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A British tank gives covering fire to a street patrol in Athens, Greece, on Dec. 29, 1944. [AP\/File]<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
Across the street from the Temple of Olympian Zeus, the ancient monument in central Athens, historian Menelaos Haralabidis pauses in front of a drab apartment building.<\/p>\n
The building\u2019s facade, freshly painted a mustard color, is riddled with bullet holes made by heavy machine gun fire. The marks have been stubbornly preserved for 80 years.<\/p>\n In December of 1944, as the final stages of World War II unfolded, Athens, newly liberated from Nazi occupation, was again ravaged by fighting. Allies turned on each other as Europe\u2019s boundaries were already being redrawn by the war\u2019s ultimate winners.<\/p>\n British troops and the new Greek government battled communist-led WW II resistance fighters in a bloody five-week confrontation that raged across the city.<\/p>\n \u201cAthens was turned into a battlefield for 33 days, with major destruction, mostly in the surrounding districts, and thousands of victims,\u201d Haralabidis said. \u201cThere were regular operations from all parts of the military: land army, artillery, air force, even British ships bombarding parts of Athens.\u201d<\/p>\n During the battle, Winston Churchill visited Athens at Christmas before British forces prevailed. The Dekemvrian\u00e1, as the December battle is known in Greece, extended a lasting legacy of violent political division and a reluctance to confront the past.<\/p>\n Haralabidis, a 54-year-old historian and author, has organized tours of the urban battle sites and the little that remains to commemorate them: Pockmarked walls and chipped surfaces that still exist on a handful of buildings around the Greek capital.<\/p>\n \u201cGreek society must reckon with its history. To heal its wounds, we need to discuss them openly, understand what happened, and come to terms with the past,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Kaisariani, a once impoverished hillside district of Athens, earned the wartime nickname of \u201cLittle Stalingrad\u201d for its concentration of resistance fighters, and witnessed some of the most ferocious fighting in December 1944.<\/p>\n Giorgos Kontostavlos, the district\u2019s former mayor, grew up there on stories of the battles: Rebel fighters throwing up barricades with debris from artillery shelling, low-flying British bombers and intense exchanges of machine-gun and mortar fire, one blowing a hole in the roof of his grandfather\u2019s home.<\/p>\n On a narrow side street in Kaisariani, a row of apartment blocks still display the damage from 1944 and fading slogans of defiance written by the rebels in red paint. Kontostavlos supports a local campaign to give protected status as a wartime monument.<\/p>\n \u201cThe monument should live on, not as a symbol of war or death, but as a monument to peace,\u201d he said. \u201cOver 20% of the district\u2019s homes were destroyed. The neighborhood faced immense pressure, and the residents found themselves in a very dire situation \u2026 These were, essentially, the first battles of the Cold War.\u201d<\/p>\n The December uprising was triggered by a failure to reach an agreement with resistance groups to disarm and about what a post-war government would look like. It cost an estimated 5,000 lives and eventually triggered the longer and bloodier Greek Civil War in 1946-49.<\/p>\n A debate over the Athens battle\u2019s legacy remains fraught in part due to the involvement of armed groups of Nazi collaborators. Seeking to reinvent their roles and evade fatal retribution, they zealously fought communist-backed rebels and opposed reconciliation efforts.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s still no agreement, even among professional historians,\u201d Roderick Beaton, a professor of Greek history at King\u2019s College in London, told The Associated Press.<\/p>\n \u201cSome still hold to the narrative put about by the winning side afterward, that the communists had been intent on seizing power,\u201d he said. For others it \u201cshowed the Greek people reclaiming their own self-determination in the face of former collaborators with the Nazis and the British who had replaced them as an occupying power.\u201d<\/p>\n For Beaton, author of the book \u201cGreece: Biography of a Modern Nation,\u201d the battle was less about Cold War tensions than the catastrophic effects of wartime occupation.<\/p>\n \u201cSo far as I can see, the tragic events \u2026 in Athens were an accident waiting to happen. There was no plan for an armed uprising by the left, but neither was there a right-wing or British plan to crush the former resistance,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n In Greece, there are no official monuments or museum exhibits dedicated to the December battle or the civil war \u2014 conflicts that were officially forgotten.<\/p>\n Emergency measures from that time were only fully abolished in 1989.<\/p>\n That year, a bronze statue was unveiled in central Athens square of three towering human-like figures standing at 8 meters (26 feet) tall, intertwined in a harmonious embrace.<\/p>\n It\u2019s named, simply, the Statue of National Reconciliation.<\/p>\n [AP]<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n![\"scars-of-december-a-pivotal-cold-war-era-battle-in-greece-quietly-passes-its-80th-anniversary0\"](\"https:\/\/www.ekathimerini.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/Dekemvriana-battle-of-athens-bullets-AP.jpg?1733518706221\")
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