Original subtitles

(intriguing music)

NARRATOR: July, 2019. Conservative Kyriakos Mitsotakis

is sworn in as Prime Minister of Greece

and shakes hands with his predecessor,

leftist Alexis Tsipras.

At one time, such a peaceful transition

between the two extremes on the Greek political spectrum

would have been unthinkable.

- (intense music)

NARRATOR: But Greece has come a long way

since the dark days of division and tyranny.

Political acrimony first emerged

amid the fall-out from the murkiest period

in the nation's history...

the invasion and occupation by Nazi Germany.

The bloodiest episode in the clashes between the Greek left

and right happened on the 3rd of December 1944

in Syntagma Square, in front of the Greek Parliament.

On that day, a Communist Party demonstration

in support of the resistance fighters

who fought against the Nazis ended in a bloodbath,

after they were fired upon by police.

RICHARD TOYE: One policeman dropped to the ground on his knees,

pointed his rifle and said, "Come on, let's shoot the (BLEEP)!".

- (gunshot)

- A significant number of people are killed and wounded.

We don't know exactly how many.

- It took years for Greek society

to recover from that excess

of mutual hate and blood-letting.

NARRATOR: World War II was not yet over,

but what lay behind this bloodshed

was not just recrimination against the Nazis and their collaborators

but also against the British.

- A bipolar state.

For those who were on the right side of it,

it felt like a free society and opportunities were there

for the taking. But for those who had a history

of being on the wrong side,

the various forms of repression

lasted a very long time.

- (indistinct chatter over radio)

- (siren wails) - (indistinct shouting)

- (film projector clicking) - (typewriter clacking)

- (engines rumbling)

- (explosion rumbles) - (thudding footsteps)

- (intriguing music)

NARRATOR: In 1936, after multiple coup d'etats

and years of political polarization between republicans and monarchists,

the military dictatorship of General Ioannis Metaxas

came to power in Greece.

- Metaxas, who was born in 1871,

was very much on the monarchical side.

He owed progress in his military career

to royal patronage and in 1936,

he became prime minister, and quickly afterwards launched a coup,

which established what became known as the 4th of August regime.

And with the support of King George II,

he established himself as a dictator.

NARRATOR: Metaxas dissolved the Greek Parliament

and suspended constitutional rights,

establishing an authoritarian regime of anti-communist character.

When World War II broke out in 1939,

the king and Metaxas initially maintained a policy of neutrality.

But this changed when Italian troops invaded Greece

from their military bases in Albania.

- In October 1940,

Metaxas was suddenly presented with an ultimatum

that he should give up this territory

um...or face invasion by the Italians.

When Metaxas is presented with this ultimatum at 3am,

he simply says, "No", and this becomes known as 'The Big No'.

There is another version in the diary of count Ciano,

who was the Italian foreign minister,

that actually Metaxas equivocated,

and only decided to resist

after he had consulted with others,

including the British minister in Athens.

- (tense music)

NARRATOR: Metaxas ordered the defence of the country

and, with the help of the British Air Force,

took up the fight against Benito Mussolini's troops.

VO: (on recording) For a little while, it looked as though Greece

were going to go the way of Holland and of France, but not for long.

The man in Rome shouts encouragement to his troops,

proclaims his early victory to the world,

and then Greece turns his armies upside down

and throws them back at it.

NARRATOR: Metaxas died in January 1941.

His successor, Alexandros Korizis,

supported by King George II,

allowed British troops into Greece,

which, inevitably, triggered

an aggressive response from Hitler.

Operation Marita,

launched in April 1941, was a coordinated action

by the Axis forces to overwhelm Greece

and undermine British control in the Mediterranean.

Nazi troops attacked from Yugoslavia

and the Italians resumed the offensive from Albania.

Within a few weeks, Greece was defeated

and its territory was divided among the Axis forces.

- The British sent troops in support of the Greeks,

unfortunately, this is really a disastrous move.

The British are quickly forced out,

they lose about 11,000 men either killed or wounded or captured.

