On the morning of 3 December 1944, a Sunday, a large crowd of EAM supporters gathered in Syntagma Square in the centre of Athens. They had come to protest the disarmament order issued to the resistance forces of ELAS — the military wing of the broad left coalition that had fought the German occupation for three years. The crowd was unarmed. The Greek police — though responsibility for the firing has been debated — opened fire. Estimates of those killed range from around twenty to thirty, with many more wounded. By nightfall, the capital of a country that had just been liberated from Nazi occupation was engulfed in street fighting.

Winston Churchill flew to Athens on Christmas Day, accompanied by his foreign secretary Anthony Eden. He arrived in an armoured car and held emergency talks at the British embassy with representatives of all factions, including the communists of KKE. He was not there to broker a peace based on democratic principle. He was there to prevent Greece from falling to the left. His famous “naughty document” — the scrap of paper on which he had written, in Moscow in October, that Britain should have ninety per cent influence in Greece to the Soviet Union’s ten — symbolised the extent to which Greece’s postwar fate was shaped by great-power bargaining. The agreement he eventually secured, the Varkiza Agreement of February 1945, ended the immediate fighting but solved nothing. What followed was not peace. It was the setup for something worse.

The years between 1944 and 1949 produced the most violent rupture in modern Greek history — a civil war that killed between 80,000 and 160,000 people, displaced hundreds of thousands more, drove the communist leadership into permanent exile, and installed at the heart of Greek political culture a principle of exclusion so deep that it would not fully loosen until the fall of the colonels’ juntaJunta Full Description: A military or political group that rules a country after taking power by force. These military councils suspended constitutions, dissolved congresses, and banned political parties, claiming to act as “guardians” of the nation against internal corruption and subversion. A Junta is the administrative body of a military dictatorship. In the Southern Cone, these were often composed of the heads of the different branches of the armed forces (Army, Navy, Air Force). They justified their seizure of power as a “state of exception” necessary to restore order, presenting themselves as apolitical technocrats saving the nation from the chaos of democracy. Critical Perspective:The Junta represents the militarization of politics. By treating the governance of a nation like a military operation, these regimes viewed distinct political opinions not as healthy democratic debate, but as insubordination or treason to be court-martialed. It replaced the messy consensus-building of democracy with the rigid hierarchy of the barracks. a generation later. This essay is about what that war did to Greece: not the battle lines and commanders, but the political culture it created, the wounds it opened, and the peculiar, constrained form of democracy that emerged on the other side.

The Making of a Fractured Resistance

To understand December 1944, you have to go back to the occupation. When the Axis powers divided Greece between them in 1941 — Germany taking Athens and key strategic points, Italy the bulk of the countryside, Bulgaria the northern territories — they imposed on the country a catastrophe that was both immediate and structural. The famine of the winter of 1941–42 killed an estimated 100,000 people in Athens alone. Entire villages in the mountains were massacred in anti-partisan reprisals. The collaborationist Security Battalions, armed by the Germans to suppress the resistance, would later provide the personnel for some of the worst anti-communist violence of the postwar years.

The resistance that emerged from this chaos was dominated from the start by EAM, the National Liberation Front, and its military arm ELAS. Founded in September 1941 under KKE (Communist Party of Greece) leadership but drawing in socialists, liberals, and those simply motivated by patriotism and hunger, EAM became by 1943 one of the largest resistance organisations in occupied Europe. At its peak it claimed up to two million members — in a country of seven million. Its rival, EDES (the Greek National Republican League), led by the more conservative Napoleon Zervas, controlled a fraction of the territory and manpower, but enjoyed British support out of all proportion to its strength.

The British relationship with the Greek resistance was, from the start, shaped less by military need than by postwar planning. The historian Mark Mazower, in his landmark study of the occupation, has shown how British Special Operations Executive officers in the field were frequently frustrated by policy directives that prioritised preserving the Greek government-in-exile in Cairo and containing the power of EAM over anything else. The result was a resistance effort riven by politics before a single German soldier had left Greek soil. ELAS and EDES fought each other in the winter of 1943–44, a dress rehearsal for what was coming.

Dekemvriana and the Logic of Intervention

Churchill’s calculation at the time of the Varkiza Agreement was, in its own terms, ruthlessly coherent. Greece sat at the southern tip of a Europe whose fate was being decided by armies. The Soviets were advancing through Romania and Bulgaria. Yugoslavia’s Tito was already clearly outside Western control. If Greece went left, British influence in the eastern Mediterranean — the lifeline to Suez, India, the whole structure of imperial power — would be gravely compromised. These were not paranoid fantasies. They were strategic realities, however brutal their implementation.

