December 1944 – December 2024: Eighty years have passed this year since those 33 days that shook Athens. Just two months ago, the city was celebrating the throwing off of the Nazi yoke, after three and a half years of Occupation. But how did Athens find itself from the euphoria of the Liberation to the turmoil of the Decembrians?

The Prime Time camera and Pavlos Tsimas discovered the hidden scars of the Battle of Athens, recorded the testimonies of protagonists and people who lived through the events, outlined the crucial developments that led to the bloody conflict, focusing on the first act of the Civil War.

See the revealing research on the Decembers of 1944

The greatest tragedy in modern Greek history happened on such days 80 years ago. December 1944. And it developed into a dense time. October 12, 1944, Athens is liberated after 3.5 harsh years of German occupation. A crazy festival of joy. People celebrate in the streets with Greek flags and the flags of the three major allies still fighting. But just 52 days later the joy turns into a nightmare. The streets are stained with blood. The city becomes a battlefield, hunger returns worse, houses are destroyed, mass graves are filled with corpses.

The dead of the Decembrians are around 5,000. The majority of the dead were civilians.

80 years later, one would think that this is an old, tragic but forgotten page of history. But its signs remain visible. Not only in the soul, in individual or collective memory. But also on the walls of Athens. One just has to pay attention to them. In the refugee camps of Alexandra, for example.

One finds many signs in Neos Kosmos as well as in the center of the city, in the Syntagma, in Thisio, in Freedom Park. On the night of December 13, 1944, one of the fiercest battles took place in Freedom Park. The British had that night 20 dead, 48 wounded and 110 prisoners, before repelling the ELAS attack.

Nowhere, however, are the signs of the battles more evident than in Caesariana.

An agreement written on scrap paper

Those who lived through the Decembers are impossible to forget. But how and why is this trauma of the civil war transmitted to subsequent generations and remains alive to this day?

In April 1941, the Germans entered Athens. The king and the then government flee to Cairo. The hard test of possession begins. Athens is experiencing days of hunger, the worst famine in all of occupied Europe. Performances. Destruction. A few months after the entry of the Germans, on the initiative of the KKE, the National Liberation Front was created and a little later its armed organization, ELAS, was formed. It is the strongest of the resistance forces. And when the Germans leave, much of the country is under their control.

Two crucial developments had taken place. In May 1944 in Lebanon, the EAM, the KKE and the exiled Greek government under George Papandreou agree to the formation of a government of national unity and later to the subordination of all Greek armed forces to a British commander. In October 1944, three days before the liberation of Athens, in Moscow, Churchill and Stalin agree on the distribution of the zones of influence. The agreement, drawn up on scrap paper, gave Britain a 90% stake in Greek affairs.

What did the EAM leadership know about that deal? In an interview he gave in 1994 to Pavlos Tsimas, the professor and academic Angelos Angelopoulos, a member of the EAM government in ’44, said that he knew, but underestimated its importance.

Lawrence Crisp was an English NCO serving in Athens in December 1944. “We had fought in Africa, we had fought in Italy, and we had no appetite to finally be killed in someone else’s war, about which we knew nothing. Civil war is wilder than normal war. In the trenches you know where the enemy is. In Athens you don’t we knew where they are. Nor who is their enemy. And we are very distressed, because in the days before December, we had loved them Greeks. We had made many friends, and when we were ordered to shoot anything that moved, we felt that we were shooting our own friends.” has mentioned in his testimony for that fateful day.

“Really the first demonstration on December 3 was made by unarmed people. It is a fact that they were shot by the police, by the Greek police, because here too some attempts have been made to challenge it. No, this thing is fully proven. Also, and on December 4, at the funeral of the dead, also in the same way the demonstration, the funeral was shot, and only on December 5, on the third day, the EAM leadership accompanied the demonstrations with armed fighters who responded and conflicts became generalized’.” is narrated by Grigoris Farakos.

Christmas ’44, the British discover that a large amount of explosives had been placed under the “Great Britain” hotel. Those were the days when Churchill came unexpectedly to Athens. A sign of the priority Greece had in the British war effort.

“Churchill, in his attempt to put the situation together, came here on Christmas Eve ’44 and presided over a conference on December 25. …/…. Of course it was now too late to find a political solution. EAM put forward some claims out of place and time, because it was already almost defeated in the battle of Athens. says Professor Charalambidis.

The battles in Athens lasted 33 days. From December 3, 1944 to January 5, 1945. On January 11, an armistice was signed and ELAS left Athens.

The tally of those 33 hard days: About 5000 dead in an almost destroyed city. Giorgos Seferis, in his diary, records day by day the horrors of the civil conflicts:

“Wednesday, December 6. St. Nicholas.

Black day. Since dawn, the clash.

From the office window, through the closed shutters, Kydathinaion Street was clearly visible. Elasites held the corners. At the corner of Kodros, three entrenched in the avogyros of Sotiras. The one in a suit and a briefcase, seems to be their leader from the way the others treat him. A hunter’s eye that has set up a cartridge. For a moment he takes out a cigarette. He puts it in a short pipe and looks for matches. The other sets him on fire. In the corner of Victory, one stands guard facing the Syntagma. Near him, sitting carelessly on the ledge of a low window, another, unarmed, plays with his hands. In a little while when I turned to the window, Elasitis of the Victory corner dead with his hand on his forehead holding a khaki scarf, a little above our door. His gun was left where I first saw him, next to a trail of blood, and below that was his helmet.”

“Sunday, December 17.
Since a week without water, bread non-existent, grocery stores empty. They bury their dead on the spot. The Royal Garden stinks. Yesterday the mortars or shells of the 75, which have been falling for several days around “Brittany”, killed three or four people on Filellinon street, opposite the Russian church, at the time when people go out to shop at 12.30.

When the guns fall silent, at the beginning of 1945, Greece is now turning a political page.

In February 1945, the Varkiza agreement was signed, which provides for pacification and disarmament of ELAS. The agreement is not honored.

In the first post-war elections, in 1946, the EAM forces and some centrist parties abstained. The Greek Civil War begins which will last for three or so years, until August 1949. Greece lived for many years in the shadow of its consequences.

The result of the civil war brought Greece definitively into the Western camp. But the bloody five years 44-49 deprived Greece of much of what her participation in the Second World War could have offered her.

The conflicts of 1944 had economic consequences as well. When other European countries were investing Marshall Plan resources in their reconstruction and development, Greece was consuming them in a civil war. But perhaps the most important thing is that that confrontation opened wounds that are slow to heal.