That also has the consequence that it weakens the British effort

in North Africa which, previously, had been going reasonably well.

So, this is one of the major military errors

of the British during World War Two.

NARRATOR: After the invasion, King George and his family

fled to Crete.

From there they moved to Egypt and then to London.

The Greek government also functioned in exile there,

while in Athens, after Korizi's suicide on April the 18th,

a collaborationist government was installed.

- The brutality that the occupiers brought to the country

actually trickled down very quickly,

so that the whole of Greek society became embattled.

They were fighting for survival against the occupiers.

But as often as not, survival meant

also just fighting to keep alive yourself.

NARRATOR: The horrors of war spread throughout the land,

but a new political force was growing in Greece.

One that would form the vanguard of armed insurrection

against the Axis forces.

- The country had been very deeply divided

for 20 years before that, and broadly, it's a division

between conservative monarchists

and liberal Republicans.

But come the Second World War and the occupation,

a new force enters Greek politics

and really changes the entire picture.

And that is the Communist Party,

which had been very marginal until that time

and, indeed, outlawed, almost annihilated

under the pre-war dictatorship.

There are essentially three political forces

or factions in Greece at the beginning of the 1940s:

the monarchists, the Republicans,

and the communists.

NARRATOR: Despite the enormous ideological division

between these factions, they would fight

against a common enemy.

However, they would not always have the same goal

and when their common enemy was vanquished,

they would soon be at each other's throats.

Plunging the country into a conflict

with far worse consequences than those of the Nazi occupation.

NARRATOR: From late 1941, during the Nazi occupation,

The Greek resistance movement was born.

It was, however, divided along ideological lines.

On the left, the National Liberation Front,

EAM for its Greek acronym, was made up of left-wing militants

and led by the Communist Party of Greece,

the KKE.

It also had a military wing, ELAS,

which was the People's National Liberation Army.

- EAM and ELAS dominated the resistance,

and they were dominated by the Communist Party.

But many Greeks wanted to fight for their independence,

so local resistance groups

sprung up all over Greece.

And many of those quickly find themselves

in competition and then in conflict

with EAM and ELAS.

- (ominous music) NARRATOR: On the right,

was the Greek National Republican League, EDES,

an anti-monarchist, nationalist organization

made up, mostly, of Greek military personnel.

- (gunshot) NARRATOR: The EDES and ELAS

led the armed insurrection against the Nazis.

- The Greek Communist Party, although it had been tiny

until this time, was ideally placed

to take on clandestine operations under the occupation,

because they'd already been forced underground

under the pre-war dictatorship.

And they were the ones who actually assumed the leadership

at the beginning of resistance to the Axis,

to the Germans and the Italians.

They had a great deal of success. Over the course of the occupation

of three and a half years, they recruited up to 50,000 men

and a good many women as well.

NARRATOR: Seeing the growing strength

of the Soviet-backed KKE,

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was concerned

that the communists would try to take over Athens

when the Nazis were finally driven out.

He secretly met in Moscow with Joseph Stalin,

the leader of the Soviet Union, in October 1944,

to define the future of the Balkans and Greece after World War II.

It was a coming together of two implacable ideological enemies,

forced to unite in the interest

of negotiating influence in the territories.

Their meeting became known as the Percentages Agreement.

- This agreement is rather controversial

for various reasons. Firstly, because it seemed to show

Churchill being quite ruthless in the way in which

he was dividing the world up into spheres of interest.

He draws a list of different countries,

and then shows the percentages, the relative percentages

of influence that the Soviet Union

and Britain should respectively have.

In the case of Greece,

Churchill writes down 90% Britain

and 10% for the Soviet Union.

- In terms of British interests and later American interests,

Greece was seen as strategically important,

in terms of Soviet Russian interests, it wasn't.

NARRATOR: As Soviet armies advanced decisively into Eastern Europe,

Churchill knew he needed Greece

to secure British influence in the Mediterranean.

- In the days when India was still...

part of the British Empire, the sea routes to India

through the Suez Canal were always

of strategic great importance to British Governments.

