The underground press during the greek civil war
After the liberation of Greece the leftist publications experienced a short period of legality. From 1944 until 1946 more than 300 newspapers and magazines were published; but they were on the verge of a very thin and fragile legitimacy. This period did not last long: the eruption of the Greek Civil War pushed them back in illegality. On December 27, 1947 the Sofoulis government passed the “Obligatory Law 509” which banned the Communist Party and the pro-communist press. “The promotion of ideas which have the overt purpose to overthrow the regime by violent means, the overthrow of the detaining social system and the detachment of a part of the national territory” would be punished with imprisonment or death. If this offense was committed by the press, “the responsibility would lie with the author, the director or the publisher of the newspaper”.

From the introduction of “Law 509” until the end of the civil war in 1949, the Communist Party, the Democratic Army of Greece, the Greek Agrarian Party and other pro-communist organizations published more than 130 newspapers and magazines in order to propagandize their political ideas and deconstruct the anti-communist propaganda. These publications were usually issued in mountainous areas controlled by the Democratic Army.

The proposed project will use these newspapers in order to provide new elements and alternative interpretations on the “child abduction” and the “role of the women” which are two major and debatable issues of the Greek Civil War, it will compare for the first time some aspects of the Greek and the Spanish clandestine press and it will draw the image of Spain in order to discover and highlight new similarities and differences of the two cases.