Patrick Comerford
Today is Oxi Day in Greece, the 85th anniversary of the day Greece said No, Όχι, to fascism in 1940 and a day of national pride. In Greek, this day is known as Επέτειος του οχι, or ‘the anniversary of No’.
Oxi Day (sometimes spelt Ohi Day) is a national public holiday in both Greece and Cyprus and is celebrate by Greeks around the world.
On this day 85 years ago (28 October 1940), the Prime Minister of Greece, Ioannis Metaxas, said ‘No’ to Mussolini’s demand to allow Italian troops to cross the border into Greece.
In the days that followed, as news of this rejection by Metaxas spread around Athens and throughout Greece, Greeks took to the streets shouting ‘Oxi! Όχι!’ That refusal on 28 October 1940 is commemorated each year as a day that represents bravery, solidarity and heroism for millions of Greeks all around the world.
Although Greece had tried to remain neutral in the early days of World War II, increasing threats from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy pushed the Greek dictatorship into turning to Great Britain and the allies. The Greek army emerged as a formidable force, holding back the Axis forces from entering Greece for almost six months. Churchill commented at the time: ‘Hence we will not say that Greeks fight like heroes, but that heroes fight like Greeks.’
The Oxi Day parade in Athens today included marching bands, clubs, societies and school children in their thousands marching through the city centre, along Leoforos Vassilissis Amalias Avenue, moving past the Parliament in Syntagma Square and then along Panepistimiou Street. This display of colour and national pride was repeated in every city and town in Greece.
Oxi Day was also celebrated with free entry into archaeological sites in Athens, including the Acropolis, the Acropolis Museum, the Byzantine Christian Museum and the National Archaeological Museum. Most shops were closed, but most restaurants and bars stayed open, particularly in the main tourist areas.
In Rethymnon in Crete, today also marks the Feast of the Four Martyrs of Rethymnon, commemorating four local men— Angelis, Manuel, George and Nicholas — who were martyred in 1824 for refusing to renounce their Christian faith under Ottoman rule.
Sunday last was the Feast of Saint Demetrios of Thessaloniki (26 October), and both his feast day and Oxi Day were marked with special celebrations in the Greek Orthodox Church in Stony Stratford last weekend, beginning with Vespers on Saturday, and concluding with themed performances by the children, parents and teachers in the Church Hall at lunchtime on Sunday.
Mussolini had been planning his war against Greece for several months. He never informed Hitler of his plans though, and notoriously said that Hitler was going to read about it in the papers.
On 15 August 1940, an Italian submarine fired three torpedoes against Elli, a Greek protected cruiser on the island of Tinos island, and nine people were killed. In an effort to avoid the conflict with Italy, the Greek government never officially acknowledged the nationality of the submarine.
Events escalated week-by-week, and on 28 October 1940 Mussolini gave an ultimatum to the Greek government through the Italian ambassador in Greece, Emanuele Grazzi.
Grazzi asked Metaxas, to allow the Italian troops to pass through Pindos mountains, in the region of Epirus. If the forces were not allowed through the Greek border and Greek territory, then there would be war, Mussolini warned. br />
Tradition says Metaxas replied to this ultimatum with a single word: OXI. This refusal marked the beginning of the Greco-Italian War. On the next day, Italian troops deployed in Albania forced their way into Greece. As the news spread, the whole nation joined forces to combat the foreign invader. People took to the streets, shouting ‘OXI’.
The high morale of the Greek troops and their extreme heroism were praised worldwide, and the Greek Resistance fought with determination against Axis occupation. World leader including the American president Franklin D Roosevelt, the British statesman Winston Churchill, the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and the exiled leader of the French resistance Charles de Gaul all praised the Greek army.
But it is for historians to disentangle myth and history, and popular tellings of stories from the events of the past.
So, did Ioannis Metaxas (1871-1941) actually deliver that one-word rebuttal, Oxi?
And was he taking a principled stand against Fascism?
When Mussolini demanded that Greece would consent to Italian troops crossing the border into Greece, the story goes, Metaxas responded brusquely and bluntly: ‘OXI!’
In reality, Grazzi and Metaxas had a longer dialogue in French, which is documented in Grazzi’s memoirs. Metaxas responded to the Italian ultimatum in French, the diplomatic language at the time: Alors, c’est la gueree!, ‘Well, then it is War!’
According to Metaxa’s daughter, the dialogue escalated as follows:
Grazzi: Pas nécessaire, mon excellence (Not necessarily, your excellency).
