Greek Remembering To Forget Analysis

Following the Turkish invasion in Cyprus and the collapse of the regime of the Colonels, former Prime Minister Konstantinos Karamanlis was summoned back to Greece and on 24 July 1974 he became the first Prime Minister of the Third Hellenic Republic. For Karamanlis to set Greece on the road to democratic stability he first had to restore national unity, fractured as it had been by three decades of bitter divisions between first-class citizens –the so-called ethnikofrones- and the rest. A veteran of the Right, Karamanlis was quick to legalise the parties of the Left taking a first decisive step towards national reconciliation. As Nikolas Demertzis points out, ‘reconciliation’ became a popular catchword during the initial period of the metapolitefsi embraced by the Right and the Left alike. He also argues, however, that ‘such an almost universal demand was premised on a paradoxical act of ‘remembering to forget’ that is to say ‘on a highly selective process of restructuring the official and the collective memory of the 1940s.’ While the memory of the left-wing Resistance could at long last find its way into the mainstream narrative, a veil of silence was thrown over the

As Siani-Davies and Katsikas argue, ‘reconciliation in 1974 was, therefore, not primarily about healing the wounds of the conflict but was, rather, a specific political project designed to bridge the divides in Greek society so as to forge a national consensus’, a consensus which was at large premised on the principle of ‘remembering to forget’. Purged from the official discourses of the political elites, the troubling aspects of the 1940s were also outright silenced in the school textbooks of the first period of the metapolitefsi as it was discussed in a previous