He faced his first challenge at eight, when his parents thought it important for him to be trained at the Peiramatikon Gymnasium, the experimental school of the University of Athens. The city’s most prestigious secondary school, it offered eight years of rigorous education and was limited to 30 boys per grade. Two cousins on his mother’s side already attended upper classes there and were standout students. Admission to Peiramatikon was on the basis of a highly competitive entrance examination, which Elias passed on his first attempt.
In October 1937, two months before his ninth birthday, he entered the modern, spacious building on the corner of Lykavittou and Skoufa streets. The school was socially mixed, with a few children of the rich driven by their parents or chauffeurs in private cars, then still a rarity in Greece. Most, like Elias, came on foot from nearby.
Elias began as an unremarkable pupil. His more sophisticated peers considered him “naïve,” somewhat insecure, and less articulate. He lacked the give-and-take common to those who grow up with siblings. His friends teasingly called him boudalas, a pejorative term for an awkward person, which in this case probably had more to do with his nerdy formality than with any physical clumsiness.
Elias’s academic epiphany occurred when his professor of Greek, as part of an oral examination in front of the entire class, asked to see his copybook. Elias replied that he had forgotten it at home. “Go and bring it,” demanded the teacher, knowing how close to the school Elias lived. Elias responded by confessing that he had never written the assigned lesson. Then, recalled a classmate more than 70 years later, “the professor scolded and ridiculed him in an abominable way.”14
The public humiliation deeply hurt his pride. Afterward, Elias turned to his academic subjects with a vengeance. By the end of the term he was at or near the top of his class, and he stayed there. “It was a big achievement that made him self-confident and energetic, performing whatever he was doing with exactitude and diligence,” said classmate Antonis Drossopoulos. Elias’s favorite subjects were history, geography, and mathematics.
Elias had fond memories of the school’s rigorous curriculum and the stern teachers who challenged and inspired him, but he was quick to acknowledge his father’s leading role in his education: Panagiotis filled him with stories of the greatness of Greece from ancient days to the 1821 fight for independence. Adventures described by Homer and Xenophon weren’t remote tales but living history. He learned from Herodotus the art of storytelling, and from Thucydides the importance of observation and careful reporting.
His father stressed the unwavering importance of truth, integrity, and the “majesty” of character. Repeatedly, he extolled philotimo as the highest of all virtues.15 The roots of this very Greek word are: philos (friend) and timi (honor), but its meaning goes far beyond those simple words to an all-embracing way of life that encompasses the concepts of pride in one’s heritage, country, community, family, and self. “You have a duty to do good” and “do the right thing eagerly,” his father explained, “even at great personal sacrifice.”
Some of the best times of his childhood were his private tours around the Acropolis, escorted by his father, who described Neolithic encampments more than 7,000 years earlier, mythological legends, twists of history, recent archaeological discoveries, and architectural details of the Parthenon itself. Although sometimes it seemed to Elias his father was practicing parts of his archaeological spiel, the message was so personalized that he thought it had been designed just for him. His father told him about the heroes of the Golden Age of Athens, the difficulty of transporting the thousands of large blocks of marble from a new quarry on Mount Penteli, and how sculptors ingeniously shaped the Parthenon’s Doric columns to create the illusion of perfect symmetry. Panagiotis also described how different occupiers had turned sacred Acropolis buildings into a church, a mosque, a harem, and barracks. He pointed out the spots where the Turks had desecrated the Parthenon by using its interior for storage of ordnance and for target practice.16
Both father and son had a special affection and reverence for the sublime Erechtheion, built on the site where Athena and Poseidon were said to have fought over who should be the city’s patron. Sometimes the two mortals would stand silently near the temple of the gods, gazing at the Porch of the Caryatids, where exquisite statues of women in diaphanous robes serve as columns, their forms basking in the lambent sunshine.
Elias never tired of trips to the Acropolis, scurrying up the broad stone steps as fast as his legs could carry him, always careful not to trip on the slippery marble surfaces. It was a magical time, with the expanding city stretched out below. No crowds, no tourists. Just the two of them, alone, the wind blowing, and a profound feeling that ghosts of their Hellenic heritage were everywhere. His father lectured him, tested him with questions, and dropped aphorisms, often quoting Plato on overcoming ignorance through education and Aristotle on the importance of friendship. Panagiotis also taught his son English from early childhood, at a time when speaking any second language was rare, and when, for the educated elites, the second language of choice was French. These lessons would prove fateful.
