Theodosis Papathanasiadis, head of the Greek Olympic Committee from 1969 to 1973, lays a wreath at the tomb of Frenchman Pierre de Courbetin, who revived the modern Olympics in 1896, during the torch-lighting ceremonies in Olympia, on December 19, 1967. [AP]
Almost 60 years after April 21, 1967, when a right-wing military coup took place in Greece, establishing a seven-year dictatorship known as the “Regime of the Colonels,” the discussion about it returns with an intensity that says more about the present than about the past itself. Not because we are rediscovering its violence – which never ceased to be the undisputed core of the seven-year experience – but because the question arises as to how we narrate its complexity today.
Was it a “dark” period or was it ultimately one where culture “prospered?” The question seems logical, at first glance, but in reality it is misleading, because these are not two competing interpretations, but two equally inadequate simplifications.
Culture wasn’t suspended
The idea that there was cultural life under the junta is neither new nor subversive. The historiography of the last 30 years has shown in every way that culture is not mechanically suspended within an authoritarian regime. It transforms, folds, hints, and clashes with reality. From music and cinema to literature, publishing, youth culture and the aesthetics of everyday life, the period 1970-73 has already been studied as a field of transformations and contradictions, and not as a cultural void. The supposed discovery of a forgotten “thriving” cultural landscape says less about how we actually remember that era and more about the contemporary need to construct supposedly corrective counter-narratives.
The essential question is not whether there was life, song, love or entertainment during the dictatorship. It is how all of this was regulated within a regime that was not content with prohibiting things, but attempted to regulate the very horizon of everyday life. Dictatorships are not imposed only by torture and censorship; they also govern by organizing time, desire, “normality.” The junta invested equally in symbolisms and celebrations in stadiums as it did in television, electrical appliances, cars, consumer credit, vacations – in all that singer-songwriter Dionysis Savvopoulos condensed with precision in the lyrics of the 1969 song “Theia Maro” (Aunt Maro): “Cheap television, refrigerators, installments, cars and construction.”
The history of everyday life is crucial, precisely because it allows us to see how authoritarianism is experienced in its most banal forms. Not to whitewash it, but to understand the way in which societies live within constraints without ceasing to produce meaning. Even within the most authoritarian regime, life remains messy, contradictory and open to multiple readings.
In Vassilis Maros’ documentary “The Bouzouki” (1973), for example, this is captured in an almost ideal way: We watch old rebetes (musicians involved in rebetiko music) playing in student clubs, popular singers appearing in clubs in coastal Athens, and renown composer and bouzouki player Vassilis Tsitsanis performing at the Hilton. Zembekiko music, the smashing of plates, the looks and gestures, compose a dense archive of sociability, without ever transforming it into an image of untroubled normality, because all of this was essentially unfolding in a state of surveillance; and because the authoritarian structure not only did not eliminate the political dimension of things, but actually imposed it on everything like a chokehold.
The ‘hidden transcripts’
This is precisely where the political ambiguity of culture lies. The same song could mean different things to different audiences: for some an implied political allusion, for others simply entertainment. The same is true of theater or cinema, where a critical mass reads the political message between the lines, communicating in an almost “magical way” with the creators, according to director Theodoros Angelopoulos.
Social scientist James C. Scott’s theory of “hidden transcripts” is particularly useful here. Political connotations were not always inherent in the works themselves; they were activated only for those who possessed the corresponding interpretive codes. Not because every allusion constitutes resistance, but because the political is produced through contexts, assumptions, communities of interpretation.
This is lost when the cultural density of the period is detached from its political context, in interpretations where the latter functions simply as a backdrop. The intense creativity of the era did not spring forth in a historical vacuum. It developed within an environment of censorship, surveillance, fear and suffocating limits, which it tried to overcome by inventing new ways of expression. But even later, the relative relaxation of restrictions and the adrenaline of constant negotiation with the limits of the regime fueled an existential search for a way out and survival strategies, rather than a substantial sense of personal or artistic liberation.
The issue is not to replace the dark image of military rule with a brighter one. It is to avoid both conveniences: heroic simplification and ostentatious revision. The junta was a regime of violence, which at the same time attempted to organize daily life, to discipline aesthetics, to produce the illusion of prosperity and normality. On the other hand, the intentional action of people who felt, suffered, fell in love, dreamed and created unfolded within this structure, without necessarily identifying with it.
If we want to understand this period historically, we must examine both simultaneously, as indivisible aspects of the same condition. Because the seven-year junta, beyond its ex post facto taint, was a period of authoritarian power that sought to dress its imposition with variations of normality.
Kostis Kornetis is assistant professor of contemporary history at the Autonomous University of Madrid and adviser to the Spanish government on matters of historical memory.
