The Land and People since the War
PENGUIN BOOKS
List of Plates
List of Maps
Preface to the Second Edition
Preface to the Third Edition
Introduction
PART ONE From Civil War to Democracy
1. Origins: Epirus and the North
2. The End of the Monarchy: A New Democracy?
3. A European Destiny? Greece and the European Union
4. The Advent of PASOK
5. The Evolution of PASOK: New Democracy without Karamanlis
6. PASOK after Papandreou: The Simitis Years
PART TWO Contemporary Perceptions
7. Tourism: The Visit to Paradise
8. Archaeology
9. Athens and the Urban Crisis
10. Agriculture
11. Religion: Oppression and Freedom
12. Food, Drink and Material Life
13. Language: Words, Music
14. The Family: The Domestic Fortress
15. Environment: Paradise Threatened?
PART THREE Neighbours and Minorities
16. The Hidden Patchwork: Albanians, Vlachs and Sarakatsans
17. Thrace and Cyprus
18. The Macedonian Background
19. The Diaspora
20. A Balkan or a European Future?
PART FOUR From Boom to Bust
21. The Alchemist’s Years: 2000–2008
22. From Greek Crisis to European Crisis: 2009–2012
Some Background Reading
12 October 1944 LIBERATION
At the beginning it was all joy and love. Down from the mountains came the partisans to be wept over and embraced. The prisons were opened. Families were reunited. The Greek flag flew alone once more over the Acropolis. But soon, so soon, came a feeling of vague uneasiness. The partisan army had marched to Athens to join in the rejoicing, but outside the city it stopped. Why?
– Melina Mercouri, I was Born Greek
Few foreign tourists go to Epirus, and few Greeks live there nowadays. Seen from Corfu, across the narrow straits, the mountains of north-west Greece are remote, yet these are only coastal ranges, the Grammos and Vitsi ranges on the inland border with Albania are of Alpine scale and grandeur – brutal walls of limestone and granite marking the boundaries of northern Greece. In Epirus, fifty years ago, wolves and bears were still common and traditional dress was worn by shepherds. After a brief period of prominence in Byron’s time, when the region was the seat of despotic, glamorous Ali Pasha, the lion of Ioannina, with his huge harem and armed retinue, and who, under the Turks, ruled a vast, wild domain stretching from Arta in the south to Berat in Albania, Epirus sank into primitive obscurity. It was one of the last parts of Greece to be liberated from the Turks; the Sultan’s troops did not leave their grim fortress at Ioannina until 1913. Today, Ioannina is quiet, a respectable regional capital, with fine metal workers and its great, dark green lake full of eels, carp, trout and tench. The reeds stretch for acres, teeming with dark blue dragonflies and thousands of frogs. It is difficult to associate Ioannina with nationalist passion or the blood-drenched years of struggle against Ottoman rule. But a walk on Ali Pasha’s island in the middle of the lake soon reminds the visitor of history. Here the great enemy of the Turks met his end; here the eyes of every saint in the beautiful frescoes on the walls of Philanthropian monastery have been gouged out.
Epirus is dense forest; the only significant relic of ancient Greece is the theatre and the oracle at Dodona – wintry Dodona, Homer called it. Olives grow only in the most sheltered coastal areas; the trees are deciduous on the lower slopes. Epirus is passionate music, the deep bubbling rumble of the Epirot clarinet. The empty forest roads pass occasional logging camps and timber mills, all a very long way from Athens.
For many citizens of that city, Epirus is the Wild North rather like the Wild West; an Athenian would no more consider living there than a Cockney move to a rain-sodden blanket bog in Wester Ross. When the Epirots emigrate, many go to Canada; it is not difficult to see why – just as those from the hot plains of Laconia and Messenia go to Australia.
But modern Greece was born among these forests as much as in the streets around Syntagma. Olivia Manning caught it exactly in The Balkan Trilogy in the passage where a hotel porter in 1940 Athens gives an account of the Greek troops’ heroic fight in the beech woods:
The old porter, who waited in the hall with the news, enacted for the Pringles and other foreigners the drama of the encounter. He stumbled about to show how the Italians had been blinded by snow then, drawing himself up, eyes fixed, expression stern, he showed how the Greeks had been granted miraculous penetration of vision by Our Lady of Tenos … The evzoni captured the heights of Ochrida in a snowstorm … the Greek women, who had followed their men, climbed barefooted up the mountainside to take them food and ammunition.
