Elias’s father, Panagiotis, was born in tiny Leondarion, about six miles from Megalopoli, a mountainous village in the province of Arcadia, in the east central Peloponnese. To poets, playwrights, and painters, Arcadia is a utopian idyll of unspoiled wilderness and natural beauty. At the end of the 19th century, Panagiotis’s hardscrabble agrarian parents found it inhospitable land from which to eke out a living and an inauspicious place to raise a family. They moved to Athens in his early childhood.
Panagiotis Demetracopoulos shaped his own life. In his late teens, he sought his fortune in America. In Chicago, the destination of choice for many Arcadian Peloponnesians, he worked at odd jobs, from construction to food carts, until the Great War came. Unlike fellow Greek emigrants, disparaged in ethnic lore as kourabiedes (butter cookies) or kotes (hens), for remaining abroad in times of trouble, Panagiotis returned home to fight. He volunteered to defend the fatherland, and he was almost killed in the process.
Afterward, still seeking better economic prospects, he returned to Chicago, where he worked until the mid-1920s. He settled in the growing “Greektown” enclave along Halstead Street. It was a difficult time to be a Greek in America; Greek immigrants were discriminated against for being “strange,” “undesirable,” and “dangerous.”1 Panagiotis started his own fruit stand and did modestly well at first. Instead of sending his meager earnings home, he invested in the rapidly rising stock market of the Roaring Twenties. But, like many of the unsuspecting public, he was unaware of then-legal stock price manipulation schemes, and his losses soon outpaced his gains.
Growing nativism and exclusionary US immigration quotas on those coming from southern and eastern Europe, prompted Panagiotis to consider naturalization. But the pull of home was strong, and he did not want to be one of the many single Greek males to start an American family with a “picture bride.”2
When Panagiotis returned to Athens, his English was good enough to provide him steady work as an interpreter for businessmen and tourists. But he wanted something more. A lover of history, antiquity, and the Greek classics, he was proud of his heritage and taught himself the elements of archaeology. He enrolled in the necessary courses, then passed the qualifying examination to be a state-certified, official guide to archeological sites throughout Greece. Panagiotis spent much of his life as a xenagos—a guide for foreigners at the Acropolis and Athens museums. For decades, “Mr. Demetracopoulos” was the big hotel concierges’ guide of choice for visiting celebrities and other VIPs.3
Home for good, Panagiotis met Panagiota Bokolas, who had grown up in a moderately wealthy family with extensive farming and business interests in the northern Peloponnese town of Aigion, not far from the bustling port of Patras. Panagiota’s good-natured demeanor masked her fiercely protective and takecharge personality. After a brief courtship, they married in Athens on February 25, 1928. Panagiotis was 40, a decade older than his bride. Less than ten months later, on December 1, they had their first and only child, Elias Panagiotis Demetracopoulos.
Elias was named for Elijah, the zealous prophet-saint who sternly reproves the lawlessness of Ahab and Jezebel, challenges the injustice of the King, slays false prophets and priests for leading the people astray, and ultimately rides to heaven in a flaming chariot. Given his father’s Greek mythology predilections, Elias may also have been named for Helios, the all-seeing sun god who each day traversed the sky in his golden chariot. Either way, his name would prove prophetic.
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MODERN GREEK HISTORY is a tale of tangled and conflicting dualities, including Byzantine and Western, authoritarian dictatorships and fragile democracies, alternating monarchies and republics. Its roots intertwine Hellenistic paganism and Christian orthodoxy and are expressed in both its liberal cosmopolitanism and provincial conservatism.4
From the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to its creation as a sovereign state in 1830, Greece was a peripheral province of the Ottoman Empire, a dusty backwater, outside the pale of basic economic development. The educational and cultural benefits of the Renaissance and Enlightenment had largely passed it by. Even the glories of ancient Greece were alien to the impoverished inhabitants. It was foreigners educated in the classics who rekindled interest and helped the new nation rediscover both its Hellenic and Byzantine pasts.
The oppressive Turkish occupation, rife with intrigue, corruption, favoritism, greed, opaque bureaucratic legerdemain and arbitrary enforcement of draconian laws, weighed heavily on Greek life. It took an assortment of Greek expatriates, wealthy westernized aristocrats and merchants, later joined by kleftes—guerrilla brigand leaders operating in rural mountainous regions—to ignite the Greek liberation movement. The insurgents knew that even though the Ottoman Empire was crumbling from within, their success ultimately depended on support from major European powers. In what would become a pattern over much of the next two centuries, they sought foreign patronage.
The governments of Britain, France, and Russia were slow to act. However, European and later American writers, poets, intellectuals, academics, and travelers, fueled by a romantic idealization of ancient Greece, ignited public opinion that engaged politicians and diplomats.5 They celebrated ancient Greece as the progenitor of Western civilization. Periclean Athens was mythologized as the apotheosis of democracy in its purest form, the pinnacle of Western humanism and artistic achievement.