What Churchill did not fully reckon with was what it would cost Greece to be the laboratory for this logic. The Varkiza Agreement required ELAS to demobilise and surrender its weapons. In return, the Greek government promised an amnesty for resistance fighters and a plebiscite on the monarchy. The amnesty proved partial and unevenly applied, leaving many leftists vulnerable to prosecution or extrajudicial violence; the plebiscite did eventually occur in September 1946, but was widely regarded as flawed and conducted in conditions that made a free vote effectively impossible. What followed the demobilisation of ELAS was a period of anti-communist violence so widespread and systematic that Greek historians have come to call it the White Terror.

The historian David Close, in his careful study of the period, estimated that between February 1945 and the formal outbreak of civil war in 1946, somewhere between 1,200 and 1,600 left-wing activists were killed — though figures vary considerably depending on source and definition — around 100,000 were imprisoned, and tens of thousands fled to the mountains or across borders into Yugoslavia and Albania. The perpetrators were largely drawn from the wartime collaborationist networks — the Security Battalions and their successors in the National Guard — who were now being recycled into state service against a new enemy. Men who had served the German occupation were being used, with official sanction, to hunt down those who had resisted it. This grotesque inversion did not go unnoticed. It simply went unpunished.

Foreign correspondents and diplomats who passed through Greece in 1945 reported torture in the prisons, systematic reprisals against villages suspected of leftist sympathies, and a countryside in which being known to have been in EAM was enough to make you a target. Much of this reporting was ignored by a Western press already warming to Cold War framings in which any anti-communist excess could be contextualised as necessary. The British Foreign Office was better informed, and more cynical. Senior officials noted privately that the Greek authorities were making it very difficult to defend Britain’s position in Parliament, but no change of course was ordered.

The Third Round: Civil War Proper

By the spring of 1946 the pretence that Greece was at peace had become untenable. The March elections — boycotted by EAM on the grounds that security conditions made fair voting impossible — returned a conservative government. A rigged plebiscite in September restored the monarchy. In the mountains of northern Greece, KKE-aligned fighters, now organised as the Democratic Army of Greece (DSE) and led by Markos Vafiadis, had resumed armed struggle. The civil war’s third round — the first two being ELAS–EDES fighting in 1943–44 and the Dekemvriana — had begun.

The DSE was never a negligible force. At its peak in 1947–48 it fielded some 23,000 fighters and exercised control — often contested and fluid rather than stable governance — across large areas of northern and central Greece. It received material support from Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria, though the exact nature and scale of Soviet involvement remained, and to some extent still remains, historically contested. What is certain is that StalinStalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (18 December 1878 – 5 March 1953) was a Soviet politician, dictator and revolutionary who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. Read More viewed the Greek communists with a mixture of limited sympathy and strategic caution: Greece was Churchill’s ninety per cent, and Stalin was not eager to fracture the Yalta framework over a country he had conceded to Western influence.

It was into this situation that Harry Truman stepped in March 1947, announcing to Congress that the United States would henceforth provide military and economic assistance to governments threatened by communist subversion — with Greece and Turkey as the immediate beneficiaries. The Truman DoctrineTruman Doctrine Full Description:The Truman Doctrine established the ideological framework for the Cold War. It articulated a binary worldview, dividing the globe into two alternative ways of life: one based on the will of the majority (the West) and one based on the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority (Communism). This doctrine justified US intervention in conflicts far from its own borders, arguing that a threat to peace anywhere was a threat to the security of the United States. Critical Perspective:Critically, this doctrine provided the moral cover for aggressive expansionism. By framing complex local struggles—often involving anti-colonial or nationalist movements—strictly as battles between freedom and totalitarianism, it allowed the US to support authoritarian regimes and crush popular uprisings simply by labeling the opposition as “communist.”, as it became known, marked a pivotal moment in American foreign policy and in the Cold War’s global architecture. For Greece, it meant the substitution of British patronage with American, and the transformation of the civil war into a rehearsal for the broader logic of containment.