The porter is a modern Homer; the teller of epic tales, but where the legend is also accurate history. Ancient and modern military heroism coalesce in these remote woods. When Olivia Manning wrote, it was the heroism of a united nation, when even the dictator Metaxas, who seized power in 1936 and abolished parliamentary democracy, had to resist the Italian forces sweeping down through the Aoos valley from Albania.
But in a very Greek reversal of fortunes, a profound echo of the reversals of ancient tragedy, it was in these same northern woods that the final, excruciating and bloody encounters of the Civil War were fought in 1949. In the Grammos mountains inland, remnants of the left-wing Democratic Army retreated to Yugoslavia and Albania under bombing by the US-advised Greek national airforce, the first use of napalm.
The history – or at least attempts to write the full history – of those nine years of turmoil and pain under occupation and through the Civil War is only just beginning to be written in Greece, fifty years of silence and propaganda is being broken. The political rights and wrongs are opening up to rational discussion by historians and commentators; the files on participants were consigned a couple of years ago to the furnaces of the Athens public incinerator by the then coalition government in an act intended to promote national reconciliation. But the Civil War lives on as an important background element in their psychology however much Greeks of all political persuasions would often prefer to forget it.
Some of the outlines are clear: the criminal, almost unbelievable mistakes of the EAM leadership which threw away what could have been majority support for a left-wing government over much of Greece at the end of the War against a background of betrayal by Stalin at Yalta; the atrocities both sides committed and the lethal damage to the social structure chronicled, from the point of view of the Right, by Nicholas Gage in Eleni.
But whatever the conclusions of historians, and the bitter exchanges between Right and Left over what really happened, the economic and social consequences were as terrible as they always are in civil wars. In Greece these were principally rural depopulation – the collapse of the traditional village way of life in many mountainous areas, and mass emigration to the cities (Athens in particular) and political exile in distant lands.
This legacy was impossible to foresee when the Axis forces first swept down from the north into Greece, following the same routes as all previous invaders from the Slavs of the Dark Ages onwards. But the irresistible desire of the Greek people for freedom saw the flag of resistance raised in the mountains and the cities, and among militant trades union organizations in cities like Volos and Patras. It was a lonely struggle against a determined and ruthless occupier. Reprisals against villages suspected of supporting the resistance were severe and, as the history of similar movements elsewhere in Europe shows, local loyalties were strained to breaking-point. With the background of recent Greek history, the inter-war political turmoil and the weakness of democratic institutions, it was not surprising that what had begun as the necessary use of military force by the resistance acquired a dynamic of its own and led to prolonged civil war. Our images of these years have been formed by the many memoirs and histories written by British officers attached to the various resistance groups and usually parachuted in by SOE from Cairo. They found themselves in a world with a genuinely heroic dimension – the popular struggle against the Germans and Italians, often against overwhelming odds in the early days – but also a world of dark intrigue and Byzantine political complexity as the different political forces shaped up to fight over Greece’s future after defeat of the Axis. As elsewhere in Europe, many of the most efficient resistance groups were Communist-led; the tension between the immediate military objectives of the resistance and long-term political needs of the western powers became overwhelming. In simple terms this meant Greece was effectively a British Protectorate in 1945.
The National Liberation Front (EAM) and its military wing, the National Popular Army of Liberation (ELAS), were by far the most effective anti-German forces in the country. Both were ultimately controlled by the Greek Communist party (KKE). British policy was to restore the monarchy and right-wing government, and the leaders of the resistance were invited to Cairo in an attempt to secure unanimity among guerrilla leaders and politicians. After a series of manoeuvres of infinite complexity, this plan, and its formal expression, the Plaka Bridge agreement, collapsed. The liberation of Greece, however, was proceeding apace and by October 1944 Athens and Piraeus had been liberated, with EAM the effective government of most of the country. But British forces, under General Scobie, landed in Athens soon afterwards and played a major part in dispossessing EAM. The seeds of future tragedy were sown and whatever legitimate motives the British forces may have had in attempting to enforce order in the chaos of Athens, the reality to many Greeks was that they were protecting collaborators and fascists from popular justice and attempting to determine the political future of their country.
