Demetrios Gounaris

Demetrios Gounaris                                             ΔΗΜΗΤΡΙΟΣ ΓΟΥΝΑΡΗΣ

Born 5 Jan. 1867                                                      Died 15 Nov. 1922    

        
                  Section 6, Number 157

Section 11 in front of 157 and 164

It’s a complicated story. Demetrios Gounaris (Δημήτριος Γούναρης ) was one of Greece’s unluckiest Prime Ministers. When Greece suffered its humiliating defeat in Asia Minor in 1922, a defeat that ended the long run of Greece’s expansionist Great Idea (Μεγάλη Ιδέα), he had been one of the Prime Ministers at the helm.

Elefterios Venizelos, one of the Great Idea’s most ardent architects, had been defeated in 1920 and was in exile. Gounaris, a royalist and an anti-Venizelist became Prime minister in 1921 and had promised a war weary country that he would bring the boys back home. But, in an effort to manoeuvre for a better bargaining position with the Turks, he attempted one more offensive. It turned into a disastrous rout. This would eventually result in the transfer of populations between Greece and Turkey, economic chaos, untold hardships and emotional scars that are still in evidence today.

 Someone had to pay...

 

On Nov 15, 1922, Gounaris and five others blamed for the defeat were found guilty of treason in the early hours of the morning, lined up in a field at 11 am, shot dead, and their grieving families were told to bury them before the sun set.

So…

Imagine our surprise when we discovered that the vilified Demetrios Gounaris was not only buried in Athens First Cemetery, but that he seems to have been buried there twice. 

Wikipedia

His Life:

Demetrios was born in Patras in 1867, studied law in Athens, Germany, France and England. Like so many men of his era, he was cosmopolitan and multi-lingual. He entered parliament in 1902 as a member for Achaia in the Peloponnese. He was something of a reformist at the beginning and joined the government of Giorgios Theotokos as finance minister in the hopes that he could introduce some of his ideas there. He couldn’t.

 The years 1910-20 saw him very much involved in a push-me pull-me period of intense political battle between republican Venizelists  and  conservative royalists.

  

 Gounaris became a leading opponent of republican minded Elefterios Venizelos. He was briefly appointed prime minister by the king in 1915 when the king had forced Venizelos to resign; he went into exile along with the king when Venizelos made his comeback in 1917, and then made his own comeback along with the king in 1920 when Venizelos lost the election and departed for Paris. (1)

Gounaris became Prime Minister for a second time in 1921 in the very midst of the ongoing Greco-Turkish War (1919-22), and at a point when it was becoming clear that the Greeks were losing. The Greeks had wanted to hang on to and expand the territory in Asia Minor that had been mandated by the 1919 Treaty of Sèvres; the Young Turks, nationalists led by Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk),  were determined to push Greece right out of Asia.

Gounaris’ intentions were good. He knew that the Greek cause was in serious trouble but he wanted an “honourable extraction” that a new offensive success might bring about. Unfortunately the offensive was ill-planned and the army ill-equipped. Not only that, Great Britain, seeing potential in the Young Turk’s movement had already become a lukewarm ally. (2)  In a worsening situation, Gounaris was simply not willing to pay the political cost of an all out withdrawal. 

The stage was set for a tragedy of Shakespearian proportions.

 In August 1922, the Greek army was routed and the predominantly Greek city of Smyrna was utterly destroyed by fire.

By September 24, a Revolutionary Committee had already been formed by three very unhappy army officers: Nikolaos Plastiras Stylianos Gonatas, , and Dimitrios Phocas.

 They took over the country(3), asked Venizelos who was still abroad to use his influence to negotiate on behalf of Greece, and promptly court marshaled the six men whom they blamed most for the debacle. (4) The Revolutionary Committee also promised it would punish the Greek crown Prince for his poor military leadership. This proved to be too much for European royalists and the Committee had to be content with sending Prince Andrew into exile.  His son Phillip would marry the future British Queen, Elizabeth II.) 

The so-called Trial of The Six (Δύκη των Έξι) took place from the 13^th of November until the 27th November, 1922. Gounaris was suffering from typhus at the time, but a plea for postponement was rejected. The Revolutionary Committee needed scapegoats immediately – to assuage genuine public anger –especially among the military - but also to consolidate their own position.