Large in stature and lean in build, with powerful hands and big ears, Panagiotis was imposing in personality and forcefully conservative in his beliefs and politics. He neither smoked nor drank, dismissing these habits as intemperate vices and personal failings. He had difficulty expressing affection, and Elias could not recall moments of tenderness or sentimentality with him. This reticence carried over into a reserved demeanor in his public life, which some of Elias’s childhood friends remembered as being cold and unfriendly.
Politically, Panagiotis was more a cafeteria conservative than a true believer. He was not a regular churchgoer and did not particularly like Ioannis Metaxas or the trappings of his dictatorship. He was, however, sympathetic to the King and the royalist cause, and in recent years he had been quick to criticize Venizelos, his followers, and the failings of successive republican governments.
At first, Elias echoed his father’s views, but at an early age he began asking questions, cultivating a slight contrarian streak. By age twelve he thought of himself as a liberal republican. To his father’s surprise and sometimes displeasure, he became a youthful Venizelist, espousing the late statesman’s cosmopolitan and reformist views.
Elias’s first lessons in democracy had come from his father’s inspirational descriptions of Hellenism and the golden age of Pericles, a romantic vision of freedom and portrait of ancient Greece as the “cradle of democracy.” In school, however, he became increasingly impressed with stories about the American and French revolutions. He started to think through the meanings of democracy, from the 5th century B.C.E. to the 1930s, in all their nuanced complexity. The son began to pick at inconsistencies and uncomfortable truths in his father’s unqualifiedly glorious legends. Elias liked part of the story of Socrates, the “gadfly” biting the steed of state for its own good,17 but he was troubled that in doing so the philosopher brought about his own death by hemlock. He also was disturbed that the much-celebrated Periclean Athens denied rights to women and relied on the labor of slaves. He saw disconnects between aspects of modern Western democracies and the classical Greek version. Though Elias shared his father’s nationalist pride, he was more open to questioning uncomfortable realties about his homeland.
Elias revered his father and respected his toughness, but chafed at his strictness. He had tremendous difficulty winning paternal praise or approval. It was his warm-hearted mother, indulging her only child, who acted as a gentle buffer against his father’s sometimes overbearing pressures. Petite, but powerful in spirit, she ran the household and, although the youngest of her siblings, was the linchpin of her family’s Athenian network. Although her inheritance was a critical safeguard for the family in hard times, she lived modestly and never used her relative wealth to diminish her husband’s role as paterfamilias.
Elias’s mother was deeply pious and went for vespers almost daily to the nearby church of Saint Nicholas, but she never forced her religiosity on her son. As a boy, he had often joined her at services, but as he got older he, like his father, preferred to stay away. In this, as in other activities, Panagiota encouraged Elias to find and express himself.
The life lessons his mother tried to instill in him complemented those of his father: Stand up for yourself but be tolerant of others. Keep your eyes open. Listen carefully. Be careful not to make snap judgments. She too impressed on him the importance of philotimo, doing the right thing, modestly, even when no one was watching.
Elias was fiercely protective of his mother, whose hearing difficulties became progressively worse. The sonorous voice and carefully modulated diction he developed early on to ensure that Panagiota would not be left out of conversations evolved into a speaking style that some later would describe as affected.
—
PANAGIOTIS NEVER DISCUSSED the discrimination he must have experienced while living in America. With close friends and family, he expansively praised the United States as a land of opportunity where liberty and democracy flourished together. America to him was “the apotheosis of nations,” the likely and best world leader, then and in the future. On this issue, Elias did not challenge his father’s views.
Elias’s first encounter with an American was with its highest-ranking representative in Greece: Lincoln MacVeagh, the former publisher of the Dial Press, appointed ambassador by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 and famous for giving his inaugural public address in classical Greek. In the 1930s there was no US ambassadorial residence, so MacVeagh and his family had moved into the American School of Classical Studies on Souidias Street, an imposing stone edifice across from the home of one of Elias’s uncles, whom Elias often visited. Occasionally the silver-haired MacVeagh would engage young Elias and his cousins warmly in street conversations about life in Greece and books they might consider reading.