It is worth remembering just how materially devastated Greece had become in 1945. The Paris Reparations Conference estimated the cost of war devastation at $8,500 million. One quarter of all buildings had been destroyed, along with over two thousand villages, three quarters of all merchant ships, two thirds of all motor transport and nine tenths of all railway rolling-stock. All larger road bridges had been demolished, huge areas of olives, vines and agricultural land were ruined, and hundreds of thousands of people were on the brink of starvation.
The British may have believed that the army could impose order and that democratic government would re-emerge under the monarchy but the wounds of the War went too deep. Society was too divided and shattered for anything more than a truce to be possible. Between 1947 and 1949 the last bitter battles were fought out: the Democratic Army leadership of Markos Vafiades established an effective guerrilla army that operated without hindrance in much of northern Greece with considerable support from the peasantry but was unable to take any of the major towns held by government troops vitally assisted by US air power. The final offensive in the Grammos mountains was controlled by a joint US–Greek general staff, symbolic of the underlying political realities that were to dominate Greece for the next thirty years. General Papagos, who was commander-in-chief of the national army, became a political leader of the country afterwards and Prime Minister in 1952. This would never have happened without American support under the Truman Doctrine from 1947, following Britain’s withdrawal from the fray.
The last stand of the Democratic Army on Grammos, a heroic fight against hopeless odds, has been a powerful symbol for the Left. Greece is a profoundly Orthodox country and Orthodoxy is very much a church of martyrdom. The Civil War supplied both sides with numerous real martyrs, good people who died for what they believed in, symbols to justify their social and political attitudes.
Although these events took place fifty-odd years ago, and Greece has experienced both military dictatorship and left-wing populist democracy since then, they are in a way where the story should begin and end. Without the wounds of the Civil War, so many only partially healed, the intermittent turmoil and febrile atmosphere of Greek life cannot be understood. But many people, even now, may strongly disagree with this outline of events. According to the extreme Right, for instance, or some of its apologists, the peasants never, ever, voluntarily helped the ELAS guerrillas and the British army never protected Axis collaborators, and so on. In the view of some hardliners on the Left, Stalin never betrayed the Greek Communists, the ELAS men never stole so much as a chicken throughout the Civil War, and so on. The issue that generated most controversy, and still does today, was the Communist removal at the end of the Civil War of twenty thousand Greek children for education in the ‘socialist’ countries. While the subject is still emotive, and there are those alive who took part in the events, it is unlikely that the real motives of those involved – and what took place – will be fully established. When the Left knew it was losing the Civil War, children were sent abroad for reasons of their own safety if government troops were thought to be about to enter left-wing villages to take reprisals on the inhabitants – as had sometimes happened. Nobody, for instance, sees any anomaly now that children from the Catholic areas of Northern Ireland were sent to Brittany during the Troubles, or from the East End of London to the Cotswolds in the Second World War, or that Jewish children left Nazi Germany – all for reasons of safety.
But there are well-documented cases of children being taken against the wishes of their parents to a life in exile. Independent Red Cross witnesses interviewing children in exile in the ‘socialist’ countries at the time did not find widespread evidence of coercion, although it was claimed that they had been hoodwinked by the KKE. As elsewhere in the Civil War, what happened undoubtedly varied very much from place to place. What is not in doubt has been the enormous propaganda value of the episode to the Right. This persists, at least among the older generation in Greece, to the present day in a society which prizes the family unit above all and where small children are the most honoured members in it.
