It became the rallying cry of public outrage following the death of Grigoris Lambrakis. A respected deputy of the Left, and a leader of the peace movement, Grigoris Lambrakis was run down in Thessaloniki by a three-wheeled vehicle as he made his way to a peace rally in May, 1963. He died shortly thereafter of his injuries. Lambrakis had been murdered by radical right-wing toughs with, the evidence suggests, the tacit cooperation of the police and the blessing of highly placed members of the military.
The government at the time — Constantine Karamanlis was Prime Minister — tried to dismiss the matter as an accident, as did most newspapers here and abroad. Eventually the truth emerged, however: At the trial of the driver of the vehicle, Spyros Gotzamanis — those three-wheeled vehicles are often called ‘Gotzamanis’ today — it was revealed that he had deliberately run down Lambrakis, simultaneously striking him on the head with a lead pipe. He was tried and imprisoned. Vassilis Vassilikos’s book, Z, a fictionalized documentation of these events, was the basis for Costa Gavras’s film by the same name.
In the early hours of May 1 of this year, Alekos Panagoulis, the most prominent hero of the resistance against the Junta, and a member of parliament, was killed in an auto accident. In light of the Lambrakis affair, it is not surprising that the immediate reaction of most people was that Panagoulis was the victim of political assassination. That it was May Day and the beginning of a long week-end during which there would be a partial news blackout since newspapers would not be published for three days, only added to the specula-tion. Although planning an immediate and thorough investigation, the Gov-ernment moved hastily to lay suspicions to rest by giving the accident extensive coverage over government-controlled television and radio. The Opposition and the population with equal haste, however, assumed that Panagoulis, who was in possession of ESA (military police) files related to atrocities com-mitted during the Junta, was murdered.
Although there are many parallels between the death of Lambrakis and Panagoulis, there are many differences. The suppressive political climate in the early 1960s was very different from that of today. Then, left-wing politics and pacifist activities were regarded as a threat to the status quo and were an anathema to right-wingers and reactionaries. Furthermore, even though he sat in the Opposition benches, Panagoulis was a liberal democrat whose political philosophy was not substantially different from that of the governing party.
Alekos Panagoulis was twenty-seven years old and doing his military service when the April 21, 1967 coup occurred. From the day of the Junta’s take-over, he dedicated his life to its overthrow. He concluded that it was his duty to desert the army in order to serve his country. This he did. In July, 1967, he escaped to Cyprus where he acquired a passport under an assumed name and in January, 1968, he travelled to Italy where he formed a small resistance group. During this time, he slowly came to the belief that if democracy were to be restored to Greece violence was necessary and that George Papadopoulos, who had emerged as the unquestioned leader of the Junta after King Constantine’s unsuccessful countercoup in December, 1968, must be assassinated. Panagoulis returned to Greece and began putting this determination into action.
Papadopoulos at that time was residing during the summer at Lagonissi, a resort forty kilometres from Athens. Every day, with foolish exactitude from a security point of view, he drove, surrounded by a convoy of motorcycles and police cars, to his offices in Athens. After methodical research, Panagoulis and one of his group began, at midnight on August 10, 1968 to plant explosives in a culvert under the coastal road next to the thirty-first kilometre stone. On the morning of the 13th, Panagoulis and his men were ready. The explosives went off a split second after the Papadopoulos limousine had passed. Panagoulis, stationed on the rocks beneath the road, was caught at once. Another fourteen were soon rounded up.
The Trial of the Fifteen opened in Athens on November 4. There were no witnesses for the defense. Panagoulis’s lawyer had not been given a brief and he was only allowed a few words with his client on two occasions. At the conclusion of the trial Panagoulis made a statement part of which read:
Ί believe in man; I believe in free dialogue, in dissent and in democracy. I do not accept violence or political murder. But in this case to change a situation forced upon us by violence, only with violence can it be accomplished… As a result the act of my desertion was due to a conviction that I must be either a deserter or a traitor, I preferred desertion… When a state of affairs becomes entrenched through violence; when for over a year any attempt fails, only violence can succeed. If we fail, others will follow. There is no other way.’
