50 Drachma Greece / Kingdom of Greece (1944-1973) Silver

1967, Greece (Greek Junta). Silver 50 Drachmai Coin

Mint Year: 1970

Reference: KM-93.

Denomination: 50 Drachmai - The coup d'état of 21 April 1967.

Material: Silver (.900)

Weight: 12.5gm

Diameter: 30mm

On 21 April 1967, just weeks before the scheduled elections, a group of right-wing army officers led by Brigadier Stylianos Pattakos and Colonels George Papadopoulos and Nikolaos Makarezos seized power in a coup d'état.¹⁹ The colonels were able to seize power quickly by using elements of surprise and confusion. Pattakos was the commander of the Armour Training Centre (Κέντρο Εκπαίδευσης Τεθωρακισμένων, ΚΕΤΘ), based in Athens.

The coup leaders placed tanks in strategic positions in Athens, effectively gaining complete control of the city. At the same time, a large number of small mobile units were dispatched to arrest leading politicians, authority figures, and ordinary citizens suspected of left-wing sympathies, according to lists prepared in advance. One of the first to be arrested was Lieutenant General Grigorios Spandidakis, Commander-in-Chief of the Greek Army. The colonels persuaded Spandidakis to join them, having him activate a previously-drafted action plan to move the coup forward. Under the command of paratrooper Brigadier General Kostas Aslanides, the LOK took over the Greek Defence Ministry while Pattakos gained control of communication centres, the parliament, the royal palace, and – according to detailed lists – arrested over 10,000 people.

By the early morning hours, the whole of Greece was in the hands of the colonels. All leading politicians, including acting Prime Minister Panagiotis Kanellopoulos, had been arrested and were held incommunicado by the conspirators. At 6:00 a.m. EET, Papadopoulos announced that eleven articles of the Greek constitution were suspended.One of the consequences of these suspensions was that anyone could be arrested without warrant at any time and brought before a military court to be tried. Ioannis Ladas, then the director of ESA, recounted in a later interview that “Within twenty minutes every politician, every man, every anarchist who was listed could be rounded up ... It was a simple, diabolical plan”.Georgios Papandreou was arrested after a nighttime raid at his villa in Kastri, Attica. Andreas was arrested at around the same time, after seven soldiers armed with fixed bayonets and a machine gun forcibly entered his home. Andreas Papandreou escaped to the roof of his house, but surrendered after one of the soldiers held a gun to the head of his then-fourteen-year-old son George Papandreou.

Papadopoulos' junta attempted to re-engineer the Greek political landscape by coup. Papadopoulos as well as the other junta members are known in Greece by the term “Aprilianoi” (Aprilians), denoting the month of the coup. The term “Aprilianoi” has become synonymous with the term “dictators of 1974”.

The Greek junta or Regime of the Colonels was a right-wing military dictatorship that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974. On 21 April 1967, a group of colonels overthrew the caretaker government a month before scheduled elections which Georgios Papandreou’s Centre Union was favoured to win.

The dictatorship was characterised by policies such as anti-communism, restrictions on civil liberties, and the imprisonment, torture, and exile of political opponents. It was ruled by Georgios Papadopoulos from 1967 to 1973, but an attempt to renew its support in a 1973 referendum on the monarchy and gradual democratisation was ended by another coup by the hardliner Dimitrios Ioannidis, who ruled it until it fell on 24 July 1974 under the pressure of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, leading to the Metapolitefsi (“regime change”) (Greek: Μεταπολίτευση) to democracy and the establishment of the Third Hellenic Republic.