At the end of the Thirties the population of Athens was just over one million people. Greece was still a predominantly rural society where agricultural methods had changed little since antiquity. Many areas, such as Crete and huge tracts of the wild mountains in the north, in Thrace and Macedonia, had only recently become part of the modern state after the Turks finally relinquished territory before the First World War. Until then brigandage had been endemic and many areas were only nominally under the control of Athens, de facto under local chieftains from traditionally powerful families. Central authority in Athens was weak, to say the least, and Greeks who had emigrated in large numbers from poor rural areas since the end of the nineteenth century did not find much change on their return.
The founders of ELAS, such as Aris Velouchiotis, had been seen as successors of the old brigand leaders, men of the mountains, who had taken up the national cause when it seemed lost in Athens – then, as later, viewed by the Left as a corrupt middle-class city under foreign control. The resistance and political struggle for a new socialist Greece had begun in small communities that many members of pre-war Greek governments would scarcely have heard of – like Karpenisi, Velouchiotis’s base in the mountains. The defeat of ELAS in the Civil War was not simply a defeat for Communism but a defeat for an older Greece, the anarchic world of pre-capitalist kinship ties and a primitive sense of local democracy and nationality. The Right stood for a kind of modernization, the integration of Greece into a modern technological world with its foreign investors and new factories, and a powerful central government in Athens which would legislate for Greece to become a modern western democracy.
The history of Greece since the Civil War has been, in essence, a struggle between these two worlds. Both sides can claim victory. For example, the Right can, and does, trumpet success that Greece is a member of NATO and the European Union, has remained within the western orbit since 1945, and so on. On the other hand, it could be said to have failed, in reality – even if the victory of the Right in the Civil War has determined the formal institutions, the reality of political development has been very different. The most obvious manifestation of this failure has been the suspension of democracy itself for some years.
Greek politics were a potential quagmire; the country had an increasingly fragile, some might say derelict, economy; the fabric of many aspects of social life was in decline; adherence to the West had only been achieved by long periods of very partial democracy when major political parties were banned and honest men served years in gaol for their beliefs; a pattern of endless foreign interference in domestic politics became apparent, mainly by the United States; and there were several years of brutal military dictatorship.
After the Civil War there was stability of a kind. The old cliché is true: the war was won with dollars as much as guns, and the integration of Greece into the new economic world of the Fifties proceeded apace. A new commercial ethos grew in middle-class life and the cities were a hubbub of new building with many of the dispossessed from the villages finding jobs in the construction industry. But although on the surface Greece became another small part of a Western Europe dominated by the United States, underneath many facets of life had not changed.
Agriculture stagnated and crops that had been the mainstay of the economy, such as tobacco, declined. Shipping boomed, with the Fifties seeing the consolidation of Very Rich Greeks – the Niarchos, Onassis and other shipping dynasties – as international figures of folklore, but little of their vast wealth found its way back to Greece. Piraeus started its long decline as a commercial port as ship sizes increased and dwarfed its capacity. Mass tourism did not start to become a decisive economic or social factor until the Sixties’ advent of package tours and cheap flights, so the economic level of many islands continued to be dependent on subsistence agriculture and remittances from abroad.
A consistent picture emerged of a country with a pattern of uneven and arrested development, a producer of agricultural products that were mostly in decline, like currants, or already in oversupply in Europe, such as wine, without the transport or industrial infrastructure to produce anything the world might need. Although investment in new industries grew – the establishment of a modern petrochemical industry in the Gulf of Corinth, for example – the owners of the new installations were frequently foreign and much of the wealth generated left the country.
The norm for business of any kind was still the small family enterprise, which had the advantage of preserving native craft traditions in industries such as leather and woodwork, but was hopelessly incapable of withstanding international competition. The single most important worldwide growth industry of the Fifties – motor-vehicle manufacturing – was completely non-existent in Greece. An economic dependence on outside forces was established with profound consequences for the development of the country and for democracy itself.
There has always been the belief in Greece that behind every leading politician is a foreign boss pulling the strings of his puppet as in a shadow play. Sometimes, as with Metaxas, who was beholden to the fascist powers in the late Thirties, this was so. It goes with the general Greek belief that their country is the centre of the political world and that outside powers are always seeking to control it, an idea that can aid both Right and Left. It was very damaging, for instance, that the Greek Communist party in the Civil War was manipulated by Stalin, and that Papagos in the early Fifties was considered a tool of the White House.
