The Greek junta

It was a normal morning.
I woke up, got ready and left the house to go to school.

The street was strangely deserted. At the corner a guy in a dark trenchcoat asked me: "where are you going little one?"

I answered I was waiting for the school bus to pick me up.

"Go back home",he said,"there will be no school today"

"Why?"

"There was a military coup d'etat during the night, a military dictatorship",he said.

So I went happily back home and announced smiling to my mother that "we have a dictatorship,so no school today"

I was amazed that my mother didn't share my enthusiasm. Instead she burst into tears and run to wake my grandmother.

She knew what a dictatorship meant,I didn't.

My father returned home from out of town and he too collapsed and started crying like a child.

When he calmed down he gave me my first lesson of what democracy and dictatorship mean.

Then he and my mother purged their library of any book who could be even remotely considered "center left" ,even Bertrand Russell had to go, and dropped them in the sea.

21st of April 1967 it was when the tanks went rolling through the avenues of Athens and for the next 7 years we lived in a surrealistic deadly-dangerous military Kitsch reign of nobodies, complete with exile camps,torture and all the treats of a Junta. 

The Junta collapsed in the summer of 1974 after a student/youth uprising (November 1973) that had been savagely crushed. 

I wasn't happy with the photos I found in the Net.Too small and fuzzy. So take a look at the first 1,5 minute of the video to get the mood of the first few days after 21.4.67. 
The voice of the radio announcer reads the law of emergency...everyone found in the streets  after sunset will be shot without warning...police can arrest anyone,anywhere for any reason...etc etc.

PS. Notice that at that time Greece had a king and a royal family...soooo last century...:)