It’s November 17, 2012, the 39th anniversary of the bloody suppression of the 1973 Polytechnic revolt against the military strongmen that seized power in a coup in 1967.
Thousands of people are expected to march today in memory of that event, but also to reiterate the basic message of the student protesters: bread, education, freedom.
The online archive of this newspaper (The Athens News) provided a wealth of accounts from eyewitnesses of that fateful morning in 1973 when tanks burst through the gates of the Athens Polytechnic. In the hours surrounding the storming of the campus, 24 were killed and 886 people arrested. …
15-17 November 1973: University students made history by turning the Athens Polytechnic into a rallying point of popular revolt against the military junta that had seized power six years before.
Using the slogan “Bread, Education, Freedom”, they drew huge crowds around the university campus, including a convoy of farmers on tractors from the town of Megara protesting at the junta’s acquisitioning of their land to build an oil refinery.
In the early hours of November 17 - ironically, International Students’ Day - the police dispersed the protesting crowds around the campus. A short time later, a column of ten army tanks and three armored personnel carriers unloaded 150 paratroopers in front of the main gate of the university on Patission Street. The remaining students standing inside the campus fences started shouting slogans “We are your brethren” for the soldiers to join them in their uprising.
“Listen up! You’ve got ten minutes to clear the university entrance and open the gates, or we’ll do it ourselves,” the commander-in charge of the army and police forces surrounding the university told the barricaded students over a loudspeaker.
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