cinema’s shutters and staged street battles with the police in the entire center of Athens, where many got beaten up, arrested, and had their hair cut.⁵¹ Greek youths were effectively displacing their opposition to the dictatorship by adopting the countercultural energy of Woodstock: “They were thus locating their struggle in (the context of) the 60s and dis-locating the abusive topos of the Greek dictatorship,” cultural theorist Dimitris Papanikolaou observes.⁵²

These students were out of tune with the conservative Greek society’s attitude toward protest and counterculture. In an article published in the liberal newspaper Ta Nea the playwright Dimitris Psathas observed with revulsion: “The whole story was that some people wanted to get inside [the cinema] and watch the hippies and listen to the hippie songs, and the police were so scared by the possibility that our youth would also be seduced during the screenings by the frenzied action, the hysteria, the madness and the maniac crises of foreign youth—especially American—that at some point it thought of prohibiting the movie.” Later on in the article, Psathas continued in the same line:

The hysterical yelling of youths with their hair pulled out and of singers wearing long moustaches and beards, dressed in rags, covers the greatest part of the hippie movie. The whirling dervishes of hippie music beat themselves, pull their hair out, faint while singing, bleat desperately or holler. Maybe there are a few kids here in this sick category as well, among whom were certainly those silly chits with or without long hair who created the fuss last Sunday. The greatest part of our youth, however, is not being seduced by such rubbish.”⁵³

Psathas’s comments are reminiscent of the moral panic that Western pop music was causing to officials in the Communist Bloc countries in about the same period.⁵⁴

The day after Woodstock’s failed screening, Deputy Minister Georgalas visited Panteios School and made a speech “analyzing the aims and ideology of the Revolution of April 21.” Thereafter, a pro-regime medical student complained that “after three and a half years of efforts to detoxify the youth nothing ha[d] been achieved,” since “the distancing of the youth from other activities ha[d] pushed them deeper into hippyism.” Georgalas retorted that the youth was effectively detoxified, that the revolution had not yet used all its potential, and that the Woodstock incident was of no great importance. When the student mentioned the appearance of “three to five thousand anarchists,” Georgalas responded that “they weren’t anarchists but vivacious youths,”⁵⁵ as it was probably too hazardous to label them otherwise. The interchange between the two, which included frequent references to “detoxification”—Georgalas’s favorite phrase to use when referring to the youth—and to anarchists and hippies, conveys the level of public debate on such matters and the negative charge with which these were loaded. It is noteworthy that at this time the Greek film comedies My Aunt, the Hippie [I Theia mou I Chipissa], A Hippie with Tsarouchia [Enas Chipis me Tsarouchia], and the theatrical play Hippies and Dirladas [Chipides kai Dirladades] enjoyed great success.⁵⁶ This suggests the almost obsessive treatment of the subject of “hippies,” who were presented as grotesque, buffoonish, and as engaging in decadent cultural behavior. Equally interesting was the mainstream comedy Marijuana Stop (dir. Giannis Dalianidis, 1971), which adopted a strongly moralist tone in reference to the hippie counterculture, including drugs. Meanwhile, for dissident students hippieism connoted apolitical behavior, and drugs were identified with the underworld. They longed to be energetic rather than “stoned” and were getting their “fix” with adrenaline alone. “It seems that the [student] movement itself is like a drug,” former student leader Giorgos Vernikos concludes.⁵⁷

However, the fact that Greece was a stage for hippieism contributed to locals’ being accustomed to freer habits, even if by 1971 the Holy Synod of the Greek Orthodox Church was calling all monks and nuns to pray for help because Greece was “scourged by the worldly touristic wave” and “contemporary western invaders.”⁵⁸ The Economist further reported: “The Greeks, and not just the soldiers, don’t much like to see unwashed, barefooted and shabby youth sitting on the pavements in the center of Athens; nor do they have any respect for the dropouts hitch-hiking their way to Istanbul, Kabul and Goa without a drachma in their pockets. But they tolerate them.”⁵⁹ In contrast to this article’s assertion, however, hippie attire gradually became fashionable in Greece; though drugs, yoga, and Zen Buddhism remained largely unknown, the spirit, the fashion, and the aesthetics of the hippies influenced everyday life, despite the fact that this was an otherwise authoritarian society and state. From the hippies came the trends of wearing bloomers and carrying handwoven bags. In addition, words and phrases like “flower power,” “make love not war,” “Twiggy,” and “Carnaby” penetrated the Greek vocabulary, and a multicolor, dreamlike psychedelic aesthetic was promoted by commercials.⁶⁰

Connected to US counterculture was also Stuart Hagmann’s The Strawberry Statement (1970), which became the “cult” feature movie of the time. The film, based on a best-selling autobiographical account of a “college revolutionary,” chronicled the uprising of Columbia University students in 1968, exalting student activism and free love and rejecting university authoritarianism and police brutality.⁶¹ The most powerful point in the movie is its final scene, in which the barricaded students welcome the storming police while rhythmically chanting “Give peace a chance” before the action turns into brutal clashes and beatings. Myrsini Zorba remembers this as an explosion that the students “were internally ready for” (Zorba, interview). American Ambassador Henry J. Tasca reported in November 1970 about the screening of the film in Athens in a telegraphic fashion:

At several performances in at least two theaters, spectators in front rows stood up and shouted slogans. In one case groups shouted “1-1-4” which refers to article in former constitution promising equality to all citizens and was popular leftist street chant before coup. In another case disturbance was so great that police were called in to remove some of those causing disturbances, although as far as informant was aware no arrests were made. … Anti-regime slogans shouted during performance of feature film and accompanying newsreel, reported applause for episodes in which students beat up police and applause following glimpses of photographs of Robert Kennedy, Che Guevara and Mao Tse Tung.⁶²

The enthusiastic responses that the film generated among students demonstrate their identification with the rebellious protagonists, confirming Laura Mulvey’s analysis that spectators in cinema blatantly project their repressed desires onto the performers.⁶³

Apart from offering a space for mimicking foreign student movements, cinema halls—especially Alkyonis and Studio in Athens and Thymeli in Salonica—served as sites for information exchange and recognition. “In the movies everyone participated—police spies and left-wingers. They all watched along,” Thanasis Skamnakis remarks. “And you started getting to know faces, you saw them at the university, you saw them in the places where you hung out. And you started, you know, acquiring a visual connection to some people” (Skamnakis, interview). Thodoros Vourekas explains: “It became a nucleus; it became an agitational network between us, a very serious agitation, meaning that all the preparation was taking place there. Afterward I realized that most people who were acting in the student movement were also there” (Vourekas, interview). “The only issue was how to break the ice. This was the big issue,” Chrysafis Iordanoglou remembers. “How to break it, how to bring the people out, how to get to know each other.” (Iordanoglou, interview)

Figure 4.3. Projecting the repressed desire for freedom onto the screen. This was the 1970 advertisement for the film The Strawberry Statement, which dealt with student uprisings on US campuses. The film caused a sensation and was subsequently banned.

Cinema was a major advocate of common consciousness and a vehicle for self-education—“a whole internal world,” in the words of Iordanoglou. Greek students shared what media theorist Peppino Ortoleva has defined as the “eros of student movements for cinema” in the 1968 era.⁶⁴ In her life story Angeliki Xydi recalled a day associated in her memory with Alain Resnais, highlighting the fact that hers was a generation of serious film buffs:

I remember that I saw Last Year in Marienbad the day in which I went for the first time to the Police Station for “a private matter.” This terrible piece of paper had arrived home calling me to go in for “a private matter.” It was 8 November 1972; I remember well because it was my name day. … They wanted to advise me of course in the way that they knew best. In any case, I was beaten black and blue that day, and I used to have very long hair back then, which I had just shampooed because it was my name day, it was beautiful. And they pulled it so hard [laughter] that it became like a wig and my head was aching terribly. But the evening was booked: in no case would we miss Last Year in Marienbad! [laughter]. (Xydi, interview)

This passage vividly depicts not only the repressive character of the regime even in the period of liberalization but also the strong connection between students and visual culture, with the latter offering a magical “window to the world,” a tool that could reverse and smooth over existing harsh realities. Therefore, I strongly disagree with eyewitness Kevin Andrews’s conclusion that “the result of these very few, uneasy and hesitant productions was that tired audiences could come away refreshed for yet one more tomorrow of boredom, anxiety, humiliation and eventually … indifference because it’s all too difficult.”⁶⁵ Instead of acting as a two-edged sword, as Andrews suggests, art in general, and cinema in particular, proved to be a game-changer in the arena of protest. Film became the necessary companion of dissident students, facilitating the emergence of a militant social network and bringing culture and ideology together with artistic consumption and political agitation.

A place of recognition but also a lieu par excellence for voicing dissent was Salonica’s annual Film Festival. The screenings offered opportunities to assemble and became the definite meeting point for students in late September each year. It was state policy to promote and reward war epics about Greek bravery against either the German or Bulgarian aggressors during the Second World War. Since these films supposedly promoted the military virtues of Greek people, students tended to mock them. The darkness and the relative anonymity in Salonica’s large State Theater offered a perfect setting in which young people could vent their anger against the state-imposed movies and indirectly against the general political situation. According to filmmaker Grigoris Grigoriou “resistance … started from the spectators. Within the dark theater, during the screening hours, people applauded any scene that they considered as a hint against the Junta and wildly booed any scenes of anticommunist hysteria.”⁶⁶ The pro-regime newspaper Eleftheros Kosmos reported with annoyance in 1970:

A group of immature youngsters during the screenings is booing whatever is not of their liking from an artistic or historical perspective. Hiding themselves within the darkness of the theater, these coward “revolutionaries” create a rude atmosphere that disturbs the other spectators who have gathered in order to take part in an artistic show and not a political meeting. Shouldn’t the police be present at the balcony … in order to bring the troublemakers back to order?⁶⁷

Frequently, students opened a mock dialogue with the characters in the movies, asking them questions, responding to their lines, or just commenting. During one season, the Junta’s main film producer, James Paris, provoked the angry disapproval of students who exited in protest (“Shame on you!”) and the outburst of a young filmmaker who asked in a loud voice, “Is there no censorship for this?” Maria Mavragani remembers that it was an obligation to go to the theater balcony and shout. The students’ reactions tended to be overtly subversive, using irony and references to television commercials. Another film presented at the same festival was called Raging Youth [Orgismeni Genia] (dir. Gerasimos Papadatos, 1972), hinting at young people’s rebelliousness but clumsily presenting them as disoriented and vain. Students repeated slogans from television commercials in order to ridicule the dialogue, for example by starting to sing the tune of an advertisement called “Mr. Forte” when the film’s male protagonist demonstrated his toughness to his female counterpart. When he was informed by his girlfriend that she was pregnant, young people sang yet another common television commercial called “Now you know.” The reverberation of these commercials on behalf of dissident students points to the growing presence of a mass culture in Greece that was reinforced by a boost in mass consumerism by the regime.⁶⁸ It also indicates a “situationist” mode of inverting and subverting the commercials’ initial meaning. During a moment of provocation, some youths shouted that they preferred watching the well-known porn star of the period, Kostas Gousgounis, to the film.⁶⁹

During the screening of costume drama Hippocrates and Democracy [O Ippokratis kai I Dimokratia] (dir. Dimis Dadiras, 1972) at the thirteenth festival in September 1972, the character Hippocrates at one point said, “Then we have democracy,” and a student from the gallery asked, “Come again?” When Aspasia, Pericles’ wife, said, “There are greater sorrows awaiting us,” someone replied, “Us too, us too!”⁷⁰ Here too, the “situationist” practice of mock dialoguing with the film undermined the spirit of official propaganda in which the movies were packaged, as well as the serious character and prestige of the festival as a whole. Historian Nikos Papadogiannis’s conclusion that this was a typical case of the survival of the practice of “dialogue with the screen”—a practice that dates back to the early days of cinema—is particularly pertinent.⁷¹

The movies offered an opportunity to express anger and dissatisfaction with the cultural priorities and aesthetics of the pro-Junta artists, as well as space to branch out. More importantly, the students made subtle references to the political situation. Little by little, and especially in 1973, their reactions in the gallery of the theater tended to be dictated by exclusively political criteria. A contemporary film critic characteristically complained in the autumn of 1973: “We understand the hunger of the audience for politics but we should not abandon our aesthetic standards entirely; a bad movie should not be praised just because there are glimpses of the Vietnam War or snippets of revolutionary songs and political slogans.”⁷² The fact that this kind of critique was not voiced by an “indignant” pro-regime intellectual demonstrates the growing politicization of public discourse at the time and the rising fear of critics that qualitative criteria would be eventually entirely overshadowed by cheap militantism. In any case, the dissident subculture that was established in Salonica Film Festival’s gallery during the Junta years was to be continued and even intensified in the years following the restoration of democracy in 1974.