On November 17, Panagoulis was sentenced to death on two counts. During the silence that followed — it was the first death sentence to be asked for by the regime — he calmly turned to his lawyer and said that on no account should mercy be asked. The Government duly printed up the announcement of his execution but at the last moment postponed it because of the huge outcry in the international press.
For the next five years Panagoulis suffered the most appalling treatment. Transferred from prison to prison, and tortured in all of them, his health was permanently damaged but his spirit was never broken. Befriending guards, Panagoulis smuggled out bits of paper carrying messages and poems which he wrote with his blood. These poems, set co music by Mikis Theodorakis, became widely known. He escaped from prison in June, 1969, together with a guard,but was recaptured after four days. In a later attempt he was assisted by Amalia Fleming, the widow of the discoverer of penicillin, but this also failed.
In August, 1973, following the referendum that abolished the monarchy, Papadopoulos, now as President, declared a general amnesty and singled out his would-be assassin, Panagoulis, granting him ‘mercy’. This, Panagoulis rejected. He was, nevertheless, expelled from prison. He soon escaped to Italy, where he published his poems and continued to work for the resistance. A year later, in August, 1974, he returned after the fall of the Junta. He successfully ran for Parliament with the Centre Union-New Forces, but in the spring of this year he announced his resignation from the party. He had continued to work up to the day of his death collecting and documenting evidence of ESA activities. Some of these were published in Ta Nea not long before he was killed.
Although Panagoulis had acted on his convictions and attempted to assassinate a dictator, he was not a terrorist. With the re-establishment of democracy, he emerged as a rational and modest individual, consistent in his beliefs. He was against capital punishment. When the members of the Junta were tried and found guilty of treason, he was among the first to speak out against the death penalty.
On May 5 the procession which bore the body of Alekos Panagoulis from the Cathedral to the First Cemetery was followed by close to One million mourners.
The preliminary investigation is underway. The State, which in accordance With legal procedure is the plaintiff, is represented by the Public Prosecutor. The representatives of the Panagoulis family, who have exercised their rights as civil plaintiff, are working parallel with the prosecution in the State’s preliminary investigation.
When Earl Warren, the Chief Justice of the United States, was invited by Lyndon Johnson to head a committee to investigate the assassination of John F. Kennedy, he told reporters as he emerged from the White House that the truth would never be known in our time. It may well be that in the case of the death of Alekos Panagoulis, the truth will never be certain. If the investigation brings in the verdict of accidental death, doubts will continue to linger. Ironically, only the unearthing of a proven conspiracy will lay doubts to rest.
The Shipowners Are Coming
ADMIRAL Chester William Nimitz once said, Ά ship is always referred to as “she” because it costs so much to keep in paint and powder.’ Our ships — most Greeks like to think of them that way even though we may not personally own so much as a dinghy — are no exception. According to a recent estimate, the cost of maintaining the Greek-owned merchant marine in operational condition is somewhere in the vicinity of eight billion dollars a year.
Greek shipping is a diffuse and fluid industry spread all over the world. If Greek – owned ships sailing under foreign flags are included, the Greek merchant fleet today is the largest in the world, with some four-thousand, five hundred vessels, weighing forty-five million gross tons. One of the current problems of the industry, in fact, is finding sailors to man the increasing number of ships. This year’s Posidonia Exhibition, to be held from June 7 to June 12, will include a promotional campaign to recruit more men to the merchant navy.
The varied needs and the enormous buying power represented by the fleet inspired the idea of the Posidonia, a maritime exhibition inaugurated in 1969. It provides the international shipping world with an opportunity to display its products to the Greek shipping community. It is also the occasion for a gathering of the Greek shipping clan whose members fly or sail in from various parts of the world for a nostalgic get-together here at home.
