WHY GREECE'S COLONELS ARE THAT WAY

RATHER like a stern father rewarding good behavior, Premier George Papadopoulos last week returned several previous liberties to the Greek people. He was observing both the Easter season and the second anniversary of the coup that ousted the previous government and brought Papadopoulos and his fellow army colonels to power. He was also trying to head off criticism of the Greek regime from the NATO ministers' meeting in Washington. Announced the Prime Minister: 1) freedom of assembly and association will be restored; 2) homes will be off limits to policemen without warrants; 3) press censorship will be reviewed; 4) some of the nearly 2,000 political exiles who have been held on Aegean islands may be brought home, and some government employees ousted by the regime will get their jobs back. Papadopoulos seemed not to notice one irony: the press conference revealing all these freedoms was held in the now vacant Senate chamber of the Parliament building in Athens. One freedom that the birthplace of democracy has not recovered is a democratic assembly.

Such subtleties apparently do not trouble Papadopoulos and his colonels because they are elementary men. Or so it seems, for in a complex world they are trying to forge an anachronistically simplistic nation. Long hair is now immoral for schoolboys; the government has ordered haircuts, and in some cases police wielded the shears themselves. Bouzouki tavernas, where high-spirited Greeks loved to smash crockery in time with the frenzied music, have been tamed: guests are no longer allowed to break even a single saucer. Miniskirts are forbidden for young girls, and bar girls are being discouraged. Government officials must attend church--other Greeks are urged to do so to build a nation of "Christian Greeks"--while anyone who publicly doubts God or the army may be held guilty of blasphemy. These spiritual up-liftings are hastened, opponents of the military government say, by torture as well as exile. "Christians behave themselves because they are afraid of going to hell," explains Deputy Prime Minister Stylianos Pattakos. "Likewise, under our regime, Greeks behave because they are afraid. Only the bad people are going to be punished."

Small-Town Morality. In sophisticated Athens, such sermonizing is glumly greeted. Few politicians from other parties have joined the colonels since their coup. Most refer to them as steno-kephalos, or narrow heads. Athens wits insist that Nikolaos Makarezos was selected to oversee the economy as Minister of Coordination because he was the colonel who knew how to add and subtract. Retired diplomat and Nobel laureate Georges S. Seferiades laments the "state of enforced torpor." But out in the stony, sun-washed countryside beyond Athens, the colonels' austerities are better received.

Greece is a nation of small towns, most of them mountain-isolated, fiercely independent, suspicious and resentful. Almost half the 11,516 settlements in the country are hamlets of fewer than 200 people. From such towns and their debilitating poverty came Papadopoulos, Pattakos, Makarezos and the remainder of the nearly 300 nonEstablishment army officers who made the revolution. "We were all so poor," says Secretary-General of Interior Ioannis Ladas,one of the participants in the coup, "that we called Papadopoulos 'the rich man' because his father was a schoolteacher." The colonels understand the towns and despise the glib and loose culture of cities. They intend to save Greece with old-fashioned country morality.

Faith and Family Honor. To understand both men and towns a little better, TIME Correspondent Wilton Wynn toured the home villages of the four top colonels. On Crete, he visited Aghia Paraskevi (pop. 154), where Pattakos was born. He stopped at Dirahion (pop. 613) in the Peloponnesus, where loannis Ladas grew up, and Gravia (pop. 690), home of Nikolaos Makarezos. He stopped at Elaiohorion (pop. 280), a village surrounded by low hills, wheatfields, vineyards and olive groves, where Papadopoulos' father was schoolmaster. In each town the foundations were the same: the church, the cafe, and a code of ethics grounded in faith and family honor.

Since the days of Ottoman occupation, village churches have been more than houses of worship. They also developed into centers of Greek patriotism and serve as town halls where local problems can be threshed out and the people protected from the world below before they reach the haven of heaven above. The Premier has already remembered his church at Elaiohorion by giving it new pews and a lectern, an icon stand and a bishop's chair. Pattakos' sister Irene, who still lives in Aghia Paraskevi, recalls their religious upbringing. "Mother taught us to make the sign of the cross before sleeping. My brother not only made the sign before his face but also on his pillow. I used to tease him by pretending to erase the cross from his pillow with my hand. He would make one sign after another, until I gave up."

What of the Women? There are no bar girls to be found in any of the villages. The men, after a day's farming in the stony fields, or, at Gravia, in the bauxite mines, stroll to the cafe, lay down their crooked walking sticks and sip ouzo or Cretean tsikoudhia while they play cards and talk. The women, too, work the fields, and for diversion "they have their Sunday evening walk," says a village elder in Aghia Paraskevi. "On Sunday evening, everybody gets into the streets and walks up and down until they get tired." A young Gravian in shabby black suit and cap explains: "You must remember that this is a mountain village. We still expect our women to behave. No decent woman would be seen smoking, going to the cafe or riding a bicycle. If a girl goes out alone with a boy, it is as if they had gone to bed together. If they see each other during the big Sunday evening promenades and want to get married, they have to ask their parents to arrange it."

Poverty pervaded all the towns in the colonels' youth. Each of the leaders needed family sacrifices to get him into high school, cadet school and finally the comfortable middle-class security of an army commission. "Our breaths stank from hunger," Ladas remembers bitterly, adding that the first meal that ever made him feel stuffed was served at cadet school. A friend recalled last week that Makarezos as a boy "used to hang around when they dug potatoes. He would pick up the culls and take them home for his mother to cook." Poverty was complicated by what Greek peasants, with wonderful exactitude, refer to as "eaters"--the bureaucrats they had to bribe, the merchants who bought their produce at unscrupulously low prices, the moneylenders who kept them in perpetual bondage. In one of his first acts as Premier, Papadopoulos forgave farmers' debts to the national bank .of agriculture. "You are the clear heads and the soul of the nation," he told a delegation that came to thank him.

Later Hatred. In later years, the colonels and the country folk developed a special hatred--this one for the Communists, who provoked civil war. In Dirahion, a split-level village where a fast-running mountain stream divides the town, the wrinkled village clerk explains why. "It was in 1947, right there," he says pointing. "Ioannis Ladas' mother tried to run across the street, carrying a baby nephew in her arms. Guerrillas shot her down, killed them both. She was a good woman." In Elaiohorion, Mayor and Cafe Proprietor Nikos Papathanasou, a distant cousin of Papadopoulos, was tortured by Communists, and so were three other men. The village doctor was killed by guerrillas and has never been replaced. Greece's foreign relations are now shaped by such intimate memories and private hatreds.

The colonels are banking on ingrained village traditions to make them a success. "Our revolution succeeds or fails not in the cities but in the countryside," Pattakos says. "The air in the cities is never as fresh as that in the country." Nor perhaps is the love of freedom so violent. Last week in the central-Greece village of Megalo Kalivia, 40 peasants were hurt and two score more arrested in a pitchfork battle with police. The battle flared over a strip of ground that the peasants have always used for sheep grazing. Those new eaters in Athens want to erect a meat-packing plant there.

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