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“What will a free man say? He who does not fear death! These words belong to the great Nikos Kazantzakis. If the same great writer lived through the troubled 1970s, it is very likely that he would have put the photo of Kostas Georgakis next to this phrase.
The Greek student was exactly what Kazantzakis described a few decades ago in an interview he had given. He was freer. And he was freer, because he was not afraid of death.
Georgakis watched his homeland sink deeper and deeper into the darkness that had been put up by a handful of semi-crazy meetings and he himself, although he lived and studied abroad, could not bear it. I wanted to scream. Shout. And he did. In a unique deafening way. His scream was so loud that it can be heard even today.
Who was Costas Georgakis?
He was born on August 23, 1948 in Corfu. He was the son of a tailor. He had two brothers. An older sister, Katerina, and a younger brother, Aristotle.
His family managed with great effort and bloody savings to secure his studies in Italy. Costas went to Genoa study geology.
Living within the intense political climate that existed at that time, he also chose a side and became a member of EDIN, the Youth Center Union.
The years in Italy alone cannot be easily characterized. Georgakis is there but his mind was back on Greece and what is happening. Some of his colleagues describe him as a highly politicized young man who had been influenced by what was happening in his native land. In no case did Georgakis do what today we would call “student life.”
He dedicated himself to denouncing her dictatorship in Greece. It openly and practically clashes with the brown “students” that the junta had “planted” in Italian universities and formed its own organization, the “League”. On June 26, 1970, shortly before her sacrifice, she gave an anonymous interview to Domenico Grassi and Maria Grazia Lizzo in the magazine “Sigla a” and revealed everything by name and address.
His identity is revealed by his Corfiote accent and he himself, fearful that the junta “explodes” on his relatives, decides to do something even greater, with the obvious objective of publicizing and thus protecting his own people.
At the same time its people meeting but also his Italian fascist collaborators have begun to look at Georgakis who understands and accelerates his energy.
His unprecedented sacrifice
To fully understand the scene around Georgakis’s sacrifice, we must have a picture of the time. We are in 1970. Three years after the imposition of the board. Three years before Polytechnic survey. Right in the middle, that is. At a crossroads, where the young student saw that there is no solution to the problem facing Greece since foreigners are silent and Greeks (with notable exceptions) do not react because they are afraid to do anything.
This is exactly the crucial point. Georgakis sees this as an absolute impasse and at the same time he cannot bear to see his country under the boots of the colonels. It is the point at which you decide to act. He decides to sacrifice himself so that the slavery of Greece by the boards acquires an international dimension.
Somehow, on the night of September 18, Georgakis, who has already made his decision, writes a letter to his father (you will read it later), hands his windbreaker jacket to Rozana’s fiancee, and leaves their house. .
He places his Faraki 500araki in front, on the windshield of which he had his photo attached Andrea PapandreouAt about 3 in the morning he arrives at the Mateoti square and goes to the Palazzo Ducale, where the city courts were located.
He takes three cans of gasoline from the trunk of his car and, holding them in his hands, reaches the large gallery. Then she pours gasoline on her clothes and lights a fire with a match. In fractions of a second, the flames had “swallowed” her.
There were no civilians in the scene at the time. Unique eyewitnesses to his sacrifice, four street cleaners who ran to help him. When they approached him, however, he screamed with all his remaining strength: “Long live free Greece.”
When the fire was extinguished, Georgakis was taken to hospital. The doctors could do nothing. They were only waiting for the death that occurred about ten hours later.
The shocking words of his father and the last goodbye
When, after the process, the Italians discovered who the man who set himself on fire was, they contacted his father in Corfu. He was asked to travel to Italy because Costas had been the victim of a car accident and is struggling to stay alive:
“Costas is being treated at the San Martino hospital. “You must come here immediately,” they told him.
As he describes himself, he learned the truth when he arrived at Brindisi airport by chance thanks to an employee who had learned the news through the news. The next day in Genoa he had to go to the morgue.
The testimony of the tragic father to the investigator of the case, Konstantinos Papoutsis, is shocking: “The time has come and the priest accompanied me to the morgue. The medical examiner asked me to identify myself. It was burned, that is, coal, burned down to three centimeters deep. Yes, this is my son… This is my Costas. I made my cross, I kissed it and it collapsed ”.
Shortly before leaving his home to complete his human sacrifice, Georgakis wrote a letter addressed to his father:
“Forgive me this act without crying. Your son is not a hero. He is a man like the others, perhaps with a little more fear. He kissed our land, for me. After three years of violence, I can no longer bear it. I don’t want to. that you take no risk from my own actions, but I can do nothing but think and act like a free person. I am writing to you in Italian to immediately arouse everyone’s interest in our problem. Long live democracy. Down with tyrants. Our land, who gave birth to freedom, will eradicate tyranny. If you can, forgive me. “
Today, in the place where fire was set, there is a commemorative plaque with the inscription in Italian: “To the young Greek Konstantinos Georgakis who sacrificed his 22 years for the Freedom and Democracy of his native land. All free people jump in front of his heroic gesture. Free Greece will remember him forever. “
The body of the young student was buried for four whole months. The consul demands that Georgakis’s father read a fabricated statement to ANSA, in exchange for taking her son’s body to Corfu. He refuses.
Although he was transported by his friends and classmates to the cemetery of the Italian city, the board put up several formal-bureaucratic obstacles so that the process could be formally completed. At the same time, he prohibited the immediate transport of the body to Greece. Finally, the student’s lifeless body was secretly transported to Corfu by the ship “Astypalea”, in January 1971. His burial took place in the First Corfu Cemetery.
“You dressed as a groom, you were enlightened as a nation. You became a spectacle of the soul, unfolding on the horizon. You are the brilliant summary of our drama, our hands to the East and our hands to the West.” You are on the same candle , a risen light and our epitaph regret, “he wrote about it. Nikiforos Vrettakos.
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