Attiko Metro S.A. decided to change the name of Evangelismos and Agios Dimitriou stations, renaming them Pavlos Bakoyiannis and Alekos Panagoulis respectively.
The occasion was the completion of 30 years since the murder of Pavlos Bakoyannis.
The abolished name of the stations will be retained on the station signage in parentheses, i.e. "Pavlos Bakoyannis (Evangelism)" and "Alekos Panagoulis (Agios Dimitrios)", until April 30, 2020. Thereafter, the exclusive use of the new name will be applied .
Below we remember the hero, Alekos Panagoulis.
The hero of the resistance, Alekos Panagoulis
May 1, 1976. It was a sunny, almost summer day, and preparations for the traditional feasts had begun all over Greece. Suddenly the ERT radio (at that time there were no television channels and ERT television started its program in the afternoon) stopped the songs and broadcast the tragic news:The death of Alekos Panagoulis. His car, a Fiat Mirafiori, which was running at high speed on Vouliagmenis Avenue heading towards Glyfada, ran off course...
Suddenly it became cloudy. Not in the sky, in the faces of almost all the Greeks, who lost their man, their hero. A man who held the conscience of the Greeks high, who would not compromise, would continue to fight for the national and public good. Immediately rumors that it was a murder spread throughout the country. The next day, the newspapers published the possible murder of Panagoulis as the first topic.
The climate, charged anyway, highly politicized, could not help but be affected by his sudden and unexpected demise.
Panagoulis had revealed ESA files, which would have caused enormous problems for the political establishment and brought him into direct conflict with Averof. Also, it is characteristic that Panagoulis was ready to resign from the Union of Center - New Forces, with which he had been elected as a member of parliament in the first elections of 1974, due to the existence of a politician and also a member of parliament from the same party, who had collaborated with the junta. ..
The strange car accident
Prosecutor Dimitris Tsevas, who had taken over the case, said:"The case is being investigated in all directions and it leaves wide logical margins for the possibility of criminal action. It's a freak car accident. So strange that one cannot logically argue that it is an accident.”
It is noted that in those days everyone is looking for the three unknown cars that are supposed to have taken Panagoulis' car off the road. There were many questions and significant complaints from investigators and his family that were never answered. Ultimately important information was left in the dark and the rumors were never confirmed.
The funeral of Alekos Panagoulis takes place on May 5 and turns into a widespread democratic rally, while the main slogan, "He lives", which resonates in Athens, will be written on most of the city's streets
Alexandros Panagoulis was born in Glyfada. Second son of Athena Kakavoulis (1908-1991) and Vassiliou Panagoulis, army officer. Brother of Georgios Panagoulis, victim of the regime of the Colonels, and Efstathios Panagoulis, later a politician.
His life
On his father's side he comes from Dibri (Lampeia) Ilias and on his mother's side from Syvros Lefkada. Due to the occupation by the Axis forces, A. Panagoulis spent part of his childhood in Lefkada. He studied at the National Technical University of Athens at the School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering.
Politics
A free and democratic spirit, Alexandros Panagoulis joined the local centrist political forces from a young age:the Center Union (EC) of Georgios Papandreou. Specifically, A. Panagoulis joined the party's youth organization - Center Union Youth Organization (ONEK), later renamed Hellenic Democratic Youth (EDIN) - to take over after transition to its presidency on September 3, 1974.
Anti-dictatorial action
Alexandros Panagoulis actively participated in the fight for the restoration of democracy and against the military regime of G. Papadopoulos (1967-1973). He deserted from the army and founded the National Resistance organization. He exiled himself to Cyprus to formulate a plan of action. There he comes into contact with local politicians, such as Polykarpos Yorkatzis, in order to ask them to help in the resistance. He returns to Greece and together with his close associates plans the assassination attempt of the dictator Papadopoulos on August 13, 1968 near Varkiza. He fails and is arrested. As Oriana Falatsi notes in her interview with Alexandros Panagoulis after his release, his act was a political act against the dictatorship. Falatsi quotes A. Panagoulis as follows:I did not seek to kill a person. I am not capable of killing a human being. I sought to kill a tyrant.