Metaxas: Non, c’est necessaire (No, it is necessary).
But, a long quotation in French does not really work as a slogan in Greek. On 30 October, a creative journalist published an article with the headline ‘ΟΧΙ,’ referring to Metaxas’ refusal. This, in turn, became a catchphrase of the Greek resistance, and it remained a remembered word among generations of Greeks ever after.
But was Metaxas a principled political opponent of Fascism and the threatened fascist invasion of Greece?
General Ioannis Metaxas (Ιωάννης Μεταξάς) was born on the island of Ithaka in 1871 into an aristocratic family. He entered the Greek army as a career office at an early age. He took part in the Greco-Turkish War (1897) and the Balkan Wars (1912-1913), and quickly rose through the ranks of the Greek army. He studied at the Berlin War Academy in 1899-1903 on the personal nomination of Crown Prince Constantine and became an admirer of Prussian militarism and an opponent of what he regarded as ‘intemperate parliamentarism’ in Greece.
When Eleftherios Venizelos became Prime Minister, he appointed Metaxas as his adjutant in 1910 as part of an effort at rapprochement with the monarchy. At the outbreak of World War I, Venizelos and King Constantine rejected a German request to join the Central Powers, and instead Venizelos approached the Entente Powers, Britain, France and Russia. Venizelos was shaken when Metaxas resigned in February 1915, and when King Constantine decided to keep Greece neutral Venizelos resigned.
Venizelos won the May 1915 elections, formed a new government and recalled Metaxas as deputy chief of staff. Venizelos received support in Parliament for Greek entry into the war and the presence of allied troops in Thessaloniki with a 152-102 vote on 22 September. However, the king dismissed Venizelos the next day, solidifying the rift between monarchists and Venizelists and creating the ‘National Schism’.
When Constantine and the army leadership allowed German and Bulgarian troops to occupy parts of east Macedonia in 1916, there was widespread popular anger throughout Greece. Venizelist officers launched a revolt in Thessaloniki in August 1916 and Venizelos formed a ‘Government of National Defence’. The new government entered the war on the Allies’ side, while the official Greek state and the royal government remained neutral, and King Constantine and Metaxas were accused of being pro-German.
Metaxas formed a monarchist paramilitary Epistratoi force during the events in Athens known as Noemvriana (November) or ‘Greek Vespers’. But King Constantine was deposed in June 1917 and was replaced by his son, King Alexander. Venizelos returned to office, and Greece officially joined the war.
Metaxas and other leading opponents of Venizelos were exiled to Corsica, but he escaped to Sardinia and later to Siena. He was sentenced to death in absentia in January 1920 for his role in the Noemvriana events. But after the electoral defeat of Venizelos in November 1920, Metaxas retuned to Greece and was reinstated in the army with the rank of major-general.
Following the defeat of Greek forces in Asia Minor, King Constantine was again forced into exile after a coup led by Colonel Nikolaos Plastiras. Metaxas entered politics and founded the Freethinkers’ Party in 1922. However, his role in a failed monarchist coup in October 1923 forced him into exile again. King George II was forced into exile too, the monarchy was abolished, and the Second Hellenic Republic was proclaimed in March 1924.
Metaxas soon returned to Greece, publicly declaring his acceptance of the new republic. But in elections in 1926, his party won 15.8% of the vote and 52 seats in Parliament, and Metaxas became Communications Minister in a coalition formed by Alexandros Zaimis.
His party became entangled in infighting and dropped to 1.6% of the vote and three seats in 1933, but he became Interior Minister in the cabinet of Panagis Tsaldaris. He soon became the most intransigent and extreme of all the Monarchist politicians with his call for an absolute monarchy. When there was a failed assassination attempt against Venizelos in 1933, Metaxas praised it in his newspaper Hellenki, expressing regret only that the attempt failed.
Venizelist officers attempted a coup in Thessaloniki on 1 March 1935. The city was known as a ‘hotbed of republicanism’ and had taken in the bulk of the 1.3 million Greeks expelled from Turkey in 1923, and the majority of the refugees there lived in extreme poverty.
After the failed coup, Metaxas called for a ‘new order’ in Greece. Tsaldaris called early elections and for a referendum on restoring the monarchy. Metaxas and his party took 20% of the vote in Athens, and the War Minister, General Georgios Kondylis, declared he was an admirer of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The army was purged of Venizelist officers, Metaxas spoke openly of a civil war and there was a wave of strikes and protests across the country.