Yet despite all the dollars and propaganda, the American writ did not really run very far outside Athens. As soon after the Civil War as January 1950 new elections were held under the 1946 system of proportional representation that showed a distinct swing away from the Right towards the Centre, and created a situation where no single party could command a majority in parliament. After four doomed governments collapsed, elections were held in November 1952 under a new, and basically unfair, electoral system designed to eliminate the smaller parties. Civil-war soldier General Papagos was duly installed as leader of the first ‘stable’ government for many years. This stability had been bought at a high price, reinforced by later reforms of the system in 1956 which excluded many strands of opinion from parliament by arbitrary manipulation of electoral boundaries, with a bizarre mix of different systems for different areas of the country, and by deliberate gerrymandering and under-representation of traditional left-wing areas such as Thessaly and western Macedonia.
But the Centre and Left revived and after Papagos’s death in October 1955 the figure of Constantine Karamanlis became increasingly central with the establishment of his new party, the National Radical Union. He campaigned for new elections under a fair electoral law. The essence of politics in these years, in domestic terms, lay in the struggle of these moderate and responsible forces to obtain fair representation – and their underlying failure to do so. The old Right was always grossly over-represented in parliament and in all sorts of positions in Athens that were ultimately dependent on, and answerable to, foreign powers – the USA mainly – rather than responsible to the democratic institutions in Greece itself.
So the new prosperous middle class that grew in these years suffered from a terrible insecurity. In far too many cases, wealth and position seemed to depend on foreign money or political patronage rather than on hard work or ability. A dependent economy was created at every level: from the remittances of sons in Australia that elderly parents might receive every month in rural Arcadia – sent by men who, if the family had the ‘wrong’ political colour, could never get a job in the village – to the mixture of legitimate foreign investment and local bribes that came to many members of the Athens élite.
And politics continually intruded, most forcefully in the shape of the Cyprus problem. Just when the national question appeared to have been solved, the Greek Cypriots sought independence, then union with Greece, and drove what were designed to be complaisant Athens governments into open conflict with Britain and the United States. In their handling of the Cyprus question, the Papagos and Karamanlis governments frequently appeared to Greeks to be acting as agents for the major western powers rather than for the Greeks of Cyprus. The Athens governments could never ignore the Cypriot demands for enosis (union with Greece) even if they wanted to, and the long struggle of the Cypriots for independence gradually eroded much of the foreign policy credibility of the Greek governments of the Fifties and early Sixties, and made many ordinary Greeks take a more critical attitude to Britain and the United States.
And although the figures tell an optimistic story of these years, with high growth rates and a large increase in GDP and employment, it was a very fragile economic miracle. It involved the virtual abandonment of large rural areas in Epirus, Thrace and many parts of Macedonia to economic collapse, where the inhabitants of villages without sewerage or electricity had living standards lower than in many parts of the Third World. As the distinguished historian C. M. Woodhouse has pointed out, in commenting on the war years when he had been attached by SOE to the Greek resistance, the élite of Athens knew and cared as little about this rural world as they did about Tibet. The sprawling growth of the Athens basin with its accompanying unplanned industrial development laid the foundations for the Attica environmental crisis today. The political culture was unhealthy where the Communist party and other left-wing groups were still officially banned, and where the commitment to democracy was still skin-deep.
This precarious stability did not last as a better-educated population in the new cities, tired of the fortress mentality that had developed through the Cold War, looked to take the western rhetoric seriously, so that in addition to security from Communism, protection from ill-health and want in old age was sought, as well as the decent schools and facilities that for many years had been provided by the public sector in western countries. The Greek people wanted a welfare state and some of the basic elements of a caring, compassionate society.
