Victims of Greek Purges Seek Island Prison Memorial

Tangles of barbed wire lie rusting among the thyme. Goats pick through crumbling buildings. Faded letters from propaganda slogans dot hillsides.

A panorama of neglect is all that’s left on the prison island of Makronisos as testament to one of Greece’s blackest periods, a time when people were interned for holding leftist views.

A handful of Greeks, led by former political prisoners, hope someday to view a different landscape--a well-tended memorial that recounts the sufferings on the wind-swept island a half century ago and reminds Greeks never to repeat the horrors of civil war.

“What I see here fills me with indignation,” a former detainee, 76-year-old Vassilis Christakeas, said while walking through a derelict prison building.

Public interest in the idea of a memorial seems low, however. Many people apparently would prefer to let memories fade of what happened here as a result of the brutal 1946-49 civil war and the persecution of defeated communists and their perceived supporters.

Even as visitors tour Europe’s former Nazi death camps and researchers pore over former Soviet bloc archives, many Greeks find their own country’s trauma too painful to touch.

Makronisos was lauded by Greece’s postwar conservative governments as a brilliant experiment in “moral re-education” for the leftist losers of the civil war, which claimed an estimated 80,000 lives.

But the island is now widely seen as a symbol of the anti-leftist repression that has left lasting social wounds.

Painful Memories of Persecution

Still, a decade after Makronisos was declared a historical monument, little has been done to preserve the place where an estimated 50,000 people were imprisoned between 1947 and 1953.

Those suspected of communist sympathies were confined in six to eight camps on the island, about 30 miles southeast of Athens. Women were segregated in one camp, and teenage prisoners had their own. There also was a traditional prison where some soldiers were kept.

About eight miles long and a mile wide, Makronisos is a short boat ride from the mainland. But strong currents made it dangerous for prisoners to attempt escape.

Hundreds reportedly died as a result of brutality and illness. Former inmates speak of severe beatings, being dunked in the sea until nearly drowned, and intense pressure to denounce communism.

“They made cages of barbed wire like this,” said former inmate Dimitris Mouratidis, pointing to a large, tangled bale of rusting wire. “You couldn’t stand up in them. Like cages for animals.”

About 250 reserve army officers who persistently refused to sign anti-communist declarations were taken to a sunbaked gully, where they lived in tents surrounded by barbed wire, survivors say. Stavros Avdoulos, now 81, spent more than two years in the gully, which was known as “the wire.”

“Life here was unbearable, and yet it became our home,” Avdoulos said.

The civil war was characterized by atrocities on both sides. But Makronisos is one of the few tangible reminders of the political persecution that continued long after the war. It was only in 1989 that the government finally destroyed files kept on Greeks considered “a threat to the state.”

Buildings Now Shelter Sheep

Advocates of a Makronisos memorial believe it would be a powerful point of remembrance for national unity.

“These buildings must be maintained for the historical memory to pass on to younger generations,” said Christakeas, who was interned for two years.

The foundations of the inmate quarters--low brick walls that were covered with canvas tops and sheltered up to 10 to 12 people--are still visible lining the slopes.

Most of the buildings that housed officials running the detention camps are now being used by shepherds to shelter their flocks.

Although shepherds have used the island since the 1890s, recent legislation limits them to the northern part, said Louisa Martha of the International Council on Monuments and Sites, which participates in a working group dealing with Makronisos.

“The shepherds have caused the most damage in recent times,” Martha said. “We have made countless appeals for the shepherds to leave. We have had no result.”

A few illegal squatters have installed furniture in better-preserved buildings, apparently for use during the summer.

During the 1960s, the government ordered the prison installations destroyed in order to obliterate all traces of the camps, Martha said. All reusable building materials--marble, wood, bricks--were sent to construction sites in rapidly growing Athens.

Various proposals were made for developing the island, including building an airport and creating a landfill, but nothing happened.

Then, in 1989, the culture minister in a socialist government, actress Melina Mercouri, declared the island a historical monument.

“It is a place of memory . . . for all Greeks, and particularly younger generations, because it is a symbol of condemnation of the civil war, of all torture and repression wherever it originates,” said Mercouri, who had fled Greece during the 1967-74 military dictatorship.

Preservationists restored some buildings, but parts of the restored sites have reverted to being used as stables for goats and cows. For aging former prisoners, the chance to make a permanent memorial is slipping away.

“Biological time is pressing us greatly,” Avdoulos said.