After a day and night of continuous torture, he is taken half-dead to the hospital and then tried by the Military Court on November 3, 1962] and sentenced to death, together with other members of the National Resistance, on November 17, 196. He is transferred to Aegina for the execution, which, however, was aborted thanks to G. Papadopoulos, who personally intervened in court, requested the granting of pardon to the convicted Panagoulis. On November 25, 1968, Panagoulis was transferred from Aegina to the Military Prisons of Boyatiou (S.F.M.), where he was imposed the "penalty of walling in" as he says. He escaped from there on June 5, 1969, but was arrested again and temporarily taken to the camp in Goudi to be transferred after a month to Boyati prison again. There, isolation awaits him in a cell that was made especially for Panagoulis and was like a copy of a tomb. He tries to escape several times without success. He writes poems as an outlet. He continues to write even when all stationery is confiscated, using his blood for ink and the walls of his cell-tomb for paper.
A. Panagoulis, according to some, refuses the offer of pardon offered to him by the junta.
In August 1973 – after almost four and a half years of imprisonment – he was released based on the general amnesty that granted the status of colonels to political prisoners, following the failed attempt by G. Papadopoulos to liberalize his regime. He exiles himself again, this time to Florence, Italy, in order to reactivate the resistance, but in fact he continues the resistance in Greece by coming secretly to where he organizes resistance groups.
In the post-colonial period, Alexandros Panagoulis was elected deputy of the Second Athens with the Center-New Forces Union (EK-ND, today the Democratic Center Union) in the elections of November 17, 1974.
It seeks to isolate politicians who collaborated with the dictatorial Junta regime and unleashes a barrage of complaints. Shortly after his election, he broke with the leadership of his party because he had gathered information about the cooperation of Dimitris Tsatsos with the Huntic regime, with the consequence that he refused to coexist with the "traitor" in the same party and resigned. However, he remained in the Hellenic Parliament as an independent MP. He persists in his complaints and comes into open confrontation with the Minister of National Defense, Evangelos Averof and Dimitris Tsatsos. He received political pressure as well as threats to his life to withdraw his complaints, such as burglaries in his political office, messages left to him by strangers, etc.
As we mentioned above, he is killed on May 1st 1976 at the age of 36 following a car accident on Vouliagmenis Avenue (his car went and crashed into an underground store on the avenue perpendicular to the course), a few days before the disclosure of the files regarding its security instruments Junta (ESA file). The disclosure of the files, which never took place, was said to contain incontrovertible evidence against some politicians who collaborated with the junta.
According to many, the traffic accident was staged to put Alexandros Panagoulis out of the fight and to destroy the evidence he had in his possession. However, no evidence has been presented to date for all these speculations.
Alexandros Panagoulis is tortured daily, with the most imaginative, cruel and disgusting tortures throughout his detention. His self-control, self-discipline, stubbornness to stand up for what he believes in and his sense of humor act as shields thanks to which he manages to survive the physical and mental abuse. According to many, in the prisons of Boyatiou he writes his best poems on the wall of his cell or on tiny scraps of paper, often in ink with his own blood. Many of his poems did not survive.
But several of them he either managed to get out of prison in various ways or to rewrite them later thanks to his powerful mnemonic.
In 1972, while he was still in prison, his first poetry collection in Italian Altri seguiranno:poesie e documenti dal carcere di Boyati (Others will follow:poetry and documents from the Boyati Prisons) was published in Palermo with an introductory note by the Italian politician Ferruccio Paris and the Italian director and artist Pier Paolo Pasolini. For this work, A. Panagoulis was awarded the Viareggio International Literature Prize (Premio Viareggio Internazionnale) the following year. After his release, A. Panagoulis published in Milan his second poetry collection in Italian, Vi scrivo da un carcere in Grecia (Through a prison I am writing to you in Greece) with an introductory note by Pier Paolo Pasolini. It was preceded by the publication in Greek of notebooks such as the collection entitled The Paint.