“OR search for the right for the Greek Center interested me in this book. All of our lives don’t just go Left and Right, there is also the Center, which the concept of major conflicts has in a way obliterated, but whenever there was any substantial reform in Greece, it came from that» comments the historian Tasos Sakellaropoulos, in charge of the Historical Archives of the Benaki Museum.
Surrounded by plants, in the cafe of the Benaki Museum in Piraeus, we have found a cool refuge from this year’s summer drought. This time our conversation – one of many we’ve had over the years – turns to his recently released book, Peace, War, Politics, Conspiracies: The Greek Officers, 1935-1945 (published by Pataki, 2024).
For those born into the junta and brought up in the Postcolonial era, the military is a taboo subject, I tell him. “And especially right-wing» he adds, laughing out loud. He is interested in showing how people narrate the march to the arbitrariness and autonomy of the military on April 21, 1967, and for a historian that means looking for the roots of evil.
It takes me back to the army in the Venizelos years, at the end of the Balkan Wars.
«Venizelos does extremely disruptive things. Balkan and World War I survivors, students, teachers, bankers, able-bodied people and very good warriors on the battlefield, he sends them to the School of Ephepidia, to learn to eat, dance and talk, and returns them to the army . This completely turns the internal situation of the army upside down. With the army at his side, Venizelos will grow Greece and make any reform he could, in work, education, etc. At the same time, for these people the army is an excellent springboard for social advancement and the prestige of the army in society is high” explains.
The failure on the Asia Minor front in 1922 changes things. It was the first trauma of the Greek army. In the interwar period his social prestige declined, “either because of the movements or because there was no war, and the army enters a phase of introversion. In 1935 we have a last convulsive movement – a big mistake of Venizelos – trying to regain control of the country despite losing the elections, with the following disastrous consequence: the dismissal of the Venizelos officers.
Now, and because the army operates on the basis of a “patriarchal” relationship, the only role models the younger ones will have are royal officers; no one in favor of democracy. Therefore the army becomes an intra-rightist affair and we enter the war of 1940-1941 with a Metaxas very phobic towards the Venizelian officers. However, the Middle East uses them again, that is, the British».
In the book, in addition to politics, there is also the war course of things. “I don’t write military history,” clarifies, “but we are interested in the successes and failures of the military in order to understand their moral impact on officers and society.’ The most successful, strict and essential unit of the Greek army in the Middle East was the Holy Company under the command of Lt. Col. Tsigande, he explains, “who set him up with officers regardless of political creed – not left-wing, of course – threatening them that if they talk politically among themselves he will kill them”.
The Middle East occupies the heart and most of the book. “There was the land army’s chance to become professional and to stop spending itself in the pursuit of the internal enemy; and it refused it, preferring the conspiracy. Thus, the Center is out of the game. On the contrary, the Navy we have today is being built in the Middle East because for four years the Greek ships have been operating together with the British ones. The British have behind them a tradition of centuries in the matters of the army and the Navy, because they have goals, they do not put a cannon to clean political potatoes” he says brightly. A methodical researcher, he is also a lively, charismatic storyteller, managing to transform the product of many years of scientific research into an interesting narrative. There, in the Middle East, next to the Throne and the Venizelics, the third axis enters: the Left.
«All three have in mind what they will do when they return to Greece and how they will control the army. The British are trying to build a bourgeois composition – not particularly pressing, I would say – between the royalists and the Venizelians, the royalists don’t want it, and then the Venizelians turn to the left and join them. Then they break away, but they are left with the concept of “companion”, which will be the main argument for their persecution in the 1950s and 1960s».
Throne control of the military post-war means that “there is absolute control over the internal affairs of the army, who will be promoted, who will go to the Hope School, to schools abroad, to retraining, to good transfers… There is a conspiracy that controls all of this under the tolerance of the Throne. Outside of this “arrangement” there remain the few centrists who had managed to enter the army and a very large number of officers of the School of Hope during the civil war. They are not promoted quickly and this greatly reduces their social prestige and also there is combat inertia. The Papadopoulos group fishes on this inactivity saying that “The politicians have ignored us, we won Grammos and they have abandoned us”. A lumpen part of the army is then cultivated and a mentality is consolidated». What the book wants to show, he notes, is that “the roots of the junta are not a plan, they are a mindset.”
Fifty years have passed since the beginning of the post-colonial revolution, and in surveys of trust in the institutions of recent years, the army is always in the first places. How does he interpret it? “There is an extremely deep root system based on two key elements: one is libertarianism, that is, the idea that all the people living in today’s Greece got together because some officers tried. The second is the coming of age of minor boys through conscription and patriotism.
Today this dimension may have been lost, but it remains in the imagination of the Greeks. Until recently, in the Greek home you would find the iconostasis, the wreaths and the photo of the child who was a soldier. The great confirmation was the army”. However, this confidence in the institution of the military is not reflected in the attendance numbers at military schools, which has been in the news following this year’s national exams. “It is one of the contradictions of Greek society“, comments, “we give things a symbolic character but that doesn’t mean we intend to support them at all».
The identity
Historian, head of the Historical Archives of the Benaki Museum, Tasos Sakellaropoulos studied History at the University of Siena. He has written studies and edited collective volumes and historical reports on issues of Modern Greek History of the 20th century (the policy of Eleftherios Venizelos, the campaign in Asia Minor, the occupation period, the civil war, the dictatorship of 1967 and the Postcolonization).
The political role of the Greek army during the period 1935-1945 was the subject of his doctoral thesis at the University of Crete; his military-related research continues until the Imia crisis in 1996.
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