“Tickets to Freedom”: Theater

Another privileged site of student communication and interaction was theater. From April 1967 through November 1969, the Colonels exercised direct state-imposed censorship over theater productions, making it “virtually impossible,” according to theater specialist Gonda Van Steen, “for stage companies to stage anything capable of being construed, or misconstrued, as a challenge to authoritarianism.”⁷³ The initial ban on plays included a number of classical dramas deemed radical in their political ideas: Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus (revolutionary ideas and unbowed spirit of Prometheus), The Phoenicians (heretic in morality, nonbelief in religion, radical in politics), the subversive The Suppliants by Euripides, Ajax by Sophocles (lack of solidarity within the army), and above all Antigone (a standing incitement to civil disobedience to a military usurper who has taken over an enfeebled monarchy).⁷⁴

Similarly, Aristophanes’ comedies, which are characterized by a general distrust of authorities and intellectuals alike, were banned; Lysistrata, with its ‘ithyphallic apparatus … and thrasonical soldiers on stage” was the worst offender.⁷⁵ A foreign correspondent observed: “The censors consider that [these plays] contain ideas subversive to society, the King and religion, the three pillars of the regime instituted by the coup of April 21. They have substituted other plays regarded as ‘less dangerous to the public mind.’”⁷⁶ The dictators treated Aristophanes as a nonconformist creator of irreverent artifacts, occasionally allowing his plays to be staged in an attempt to seem liberal and to offer “safety valves for venting dissent.” This trick failed miserably, however: because modern opposition plays were banned, Aristophanes provided the raw material for criticizing the excesses of the ludicrous dictators. It was up to the audience to identify the resemblances.⁷⁷

By the early 1970s, the theater, like the cinema and the publishing world, had been somewhat liberalized. The softening of censorship allowed certain plays to return to the stage, even if norms of production and reception remained distorted. As the classical actress Anna Synodinou maintained in late 1972, one of the main reasons for the reemergence of artists, including playwrights and actors, was a growing concern that the new generation should not suffer from a cultural void—a statement similar to that made by Manolis Anagnostakis concerning books.⁷⁸ In other words, artists like Synodinou wished that the previous generation of young people, which suffered the absence of any substantial cultural activity from 1967 to 1971, would be succeeded by one that would experience a renewed intellectual dynamism. In July 1972, Synodinou reemerged with Sophocles’ Elektra, and in early 1973 she went overtly political with the staging of Bertolt Brecht’s Antigone, in which she played the main role.

Soon, the subtext became more important than the apparent subject matter, and theater became a venue for dissent. The relationship between spectacle, text, music, and dance, and particularly the metatheatrical and extradramatic elements in the performances of politicized actors, contributed to that shift. By 1972, a number of directors, playwrights, actors, and actresses had devoted themselves to a theater that would reach the people and would communicate political messages. The journal Anoichto Theatro [Open Theater] (Athens, 1971) outlined this new role in an editorial published in its first issue in 1971 that defined “political theater.” The editorial concluded, in line with the reelaboration of tradition, that the correct knowledge of tradition “is always the starting point of every renewal.”⁷⁹

In Athens, Karolos Koun’s Theatro Technis [Art Theater] basement performances were a focal point of the theater revival. The Theatro Technis’s particular approach to Attic comedy followed an idealized quest for pure folk culture. There followed productions of plays by Harold Pinter, Luigi Pirandello, Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, and a single production of a Shakespeare play, Measure for Measure, which, according to Modern Greek scholar Peter Mackridge, was “a symbolic choice of play, with its central themes of justice and mercy.”⁸⁰ To paraphrase sociologist José María Maravall’s conclusion about anti-Franco Spanish students at the same time, cultural deviance in the Colonels’ Greece was equivalent to political deviance: Beckett or Genet were as subversive as Lenin.⁸¹ For *Katerina, these performances contained “an allusory wink” that the trained student audiences of the time “could easily grasp” (*Katerina, interview). The Stoa Theater in Athens that was inaugurated in 1971 by Thanasis Papageorgiou and Eleni Karpeta also staged performances of political plays, such as Peter Weiss’s The Song of the Lusitanian Bogey. Drama teams like Stefanos Linaios’s Synchrono Elliniko Theatro [Contemporary Greek Theater] (Athens, 1970) performed plays that included political references, among them Goodnight Margarita, an adaptation of an old theatrical success based on a dramatic story during the German occupation. Nikos Bistis points out how this particular play helped to break down barriers and attract people to the student movement: “This was a classic performance of the bourgeois woman who passes over to the Left, she falls in love with a partisan. … All these spectacles helped people to be drawn to the Left” (Bistis, interview).

In Salonica, interest in theater blossomed tremendously under the Junta. The State Theater’s productions managed to attract more than three hundred thousand spectators per year to their performances, a great number of whom were students. As the state-controlled theater did not make a serious effort at transcendence in its repertoire, the growth seems indicative of a new form of group socialization and exchange through the theatrical ritual. Gradually, young people became increasingly preoccupied with theater. It became a widespread phenomenon, giving the students an important and influential role as consumers of cultural artifacts. The general director of the State Theater of Salonica, Georgios Kitsopoulos, stated in an interview with the pro-regime student paper O Foititis in late 1972 that he was seriously considering asking the opinion of the students, whom he considered a “class” on their own, before deciding to stage future plays:

The attendance of all these students in theater, the get-together, this lively participation, the notes with opinions and comments, have created a community. We have the perspective of having a closer relation to the class of youth, so that you should not be surprised—this is the first time I say this—if in the future we invite representative groups of youth before staging a play, in order to read it to them and let them give their opinion on the reasons why that play should be staged or not.⁸²

Theater journals containing quite radical standpoints began to appear and were readily consumed. The most influential was Anoichto Theatro, a “monthly review of political theater” that contained articles by renowned left-wing intellectuals like Gyorg Lúkacs and traced international innovative developments such as the Living Theater in the United States. In an interview with Protoporia, the director of Anoichto Theatro, Giorgos Michailidis, stated clearly that “for us political theater means, first of all, opposition to any form of power.”⁸³ Similarly, the journal Theatrika [Theater Issues] had as its motto a phrase by Eugène Ionesco: “All people that have the tendency to dominate others are paranoid.”

In late 1971, the theater scene started changing in Salonica as well, and interesting links were created between the literary scene and the Theatriko Ergastiri [Theatrical Workshop], which was run by students. A network of publishers, theater persons, and accommodating student groups was put into place. Bookseller and theater aficionado Kaiti Saketa recalls: “Filippos Vlachos of the Keimena publications came to Salonica. Salonica then was a distribution center for books, and we were in contact with all the publishers of Athens. So, where did he go when he came over here? Straight to the Theatriko Ergastiri.” At the same time new creative spaces were developed around theater, which facilitated the creation of new meaning. For a long time there was no student society that could accommodate dissident students; thus Saketa argues, “It was as if [students] had theater as their base” (Saketa, interview).

When the Theatriko Ergastiri brought Bertolt Brecht’s Man Equals Man in late 1972—a play full of references to everyday alienation, including the loss of innocence, the impossibility of communication, and the estrangement of the self (“You should forget about your opinions”)—the first performances took place in half-empty theaters. The theater columnist for Thessaloniki wondered, “How many—if not everybody in the theater room—should leave the Amalia Theater skeptical every night? It is an obligation, it is an injunction to get to know ourselves, to judge ourselves.”⁸⁴ His moralist tone condemns the passive attitude of those who did not join the spectacles and who did not question themselves about the restrictions that were imposed on them on a daily basis.

The students redeemed themselves, however, proving to be some of the most sensitive receivers of theater and establishing a direct dialogue with the art form and its content. Brecht’s epic theater was much more influential on the young people of Greece than, for example, street theater, which did not manage to penetrate the country. The Theatriko Ergastiri turned to a more Greek-centered repertoire and in 1972 performed Greek playwright Mendis Bostantzoglou’s (Bost) Fafsta, a satire of bourgeois life and its linguistic anarchy. The workshop’s contributors articulated a desire to form a sort of “Greek Theater” by adopting a Greek repertoire and themes close to the Greek reality. The whole play is a sort of feast, in which the spectators themselves are involved in the end, in this way partaking in the spectacle in a dynamic way. The farce established a special relationship with the spectators by inviting them to interact—a practice that was about to become a standard feature in alternative theater performances over the following years.

Elefthero Theatro [Free Theater], the most remarkable of all of the theater groups of this period, was a collective created in 1970 by young actors and artists. With “living theater” features and a belief in Brechtean Verfremdung, the group decided to abolish the “director-dictator” in a symbolic antiauthoritarian move that resonated both with the repressive state of affairs in the country but also with a general radical tendency abroad: everything had to be the result of collective creation—in the tradition of Ariane Mnouschkine’s Théâtre du Soleil.⁸⁵ Many of the Elefthero Theatro’s actors were members of the Maoist EKKE, not least because one of them, Giorgos Kotanidis, belonged to the organization’s leading group. As he notes in his memoirs, “In Europe a revolutionary ideology was being born and artists were in the vanguard. What better proof that theater, cinema and the revolution are part and parcel?”⁸⁶ The collective’s political radicalism also inspired a stance critical of the “absolute spectacle” and a search for theater of contestation. Elefthero Theatro’s manifesto declared, with extraordinary frankness in its Marxist wording, that it was a group comprised of people under twenty-eight who detested bourgeois theatrical values.⁸⁷ Just like with cinema, the idea here was that the spectators should be induced to think critically: “We oppose this passive attitude of the audience; its decline in front of a universe of heroes, divas, routine, lots of crying, lots of laughing. In contrast, we advocate a spectacle that keeps the audience alive, perceptive and happy.”⁸⁸

The group was composed of graduates of the National Theater, some of whom were also enrolled as students in the universities of Athens or Salonica in order to retain their student status. This link with the student world was intensified through their close collaboration with EKIN, which included the staging of plays in the latter’s basement and the active role of some actors in its initiatives, and vice versa. The main contact was Elefthero Theatro’s leading actor, Nikos Skylodimos, himself a graduate of the prestigious Leonteios School and therefore a fellow student of some of those well-to-do youths who comprised the main circle of EKIN.

Elefthero Theatro had a spectacular debut when it staged John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera on 3 September 1970, in Athens. Kaiti Saketa remembers the same performance when it was staged in Salonica the following year: “This was a revolutionary act for Salonica, to have a play similar to Brecht’s Threepenny Opera staged at the Royal Theater, with innuendos, with pantomime against the dictatorship, things that were not stated clearly” (Saketa, interview).

Another breakthrough event for the Elefthero Theatro was its staging in 1971 and 1972 of Petros Markaris’s The Story of Ali Redjo [I Istoria tou Ali Redjo]. Being a clear indictment of the socioeconomic exploitation of the powerless have-nots by the powerful haves, the play was a succinct but unambiguous statement of social protest. The play included, among other things, the projection of a film that involved images of a tractor intercepted by shots of a tank. When the still of the tank covered the screen in the end, it became clear that it “pointed to the colonels and their military semiotics.”⁸⁹ Playwright Markaris argued in an autobiographical text years later that the Elefthero Theatro’s staging of his play was the most collective and full-fledged resistance act in the field of the arts throughout the Junta years.⁹⁰

In 1973, due to political differences the initial group of Elefthero Theatro broke up.⁹¹ Nonetheless, in the summer of the same year, and with some of the founders of the group persecuted or imprisoned for subversive political action, Elefthero Theatro made a direct statement regarding the current affairs and especially the dictators’ “controlled liberalization” experiment. With …And You’re Combing Your Hair […Kai Sy Chtenizesai], a production in the tradition of the Athenian epitheorisi (revue genre) and co-written by the group members together with left-wing playwrights Kostas Mourselas, Giorgos Skourtis, and Bost, it advanced the idea of abstention from the 29 July 1973 referendum for the abolition of the monarchy. The revue’s title (“You’re combing your hair,” meaning you are brushing your problems away) and the show’s poster and program (a collage with a finger pointing at the reader/audience over bodiless dancing legs), were a clear indictment of the entire society of indifference and social apathy.⁹² Since Elefthero Theatro members believed that the lifestyle and conformism of the Greek petty bourgeoisie were responsible for many of the country’s ills, several of the revue’s satirical numbers actually castigated issues such as the lower-middle-class obsession with socioeconomic mobility, its hypocritical stance regarding premarital sex, and its fascination with football and television.⁹³

Figure 4.4. The avant-garde theater group Elefthero Theatro performing John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera in 1970. The group, which decided to abolish the director-dictator in a symbolic antiauthoritarian move, exemplified the fusion between politics and the arts. (Courtesy Giorgos Kotanidis)

By this point, audiences interpreted Elefthero Theatro’s productions as political commentary with great potential and impact.⁹⁴ Rena Theologidou remembers the performances of …And You’re Combing Your Hair as “a revolution within the [Junta’s] ‘Revolution’—a real revolution”: “We used to go to [the theater of] Alsos every night, I could go on stage and play it. We knew it by heart, the dialogues, everything” (Theologidou, interview). Even though magazines of the time attest to the fact that the greatest and most enthusiastic part of the audience was comprised of students, the massive numbers of people that flocked to watch the show reveal that performance theater with a political edge was becoming mainstream.

By 1973, even mainstream companies, such as that of popular actress Jenny Karezi, staged political plays. Karezi, with her husband and fellow actor Kostas Kazakos, commissioned Iakovos Kambanellis to write a play that was performed in the spring of 1973 and was about to become one of the most popular anti-Junta theatrical events of the entire dictatorship period: Our Grand Circus [To Megalo mas Tsirko]. Academic and antiregime activist Giorgos Koumandos claims that the performances of this particular play “became massive political demonstrations, the biggest ones during the seven-year dictatorship—before the events at the Polytechnic.”⁹⁵ The play was based on a series of historical vignettes that were filled with allusions and references to the Greek people’s suffering throughout the centuries from either foreign rule or domestic autocracy. In an alternative reading of Modern Greek history, Our Grand Circus paralleled authoritarian moments of the past to the rule of the Colonels and to US neocolonialism. Ostensibly in reference to the constitution granted by the first sovereign of Greece, the Bavarian King Otto, in 1844, characters in the play voiced the slogans “The people’s voice equals God’s rage” and “Constitution”—drawing an inescapable comparison to the savage violation of constitutional rule by the Colonels ever since 1967.

