Greeks reflect on democracy’s new dawn 50 years after its return

After a seven-year military dictatorship that tortured and exiled opponents, violently suppressed dissent, and restricted freedom of expression, a new dawn broke in Greece on 24 July 1974. The authoritarian regime of the colonels that had ruled since 1967 had collapsed the previous day.

“I was at a friend’s house when my mum called and demanded I return home. She said there might be trouble,” said Panagiotis Fourkiotis, 63, recalling the night the regime fell. But in his neighbourhood, all he remembered seeing were smiling faces as he walked home.

The fall of the Greek far-right junta followed a turbulent year: 1973 had seen the government’s violent crackdown on student-led protests, the abolition of the monarchy and the junta’s leader, Georgios Papadopoulos, being deposed from within.

Dimitrios Ioannidis, the hardliner head of the military police, replaced Papadopoulos: in mid-July 1974 Ioannidis ordered a coup to overthrow Cyprus’s leader, Makarios III. Makarios survived, but the move triggered an invasion by Turkey on 20 July 1974 . The conflict would result in thousands dead, missing, raped, tortured and internally displaced, and an island that is divided to this day.

Greece responded by mobilising for war with Turkey. It was the final straw for the deeply unpopular dictatorship, which crumbled within days.

Related: ‘Why can there be no peace?’ Cyprus remains divided 50 years on

Fourkiotis’s father was ex-military and “not at all left wing”. But, returning home that night, Fourkiotis remembered that relief was initially tempered with anxiety: “There was still fear that the junta could return.”

Related: Coups, crackdowns and chaos: art inspired by democracy – and the despots who overthrew it

As a child during the dictatorship, Fourkiotis learned not to speak about politics: “One day, I saw someone had written KKE (Greek Communist party) on a wall opposite our house. I asked my mum about it, who covered my mouth and said: ‘Don’t ever say that word again’.”

At secondary school, Pericles Grambas, 64, and his classmates were warned to steer clear of “undesirable influences”.

“We would have a general come to school to lecture us boys about ‘staying vigilant’ against ‘undesirable influences’, which included Karl Marx and the Beatles,” the retired educator and former reporter in Athens said. “We didn’t know much about Marx, but we loved the Beatles.”

The funeral of the former prime minister, Georgios Papandreou, who died while under house arrest in 1968, represented a moment of quietly powerful defiance, remembers Stefano Kotsonis, 67: “People walked behind the hearse, quietly singing a banned Mikis Theodorakis song while trying not to move their lips. I’ll never forget the shivers down my spine.” In 1971, the funeral of the Greek poet and Nobel laureate Giorgos Seferis, who opposed the dictatorship, also drew massive crowds.

The 1973 “polytechnic uprising”, in which dozens being killed during the government’s crackdown, was pivotal. Giorgos Kotsalis, 72, then a medical student, was there the night of 17 November – a date that has become a touchstone in Greek history: “The police lost control and the regime became frightened and brought in the army. I escaped through a broken railing.” After being chased amid gunfire, he hid in a building site until dawn. In subsequent days, Kotsalis – now a retired doctor with decades of involvement in leftwing politics, including as a local councillor – was arrested and held in police custody.

The polytechnic uprising marked a turning point, noted Grambas. “I remember hearing the shots, and my parents crying and my dad muttering, ‘murderers’. After that, there were people who were openly [angry] about the junta.”

As during the civil war of 1946-49 and the authoritarian Metaxa regime that came before it, the authorities internally exiled political dissidents. “The junta didn’t come out of nowhere – there had long been [political] repression,” said Kotsalis. In the dictatorship’s early days, Kotsalis’s leftwing father was arrested in their home town, Limnos, and exiled on the uninhabited island of Gyaros.

His wife, Aspa Aroni-Kotsali, a 70-year-old retired teacher in Athens who has also been active in leftwing organising, took part in the polytechnic occupation, too. The dictatorship created “a real insecurity in people’s relationships,” she remembered. “Fear was constant, that your neighbour would betray you.”

With the junta’s collapse, Konstantinos Karamanlis, a former prime minister, flew to Athens to be sworn in again. Crowds gathered in the centre, chanting dimokratia (democracy). Kotsonis, a retired journalist living in Massachusetts, rushed to await Karamanlis’s arrival at Athens’ Grande Bretagne Hotel: “It was a time of great hope.”

The metapolitefsi era – the restoration of democracy – was a time of fierce optimism, Aroni-Kotsali recalls: “There was enthusiasm and mass political participation. We could suddenly freely read, listen to music, watch films that had been banned.”

For Grambas, too, Greece after the restoration of democracy was like living on “another planet”. “Before that, even miniskirts were banned. Leftwing parties were legalised, and society changed.” Others experienced it differently, he acknowledged: “There were people who had been persecuted for decades – for many, it took years to feel safe.”

For Fourkiotis, who now works as a gardener, relief at the end of the regime “turned to rage” as the details of the junta’s crimes were revealed. While the 1967 coup’s leaders were initially sentenced to death (their sentences were later commuted to life imprisonment), he felt “big disappointment with the decision not to prosecute a number of collaborators of the regime”.

Despite the optimism of the early metapolitefsi period, for Kotsonis, the junta left its mark on Greek society and many institutions: “Unfortunately, it seems dictatorships do underlying damage to democracy … including corruption.” Kotsonis was later disappointed to see protesters marking the anniversary of the polytechnic uprising “ritualistically smash shop windows”.

In some households, the scars of the junta took a long time to fade. Even in the late 1980s, Chrysa Chouliara, a 42-year-old communication worker now living in Switzerland, remembers a sense of unease: “My parents seemed plagued by a lingering sense of anxiety and fear. They acted as if their every word was being recorded.”

She recalled the way the period was taught at school: “I grew up with a very distorted picture of Cyprus: only Turkey was at fault, Greece did nothing wrong. If we asked too many questions, the teacher would turn back to 1821 and Greek independence – a safer topic.”

Half a century from the restoration of Greek democracy – a period that has included a punishing financial crisis, austerity, civil unrest and fractured politics – Fourkiotis criticised what he viewed as attempts to whitewash the dictatorship and the ascendancy of far-right politics. “This era has haunted my generation,” he said. “It shaped us.”

Aroni-Kotsali said there was a generational chasm. “Just as we didn’t know what it was like to live through the [1941-1944] occupation, the younger generation haven’t lived through the junta.

“We say, never again. When you stamp out freedom, you stamp out life itself.”