The other thing, which actually has probably

more of a bearing on the Greek Civil War,

was Churchill's fixation

on the institution of the monarchy in Greece.

So, Churchill seems to have felt a kind of loyalty

to the exiled king of Greece.

Both to make sure that he got back to his throne

and also his belief, which turned out to be a wrong one,

that a monarchy dynastically related

to our own would ensure

the benefit of British interests

and also the stability of Greece itself.

And that was a tragic miscalculation.

- (ominous music)

NARRATOR: For the communists who controlled most of Greece,

the agreement reached in secret by Stalin and Churchill,

would be a ticking time bomb.

- (projectior clicking) VO: (recording) The German army

hastily left Greece in October of 1944,

their occupation of the historic country came to an abrupt end

after the allied invasion of Italy.

Acting as liberators, the British forces arrive at Athens

receiving a joubilic Hellenic welcome.

From the moment the German occupation had begun,

two Greek underground organizations,

The ELAS and the Royalist Forces,

fighting under the aegis of the exiled King George,

had battled the Nazis with undying hatred.

- (intense music)

NARRATOR: By the end of October 1944,

all Axis forces had left Greece.

The Greek government in exile, loyal to King George II

and headed by Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou,

then returned to the country backed by British troops.

They formed a coalition government

with minimal representation of Greek Communists.

Among the first of his measures, Papandreou called

for the disarmament of all partisan militias.

EAM, fearing repercussions from the EDES guerrillas,

called for the disarmament of all factions, left and right.

However, Papandreou refused their proposition.

- The communists saw this as being

an attack on them,

and the communist members of the government

walked out on the first of December. - (distant clamouring)

NARRATOR: The Communist Party called for a peaceful demonstration

in Syntagma Square, outside the Greek Parliament in Athens

on the 3rd of December 1944.

They were to protest against the dissolution of the partisan groups,

unaware of the bloody outcome that awaited them.

- Touchingly, the communists actually filed

a formal request to the government that they just left,

saying, "As according to the regulations,

we want to hold this demonstration", asking for permission.

Permission was given. A few hours later,

the government panicked, permission was revoked,

and all the national newspapers on the Sunday morning

had banner headlines: "This demonstration is not going ahead".

All except the communist newspaper,

which did not carry that news.

As a result, everyone who supported the communists in Athens

came flocking to Syntagma square

in time for 11 o'clock on that Sunday morning.

- They find police barricades,

which are there to prevent them getting in.

In spite of that, a number of them push forward

and succeed getting past the barriers.

- The crowds were too many for the police to hold them off

and more and more people came flooding into the square.

Many, perhaps the majority, were women and children.

Not long after 11 o'clock, shots were heard,

not in the square, but a few streets away.

Nobody quite knows what was happening there,

but this atmosphere is tense.

- It is said that one policeman

dropped to the ground on his knees,

pointed his rifle and said, "Come on, let's shoot the (BLEEP)!".

- The result was an instant stampede.

Gunfire broke out from everywhere.

And when the square was cleared,

a few hours later,

somewhere between 6 and 22 people,

several of them women, actually lay dead in the square.

- (melancholy music)

NARRATOR: It was clear that the terror had not disappeared

with the Nazis and it was equally clear

the British were not doing enough to ease tensions in the country.

- The British weren't running Greece,

they simply sent enough troops as they thought

to maintain order and to support the government.

Though in fact, as it turned out, it was barely enough

to maintain order in Athens.

But this government

was a precarious affair from the beginning.

NARRATOR: For Churchill, the bloodshed in Syntagma Square

in December 1944, made it easier to justify

the increased number of British troops sent to Athens.

And they would be needed because after the massacre,

EAM responded by attacking police headquarters in the city.

Since November 1944, the British had secretly begun

to release officers from the Security Battalions.

These were Nazi collaborationist forces

that had been integrated into the SS

during the occupation.

The officers released were to join this new National Guard

in charge of maintaining order

and, above all, fighting the communists.