American military advisers flooded into Greece. Sophisticated weaponry and aerial firepower gave the Greek National Army capabilities it had previously lacked. But the decisive military turning point was geopolitical rather than tactical. In June 1948, Stalin expelled Yugoslavia from the CominformCominform Short Description (Excerpt):The Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ Parties. It was a Soviet-dominated forum designed to coordinate the actions of communist parties across Europe and enforce ideological orthodoxy in the face of American expansionism. Full Description:The Cominform was the political counterpart to Comecon. Its primary purpose was to tighten discipline. It famously expelled Tito’s Yugoslavia for refusing to bow to Soviet hegemony and instructed Western communist parties (in France and Italy) to abandon coalition politics and actively strike against the Marshall Plan. Critical Perspective:The establishment of the Cominform marked the hardening of the Cold War. It signaled the end of “national roads to socialism.” The USSR, feeling encircled by the Marshall Plan, used the Cominform to purge independent-minded communists, demanding absolute loyalty to Moscow as the only defense against American imperialism.
Read more. Tito, furious, closed the Yugoslav border to the Greek rebels. The supply lines that had sustained the DSE were severed. The Democratic Army, already under pressure from the National Army’s offensives in the Grammos and Vitsi mountain ranges, was fighting on borrowed time.

The final battles took place in the summer of 1949. By October, the DSE leadership had crossed into Albania, its forces broken. On 16 October 1949, KKE General Secretary Nikos Zachariadis announced a “temporary ceasefire.” The war was over. Greece had been held in the Western sphere. The human cost was staggering: tens of thousands dead in battle, disease, and mass executions; approximately 700,000 internal refugees; estimates suggest around 100,000 political prisoners at the war’s end; and some 80,000 exiles who would spend the next two decades in Eastern European camps, unable to return.

The Shape of Victory: What Winning Cost Greece

Scholars of comparative democratisation have long noted the paradox at the heart of postwar Greek politics: the country that had fought off fascist occupation and communist insurrection alike arrived at formal democracy with a political system structurally incapable of representing half its own population. The Greek historian Nikos Alivizatos, in his important study of constitutional development, described the postwar Greek state as operating through what he called “the para-constitution” — a web of emergency laws, loyalty certificates, and security apparatus provisions that existed alongside the formal legal order and consistently undermined it.

The architecture of exclusion built during the civil war did not dismantle itself when the shooting stopped. On the contrary, it became the skeleton of the Greek state for the next two decades. Loyalty certificates, required for government employment, passports, driving licences, and in some areas simply for access to education, were issued by the gendarmerie based on assessments of “national reliability.” To have been in EAM, to have a relative in the DSE, even to have voted for the left in the 1946 elections, was enough to make you unreliable — and therefore, in practice, a second-class citizen.

The political consequence was the systematic exclusion of the left from formal political life. The United Democratic Left (EDA), established in 1951 as a vehicle for left and centre-left voters who could not vote for the illegal KKE, became the focal point for a significant section of Greek society — it came second in the 1958 elections, winning 25 per cent of the vote, a result that shocked the establishment and was interpreted by many conservatives as evidence that the threat was still active. The logic was circular and self-reinforcing: the exclusion of the left from power justified itself by pointing to the left’s persistent electoral strength as evidence of ongoing subversion.

The military, throughout this period, regarded itself not as the instrument of elected governments but as the guardian of a particular vision of the national interest. The tradition of military intervention in Greek politics — coups and counter-coups had been a feature of modern Greek history since independence — was now reinforced by the experience of the civil war, in which the army had been not merely a military institution but the central vehicle of ideological war. Officers who had fought the communists did not necessarily accept the legitimacy of governments that seemed insufficiently vigilant about the communist threat. The Papagos governments of the 1950s, the Karamanlis administrations, and the governments of the early 1960s all operated under the permanent surveillance of an officer corps that believed itself to have a constitutional vocation above and beyond electoral outcomes.

The Unhealed Wound: Memory, Silence, and the Persistence of Division

The Greek Civil War was, for the first three decades after its conclusion, essentially unspeakable in public life. Its losers were in exile, in prison, or in silence. Its winners controlled the narrative. The resistance against the German occupation — in which EAM and ELAS had been the dominant forces — was rewritten as a story in which communist treachery had undermined the national struggle. The EAM fighters who had blown up the Gorgopotamos viaduct in 1942, one of the most significant acts of sabotage in occupied Greece, were largely written out of official commemoration.

The families of those who had fought in the DSE or fled after its defeat lived under the loyalty certificate system, watched by local gendarmerie, unable to speak of their relatives’ fates. The mass graves of civil war victims in the northern mountains went unmarked. The exiles in Tashkent and Bucharest and Warsaw grew old waiting for a return that would not come for most of them until after the fall of the junta in 1974 — and for some not until after the fall of the Soviet Union itself.