The play was highly charged emotionally, not least because of a very powerful music score by Stavros Xarhakos that was performed by dissident student idol Nikos Xylouris.⁹⁶ Through an unconventional stage and seating arrangement it granted multiple occasions for direct interaction between the performers and the members of the audience, who were mutually exposed.⁹⁷ As drama scholar Gonda Van Steen explains, “The majority of the spectators could … observe other people’s reactions which encouraged self-observation and self-reflection, especially when the actors fired difficult questions at them.”⁹⁸ The fact that the audience, mainly composed of students, went off to demonstrate soon after the play’s premiere, demonstrates the clear agitprop effect of the play and its metatheatrical elements. Playwright Kambanellis recalled with emotion that the popular response was so enthusiastic that youths at later performances did not simply ask for tickets, but for “tickets to freedom.”⁹⁹ In November 1973, some of the play’s slogans, written on huge placards, were taken up by student protesters, and right after the Polytechnic occupation, actress Jenny Karezi spent a month at the EAT/ESA and was subjected to psychological torture. When she resumed the play, the greatest part of the historical references that had been its major strength had been butchered by the censorship.

All in all, students were patrons of cultural creations and bearers of a new cultural radicalism, which again was facilitated by their predominantly middle-class background. They experienced and contributed to the radicalization of the entire cultural scene, a process in which theater played a fundamental role, partly due to the direct interaction between artists and audience. Theatrical journals openly questioned the boundaries between culture and politics, introducing a new, direct discourse that differed from the previous secrecy. The term political theater penetrated everyday jargon. By the winter of 1973 so many political plays were staged that critics started to doubt the solely artistic aspirations that their producers claimed. As had happened with political books and cinema, performances with an engagé content were often judged to be superfluous and cunningly misleading, as the political subject matter ensured success with audiences. An editorial by Anoichto Theatro was so harsh in its criticism that it dubbed extreme “politicization” demagogy: “The pseudo-resistance of big words, the people with their collars turned up, the blood-shedding students, the red cloaks, the iron bars of prisons, and, in general, the ‘pornography of violence’ do not render anybody emotional. Being a creation of the last few years, the theater of demagogic findings has tired and disappointed.”¹⁰⁰

It is important to note that this specific editorial placed “pseudo-resistance theater” alongside three more potential enemies of Art, which were either introduced or boosted by the military regime: television, football, and the Ford Foundation. The fact that the latter, in particular, was famously granting abundant grants to Greek intellectuals and artists during the Junta period was often interpreted by left-wingers as a sell-out to the Americans. In his memoirs, Elefthero Theatro actor Giorgos Kotanidis analyzes at length how tempted the group was to accept a lavish Ford grant which it ultimately rejected due largely to the fact that it was coming from the States, “the country which created and supported the dictatorship.”¹⁰¹

Nevertheless, this whole discourse on the crisis of theater (a similar one was articulated by literary circles) seems to come from the future, and in particular the Metapolitefsi period. It is astonishing that in the midst of the Junta period critics would emphasize issues such as overpoliticization and commercialization. Despite all this, theater proved to be a privileged space for voicing dissent, just like cinema. It managed to go from “the margin to the mainstream,” to quote theater specialist Philip Hager’s term, and from “pocket theaters” to big outdoor productions in front of mass audiences.¹⁰² Political, “engaged,” or agitprop theater flourished during the last years of the dictatorship and turned out to be a major rallying point for students who opposed the regime and were eager not only to share their subversive artistic codes but to participate actively in the shows, demonstrating their direct complicity.

The Musical Culture Wars

“Revolutionary” music was another subversive artistic product that circulated in the early 1970s. Eclecticism, one of the landmarks of the international art scene during the 1960s, ruled. A mixture of Mikis Theodorakis’s banned reworkings of poetry and Dionysis Savvopoulos’s “paralogical” texts was coupled with the parallel discovery of the local rembetika and foreign imported Anglo-American music, resulting in a fusion of the old with the new. The mixture between traditional folklore and experimental rock created an explosive blend.

Rock music was becoming popular, and a form of rock culture infiltrated Greece and the antidictatorship student movement in different forms and colorations, both directly and indirectly, through the folk rock of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, through movies such as Woodstock, and even through Greek artists like Savvopoulos. In addition to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Doors, Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, and most of the artists who had played at Woodstock (Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin) became points of reference. Militant student and present-day journalist Antonis Davanelos remembers that students differentiated between “politicized” and “apolitical” rockers: “I remember that in my school we were split in two, the nonpolitical rockers, that is, Led Zeppelin, to put it in a schematic way, and the politicized part that listened to Dylan; Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young; and these were like Gospels.” He goes on to argue that the spirit of contestation was arriving via music: “The message that was coming from abroad, mainly from abroad, was the following, the wind of freedom that was unleashed after May ’68. Since in Greece there was no political discussion, it was banned by the Junta, it’s strange, but I think, without being sure, these are at least my memories, that the message was coming mainly from the States and mainly through music” (Davanelos, interview). Music from the Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd comprises part of the soundtrack of the film Black-White—alongside tunes by the Greek songwriter Manos Loizos. At one point in the film, the student protagonist enters a music store in Athens and stares at a poster of Frank Zappa, while in the background one can hear a song by Deep Purple. This scene suggests the extent of young people’s familiarization with Western pop culture, including progressive rock groups, at the time.¹⁰³

A number of Greek rock bands gained popularity by referring to drugs and rebelliousness in their lyrics. The most significant were Socrates, Exadaktylos, and Damon and Fidias. Other bands perpetuated the 1960s trend of combining political and countercultural elements. The hippie message “Make love not war” was echoed in the Greek smash hit of 1972, “Make Love, Stop the Gunfire” [Anthrope Agapa] by the rather conventional rock group Poll, which referred directly to the Vietnam War.

As former militant and present-day historian Leonidas Kallivretakis recalls, however, this generation, despite its contact with the rock scene, clearly preferred the Greek political song.¹⁰⁴ Greek resistance music led the way, with Theodorakis’s heroic tone encapsulating the spirit of the time and marking continuity with the past in the form of the eponymous Lambrakis movement. In the early 1960s, Theodorakis was the first to gather large crowds of people in big stadiums to hear his musical reworkings of poetry by George Seferis, Odysseus Elytis, and Giannis Ritsos, whose work he consciously attempted to popularize. Theodorakis’s music had been persecuted by right-wing governments and ultra-right-wingers in the past, who tended to disrupt his concerts—events that were “widely reported, and contributed to the political reinvestment of [his music’s] symbolic status before the dictatorship,” as Dimitris Papanikolaou writes. “It was the Gramscian overtones of Theodorakis’s rhetoric,” however, “that rendered all popular culture described in his [work] potentially political.”¹⁰⁵ Theodorakis invested much of his time trying to demonstrate that true popular art is political.

As one might expect, Theodorakis’s music was banned in Greece after the Junta came to power in 1967, a situation that continued even after the regime lifted censorship of theater and literature, for the Colonels believed that the people “must be protected from any contagious disease, such as Left-wing views or Left-wing music, which could delay the day when [Greeks] will all become true Greeks, following truly Greek policies and principles” in a general process of reeducation.¹⁰⁶ Accordingly, the buying, selling, transmission, reproduction, or lending of Theodorakis’s music became a court-martial offence.¹⁰⁷ Dissident students had his records smuggled to them by friends studying abroad (giving them new ways to escape discovery by the police); copying and reproducing them became a common clandestine activity.

Soon, not only his music but his entire Gestalt turned political, rendering Theodorakis a powerful icon of resistance, a status reinforced by his legendary escape from arrest for many months after the coup. His famous song cycles, such as The Songs of the Struggle [Ta Tragoudia tou Agona], which are mostly about freedom, prison, and lost dreams—many inspired by old partisan melodies—became the necessary companions of young people, who eagerly sang them in the tavernas. Many commentators have seen Theodorakis as the embodiment of the 1960s’ spirit of liberty, the engagé artist par excellence, leading to his mythologization at home and his commodification abroad.¹⁰⁸ Vera Damofli remarks of Theodorakis’s ubiquity and importance: “It was more revolutionary for us back then … to receive the illegal songs of Theodorakis that arrived here in tapes, and we learned them by heart, no matter if they were nice or not. But in those days it meant something, that the tapes came from abroad, and this was spread out, the one told the song to the other, you know, we put them in our house and this was something [meaningful]” (Damofli, interview).

There was a strong divide between Theodorakis (who was committed to communist ideals, partisan traditions, and Generation Z) and another figure of the early 1960s, the poète-chansonnier Savvopoulos. Savvopoulos represented both a continuity with the avant-garde “New Wave” of the Greek song of the early 1960s and also a break with it, in a Bob Dylan-esque way. Apart from Dylan, Savvopoulos’s role model was Georges Brassens, the French anarchical “singing poet” who fused folk song elements canonized as “oral poetry” with identifiable popular song.¹⁰⁹ Similarly, the Greek troubadour took disparate strands of traditional music and wove them together with electric guitar into a form of “serious pop” with folk elements. In his shows—immensely popular among progressive students—Savvopoulos revisited regional variants of folk known as dimotika.¹¹⁰ Members of his show were iconic folk singer Domna Samiou, shadow puppeteer Evgenios Spatharis, circus strong man Jimmy the Tiger, and experimental filmmaker Lakis Papastathis. Despite his often unorthodox, grotesque, and ironic reinterpretations, Savvopoulos was a central figure in the use of folkloric elements and traditional instruments as part of a new revolutionary spirit. In his words there existed an interesting tension between tradition and revolution: “Tradition with one hand was giving us shapes of life and with the other was reducing our revolutionary spirit. How can I be revolutionary and traditional at the same time? Revolution is a mute instrument without tradition. And tradition without revolutionary spirit is a fossil.”¹¹¹ It was precisely this gap that Savvopoulos was trying to bridge.

Figure 4.5. Dionysis Savvopoulos being filmed by one of his collaborators, director Lakis Papastathis, during the legendary sessions at the Kyttaro Club in 1973. Kyttaro was a meeting point of the political and the countercultural. (Courtesy Lakis Papastathis)

Savvopoulos’s songs made constant reference to the youth of his time (“the lads with the long hair and the black clothes”) and masterfully described the mass consumption that had arrived in Greece by the late 1960s. He referred to the destructive influence of the mass culture promoted by the hegemonic media as “tons of excrement” in his song “The Baby” [To Moro] (from the LP Filthy Bread [Vromiko Psomi], 1972), for example. In a 1970 interview, he described the rapid changes brought about in mass consumption after the Junta took power: “I haven’t been to Salonica for seven years. … Last time I went I was impressed by the change. Many things which were not accessible to the lower classes, now are everywhere to be found. You see them being sold on every corner: refrigerators, televisions, kitchens. Let alone the building blocks.”¹¹² The rapid increase in mass consumption that Savvopoulos refers to was partly the result of the booming economy in the early years of the Junta and of the dictators’ inclination to buy off political dissent through increases in state allowances and benefits. The electrical devices and elements of household modernization had made their way through to Greece in the 1960s, but they were consolidated on a grand scale throughout the country only in the early 1970s. While television was still a luxury in the late 1960s, it was a standard accessory in half of Greek households by the mid-1970s.¹¹³ Artists and intellectuals tended to view television as “the new dictator,” its invasion an epidemic that facilitated the consumption of cultural garbage at home.¹¹⁴ As was the case in Franco’s Spain, television became a major instrument of regime propaganda, but also of entertainment and a certain homogenization, not least because of the advertisements.¹¹⁵ Him and Him [Ekeinos ki Ekeinos] by Kostas Mourselas was probably the only exception to this, being a show that had a subversive, albeit cryptic, script.

In a period in which direct political expression was banned, the kind of music Savvopoulos produced conveyed indirect messages and a general ethos.¹¹⁶ As social scientists Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison have argued, some popular music in the 1960s through form and content “translated the political radicalism that was expressed by relatively small coteries of critical intellectuals and political activists into a much different and far more accessible idiom.”¹¹⁷ In this respect, Savvopoulos, like Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan in the United States, Lluís Llach in Spain, or Paolo Pietrangeli in Italy, was providing a new kind of political discourse: “a musical variant of critical social theory.”¹¹⁸

In contrast to Theodorakis, however, Savvopoulos shaped and reflected on youth culture without feeling himself to be an enlightened instructor who would educate the masses. Accordingly, in the same 1970 interview cited above, he questioned: “Who are you? Is there a group around there with a common conscience, a different desire, needing a ‘representative’? Because from your side I don’t hear any sound! … Ah, of course! Singers in London and New York can easily act as the ‘representatives.’ But down here?”¹¹⁹ One cannot but note here the similarity between this and Bob Dylan’s rejection of the role of the guru of the American New Left through his phrase “There really isn’t a New Left”;¹²⁰ this becomes even more pertinent since Savvopoulos very consciously mimicked Dylan, not only in terms of music.

His daily program at the Athens boîtes, namely the small music halls of the early 1960s, became an important meeting point for nonconformist students. These youths, critic Giorgos Notaras writes, “had no relation to tradition, no serious education, but were full of imagination and passion and a suppressed drive which at some point [was] about to come to the surface.”¹²¹ Former student militant Giorgos Karambelias argues that Savvopoulos expressed the “marginal element” of the period, “that element which was secondary to the central aims of modernization and democratization, but which was already mobilizing the most progressive section of youth.”¹²² Savvopoulos himself has criticized purely political music—implicitly that of Theodorakis—and argued that songs which went beyond party folklore, attacked ideological discipline, and were closer to everyday realities, were more appealing to students who thought critically: “It used to be fashionable and people wrote political songs, like ‘We have to reinforce the struggle.’ Some epic stuff … The [song] “Assembly of EFEE” was more meaningful, as the guy fancies a chick who is not at the assembly. This became a symbol for students, you see. … That is, if you were a bit more aware of the things that were going on, this is the kind of song you would seek out” (Savvopoulos, interview). In addition, what can be discerned in most life stories is the conclusion that Savvopoulos brought Greek society into contact with the spirit of international student protest.

