In this report from the field, Dr Huw Halstead tells us about his approach to oral history research on the Greek dictatorships and how this work was unfolding prior to the hiatus imposed by the global pandemic.
Until the global pandemic enforced a necessary hiatus in face-to-face research, I was in Greece conducting oral history interviews for the Dictatorship as Experience research project. My primary focus during this fieldwork was on the everyday experience of dictatorship: people’s quotidian practices, tactics, and subjectivities as they navigated the lived reality of dictatorial rule.
Evidently, the ‘everyday’ is quite a slippery object of analysis. To address this difficulty, I’ve adapted for oral history the sociologist Jon Fox’s technique for what he calls ‘breaching’ the everyday by exploring the spatial, temporal, and political ‘edges’ where people’s everyday practices are revealed. These ‘edges’ are moments and spaces of transition or disruption whose liminality can expose what is normally unsaid, taken for granted, or forgotten. By honing in on these edges in the course of a semi-structured interview, things that are often passed over in spontaneous autobiographical recollection – such as people’s shifting and ambivalent everyday responses to authority, or the density and complexity of their quotidian social interactions – are brought into sharper focus.
I want to focus here on one particular temporal edge that I discussed extensively with interviewees: the first day of the Colonels’ regime on 21 April 1967 when a group of junior army officers deposed the democratically elected government and seized control of the country. By presenting a handful of micro-scale stories from the oral testimonies – what the German historian Alf Lüdtke calls ‘miniatures’ – my aim is to hint at the agency and ambivalence with which people sought to adapt to the new situation: a situation that in many ways seemed ‘familiar’ given their memories and inherited postmemories of the previous Metaxas dictatorship (1936-1941) and the internecine conflict of the 1940s, but one that was also highly unpredictable, quickly evolving, and of unknowable duration.
The Colonels’ regime came to power less than 20 years after the Greek Civil War (1946-1949) between communists and nationalists, and its leaders were far right and fanatically anti-communist. Accordingly, when news of the coup d’état broke, many left-wingers were immediately alarmed and took steps to inoculate themselves against regime suspicion. The daughter of a left-winger from the town Karditsa in central Greece told me that her father, fearing police searches, immediately destroyed most of the recordings he owned of the left-leaning musician Mikis Theodorakis. Loathe to part company with his entire collection, however, he kept a select few records on the basis that they were on his daughter’s piano syllabus, theorising that this would give him a plausible excuse in the event of official snooping.
Meanwhile, in Athens, my interviewee Kostas* – well-known locally as a left-wing student activist – went straight into hiding, but upon returning home shortly afterwards for a change of clothes was arrested and promptly sent into internal exile. His fiancée – Vaso – was left in an awkward position. She was at the time trying to secure the necessary qualifications to become a teacher, which her association with Kostas the exile threatened. Navigating between her loyalty to Kostas and her employment prospects was tricky: when I asked her if she ever wrote to her fiancé in exile, she replied, laconic, ‘no, because I wanted to get my qualifications!’ Episodes like these are testament to the quotidian tactical manoeuvring required of people under dictatorial rule, especially those considered as potential threats by the regime.
For those on the right of the political spectrum, things could sometimes be rather different. When I asked right-wing husband and wife Panos and Tasoula what they did on 21 April 1967, they exchanged a brief glance, before Panos, with a nervous chuckle, told me that they went to a friend’s house for beer and chips. When I tried to clarify whether this was a celebration, Tasoula immediately answered in the negative, insisting that they were against the dictatorship from the beginning. Panos, whilst ostensibly agreeing with his wife, was a little more circumspect, proclaiming that the couple were not so much actively opposed to the new regime as indifferent towards it. This conversation went back-and-forth for several moments, Panos gradually backpedalling on Tasoula’s initial statement whilst Tasoula tried, in vain, to draw a line under the issue. By degrees, Panos – ignoring his wife’s glances – finally arrived at the revelation towards which he had been working ever since I asked my question: that he and the others who gathered together for beer and chips had in fact initially been rather supportive of the coup d’état, thinking that it was a ‘good thing’ that the Colonels had taken over and that they would bring an end to political turmoil in the country. This exchange hints at a major methodological challenge in my research: those who were at the time supporters of the Colonels, however tentatively, are often coy about their historical attitudes towards the dictatorship or even reluctant to speak to a researcher altogether.
