by NIKOS RAPTIS
On Saturday April 30, 2011, three days before the writing of this piece, Lakis Santas died in Athens, at the age of 89. “Lakis” is the diminutive ending of the “given” Christian name “Apostolos” [“apostle” in English; one of Christ’s original disciples]. Therefore, Santas’ name was “Apostolakis” [“little apostle”]; shortened to “Lakis”.
During the Second World War the Nazis entered Athens, as occupiers, in the morning of April 27, 1941. The same morning they raised a huge flag with the swastika on the Acropolis. The message sent to Hitler, a fervent admirer of classical Greece, read:
My Fuehrer,
On the 27th of April 1941, at 8 and 10′ a.m. we arrived in Athens … and at 8 and 45′ a.m. we raised the German flag on the Acropolis…
Heil my Fuehrer
Lakis Santas was 19 years old at the time and was a student at the School of Law in the University of Athens.
The Zappas cousins, Evangelis, the older, and Konstantine, the younger, were two Greeks who around 1850 made a huge fortune in … Rumania. Being “patriotic” Greeks, they donated a lot of money to revive the … Olympic Games! So they built in Athens a monumental building, the Zappion Edifice, to be used as the base for the Olympic Committee and as a place for agricultural exhibitions, etc. Later, the area surrounding the building was turned into a park and the section just in front of the building was left as an open space for promenade, etc, after removing a Protestant cemetery that occupied the site.
[Parenthesis: The Greeks, at the age of a few months, whether they agree or not, are baptized as Orthodox Christians. So, almost 100% of the Greeks are … Orthodox. I wonder who were the Protestants that died in Athens in the 19th century. Of course, the, inevitable, “occupiers” of the country at the time were the Bavarians. But they were mostly Catholic. Maybe, somewhere there were some British doing the usual patriotic “intelligence” work for the Empire. Anyway, the Orthodox beat the Protestants that time. I wonder if one in a million Athenian Greeks knows the story about that cemetery.]
Innumerable millions of Americans and Europeans have “paraded” in front of the Zappion, during the last 60 years or so, without being aware of it. Because, they simply visit the impressive Temple of Zeus, just across the street from the Zappion.
A few weeks after the entrance of the Nazis in Athens, Santas and his friend Monolis Glezos, a student at the School of Business, also 19 years old, were at the Zappion promenade, a preferred watering hole for the students of that time. The distance from Zappion to the point on the Acropolis, where the Nazi flag was raised, is about 800 yards. That being 1941, the flag was visible from Zappion, as the buildings, at that time, had at the most three stories.
At some point, that morning, Glezos tells Santas: “Lakis, look up there, see what is happening up there …” Then, Santas turns, sees the Nazi flag and replies: “Yes, you are right, that’s it, that is what we should do to them, if we can …”
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