Given the success of Savvopoulos’s concerts, the creation of the Kyttaro Club in Athens in 1970, which could host up to four hundred people, partly accommodated his large audiences, which the seventy-seat boîtes could not do. In a way, the clubs Kyttaro and Rodeo (opened in 1967) in Athens were the equivalent to the legendary Fillmore Auditorium in the United States and the Marquee and UFO clubs in Great Britain at about the same time.¹²³ During his gigs, Savvopoulos performed next to dynamic representatives of the emerging rock scene, whose stated intent was not only to copy the foreign model but to initiate rock with Greek lyrics and explore the realities of the youth, as in the legendary live recording Zontanoi sto Kyttaro [Live at Kyttaro] (1971). This album documents a fusion of progressive, folklorist, and acutely political elements, both indigenous and foreign. Savvopoulos’s song “Black Sea” [Mavri Thalassa], an Epirote folk tune mixed with psychedelic flute solos, was followed by Exadaktylos’s controversial pop and Socrates’ imitation of Jimmy Hendrix’s famous napalm bomb-like guitar solo at Woodstock. Socrates’ guitarist Spathas describes his guitar effects as containing “the sense of protest” and remembers the young people who were at the concert as an audience full of energy, singing along and applauding with exhilaration.¹²⁴ Despoina Glezou, the singer of the popular band Nostradamus, recalled with pride in an interview that even experienced foreign artists were impressed by the countercultural energy exposed by the performers at Kyttaro. Once again, both in the case of Socrates and hers, Woodstock seems to be the absolute point of reference:

Some amazing nights at the Kyttaro were a total confirmation of the beauty that emerged from inside this place. Mike Wadleigh, who directed the film “Woodstock” came, Cat Stevens came, Richie Havens, the black performer who sang “Freedom” at Woodstock, came, and they all were completely enchanted. I mean the nights were so powerful that these people with all their experience, who had experienced thousands of people when they performed at Woodstock and who made “Woodstock,” were entranced by us!¹²⁵

The fact that as early as 1971, when the student movement was still low-key, a major event of such transgressive intensity took place, in which avant-garde musicians were “jamming” together with the underground rock scene of Athens, indicates the explosivity of the Greek counterculture.

In addition to becoming political, rock music also borrowed from the folk scene, creating a vibrant fusion of genres. Rock groups Damon and Feidias and Bourboulia played songs “based on folk music and classic rock,” with lyrics in Greek and with “sociological sensitivities,” according to the groups’ own description.¹²⁶ One of the most promising rock producers of the time, Stelios Elliniadis was a member of the Maoist EKKE and a frequent habitué of the cult record shop Pop 11. Elliniadis plainly describes the hybridization of the cultural tastes of this generation: “Verses, characters, underground social streams, political environment, aesthetical tendencies, cinema and literature were shaping the rock scene together. Paul Butterfield, Electric Flag, the Grateful Dead and John Coltrane, instead of the treacly Baez and the childish Utopia of the flower children. And at the same time Vamvakaris and Hadjidakis and, of course Savvopoulos, in Rodeo. Light behind the dazzling façade.”¹²⁷

Music halls became a meeting place and a melting pot for both apolitical youth, who were still called yé-yés, and politicized students. Savvopoulos remembers: “The main audience at the boîtes were students. At Rodeo, in those clubs, there were students but not [an] unmixed [group] anymore. A youth was coming too that liked to listen to rock groups. … We called them ‘yeyedes.’ Different kinds of youth started meeting each other” (Savvopoulos, interview). This mixture, which led to the creation of a new youth culture combining political with countercultural features, was also apparent in the appearance of the youth. The militants started adopting the yé-yé style, wearing long hair and beards. The opposite was also true, as Panos Theodoridis, a student who considered himself a typical rocker of the time, explains: “So, whereas we were rockers and did not have responsibilities, being apolitical and cool, all of a sudden we got transformed into political creatures.”¹²⁸ Whereas former student militant and present-day historian Leonidas Kallivretakis asserts that students left rock culture behind when they were organized into antiregime political groupings, in reality rock and politics coexisted.¹²⁹

Reinventing Tradition

In one of his most emblematic songs of the period, “Ode to Georgios Karaiskakis” (1969), Dionysis Savvopoulos mixed traditional instruments and tunes and a ballad-like melody with political undertones. Though the song’s title suggests that its subject is the nineteenth-century hero Karaiskakis, in fact it refers directly to Che Guevara. The mixture between politics, tradition, revolution, and electronic communications is striking:

Where are you going brave man?

Beautiful like a myth

You are swimming straight to death.

And all the antennae

of a battered earth

loudspeakers and wireless everywhere

they sing you sweet lullabies

and you rise

high among the kings of the skies.¹³⁰

Savvopoulos often performed together with Marisa Koch, a flamboyant singer—a 1973 article in Thessaloniki described her as “a mixture of the wildness of Janis Joplin, the endurance of Yoko Ono, and the sensitivity of Joan Baez”—who specialized in performing demotic songs. The Thessaloniki piece remarked, “Folk song and rock music become one in order to convey the new Greek musical ‘color,’”¹³¹ defying the regime’s demand for cultural authenticity. In Koch’s concerts acid rock, funk, garage, and country were mixed with famous folk songs and songs with clear antidictatorship connotations, such as Giannis Markopoulos’s emblematic “Enemies” [Ochtroi] (1972), which pointed to the Colonels. Theodoridis remembers with emotion a combined concert of Savvopoulos and Koch in Salonica where they launched their own versions of folk songs: “In 1970, I think, Savvopoulos’s ‘Ode to Karaiskakis’ came out, with those bagpipes at the end of the track—or was it a clarinet?—well, this thing came out and Savvopoulos came over with Marisa Koch, I think it was in 1970, to Palais des Sports Stadium, and Marisa Koch sang the ‘She-Deer’ [I Elafina], which was, a folk song, for 3,000 to 3,500 enraged students.”¹³² The fact that all those “enraged” Greek students got all fired up listening to a traditional folk song speaks volumes about the political electricity that this kind of music was generating.

Koch’s own recollections highlight the manifest antagonism between old-style folk songs championed by the regime and new-style, reelaborated ones favored by its opponents:

When I met Dionysis Savvopoulos in 1969 and we arranged the program for Rodeo, above all I didn’t want to sing any song that had been submitted to the censorship committee. … So, it crossed my mind to sing old songs in a way in which I could express my inner drive but also the sounds that I had in my ears back then, listening to them day and night. … The issue was to not let anyone hinder the cry and the wildness in singing, in order to sing in a “traditional” way. … The songs had such an immediate success, as if the people were waiting for this. As a matter of fact, the people then, at least the ones who were coming to those places, were the same people that a bit later were inside the Polytechnic, and they wanted to do “harm” to the traditional songs, because every statement of the Colonels was accompanied by a traditional song.¹³³

Figure 4.6. Marisa Koch performing in a video clip of the early television shows. The fusion between the traditional song (“Armenaki”), Koch’s hippie attire, and the psychedelic background was part of a conscious strategy to “harm” tradition. (Courtesy Nikos Mastorakis)

Koch’s reference to censorship is important: the raw material of reinvented folk hardly attracted the censor’s eye due to its national characteristics. Understanding this fact is crucial to interpreting the rediscovery of tradition in countries under an authoritarian regime, such as Greece, Spain, Portugal, Chile, and Brazil. Folk revivals never became an emblematic feature of the ’68 movements in Western Europe like they did in Colonels’ Greece because it was only in the authoritarian context that seemingly innocent music could be used as a weapon against the authorities. Tradition thus became a point of departure for fighting the regime’s monolithic attempts to defend Hellenic civilization. The fact that the dictators were great proponents of folk songs and dances who never missed a chance to publicly promote them by demonstrating their skills in kalamatianos, tsamikos or karagkouna, prompted a number of dissident artists to explore folklore in a heterodox way.¹³⁴ Here, I share Modern Greek scholar Karen Van Dyck’s conclusion that the paradoxical embrace of folk-culture by this alternative sphere was the equivalent of the physician’s homeopathic cure, whereby “that which is threatening can be used to strengthen the immune system.”¹³⁵ The clearest indication of this method was offered by Savvopoulos in an interview in 1972: “We conceptualize the material world as a piece of filthy bread which could, from filthy and unhealthy, be transformed into clean and healthy for the body and the blood, via the process of eating it.”¹³⁶

Dissident artists sought to explore genuine folklore in depth in order to generate opposition to the hegemonic culture’s revival of tradition. This created two competing folk cultures: the dictators’ favorite dances broadcasted and promoted by radio and television, versus the “subversive” folk culture represented by artists of the opposition. While the traditionalist use of folklore by the regime resisted the mixing or recombining of different genres, antiregime artists tended to undermine the supposed purity of folk culture by joining it with other varieties.¹³⁷ Their uses of folk music testify to the fact that popular practices, including festivities and music, can be interpreted and used in the opposite ways of those initially intended by a given authority, challenging power from within.¹³⁸ Still, both sides were arguing for “authenticity,” be it in form (the regime) or in content (the artists).

Figure 4.7. Regent General Georgios Zoitakis—with glasses—and Brigadier Dimitrios Ioannidis—the notorious Head of ESA and latter day “invisible dictator”—championing a folk dance during Orthodox Easter in 1971. Regime figures never missed a chance to demonstrate their skills in the folk dances tsamikos or kalamatianos in public. (Source: ELIA, Greek Literary and Historical Archive)

A Singing Movement

The most popular of the folk songs were from Western Crete, the rizitika, rediscovered by the composer Giannis Marcopoulos, who also crafted political songs with a surreal twist that created semantic confusion, such as the enormously popular “Tarzan” (1972) and the evocative “Papadop dop dop” (1973) whose concluding stanza was quite telling: “Whoever remains silent is going to wither away.” Rizitika were usually sung by one of the students’ idols, the Cretan singer and lyra player Nikos Xylouris. The songs, which dealt with the fictional struggles of local heroes with Death (Charos) and the historical Cretan uprisings against the Ottomans in the late nineteenth century, already belonged to the canon of resistance. Crete itself functioned as a place with symbolic value, condensing the traditional popular patriotic and neo-romantic sentiment: peripheral but proud. The absolute favorite from this tradition was the cortege song “Xasteria” whose refrain was, “When will the season of starry nights come round again?” Anthropologist Jane Cowan remarks that “this song was unmistakably a call to arms”: “When will the skies clear? / When will February come, / so that I can take up my rifle?”¹³⁹ The song in reality declares in a celebratory manner a series of intended massacres: “I shall leave mothers without sons, women without men.”¹⁴⁰

Equally militant were the old left-wing guerrilla songs, the so-called andartika, which also underwent a revival. These were songs sung by the rural folk during the resistance period and the civil war in the 1940s. Their raw militancy created the illusion that the students were communicating with the romanticized heroes of wartime resistance. These songs contained a significant amount of communist propaganda, but it was always amalgamated with “the traditions of populist agrarianism and age-old peasant traditions.”¹⁴¹ Many of these songs were a call to arms, and their appropriation by the students in the 1970s can be described as “retro resistance.” Art historian Elizabeth Guffey argues that “retro” should not be confused with “nostalgia,” since nostalgia involves “a heavy dose of cynicism or detachment,” demythologizing its subject.¹⁴² I believe, however, that in the Greek case, and in particular concerning the resistance, “retro resistance” and nostalgia were hardly distinguishable from one another.

Often, the andartika were reelaborated versions of kleftika folk songs from the period of Ottoman rule. Similar to the partisans in the 1940s, antiregime students were attracted by the rich kleftic tradition and its semantics. Its songs fit well with the imaginary of the premodern, renegade, freedom-fighting figure, already exploited by the left-wing generation of the 1940s. The kleftika were altered, transformed, and modified in the process of their adoption by students. A well-known song containing the line “Bleak is the life we dark klefts are leading,” for example, was rewritten as “Bleak is the life we students are leading.”¹⁴³

Dissident students also discovered and reappropriated the rembetika, songs imported from Asia Minor in the 1920s that both were strongly associated with the underworld and marked a form of social protest. The rembetika had a strong countercultural resonance because of their plentiful references to drugs, being “songs of love, sorrow and hashish.”¹⁴⁴ They were banned in the interwar period and officially denounced by the Communist Party as lumpen, as they supposedly led working-class fighters to stupefaction and degeneration. During the first years of the Junta, the rigid moral code of the “Hellenic Christians” regarded the rembetika as offensive. To take one prominent example, the breakthrough study of Ilias Petropoulos Rembetika Tragoudia (1968) was banned, and he was imprisoned. The situation was not entirely restrictive, however, as old rembetes such as Vassilis Tsitsanis, Markos Vamvakaris, and Sotiria Bellou performed in dives in Athens and, to a lesser extent, in Salonica. Savvopoulos himself turned to rembetika to acquire raw material, as many a composer had done before him, including Hadjidakis and Theodorakis in the late 1940s and early 1960s, respectively.

The rembetika offered rich material evoking past epochs, a favorite tendency at that time. Apostolos Kaldaras’s song “Night Has Fallen without a Moon” [Nychtose Choris Feggari], recorded in 1947 during the Civil War, goes: “A door opens, a door closes / but the key is turned twice; / what’s the kid done / that they threw him in jail?” Jane Cowan rightly observes that “with the regime’s prison cells full of young people brought in for interrogation and torture, the lyrics simply achieved too direct a hit.”¹⁴⁵ A similar example is offered by Markos Vamvakaris’s song “The Prisons Are Ringing Out” [Antilaloun oi Fylakes] (1936), a very popular tune dating from the time of General Metaxas’ dictatorship. Rembetika songs, always sung collectively, fitted neatly with the formation of large groups of friends who met in tavernas or went to the basements where the old rembetes sang. Vera Damofli remembers that what counted was the allusion, that “one word within the song” (Damofli, interview). Ilias Triantafyllopoulos characterizes this as a joyful rediscovery of a long-lost socialization through music: “It’s the rediscovery of Bellou, Tsitsanis, again the popular songs and the rembetika and of course Savvopoulos and the others and the international streams [too], rock and all the rest. But the tavernas start all over again, the songs restart, and this was what created the groups of friends” (Triantafyllopoulos, interview).

