Greek Junta Collapses

The officers who had ruled Greece since 1967 staked their credibility on Cyprus, and lost it within a week. When Turkish forces landed on 20 July, the regime of Dimitrios Ioannidis called up nearly every man of fighting age. The call up put heavy strain on an economy already in trouble, and the risk of open war with Turkey, a NATO ally, was real. Senior commanders abandoned Ioannidis and his policy.

On 23 July President Phaedon Gizikis called an emergency meeting of military chiefs and senior politicians from before the dictatorship. The armed forces leadership said the military would return to its professional role and stay out of forming a government. The politicians agreed that the right person to lead a transitional government was Konstantinos Karamanlis, the former prime minister who had been living in self imposed exile in Paris. Gizikis invited him back. Karamanlis landed at Ellinikon airport at about 2 a.m. on 24 July, to crowds celebrating in the streets, and was sworn in as prime minister by Archbishop Seraphim early that morning at the head of a government of national unity.

In Nicosia the coup collapsed at the same time. Nikos Sampson resigned on 23 July, and Glafcos Clerides was sworn in as acting president of the Republic of Cyprus, a role he held until Makarios returned.

The new leaders inherited the crisis rather than ending it. Turkish forces still held their bridgehead in the north, and talks between Britain, Greece and Turkey opened in Geneva on 25 July. When the second Turkish offensive began in August, Greece withdrew from NATO’s military wing in protest. At home, Karamanlis’s New Democracy party won a large majority in the November 1974 elections, a referendum ended the monarchy, and leading junta figures, including Papadopoulos and Ioannidis, were tried in 1975. Death sentences passed on the regime’s leaders were commuted to life imprisonment.