Product Description

The adventurous life of a major Greek politician and intellectual that runs through the tumultuous political scene of Greece in the 20th century, filled with revealing details and unknown events. The reader will follow the hero of the book from Patras of the Belle Époque era to the philosophical milieu of Heidelberg in the Interwar period, and he will return together with the young sociologist to interwar Greece which was beset by fierce political and ideological conflicts that led to the Regime of the 4th of August in 1936. The reader will then join Kanellopoulos in the front of the Greek-Italian War in 1940, and he will afterwards escape with him to the Middle East, where Kanellopoulos formed the Greek Sacred Band that joined the Allies against Rommel’s troops. Afterwards he will walk along Kanellopoulos in his lonely dramatic course during the Greek Civil War that raised pressing dilemmas in people’s conscience. The 1950’s and 1960’s saw Kanellopoulos as leading member of the Greek conservative party, along prime ministers Papagos and Karamanlis. The undermining of the democratic regime in the 60s is unfolded in revealing detail, bringing us to Kanellopoulos’ arrest in the morning of the coup of April 21st 1967, while he was serving as prime minister. The epilogue includes a unique, for a Greek politician, self-criticism in relation to postwar events. The book, which is based on extensive research in archives in Greece and abroad, is supplemented with rare, unpublished photos.