Maria Rezan ΜΑΡΙΑ ΡΕΖΑΝ
Born May 4, 1921 Died January 3, 2004
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Section 5, Number 87 |
Some old Greek hands will remember her characteristically gravelly voice from the radio show An Hour without a Program (Μια ώρα έτσι χωρίς πρόγραμμα) and her many interviews with politicians and artists, but not everyone remembers the fascinating personal journey of Maria Rezan, the owner of that distinctive voice. During her long life, she wore a bewildering number of hats: as a Red Cross nurse, a political wife, a mother of four children, a book store owner, a member of the National Tourist Organization, and, most famously, as journalist and talk show host. She had a long career with twists and turns that no one, least of all she, could have anticipated. Circumstances forced her to reinvent herself on numerous occasions throughout her long life.
Let’s Begin at the Beginning
Maria, of Jewish origin, was born in Athens on May 4th 1921 to Joseph and Mari Misrachi (Μισραχή). They named her Rezan. Her parents had come to Athens from cosmopolitan Smyrna and named her after a famous French actress whom Joseph admired at the time. It was an educated household. As a child she would recall her father settling down to read the French newspaper “Le Temps”. Rezan was very close to her father and he to her. One of his birthday messages reads, “Always remember there is nothing better in the world than a night illuminated by stars and by the feeling that you have done your duty”. (Goethe).
She attended the same high school as actress Melina Merkouri (Athens was a smallish city back then) and after high school registered in the School of Philosophy at the Athens University with an eye to studying archaeology.
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 As a young woman |
When she was 17, her father enlisted her in the Sixth Battalion of Scouts, a move that helped her to get over what she described as inherent timidity. That connection was short lived, however. One year later, when dictator Ioannis Metaxas created his own youth organization(EON) based on Hitler Youth and wanted the Greek Scouting organization to integrate with his, they refused and had to cease their activities altogether until 1945.
After the Italian invasion occurred in 1940, she took nursing lessons at the Red Cross after hearing a plea over on the radio for every citizen to contribute to the defence of Greece. She was placed in the 11th hospital of Athens, housed in the Athens College in Psychiko. In her memoir, With Nostalgia...for a Life Lived Without a Program, she wrote what must have been true for so many young people at that time:
That practice served for all of us there, as a rigorous exercise in growing up quickly.
At age 19, Rezan met (though correspondence at first) Andreas Josif (Ανδρέας Ιωσήφ), a journalist from the newspaper “Estia”, who was at the time serving in the military at Koritsa in Albania. He was 25. They fell in love. In order to marry, she was baptized into the Orthodox faith, and took the name of Maria, keeping the name Rezan as a surname in order to please her father. They married in Agios Ioannis Rangava, the picturesque Byzantine Parish church of the Athens’ Plaka district.
The War
The German occupation was a time of fear and terrible hunger. Her family had to live in hiding in Athens during the occupation when Jewish families were being ferreted out by the Germans and sent to their deaths in Europe. She described one such hideaway as a house in Ilioupolis belonging to a brave seamstress who, not for a moment, hesitated to hide Jews. In an attempt to assure their safety more fully, her husband Andreas separated their identities as a couple and secured false identity papers from Athens police chief, Angelos Evert. Maria briefly became Maria Foumi from Chania Crete! Evert saved many Athenian Jews with these papers. (1)
In 1943 she was imprisoned for a time in Averoff Prison by the Italian authorities. She and her husband had been listening to banned BBC programs and she had written to a friend in Itea the list of VHF stations. She claimed that she had not written the letter. The authorities let her go then. The authorities called her in again to see if she would tell the truth but she insisted that the letter was not hers and, at that point, they locked her up. Her cellmate was none other than the future Amalia Fleming who had been arrested as a resistance member. (2)
The War Ends, But...
When the Germans withdrew, she and Josef returned to their flat in Mayer street (just northwest of Omonia Square) and her parents to their apartment in Diodotou street. Andreas resumed work again at Estia as a political editor. Life went on but, even before the liberation, trouble was brewing between the supporters of EAM-ELAS and the government in exile which would eventually lead to the civil war. Nonetheless, Maria occupied herself with running the bookstore The Independent on Amerikis Street in downtown Athens and with rebuilding the foreign press outlet, a business owned by Andreas’ family. But when there was a call for nurses to take up duty at first aid stations as the civil war raged, Rezan answered the call.
Although her husband was a political commentator and many of their friends were politicians, she recalled that during that immediate post war period she did not pay much attention to politics, concentrating instead on her book store and her growing family.
The 50s: the Belogiannis (Μπελογιάννης) Debacle, Bankruptcy and Divorce.
