A quote for our time
Topkapi (1964), the classic caper film, stars the late Melina Mercouri. By chance last night, I came across and watched it again on TCM. After its run, the host made a point of mentioning how the late Greek actress, after the Greek military junta in 1967 stripped her citizenship, issued a classic comeback.
Briefly, via Wikipedia:
The Greek junta or Regime of the Colonels[a] was a right-wing military junta that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974. On 21 April 1967, a group of colonels overthrew a caretaker government a month before scheduled elections which Georgios Papandreou‘s Centre Union was favoured to win.
The dictatorship was characterised by policies such as anti-communism, restrictions on civil liberties, and the imprisonment, torture, and exile of political opponents. It was ruled by Georgios Papadopoulos from 1967 to 1973, but an attempt to renew popular support in a 1973 referendum on the monarchy and gradual democratisation by Papadopoulos was ended by another coup by the hardliner Dimitrios Ioannidis. Ioannidis ruled until it fell on 24 July 1974 under the pressure of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, leading to the Metapolitefsi (“regime change”; Greek: Μεταπολίτευση) to democracy and the establishment of the Third Hellenic Republic.
Mercouri was performing in New York at the time. She condemned Brig. Gen. Stylianos Pattakos, one of the junta’s principals, and began an international effort to help bring down the dictatorship. The junta stripped Mercouri’s Greek citizenship, revoked her passport, and confiscated her property. (Her citizenship was restored after the junta fell. She was elected to Parliament in 1977. She was appointed Minister of Culture in 1981.)
Mercouri responded, ”I was born a Greek and I’ll die a Greek. Pattakos was born a fascist and he’ll die a fascist.”
Americanized, there’s a quote for our time.
View on Threads
* A veteran friend notes that it’s not the generals you have to worry about. It’s the colonels.