Kondylis staged a coup, Tsaldaris was deposed, and George II returned from exile in London after a heavily rigged plebiscite and took the throne in 1935. On 11 December 1935, the king met Ernst Eisenlohr, the German envoy in Athens, who reminded him that Germany was Greece’s largest trading partner and that ‘Greece could not live without her German customers.’
Venizelists and anti-Venizelists failed to form a government after elections on 26 January 1936, in which the Liberals or Venizelists won 141 seats, while the followers of Kondylis won 12 seats and the followers of Metaxas only seven seats. The big breakthrough was by the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) which took 15 seats. The army chief of staff, General Alexandros Papagos, threatened an immediate coup d’état if the Liberals formed an alliance with the KKE.
On 5 March 1936, George II appointed Metaxas the Minister of Defence, a post he held until he died in 1941. A government under Konstantinos Demertzis government was sworn in on 14 March, with Metaxas as vice-president of the government and Minister of Defence. When Demertzis died suddenly on 13 April, the king immediately appointed Metaxas as Prime Minister.
Parliament voted on 30 April to suspend its sittings. Stikes were called across Greece, and a general strike began in Thessaloniki on 9 May. Metaxas used the unrest to declare a state of emergency. He adjourned parliament indefinitely, suspended many articles of the constitution guaranteeing civil liberties, and declared he would hold ‘all the power I need for saving Greece’.
The regime became known as the ‘4 August Regime’ and Greece became a totalitarian state, in which Metaxas was presented as ‘the First Peasant’, ‘the First Worker’ and ‘the National Father’ of the Greeks. He adopted the title of Arkhigos, Greek for ‘leader’ or ‘chieftain’ and claimed he was initiating a ‘Third Hellenic Civilisation’, inspired by ancient Greece and the Byzantine Empire.
State propaganda portrayed Metaxas as a ‘Saviour of the Nation’, all political parties and strikes were banned, there was widespread censorship, the Communist leader Nikos Zachariadis was arrested, and many political activists were arrested and tortured.
Metaxas made himself Minister of Education in 1938 and had all school texts rewritten to fit the regime’s ideology. Book burnings targeted authors such as Goethe, Shaw, Freud and several Greek writers. Even Plato’s Republic was on the list of banned books. The Fascist salute was introduced, the Minoan double-axe was used in the way Mussolini used the Roman fasces in Italy, and regime propaganda constantly praised Hitler, Mussolini and Franco.
But Metaxas had no mass political party and his power depended on the army and the support of the king. Although most Greeks regarded Italy as their principal enemy, Metaxas saw Germany as a counterweight to Italy.
The crux came when the Italian Ambassador Emanuele Grazzi visited Metaxas at 3 in the morning and in the darkness of the night presented his demands on 28 October 1940, the night of Oxi Day. By morning, Greeks were taking to the streets in cities, towns and villages, chanting ‘Oxi! Όχι!’ A nation refused to bend the knee to fascism or to bow to military threats.
If Greeks had said Yes, Italian troops would have marched in unopposed, independence would have disappeared overnight, the Axis powers would have dominated the Mediterranean, the world would have lost a symbol of resistance, Greek pride and unity would have been silenced and would have dissolved. Greece would have been subugated. Later that morning, Italy invaded Greece from Albania. But Greece fought back, winning the first Allied victory in World War II, and Greeks became an inspiration for anti-fascist resistance throughout Europe.
Metaxas died in Athens on 29 January 1941, before the German invasion and the subsequent fall of Greece. Metaxism was undoubtedly a form of Fascism. During the colonels’ junta in 1967-1974, he was honoured as a patriot.
Many of his decisions and policies have uncanny reflections in the actions of the Trump regime in the US today, from banning books in schools, to overriding the elected members of parliament, ignoring the constitution, arresting political opponents, promising to make Greece great again, pretending to be a voice of the people, and proclaiming himself the ‘leader’, the ‘chieftain’ and the ‘Saviour of the Nation’.
Metaxas never said No, his reply was, in fact, a polite diplomatic démarche in French. It was ordinary Greeks who took to the streets shouting ‘Oxi! Όχι!’ and the word Όχι echoed throughout Greece. The word belongs to them, and the heroism was theirs. So, it is paradoxical but understandable that Metaxas has also become a symbol for Greeks across the political spectrum of resistance to Fascism, and for Cypriots this resistance to an Italian invasion has parallels to resistance to the Turkish invasion over half a century ago in 1974.
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