ESC FACTOR stories of Europe

Kōstas Geōrgakīs and the Polytechnio uprising

THIS STORY WAS TOLD TO US BY OUR ESC VOLUNTEER: PANOS, 25 YEARS OLD, GREEK.

Did you know that on the night of September 19, 1970, Kōstas Geōrgakīs, a Greek activist and geology student at the University of Genoa, killed himself by setting himself on fire in Piazza Matteotti while shouting: “Long live free Greece”?

But why did Kostas come to commit this crazy act?

On June 26, 1970, Georgakis gave an anonymous interview to a Genoese newspaper, in which he revealed that the Greek military junta had infiltrated the Greek student movement in Italy. In the interview, he stated that the Greek secret services had created ESESI (National League of Greek Students in Italy) to establish offices in Italy.

During the third year of his studies and after successfully passing the second semester exams, Geōrgakīs found himself in the difficult position of having his military exemption revoked by the military junta as well as his monthly maintenance from his family. The junta did this in retaliation for his involvement in the anti-junta movement, as a member of the Italian branch of PAK, the Panhellenic Liberation Movement.

He decided that he had to do something to raise awareness in the West about the political situation in Greece. Once he had made the decision to sacrifice his life, Kōstas Geōrgakīs filled a can with gasoline and wrote a letter to his father and his fiancée.

At 1:00 a.m. on September 19, 1970, he drove his Fiat 500 to Piazza Matteotti. According to eyewitnesses, garbage collectors working around the Palazzo Ducale, there was a sudden flash of light in the area around 3:00 a.m.
At first, they didn’t realize the flame was a burning man. Only when they understood did they approach the flaming Geōrgakīs, who, burning, was shouting, “Long live Greece,” “Down with the tyrants,” “Down with the fascist colonels,” and “I did it for my Greece.”

Geōrgakīs is the only resistance hero against the Junta known for protesting by taking his own life, and he is considered a precursor to the subsequent student protests, such as the one at the Polytechnic.

The Polytechnic Uprising:

Since April 21, 1967, Greece had been under the dictatorial rule of the military. During those years, civil rights were abolished, and many politicians and citizens were tortured, imprisoned, or exiled for their political beliefs.

The junta tried to intervene in universities with a law that sent students with differing political beliefs, who were against the regime, into military service.

The first massive public action against the junta came from the students on February 21, 1973, when law students went on strike and barricaded themselves inside the buildings of the Faculty of Law at the University of Athens, demanding the repeal of the law that required enlistment in the military. The police were ordered to intervene, and it is reported that many students were subjected to brutality. The events at the Law School were the first real uprising and marked the beginning of the fall of the dictatorship.

On November 14, 1973, students at the Athens Polytechnic (Polytechneion) went on strike and began protesting against the military. While the authorities were waiting, the students called themselves the “Free Besieged” (in Greek: Ελεύθεροι Πολιορκημένοι, a reference to the poem by Greek poet Dionysios Solomos inspired by the Ottoman siege of Mesolonghi). Their main slogan at the time was:

BREAD-EDUCATION-FREEDOM!

The students even managed to set up their own free and independent radio, informing every Athenian citizen about what was happening at the university, gaining increasing support from the population.
The students’ slogans and graffiti were anti-NATO and anti-American, and they compared the Greek junta to Nazi Germany.

The night of November 17, 1973:

In the early hours of November 17, 1973, the government sent a tank to break through the gates of the Athens Polytechnic. The city’s lights had been turned off, and the area was illuminated only by the campus lights, powered by the university’s generators. An AMX 30 tank (still preserved in a small armored unit museum in a military camp in Avlonas, not open to the public) crashed into the railway gate of the Athens Polytechnic around 3:00 a.m.
In a blurry video secretly filmed by a Dutch journalist, the tank is shown as it demolishes the steel gate of the campus, to which people were clinging. In the footage, a young voice can be heard desperately asking the soldiers (whom he calls “brothers-in-arms”), who are surrounding the building complex, to disobey military orders and not fight the “brothers protesting.”

An official investigation launched after the fall of the junta stated that no student from the Athens Polytechnic was killed during the incident. The total registered casualties amounted to 24 civilians killed outside the Athens Polytechnic campus. These included 19-year-old Michael Mirogiannis, who, according to records, was killed by Officer Nikolaos Dertilis, high school students Diomedes Komnenos and Alexandros Spartidis from the Lycee Leonin, and a five-year-old child caught in the crossfire in the Zografou suburb.
The records of the trials held after the collapse of the Junta document the circumstances of the deaths of many civilians during the uprising, and although the number of fatalities has not been contested by historical research, it remains a subject of political controversy.

ESC FACTOR, Stories of Europe:
The communication campaign ESC FACTOR, Stories of Europe was born from the experience of a workshop on multi-channel communication that further enriched the personal background of the young volunteers of the ESC project, European Solidarity Corps who have been living for months at Il paguro Ostello, a small house for young Europeans, a property confiscated from the Casalesi family in which Giosef Italy has created a youth hostel, in Casapesenna.
During the past few months, the young people involved have had the opportunity to learn about the history of Italy, through a series of meetings whose main theme was the history of the Antimafia.

From the realisation that such an important and well-known history in our country is often ignored by other young Europeans, this project was born.
We said to ourselves, what if we now tell our readers stories that changed the history of your home countries but are not known by the Italian public?

This is how the idea of THE ESC FACTOR was born, a project dedicated to sharing stories of movements and people who have one thing in common: the courage for freedom, the desire for justice, the fight for the affirmation of civil rights, in all their forms, beyond any boundary.

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