The Epta-etea or junta or the Colonels Page 2

Both Yorgos Papandreou and his son Andreas were persecuted, as well as the famous composer Mikis Theodhorakis, and the actress Melina Mercouri, whose citizenship they revoked from afar she was out of the country, and thousands of important Greek figures joined her in exile. Their censorship even involved bans on folk instruments such as the ‘tsambouna’ (island bagpipe) on the island of Mykonos, deemed primitive by the rulers, and they even banned the Classical tragedies.

Though the majority of Greeks opposed them and some Greeks protested from the beginning from outside of the country , and they were barred from the Council of Europe, the U.S. presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon extended generous amounts of aid and support, and sold them military technology.

Demonstrations finally erupted in 1974, a full six years after the colonels had seized power, something fully understandable given the silencing tactics of imprisonment and torture, and the infiltration of their secret police into resistance groups.

On the 17th of November in that year (a day made afterward into a national holiday of remembrance), the students of the Athens Polytechnic occupied the university buildings, broadcasting from underground radio to the public from within. Tanks stormed the buildings, with at least twenty students killed (though no one knows to this day how many) with many others injured. Eight days later Papadopoulos was outsted by the head of his secret police, Ioannidhis, who then took over.

Junta Page One | Page Two | Page Three