[1949 - 1974] Post-War Reconstruction and Military Junta

The year is 1949, and Greece is a nation of ghosts. The Second World War has bled into a vicious Civil War, pitting brother against brother, and the fighting has finally ceased. But there is no victory parade. There is only the silence of exhaustion, the dust of crumbled villages, and the deep, gnawing hunger in the bellies of a million people. The country is a skeleton, with over 1,200 villages destroyed and more than 700,000 people left homeless. The air itself seems thick with suspicion, the legacy of a conflict that has left no family unscarred. From this abyss, a strange and frantic rebirth begins. American money, part of the Marshall Plan, flows into the shattered economy—over $2 billion in aid, a lifeline in a sea of despair. With it comes a period of explosive, often chaotic, growth that would later be called the "Greek Economic Miracle." For nearly two decades, the economy would surge at an average of 7% per year, one of the highest rates in the world. What did this miracle look like on the ground? It looked like a forest of concrete. In Athens, Thessaloniki, and Patras, graceful 19th-century neoclassical mansions were torn down with breathtaking speed, replaced by the defining architectural feature of the era: the *polykatoikia*. These multi-story apartment blocks—functional, plain, often hastily built—sprouted everywhere. They were a symbol of progress, a vertical solution to the housing crisis as hundreds of thousands of Greeks abandoned their impoverished villages for the promise of a city job. For a family moving from a stone hut with no electricity, a small apartment with a refrigerator and an indoor toilet was the pinnacle of modern living. Daily life was transformed. The clatter of the three-wheeled utility trucks, cheap and versatile, filled the streets, carrying everything from produce to construction materials. The first televisions flickered to life in living rooms, broadcasting images of a glamorous world beyond. This was the golden age of Greek cinema, when actresses like the fiery Melina Mercouri and the statuesque Irene Papas became international stars. The haunting, melodic music of composers like Mikis Theodorakis and Manos Hadjidakis became the soundtrack to this new, aspiring Greece, playing from radios in bustling cafes. The old ways—the strict village hierarchies, the agrarian rhythm of life—were rapidly giving way to a new urban consumer culture. But beneath the gleaming chrome and fresh concrete, the old wounds festered. The political world was a battlefield. The state that emerged from the Civil War was ferociously anti-communist. A powerful "parastate" of security forces, military officers, and royalist hardliners operated in the shadows, ensuring that anyone with leftist sympathies was barred from public life, denied a driver's license, or worse. Elections were held, governments led by figures like Konstantinos Karamanlis oversaw the economic boom, but the democracy was fragile, polarized, and haunted by the fear of a communist resurgence. The king, Constantine II, meddled in politics, and the system grew increasingly unstable. Then, in the pre-dawn hours of April 21, 1967, the fragile democratic façade shattered. As Athens slept, tanks rolled through its ancient streets. They surrounded the Parliament, the royal palace, and the national radio station. The city awoke to find itself under military occupation. This wasn't a civil war; it was a swift, chillingly efficient coup d'état, led by a small group of mid-ranking army officers, the most prominent being Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos. They called their regime the "Revolution to Save the Nation." Their proclaimed enemy was a supposed imminent communist takeover, an idea for which there was little evidence. Their slogan was "Hellas of Hellenic Christians," a rigid ideology promoting patriotism, religious orthodoxy, and traditional family values. Life under the Colonels, as they became known, was a study in surreal contradiction. On the one hand, they promoted an image of order. Streets were clean. Bureaucracy was, for a time, streamlined. They courted tourism, and posters showed smiling visitors on sun-drenched beaches, a carefully curated paradise. On the other hand, this order was enforced by the brute fist of repression. In the first few days, over 10,000 people—politicians, intellectuals, artists, unionists, students—were arrested. Ancient island prisons like Yaros were reopened. Torture was systematic. A new vocabulary of fear entered the Greek language. Censorship was absolute. The music of the beloved Mikis Theodorakis was banned; owning his records was a crime. The police enforced a strict moral code: long hair on men was forcibly cut, and women in miniskirts were publicly shamed. It was a suffocating silence, a nation holding its breath. Resistance simmered. It was in the defiant poetry of Nobel laureate Giorgos Seferis, whose funeral in 1972 turned into a massive, silent protest. It was in the coded language of popular songs. But the breaking point came from the young, from those who had no memory of the Civil War's horrors and refused to accept a future without freedom. In November 1973, students at the Athens Polytechnic University began a protest. It grew rapidly. They occupied the campus and set up a makeshift radio station. For three days, their voices electrified the city, broadcasting a simple, powerful message: "Here is the Polytechnic! People of Greece... Down with the Junta! Down with Papadopoulos! Americans out! Bread, Education, Freedom!" Thousands of citizens gathered outside the university gates in support. The regime’s response was brutal and absolute. In the early hours of November 17, a tank, its headlights glaring, rumbled down the street, and without hesitation, smashed directly through the university's steel gate, crushing the students crowded behind it. The exact number of dead remains disputed, but the image was seared into the national consciousness. The Polytechnic uprising was crushed, but it exposed the Junta’s raw brutality to the world and fatally wounded its claim to legitimacy. The end, when it came, was a direct result of the regime’s own hubris. In July 1974, the hardline faction of the Junta orchestrated a coup in Cyprus to unite the island with Greece. The move was a catastrophic miscalculation. Turkey responded by invading Cyprus, occupying the northern third of the island. The Greek military, built for parades and internal repression, not actual warfare, crumbled. Faced with a national humiliation and the imminent threat of war with Turkey, the military regime imploded. The Colonels were finished. In a desperate bid to avert total disaster, the nation's leading politicians called for the return of a civilian government. On July 24, 1974, Konstantinos Karamanlis, the old statesman, flew back from his exile in Paris. As his plane touched down in Athens, massive crowds flooded the streets, not with the anger of protest, but with the explosive joy of liberation. The seven-year nightmare was over. The period of transition to democracy, the *Metapolitefsi*, had begun. Greece was free, but the scars of both its frantic reconstruction and its time in chains would shape the nation for decades to come.