What I can see

The statue of Konstantinos Karamanlis was sculpted by Tzanoulinos Praxitelis and the simple lines do not exude a Doric style, but a lack of plasticity. It belongs to the category of monumental sculpture, without however introducing anything new or reframing older artistic forms. Karamanlis is depicted leaning on a marble block, a technique for the sculpture’s better stability, due to its size.

What I can't see

Konstantinos Karamanlis (1907-1998) had been a member of parliament since 1935, Prime Minister for 13 years and twice President of the Republic. He is a political figure identified with the transition from dictatorship to democracy and the country’s entry to the European Union. The peak of his political career began in 1955, when he succeeded Alexandros Papagos as Prime Minister, due to his death. He was a favourite of the palace, as he was considered popular, capable and a unifier, in a post-Civil War Greece that had its eyes on the United States and the ties that had already begun to develop between the two countries. King Paul assigned him to form a government before his party (Hellenic Alarm) elects a president, a move that angered the opposition and members of the ruling party, although later, Karamanlis was elected president and received the parliament’s mandate. At the beginning of his premiership, he had to deal with urgent problems, such as the Cyprus problem and Greek-Turkish relations. During the following terms, his government became more authoritarian, with systematic persecution of leftists, among whom was Manolis Glezos. He was responsible for many incidents of electoral violence, the informal establishment of parastatal organizations and the institutional establishment of the General Directorate of National Security, which targeted and persecuted leftists and communists, which brought back a civil war climate, extreme polarization, social unrest and the discontent of the palace. Following all this, he was forced to resign and left Greece. With the political crisis of 1967, for which the palace was mainly responsible, the choice of Karamanlis as prime minister, within the framework of a coalition government, might had been a solution, which however was not materialized and to a great extent led to the military dictatorship. With the fall of the dictatorship, he took over as prime minister in a government of national unity. He founded the New Democracy party and was one of the founders of the political rebaptism of the right, that is, from that of nationalism to that of extroverted European liberalism. At the same time, he contributed to the mitigation of the post-civil war rhetoric against the left and communism and legitimized the Greek Communist Party (KKE), in a period, however, when the left did not constitute a political “threat” to the right. His characteristic phrase “we belong to the West” is a part of the Greek modern history, clarifying Greece’s unwavering orientation towards NATO and the EU. Together with political forces from different ideological spaces, he contributed to the post-dictatorial restart of the country, which now had a new political system (parliamentary republic) after the abolition of the constitutional monarchy and the political marginalization of the military forces. According to some historians and political analysts, the post-dictatorship election of Karamanlis probably prevented a new civil war, even though this hypothesis has not been sufficiently proven. Furthermore, Karamanlis, since the 1950s, had been identified with the “land- for- apartment exchange system”, which on the one hand caused the almost anarchic urban planning in Greek cities, but at the same time solved serious housing problems and favoured the upward social mobility of the lower classes. Karamanlis is considered a political benefactor in Thessaloniki, as during his time, the TIF, the Seafront and the New Seafront were expanded and the AUTH campus was built on the site of the old Jewish cemetery, which had been completely destroyed by the Nazis. It had been widely circulated that Karamanlis was a Nazi collaborator, but these accusations have not been based on sufficient historical evidence.

Info

• Address: Sea- Front

Bibliography