Manolis Glezos

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Manolis Glezos (2007)

Manolis Glezos ( Greek Μανώλης Γλέζος , born September 9, 1922 in Aperathos on Naxos ; † March 30, 2020 in Athens ) was a left-wing Greek politician ( SYRIZA ) and author . He became known as a resistance fighter against the German occupation in World War II . He was the oldest member of the European Parliament from 2014 to July 7, 2015 .

biography

Glezos was the eldest son of a teacher and an accountant and journalist. The father died when he was three years old and before his brother Nikos was born. At the age of twelve, Glezos moved with his mother, brother, new stepfather and two half-siblings from Naxos to Metaxourgio in northern Athens . The stepfather received a scholarship and traveled to Germany and France without a family. Glezos attended high school and studied from 1940 at the Athens University of Economics .

Second World War

Swastika flag on the Acropolis in Athens

In 1939 Glezos was still a student in founding an anti-fascist youth group that opposed the Italian occupation of the Dodecanese and the dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas . At the beginning of the Greco-Italian War , his application to join the Greek Army was rejected for reasons of age. For this he worked as a volunteer for the Greek Ministry of Economics. After the Wehrmacht occupied Greece in the Balkan campaign , he worked for the Hellenic Red Cross , but was also active in the Greek resistance .

On May 30, 1941, he climbed the Acropolis together with Apostolos Sandas and tore down the swastika flag that had been hoisted there since the German occupation of Athens on April 27, 1941 . This first act of resistance in Greece, through which Glezos became an anti-fascist hero, was a beacon that incited many Greeks to resist. Glezos and Sandas were sentenced to death in absentia. On March 24, 1942, Glezos was arrested and held captive and tortured by the German occupation forces. While in custody, he became seriously ill with tuberculosis . After he was released because of his poor health, he was arrested by Italian occupation forces on April 21, 1942 and held for three months. On February 7, 1944, he was arrested again, this time by Greek collaborators . He spent an additional seven and a half months in prison before escaping on September 21, 1944. In the same year his younger brother Nikos was executed by the German occupiers.

Flagpole on the Acropolis today

Civil War and Post War

After the end of the war, Glezos took over the management of the communist newspaper Rizospastis in 1945 . He was arrested three years later and charged with press offenses 28 times. On March 3, 1948, Glezos was sentenced to death. Because of international protests, the sentence was not carried out, but instead converted into a life sentence in 1950. In 1951 Glezos - still in custody - was elected to the Greek Parliament on the list of Eniea Dimokratiki Aristera ( Greek Ενιαία Δημοκρατική Αριστερά ΕΔΑ , Association of the Democratic Left, EDA ). After his election, he went on hunger strike to obtain the release of the other FDFA MPs who were imprisoned or exiled to islands. After the release of seven banished MPs, he ended the hunger strike. In July 1954 he was released from prison. On December 5, 1958, he was arrested again and (like many leftists during the Cold War) convicted of espionage. His release on December 15, 1962 was due to public outrage in Greece and abroad. During the second period of his post-war imprisonment, Glezos was re-elected as a member of the EDA in 1961.

Military dictatorship from 1967 to 1974

During the military coup on April 21, 1967, Glezos was arrested, along with the other leading politicians, at two o'clock in the morning. During the rule of the colonels under Georgios Papadopoulos , he was imprisoned and exiled for another four years until 1971.

Manolis Glezos suffered a total of eleven years and four months imprisonment and four years and six months in exile due to political persecution.

Since 1974

After the restoration of democracy in Greece in 1974, Glezos participated in the reconstruction of the Eniea Dimokratiki Aristera (EDA). In the 1981 and 1985 elections he was elected to parliament on the list of the socialist PASOK . In June 1984 he was also elected to the PASOK list as a member of the European Parliament (MEP). From 1985 to 1989 he was chairman of the EDA.