Against this background, support for the Centre and Left grew. The election of 1961 was a watershed in that gerrymandering and intimidation from the Right reached such levels that the whole process was called into question by many people who by no stretch of the imagination could be called stooges of the Left. Perhaps as many as a hundred thousand illegal votes were cast by the Right in the left-wing stronghold of the Athens region, and in the rural areas there were widespread and well-documented cases of violent intimidation of voters by the extreme-right Security Battalions, an anti-Communist militia with roots in the Civil War period. In one electoral district 206 gendarmes were alleged to have used the same address. The virtual monopoly of power enjoyed by the Right, with the backing of their foreign allies since the mid Thirties, could now only be maintained by the most outrageous manipulation of democracy itself. It was subsequently claimed that a NATO-inspired plan called Operation Pericles had been put into operation to fix the elections for the Right. George Papandreou, the centrist leader who had suffered most from the electoral corruption, blamed the whole fraudulent process on the palace and broke off all contacts with the King. It was the beginning of a loss of confidence in the democratic process that was to culminate in the colonels’ coup six years later.
Tension was increased in May 1963 by the murder of a left-wing deputy, Grigorios Lambrakis, in Thessaloniki. His extreme-right murderers were subsequently shown to have had close links with the Thessaloniki police. The murder demonstrated, above all, that there still existed an extreme-right-controlled paramilitary apparatus, mostly consisting of ex-Security-Battalion men, with strong links with the United States, that would if necessary use violence against the Centre and Left if they showed any signs of winning power by democratic means. But in the aftermath of the murder, the Centre and Left continued to advance and in the November 1963 elections, much fairer than two years before, Papandreou’s Centre Union emerged as the largest party, with the extreme-left United Democratic Left, largely a front for the still-banned KKE, holding the balance of power. Karamanlis left Greece to begin what was to be an eleven-year exile, and after yet another election in the following year Papandreou emerged with undisputed power. But real and effective power was elusive, as he soon discovered: many appointments were in fact made by foreign interests or the palace – or both. Although some worthwhile reforms, mainly of the educational system, were made before his government was engulfed in the major political crisis of July 1965, little structural change had been attempted. Greek democracy and the nation were to pay a heavy price for this failure in the years ahead.
The labyrinthine moves that led to the colonels’ coup and the end of democracy in 1967 had many causes. On the Left it has been conventional to ascribe the whole process as a conscious attempt by the United States, the CIA particularly, to subvert the democratic process; on the Right the coup had its apologists at the time among those who saw Greece slipping towards chaos and probably Communism, and the colonels restoring ‘order’. The memory of the Civil War was still strong in many western capitals and, in the early days, led to the colonels being given the benefit of the doubt by some commentators and foreign politicians who should have known better. But what is more important is that the coup was only able to succeed – and the colonels establish a viable regime that lasted for some years – because of very serious deficiencies in the existing democratic culture. The violence, the use of torture, the judicial murder of political opponents, detention on prison islands like Amorgos and Makronisos – they had all been part of the script in the Civil War. When the same play was enacted in the late Sixties, the Greek people knew what to expect.
Ritual plays a large part in Greek life, whether in the beautiful customs of the Orthodox Church, the small courtesies of the home or of the taverna, or in the nature of greetings that are offered to friends. In Greek politics since the Civil War, there is a sense of a terrible ritual being repeated, the same people as victims of a cruel political fate. The distinguished poet Yiannis Ritsos spent time on Makronisos in his youth in the Civil War only to return there under the colonels’ junta in the Sixties, meeting again, as he has written, many of his friends as he set foot on this grim rock off the south-east coast of Attica.
Yet there have been many improvements over the same fifty years; the average Greek is better housed and has more material wealth than wartime generations could have dreamt of – even if health and social services still lag behind comparable countries in Western Europe. The unique beauty of land and sea remains, along with the variety of flora and fauna in the regions, and the warmth, generosity and humanity of the people. Many important new discoveries have been made about the ancient civilization, the inexhaustible spiritual font of western culture. The scattered diaspora communities of Greeks have flourished, with many people of Greek origin, such as US Vice-President Spiro Agnew, rising to the highest positions in their adopted countries a generation after their families arrived as desperate and penniless refugees.
Greeks are, in a real sense, the descendants of
Odysseus, wanderers over the sea who return home, even if only to a burial place. As
Cavafy wrote:
Ithaka gave you the marvellous journey.
