A Greek coup: The day the colonels took power

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 6 December 2023

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On 21 April 1967, a group of right-wing army officers seized power in Greece to prevent the election of a social democratic government led by veteran politician George Papandreou.

The dictatorship, backed by the United States, lasted for seven years. Thousands of people were imprisoned, exiled and tortured.

The grandson of that politician, also called George, was 14 at the time. He went on to be elected as Greece’s prime minister in 2009.

In February 2012, George Papandreou Junior spoke to Maria Margaronis about the night when tanks rolled through Athens and soldiers came to arrest his father. Archive audio is used by permission of ERT, the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation.

Archival audio used by permission of ERT, the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation.

(Photo: The younger George Papandreou in 2011. Credit: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg/Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the
0:03.8	podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.
0:08.6	It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.
0:15.0	What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism
0:20.0	and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.
0:23.7	And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject
0:28.3	you might not even have thought you were interested in.
0:30.2	Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,
0:36.0	you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds. Hello and welcome to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service.
0:50.3	I'm Maria Margaronis taking you back to April 21st, 1967 when a military
0:56.4	coup is underway in Athens. So they came to the door, they started banging on the door.
1:01.0	What time was this? This was two o'clock in the morning
1:03.3	approximately. Were you asleep or did you know? Yeah, they were asleep. How many men came? There
1:07.5	must have been about two lorries. Two lorries? Full of men. Full of men.
1:11.5	Yes. Then they broke the door down.
1:13.0	It was a glass and steel door, but they broke it down.
1:17.0	That woke me up.
1:18.0	George Papanreu is from one of Greece's most prominent political families.
1:22.0	He was named for his grandfather,
1:23.8	Yoryos, three times Prime Minister and the leader of a center-left party.
1:27.8	He is at home with his father, Andreas, a left-wing economist and former MP, a prime target for the far right.
1:35.0	The last right.
	...

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