Elias’s father had met MacVeagh on a few of the diplomat’s frequent archeological outings on the Acropolis—the finds from which MacVeagh contributed to the Greek National Museum—and Panagiotis respected the legate’s keen interest in Greek antiquities. At the same time, MacVeagh’s trenchant, often acerbic telegrams and dispatches provided Washington with a steady stream of information describing the “labyrinthine complexities” of the various royalist and Venizelist intrigues, coups, and counter coups in the immediate pre-war period, and the King’s blessing of Metaxas’s right-wing dictatorship.
For a long time, the United States had not had close relations with Greece, a country largely irrelevant to its interests.18 The United States waited until 1837 to appoint its first consul in Greece and did not establish full diplomatic relations until 1868. For more than a hundred years, the United States had left nation-building in the Balkans to the Europeans, with Greece predominantly a region of British influence. MacVeagh, however, in monitoring signs of a second World War, first promoted, then managed the American transition from passive observer to active participant in that Southern European arena.
—
GENERAL METAXAS HAD a soft square face, Charlie Chaplin moustache, round wire-rimmed spectacles, thinning hair combed back over a high widow’s peak, and an avuncular appearance. He believed his people needed a paternalistic popular autocracy, more discipline and efficiency. When he took over in 1936, he declared his Fourth of August Regime to be the Third Hellenic Civilization, blending the best of mythic ancient Athens, the First Hellenic Civilization, and Byzantium, the Christian apogee. And he paid unsubtle homage to Hitler and Mussolini, demanding to be called Kyvernitis (“Governor”) and requiring people give him the Fascist salute. Having trained with the German army, he had a proclivity for Teutonic values and culture.
Metaxas declared a state of emergency, annulled parts of the constitution, decreed martial law, imposed press censorship, and curtailed freedom of speech. He created a secret police apparatus to restore public order, crushing the incipient Communist Party. As dictator, he larded the civil service with his friends and purged liberals and centrists.
During his four and a half years, Metaxas did much that could be characterized as tyrannical, reactionary, sanctimonious, and absurd.19 But notwithstanding his Teutonic predilections, he maintained British ties and did not embrace the Axis. He significantly reorganized the armed forces to prepare for any incursion from Bulgaria across a newly fortified border called the “Metaxas line.”
Metaxas overreacted to the Communist threat. In suppressing countless supporters at home and expelling thousands to intolerable island prisons, he fostered a wellspring of sympathy to their cause internationally. With the benefit of hindsight, Elias agreed with historians who described the Metaxas regime as fascism lite, a variety closer to Salazar’s Portugal than Hitler’s Reich. For one thing, he lacked “one of the most important hallmarks of fascism, an ideologically radicalized mass base,”20 even if he did create a state-organized youth movement. Nevertheless, Elias felt that his parents, who despite their royalist leanings were not enthusiastic with life under Metaxas, should have been stronger in their criticism. Elias and his family did not know any Communists and did not feel any particular affinity for their ideological cause, but as early as age nine Elias made clear his distaste for the dictator. His role model for these views, and many others, was the family’s eloquent 40-year-old doctor and close friend, Kostas Giannatos, a debonair scion of a notable Athenian family.
The Demetracopoulos household followed the news closely, from the Third Reich’s annexation of Austria to its takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1938 and the invasion of Poland in 1939. Their polished wooden shortwave radio, with its bright dial, impressive buttons, and cloth-covered speaker, held a place of honor in the living room. It was usually tuned to a BBC broadcast or local news. From time to time, friends who didn’t have such radios came by to listen and discuss the day’s events and ponder the future. Through this medium, more than the newsreels preceding movies at the cinema, Hitler, and his strident staccato oratory, became an increasingly palpable presence in the Demetracopoulos household.
Newspapers were their most important source of information. The family’s daily paper was Kathimerini, the preferred choice of conservative Greeks. Every day Panagiotis sat quietly in his big armchair in the living room, methodically reading the broadsheet. Elias also picked up copies of the center-left Ta Nea on daily trips to the local kiosk. Whether he did this out of an early interest in multiple news sources, or simply to tweak his father, is not clear. Elias got his first paying job at the age of nine, distributing a variety of newspapers in the neighborhood. He was a familiar sight, out before breakfast, freshly scrubbed, wearing a clean shirt, short pants, and polished shoes, pulling a wagon piled high with papers along his route. It was the first money he earned in the news business.