Without her you wouldn’t have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
You’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
Cavafy lived in a Greek community in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, a world of Greek merchants and traders. But his homosexual milieu was not the world of other diaspora Greeks. More typical was John Sakellaridis, mastermind behind the Egyptian cotton industry and pioneer developer of new growths of cottons; or Hercules Voltos, the first classifier of fine cottons; or Demetrius Cassaveti, founder of one of the largest Alexandrian trading houses which opened a London office as early as 1837.
Many twentieth-century Alexandrians did just as well, although whether the legacy of Hellenism was carried on quite as traditionally is open to doubt. The key element of Greekness, at nearly all times in history, has been use of the language. An original definition of a barbarian was simply that of someone who did not speak Greek. There are disturbing signs of a decrease in the use of the language in Canada, the United States and Australia today, linked to an increasing secularism in the diasporal communities and the declining influence of the Church.
Herodotus, the founder of history, wrote that ‘poverty is the inheritance of Hellas from old’. While this has been true for most of the population, through all periods of history, the years since Common Market membership have tended to obscure his observation, although it may be becoming more relevant again, as, despite the progress of the last five years, Greece remains near the bottom of the league in the EU in relation to the size of its debts, lack of growth in the economy, unemployment, and inflation.
President Karamanlis, speaking at an important government function in the summer of 1991, observed that despite Greece’s problems there were no threats to the democratic order within the country as in the past. The fact that such a statement is made at all is important. It is, of course, true, on the face of it – although few coup plotters ever announce themselves before they seize the radio station, any more than the colonels did in 1967. For although the Greeks invented democracy, until 1974 it was peculiarly difficult for them to make it function in a modern industrial society.
Though killed I killed the killer; but even so he didn’t go to Hades; it was I who died.
– Riddle from the Delphic Oracle
At the moment the King of Greece lives in exile in southern England, a familiar figure who is part of the British royal circle. It is perhaps difficult to see him as a fundamentally divisive figure although he is the son and grandson of very controversial men; a book about one of his recent ancestors is called Constantine – King and Traitor. Yet the current ex-monarch appears to us to be harmless enough and, with the revival of interest in monarchy in the Balkans and in Eastern Europe, it might seem possible for him to return to his throne.
But any actual prospect of King Constantine’s return to the royal palace in Athens is remote. Most Greeks – in overwhelming majorities according to all recent opinion-poll evidence – do not want their monarchy back. The reasons for this lie in the events of the Second World War and the Civil War and where opposition to the monarchy was suppressed in the quasi-democratic Fifties and re-emerged under the junta, although the institution had been in an unstable position many years before.
Always seen by most Greeks as a foreign imposition, the Danish-origin, German-influenced Glücksburg dynasty in the twentieth century had suffered extraordinary vicissitudes ever since King George was assassinated by a Macedonian in Salonika in 1913, followed by the unfortunate efforts of his son Prince Constantine to keep Greece neutral during the First World War, his subsequent abdication in 1917 and flight from a small port in Euboea to Swiss exile.
His successor, King Alexander, lasted in power for just three years, dying of blood-poisoning after being bitten by a pet monkey. After a chaotic inter-regnum King Constantine returned to Athens, only to abdicate, again, after the catastrophic defeat of Greek forces in Asia Minor in September 1922. George II succeeded him but was also soon forced into exile, later to return after the abortive military rising in 1935. The whole process seems to represent some slightly odd game of snakes and ladders, with too many snakes.
After a period of collaboration with the Metaxas dictatorship in the late Thirties, exile was again the fate of the monarchy during the Second World War. Largely thanks to the obsession of Churchill in aiding his restoration, the King returned to the palace – with the Greeks, as always, deeply divided on the issue. The impression is of a monarchy, whatever its other qualities, which has been a symbol of foreign interference in Greek political life and which has needed a fast car running on the gravel for the times when the patience of the Greek people ran out.
But all the previous difficulties of the monarchy pale into insignificance against the train of events that began with the political crises of the late Sixties and ended with the colonels’ coup d’état. After the death of King Paul, a gloomy but not deeply unpopular figure, at least compared with some of his predecessors, the young King Constantine assumed the throne, very much under the influence of his mother, the German-born Queen Frederika. She was a domineering figure with her own web of palace contacts and a côterie of extremely reactionary advisers. Her instincts were inherently anti-democratic and some might say anti-Greek, at least as far as the traditional political élite was concerned.