The political philosopher Stathis Kalyvas, who has written with great analytical precision about the logic of civil war violence, has noted that Greek civil war memory was distorted not only by official censorship but by the nature of the violence itself: so much of it had been local, intimate, community-based, involving neighbours denouncing neighbours, that its full dimensions could only be spoken of at enormous personal and social cost. This was not a war between strangers. In many villages, the same family had members on both sides.

The transition to democracy after 1974 began a long and still incomplete process of reclamation. It was not until 1981, under the PASOK government of Andreas Papandreou, that the resistance of EAM and ELAS was officially recognised, the civil war veterans’ exile was formally acknowledged as a wrong, and the loyalty certificate system was finally abolished. Forty years after the resistance, the men and women who had been its backbone were permitted to be Greek patriots.

But the deeper reckoning took longer still. Academic work on the civil war — work that challenged the official narrative and took seriously the experience of the DSE fighters and EAM activists — began to be published only from the 1980s onwards, and accelerated through the 1990s and 2000s as archives opened and survivors spoke. The scholar Polymeris Voglis, examining the experience of political prisoners, gave voice to a generation that had been doubly silenced: first by imprisonment, then by official amnesia. The important collaborative volumes edited by the historian Lars Baerentzen and others on British policy and Greek politics began to sketch the international framework that had made the civil war not just a domestic tragedy but a foreign policy outcome.

None of this work has produced a settled national narrative. The Greek Civil War remains, in ways that are distinctive in European memory, a genuinely open wound — contested, politically charged, and capable of generating real public argument. When the left-wing government of SYRIZA came to power in 2015, bringing with it politicians whose grandparents had fought in the DSE, the war’s ghosts were briefly visible again. When Alexis Tsipras laid a wreath at the Kaisariani firing range — the site where two hundred resistance fighters had been executed by the Nazis in 1944 — he was making a point about historical legitimacy that his critics understood perfectly. The civil war, in Greek political culture, is never entirely past.

The Long Arithmetic of Loss

What the Greek Civil War bequeathed to postwar Greece was not merely a set of political institutions or a distribution of power. It bequeathed a way of imagining politics itself: as a zero-sum conflict between forces whose coexistence was impossible, in which losing carried existential stakes, and in which the instruments of state — the police, the army, the judiciary — were tools of a permanent internal war rather than neutral arbiters of a shared life. This imagination, once established, proved remarkably durable.

The junta that came to power in 1967, led by a group of middle-ranking officers whose formation was entirely the civil war period, did not come from nowhere. Its leaders had grown up in a political culture in which the left was not an acceptable opposition but a permanent threat to the national body. Their coup was not an aberration from the postwar settlement; it can be seen as a culmination of dynamics rooted in the civil war period — the fulfilment of a tendency toward authoritarian resolution that had been building at the centre of Greek political life for two decades, shaped also by Cold War pressures and the fractious relationship between the monarchy and the military.

Understanding the junta, then, requires understanding December 1944 and the white-knuckled peace that followed. Understanding the peculiar shape of Greek democracy — its exclusions, its violence, its extraordinary polarisation — requires taking seriously the full costs of the civil war, paid not only in lives but in decades of distorted political development. Greece is not a country with an unfortunate episode of civil war in its recent history. It is a country made, in large part, by that war: by who won, who lost, and the systematic terms on which losing was enforced.

The tragedy is not only that the war happened, though it is that too. It is that the political conditions which produced it — the British manoeuvres of 1944, the White Terror, the loyalty certificates, the culture of surveillance and exclusion — were allowed to persist and harden into a political order that made genuine democratic consolidation impossible for a generation. When Karamanlis brought Greece back to democracy in 1974, he was building on soil that the civil war had badly poisoned. That he succeeded — that Greece did eventually achieve the democratic stability it had been denied for so long — is in its own way remarkable. But the path from 1944 to 1974 is not a story of democratic progress interrupted. It is a story of democratic possibility systematically foreclosed, and of a society that had to wait thirty years to begin to count its own dead.

Listen Further

If you enjoyed this essay, these episodes from the Explaining History archive explore related themes:

• The Truman Doctrine — the ideological framework for Cold War containment, featuring Greece and Turkey as the first test cases
• The Truman Doctrine 1947 — on the American commitment to defending Greece and Turkey against communist pressure