- Many, particularly the communists, really hated them,

because they saw their own police as being part of the enemy.

- (explosions)

NARRATOR: Violence between nationalist and communist militias

became widespread.

- In the aftermath of the killing of the demonstrators,

Churchill sent a cable to General Sir Ronald Scobie,

who was the British commander, and he told him

to hold Athens as though it was a conquered city.

And to do this, it will be better if it can be done without bloodshed,

but should be done with bloodshed, if necessary.

- (gunfire)

BEATON: Within a few weeks, the battle for Athens,

as it came to be known, was a battle

not only between right-wing Greeks and left-wing Greeks,

but also between the Greek communists,

ELAS, and the British Army.

- (plane engine rumbles)

NARRATOR: The British Air Force bombed the capital for weeks,

while massive street battles between the various factions

left dozens dead. - (sombre mandolin music)

NARRATOR: Britain openly supported the right-wing nationalist,

anti-communist forces during the Battle of Athens,

but gaining control of the capital was no easy task.

- It was a close run thing.

British reinforcements had to be flown in from Italy,

in order to quell this rebellion,

as it turned out to be,

during the month of December.

NARRATOR: The situation was becoming dire

and Churchill decided to travel to Athens himself,

secretly, over Christmas 1944

to chair a conference with Greek and British representatives

seeking a cessation of hostilities.

Unbeknownst to them,

the Communists had hatched a secret plan

to assassinate General Sir Ronald Scobie

as part of their offensive in the capital.

They planted explosives at the Hotel Grande Bretagne,

where the conference chaired by Churchill was taking place.

The communist guerrillas were standing by

to detonate the bomb,

but the order never arrived.

The communists did not dare carry out the attack

as they didn't want to be responsible for killing

one of the leaders of the Big Three.

A few days later, Greek Prime Minister Yorgos Papandreou

resigned in the face of great national and international pressure.

Power was left in the hands of Nikolaos Plastiras,

a military leader of EDES appointed by Churchill

to head the civilian government,

which would be supported by British forces.

But this did not bring stability.

The clashes continued in Athens

from December 1944 through January 1945.

The Dekemvriana, as the Battle of Athens became known in Greece,

ended on February the 12th 1945

with the signing of the Varkiza Treaty

between the Greek government and the Communist Party.

A condition of which was the disarmament of ELAS.

- So, that is the end of ELAS and the beginning of a period

when communists, having laid down their arms,

are now actually being very heavily victimized

by the people they had formerly fought against.

NARRATOR: Athens was controlled by the Greek government forces

with the support of British troops

and the new National Guard.

Having rid themselves of Hitler and the Communists,

the Greek Nationalists were now in charge.

But the end of hostilities between the factions

was far from over.

NARRATOR: By the beginning of 1946,

a right-wing government took control of Athens.

But in the rest of the country the communists were well-positioned

and determined to change the direction

in which Greece was heading.

That year, elections and a referendum were held,

under the supervision of the British,

to consult popular opinion on the return of the Greek monarchy.

The communists decided not to participate, however,

instead boycotting the votes

since they did not recognize the government as legitimate.

- It's one of the ironies of the story of the Greek Civil War,

that the anti-communist government

that was voted democratically

in March 1946,

the first democratic election for 10 years,

was actually boycotted by the communists.

If the Communist Party had contested that election,

it and its center-left allies

would almost certainly have topped the poll

and formed the next government, but because the communists boycotted it,

it was actually the right wing who won a landslide victory

on about 50% turnout.

That in turn, led to a plebiscite

which was not quite rigged,

but definitely strongly slanted,

that ensured that King George II

did return to his throne

in September 1946.

And, thereafter, anti-communist governments in Greece

ruled for most of the next 20 years.

NARRATOR: The return of King George II galvanized the nationalists,

who, with the support of the security forces,

had already started to persecute the communists.

The White Terror began in Greece.

- The White Terror was basically a series of revenge attacks

by Greeks who had, themselves,

been victimized by the communists.

