I have a black and white photo, possibly from 1970, of my cousins and family picking bits of meat from a lamb that had been roasting over a pit of coals since daybreak in my grandmother’s ancestral village of Kakovatos on the Peloponnesian coast in Greece.
I was only five when my parents decided, like many others, to return to Greece in 1967. We lived in Athens until we returned to Adelaide for good in 1971.
I remember that Easter in Kakovatos vividly, as it was the first time I saw an animal slaughtered. It happened quickly, with a sharp knife sliding across the lamb’s throat, and its eyes rolled back in surprise.
The carcass was then hung, and my grandmother’s sister slit open the beast’s stomach, allowing the entrails and other offal to cascade into a large metal bowl she was holding. It was for Magiritsa, a traditional soup for the post-midnight meal of Anastasi.
Kakovatos a magical contrast to concrete Athens. The village had a beach within walking distance, with sand dunes leading into a pine forest. There was also a seasonal river that ran in winter and dried up almost completely when temperatures rose; we’d find crabs dug deep into the muddy walls of the river.
The village was home to both domesticated and native animals, including goats, lambs, chickens, puppies, donkeys, horses, turtles, frogs, hedgehogs and wild ducks.
However, my mother did not share my enthusiasm for the village, as there were no flushing toilets, electricity had only recently been introduced and there were no contemporary amenities. I remember the absence of her smile, and my father’s furrowed brow during that Easter celebration. They huddled every night around a shortwave radio trying to get BBC Radio and when they could only hear a faint whisper, they would try to interpret it for the others as they understood English well enough.
During that time, I heard my parents talk about war and people being taken, which scared me.
But my uncles would intervene, reassure me and make me laugh.
It was around that time, I think, that the decision was made for us to return to Adelaide.
We arrived in Athens in 1967 and I started school again in Athens, repeating grade two after attending Thebarton Primary in Adelaide. There was an absence of fun and much bullying from local kids. My morning routine was to turn on the radio and listen to “Mrs Rena’s Fairy Tales” while my mother got me ready for school. Mrs Rena would read out fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Little Mermaid and Greek myths for kids.
One day, when my mother turned on the radio, Mrs Rena was missing and martial music had taken her place.
My father rushed into the bedroom anxiously. Every station was playing the same military music and a metallic voice would interrupt to announce the 21 April Revolution.
Outside, we heard the rumbling of engines and voices of men. My mother’s face was contorted with a knowing fear. She went out onto the balcony and I followed.
Armed soldiers were patrolling the streets below and one of them pointed his gun at us, shouting for us to get back inside.
My father was on the phone, calling family, friends, and others, but no one wanted to talk because they were all scared, he said.
Mum trembled. As a kid, I didn’t understand what was happening, but felt it was bad. Soon things became normal, well not normal, a dystopia, a neofascist military junta was now governing Greece.
As school kids we often lined the streets, forced to salute at military parades of tanks, jeeps, jets and soldiers. My parents warned me to never to tell anyone what I heard at home. A shadow had been cast and regardless of the sparkling sun, the shadow had seeped into everything. Even to say “cheese is expensive” could result in jail, beatings, and torture.
For seven years, 1967 to 1975, the coup leaders, Colonels Papadopoulos and Patakos, were grotesque and brutal towards humans. They clamped down on free speech, banned “unsavory” books and free media. They also banned long hair, miniskirts, and jailed “immoral hippies”. Over 6000 communists, socialists, democrats, and small “l” liberals were either jailed or exiled to remote Greek islands.
Culture became banal variety shows, folk kitsch, technicolor Bollywood-style musicals and lots of nationalistic war films with evil Albanians and Bulgarians.
The Nazis and Italian Fascists that turned Greece to ash were invisible. My father feared that as a left-winger, even if he wasn’t active, he was active enough. CIA advisers helped the Colonels’ regime with new interrogation methods and thousands went through those tortures, many of whom did not return.
We returned to Australia in 1971, and my first big surprise as a 9-year-old was the complete absence of the military on Adelaide’s flat, quiet streets. In November 1973, now 11 years old, my parents were glued to the TV, trying to find out what was happening in Athens as Polytechnic students bared their chests to the colonels’ bullets. The fascists shot unarmed students. The student uprising escalated into an open anti-junta revolt and ended after more bloodshed on 17 November, with a tank crashing through the gates of the Polytechnic. The army, the ordinary soldiers, refused to shoot more civilians.
And just like the day Mrs. Rena’s fairy tales were abruptly shut down, the Colonels fell.
Their shadow cast long over Greece, and the fear of a deep state, of another fascist cancer in the military, seemed to loom large for years.
That Easter in the village, as a child, I was embraced by the bucolic scenery as democracy lay dying, unbeknownst to me.
The blood of a radical Essenes Jewish Rabbi, Athens Polytechnic students, and a pure lamb seeped into the loam to resurrect democracy again.
