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[supporttheunderdog]

This is a man whose politics I disagree with but who was clearly a hero in the classic Greek mould.

Apostolos Santas, who died on April 30 aged 89, was one of a pair of teenagers who, a month after the German invasion of Greece, tore the swastika flag from the Acropolis in an act of defiance that has come to symbolise their country's resistance to Nazism.

Apostolos Santas
5:15PM BST 22 May 2011 1 Comment
German tanks had rolled into Greece in early April 1941. By the end of the month a huge swastika was hoisted over the Acropolis in Athens, towering over Greece's blue-and-white flag which was allowed to stay on a smaller pole nearby.

"Lakis" Santas, a 19-year-old law student at Athens University, and his 18-year-old friend, Manolis Glezos, determined to remove the Nazi flag which, as they put it, "offended all human ideals". They discovered, from a library book, that the north side of the Acropolis contained a natural cave leading from the base to the top which had been used as a secret passage in ancient times and seemed to offer a chance of evading detection.

On the night of May 30, armed with only a torch and a pocket knife and inspired by Leonidas's heroic stand at Thermopylae, they crept through the undergrowth and entered the cave.

When they eventually emerged at the top of the Acropolis they found, to their dismay, that the flagpole was 50ft high, with the swastika firmly tethered to the top. It took three hours before they succeeded in scaling the pole and cutting the ropes to bring the banner down. According to their later account, they tore off five pieces for themselves and for friends, then threw the rest of the flag down a well in the cave before making their escape. At the base of the Acropolis they were stopped by a Greek police officer, who let them go.

In the morning Athenians woke up to find that the hated swastika was gone, replaced for a few precious hours by the Greek flag. The Gestapo immediately announced that the perpetrators would be executed if caught and launched a manhunt. The boys' mothers burned the pieces of the flag and a diary of their exploits.

Their act would have remained unknown to the wider Greek populace had not the tightly-censored Athenian press given the event extensive front-page coverage under strongly-worded editorials "condemning" the perpetrators. The story of the removal of the flag continued to inspire the Greek Resistance throughout the war, but the truth of how the flags were switched remained a mystery.

The details became known only after the war ended in 1945, when the police officer who had stopped the boys told of his encounter, bringing Santas and Glezos a brief celebrity. It did not last. As communists, they soon found themselves caught up in the civil war between communists and nationalists which raged in the power vacuum created by the end of the German occupation. During the conflict both men were tried and given death sentences that were eventually commuted following a public outcry.

Apostolos Philippos Santas, commonly known as Lakis, was born on February 22 1922 on the Ionian island of Lefkada, and began studying Law at Athens University in 1940.

After their adventures on the Acropolis, he and Glezos became active in the Greek Resistance. In 1942 they were betrayed and arrested, though the Germans failed to make the connection with the earlier assault on the Acropolis, even though the boys had left their fingerprints on the flagpole. Santas was later released under an amnesty, and in 1943 he joined the communist partisans, fighting the occupiers in the mountains of central Greece.

In 1948, during the Greek Civil War, Santas was imprisoned under sentence of death on the island of Makronisos, but he managed to escape to Italy and was eventually granted political asylum in Canada. He returned to Greece in 1963, but four years later found himself in prison again after the military junta seized power.

Santas's wife, Cleopatra, predeceased him; he is survived by their two daughters.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituar ... antas.html