The centrist government of George Papandreou was viewed with scarcely disguised contempt from the palace, and the Prime Minister’s attempts to secure the appointments of officers loyal to the government in the highest ranks of the armed forces were made more and more difficult. The monarchy acted without regard for the normal constraints on the institution in any parliamentary democracy – a problem common to Greek monarchs going back to the nineteenth century. Relations between monarchs and the elected politicians had usually been bad from the era of Constantine’s grandparents when the great republican Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos had been unifying the modern state. Much of his time, as a Cretan republican, was spent at loggerheads with the royal family, who, quite rightly, felt him to be a rival for national fame and affection. During the nineteenth century the monarchy had been seen as a bastion of German influence in Greece. This continued until the First World War, in an open form, with the King advocating that Greece should take the side of Germany in the intense rivalry between Britain and Germany in the Balkans between 1911 and 1914. Few of the Glücksburg line seemed to possess any notion of the needs of the country or any sense of political tact. Most royal politics have been of, or around, the extreme Right, and time and again this led to conflict between the Greek national interest and that of the monarchy. At a more basic level the actual institution seemed to inhibit the development of democracy itself and act as a focus for authoritarian tendencies.
So it was not surprising that, at the end of the Second World War, with the country torn by the Civil War and the attempted socialist revolution, it took strong support from Churchill to secure the restoration of the monarchy, against the advice of Roosevelt and most of the Allied political leaders, and the artificial creation of a pro-monarchist faction of the Greek army in Egypt. Yet again, foreign patrons were required to keep the Greek King on the throne. As long ago as 1935 George II had been able to return to power only after an openly rigged referendum when 98 per cent were supposed to have voted for the monarchy and only 2 per cent against. In the September 1946 re-run there was substantial evidence to show vote-rigging and intimidation on a scale to produce the result that Churchill and the Right wanted. The Allied Mission for Observing the Greek Elections concluded in a secret report that ‘the conditions necessary for holding a fair plebiscite did not exist in several parts of Greece’, and many other contemporary observers felt that without the ‘white terror’ against the Left in 1945–6, and monarchist control of the police and armed forces, the people would have voted overwhelmingly for a republic.
On 21 April 1967 when tanks rolled into Athens and democracy was snuffed out, a unit of armoured vehicles also surrounded the King’s country house at Tatoi outside Athens. Whatever else, the colonels were nationalists, and even at this early stage in their coup they sensed a centre of power outside national parameters that needed to be controlled. In the early days of the junta the King’s private secretary, Brigadier Michael Arnaoutis, was arrested. But although he was quickly released, the palace made no attempt to rally the Greek people to defend democracy. In the stunned confusion of Athens, the King was seen to compromise with the junta, a course which many feel was recommended to him by the Central Intelligence Agency bureau chief in Athens who is generally believed to have had foreknowledge of the coup. Whatever the details of events, this error led the great majority of Greeks to the irresistible conclusion that the monarchy and a functioning democracy were once and for all irreconcilable.
Worse was to follow for Constantine in the next few years under the colonels’ regime. After early compromises had destroyed any possibility of the palace being seen as the defender of democracy, or as anything other than the enemy of the Left and Centre, the royal relationship with the colonels themselves deteriorated, demolishing whatever remaining mass support the monarchy had among Rightists.
The junta officers seem to have been divided about the role of the monarchy. There was little respect for the King himself but the actual institution was seen to have a useful symbolic value as Constantine began to identify himself with some of the junta’s policies. But his movements were strictly controlled, especially in terms of international contacts, and any remaining independence the palace had was reduced mainly by regular purges of staff from all important state institutions. Ominously the junta decided to bring in a new constitution with the clear indication that the role of the monarchy was open to question. The colonels were ungrateful for the real gift Constantine brought them – diplomatic recognition – when he swore them in as the legal Greek government.
enosis