Some who had actually worked with or collaborated with the occupiers,

and others who just had personal

or family grudges with members

of the Communist Party.

- Persecution took various forms,

if you were known to be an active communist

or seemed to be involved in certain plots

or in certain publications, you could easily end up in jail.

And some-some people spent time in jail

until about the early 1960s.

That is 15 years in jail.

That means the better years of your life are gone.

- (ominous mandolin music)

- Other people were known to be...

to have been in a leadership position,

and political executions of communists take place

in Greece in the 1950s,

as late as 1954.

NARRATOR: In 1946, the Communist Party

refused to recognize the monarchist government

and the various disbanded ELAS units reunited

to form the so-called Democratic Greek Army, DSE.

A bitter guerrilla war began

in the mountains of Macedonia and Epirus.

The communists established themselves in the North

of the country and installed their headquarters

in the border area with Albania and Yugoslavia.

Both socialist allies who could aid them in their continuing struggle.

- Nobody quite knows why, but everything just went back

to a kind of brutal basics.

And it took years

for Greek society to recover

from that...excess

of mutual hate and bloodletting.

NARRATOR: At the beginning of 1947,

with the situation escalating into full blown civil war,

the Greek government asked the British for help.

But the United Kingdom was in no position to maintain the leadership

of the anti-communist struggle in the region.

Greece that had been so important

to Churchill at the close of the Second World War

was now slipping through British fingers.

Instead, a new actor enters the Greek conflict:

the United States of America.

- In 1947, the British government was facing a domestic crisis,

there was a shortage of coal, uh...

the economy was really in great difficulty.

And as a kind of emergency response,

one of the things which the British did was to decide

to stop supporting, stop giving aid

and help to the Greek government.

And when this decision is communicated

to the Americans, it really causes

a lot of anxiety, you could even say, panic in Washington.

This leads to President Truman

making a speech known as the so-called Truman Doctrine speech.

- This is a kind of a crucial moment in the Cold War,

where the Americans decide that they're going to take

a global responsibility

for attempting to roll back communism.

NARRATOR: The Americans were at the forefront of support

for the nationalist government in Greece,

intervening with arms and training for the army.

In turn, the Greek Communist Party, the KKE,

asked the Soviet Union for help.

But Stalin knew that the British and Americans would fight

to prevent a communist government in Greece.

To avoid a conflict with his former allies,

the Soviet leader ended up giving very little help to the KKE,

despite their loyalty to the USSR.

- It's very clear that Stalin chose to honour

the agreement he had made with Churchill

in Moscow back in October 1944.

And beyond a little bit of propaganda,

a little bit of agitation, the odd gesture,

and things being dangled towards the Greek communists

that never came to anything, the Soviets never actually

intervened in any significant way,

in any of the stages in the Greek Civil War.

And indeed, by the time it ended,

Stalin had already begun to fall out

with Greece's communist northern neighbours,

Albania and Yugoslavia.

And it was to those countries that the surviving Greek communists

fled at the end of the Civil War.

NARRATOR: Stalin's lack of support for the Greek communists

was criticized by Yugoslav leader Josip Broz, "Tito",

who was the main patron of the DSE rebels.

For Tito, a communist state in Greece was necessary

to safeguard its southern border.

However, his support for the DSE

fed the Soviet Union's fear

that Tito would revive the old plan

to create a Balkan Socialist Federation

under his control, without Soviet influence.

- There was the fact that the Greek communist leadership

was closer to Tito and Enver Hoxha,

in Yugoslavia and Albania respectively,

was a further wedge between them.

And the only communist leader who might have helped them,

which was Stalin...

but Stalin didn't.

NARRATOR: The Greek Civil War ended up deteriorating relations

between Tito and Stalin further,

which would eventually break down completely in 1948.

A persecution of the 'Titoists' within the KKE began

and the divisions within the communists multiplied.

As a result, in July 1949,

Yugoslavia withdrew its support to the DSE rebels

and militarily closed its borders with Greece.

