Every year today, on November 17, Greece commemorates the uprising of the students of the Polytechnic University, a day of remembrance and celebration. This year marks half a century, 50 years since the uprising that preceded the return of democracy to Greece.
Eva Metis Koutoumanou
The student movement of 1973 played a leading role in the uprising of the Greek people and the fall of the authoritarian regime of the "Junta of the Colonels" imposed by a coup d'état by the Colonels of George Papadopoulos on April 21, 1967.
The Chronicle of the Polytechnic Uprising
The countdown began on February 14, 1973, when students from Athens began gathering at the Polytechnic. The reason for the uprising was the demand for the repeal of Law 1347, which provided for the compulsory conscription of those who developed trade union activity during their studies.
The police, violating the university asylum, entered the premises of the institution, arrested 11 students and put them on trial on charges of "contempt of principle". 8 were sentenced to various sentences, while about 100 others were forced to interrupt their studies and join the army.
Seven days after the first events at the Polytechnic, on February 21 students occupied the building of the Law School in Athens, with the main slogans "Democracy", "Down with the Junta" and "Long live Freedom". The police intervened again to suppress the uprising, but the violent eviction of the students from the Law School building further strengthened their militancy.
The next uprising began on November 14, 1973. On the morning of that day, students gathered in the courtyard of the Polytechnic and decided to abstain from classes, with a request to hold elections for student unions in December of the same year and not at the end of next year, as the regime had announced.
This was followed by student assemblies at the Medical and Law Schools with demands for the revocation of the junta's decisions on the conduct of student elections, the democratization of university institutions, the increase of spending on education to 20% of the budget and the revocation of Law 1347 on the forced conscription of students.
The same afternoon the decision was taken to occupy the Polytechnic by the students and other citizens who had begun to gather in it. The doors were closed.
On 15 November the junta was faced with a generalized uprising which led to the bloody events of 17 November and the violent suppression of the student uprising by the army, ordered by the then transitional Greek government.
Specifically, at 3 a.m. on November 17, while negotiations for the safe departure of students from the Polytechnic campus were in progress, the transitional government decided to intervene by the army and one of the three tanks that had been deployed outside the school, demolished the main gate, crushing a few and injuring many students.
The Polytechnic radio station appealed to the soldiers to defy the orders of their superiors and then the announcer recited the Greek National Anthem.
The transmission continued even after the tank entered the school grounds. The students who had remained at the Polytechnic gathered in the central courtyard, chanting the national anthem.
The fall of the gate of the Polytechnic was followed by the entrance of a unit of armed soldiers of the LOK who led the students out of the Polytechnic, where they were attacked by the police forces waiting on the two sidewalks of Stournari Street.
The official police statement after the events spoke of 840 arrested. However, after the Transition to Democracy, questioned police officers reported that the number of people arrested on November 17 exceeded 2,400 people!
The death toll officially stood at 34 people. In the interrogation carried out in the autumn of 1975 against the perpetrators of the repression, 21 cases of fatal injury were identified.
However, the victims must have been much more, because many seriously injured, in order to escape capture, refused to be taken to hospital.
George Papadopoulos declared martial law, but on November 25 he was overthrown in a coup.
The new "strongman" who took over after the coup was the commander of the Military Police, Brigadier General Dimitrios Ioannidis, who, however, imposed a regime harsher than that of Papadopoulos.
The dictatorship in Greece finally collapsed definitively on July 23, 1974. Three days before, at dawn on July 20, 1974, the Turkish invasion of Cyprus had preceded it.
