![]() I watched uneasily as she became more animated. She was the sort of parent who took us to civil rights marches and anti-war demonstrations back in the United States and wanted us to see the world.īut I also felt fear because I could see in my mother’s eyes that she was being swept away by a powerful force. ![]() I also knew that she was intensely devoted to our education and wanted us to participate in and learn from this historic event. She was proud to be Greek and, like many of her fellow citizens, was rejoicing at the restoration of democracy. I looked down at my mother with complex feelings of pride and alarm because she-my beautiful, gentle mother-was getting into the spirit of things too. I remember not understanding why, if they were supposed to be celebrating, the people were so agitated. Even at age twelve, I knew that I was witnessing something unusual-certainly an event unlike anything I had ever seen-and that scared me. As a child clinging to the fence, I remember feeling excited but mostly afraid. Perhaps oddly for a man who has spent his adult life studying social phenomena, I have never liked crowds. The masses began chanting slogans revealing their pent-up frustrations with years of dictatorial rule and foreign meddling: “Down with the torturers!” “Out with the Americans!” When Karamanlis arrived in Athens in the middle of the night, the crowd pulsed with power. The crowd was packed body to sweaty body. Dimitri and I stood with our backs pressed against the metal rails in the narrow bit of ledge that was available to us, and my mother stood below us wedged in among everyone else. ![]() She boosted us onto a huge stone wall topped with a wrought-iron fence that kept the animals on the other side from escaping. We got as close as a block from Syntagma Square, near the royal palace and the national zoo. “People of Athens,” the soldiers blared, “this doesn’t concern you. In the preceding hours, the junta had sent scores of trucks with armed men and megaphones into the streets. Enormous crowds gathered in all the avenues approaching the square, and my mother, Eleni, took me and my brother Dimitri out into the city that night. A former prime minister, Konstantinos Karamanlis, returned from exile to Syntagma (Constitution) Square in central Athens. When I was a boy spending the summer in Greece in July of 1974, the military dictators unexpectedly fell from power.
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