For politicized students, rembetika became part of the canon of resistance, acquiring signifiers that were not recognizable by others. Their use of rembetika evokes the notion of cultural practices as “maps of meaning” which are intelligible solely to the members of the group.¹⁴⁶ It is noteworthy that rembetika became a general fashion at the time: rembetomania. Rembetika venues became so popular that they ended up being publicized by the pro-regime student paper in Salonica, in this case stripped of their subversive nature.¹⁴⁷ Angeliki Xydi recapitulates this tendency of the politicized students to recast cultural trends for their own uses and highlights the ways in which they conceptualized rembetika, focusing on their social characteristics: “And of course we had the tavernas. Where we gave away our souls. Regularly, with rembetiko until the point of exhaustion. Which was in a way a fashion, but not only that. I think that it fit in well, it corresponded to this situation of social upheaval and discontent towards a suppressive regime” (Xydi, interview).

Although there was an association of the rembetika with drugs, it was unusual for the politically engaged students to partake. This did not apply to the rest of the society, however. When a hippie commune that used opium was discovered in Athens in October 1973, both the reportage and trial revealed the press’s utmost contempt of drug use. When the defense questioned the hippies about the music they listened to and they answered “modern music,” the defendant replied in astonishment: “This is the first time that I’ve heard of an ‘opium dive’ without rembetika.” At another point of the trial, the defense commented that the authorities had mobilized to arrest the hippies under the false assumption that they were a large resistance organization. Instead, “they bumped into kids.”¹⁴⁸ With this comment, the defense juxtaposed the “dangerous” and “mature” resistance fighters to the “harmless” and “childlike” drug-consuming hippies, who were often castigated and ridiculed by the press.

In the words of Eyerman and Jamison, “Many social movements bring older movements back to life by remembering the songs that were sung and the images that were drawn by giving them new meaning.”¹⁴⁹ The same applies to the case of the antidictatorship student movement in Greece and the fact that rizitika, kleftika, andartika, and rembetika became the soundtrack to student action. The performance and multiple reappropriations of these older musical genres located the students firmly within a long-established, longue-durée tradition of protest.

A Collective Falling in Love

Singing banned songs in the tavernas at night was the first testing ground in defiance of the authorities, but it was also a means of nonconformist socialization. A favorite meeting place was the nightclub Lidra, where student idol Nikos Xylouris performed. It was temporarily closed by a police order in 1973 due to “serious disorder taking place” and the fact that it “constituted a definite danger for the public order and the safety of citizens.” An Observer report called it the “Secret School,” a name that referred to a well-known myth from Greece’s past concerning underground schools teaching Greek language under Ottoman rule; a US newspaper referred to it as “250 square meters of freedom in Greece.”¹⁵⁰ Such places became sites where the radicalized, rebellious identity of students could be freely and collectively manifested, and the students could express ideas forbidden in all other contexts.¹⁵¹ Ioanna Karystiani stresses this point:

We used to go to the tavernas in order to let off steam by singing the banned songs, and in a provocative manner in fact, as if we were looking for trouble, for some cop passing by to ask us for our ID and bring us to the police station. You know, this thing that you have when you are eighteen or twenty years old and you want to be provocative. (Karystiani, interview)

Karystiani’s description corresponds quite well with the image of renegade individuals who collectively defy the authorities. Groups of friends acted as a sort of collective subject, such that the context of their collectivity reinforced the individual will of defiance, braving fear and danger.

Tavernas became the meeting ground par excellence, where clashes among the students were temporarily suspended in a celebratory atmosphere. They functioned as a parallel, antithetical sphere to the existing authoritarian order and its institutions. The day’s threatening reality gave way to its joyous flip side as those places of relaxation offered a therapeutic outlet to unwind. Damofli preserves in her memory moments of liberating laughter, which brings to mind Bakhtin’s assertion about its subversive character: “And of course the nights we went to tavernas and we sang and laughed, and we laughed. We used to laugh a lot” (Damofli, interview)¹⁵² Kleopatra Papageorgiou makes a similar comment, stressing the communal element in life and drawing the classic contrast with the present: “We had some great years back then in the tavernas. We were very lucky kids, because despite the sufferings inflicted by the Junta and stuff, we had a very intense social life, a great camaraderie, and we shared everything. Our thoughts, our desires, everything. We weren’t closed in ourselves as today’s students are, I suppose” (Papageorgiou, interview). The collective superseded the individual; the rise of individualism, a typical byproduct of the 1968 movements according to critics such as Eric Hobsbawm, seems entirely absent in the case of Greek protesters.¹⁵³

Student communities and social interactions provided the necessary space for the development of strong bonds, both of friendship and sexuality. Francesco Alberoni has written that when a movement is about to be born, there is a collective falling in love,¹⁵⁴ and the Greek student movement confirms this truth. Participants in a collective movement acquire a dynamic and elevated self-image that differs substantially from their everyday selves. Falling in love or joining a collective movement, Alberoni maintains, may seem dissimilar, but nevertheless they are both experiences that lead to an exalted period of self-regeneration.¹⁵⁵ One of EKIN’s leading members, Giorgos Kanellakis, encapsulates this feeling of exaltation in his description: “In the groups of friends, in the political quarrels, in the tavernas, in the excursions—with the banned songs—there was an excitement, euphoria, to the extent of … libertarian paranoia.”¹⁵⁶

Gendered Militancy and “Sexual Revolution”

What was women’s role in all this? Novelist and former activist Maro Douka’s semiautobiographical novel Fool’s Gold [I Archaia Skouria] (1979) is an interesting exposé of the difficulties, including family constraints, faced by young women coming of age during the dictatorship. It also faithfully reconstructs the rhetoric employed by the dictatorship as a step backward for public discourse on women, who were valued only for their capacity to biologically perpetuate the nation. This rhetoric bears a striking resemblance to fascist and national socialist ideologies. As dictator Papadopoulos put it in Our Creed [To Pistevo Mas], his manifesto, “The Revolution sees in the Greek woman her primary biological mission as the Mother. It honors her for this capacity with a deep consciousness of her importance.”¹⁵⁷

Nevertheless, by 1972–1973, Greek women represented 33.7 percent of all students and 38.5 percent of all graduates.¹⁵⁸ The shift of young women beginning to live away from home to study was a breakthrough for their place in Greek society and was regarded by the women in question as a liberating experience. Still, an American report of the time describing the infamous incident in which right-wing students disrupted the lecture of Professor Fatouros in Salonica’s Architecture School in December 1970 provides insight into the moral standards that were shared by military authorities in the universities. The report quotes the wording of “Governmental Commissioner” General Polizopoulos in his correspondence with the Ministry of Education: “The General, arriving on the scene immediately after the incident, was shocked at finding … one girl student who was seated on [a] table displaying herself in a most immodest manner,”¹⁵⁹ thus implying sexual provocation.

Long-established mentalities continued to define the student body as well. Most men were still in favor of separate socialization, and most female students remained largely intimidated and socially conservative. In a series of interviews conducted by the antiregime student journal Protoporia in 1972, several female students were asked vague questions on their views about university life, interpersonal relations, and established social practices.¹⁶⁰ Their replies reveal their social conservatism, eagerly condemning premarital sexual relations and defending the merits of the traditional “Greek way of life.” They habitually refer to sexual intercourse as “that thing,” discuss their parents with fear and awe, and express concern that they might be caught doing something “improper.” Last but not least, the women complain about being treated by their male fellow students with scorn and arrogance:

Figure 4.8. Change in Male and Female Student Numbers in Greek Institutions of Higher Education, 1968–1973. (Source: National Institute of Statistics, ESIE)

– A guy would never start a serious discussion with a woman maybe because he would think that she’s incompetent to follow.

– Yes, yes! You’re right. Once it also happened to me that I intervened in a serious discussion and then they said surprised “Ah! So, you know something about these things too!” and then they started taking me for a ride!¹⁶¹

Growing female participation in antiregime activities, such as the first student committees of action, finally facilitated a degree of parity. In her own account, Myrsini Zorba, a leading student nicknamed “Rosa Luxemburg” as she was, in her own playful words, “dogmatically radical,” makes an interesting juxtaposition between the freedom of spirit that left-wing women acquired over the years and the female image of the happy housewife promoted by television commercials at the time: “Much later from commercials and images I realized too that [women] were very lowly placed, they didn’t work, they stayed at home, they were very oppressed. Left-wing women, in contrast, went out of their homes, they ran out” (Zorba, interview). It is interesting to note, however, that at the beginning of the 1970s television commercials also embraced the “trendy” issue of female emancipation as a selling strategy. A washing machine commercial of the early 1970s reported: “The emancipation of the woman, working or not, starts from home. It begins when she gets rid of the stress of laundry, for example.”¹⁶² Other commercials embraced the sexual liberation model by promoting, for the first time, overtly sensual images or associational names that referred to the general climate of the period. The much-advertised shampoo “Eleftheri kai Oraia” [Free and Beautiful], for example, used words that corresponded fully to the feminist movements of the period.¹⁶³

One important stage in the development of the student movement was a juncture for female students to acquire a pivotal role; this was when the Junta passed a decree in 1973 enforcing the military draft of eighty male students who had taken leading roles in organizing student unrest. This decision of the authorities to suspend military deferment was directed exclusively at men, leaving women aside as less harmful; it was sexist and misplaced in its conceptualization of the student movement as exclusively male driven. As a result, women students moved to the forefront of the movement across numerous faculties. Albert Coerant, a Dutch reporter in Athens, recalls that during the Law School occupation in winter 1973, many female students surrounded their male counterparts in order to protect them from being photographed and consequently sent to the barracks (see chapter 5).¹⁶⁴

Women became leading figures inside the student movement in both Athens and Salonica. Kleopatra Papageorgiou and Ioanna Karystiani, in particular, are often referred to as inspirational figures, “Las Pasionarias” according to Vourekas – a powerful reference to the legendary Communist leader from the time of the Spanish Civil War, Dolores Ibárruri. Klearchos Tsaousidis argues that Papageorgiou was very well known, including to the police, as women leaders were few and far between and thus were immediately spotted: “She was also a girl that stood out: she was not some silent girl, she was a shouter, and she distinguished herself” (Tsaousidis, interview). Many former student activists speak of Karystiani as the “northern star” of the student movement, the most charismatic personality: “Given the situation, equality was imposed by reality. When you had Karystiani in the Law School, would anybody doubt her because she was a woman? Ioanna was a tornado. She would sweep everything. She was a personage. … Up to ’73, before the Polytechnic, she was the point of reference for the whole movement” (Skamnakis, interview). Nikos Alivizatos remembers on the contrary, however, that in the immediate past Karystiani had been given secondary roles, as was the norm for women:

I remember that in those first days Ioanna Karystiani had come to EKIN with a scared look. “I want to help,” and things like that, and we didn’t know who Ioanna Karystiani was, the future writer and leader of the student movement; she was a freshman; we put her to sweep the floor.

“Why don’t you do a bit of mopping?”

“Guys, don’t let me just do the mopping.”

And we had those kinds of conversations. [laughter] (Alivizatos, interview)

In addition, Vervenioti recalls that, apart from a few cases, it was the men who led the way in leading the organizations, not least due to their greater experience in public speaking. Women remained far more intimidated: “We could possibly say better things than they did, but we didn’t do it. Men did the talking. I remember that very well” (Vervenioti, interview). Zorba too claims that the role of women in the Left, though comparatively privileged, was still not one of leadership, as emancipation did not coincide with empowerment: “Despite the fact that within [the Left] women really do the ‘dishwashing,’ always the ‘dishwashing,’ they are nevertheless dynamic, responsible, and in the end equal” (Zorba, interview).

Women gradually developed a greater female consciousness. Traditionally male practices such as smoking and using offensive language were adopted by a new generation of left-wing women, not least because of their desire to emulate female prototypes abroad. International developments in fashion influenced their dressing habits too; in 1960s Greece, trousers were still considered a male trademark. Tasos Darveris’s impression is that the transformation in women students’ dress took place over a very limited timespan during the late 1960s. In his book, his literary surrogate, who is being transferred from one jail to another, takes notice of the shift, which he perceives as a huge transformation—an impression that was probably reinforced by the fact that he had spent eight months in isolation: “Several women wore trousers, which was something unprecedented in the history of Modern Greece.”¹⁶⁵

By 1973, moreover, one result of progressive female students’ everyday interactions with their male colleagues in shared antiregime activities and socialization was a more uninhibited attitude toward sexuality. Student everyday habits became liberalized, despite the fact that Damofli argues that “it was the previous generation that started the sexual revolution and we the ones who consolidated it”—referring to liberal outbreaks as part of the 1965 “July events.” In comparison to the previous student generation, the new one appeared more open in its attitude toward sexual conduct, not so much in seeking to transform the public sphere as in conquering the private one. Zorba remarks: “Sexual liberation was a trademark. We women became more liberated, we started finding jobs, anything you can imagine” (Zorba, interview). In early 1970s Greece, however, birth control remained taboo, abortion was “a crime under all circumstances,” and female adultery was a serious offence. In addition, female contraception was still finding its way, as the selling and advertising of the birth control pill was prohibited and punished by criminal law.¹⁶⁶

In these conditions, and with social conservatism being reinforced and rewarded by the regime, the enjoyment of open sexual relations was soon understood as a means not only of social emancipation but also of political resistance, and this despite the fact that the absence of the pill deprived Greek female students of a major emancipatory practice in terms of taking control over their sexual practices. Interestingly, the otherwise very open life stories of female students largely omit any mention of abortions, which remained underground and traumatic. Only Karystiani broke the barrier of silence when she mentioned coming together to pay for students’ abortions as an example of collective bonding and solidarity (Karystiani, interview).