Andreas successfully ran for parliament in 1950 under the banner of EPEK, the centrist party of Nikolaos Plastiras. He was appointed vice-premier with responsibility for media and information. Suddenly, she was a political wife at a very tricky time in Greek political life. Josif was a conservative politically but had been voted in from an area that was known for centrists and leftists. Plastiras joked to Maria that he had chosen a right one but got a left one instead.(3)
Their relationship with Plastiras was warm at first- until he acquiesced to the execution of communist leader Nikos Belogianis (Νίκος Μπελογιάννης) (4) who was executed along with three others in 1952. This was a very contentious trial that many believed had been rigged. Even some anti-communists were against this execution, viewing it as an act out of sync with the times and one intended as a dire warning to the left rather than as a justified execution. Andreas stated publicly that he would resign if the execution actually took place. At the time he was sure that foreign and local public sentiment would save them. He resigned on the day Belogiannis was executed - the only member of the Plastiras government to do so. He never forgave Plastiras for his refusal to stop the execution. Maria would write indignantly of these Sunday executions, stating that even the Nazis had the decency to refrain from executions on a Sunday.
1953 brought another catastrophe for Maria and Andreas. On the 9th of April that year the drachma was devalued 50 percent against the dollar.
This devaluation undermined the family business which depended on selling foreign publications which were suddenly out of the economic reach of their customers. The book store now owed for foreign publications it could not reasonably sell. According to her biography, first came financial hardship and then bickering. The bookstore went under and she and Andreas divorced. He took on the store’s debts and she took on their four children.
These were difficult times for Maria – and in a decade when things had started so well.
Still, the resilient Maria was able to make many new friends and reconnect with old ones. One journalist friend convinced her to ask Georgios Androulidakis (Γιώργης Ανδρουλιδάκης), an editor of the popular centrist newspaper Eleftheria, for a job. At their first meeting Androulidakis was not encouraging, but she persevered until finally he asked her to write a piece about foreign books. This article was the start of a long journalistic career that ran the gamut of interviews with Greek royalty, celebrities of the day, artists, and politicians of every stripe.
She recalls that Androulakis gave her some good advice, - not to just think of her own circle or her peers when composing, but to write for his uncle Haralambos in Crete, meaning that she should write simply and directly. She had a talent to do just that and, after a time, the paper’s editor, Panos Kokkas offered her the paper’s important cultural page. At that point she was able to work with many of the stars of the paper including Spyros Vasileiou, Minos Argyrakis, AlekosFasianos, and sketch artist Vasilis Mitropoulos. She learned a lot and, whenever subsequently asked about her educational credentials, she would respond that she had studied at the University of Eleftheria.
The problem of money was never far away. At one point she went over to the offices of the National Tourist Organization across from the newspaper hoping to sell some of the guidebooks still unsold when the bookstore closed. To her surprise, they offered her a job at 1500 drachmas a month! This gave her much needed extra cash and entrée to the international cultural greats of the day whom EOT was bringing to Greece from Europe, the Balkans, and the Soviet Union. Violinist David Oistrakh, the Bolshoi Ballet, the Paris Opera, and greats like Pablo Casals all came within her orbit.
Life from 1960 to 1967 was inextricably mixed up in local politics and neutrality ceased to be an option, so charged was the political atmosphere in the country. Journalists, whether they liked it or not, were forced to choose sides. When Georgios Papandreau had founded the Centre Union party in 1961, it was his attempt to gather disparate parties together in the centre to offer an alternative to EDA the party of the left and ERE the party of the right. Eleftheria backed Papandreau in the 1963 elections and again in 1964 when he won a clear majority in parliament. But his was a party made up of so many smaller parties, each with its own specific agenda, that there were difficulties going forward. The problem became acute when Papandreou was being challenged by the left in his own party led by his son Andreas. Add consistent palace interference and the army (always at the ready in the background) to these Centre Union intrigues and all the ingredients for confusion, betrayal, and political chaos were in the mix. Eleftheria's editor, Panos Kokkas, supported the elder Papandreau but many of his journalists did not. So many resignations from the paper occurred during that time that Maria’s father asked her if she was considering resigning as well. She responded: I will never leave; it gave me my start in journalism; it is my second family.
The Junta
Brave words, but all for nought. When the colonels decided to bring their tanks into the Streets of Athens on April 21, 1967, their henchmen entered the offices of all the newspapers and stopped the presses. Eleftheria disappeared along with Kathimerini and many other dailies. Kathimerini’s Eleni Vlakou was placed under house arrest and Maria’s mentor, Georgios Androulakis, was put in jail. Since Panos Kokkas had gone into hiding, the Junta arrested his father instead! And Maria? Like so many journalists, she found herself against the dictatorship - and without a job.
