The Years Greece Woke Up.

On the eighteenth of October, 1963, Giorgos Seferis received a telegram in Athens informing him that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was sixty-three years old, had spent most of his professional life as a diplomat, and had published across four decades a body of work that most of the literary world had not read. The Nobel committee, characteristically, had taken its time.

Greece was not slow to respond. The celebration was extraordinary — not merely national pride at a prestigious foreign award, but something more specific. Seferis was the right Nobel for the right moment. His poetry was difficult, allusive, saturated with the weight of Greek history and the melancholy of displacement; he had been born in Smyrna, which was no longer Greek when he was writing, and the loss of that place ran through everything he wrote. But it was the modern Greek language he used — demotic and alive — and the prize was partly a recognition that this language, which had spent centuries being contested and suppressed and simplified, was capable of sustaining great literature.

The 1960s were the decade Greece understood what it was.

The economic numbers were remarkable by themselves. Greece grew at an average of around seven percent annually through most of the decade — one of the fastest growth rates in the world. The European tourists were arriving: first the artists and intellectuals who had been coming since the 1950s (Lawrence Durrell's Corfu; Henry Miller's Maroussi; Patrick Leigh Fermor's Mani), then the jet set, then the package holidays. The islands became the destination. Greece was discovered to be beautiful at approximately the moment it became prosperous enough to show itself off.

The culture was operating at a different frequency altogether. Mikis Theodorakis had written the Zorba the Greek soundtrack in 1964, which introduced his name to the world, but his real work was political: the Epitaphios song cycle, the settings of Ritsos and Elytis, the specific form of Greek popular music that fused rebetika with symphonic ambition and contemporary poetry. Melina Mercouri had won Best Actress at Cannes in 1960 for Never on Sunday, playing a Piraeus prostitute with more intellectual confidence than any of the men who visited her, and had become internationally the image of a Greece that was intelligent, sensual, and not remotely apologetic. Elytis was writing the work that would eventually win him his own Nobel, in 1979. Theodorakis, Mercouri, Seferis: three artists in the same decade, all figures of international importance, all products of this specific city and this specific culture.

Then April 21, 1967.

The coup happened at dawn, the way coups prefer to. The military officers who executed it — Papadopoulos, Makarezos, Pattakos, the colonels of history — arrested politicians, closed the parliament, imposed censorship, suspended constitutional rights. They had planned it as part of a NATO exercise and executed it before anyone understood what was happening. By morning it was done.

The cultural consequences were immediate. Theodorakis' music was banned — not just from broadcast but from possession; you could be arrested for owning a recording. Mercouri was stripped of her citizenship. Seferis, who had spent the junta's first years in silence, gave a statement to the BBC in March 1969 that was simultaneously the most restrained and most devastating act of resistance available to him: a few paragraphs of measured prose, concluding that this state of affairs could not continue. He died four years later. Forty thousand people attended his funeral in Athens, turning it into a demonstration.

The resistance was not primarily the work of diplomats and Nobel laureates. It was students, workers, the urban poor who had built the polykatoikia city and now found themselves living under martial law in it. The Polytechnic uprising of November 1973 was the most visible act of defiance: students occupied the National Technical University, set up a radio transmitter, broadcast appeals for the public to join them. On the morning of November 17, the junta sent a tank through the iron gates. The number of students killed remains disputed. The date is now a national memorial.

Eight months later, the junta collapsed. The Cyprus operation — in which the Greek military supported a coup in Nicosia that triggered the Turkish invasion — had produced a disaster too large to survive. Konstantinos Karamanlis flew back from Paris at two in the morning on July 24, 1974. The Metapolitefsi — the restoration of democracy — had begun.

What the seven years of the junta produced, paradoxically, was a generation of Athenians with an unusually intimate relationship with their own culture. When music is banned, people learn it by heart. When speech is suppressed, literature becomes political. When the official version of identity is enforced by violence, people discover what their identity actually is — which is always stranger and more complicated than the official version.

Greece in the 1960s had discovered it was extraordinary. The junta's years confirmed it by trying to take it away.

The Athenian character that visitors encounter now — ironical, resilient, suspicious of grandeur, capable of extraordinary warmth and equally extraordinary detachment — was forged partly in the economic miracle and partly in what followed it. A people who have known, within the span of a single generation, both the sensation of being the most admired country in Europe and the experience of living under military occupation develop a particular immunity to self-importance.

Seferis knew this before the junta. His Nobel speech, modest and precise, declined the apparatus of triumph. The prize, he suggested, belonged to the language — which had survived everything done to it, and remained, whatever happened, itself.

So did Athens.