For whatever it may be worth to those of my readers who don’t have much background on Greek politics, here you are.
After several centuries of Ottoman rule, Greece won its independence in the nineteenth century; the war of independence lasted from 1821-1829, and the treaty settling it was signed in 1832. (Personal note: One of the heroes of Greek independence was a monk named Anthimos Gazis - the same last name as my own family. We don’t know him to be an actual relative, though.)
When it gained independence, Greece was a much smaller country than it is now, containing only about a third of the Greeks in the Ottoman Empire. Major chunks of what is now Greece, including Crete, Epirus, Macedonia, and the Aegean Islands, were still under Ottoman rule. My own grandparents were born under Ottoman rule, in Kozani and Thessaloniki. The Ellis Island immigration records for my great-aunt and great-uncle show them as immigrating from the Ottoman Empire (if I remember right, their nationality actually got listed as Turkish, though they were, of course, ethnically Greek). Greek politics for the rest of the nineteenth century, and the early twentieth century, was dominated by the Megali Idea - the desire to unite all Greeks in one country.
Greece was established as a monarchy, initially with a King Otto, from Bavaria, being installed by the great European powers. When he proved too autocratic for the Greeks and was deposed, the Greek National Assembly brought in a Danish prince to become George I, the first King of the dynasty that would rule Greece for the next century. Under George I and successors, Greece was a constitutional monarchy.
For much of the twentieth century, Greece was politically divided between royalists and liberals. (My own grandmother, my father always said, was a staunch royalist, who named her children after the kings of Greece. Conveniently for her, the first two kings of Greece also had the names of the two grandfathers, who, by Greek custom, would already expect to have her first two sons named for them.) Among the liberals was the greatest of Greek statesmen, Eleftherios Venizelos, who served as Prime Minister multiple times. Venizelos modernized Greece, and his reorganization of the army and navy prepared Greece for its victories in the Balkan Wars.
These Balkan Wars, in 1912 and 1913, first rested Macedonia from the Ottoman Empire, and then divided it between Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria (which three countries had fought the Ottoman Empire together, but then disagreed about the spoils). Bulgaria, wanting a port, tried to seize the great port city of Thessaloniki. My father told me that my grandmother remembered her father and uncles going out to fight the Bulgarians, singing “What has Bulgaria to do with Macedonia?” Thessaloniki, at this time, was a city with a very large Sephardic Jewish population, in addition to Greeks and Turks; my grandmother grew up speaking Turkish and Ladino (a version of Spanish spoken by Sephardic Jews), as well as Greek. This Jewish community would later be almost entirely killed by the Nazis.
Victory in the Balkan Wars brought popularity to both Venizelos and the king, but Venizelos and the monarchy would later split over whether Greece should enter the first world war. The king at that time, Constantine I, was sympathetic to the German side due to family ties with that royal family, and therefore wished to stay neutral, while Venizelos saw siding with the English and French as in Greece’s best interests. In the end, Venizelos won out, and Greece entered WWI, late, on the Allied side.
After WWI, England and France permitted Greece to occupy parts of the Ottoman Empire (which had been on the losing side), an opportunity that Greece welcomed because it still hoped (in the spirit of the Megali Idea) to unite to itself Greeks in Anatolia (including what had once been the capital Byzantine city of Constantinople). This enterprise, though, was not so successful. Kemal Ataturk, founder of modern Turkey, rallied the Turkish army, England and France abandoned their support for Greece, and the final result was Smyrna in flames. The result of what my aunt called “the Great Catastrophe” (also known, in Wikipedia, as “the Great Disaster”) was the end of the Megali Idea, and massive dislocation, as Greece received 1 million refugees from Turkey (in exchange for 500,000 Muslims going from Greece to Turkey). At this point, a very large portion of the Greek population were refugees from Asia Minor.
I skip over the political details of who got deposed and brought to power when during the following years, but suffice to say that conflict between royalist and anti-royalist factions in Greece continued, until finally Metaxas came to power, and established a military dictatorship. Metaxas ruled Greece at the beginning of WWII; I suppose you could see him as part of a European-wide trend, in those days, toward fascism. He also, in Greek political terms, represented the royalist portion of the army. (At this time, my own grandfather was an officer and civil engineer in the Greek Army, and before the war was involved in the construction of the Metaxas line, which was sort of Greece’s version of the Maginot line.)
Though Metaxas was politically not unlike Mussolini, he wasn’t willing to have Mussolini dictate terms to him; when Mussolini sent Metaxas an ultimatum, Metaxas said no, an event celebrated by Greeks as “Ochi Day” (Ochi being No in Greek). Greece defeated Italy (not bad for a small country), and was then occupied by Germany. (My grandfather died at this point, and my grandmother was left to raise five children alone in occupied Greece. As an officer’s wife, she was to have been evacuated to Athens, but ran into difficulty on the way, and so the family settled in Volos for the duration of the war.) The occupation was brutal, and many Greeks went hungry. Multiple guerrilla groups resisted the occupation, and the Nazis retaliated harshly.
As soon as Allied troops liberated Greece, the country became embroiled in a civil war, between the Communist-friendly guerrillas and the Communist-unfriendly ones. (One of my uncles had run away at the age of sixteen to join the guerrillas, and lost a hand fighting on the anti-Communist side.) The anti-Communist side won.