Clearly, then, the temporal ‘edge’ of 21 April 1967 was sharper for some Greeks than for others. Indeed, for a whole variety of reasons, many contemporaries found the establishment of the dictatorship to be something quite distant from their everyday lives and local social worlds. In Athens, Maria – who got married early in the dictatorial period – was struggling with a controlling husband who was restricting her movements and, in particular, preventing her from visiting her family because he felt they were conspiring against him. Maria told me that the dictatorship barely registered as an influence on her life: as she put it, she was dealing with a ‘personal dictatorship’ much closer to home. Throughout its 7 year course, the Colonels’ dictatorship would only really intrude into her everyday life at specific moments in specific places, as when she (temporarily) lost track of one of her children in a public square in the confusion triggered by another coup d’état in 1973 when Dimitrios Ioannides seized power from Georgios Papadopoulos.
In the immediate hours and days after the 1967 coup d’état, many Greeks were preoccupied more with practical than ideological concerns. A foreign journalist I interviewed, who spoke no Greek, was somewhat taken aback by his elderly Athenian landlady’s matter-of-fact and pragmatic response to the news: in broken English, she shouted up to him, ‘government down, buy bread!’ Clearly, having lived through a previous dictatorship, numerous coups, and at least two wars, she knew the drill. Similarly, in the Peloponnese, 18-year-old Babis awoke to hear military marches on the radio and, unsure precisely what was happening but recalling his father’s stories about famine and banditry during the civil war, took it upon himself to make a 5 mile round trip to drag his father’s ox home from the family fields for safe keeping. Given the distances involved and the imbalance of muscle power between the teenager and the draft animal, this was an arduous and time-consuming act that was likely observed by Babis’ fellow villagers, and it is interesting to consider how this sight may have affected their own emerging impressions of what was happening.
Fifty-three years have passed since the Colonels’ coup d’état and, accordingly, many of my interviewees were children at the time. Their recollections of the first day of the regime – the demeanour and attitudes of their parents and other elders, and how the children in turn internalised these behaviours – are valuable in revealing further ambivalences and contingencies that are sometimes absent from the testimonies of elder informants. Daughter of centrists Eleni, having picked up on her parents’ distress, took it upon herself to start making handwritten anti-dictatorship flyers, and vividly recalls her mother’s fright when she uncovered her handiwork. Elsewhere, Manos from Sparta – a teenager in 1967 – told me that he and his friends, after being sent home from school early, performed an impromptu parade through the city centre singing patriotic songs. Like Babis’ struggle with the ox, this public display may well have impacted on how observers perceived and experienced the establishment of dictatorship. Yet, in Manos’ estimation, the parade was more a product of youthful exuberance over the premature end to the school day than any kind of political statement, and the singing of patriotic songs simply a habit carried over from school parades on national holidays. These youthful recollections highlight the importance of treating apparent displays of dissent/resistance and support/complicity as nuanced and multifaceted phenomena and caution us against assuming congruence between the intentions of the actors and the perceptions of observers (be they contemporaries or historians).
Generalisations about the experiences of Greeks in the years 1967-1974 cannot be made based on these scattered miniatures, but, as Lüdtke recognised, they can render three-dimensional and tangible the local and personal aspects of broader historical processes that so often appear flat and simplistic in top-down approaches. In doing so, these miniatures hint at the multivalency, mutability, and – to borrow a term from Kate Ferris – ‘messiness’ of living under dictatorship.
*All names used for interviewees are pseudonyms.