—
AT THE OUTBREAK of war in 1939, ten-year-old Elias eagerly advocated for the British-French side. His mother was generally apolitical. His father did not like the Germans but respected their prowess. Sensitive to the royal family’s historic ties to Germany, and aware of the economic benefits of maintaining good trade relations with the National Socialist government, he was not eager to see Greece enter the fray. The country was bitterly divided between the royalists and Venizelists. Panagiotis felt that the best choice for Greece, as during the Great War, was to remain effectively neutral.
One issue on which the whole family could agree was their contempt for Italy, the country that posed the most immediate threat to Greece. After the fall of France and other German conquests, Benito Mussolini became increasingly restive, resentful that Germany had, without telling him, moved into Romanian oil fields that he regarded as part of Italy’s sphere of influence. He wanted to show his Axis partner that Italy too could achieve significant victories. Il Duce’s vision of a new Roman Empire included the takeover of Greece, and he set about finding ways to provoke a Greco-Italian war, whipping up propaganda at home, authorizing flyovers of Greek territory, and encouraging sporadic attacks on Greek vessels.
The August 15, 1940, torpedoing of the light cruiser Elli, moored at the island of Tinos for the annual Feast of the Dormition holy pilgrimage, was particularly odious. Sailors were killed. Onlookers panicked. Greek government officials pretended they didn’t know the perpetrators, but many citizens disbelieved them. That date, the name day for both of Elias’s parents, marked the moment when Elias’s father ceased to support Greek neutrality.
—
ITALY APPROVED WAR plans to attack Greece on October 26. Two days later, at about three in the morning, Italy’s ambassador in Athens, Emanuele Grazzi, left the Italian Embassy for Metaxas’s house in the suburb of Kiffisia. There, he woke up the Greek leader and handed him an ultimatum from Mussolini in which Il Duce demanded safe passage for his troops to occupy unspecified “strategic points” inside Greek territory. A heated exchange in French ensued. Italy was in effect asking to be invited to invade Greece. Metaxas rejected the ultimatum, shouting: “Alors, c’est la guerre” (“and so it’s war”). In this surprisingly brave act of defiance, he voiced the will of the Greek people to resist, a spirit popularly expressed in the single word ochi (“no”).
Air-raid sirens sounded in Athens at the first light of dawn. Within hours of the diplomatic confrontation, Italy began attacking Greece from Italian-occupied Albania. A country of 40 million with the second-strongest military on the continent invaded a nation of fewer than eight million. The outcome seemed obvious. In London, His Majesty’s government, which had signed a declaration in April 1939 proclaiming that, if Greece’s independence were threatened, it would be honor-bound to provide “all the support in their power,” decided there wasn’t much that could be done. Mussolini had been assured by his staff that Greece could be defeated in a matter of weeks.
Metaxas rallied the nation. It helped that Italy’s planning and mobilization were incompetent, and that the Italians lacked the manpower, supplies, and expertise to do battle in the mountainous terrain of northern Greece. Although it was already late autumn the invaders, expecting a short conflict, did not even bring winter coats. Fortuitously, unseasonably bad weather rendered Italy’s superior air force ineffective. In the Pindos Mountains in Epirus and West Macedonia, the invading Italians were soundly defeated and pushed back into Albania. By mid-November, it became clear that the Italian version of a blitzkrieg had failed miserably. The two sides positioned themselves for a long winter slog.
The Demetracopouloses and their neighbors cheered the early upbeat, fragmented reports they received from the BBC and Radio Athens. They laughed at the anti-Mussolini songs and jokes that ridiculed their Italian enemy. At first, they tracked battles on a regional map tacked to a living-room wall, using colored pins to mark Greek military progress. But, as time wore on and they heard more stories of returning soldiers maimed and deeply frostbitten, their mood darkened. For much of Elias’s young life, the word polemos (war) had been something once-removed. He had read about its ravages in Tolstoy and other works of literature and in his history books. There was even a touch of unreality to the reports of conflicts in remote parts of Europe and nearby Albania. But increasingly, Elias’s parents expressed deep concerns about impending danger. Polemos was coming much closer to Dafnomili Street.
2.Resisting the Germans