Hoover Institution, at Stanford, has boxes of documents from Greece during this period, which I’ve looked through. There’s a Greek-American with family ties to ELAS/EAM (the leftist/Communist-friendly guerrilla group), who, in his role of working for the US, is trying to persuade the US to support that side (which, of course, didn’t happen). There are claims that the other side includes people who were Nazi collaborators, and there are pamphlets saying things like “this is what the Communists have done” and showing dead bodies. There are reports, in Greek, of Nazi troop movements. And there are reports of election observers from Greece’s first post-war elections.
Anyway, the civil war, as is the way of civil wars, was brutal, and left some lasting resentments (see Nick Gage’s Eleni, about his mother’s death, for one such story about the Communists).
After the civil war, Greece was a parliamentary democracy, with a king, until 1967, when a military junta came to power. Greece was then under the rule of a military junta from 1967-1974. The fall of the junta was preceded by a massive student demonstration known as the Athens Polytechnic uprising of 1973; this led first to a reorganizing of the junta, but it then fell the next year, after some really bad moves in Cyprus that led to the Turkish invasion there.
When the junta fell, Constantinos Karamanlis returned from self-exile to head the government and found the center-right Nea Demokratia party (the party that now governs Greece and is now led by his nephew Costas Karamanlis). The king, however, was not brought back - he had been removed by the junta after an abortive counter-coup, but remained unpopular in Greece (among other things, for swearing in the junta in the first place), and so his removal was confirmed by plebiscite.
Since 1974, Greece has been a parliamentary democracy, with a prime minister as head of government and a president as head of state. The two largest parties are Nea Demokratia (center-right) and PASOK (center-left); smaller parties trailing far behind these two include the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), the Coalition of the Radical Left, and the Popular Orthodox Rally.
What parts of this history may be relevant to the current strife? Well, the part about the junta and the student resistance to it may have some relevance; the abuses of the junta did degrade trust in the police, and the students in the Athens Polytechnic uprising were heroes for their role in leading up to the fall of the junta. It has, of course, been more than thirty years since the junta - but here in the US we still sometimes find ourselves refighting conflicts of the sixties, even now.
One thing I’m not sure of is where the Greek anarchist movement comes, out of all of this. Greece has a much more active anarchist movement than the US - perhaps that dates back to resistance to the junta? I’m a bit weak in my knowledge of Greek anarchist history.
Today’s ekathimerini brings the news of sit ins in scores of Greek academic buildings, along with three different editorial/commentary pieces.
Calling a spade a spade calls on the leaders of Greek universities to act:
Anonymous protests and theatrics will simply not do this time.
When they know that a university campus has been occupied by individuals who use it as a military depot in which to store their ammunition for street fighting, the academic community must ask the state to intervene.
Six in 10 criticizes the government.
Six out of 10 people questioned in a poll for Kathimerini define the events of recent days as a “social uprising.” This is exactly what the foreign media has been saying for the past 10 days, even if the Greek government refuses to define it as such. The same number also said that this is a mass movement and not the work of individuals. It’s unlikely that all the people questioned are agents of the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA)….
The government has never defined nor assumed what its political responsibility is in all this, probably because it isn’t sure how well its shoulders will hold up under the burden. It hasn’t assumed its moral responsibility either. And so Evripidis Stylianidis is still our education minister even if he was oblivious to the shooting of the student on the night of the event because, he said, he didn’t hear his cell phone ring over the sound of the nightclub’s music. But asking for a minister to be removed from his post for reasons of morality is seen as nothing more than a populist ploy.
And Veil of illusions lifted argues that
For years we feared that the dangerous game between anti-establishment youths and police would lead to someone being killed. But even so, when the dreadful event did occur, no one could have predicted how terrible it would be nor how it would shake Greece to its core. The murder was not committed in the heat of battle between anarchists and riot police, where it could somehow be explained as a predictable accident. It came in the form of a police officer losing his temper and firing at a group of youngsters, who may or may not have taunted him and his partner when they drove by a bar in the anarchist stronghold of Exarchia. The victim, instead of a hardened firebomb-hurling veteran of years of clashes with the police, was a beardless 15-year-old from a middle-class suburb of Athens, who was celebrating a friend’s nameday in Exarchia.
Things could not have been worse for the police, the government or for Greece itself. Alexis Grigoropoulos, the victim, became an instant symbol for everyone looking for a martyr. For the anarchists and other anti-establishment groups, Alexis personified all victims of state brutality. This gave legitimacy and purpose to the angry young men and women who have made a life out of attacking police and other symbols of state authority with seeming impunity. These tough youths then went on the rampage, exploiting demonstrations staged by other groups to attack police and destroy property. Their new legitimacy and the inexplicable order given to police to stand back from the violence, resulted in the worst civil unrest and property damage ever seen in Athens (and several other cities) during peacetime. In its guilt-tainted passivity, which it presented as restraint, the government managed to humiliate itself and the state machinery twice: It had not prevented a state employee – a policeman – from killing a child and it now abdicated its responsibility to protect its citizens’ property….