On January 25, 1985, he stepped down as an MEP. After the general election in June 1985 , he became a member of the Greek Parliament. He later worked on a grassroots model experiment in his home village of Aperathos , where he was elected chairman of the local council. He curtailed the powers of the council by introducing a constitution that gave a local "consultative assembly" control over the municipal administration. This model worked for a number of years, but in the longer term interest waned and the assembly was abolished. In addition to his political work, Glezos also developed a system here to prevent flooding , combat soil erosion and protect groundwater ; it is based on building a series of very small dams that divert the water into aquifers .

In the parliamentary elections on April 8, 2000 , Glezos led the list of Synaspismos , an association of radical leftists. In 2002 he founded the political group Active Citizens, which was part of the SYRIZA alliance with Synaspismos and other smaller left parties until the alliance merged into the SYRIZA party, and ran for the office of prefect of the Attica region .

For decades, Glezos campaigned, among other things, for compensation and reparation payments from the Federal Republic of Germany to Greece and to Greek victims of National Socialism.

On March 5, 2010, during clashes between police and demonstrators on the occasion of a demonstration against austerity measures due to Greece's high national debt , Glezos was slightly injured when police used tear gas . In October 2011, he and Mikis Theodorakis called in an “Appeal for the Salvation of the Peoples of Europe” to fight against the “Empire of Money”. Glezos suggested not spending money on armaments against Greece's debt crisis , opposed illegal government debt and tax fraud, and called for spending on health, education and research. It also called Germany, which extend from the Paris Reparations resulting war debts (estimated by Glezos on 108 billion euros) to settle and during the German occupation in the Bank of Greece raised forced loan (which corresponds to a current value of 54 billion euros) to repay . There is no need for any money to flow to the Greek government ; Germany can also finance scholarships for Greek students or infrastructure projects.

In the 2014 European elections , Glezos was elected to the European Parliament for the second time since 1984 . For SYRIZA he was the oldest of all MPs . After his election, he announced that he would only exercise his mandate for one year and then leave the place to a younger man. On July 7, 2015, he said goodbye to the EU Parliament with a quote on the fight of the Greeks against the "tyrants" from the EU parliament.

Before the general election in Greece in January 2015 , Glezos campaigned for SYRIZA. Four weeks later he put Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras under the guise of window dressing. In the early elections in September 2015, Glezos ran on the list of the SYRIZA spin-off Laiki Enotita , which, however, narrowly failed with the threshold clause for entry into parliament with 2.86%.

Manolis Glezos died of heart failure in the spring of 2020 at the age of 97.

Journalistic work

Manolis Glezos wrote articles for Greek newspapers since 1942; he was also editor of the newspapers Rizospastis and Avgi in the 1950s.

He published six books in Greek:

  • Η ιστορία του βιβλιού. 1974 [The Story of the Book]
  • Από τη δικτατορία στη ∆ηµοκρατία. 1974 [From dictatorship to democracy]
  • Το φαινόµενο της αλλοτρίωσης στη γλώσσα. 1977 [The phenomenon of alienation in language]
  • Η συνείδηση ​​της πετραίας γης. 1997 [The Conscience of the Rocky Earth]
  • Ύδωρ, Αύρα, Νερό. 2001 [Hydor, Aura, Nero]
  • Εθνική Αντίσταση 1940-1945. 2006 [National Resistance 1940-1945]

Honors

"Freedom for the hero of the Greek people, Manolis Glezos!", Soviet postage stamp (1959)

As early as 1959, the Post Office of the Soviet Union honored Manolis Glezos with a postage stamp showing his portrait against the background of the Acropolis. He was also awarded the International Journalism Prize in 1958, the Joliot-Curie Gold Medal of the World Peace Council in 1959 and the Lenin Peace Prize in 1963.

For his services to democracy, geology and linguistics , he received an honorary doctorate from the Philosophical Faculty (Geology Department) of the University of Patras in 1996 , that of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Engineering Department) in 2001, and that of the Athens National Technical University (Faculty of Mining and Metallurgy ) in 2003 ) and in 2008 that of the Philosophical Faculty of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens .

