In 1941, a 19-year-old law student climbed the Acropolis in the dark and tore down the Nazi swastika flag that the Germa...

In 1941, a 19-year-old law student climbed the Acropolis in the dark and tore down the Nazi swastika flag that the German occupiers had planted on the sacred rock. His name was Lakis Santas, and what he and his friend Manolis Glezos did on the night of May 30, became the first act of resistance by Greeks under occupation. Santas was born in Patras on February 22, 1922, to a family originally from Lefkada. He had only just enrolled at the University of Athens law school when the Germans arrived. The flag came down just weeks into the occupation, a defiant signal that not everyone had accepted defeat. The act made him a hunted man. By 1942, he had joined the resistance movement EAM and later fought with ELAS against the occupiers across central Greece, where he was wounded in 1944. Liberation did not bring safety. His left-wing politics made him a target of the postwar Greek state, and between 1946 and 1950 he was exiled to Ikaria, imprisoned at Psyttaleia, and sent to the notorious Makronisos detention camp. After escaping to Italy and later settling in Canada, where he was granted political asylum, Santas did not return to Greece until 1963. He was arrested again during the military junta years that followed. He spent the rest of his working life doing odd jobs to accumulate enough contributions to qualify for a pension. In September 2010, he published a memoir titled "One Night on the Acropolis," reflecting on the act that defined his entire life. He remained characteristically modest about it, saying that thousands of men and women were killed in the resistance and that he never saw himself as the story's center. Santas died in Athens on April 30, 2011, at the age of 89, before the anniversary of the night he and Glezos climbed the Acropolis and changed history. #Greece #WWII #GreekResistance