"What will a free man say?" He who is not afraid of death! These words belong to the great Nikos Kazantzakis. If the same great writer lived the troubled 1970s, it is very likely that he would have put the photo of Kostas Georgakis next to this phrase.
The Greek student was exactly what Kazantzakis described a few decades ago in an interview he had given. He was freer. And he was freer, because he was not afraid of death.
Georgakis saw his homeland sinking more and more into the darkness that had been put in by a handful of semi-insane juntas and he himself, although he lived and studied abroad, could not bear it. He wanted to shout. To scream. And he did. In a uniquely deafening way. His cry was so loud that it can be heard even today.
He was born on August 23, 1948 in Corfu. He was the son of a tailor. He had two brothers. An older sister, Katerina, and a younger brother, Aristotle.
His family managed with great effort and bloody savings to secure his studies in Italy. Costas went to Genoa to study geology.
Living from within the intense political climate that existed at that time, he also chooses a side and becomes a member of EDIN, the Youth of the Center Union.
The years in Italy alone can not be easily characterized. Georgakis there but his mind was back in Greece and what is happening. Some of his classmates describe him as a highly politicized young man who had been influenced by what was happening in his homeland. In no case did Georgakis do what we would call "student life" today.
He was dedicated to denouncing her dictatorship in GREECE. It clashes openly and practically with the brown "students" that the junta had "planted" in Italian universities and had formed their own organization, the "Lega". On June 26, 1970, shortly before his sacrifice, he gave an anonymous interview to Domenico Grassi and Maria Gracia Lizzo in the magazine "Sigla a" and revealed everything with names and addresses.
His identity is revealed by his Corfiot accent and he himself, afraid that the junta will "break out" on his family members, decides to do something even bigger, with the obvious goal of giving publicity and thus protecting his own people.
At the same time its people junta but also their Italian fascist collaborators, have begun to watch Georgakis who understands and accelerates his energy.
In order to fully understand the scene around Georgakis' sacrifice, we must have a picture of the time. We are in 1970. Three years after the imposition of the junta. Three years before Polytechnic uprising. Right in the middle, that is. At a crossroads, where the young student saw that there is no solution to the problem facing Greece as foreigners are silent and Greeks (with a few notable exceptions) do not react because they are afraid to do anything.
This is exactly the crucial point. Georgakis sees this as the absolute impasse and at the same time he cannot bear to see his country under the boot of the colonels. It is the point at which he decides to act. He decides to sacrifice himself in order for the enslavement of Greece by the junta to take on an international dimension.
Somehow, on the night of September 18, Georgakis, who has now made his decision, writes a letter to his father (you will read it later), gives his windproof jacket to Rozana's fiancée and leaves his house. .
He puts in front his Faraki 500araki, on the windshield of which he had his photo stuck Andrea Papandreou, and at about 3 in the morning it reaches Mateoti Square and heads to Palazzo Ducale, where the city courts were housed.
He takes three cans of gasoline from the trunk of his car and holding them in his hands he reaches the large gallery. Then he pours gasoline on his clothes and with a match lights the fire. Within fractions of a second, the flames had "swallowed" him.
There were no civilians at the scene at that time. Unique eyewitnesses of his sacrifice, four street cleaners who ran to help him. When they reached him, however, he shouted with all his strength left: "Long live free Greece."
When the fire was extinguished, Georgakis was taken to hospital. The doctors could not do anything. They were just waiting for the fatality which came about ten hours later.
When, after the proceedings, the Italians found out who the man who set himself on fire was, they came in contact with his father in Corfu. He was asked to travel to Italy because Costas had been the victim of a car accident and is fighting to stay alive:
"Costas is being treated at the San Martino hospital. "You must come here immediately," he was told.
As he describes himself, he learned the truth when he arrived at Brindisi airport by chance from an employee who had learned the news from the news! The next day in Genoa he had to go to the morgue.
The testimony of the tragic father to the investigator of the case, Konstantinos Papoutsis, is shocking: "The time has come and the priest accompanied me to the morgue. The medical examiner asked me to identify myself. It was burnt, that is, charcoal, burnt to a depth of three centimeters. Yes, this is my child… This is my Costas. I made my cross, kissed it and it collapsed ".
Shortly before leaving his home to complete his human sacrifice, Georgakis wrote a letter addressed to his father:
"Forgive me this act without crying. Your son is not a hero. He is a man like the others, perhaps with a little more fear. He kissed our earth, for me. After three years of violence, I can no longer stand it. I do not want you to take any risks because of my own actions but I can do nothing but think and act as a free person. I am writing to you in Italian, in order to immediately arouse everyone's interest in our problem. Long live democracy. Down with the tyrants. Our land, which gave birth to freedom, will eradicate tyranny. If you can, forgive me. "
Today, at the place where he set himself on fire, there is a commemorative plaque with the inscription in Italian: "To the young Greek Konstantinos Georgakis who sacrificed his 22 years for the Freedom and Democracy of his homeland. All free people skip in front of his heroic gesture. Free Greece will remember him forever ".
The body of the young student was buried for four whole months. The consul demands from Georgakis's father to read a fabricated statement to ANSA, in exchange for taking his child's body to Corfu. He refuses.
Although he was transported by his friends and classmates to the cemetery of the Italian city, the junta put various formal-bureaucratic obstacles so that the process could be completed formally. At the same time, it banned the immediate transport of the body to Greece. Finally, the lifeless body of the student was secretly transported to Corfu by the ship "Astypalea", in January 1971. His burial took place in the First Cemetery of Corfu.
"You dressed as a groom, you were enlightened as a nation. You became a spectacle of the soul, unfolding on the horizon. You are the bright, summary of our drama, our hands to the East and our hands to the West. "You are in the same candle, one resurrected light and our epitaph lament", wrote about him Nikiforos Vrettakos.