In former militants’ life stories there is disagreement concerning the nature of sexual encounters among the politicized students, as some stress the arousing effects of tension under the stressful circumstances of the student struggle while others castigate the strict monogamy that reigned supreme. Maria Mavragani remembers that, at least in her environment, sexual experimentation was common: “We, that is in my group of friends, we discussed it, naively or not, but we discussed, ‘Can I go out with others,’ the couple, you see? It constituted a subject of conversation and speculation and many things happened, you know, sure, we had taken it seriously” (Mavragani, interview). Kleopatra Papageorgiou insists, however, that no “revolution” took place:

We ate out together every night, in tavernas, in pizzerias, we talked, our life was collective, almost communal. Alright, we might not have slept in the same houses, but we ate together, we discussed much. Now, sexual relations were not that far out as in the United States or in Europe. Sexual revolution—no, this was a myth. In the end, there was conservatism, big time. And this was seen later on in the course of events; you see how these people evolved. They got married, they did all the usual stuff that the previous generations did. (Papageorgiou, interview)

There was no attack on the institution of marriage, nor was there any considerable sexual experimentation. Moreover, homosexuality and homoeroticism were taboo subjects that did not emerge as a transgressive demand in the student movement either, as they did in other countries. The celebrated translator and novelist Kostas Tachtsis, himself a homosexual, commented that when students shouted “Eleftheria!” (Freedom!), they only meant it in terms of political freedom, not including sexual emancipation: “If freedom was not to be uniform and indivisible, to hell with it!”¹⁶⁷ Drawing a connecting line between May ’68 and the Greek student movement of the early 1970s, he added: “The struggle for freedom had to aim at the liberation of every kind of sexual desire too, namely that of the homosexual, and this would be realized only if one day all those who shouted ‘Bread! Education! Freedom!’ did not only mean political, but also sexual freedom, and in fact not just the right of some fuckers to come and go to the dormitories of women students at night, as happened in ’68 in Nanterre.”¹⁶⁸

Despite the validity of his accusation, however, Tachtsis overlooks the revolutionary character of the demand that people of opposite sexes be allowed to sleep together without reproach, both in the Paris of 1968 and the Athens of 1973. The demand for sexual freedom was part of discovering the political side of every sphere, including the private one.¹⁶⁹ On a side note, and even though the Colonels’ Greece was a macho society, a homosexual and “transvestite” liberation movement did spring up during the Junta years (though this movement was not at all connected to the parallel student activism), a phenomenon that Spain witnessed as well. Still, the Junta insisted that homosexuals no longer existed in the country.¹⁷⁰

Anthropologist Alki Kyriakidou-Nestoros also argued that things were changing in female students’ behavior. Kyriakidou-Nestoros was an associate professor at the University of Salonica, an uncommon position for a woman to occupy during this period in Greece. At an interview given to the pro-regime student journal in March 1972 she argued: “In contrast to the older female students, the new ones are not intimidated anymore, but are very active. … In general there is a big difference between the old and the new ones. The new female students are much more easy-going.”¹⁷¹ Shortly thereafter, Kyriakidou-Nestoros was expelled from the University as “non-law-abiding.”¹⁷²

Female provocation, a major trait of ’68, was absent too. A possible exception is profanity. Damofli delineates the difference between women who cursed because they wanted to and those who were rather unwilling but did so because it was part of the package of a new transgressive identity:

So, for example, they were calling a poofter “poofter,” and they were saying many things, because the philology … for me swearwords are part of a philology, there developed a philology. So, others were doing it—they didn’t feel it but they were doing it—and others felt like it and talked this way. (Damofli, interview)

Interestingly, by using the more impersonal third person plural Damofli leaves herself out of this dualism. Taken in context, however, her story testifies to the radical change in the behavior of women at the time.

Women’s limited emancipation was not necessarily greeted with enthusiasm by everyone inside the movement, especially by their male peers. Damofli continues:

Probably some of them were shocked. Some girls were very loose-tongued. In our generation this became established. Or it was starting to be accepted that girls could use swearwords too. And for some of them it was also part of their style, others were exaggerating, you know, they were saying things that often shocked people. (Damofli, interview)

In the socially backward and politically reactionary Greece of the time, seemingly innocent gestures could be strongly symbolic for the movement’s participants and authorities alike. Dimitris Papachristos writes in his memoirs that when he entered court to defend eleven colleagues of his in early 1973, the most striking feature he saw were his girlfriend’s hippie trousers, which infuriated the policemen: “Above all, I will never forget the bellbottomed jeans that Olga wore, on which she had imprinted the peace symbol, and this provoked them, and it became the excuse for arresting her.”¹⁷³ In that sense, there existed no provocation per se, but people were so sensitive to subtle nuances that such an act could be considered as a form of microprotest.

In contrast to Papachristos, Lionarakis reports being shocked by his own girlfriend’s “provocative” way of dressing, which in his words consisted of a simple low neck and tights—thus revealing the puritanism that persisted even in the ethics of left-wing male militants:

Melpo was a nice chick back then and very emancipated and all that jazz. I was containing myself, containing myself, containing myself, and one day, at 5 o’clock in the morning, after a night-long I don’t know what, at Nea Philadelphia Square, I told her, “Look. I’m fed up. I’ll tell you everything so that I can let myself go. I don’t want us to be together any longer, because you are embarrassing me, you dress like a whore!” (Lionarakis, interview)

Historian Dagmar Herzog’s conclusion regarding the German 1968 that “the longing for sexually free women and the fear of those free women came hand in hand,” seems particularly pertinent here.¹⁷⁴ Dissident student Kostas Kalimeris, on the other hand, expresses the conviction that equality was a fact, but that it was a negative outcome of extreme politicization: “Relations with the opposite sex were forcefully equal. Now, how can this function? It was the male comrade and the female comrade, it wasn’t man and woman. There was no space to discuss such matters” (Kalimeris, interview). Contrary to Kalimeris’s assertion about being gender-blind inside the movement, however, enforced equality did not abolish a protective male stance toward the so-called weaker sex. Tasos Darveris mentions in his autobiographical novel a deeply courteous posture toward women: “Despite all your efforts, you couldn’t stop looking at women as creatures who were too delicate for prison cells and torture, even if they were comrades.”¹⁷⁵ Even in the moments of panic during the evacuation of the November 1973 Polytechnic School (see chapter 5), gallant male behavior toward women was recorded. A later testimony noted that during the brief and abortive negotiation prior to the army’s entrance, more time was requested on the ground that “there are women inside, small, delicate, how can they get out, they will be trampled.”¹⁷⁶ Still, on an organizational level, the Polytechnic essentially signaled the institutionalization of female participation on equal terms. The presence of quite a few women on the Coordinating Committee of the Polytechnic occupation and the crucial role of two women militants as speakers in the radio station are but two examples.

Figure 4.9. A female student is dragged by the hair by two policemen around the time of the Law School events in February 1973. Misogyny and a particularly harsh treatment of women protesters were part of the regime’s repressive repertoire. (Photographer: N. A. Floros)

In ideological terms, women militants of Marxist inclinations often envisioned a socialist turn of society as the necessary precondition for an improvement in gender relations. In general, however, gender was and would continue to be an uncomfortable issue for the majority of left-wing organizations in Greece at the time; for them such matters were subordinate to the fundamental class conflict. It must be emphasized that despite the relative popularity of Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal book The Second Sex among student circles, no early signs of feminist politics or a separate women’s sector emerged in the Junta years—in contrast to Francoist Spain, where despite the oppression, protofeminist groupings emerged already in the late 1960s. In Greece, concerns about the oppression of women as the root of all oppression did not even become dominant after the breakdown of the Junta and the more vindicating period of the Metapolitefsi. Angeliki Xydi attributed the lack of any explicit feminist politics on the part of Greek women themselves or their organizations to the fact that this was too sophisticated a demand for the conditions of the time:

I think that in general there was no such issue. Men, women, the feminist aspect, which I discovered only after the dictatorship was over, did not occur to us then. It is always like that in the great moments of struggles, both the resistance, the civil wars. I remember I read a nice phrase by Rossana Rossanda saying that after the resistance women went back to the kitchen. Yes, you know, as long as the struggle required it they inveighed against the male-dominated establishment, they put us in the first line. Afterward in the calm. … (Xydi, interview)

It can be concluded that although women militants acquired an important role in politics and more emancipation in everyday life, this never translated—with a few notable exceptions—into full equality, separate demands, or leadership. In the areas of affect and self-representation, one can observe a more self-assured attitude among women of the 1970s, even though their assertions about total equity are often contradicted by their bitterness about the male-controlled party hierarchy. Women’s significant presence compared to earlier years, however, and their “alternative” socialization, including the free management of their private lives and their bodies, were among the most innovative elements in the movement, whose effect was the subversion of long-standing moral codes. In many ways, this shift went hand-in-hand with the exigencies brought forward by the movement’s philosophy: the student movement was, after all, a powerful carrier of modernization, in the sense of redefining traditional perceptions of gender relations. And, in this sense, it was in keeping with the general wave of foreign female prototypes in the post-’68 cultural climate, which helped change the way people looked at women as a whole.

Revolutionizing Everyday Life

There is a clear relation between the personal, the everyday, and the political, which includes emotional expressions and symbolic meanings. It is in “everyday life practices” that the connection between conditions of life and subjectivity takes place.¹⁷⁷ In order to understand the tropes of experience, we must understand the transformation of “objective conditions” of action into cultural meanings in the context of everyday production and reproduction.¹⁷⁸

Long hair proved to be a major issue of contention and concern for the regime, the students, and the media, which systematically treated this trend as an unacceptable sort of androgynous gender bending. Although initially a yé-yé feature, long hair soon became associated with a particular type of leftist politics as well. Colonel Ladas called it “the hirsute flag of nihilism,” and the Junta associated it with abnormality (“men becoming women”) and homosexuality, which were treated as identical.¹⁷⁹ As long hair became a fashionable means of defiance and a rival to the masculine ideal, a series of negative references started appearing in daily newspapers and pro-regime student journals. Similarly, when the majority of left-wing students wore beards, articles appeared with titles like, “Are beards anti-sexual?”¹⁸⁰ An article in the pro-regime student journal in Salonica criticized the role swapping between men and women that came about when men wore long hair, which supposedly resulted in a lack of decency. Another piece in the same issue rejected smoking pipes as part of a wider set of pretentious and grotesque behavior of left-wingers.¹⁸¹ Policemen often called male students “poofters” and female students “whores” because of their appearance.

Long hair was not accepted by the traditional working class or hard-core communists either, and it “caused the condescending semi-ironic smile of the leadership of the pure left-wing youth,” according to Kallivretakis.¹⁸² Beards, apart from the aforementioned connection with the Greek partisan tradition, were a way of imitating Che Guevara, one of the student movements’ mythical figures, omnipresent also in pictures and posters. According to Stergios Katsaros, by 1973 there was no student room in Athens without the poster of Che.¹⁸³ Che iconization was also a constant feature in the ’68 movements, to the extent that the Libreria Feltrinelli, to take the Italian case, ran out of posters—underlining an awkward mixture of third-worldism, revolutionary iconography, and commodification.¹⁸⁴

Another point of contention was that clothes such as suits and ties, the standard outfit of the overwhelmingly male-populated universities throughout the 1960s, went out of fashion among politicized students. Young people started redefining their apparel: turtlenecks, jeans, and freewheeling flared trousers became a clearly defined dress-code, while miniskirts and make-up were worn by women less and less. In the summer of 1971, the Economist reported that the Greek youth had “adopted the sartorial fashions of their age-groups in London, Paris, Amsterdam and Düsseldorf, though their sense of taste and their personal vanity ensure that they look cleaner, neater and more elegant.”¹⁸⁵ In contrast to the article’s conclusion, however, a new militant style came into fashion that featured military jackets—an international anti-Vietnam item—which became the necessary accessory of the young rebel’s outfit, again suggesting a homeopathic subversion through the use of the military Junta’s aesthetics. Kleopatra Papageorgiou describes how a well-known police torturer in Salonica ironically referred to her as a guerilla. She also makes a cultural identity statement when in order to describe her limited stock of blue jeans she refers to a popular rock song of the time:

Imagine, I had two pairs of blue jeans. … “Cleopatra in blue jeans”! There was such a song at the time, incidentally a rock one. I had two pairs of blue jeans, I was interchanging them until I finished the Polytechnic. Some hobnailed boots from Monastiraki, and Tetradakos asked me, “Are you ready to take to the mountains with those boots?” He thought they were a provocation, that I did it on purpose. (Papageorgiou, interview)

In a more practical way, fashion choices acted as visual markers with subversive content, which facilitated recognition. Stelios Kouloglou observes: “In this period the military jacket was very much in fashion. There was something of Che Guevara in our look. It was a means of recognition. Namely, very few nonpoliticized people wore these kinds of clothes” (Kouloglou, interview). Similarly, Damofli comments on the semiotics of appearance: “I looked at you with your little glasses, you know, and the long hair and the beard and all this. It was something, the gaze, the clothes, all these were signs” (Damofli, interview).

Apart from its subversive character and social disapproval, attire linked the imaginary and the style of the student movements. By mimicking the aesthetics of students in France or the United States, Greek students felt that they were communicating with the movements abroad, even if unconsciously. Mandelou says: “Everyone was wearing a military jacket, and I remember a friend of mine who used to comment on the way I was dressed—she had studied in Paris: ‘I think I will soon see you taking a petrol-bomb out of the jacket. You look like that, just like a girl I saw in Paris in May ’68’” (Mandelou, interview). A humanities student at the time, Titika Saratsi is one of the few who confesses that she did not adopt these sort of aesthetics, hoping to avoid being a replica of revolutionary prototypes, in this case the iconic Palestinian guerrilla fighter Leila Khaled. Still, she did not follow the “Lenin-Levis” rule either, “out of pure respect for Vladimir Ilyich” as she writes: “I dressed and went around like a normal girl and not in a military jacket and threadbare jeans like some bad imitation of Leila Khaled—my jeans were always well ironed, with everything that this implies.”¹⁸⁶ Katerina Detsika too is quick to add a “comme il faut” element in her self-representation, clarifying that apart from long hair and black clothes, “We were not shabby” (Detsika, interview).

