The liberation of Karditsa

On 12 March 1943 units of the Greek People’s Liberation Army – ELAS – marched in close order into Karditsa, a farming district town on the western edge of the Thessalian plain. A few hours earlier the Italian garrison stationed there had left the town and withdrawn to nearby Trikala. Karditsa passed into the hands of the partisans and their political wing, the National Liberation Front (EAM), and remained under their control for almost seven months. In Greek collective memory and in Greek historiography the event lives on as the liberation of “the first free town of occupied Europe”. That description – popularised, according to Greek authors, by BBC broadcasts at the time – is, however, more a symbol than a precise fact, and it calls for several qualifications.

Thessaly under Italian occupation

After the conquest of Greece in the spring of 1941 the country was divided into three zones of occupation. The Germans kept the most important strategic points for themselves – Athens and Piraeus, Salonika, part of Crete and a strip along the Turkish border – Bulgaria took eastern Macedonia and Thrace, and most of mainland Greece, including Thessaly, was handed to the Italians. Thessaly was held by the Italian 24th Infantry Division Pinerolo, with its headquarters at Larissa and garrisons in the district towns. Formally the country was governed by a collaborationist government in Athens, headed from December 1942 by Konstantinos Logothetopoulos, but in the provinces its authority was in practice illusory.

Thessaly – the most fertile region of the country, with its granary on the plain and the Pindus and Agrafa mountains to the west – quickly became one of the centres of resistance. The occupiers requisitioned grain, and after the Great Famine of the winter of 1941–1942 the peasants of the plain defended their harvests against requisitioning, which gave EAM the basis for a mass organisation. From 1942 the first ELAS bands were active in the mountains around Karditsa. Like the group led by Aris Velouchiotis in neighbouring Roumeli, whose first appearance in June 1942 marked the start of the ELAS struggle, they disarmed gendarmerie posts, killed collaborators and attacked smaller Italian detachments. The part played by Greek partisans in blowing up the Gorgopotamos viaduct in November 1942 also showed the British that ELAS was a force to be reckoned with.

The winter of insurrection

At the turn of 1942 and 1943 the armed movement in Greece took on a character that Greek historians even describe as a “state of insurrection” in the provinces. On 12 February 1943, near the village of Oxynia close to Kalambaka, ELAS units routed an Italian column of some 350 soldiers – a clash regarded as the first major battle of the Greek resistance. On 4–6 March in western Macedonia, in the area of Siatista and Fardykambos, partisans and volunteers from the surrounding villages surrounded a battalion of the Italian garrison from Grevena and forced it to surrender; more than 550 Italians were taken prisoner, and ELAS captured artillery for the first time.

The Italian command then began to pull in scattered garrisons from places that could not be defended effectively. At the beginning of March ELAS units blew up a railway bridge near Karditsa, cutting the town off from the line to Volos and Larissa. The Italian garrison, fearing an attack on its barracks and being cut off, was ordered to evacuate.

11–12 March 1943

The event itself was less dramatic than the later legend. Some popular chronicles speak of an ELAS “campaign” that ended with the capture of the town – in reality there was no fight for Karditsa itself: the partisan campaign forced the Italians out, but the town did not have to be stormed. According to most sources the Italians left on the evening of 11 March or during the night of 11–12 March, driving off towards Trikala; on the morning of 12 March ELAS detachments from the surrounding mountains and ELAS reservists from the town itself entered, welcomed by the inhabitants. Some accounts and a number of local authors give 11 March as the date of liberation, other publications 12 March, when the partisans took over the town. The commanders most often named are the kapetanios of the local Thessalian bands; the presence of Velouchiotis himself, who was then operating mainly in Roumeli, is not confirmed by the sources.

In the town EAM took power: local committees, a people’s militia (Politofylaki) and people’s courts were set up, and the stores of grain requisitioned by the occupiers were opened. Karditsa became a centre of the emerging “Free Greece” – an area in the Pindus and Agrafa mountains where EAM structures operated over the following months, and later a partisan airfield on the Nevropoli plateau. Young peasants now joined the ELAS units in Thessaly in large numbers, as did former officers of the Greek army who had previously kept their distance from the communist-led movement. For many people in Greece the news that a district town was free of the occupier was the first tangible proof that the occupation would not last for ever.

The Italian withdrawal was not peaceful. On the same day, 12 March, an Italian motorised column burned the village of Tsaritsani near Elassona, regarded as an EAM stronghold; around 360 of its 600 houses went up in flames, and between 40 and 45 people – depending on the source – were shot. From then on, reprisals against villages became a permanent part of the occupiers’ response to partisan successes.

How true is the “first town” claim?

The claim that Karditsa was “the first town in Europe liberated from Nazi occupation” needs two qualifications. First, Karditsa’s occupiers were Italians, not Germans. Second, partisans had already taken over towns in other countries: in Yugoslavia Tito’s forces captured Užice in the autumn of 1941 and held the so-called Republic of Užice for several weeks, and in Greece itself, on 29 January 1943, ELAS disarmed the gendarmerie in Siatista in Macedonia, which English-language studies call the first liberated town in Greece. Karditsa was, however, the first important district town in Greece that partisans took over from an Italian garrison and held for a longer period – and in that sense its symbolic significance is justified.

Its place in the war

The liberation of Karditsa was part of a wider phenomenon: in the spring of 1943 the Italians withdrew from Grevena (21 March) and Metsovo (22 April), and in an April report the Italian command admitted that its control over north-eastern, central and south-western Greece was “very uncertain, not to say non-existent”. In May 1943 ELAS set up a General Headquarters with Stefanos Sarafis as military commander and Velouchiotis as “kapetanios”, and by the summer it had some 10,000 partisans in its regular units. After the Italian armistice in September 1943 the Pinerolo Division surrendered to the partisans, and in October Karditsa was occupied by the Germans, who remained there until the autumn of 1944. The growth of ELAS power in the Thessalian countryside also meant mounting conflict with the non-communist resistance organisations and with the government-in-exile – the seed of the later Greek Civil War.