Mitsotakis, Konstantinos. 2008. Speech in honor of Leonidas Kyrkos. Eleutherotypia April 18..
- Chapter 7. 1967–1974: Dictatorship
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The generational difference among the detainees continued to be acute. The navy ships kept transporting political prisoners, “but they never bring young ones,” Karousos notes. The younger ones were kept in prisons where tortures even more intense, and certainly more scientific, took place.
An interesting development, engendered by the junta's profound climate of suspicion, fear, and deep anti-Communism (an anti-Communism that lapsed into anti-anti-juntaism, as Clifford Geertz might have said), was that after the coup attempted by the king in December 1968 a whole group of Right-wing, royalist, high-ranking officers, primarily generals, admirals, and air-force commanders, was imprisoned on the mainland and exiled to Yáros, along with the Leftists and the “democrats,” against whom they might have fought during the civil war or whom they might have helped convict and imprison only a few years before their own arrests. “I didn't have anyone to talk to, except another general,” one of them said to me. “Imagine that,” he continued, “what could I possibly have in common with them? What could we talk about? They wanted the breakdown of the state [ten dialyse tou kratous], I wanted the preservation of the king and order. But we had to eat together, and suffer together, although the gendarmes were more kind to us, they showed us the same respect that they had shown us before.”
This required yet another reordering of space: where the Rightists' tents would be, where they would sit down to eat, where they would relieve themselves, so that they would not be forced to interact with the “others,” would not have to expose to them their private parts, their intimate gestures. But one should mention here a recent comment by Konstantinos Metsotakis, honorary president of the Right-wing New Democracy Party, who, in a celebration for Leonidas Kyrkos, deputy of the Left-wing party Synaspismos, mentioned in public that when he himself was (briefly) arrested by the junta on April 21, 1967, he realized how “valuable it was for the bourgeois politicians to understand what the Left-wing politicians had been through thus far” (Mitsotakis 2008).
Karousos stayed in Yáros until July 1967, when he was transported, still in custody, to the hospital of the Averof Prison in Athens with a massive infection. After being hospitalized for fifteen days there, he was suddenly released and allowed to seek better treatment privately. But, as he states, he had been proscribed: it was against the law to mention his name publicly or to perform his work at the national theaters. He traveled to London, Paris, and Strasbourg, where he denounced the dictatorship openly and tried to find treatment at various hospitals. He died in Paris on December 3, 1969.
Perikles Korovesis, one of the younger political prisoners, states that at one point Theodoros Theophiloyiannakos (one of the chief torturers and director of the Special Interrogation Unit of the Military Police, the ESA) advised him: “Talk now, because what we are doing to you is simply barbaric. If you don't talk now we'll send you further in, for a more scientific treatment.” It would be trite even to attempt to analyze the distinction between “barbarism” and “science” proposed in this statement. The reference to “scientific treatment” was not simply metaphorical but refers to the training of the Greek Military Police by the U.S. Army and what became the CIA in techniques of interrogation, starting from the time of the civil war.
The ruins of the infirmary on Makrónisos, with the mainland and Lavrion in the distance. Photograph by the author.
Under the junta “democrats” inhabited the zone of danger heretofore occupied by Leftists, Communists, and world peace activists. “Democratically minded” citizens thus expanded the category of the dangerous citizen.