Eleni Vlachou, Greece
By Global Journalist Staff Posted Sat, Apr 1 2000
Eleni Vlachou, publisher of the distinguished Athens daily Kathimerini gained widespread respect when she defiantly ceased publication rather than submit to censorship during the 1967-74 Greek military junta.
Born Dec. 18, 1911, Vlachou started in 1935 as a reporter at her father’s paper, Kathimerini, and quickly made a name for herself with a regular political column. She assumed control of her father’s publishing concerns upon his death in 1951. She ran Kathimerini, Messimvrini, and the weekly magazine, Eikones, until 1987 when she sold her media interests.
In April 1967, when a group of Greek army colonels seized power in a coup, Vlachou refused to submit to military pressure and censorship, choosing to close her papers instead. Although the government pressured her to republish, she refused and concentrated instead on giving outspoken interviews to foreign correspondents about the junta’s suppression of press freedom. Regardless of personal risk, she used every opportunity to denounce the colonels.
On Sept. 28, 1967, Vlachou was arrested and questioned for four hours about an interview published in the Turin, Italy, daily La Stampa, in which she called the junta leaders “mediocrities.” She was placed under house arrest on Oct. 4 and told she would be tried before a military court for breaking martial law and insulting the authorities. That same month, IPI Report, then a monthly bulletin, published on its front page the photographed facsimile of an open letter she had written beforehand for publication “in the event I was stopped to express myself freely.” The letter, received by the IPI Secretariat in Zurich a week after her arrest, implored the world press not to stop writing about Greece. “Don’t stop asking why the Greek government is not keeping its promises [to restore freedom of the press] ... Don’t believe for a minute that what the foreign press writes leaves the colonels cool and undisturbed, that they don’t care. They care desperately … By now people with sense the world over know what has happened to Greece. And I ask them to worry about it. It may prove contagious.” It was a passionate plea from a fearless woman who, even after her arrest, continued to defy the colonels, and it made front-page headlines around the world.
In December 1967, Vlachou was able to flee in disguise to London, where she sought political asylum. Using London as her base, she campaigned tirelessly against military rule in her country. She made speeches, gave interviews, published the English-language Hellenic Review and wrote Under House Arrest, a book about the junta. Vlachou returned to Greece after the military dictatorship fell in 1974 and resumed publication of Kathimerini on the 50th anniversary of the day when her father published the first issue of the newspaper. That same year, she was elected to the first post-dictatorship parliament as a deputy for the New Democracy Party.
Vlachou died Oct. 14, 1995, and was buried with full state honors. She was a “truly great figure in Greek journalism,” Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou said. “She was unwavering in her principles and her beliefs … Her immediate reaction to the coup of Apr. 21, 1967, with the cessation of publication of Kathimerini and her other publications, is a crowning moment of resistance in the field of journalism.”