The Execution

The execution was horrible. The ambulance carrying the six went through the streets of Athens to the killing spot. Many army veterans lined the route hoping for a look at the condemned. Gounaris, because of his illness, had to be helped to his appointed place. Six teams of shooters were used, one for each man. (One account has shallow pits having been dug behind them although their bodies were not left there).They all declined blindfolds.  After the firing squad had done its work, each man was given the coup de grace with a pistol and their bodies hauled off to their respective families in the same ambulance that had brought them.

A certain reporter for the Toronto Star named Ernest Hemingway, who was in Greece sometime later to cover the subsequent population exchange, would read accounts of the execution and write his own gripping story of what happened. His artistic gene dominated the journalistic one and Hemingway succumbed to temptation by tweaking the time of the execution (He made it happen at dawn). “They shot six cabinet ministers at half-past six…” and he made all of the accused cabinet ministers. (5)  

I sympathize. There are times when attempting to recount these events accurately and succinctly that doing a ‘Hemingway’ has to be reluctantly resisted.

Gounaris’ body was brought to the First Cemetery on the same day as his execution. One priest was allowed at the burial ceremony but no psalters, and he was buried just about as far at the back of the First Cemetery as it would have been possible to get back then.

There Was Opposition

Many Greeks at the time objected to this rough justice, as did foreign diplomats and foreign newspapers, including the New York Times. One British paper headlined the trial: Terror in Athens. The executions would have diplomatic ramifications for years. Britain withdrew its ambassador for two years and the United States cut off its relationship with the Athens government indefinitely.(6) 

Vindication at Last

In early 2008, the case against the six was reopened at the request of the grandson of one of the accused. And on October 20, 2010, three of five judges declared the six to be innocent.

Patras, his home town, had decided long before that. In 1931 it renamed one of its main streets Demetrios Gounaris Street.

The Two Graves

The First Grave:

Section 11, in front of 157 and 164

It looks almost Celtic. Is it the tilt or the style that gives it that archaic look?

The Second Grave:

There is a lovely story about this second grave which was only revealed to Filia by a chance meeting in the cemetery. She will tell that story soon. Gounaris was related to another very famous figure in Greece: Panagiotis Kannellopoulos whose family grave this second one is. Exactly how our Demitrios Gounaris got there will have to wait for her entry. 

Map Showing Both Graves

 

Walk behind Agios Lazaris Church to the entrance to the Protestant cemetery and follow the map from there!

Footnotes

(1)The Great Idea and Venizelism are both dead and buried today (to the extent that any political idea actually dies in Greece) but, since neither is buried in the First Cemetery, they are beyond our present scope. We suggest further reading! For the origin of the Great Idea, see our Blog entry on Kolettis. Venizelos needs his own entry but he is buried in Crete and will have to fit into a future heading we propose to call “The Ones Who Got Away”.

(2)From the beginning, modern Greece was very much at the mercy of the big powers (France, Russia, and Great Britain) and, although this may sound like sour grapes, none of them seem to have really ever given a hoot about Greece unless it suited their own geo-political designs.

(3)The military virtually controlled the country and parliament until 1924 when the reins were handed over to Venizelos.  Both Plastiras and Gonatas have impressive graves in the Plaza of the Cemetery!

(4). Those tried and executed were:

 1.Petros Protopapadakis, then prime minister

 2.Dimitrios Gounaris, the former prime minister and then minister of justice

3. Georgios Baltatzis, the foreign minister

4. Nikolaios Stratos, the minister of the interior and intermediary prime minister between Gounaris and Protopapadaksi

5, Nikolaios Theotokis, the minister of war

 6. General Hatzianestis, the commander of the Greek armies during the Greco-Turkish war.

(4a) As a footnote to this footnote, Nikolaos Stratos was the father of Dora Stratou who started the famous Dance Theatre on the Philopappos Hill in 1952. She was 19 at the time and traumatized by the event. See:

https://athensfirstcemeteryinenglish.blogspot.com/2022/06/dora-stratou.html

.

 

(5) New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. P.196

(6)For the trial and its aftermath, see Sarah Inglis http://haemus.mk/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/12-Englis-2012.pdf