On the Acropolis in Athens, a bronze plaque in the area of ​​the flagpole commemorates the heroic deed of Glezos and Sandas in 1941.

The text on the board reads:

„ΤΗ ΝΥΧΤΑ ΤΗΣ 30ης ΜΑΙΟΥ 1941 ΚΑΤΕΒΑΣΑΝ ΟΙ ΠΑΤΡΙΩΤΕΣ ΜΑΝΩΛΗΣ ΓΛΕΖΟΣ ΚΑΙ ΑΠΟΣΤΟΛΟΣ ΣΑΝΤΑΣ ΤΗ ΣΗΜΑΙΑ ΤΩΝ ΝΑZΙ ΚΑΤΑΚΤΗΤΩΝ ΑΠΟ ΤΟ ΙΕΡΟ ΒΡΑΧΟ ΤΗΣ ΑΚΡΟΠΟΛΙΣ.
ΕΝΤΟΙΧΙΣΤΗΚΕ ΑΠΟ ΤΗ “ΕΝΩΜΕΝΗ ΕΘΝΙΚΗ ΑΝΤΙΣΤΑΣΗ 1941–1944” ΤΟ 1982.
On the night of May 30, 1941, the patriots Manolis Glezos and Apostolos Sandas tore the flag of the Nazi occupiers from the sacred rock of the Acropolis.
Affixed by the United National Resistance 1941-1944 in 1982. "

literature

  • Erwin Koch: The hero. On the night of May 30th to 31st, 1941, Manolis Glezos and a friend stole the National Socialists' flag from the Acropolis. Visiting an eternal partisan. Das Magazin , Tamedia , Zurich October 29, 2016, pages 12–17

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Thomas Mayer: EU Parliament elects top. derstandard.at, July 1, 2014, accessed on July 1, 2014
  2. ↑ a b Greek resistance fighter leaves EU parliament, new Germany July 7, 2015
  3. ↑ Erwin Koch: The hero. On the night of May 30th to 31st, 1941, Manolis Glezos and a friend stole the National Socialists' flag from the Acropolis. Visit to an eternal partisan. Das Magazin , Tamedia , Zurich October 29, 2016, pages 12–17
  4. ↑ http://euparl.net ( Memento from September 16, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
  5. ↑ Soil protection and water conservation - Aperathou model project . Trianet website . 2000
  6. ↑ Manolis Glezos: An injustice must be atoned for . In: The time . No. 40, September 29, 1995
  7. ↑ Interview with Manolis Glezos: "It's about justice" In: taz of May 8, 2015
  8. ↑ Greece crisis: Merkel declares war on speculators . In: The time . March 5, 2010
  9. ↑ Mikis Theodorakis & Manolis Glezos: Joint appeal for the salvation of the people of Europe . In: koalition-des-widerstand.de
  10. ↑ Thomas Schmid: Greece: The wrath of the old combatant Glezos . In: Frankfurter Rundschau . February 13, 2012
  11. ↑ Athens: "Almost 100 percent on the submission scale" . In: The press . 17th February 2012
  12. ↑ Boris Kálnoky & Dimitra Moutzouri: Reparations: “It's not about money, it's about justice” . In: The world . April 9, 2013
  13. ↑ FAZ.net February 22, 2015: Tsipras fights against protest in its own ranks
  14. ↑ Kathimerini , September 11, 2015 (English) [1]
  15. ↑ Veteran leftist and resistance fighter Manolis Glezos dies at 98 (sic) . Kathimerini , March 30, 2020
  16. ^ Matt Barrett: The Acropolis of Athens . In: Athens Survival Guide (with photo of the bronze plaque)
personal data
SURNAME Glezos, Manolis
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Γλέζος, Μανώλης (Greek)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Greek politician, MEP and author
DATE OF BIRTH September 9, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Aperathos on Naxos
DATE OF DEATH March 30, 2020
Place of death Athens