Old wounds heal slowly on Greece’s largest island of Crete, where many of its residents were alive when Nazi paratroopers invaded the island with all of the firepower and might of the Third Reich in May of 1941. Crete’s towns and villages are filled with 80- and 90-year old residents who are vocal about the future of their country that they themselves fought for seven decades earlier.
A pensioner from Chania, Manolis Bassias, was defiant as he waited in line to get his 120 euro allocation of his pension just one day before Greece’s historic referendum.
“We Cretans have waited in worse lines,” he said, continuing with a story of his fellow villagers being lined up in the village of Kontomari in June of 1941, where dozens of his fellow villagers were shot in a firing squad after Nazi Germans invaded Crete.
“We’ve waited in worse lines than these and we will continue to wait, to show these people that we have pride, we have dignity,” Bassias said.
The island of Crete voted overwhelmingly in favour of the ‘NO’ vote that was also advocated by the SYRIZA government of Alexis Tsipras. Crete’s largest district, Heraklion, recorded a whopping 71 per cent to 29 per cent margin.
Th other districts were also overwhelmingly ‘NO’, including Chania with a 74 per cent-26 per cent margin, Rethymnon with a 65 per cent-35 per cent margin and Agios Nikolaos with a 63 per cent-37 per cent margin.
In the village of Anogeia, which was burned to the ground by the Nazis during World World II, villagers donned their traditional black dress and headscarves and voted overwhelmingly ‘NO’, many bringing with them stories from the Nazi occupation in the early 1940s – stories that have been carried down to the younger generations who see German interference with their country as yet another example of an attempted occupation.
Back in Chania, Mr Bassias was just as defiant the day after we caught him waiting in line at the bank. Waiting at the local elementary school, which was designated as a local polling station, he said: “The Germans tried beating us with tanks once, and now with banks. We must say ‘NO’ again, just like we did 70 years ago.”
Source: The Pappas Post