At least one researcher, Nikos Koulouris, who has compiled a bibliography of the emphýlios that includes both Right- and Left-wing publications, has set its temporal dimensions between 1945 (post-Varkiza agreement) and 1949 (with the collapse of the front at Vitsi). See Koulouris 2000.
- Chapter 5. 1946–1949: Emphýlios
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The First Emphýlios, also called the War of Kolokotrones, because the famous hero Theodoros Kolokotrones was a central figure in it, broke out on the pretext of the future disbursement of the loan that the British government had approved as financial support of the revolution. Of the 800,000 British gold pounds that the government had approved, only 336,000 finally arrived in the hands of the Greek government, the rest having been appropriated by various warlords (also known as kapetanioi, “captains”) who were leading the revolution. The war ended when the son of Kolokotrones, Panos, who had besieged and taken the city of Nafplion, turned it over to the Executive Power when he found out that the first installment of the loan had arrived in Greece and he was given the portion that he had requested. At the beginning of 1824 Great Britain, suspecting that Theodoros Kolokotrones, Odysseus Androutsos, and Demetrios Ypsilantes, who had formed an alliance, were agents of Russia, ordered the extermination of Kolokotrones. While this internal strife, supported by the intervention of the British, was taking place, Sultan Mahmood provided the necessary incentives to Mohamed Ali Pasha, governor of Egypt, to attack Greece. The Greek revolutionaries, embroiled in their own struggle for power and financial gain, paid no attention to these preparations by Mohamed Ali and the sultan, so that the sultan and Ali were able to take advantage of this oversight and attack with disastrous results. Or so goes the interpretation given by historian George Finlay, who sought to exonerate the British from any responsibility for interfering in the management of internal Greek affairs.
The Second Emphýlios is known as the War of the Elders (Pólemos tōn Proestôn). It was fought briefly and with the single objective of taking over power from the proestoi. These were the leaders of the communities, initially appointed by the Ottomans as agents and mediators of political power between the Ottoman administration and the members of the community. Unsurprisingly, they did not, from the beginning or at all times, support the revolution against the Ottomans.
The Left used the term Emphýlios (along with Deutero Andártiko, “the Second Partisan War”) for the war fought between 1946 and 1949, whereas the Center and the Right used the term Symmoritopólemos (“Brigand War”). Rizospastis, the official newspaper of the Greek Communist Party, used the term emphýlios as early as 1947 in its leading articles. The emphýlios has been periodized by the Right, by the British, and by U.S. historiography from the beginning: the First Round (1943), the Second Round (the Battle of Athens in 1944), the Third Round (1946–49), a gesture that left no doubt as to the specificity of its timing: when it started, when it ended, and how time was spent in between. Such a specific allocation of time, however, bespeaks the desire to set specific beginnings and specific ends to the event of the emphýlios: it started in 1943, when the competing Resistance armies of ELAS (of democratic, antiroyalist, and Left forces) and EDES (of Right and, eventually, monarchist elements) fought for the right to claim exclusive power over the movement of Resistance to the Germans, and it ended on August 29, 1949, when the National Army (EES) triumphed over the Democratic Army (DS) at the decisive battles in Grammos and Vitsi.