This was a bitter blow to the communist guerrillas

fighting in the mountains, who refused to surrender.

Meanwhile, the United States began

a series of CIA covert operations in the region.

The first of these took place in Albania

and was supported by Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, MI6.

- Shortly before, the Yugoslavs had famously split

with the Soviet Union,

the schism between Tito and Stalin,

and this made Albania

geographically isolated.

Britain's cold warriors and America's cold warriors

thought, one, we have a communist government here.

And two, this communist government might be a little bit fragile.

Is there anything we can do to... cause trouble?

NARRATOR: These operations, while intended primarily

to undermine the Albanian communist regime of Enver Hoxha,

were also aimed at cutting the supply lines

to the communist guerrillas in northern Greece.

In 1949, British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin

ordered MI6 to begin Operation Valuable.

- MI6 went around recruiting

various exiles and emigres,

and they brought them all to Malta,

where they instructed them,

gave them a crash course, in sabotage,

in wireless radio communications,

in evading capture, combat.

Once MI6 felt that they were ready,

these teams left Malta

and sailed to Albania.

And their job essentially, was to,

one, gather intelligence and find out if the local people

were up for an insurrection.

And they wanted to try and find some new supply routes and sabotage them.

The problem was,

the Albanian security forces had been tipped off.

They were ready and they were waiting,

and it was a bit of a disaster.

- (ominous music)

NARRATOR: With the CIA's entry into Albania,

both secret agencies focused on sabotaging

the communist's supply of arms distribution routes.

But they were still well-established in northern Greece

and the fighting seemed to be nowhere near over.

NARRATOR: From 1948,

the Greek government declared the communist KKE illegal.

Anyone suspected of being a member of ELAS or KKE

was arrested and sent to any of the concentration camps

that were already set up in different Greek regions.

- Many thousands of Greek communists

or even just their family members

were rounded up, kept imprisoned,

tortured, uh...

deported to islands in the Aegean

where conditions were very primitive,

and they were, in effect, brutalized.

NARRATOR: In October 1949,

the leadership of the Greek Communist Party, exiled in Albania,

ordered the cessation of hostilities,

finally bringing an end to the bloody civil war.

BEATON: Huge numbers of people were displaced.

Many communists were either forced to flee

or chose to flee north

into the Balkans, into the communist countries

or the Eastern Bloc, fearing persecution at home.

NARRATOR: Then there was the extraordinary and little known case

of the children from the Greek Civil War.

Tens of thousands were taken from their families

and sent abroad for their safety,

both by DSE and government forces.

- If we think of the Greek Civil War

as a military or a political event,

we pretty much lose 70% of the history.

I'm absolutely convinced that we need

to pay renewed attention to the history of women

and children during this war.

And sure enough, the Civil War of Greece

is marked and marred

by this devastating history of child evacuation campaigns.

NARRATOR: Queen Frederica was the wife of King Paul I of Greece,

who inherited the throne in April 1947

after the sudden death of his brother, George II.

Towards the end of the Civil War,

the popularity of Greek royalty was at rock bottom...

so Queen Frederica conducted mass child evacuation campaigns.

- She founded institutions that soon became known

as 'paderpolis', children's towns,

in the name of the monarchy.

And she housed there, she evacuated there

numbers between 12,000

and 14,000 children

in what was supposedly a humanitarian effort.

Getting the children away from the front,

but also a unique opportunity for the monarchy

to try to win the hearts and minds of the Greeks.

NARRATOR: Thousands of these children ended up being adopted

in the United States.

In response to Frederica's action,

the Communists launched their own evacuation campaigns.

They took about 20 to 28,000 children

over the northern borders of Greece

into the countries of the iron curtain,

Soviet Bloc countries.

These were then communist-led evacuation campaigns

and it's highly contested

as to whether the parents agreed

to let their children go or not.

Hardly any of these children ever returned.

NARRATOR: As for the Greek communists,

they would be persecuted for generations.

- This was a bipolar state.

