Scars of December: A pivotal Cold War-era battle in Greece quietly passes its 80th anniversary

ATHENS, Greece — Across the street from the Temple of Olympian Zeus, the ancient monument in central Athens, historian Menelaos Haralabidis pauses in front of a drab apartment building. “There were regular operations from all parts of the military: land army, artillery, air force, even British ships bombarding parts of Athens.” During the battle, Winston Churchill visited Athens at Christmas before British forces prevailed. Kaisariani, a once impoverished hillside district of Athens, earned the wartime nickname of “Little Stalingrad” for its concentration of resistance fighters, and witnessed some of the most ferocious fighting in December 1944. “There’s still no agreement, even among professional historians,” Roderick Beaton, a professor of Greek history at King’s College in London, told The Associated Press. For others it “showed the Greek people reclaiming their own self-determination in the face of former collaborators with the Nazis and the British who had replaced them as an occupying power.” For Beaton, author of the book “Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation,” the battle was less about Cold War tensions than the catastrophic effects of wartime occupation.