When Greece went to war against Italy in 1940, the army officially barred women from fighting. What happened next rewrot...

When Greece went to war against Italy in 1940, the army officially barred women from fighting. What happened next rewrote that completely. The women of Epirus kept the war effort alive from the first days of the Greco-Italian War. They opened their homes to soldiers, supplied food, blankets, and clothing, carried ammunition up steep mountain ravines, nursed wounded men, and helped army engineers repair roads and bridges in the Pindus Mountains, where temperatures regularly turned deadly. They did all of this without ever being asked to enlist. Everything shifted under Axis occupation. Through National Solidarity, the social welfare arm of the National Liberation Front (EAM), Greek women moved from support roles into active resistance. Of the three million people who joined National Solidarity, 1.74 million were women. EAM became the first organization in Greek history to formally recruit women for combat. At first, women fought alongside men in mixed units. As their numbers grew, they formed their own platoons. In Thessaly, a 16-year-old named Maria Kalamboka took the rebel nickname "Yiannakis" and joined the armed resistance in 1942. An EAM newspaper reported in September 1943 from Macedonia that "the women today took up arms and went to the mountains." When Chrysoula Tamia-Jefroni was assigned to the 50th Regiment of Pieria, she found female guerrillas already there waiting. The resistance press captured the spirit of these women directly. A letter from Asimoula, a fighter in Parnassos who could not read or write, moved the editors of Women's Action to note simply: "And yet this Asimoula went out to the mountain." In May 1943, Kostoula of Roumeli wrote to Young Generation magazine: "So what if I am a woman? Am I not a daughter of the same country? And the country today needs all its children." The resistance government, the Political Committee of National Liberation, also became the first Greek governing body to call on women to vote and participate in political life, 86 years ago this decade. #GreekHistory #WWII #OxiDay