Konstantinos Konstantinidis – Amphiktyon
War begins easily,
but ends with difficulty.
It changes humanity
and first of all kills the youth.
The one who starts it
rarely emerges victorious;
arrogance overtakes him,
far removed from reason.
I experienced Nazism,
I lived through Fascism as well.
From a privileged child in Kyparissia
I became poor.
Self-censorship in the newspaper
during the years of the dictatorship;
the “AGON” of Trifylia stood lifeless
within the silence of the Metaxas regime.
During the Occupation the business closed;
my father refused
to support the occupier.
A victim of war —
the business shut down forever.
Some things were taken by the occupiers,
others by the National Resistance;
my father was executed by the Nazis,
while help from anywhere was nonexistent.
And then began
the wandering life of the migrant.
It was difficult to find shelter
in those years,
as it is in the present century.
First in Patras,
then in occupied Athens,
amid executions,
fear, and hunger.
In a small room in Aigaleo
we lived as a family.
My youngest brother,
struck by typhus,
burned with high fever,
a highly contagious disease.
Medical care then
was an unattainable dream.
But my mother, with love,
took him in her arms —
he had become skin and bones —
and carried him to the Infectious Diseases Hospital
in Korydallos.
They placed him
in the ward of the dying.
Yet he survived.
Today he is a veteran general.
And I myself, from an Italian,
received a kick.
At the market, the carabiniere
threw the basket with the rabbit into the air.
He lifted me high and then I fell back down,
and the rabbit returned to the same place.
Yet a decade later,
at NATO, in Italy,
the Carabinieri presented arms to me,
thinking I was a general;
with two silver stars, I was only a lieutenant.
My thoughts always return
to the children of nations at war —
Arabs, Iranians, Russians, Ukrainians, and Jews.
War strikes the young first;
it shatters the dreams of youth.
People are never the same
after war.
To suddenly see
the head of a boy your own age
severed by a sea mine,
washed ashore in Kyparissia
so that they could extract the explosives…
In those years, life had no value.
Children with “plasticine macaroni”
played with explosives, yellowed
by malaria and Atabrine.
One alone burned like gunpowder,
but together they became dynamite.
And so children
were blown apart.
Orphans swollen from hunger
on Akademias Street.
Their final breath:
“I’m hungry, dear lady…”
and then deadly silence.
Nearly four hundred thousand children
during the Occupation —
a bloody sacrifice
to the plunder of Nazism.
What became of the youth
of that generation?
By what right
did they cut short our youthful dreams?
Instead of playing as children,
we lived in rags,
hungry and skeletal.
The days became centuries;
freedom was slow to dawn.
Yet I was fortunate;
I had my uncle, a wise man.
He taught me letters,
philosophy,
and the quintessence of life.
The older ones
raised high
the flag of Resistance.
To see your father dead,
executed with a final bullet…
That bullet struck me too,
though I stood far away;
and on an oilcloth
they carried him to the cemetery
while the blockade still surrounded the area.
To the hero Christos Konstantinidis
we recently erected a monument.
The Italian occupiers
paid some small compensations.
But the Germans, who caused
the greatest genocide
and the devastation of villages,
paid only the first installment
of the occupation loan — and nothing more.
Perhaps some Erinys or Themis
will one day set things right.
Their atrocious crimes
will burden them forever;
Justice will not absolve them.
They imposed memoranda upon us;
they repeated a second crime
without shame, without responsibility.
“To sin twice” is considered madness.
Terrible too were the crimes
of Turkey.
I lived in Smyrna
and came to know the tragedy.
In Pontus and Asia Minor
a great Genocide took place.
An ancient Hellenism
was uprooted
by the conqueror.
The Pontic Greeks were slaughtered,
the others expelled
from their ancestral homes.
Only our dead remain there,
and they create fears within them.
All these tragedies
wounded the Greek soul.
They tempered it like steel
and made it strong.
And while we long
to live in peace,
they question our islands
and view Hellenism with hostility.
But the Greek answers them,
as his ancestors once did,
with few words:
“Mολών λαβέ” — “Come and take them.”
Yet we possessed high morale
and a longing for freedom.
The National Resistance in the mountains
gave us hope and wings.
But then were born
the eggs of Division:
some sided with Moscow,
others with the Allies.
And whoever spoke of Hellenism
was considered an enemy
by their generation.
The accursed day
of Attila’s invasion —
the betrayal of Cyprus
by the junta mafia
and reckless party politics.
We served the homeland faithfully;
we did not betray it.
We loved it as our mother.
Some of us gave our hearing,
others gave other parts of themselves.
And still we have not retired;
and wherever we may go,
we shall remain here.
Heroes are only those
who sacrificed themselves for the homeland.
Hail, heavenly Greece eternal!
(28 May 2026)
Amphiktyon – Major General (Ret.) Konstantinos Konstantinidis
Writer – Member of the Greek Literary Society