When Greeks launched their sporadic war of independence from the Ottoman Empire on March 25, 1821, the revolutionaries were riven by factional dissent. Politicians clashed with military leaders, and civil strife became civil war. The sultan, using support from Egypt, besieged and then captured Athens and the Acropolis.
In disarray, the Greeks cleverly enticed the self-interested involvement of the English, French, and Russians. The three powers proposed an armistice, warning the warring sides that if both did not accept the treaty offered, they would intervene. The Greeks accepted. The Turks did not. In the ensuing Battle of Navarino, the Allied squadrons destroyed the Ottoman fleet, effectively ending the war.
But the path to independence was perilous. The country split into regional blocs and moved closer to anarchy. In 1832, the Great Powers decided that Greece was too unstable to govern itself and would be better off as a monarchy. They shopped the royal houses of Europe and created a Kingdom of Greece with Bavarian Prince Otto Friedrich Ludwig imposed as its first ruler. Seventeen-year-old Otto, a Roman Catholic who never converted to Greek Orthodoxy, came with a regent, a retinue of Bavarian advisors, and more than 3,000 Bavarian troops. He later married a teenaged German Lutheran duchess, whose troublesome interference in affairs of state was a harbinger of 20th-century royal practices.
A minority of modernizers struggled against a majority of traditionalists to build a European-style government. After an 1843 military coup, the King was compelled to allow a constitution, modeled after that of France, but it was effectively a royal dictatorship. A form of democracy was established, but democratic rule was often twisted by violence, fraud, and clientelism. Childless, Otto was overthrown, and the royal line of succession was changed to become part of the historic German ducal House of Glucksburg, which includes the royal houses of Denmark, Norway, and Windsor.
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DURING PANAGIOTIS’S ABSENCE from Greece, his homeland witnessed the collapse of the “Megali Idea”: a type of manifest destiny that sought to incorporate large parts of the Byzantine Empire, including millions of Greece-identifying co-religionists or Greek speakers living in Ottoman lands.6 By 1913, Greece had nearly doubled its territory and population.
The leading advocate for expansion was a charismatic young Cretan politician, Eleftherios Venizelos, who sought to transform his country at home and abroad. Dubbed “the Greek Bismarck,” he became during the first decades of the 20th century the leading republican reformer, statesman, prime minister, and a national hero. However, in so doing, he clashed with King Konstantinos, whose ambitions were more modest. Their political battles led to a National Schism that would haunt the country for decades.7
Educated in Germany and married to Kaiser Wilhelm II’s sister, Konstantinos continued the crown’s linkage to Germany. Believing Germany would easily win the Great War, the Germanophile royal palace decided to remain neutral and share in the victory of the Central Powers.
In stark contrast, Prime Minister Venizelos greatly admired Britain and France. Convinced that the British navy would eventually be victorious, Venizelos enthusiastically advocated that Greece ally itself with the Triple Entente Powers, a decision for which the country would be well rewarded.
The King’s provocative and unconstitutional interference in foreign policy-making led to Venizelos’s elected government’s resigning, getting reelected, and resigning again in October 1915. In the ensuing National Schism, Konstantinos ruled from Athens, while Venizelos established a rival provisional government in Thessaloniki (known colloquially as Salonika).
The Allies recognized the Venizelos government. On the morning of December 1, 1916, twelve years to the day before Elias was born, after the Anglo-French fleet had surrounded the Greek capital and the King failed to negotiate a diplomatic solution, French warships bombarded the palace and other targets, killing and wounding civilians and Greek soldiers. Konstantinos abdicated and Venizelos formed a new national government, but he was defeated in the next plebiscite and went into exile. Konstantinos returned.
In dividing the spoils of World War I, the Allies, in the Treaty of Sèvres, gave Greece administrative control of the heavily Greek-populated Asia Minor coastal region of Smyrna (now Izmir), which had a Greek population more than half that of Athens, and Western and Eastern Thrace, not far from Constantinople. Turkey, however, refused to honor the treaty.
Ignoring diplomatic efforts of the Great Powers to find a peaceful solution to the impasse, Konstantinos and the new Greek government launched an ill-prepared invasion of Turkey, stretching out indefensible supply lines and failing in its assault on Ankara. Turkey struck back, intent on expunging 3,000 years of Greek history from its soil.
In August 1922, in what Greeks refer to as the “Great Catastrophe,” at least several hundred thousand Greeks, some of whom traced their ancestry to the time of Homer, were killed, the result of gruesome tortures, rapes, and massacres that culminated in a monumental blaze at least partially set by Turkish forces: the Great Fire of Smyrna. It is estimated that more than a quarter-million Greeks died in the overall conflict.8
Violent ethnic cleansing, which had occurred to varying degrees in both countries for more than a decade, gave way to the diplomatically controlled ethnic cleansing stipulated in the Treaty of Lausanne: the forced exchange of religious minorities. Some 500,000 Moslem Turks were expelled from Greece, and more than 1,300,000 Christian Greeks from Asia Minor9 were turned into refugees, most crowding into Greater Athens, Macedonia, and Western Thrace. They shared the same religion, but many were poor, culturally distinct, and did not speak Greek. Difficulties in assimilating them economically and socially would affect the political landscape for generations.