The students’ idiolect and their idiosyncratic conduct were shaped by their strong attachment to culture as a way of living. By 1973, progressive students started to be labeled koultouriarides, “artsy fartsies,” a term that became inflated during the Metapolitefsi.¹⁸⁷ Artist Kostas Lachas describes in a poem the kind of atmosphere that reigned in the favorite haunt of “artsy fartsy students,” a tavern named “Domna” in Salonica in the early 1970s: “Domna is thick with smoke and culture / the hullabaloo of empty words / and blasé architects hugging their Marcuse tight.”¹⁸⁸ A highly illuminating article published in the newspaper Thessaloniki in mid-March 1973 enumerates many of the prejudices about but also the actual habits of young student intellectuals at the time, making specific reference to the dressing habits and the discourse of the “artsy fartsies:”

The real koultouriaris believes that external appearance does not play a role in people’s lives, that being occupied with it is something petty bourgeois. For that reason he goes to all the lengthy and often laborious efforts that would make him look as if he does not care about his appearance. In terms of clothing everything is allowed (up to this point rightly so), provided that certain basic rules are not violated, such as: the amount of filthiness should not reach the limits of unacceptability, and the amount of shabbiness should not degrade to a too-striking pennilessness. Prohibited are, of course, all sorts of hats, anything clean washed and ironed, any careful hairbrush or haircut, while, on the contrary, all variations of coats, weird socks (black for funerals), zippers that come up and down in all directions are allowed (objectively useful only in order to satisfy the speed of a sexual act or the fulfillment of a physical need—but what happens when they get stuck?) and, finally, all folkloric fabrications: belts, skirts, bracelets. The full ensemble very often should be complemented by some trendy book (preferably tatty and grimy) or with an issue of some artsy magazine.¹⁸⁹

The article goes on to assert that the koultouriaris “believes in free love” and adds sarcastically that “at least once in his lifetime he has to contract a venereal disease.” Accordingly, “Artsy fartsy circles are impressed by those who suffer.” Moving beyond their external appearance, the best way to spot a koultouriaris, the article suggests, is in their manner of talking. Being reductive, leaving out articles, and at the same time using intricate phrases to express simple notions were standard. In fact, in the early 1970s, Modern Greek scholar Georgia Gotsi argues, “the interrelation between discourses of censorship, urban life, consumerism, and a politicized version of the American Beat produced new themes and a new language.”¹⁹⁰

A series of semantic neologisms, including derivational prefixes, and a jargon peppered with sophisticated concepts became markers of an alternative and exclusive discourse that delineated a specific sort of identity. This elaborate slang was strongly influenced by the Marxist jargon of the time and constant references to the “process” (of production/history/revolution) as well as the “system.”¹⁹¹ It was further characterized by the frequent use of an excessive (revolutionary) demotic, that is, the use of ch [χ] instead of k [κ], which lent the students’ discourse a grassroots flavor. The term διχτατορία, for instance, would be used instead of δικτατορία [dictatorship]. Through the careful appropriation of linguistic choices, the students created a distinctive lingo of their own, used both to define themselves and to mark off their symbolic territory against out-groups, particularly their parents and their “passive” peers. It is noteworthy, that even today former student militants still refer to themselves and their peers of the past as “the kids.”

The appearance of a “revolutionary” everyday life based on style and behavior came in stark contrast to the conservative outlook of the previous student generation, whose members’ attire and sexual rigidities did not differentiate them from ordinary adults. The new generation made a breakthrough in developing its own approach to socialization and aesthetics, which was reinforced by the difficulties of openly reacting against the regime. In other words, exterior appearance acquired enormous symbolic meaning, as did all the indirect, subterranean semantic codes and signals that implied an oppositional politics to the regime and its own aesthetics. To paraphrase Michel de Certeau, students used formal structures of practice to produce “everyday creativity.”¹⁹² This opposition culture provided a channel through which demands of freedom of expression could be voiced.¹⁹³ In that sense, “micro-resistances, which in turn found micro-freedoms, mobilize[d] unsuspected resources hidden among ordinary people.”¹⁹⁴

This was an entirely new habitus that created space for dissidence and dissonance, whereby alternative culture became the student’s daily bread; young people were reading the political into everything and trained themselves to read between the lines in all forms of cultural expression. All this was about to come to a head in the ten months that shook Greece in 1973, resulting in the most spectacular act of collective resistance to take place during the seven years of the dictatorship.

Notes

1. For the concept of “information monopolies” see Bermeo, “War and Democratization,” 392 (referring to Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire, 72).

2. Plaskovitis, “Years of Memory,” 245.

3. Van Dyck, Kassandra and the Censors, 25.

4. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 27. For an elaboration of this notion, see Eugene Irschick’s reflections on the British-Indian example in Dialogue and History, esp. 1–11.

5. Van Dyck, Kassandra and the Censors, 85. In her book Van Dyck offers an excellent overview of comic strip artists’ techniques during the Junta years.

6. Andrews, Greece in the Dark, 176.

7. A-74 Confidential, American Consulate Thessaloniki (Brennan) to the Department of State, “Antonios Kourtis, Publisher of ‘Thessaloniki,’” 24 October 1972, POL 6 Greece, USNA.

8. Iordanoglou, “Antidictatorship Student Movement,” 278.

9. See, for example Thessaloniki, 13 January and 21 January 1972. The antiregime press used almost identical techniques in Franco’s Spain. In October 1968, for example, a half-page image appeared in the newspaper Madrid, showing police beating protesting students under the tiny title “The Peruvian students protest against the Junta.” PP, “Los estudiantes peruanos protestan contra la Junta,” Madrid, 9 October 1968.

10. For a brief testimony by Kourtis, see “Resistance in Print through the Pages of the Newspaper Thessaloniki” in Dictatorship 1967 1974. Resistance in Print, 168–72. In the same volume also see Giorgos Anastasiadis, “The Printed Word of the Resistance against the Dictatorship (1967–1974): The example of the newspaper Thessaloniki,” 128–32.

11. Immediately preceding the publication of the Eighteen Texts many of the contributors to the volume had signed a letter of protest against the intended publication of an anthology of prose by the regime, which undermined the premise that writers were resisting through silence. After the “Letter of the Eighteen,” as it became known, the anthology was withdrawn. See Van Dyck, Kassandra and the Censors, 26–27; and Papanikolaou, “Making Some Strange Gestures,” 180.

12. Roufos, “Culture and the Military,” 159.

13. Other collective publications such as Neoi Poiites [New Poets], Katathesi ’71 [Testimony ’71], and Katathesi ’72 were also inspired by the need to be evasive or slippery for the sake of conveying a dissident message.

14. Anagnostakis, “Άγραφη Ιστορία” [Unwritten Story], I Synecheia 2 (April 1973): 3. Original emphasis.

15. Rigos, “Student Movement,” 232.

16. Sotiropoulou, Political Book, 2.

17. Ibid., 4.

18. Sofoulis, “Social Sciences,” 92–93.

19. Andrews, Greece in the Dark, 176.

20. The Themelio series was confiscated following the decree issued by the Junta on 12 May 1967 banning books by Marxist scholars, educational reformers, writers resident in Eastern Europe, and writers of “left-of-center” sympathies.

21. Sotiropoulou, Political Book, 4.

22. Ralos, “Μερικές σκέψεις για το κοινωνιολογικό βιβλίο” [Some Thoughts on Sociological Books]. I Synecheia 7 (Sept. 1973)

23. Ralos, “Παθήµατα των βιβλίων στις µεταφράσεις και εισαγωγές άσχετες προς το περιεχόµενό τους” [Books’ Misfortunes in Translations and Introductions Irrelevant to their Content]. I Synecheia 3 (May 1973): 189–90. A typical example was Th. Papadopoulos’s introduction to a translation of Gramsci’s Intellectuals, which attempts to find connections with the Greek War of Independence of 1821.

24. Sofoulis, “Social Sciences,” 93.

25. Theodoridis, Macedonian Rock, 203.

26. Kotanidis, All Together, Now!

27. See Hamalidi et al., “A Second Avant-Garde without a First.” In particular Leonidas Christakis, the idiosyncratic publisher of Kouros and Panderma, published on several occasions German antifascist photomontages on the front or back cover of his issues, drawing direct parallels between Nazism and the Greek dictatorship. Ibid, 10.

28. The editors of Tram, among whom was Panos Theodoridis, were tried in Salonica in 1972 for publishing “indecent” texts. The publisher of Anti, Christos Papoutsakis, in Athens managed to publish one issue in May 1972, causing a sensation, but then the journal was closed down by the authorities and he was arrested and tortured.

29. Cockburn et al., introduction to Student Power, 16.

30. Ibid., 7.

31. Fred Halliday, “Student Struggles: Spain,” cited in Protoporia 2 (Jan. 1972). For a detailed analysis of the student resistance against Franco’s regime in Spain see Maravall, Dictatorship and Political Dissent and Kornetis, “Student Resistance to the Greek Military Dictatorship.” Also see Kornetis, “1968 in Spain and Greece.”

32. Johnston, “Talking the Walk,” 108.

33. Primo Moroni and Bruna Miorelli, “Storia e problemi della piccola editoria,” Ombre Rosse 30 (Sept. 1979): 93–103, quoted in Lumley, States of Emergency, 39.

34. David Tonge, “Brecht Alienates Colonels,” Guardian, 10 February 1972.

35. Axelos, Publishing Activity, 52. According to Axelos, these books offered students basic feedback on resisting not only the regime but also the old Left’s arteriosclerotic stance—a common “biological” metaphor in Greek—and its traditional viewpoint. See also Lygeros, Student Movement, 69.

36. Kokkali, “Greek Cinema,” 137.

37. Ellinikos Kinimatografos, 1967, 29–31, cited in Van Dyck, Kassandra and the Censors, 85.

38. Gounaridou, “Representations of Women in the Films of Pantelis Voulgaris,” 151.

39. Petros Morozinis, Kouros, February 1971, quoted in Savvopoulos, Sum Up, 115.

40. From the television documentary by Stavros Kaplanidis History of My Times, dedicated to the making of Angelopoulos’s first feature film Reconstruction (1970).

41. See Angelopoulos’s personal site http://www.theoangelopoulos.com/daysof36.htm. Last checked 8 August 2013. In an interview to film critic Ulrich Gregor in 1973 Angelopoulos was even more outspoken: “What I was looking for was a certain climate. A reign of terror.” See Fainaru, Theo Angelopoulos, 14.

42. Soldatos quoted in the documentary We Have Decided and We Order, by Eva Vernardou and Nikos Sarlis.

43. Komninou, “Television and Cinema.”

44. Theodoridis, Macedonian Rock, 183.

45. Kaplanidis, History of My Times.

46. Kokkali, “Greek Cinema,” 143–44.

47. Introduction to Darveris’s Night’s Story, 22.

48. These two films reached more than 150,000 admissions in the period of their release (1970), as Woodstock and the Strawberry Statement did in the same year. See Chrysanthi Sotiropoulou, Greek Cinematography, 140.

49. Miliex, “Continuous Vigilance,” 347.

50. Papanikolaou, “Singing Poets,” 153.

51. Kallivretakis, “Historicizing the Rock Phenomenon,” 172.

52. Papanikolaou, “Singing Poets,” 188.

53. Dimitris Psathas, Ta Nea, 29 November 1970.

54. See for example Ryback, Rock around the Bloc.

55. “Απαντήσεις του κ. Γεωργαλά σε ερωτήσεις των φοιτητών για την πολιτική κατάσταση της χώρας” [Mr. Georgalas’s Responses to the Students about the Country’s Political Situation], Thessaloniki, 1 December 1970.

56. Both My Aunt, the Hippie, directed by Alekos Sakellarios, and A Hippie with Tsarouchia, directed by Giorgos Papakostas, were released in 1970.

57. Vernikos, Antidictatorship Student Movement, 152.

58. “Swallows Winging South,” Economist, 31 July 1971.

59. Ibid.

60. Bozinis, Rock Globality and Greek Locality, 346. Also see “Η δεκαετία του ’70. Η Ελλάδα στα ράφια” [The 70s: Greece on the Shelf], in Papapolizos and Martzoukos, Greece through Advertising, 148–51.

61. Kunen, Strawberry Statement. The whereabouts of the revolt are purposely never mentioned in the movie.

62. Telegram from American Embassy, Athens, to Secretary of State, 6423, 24 November 1970, Tasca, POL 23–8 Greece, USNA.

63. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure,” 382.

64. Ortoleva, “Le culture del ’68,” 58. Cinema was regarded as an ideal middle way between literary elitism and flat television culture.

65. Andrews, Greece in the Dark, 177.

66. Grigoriou, Memories in Black and White, 124.

67. Eleftheros Kosmos, September 1970, quoted by Grigoriou, Memories in Black and White.

68. In Kotanidis’s memoirs there are plenty of references to people using commercial tunes in everyday parlance, including fellow actor Periklis Korovesis responding to his torturers, “I am the almighty Vim” (a reference to a well-known detergent commercial) when asked if he was a communist during interrogation. All Together, Now!, 84. Interestingly, torturers themselves used the name of a well-known detergent (Tide) as a code name for a particular kind of “treatment.” See Minuzzo, Quando arrivano i Colonnelli.

69. All references from an article by Gavriil Th. Lamtsidis, “O Ιπποκράτης, η δηµοκρατία και η γαλαρία του Φεστιβάλ” [Hippocrates, Democracy, and the Back Seats of the Festival], Thessaloniki, 28 September 1972.

