This is further evidenced by the voting patterns of the area. Laconia is the only place in Greece that has consistently voted over 80 percent for the Right. See Nikolakopoulos 2007.
- Chapter 2. 1936–1944: The Metaxas Dictatorship, the Italian Attack, the German Invasion, German Occupation, Resistance
- » And Then Came the One with the Erased Face
The systematic extermination of the Left and antiroyalist elements through brutal beatings and assassinations did not constitute criminal activity in the eyes of this man, as in the eyes of those holding executive power, because the Leftists and antiroyalists were, according to his logic, criminal elements who needed to be eliminated in order for the country to be governed by a legitimate government. He continued: “It's incomprehensible to me! Everywhere else in the world, history is written by the winners. In Greece it has been written by the losers, and we [the winners, the royalists, the Right] have found ourselves in the apologetic position.”
On an opposite end a friend mentioned to me the reaction of her father (a Centrist) when she mentioned to him the name of her lover's grandmother: “I had always known about this family because when my mother was studying at the university she lived in the same house as Elias's aunt, during the Dekemvrianá (“events of December”; see Chapter 3). She was there when the andártes (partisans of ELAS) came and took out the four sons of the family and killed them in the courtyard. So I had always known about this family, and especially about Mary, my mother's friend and Elias's aunt. Actually, one day when I was young, about twenty years old, it was around the late seventies, I was a university student myself—one day I was in the streetcar, standing in front of a middle-aged lady who was sitting down. She looked at me, and at some point she said, 'You are Demetra's daughter, aren't you?' When I said, yes, I was, she said, 'I am a friend of your mother's, you look so much like her. Give her my best regards, from Mary, tell her.' So, I went home and told my mother this, and she repeated the whole story about how they were such close friends as university students, especially after the andártes killed Mary's brothers who 'nevertheless, were Chites, let's not forget that,' my mother said. My father, who had been in the Resistance, though not in any organized way, had fought the Chites in the Dekemvrianá, when they tried to take over the neighborhood where he lived. When I went to him in 1990, saying that I had met Elias and, I said, you know, he is a nephew of Mary's [and added the last name], my father looked at me incredulously and said, 'Child, they [the family] are Chites.' He said they are; he didn't say they were.”
At yet another end, given that fratricidal stories have many ends that never close off anything, I remember a story that has stayed with me for many years. One evening in the summer of 1981, a friend of my parents' came to visit them, visibly upset. This woman was from Laconia, at the southern tip of the Peloponnese, an area that is historically royalist and Right wing. It has traditionally staffed the state mechanism, both on the level of surveillance and law enforcement and on the level of the civil service: the king's personal guard came from recruits from the area, and the gendarmerie was initially made up of Lacones. This, of course, does not mean that there are no republicans in the area or that the area is exclusively Right wing, but the general expectation is that if someone is from Laconia he is probably on the Right.