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THE LATE-1920S GREECE in which Panagiotis and Panagiota were married was quite different from the one they’d grown up in. A vibrant shipping and trade center, Athens had seen its population nearly double. According to the 1928 national census, only a third of the nearly half-million Athenians had been born there, a third had moved from other parts of Greece, and a third were refugees from Asia Minor.
An expanding network of beige electric streetcars had replaced the horse-drawn trams of Panagiotis’s youth. Apartment blocks supplanted low-rise homes with gardens. Touches of modern architecture, from Bauhaus to Art Deco, dotted the 19th-century neoclassical skyline. The air was perfumed with fragrances of currants, cotton, olive oil, and tobacco, export crops that would soon crash in world markets.
But Greece’s extended political upheaval had taken a toll. Mourning for the dead and the dashed irredentist dream gave way to a military takeover of the government and the scapegoating of competing partisans.10 Officers of an anti-monarchist Military League purged officers loyal to the King, much the way Konstantinos had removed those loyal to Venizelos. Tribunals led to executions, and abdications led to a republic that could not stand. Multiple short-lived governments and several attempted military coups followed, capped by a successful military coup d’état whose leader was overthrown a year later. A republican constitution was passed in 1927, but the Populists, then the primary opponents of the republicans, refused to support it. Even the electoral system itself was a matter for dispute. High-minded rhetorical fights about whether Greece should be a republic or a monarchy continued, but the real stakes were patronage jobs and personal power.
Venizelos returned to power in 1928 committed to fostering a bourgeois democracy and improving international relations. He embarked on ambitious programs to reform education, build the nation’s transportation infrastructure, and transform its traditional agriculture system. But in 1929, Elias Demetracopoulos’s first year of life, the Wall Street crash and global Great Depression hit Greece hard. Emigrants’ remittances, exports, and agricultural prices fell precipitously. New foreign loans were unavailable, and Greece suspended interest and payments on past obligations. Venizelos’s ambitious modernization strategy unraveled.11
Venizelos lost control of Parliament. Unsuccessful coups and failed assassination attempts followed. In March 1935, Venizelos fled the country, opening the floodgates of retribution, purges, and executions of Venizelos loyalists. A rigged plebiscite paved the way for the restoration of the monarchy with Konstantinos’s son, King George II, at its head.
In the January 1936 election, royalist parties won 143 seats and republicans 141. The Communists, with only a few thousand members, received about 50,000 votes, or 6 percent of the total. With only fifteen seats in Parliament, they held the balance of power. Despite public protestations to the contrary, both royalists and republicans shamelessly tried to cut secret deals with the Communists.12
General Alexander Papagos, the minister of war in 1936, told King George II that any government that included Communists was unacceptable to the military. The king reacted first by replacing Papagos with staunch royalist General Ioannis Metaxas. Then, after unsuccessful efforts to form a ruling coalition, he appointed Metaxas to run the government. The Parliament ratified the decision and adjourned. It did not meet again for a decade. The Metaxas dictatorship had begun.
The years since the National Schism had exposed profound differences between cosmopolitan and parochial, urban and rural, republican and monarchist impulses in Greek society. Venizelists and new immigrants were generally supportive of reforms, expanding educational opportunities, democratizing the language, and paving the way for capitalist modernization. In contrast, royalists and those whose families had lived in Old Greece for generations were largely defenders of traditional, often rural, staunchly conservative and deeply held religious values. They feared the pace and direction of social, economic, and cultural changes. The stage was set for battles to come.
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FROM EARLY CHILDHOOD, Elias looked much older than his age. Taller and heavier than his friends, he had a deeper voice and started shaving earlier. His childhood friends recall him being gregarious but serious. George Enislides, a contemporary who grew up a few houses away from Elias, described him as being “always the gentleman,” polite, respectful, and solicitous of others’ feelings, a good listener, who detested bullies and saw no humor in mimicking boys or teasing girls.13
At the age of six, he eagerly walked the few blocks to his grammar school. It wasn’t an especially rigorous education, and Elias remembered affectionately his first years in a classroom. Most of his chums enjoyed such childhood amusements as playing hide-and-seek, shooting marbles, and practicing soccer on back streets, where play was more often interrupted by street vendors with donkey carts than by a passing automobile. Elias joined in neighborhood pickup games but dropped out when soccer became an organized neighborhood-against-neighborhood activity.
An only child, Elias preferred the company of his elders, eavesdropping or sitting with them as they gathered by radio newscasts and discussed current events. He was, as he recalled, “too serious to have fun.” But, he added with a twinkling eye and smile, he started early on his lifelong interest in women, young and old, actively listening to their perspectives on most everything.