In the past, the Posidonia was held in the Zappion building near the National Gardens in the centre of Athens. The growing number of exhibitors — and the dimensions of some of their exhibits — has made it necessary to find a new mooring. This year it is to be held in Piraeus at the St. Nicholas Terminal building, popularly referred to as the ‘New Customs House’.
The building provides a more appropriate backdrop for the exhibition. A spacious, modern, wing-roofed structure, it looks somewhat like a futuristic airliner about to take off. Looking down on it from above on Akti Miaouli are the lofty buildings which house the local offices of the leading Greek shipowners. Since the terminal building is perched on the waterfront, ships can deposit at its front door those displays which, when assembled, make proud oceangoing vessels.
Two-hundred and fifty exhibitors from twenty-nine countries will participate. The USSR, Egypt, Hungary, Korea, and Singapore will participate for the first time. The diverse international brigade will include builders, engineers, suppliers, agents, insurance brokers, underwriters, bankers, and financiers.
Apart from its strictly maritime function, however, the exhibition generates business in other fields. The thousands of visitors attending the Posidonia can simultaneously examine the investment climate of Greece — which often results in business being activated in areas unrelated to shipping. But mostly they will meet, talk, and do business with the-powers-that-buy in the Greek merchant fleet — and show them new ways to spend those eight billion dollars.
Troubled Idols
A MONK from Mount Athos who destroyed a plaster copy of the famous bronze, Zeus of Artemision, last March, was sentenced on May 11 to eight months’ imprisonment. Brother Nestor Tsoukalas had been inflamed by an article in a militant church publication attacking the presence of this naked idol in the lobby of the Ministry of Education, whose mantle also covers Religious Affairs. Brother Nestor, unacquainted with worldly ways, had appeared in court without a lawyer, but the court, showing charity and mercy, guided him through the ritual of appealing his sentence.
Free on appeal, Brother Nestor returned to the Holy Mountain and, unrepentant, vowed to continue his crusade against all offending idols. He singled out the Caryatids on the Acropolis and the Hermes of Praxiteles in old Olympia, in particular — for reasons that will be immediately discernible to visitors to these statues.
Given the condition of the Caryatids, however, Brother Nestor has no tirne to lose as that greatest of all iconoclasts, urban pollution, is encroaching on his area of endeavours. The Ministry of Culture has urgently requested that work be speeded up on production of imitation, but equally voluptuous, Caryatids which will replace the originals rapidly deteriorating on the Erechtheum. As for the Hermes of Praxiteles, the ancient Messenger of the Gods is already the object of considerable aesthetic criticism and has suffered a whole series of indignities since he was unearthed from his resting place exactly ninety-nine years ago.
Discovered in 1877, the Hermes of Praxiteles was first displayed without his feet, then, when these were located,.on his feet, then over-restored, then unrestored above the waist, then buried in sand for safety during the Second World War, then dug up again and housed in his own private, skylit room in the old museum. He was transferred last November to the new museum in Olympia where he is mounted on a pedestal in a low-ceilinged room looking, some complain, as if he were repairing the roof.
Once ‘idolized’, the Hermes has since been ‘knocked off his pedestal’ by a change in taste. Fourth-century art no longer holds so high a place in aesthetical canons. The Schliemanns’s discovery of the Mycenaean Shaft Graves, less than four months before the Hermes was uncovered, resulted in a gradual shift in Greek archaeological interest to prehistory, where it has stubbornly remained to this day. Even the legitimacy of the Hermes has been questioned and some believe he is only a fine Roman copy of Praxiteles’s original. In 1877 the statue was declared to be ‘the most perfect expression of manly beauty left to us by antiquity’. In this century such epithets as ‘icy’, ‘soapy’, ‘pommaded’, ‘vacuous’, ‘insipid’, and ‘spiritually empty’ have been hurled at this innocent piece of Parian marble which is unhappily unable to defend itself. In recent years, however, tastes have become more generous.