For those who were on the right side of it,

the Conservative government, it felt like a free society

and opportunities were there for the taking.

But, for those who had a history of being on the wrong side,

on the side of the defeated in the Civil War,

the various forms of repression lasted a very long time.

- (gunshots) - (plane engines rumble overhead)

NARRATOR: The Greek Civil War, the first conflict of the Cold War,

was the direct result of a British Prime Minister

and a Soviet dictator meeting secretly

to divide up the spoils of war.

Ultimately, the key role of the Americans

in deflating the Greek communists marked the beginning

of American hegemony in Western Europe.

- In the final years of the third round of the Greek Civil War,

it was American involvement, American firepower,

American hardware. Though, interestingly,

if you compare that with more recent wars,

not a single American boot on the ground.

The advisors were there, the generals were not far off,

the Navy was anchored off Faliro,

but there were no American troops involved in the Greek Civil War.

(distant, thudding footseps)

NARRATOR: The confrontation between the Soviets and Americans

intensified with the creation in 1949

of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO,

with the declared intention to act as a bulwark

against Soviet expansionism.

This would soon be countered by the creation

of the Warsaw Pact in the kind of tit-for-tat realpolitik

which would come to characterize the Cold War.

Greece joined NATO in 1952 and from then on,

the CIA and the Greek army would work together closely.

The Greek Central Intelligence Service was created,

copying the CIA scheme

and with clear anti-communist objectives.

- As long as the left wing suppression

continued to exist, the Civil War couldn't even be spoken,

it couldn't be written, it couldn't be spoken.

It was not included in the history books,

it couldn't be taught in school. It wasn't even granted

the very label of 'civil war',

it was called the bandit war,

thereby continuing to blame the communists.

NARRATOR: This political repression continued to be severe

until 1974, which signaled the end

of the seven-year military junta,

the so-called 'Dictatorship of the Colonels'.

A new, liberal era began in Greece

and the KKE was legalized again.

In November of the same year, democratic elections were held,

with left and right-wing parties competing freely.

Moreover, perhaps for the first time in its post-war history,

foreign influence in the region began to recede.

- In both world wars, the great belligerent powers

did...directly...intervene

in Greek affairs, in ways that were designed

to aid the interests of the war effort at the time.

And, understandably, the forefront in that

was not played by the Greek interests themselves.

So, great power involvement in Greece is a fact of Greek life.

And it carries right through from the achievement of independence

to the disintegration during the two world wars

of the 20th century. And it's really only

since the end of the dictatorship in 1974,

integration into Europe beginning in 1981,

that Greece has really acquired its own voice

and its own stability

as a democratic mature country

within the European Union.

And not actually having great powers

breathing down its neck.

NARRATOR: Although the wounds of the Civil War began to heal

in the mid-1970s, political polarization

has not yet completely disappeared from Greek society.

The Great Recession of 2008

plunged the country into a huge deficit

and the greatest economic crisis of post-war Europe.

Significant cuts had to be made in the public sector

and there was a considerable reduction in Gross Domestic Product,

which led to staggering unemployment and poverty rates.

Widespread discontent revived the ghosts of polarization

in Greek society, which took to the streets

in the form of numerous demonstrations,

riots and strikes between 2008 and 2014.

- The divisions in Greek society go back,

at least to World War One, arguably well before that.

They were definitely exacerbated by both world wars

and by the Civil War. And of course,

these divisions have been exacerbated by...

many things that have happened since the Civil War.

Including the Regime of the Colonels,

you could say exacerbated as well

by the global financial crisis.

But certainly, Greece is still living today

with the legacy of the Civil War.

- (indistinct chanting)

NARRATOR: In 2015, for the first time in the history

of modern Greece, the socialists entered government

following the victory of candidate Alexis Tsipras,

of the SYRIZA party.

Tsipras remained in power until 2019,

when conservative Kyriakos Mitsotakis assumed the presidency.

The peaceful transition of power between the warring sides

suggests that Greece, at last,

may be forgetting the grudges

that marked its Civil War so deeply.

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