Manolis Glezos – activist and freedom fighter dies aged 98

Today, Greece mourns ‘lion-hearted’ Manolis Glezos, one of the country’s greatest defenders of democracy and Greece’s most celebrated anti-Nazi resistance hero. He died on Monday at the age of 98.

Glezos was just 18 on May 30, 1941 when, during Greece’s occupation by Nazi Germany, he and his comrade Apostolos Santas – both members of the Communist Party of Greece and of the resistance organisation EAM (National Liberation Front) – scaled the rocky face of the Acropolis cliff in the middle of the night to tear down the swastika flag which had been fluttering above the Acropolis. Athenians awoke that morning to see that the hated symbol of fascist occupation was no longer flying above their city.

After the war, Glezos worked as a journalist and editor and was repeatedly elected to Greece’s parliament with communist and socialist parties over a 60-year period. During his lifetime he was arrested numerous times, sentenced to death three times by the Axis powers, imprisoned by Greece’s far-right-wing governments after the end of the civil war and finally imprisoned by Greece’s military dictatorship after 1967 – all because of his unfailing and continued activism and membership of the Communist Party of Greece – spending a total of 16 years in prison during his lifetime.

In recent times, he became a symbol of resistance in another, very different war: the war against neo-liberalism and world capitalism. In March 2010, pictures of the activist being tear-gassed by riot police in anti-austerity demonstrations made headlines across the world. In 2014, Glezos was elected to the European Parliament with the Syriza party, becoming its oldest deputy at the age of 91. During Greece’s economic crisis, Glezos opposed austerity measures and campaigned for Germany to repay money it had forcibly ‘borrowed’ from Greece during the occupation. “To this day, Greece remains the only country in Europe that never received reparations from Germany,” Glezos said. “We never got back any of the antiquities that they took, or the buildings that they seized, or the tons of silver and nickel that they stole.”

In 2015, he parted ways with the Syriza government after it agreed to implement devastating anti-austerity measures imposed upon it by the European bailout programme. As a movement, we are a poorer place without him.