70. Ibid.

71. Papadogiannis, “Between Angelopoulos and the Battleship Potemkin,” 19. Papadogiannis quotes film historian Janet Staiger, “Writing the History of American Film Reception.”

72. The critic Natasa Bakogiannopoulou in the women’s magazine Gynaika [Woman] in October 1973. Quoted in Kokkali, “Greek Cinema,” 145.

73. Van Steen, Venom in Verse, 205.

74. “Athens Ban on Greek Classical Plays,” New York Times, 28 June 1967.

75. Ibid.

76. Ibid.

77. Van Steen, Venom in Verse.

78. “Το Θέατρο, το Κοινό και άλλα. Γιατί επέστρεψε έπειτα από πέντε χρόνια απουσίας. Συνέντευξη της Άννας Συνοδινού στο BBC” [The Theater, the Audience and the Rest: Why She Came Back after Five Years of Absence; Interview of Anna Synodinou with the BBC], Thessaloniki, 14 November 1972.

79. Anoichto Theatro, editorial, 1 November 1971.

80. Mackridge, “Theater in the Colonels’ Greece,” 4.

81. Maravall, Dictatorship and Political Dissent, 137.

82. “Η «Νέα Σκηνή» του ΚΘΒΕ και οι φοιτηταί” [The “New Scene” of KThBE and the Students], interview with G. Kitsopoulos, the general director of the State Theater of Salonica (KThBE), O Foititis, 4 December 1972.

83. Protoporia 1.

84. Lamtsidis, “O άντρας είναι άντρας” [A Man Is a Man], Thessaloniki, 18 November 1972.

85. Hager, “From the Margin to the Mainstream,” 164.

86. Kotanidis, All Together, Now!, 87.

87. To Vima, June 1973.

88. Elefthero Theatro, “One Text,” 193. Here I am using Hager’s translation, “From the Margin to the Mainstream,” 163.

89. Hager, ibid., 196.

90. See Markaris, Repeatedly and Persistently. For a detailed analysis of the play and its production see Hager, “From the Margin to the Mainstream.”

91. Lakidou, “Theatrical Satire and Dictatorship,” 6.

92. Ibid., 11.

93. Ibid., 13. Lakidou rightly notes that much of the subject matter was influenced by homosexual writer Kostas Tachtsis’s bestselling novel The Third Wedding [To Trito Stefani] (1962), a very convincing depiction of the lower-middle-class discourse and mores at the time.

94. Varopoulou, “Theater 1974–2000,” 227.

95. From Koumandos’s preface to the published version of the play by Kambanellis, Our Grand Circus, 5. Quoted by Van Steen, “Joining our Grand Circus,” 307.

96. See Kallimopoulou, Paradosiaká, 20.

97. Van Steen, “Joining our Grand Circus,” 306.

98. Ibid., 309. Also see Hager, “From the Margin to the Mainstream.”

99. Iakovos Kambanellis in Stavros Stratigakos’s documentary Nikos Xylouris and Three Poems, ET1, 8 February 2005.

100. Giorgos Hadjidakis, “Ενός χρόνου” [One Year Old], Anoichto Theatro 12 (1972): 4–5.

101. Kotanidis, All Together, Now!, 194–207.

102. Hager, “From the Margin to the Mainstream,” 108.

103. Black-White makes extensive references to pop culture in general, as one of the protagonists is a student of fine arts who spent his semester abroad in the United States. He mentions Pop Art and uses English words in his discourse, delineating the differences between Greek students at home and those studying abroad.

104. Kallivretakis, “Historicizing the Rock Phenomenon,” 172.

105. Papanikolaou, “Singing Poets,” 93.

106. Michael Wall, “A Hundred Days of Dictatorship,” Guardian, 5 August 1967.

107. One result of this policy, according to the New York Times, was that Theodorakis’s records became more expensive, even more than doubling in price. “The News Team Investigates the Fate of Greeks Who Fail to Conform: Even Football Is under State Supervision,” 14 July 1967.

108. Papanikolaou, “Singing Poets,” 94.

109. Ibid., 24.

110. See Kallimopoulou, Paradosiaká.

111. Interview with Dimitris Gionis, Avgi, March 1975.

112. Interview by Rena S., Epikaira, December 1970.

113. Karapostolis, Consumerist Behavior, 293.

114. See, for example, Giorgos Hadjidakis’s editorial “One Year Old,” Anoichto Theatro.

115. Gracia, García, and Carnicer, La España de Franco, 297.

116. This trend in Greece became, to borrow a description from Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, “one of the main mediating forces, forms of translation, between the [student] movement’s more obvious expressions—demonstrations, organizations, books and journals—and the wider population.” See Eyerman and Jamison, Music and Social Movements, 119.

117. Ibid., 138.

118. Ibid., 124.

119. Interview by Rena S., Epikaira, December 1970.

120. Robert Shelton, No Direction Home, 15.

121. Giorgos Notaras, “Filthy Bread,” 115.

122. Giorgos Karambelias, For Savvopoulos (Nicosia, 1985), 50. Quoted and translated in Papanikolaou, “Singing Poets,” 218.

123. From the description of Kyttaro’s history in the club’s website. http://www.kyttarolive.gr/content/blogcategory/24/70/ Last accessed 8 August 2013.

124. From the jacket of the new edition of the Live at Kyttaro CD.

125. From the Antonis Boskoitis’s documentary Live at Kyttaro. Rock Scenes.

126. Olga Bakomarou, “Μπουρµπούλια: Καινούργιοι δρόµοι” [Bourboulia: New Paths], Fantasio, 6 February 1973.

127. Stelios Elliniadis, “Ο πρίγκηπας της δισκογραφίας” [The Prince of the Record Industry], in E-On Line, 6 August 2002.

128. Theodoridis, Macedonian Rock, 322.

129. Kallivretakis, “Historicizing the Rock Phenomenon,” 172.

130. Here, I am using Papanikolaou’s translation. See “Singing Poets,” 140.

131. “Οι συναυλίες της Μαρίζας Κωχ” [Marisa Koch’s Concerts], Thessaloniki, 10 April 1973.

132. Theodoridis, Macedonian Rock, 241.

133. From the record sleeve of Μαρίζα Κώχ. Στο ‘πα και στο ξαναλέω. Παραδοσιακά—λαϊκά—προσωπικά. 40 ηχογραφήσεις 1970–1992 [Marisa Koch: I Told You Once, I’m Telling You Again: Folk Songs—Popular Songs—Personal Ones. 40 Recordings, 1970–1992].

134. Another major exponent of this tendency was the group Anakara.

135. Van Dyck, Kassandra and the Censors, 51.

136. Mitras, “Συζητώντας µε το Διονύση Σαββόπουλο” [Conversing with Dionysis Savvopoulos], in Chronicle 1972, 215.

137. Marisa Koch’s performance of a “harmed” folk song [“Armenaki”] in a video clip that was presented on television is quite telling of this conflation. Apart from the melding of electric bass guitars and the folk melody, Koch—dressed in perfect hippie fashion—was surrounded by an entirely psychedelic setting.

138. For an elaboration of this practice in the Spanish context, see Kaplan, Red City, Blue Period.

139. Cowan, “Popular Music.” To Cowan’s translation of xasteria as “clear skies,” I prefer Andrews’ “the season of starry nights.” See Greece in the Dark, 56.

140. Another mythical song of the time containing references to revolutionary violence was Theodorakis’s “A Solitary Swallow” [Ena to chelidoni] (1964). Based on Odysseus Elytis’s To Axion Esti, the song concludes in an almost Jacobin way: “For the sun to turn it takes a job of work / It takes a thousand dead sweating at the Wheels / It takes the living also giving up their blood.”

141. Van Boeschoten, From Armatolik to People’s Rule.

142. Guffey, Retro: The Culture of Revival, 20.

143. Song entitled “Freedom Will Come Again to Our Poor Country” [Θάρθει, µωρέ, ξανά η λευτεριά στη δόλια µας πατρίδα] in Takis Mamatsis, “Οι αγώνες των φοιτητών” [The Student Struggles], Neos Kosmos (June 1973): 6.

144. Holst, Road to Rembetika.

145. Cowan, “Popular Music,” 11. Here, I am using Cowan’s translation.

146. See Clarke, et al., “Subcultures, Cultures, and Class,” 10.

147. “Η Σωτηρία Μπέλλου συγκεντρώνει την προτίµησι των φοιτητών που ξετρελλαίνονται για ρεµπέτικο τραγούδι” [Sotiria Bellou Is Preferred by Students Who Get Mad about Rembetiko Songs], O Foititis, 9 April 1973. The same article continues, “Rembetiko, which touches a large part of the student world, finds in Bellou an ‘authentic’ interpreter and is applauded.”

148. ‘Καταδικάστηκαν οι ‘χίππυς’ που συµµετείχαν σε χασισοποτεία και όργια σε τεκέ στο Κουκάκι’ [The “Hippies” Who Participated in Hashish Consumption and Orgies in a Dive in Koukaki Have Been Convicted], Thessaloniki, 12 October 1973.

149. See Eyerman and Jamison, Music and Social Movements, 42.

150. Interview with the nightclub’s owner, K. Manioudakis, in Stratigakos’s documentary Nikos Xylouris and Three Poems.

151. Cowan, “Popular Music,” 3.

152. See Bakhtin, Speech Genres.

153. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 334.

154. Alberoni, Falling in Love, 3.

155. Ibid. Also see Peter Braunstein, “Possessive Memory and the Sixties Generation,” Culturefront, Summer 1997, 66.

156. Kanellakis, “In Those Years,” 49.

157. Papadopoulos, Our Creed, 134.

158. Eliou, “Those Whom Reform Forgot,” 69. Still, women remained largely unrepresented in professional training colleges in the same year, numbering only 18,146 out of a total of 123,081 students, or 14.7 percent. Ibid., 67.

159. American Consul Thessaloniki to Department of State, “Follow Up on Rightist Student Demonstration, University of Thessaloniki, December 8, 1970,” 14 January 1971, XR POL 13–2 Greece, USNA.

160. “Φοιτήτρια σε τρείς πράξεις” [Female Student in Three Acts], Protoporia 2 (Jan. 1972).

161. Ibid.

162. Valiant washing machine commercial titled “For the Emancipation of the Housewife,” in Papapolizos and Martzoukos, Greece through Advertising.

163. Papapolizos and Martzoukos, Greece through Advertising. The shampoo’s name was a translation of the Italian original “Libera e Bella.”

164. Coerant, “On Their Own,” 116.

165. Darveris, Night’s Story, 130.

166. Donatella della Porta, Celia Valiete, and Maria Kousis, “Sisters of the South: Paths to Women’s Rights in Southern Europe,” unpublished paper, 7.

167. Tachtsis, Terrible Step, 288.

168. Ibid., 299.

169. Passerini, “‘Utopia’ and Desire,” 14.

170. Historian Richard Clogg mentions an incident early on in the Junta years (1968) in which the then secretary-general of the Ministry of Public Order, Ioannis Ladas, “personally beat up the author of an article in the weekly magazine Eikones, together with its editor, Panagiotis Lambrias, for having the temerity to suggest in an article on homosexuality that many of the worthies of ancient Greece had been homosexual.” Clogg, “The Ideology of the Revolution of 21 April 1967,” 41.

171. “Έρευνα της Μαίρης Πρινιωτάκη “Ο ρόλος της φοιτήτριας στην σηµερινή κοινωνία” [Enquiry by Mary Priniotaki: The Role of the Female Student in Present Society], O Foititis, 1 March 1972.

172. Zannas, Prison Notebooks, 138.

173. Papachristos, He Lived Life, 29.

174. Herzog, “Between Coitus and Commodification,” 281.

175. Darveris, Night’s Story, 131.

176. Karatzaferis, Polytechnic Slaughter, 197.

177. Luedtke, “Historiography of Everyday Life,” 38. I owe this reference to Dimitra Lambropoulou.

178. Ibid., 44, 52.

179. Van Dyck, Kassandra and the Censors, 104. See also special issue of Epikaira, “Mακριά µαλλιά. Από τον Αδάµ στους χίππηδες” [Long Hair: From Adam to the Hippies], Ibid.

180. Thessaloniki, 16 February 1973.

181. “Oι πίπες” [The Pipes], O Foititis, 16 September 1972; and “Βασίλης ή Κούλα” [Vassilis or Koula?], O Foititis, 16 October 1972.

182. Kallivretakis, “Historicizing the Rock Phenomenon,” 172.

183. In Stelios Kouloglou, The Children of Che in Greece, television documentary.

184. Prestholdt, “Resurrecting Che: Radicalism, the Transnational Imagination, and the Politics of Heroes.”

185. “Two-Headed Phoenix,” Economist, 31 July 1971.

186. Saratsi, “For Epi,” 102.

187. See Magia Lymberopoulou’s illustrative comment of 1975: “Greeks conceptualize the word κουλτούρα [culture] as an illness.” “Kουλτουριάρης, κουλτουρισµένος, κατά το ψωριάρης, ψωριασµένος” [Artsy Fartsy, Just Like Scabby], Politika Themata 72, no. 8 (29 Nov.–5 Dec. 1975).

188. Zafeiris, “Youth Hang-outs in the ’60s,” 58. I would like to thank Karen Emmerich for the translation of this short poem.

189. Atzil, “Ο δεκάλογος του κουλτουριάρη” [The Decalogue of the Artsy Fartsy], Thessaloniki, 14 March 1973.

190. Gotsi, Review of Kassandra and the Censors, 353.

191. See Bozinis, Rock Globality, 345–46.

192. Certau, Practice of Everyday Life, xiv–xvi.

193. Graham and Labanyi, “Developmentalism,” 257.

194. Certeau, Giard, and Mayol, Living and Cooking, xxi.