Rick Steves' Greece: Athens & the Peloponnese amazon.com
Bust: Greece, the Euro and the Sovereign Debt Crisis - By Matthew Lynn amazon.com
Greece's 'Odious' Debt: The Looting of the Hellenic Republic by the Euro, the Political Elite and the Investment Community - By Jason Manolopoulos amazon.com
Understanding the Crisis in Greece: From Boom to Bust - By Theodore Pelagidis amazon.com
The Imminent Crisis: Greek Debt and the Collapse of the European Monetary Union amazon.com
Eyewitness Greece - Athens and the Mainland - 352 Pages
Financial markets and economic growth in Greece, 1986-1999 [An article from: Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions & Money]
Athens Demographics:
The population count for Athens was 10,964,020 in 2001. According to eurostat, in 2008 Greece had a total estimated population of 11,262,000. Of this, some 695,979 are estimated to be non-Greek.
August 18, 2010
Dimitrios Ioannidis [March 13, 1923 – August 16, 2010] has died
A pivotal figure in the downfall of the Greek Junta
When Junta leader Georgios Papadopoulos in 1973 began a shift in his dictatorial rule by beginning a liberalization of the tightly-controlled media and social life of Greece, with a stated goal of free elections, Dimitrios Ioannidis acted. Ioannidis was the head of the ESA military police headquartered in Papagou outside of Athens, and he led the coup which successfully removed Papadopoulos (on November 25, 1973) who was the de facto ruler of Greece (sometimes called in the international press "The invisible dictator"). Ioannidis then placed his friend General Phaedon Gizikis as President of Greece. Ioannidis thus began the end of an era in Greece in which the 1967 revolution/coup brought about by "the colonels" (a group consisting of Army colonels Georgios Papadopoulos, Stylianos Pattakos and Nikolaos Makarezos) which ruled Greece from 1967 to 1973 had finally come to an end.
Ioannidis was soon undone, though: on July 15, 1974, Ioannidis executed a disastrous coup on Cyprus in an effort to unite the island to Greece (a political ideal called "enosis" long held by factions in Cyprus and Greece) and to exclude the governor ("Ethnarch") of the island, Greek orthodox Archbishop Makarios. This effort against Makarios was used as a pretext by the Turkish military to invade Cyprus on July 20th. Though Ioannidis mobilized Greek forces for war, he never committed them, and worked hard to prevent angry Greek army forces in Thrace from crossing the Evros river into Turkey proper.
Shortly thereafter, with Ioannidis being held responsible by most Greeks(and importantly, the Greek military) for the collapsing conditions in both Greece and Cyprus, his "hidden" power collapsed. In July 23, 1974, President Phaidon Gizikis announced the effort to form a coalition government. That night, 67-year old ex-Premier Constantine Karamanlis came from self-imposed exile in Paris, and at 4:15 a.m., was sworn in. The problematic political revival of democracy in Greece had begun. Ironically, the Junta leaders (and Ioannidis) never made arrangements for their legal status vis-a-vis their coup actions. Ioannidis was arrested on January 14, 1975.
Eventually, Ioannidis was sentenced to death for his role in the 1967 coup and for his actions in the Polytechnic University debacle in November 17, 1974, that resulted in 24 deaths. Ioannidis death sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment at Korydallos Prison. He died August 16, 2010, in a hospital after being taken from his jail cell after complaining of trouble breathing.
Junta member Styionos Pattakos was released in 1990 and is still alive.
New York Times bio obituary on Ioannidis:
"News of his death came from European news reports that said he died in a hospital after experiencing breathing problems in his prison cell. He was serving a life sentence for treason.
Mr. Ioannidis (pronounced ee-o-ahn-EE-dis) held tightly to a belief that patriotism and honesty were in short supply among civilian Greek politicians. It was this conviction that impelled him to become part of the “colonels’ coup” in 1967 as a young lieutenant colonel himself.
...Mr. Ioannidis became convinced the military government and the civilian partners it had installed had become too liberal. He was the principal organizer of a countercoup by younger officers against President George Papadopoulos, who as a colonel was a leader of the earlier coup.
Mr. Ioannidis invisibly called the shots in the new government. In 1974, The New York Times quoted an Athenian as saying: “Under Papadopoulos, the opposition went underground. Now the government is underground.”
But the results of the government’s actions were evident enough. Newspapers were censored, foreign journalists were expelled and errant politicians were put on trial. Enemies were accused of being Communists and persecuted."
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