Other idols in Olympia have also been considered ‘fair game’ by tongue-wagging aesthetes. The archaeological site now has two museums, and while the older museum up on a knoll overlooking the Sacred Precinct is being repaired, all the displays will be temporarily housed in the new museum down in the hollow beside the River Kladeos. The Hermes of Praxiteles was the first to make the trip. Now a whole caravan of Lapiths and Centaurs are following suit as the two pediments from the Temple of Olympian Zeus are dismantled figure by figure. Each piece, as it is removed, is replaced by a plaster cast so that the groups can always be seen complete. This has rekindled the century-old debate among experts as to how exactly each piece of sculpture should be placed in relation to the whole. Seen as a gaming board problem, it is not unlike chess — with no checkmate in sight.
Bear Facts From Prague
IT IS not a secret that here in Greece we tend to be casual or vague about time. Nine o’clock may well mean eleven or twelve, tomorrow may mean the day after, and this month, six months from now. Our concept of time is best summed up by waiters who, in response to the impatient demands of their customers, assure them that the dinner they ordered an hour before ‘has arrived’ — when in fact it is nowhere in sight. The waiters mean simply that they have not forgotten the order and that the customer will be served sometime before the restaurant closes down for the night.
Our record for tardiness, however, has inadvertently been snatched away by Czechoslovakia whose Prague Circus finally made its appearance in Athens— nine years late. In April, 1961, the troupe was making its way down to Greece by train for a scheduled appearance. Arriving at the border between Bulgaria and Greece, they found it to be closed. The date was April 21, and the colonels had just carried out their coup. Back went the coachloads of performers, animals, and props to Prague.
This year the Prague Circus not only made it across the border, but all .the way down to Syngrou Avenue in Athens where they set up their little ‘big top’ and went into action entertaining Athenians young and old. On the night we visited it, audience-emphasis was definitely on the ‘over thirty’. Middle and old-aged couples looked on, as intrigued and bug-eyed as the children, while the versatile group went through the traditional circus mysteries of conjuring, trapezing, and balancing.
Circuses generally perform under small tents in Greece. In the centre is the tiny arena surrounded by the closely packed, tiered benches which hold the audiences. These wooden bleachers tend to teeter under the best of circumstances but it was our luck to find ourselves sharing one segment with a group of extraordinarily fat ladies. It occurred to us that they were part of the show but their beaming, fascinated countenances soon convinced us that they were simply a group of neighbours who had decided on a ladies’ night out. Their enthusiasm was contagious and, as the performance progressed, our fears that the benches would collapse disappeared and we happily see-sawed up and down in rhythm to their laughter, making our own contribution to the creaking and sagging of boards.
We are not aficionados of the circus but it seemed to us that the performers of the Prague Circus work hard, many of them appearing several times in different acts. Again and again they performed dizzyingly dangerous feats. So did their pets, the dancing horses, elephants, tigers, lions and diminutive ponies that behaved like miniature poodles.
The prima donnas of the circus, however, are a troupe of versatile performing bears. And the prima donna of the prima donnas was a little bear who decided at one point in the performance that she had had enough. Spotting a gate and an opening in the audience, she cleverly performed a few tricks to satisfy the Homo sapiens watching her and then hastily made her way out to the front exit. As the ring master, trainer, and assistants went in pursuit, the band immediately struck up Ί Could Have Danced All Night’, and| the Greek master of ceremonies, trying to look composed, assured the audience all was well. In a moment the prima donna was led back, looking a little scruffy and confused, performed her solo, and then joined the chorus-bears for a bicycle ride. The audience waited with bated breath for her to pedal, along with the other five grizzlies, straight out onto Syngrou. We thought we saw her cast a sidelong glance at the gate but the ring master was stationed there and stared right back at her with a ‘don’t you dare’ look.
The Piague Circus will be doing the ‘straw-hat’ circuit during June and July.