Exile
Maria needed money for her family so, in the summer of 1967 she decided to leave for Paris with her two eldest children and make a new start. She would not be alone; many Greek politicians and dissidents had also fled to Paris. She managed to get a job with L’Express and Le Point and freelance work. It was difficult at first and she recounted that she only felt really established in Paris after she learned that Aristotle Onassis had been overheard praising her work, saying she had the best article on the situation in Greece in L’Express. She interviewed Andreas Papandreou and Constantinos Karamanlis for her articles and became quite good friends with the latter. She also became friends with Jules Dassin and Melina Mercouri as well as renewing her acquaintance with Panos Kokkas who was another exile in the French capital.
Attempting to keep Greece in the forefront was very difficult during those years if not impossible. Other world events took over: the war in Vietnam, the Prague Spring, etc. But she did what she could, especially when the Junta in 1969-70 arrested and put on trial many members of the Democratic Defense an anti-junta group which had banded together to fight the Junta from inside the country.(5) As a result, they were not sentenced to death as the Junta had promised. (Ironically, this step back from executions made some European leaders see Papadopoulos sympathetically and even resulted in the freeing of musician Mikis Theodorakis by the Junta!) (6)
The Return of Democracy
Democracy returned to Greece with her friend Constantinos Karamanlis in 1974.
Maria herself did not return until 1978. At that point, three of her four children were already living abroad. After her return, she worked for Apoyevmatini (Απογευματινή), Bima(Βήμα), and Kathimerini (Καθημερινή) and in 1980 was offered a radio show on ERT called An Hour without a Programme which gained a loyal audience. In a way, she had come full circle. She had had a show before the Junta with Tasso Kavvadia called One Hour About Nothing and Everything (Μια ώρα για τίποτα και όλα) but this time around she had a vast number of friends and acquaintances in the political and art world who were happy to come on her show and chat about, well - anything and everything.
Kudos. In the early 80s, she was elected to the administration ΕΣΗΕΑ, The Union of Press Editors of Athens, the first woman to rise to that position.
In her early 70s she suffered a stroke that ended her journalistic career and made her last years difficult. Her memoirs were dictated to her children during those years. At one point, she recalled an audience member writing to her, It matters not at which height you have entangled yourself in the electrical wires, it matters that you tried to fly.
She then said: Let me at least be remembered for that.
Maria Rezan died in 2004.
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Maria Rezan Section 5/87 |
The Map
Footnotes
(1)Angelos Evert, as police chief, participated in the rescue of many Athenian Jewish families for which he was later honoured by Israel as one of the Righteous Among the Nations. He would say that he had been inspired by the public protest of Archbishop Damaskinos on behalf of the Athenian Jews during the occupation..
(2)Amalia Koutsouri-Vourekas would later become the wife of Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of insulin. The forbidden program she and her husband followed was The Cyprus Hour, a BBC program presented by Michael Cacoyannis who later became the great film director.
(3) Nikolaos Plastiras is also buried in the First Cemetery. His career is even more convoluted than Maria’s!
(4)Nikos Belogiannis (1915-1952) was arrested by dictator Ioannis Metaxas in the 30s as a dangerous leftist and later transferred as a prisoner to the Germans when they came. He escaped in 1943 and joined The Greek Peoples’ Liberation Army (ELAS) where he rose in the ranks and fought beside ELAS leader Aris Velouchiotis. He fought against the government forces during the civil war and was one of the last to leave Greece (1949) after his side lost. But he returned in 1950 to attempt to re-establish the Communist Party (KKE) and was arrested a few months later and court-martialed. The trial began in October of 1951. He was not alone. 94 people were also accused. He answered these accusations by pointing to his war record and denied all accusations of collaborating with Russia. Many sympathized, including Pablo Picasso who immortalized him in the sketch below.
He always wore a red rose to court
(5) Democratic Defense (ΔημοκρατικήΆμυνα) was one of the many anti-dictatorial groups that fought against the 1967 Junta. After their arrest, the members nominated as leader a prominent retired general, George Iordanidis, who had once had high ranking positions in NATO. The organisation had responded to the regime with some bombings against Junta supporters such as the Esso-Pappas company in 1969. Many prominent academics and trade unionists and military personal belonged, many of whom took part in political life after the fall of the Junta. The 1970 trial attracted the attention of the press. It was considered as a major act of resistance against the regime of the colonels because many of the accused persons held important positions in the public life of Greece. When the Junta ended in 1974, many were integrated into the new PASOK party of Andreas Papandreou.
(6) When a prominent French Politician (Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber) went to Greece to speak for the members of the Democratic Defense, he tried in vain to see the dictator Papadopoulos who did not want to see him – until it was announced that the members of the Democratic Defence would not be executed. Then he granted an interview because he wanted to gain credit for his ‘mercy’ with Europe. As an extra, he offered to let Mikis Theodorakis fly to France as long as he promised not to involve himself with politics. On such weird and chance encounters did the lives of those fighting against the Junta hang.
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