Museum

Photos of George Grivas
Contributed by
Andreas Hutcheson The pictures were taken by an amateur photographer -my father- an officer in the Greek Army at the time. This is Easter 1964 so it would be a few years after Independence but still quite contemporary and show the hero status he enjoyed -and still does- in Greece.

	My fathers name is Spiros Archimandritis He was born in Athens in 1929, and was a teenager helping the resistance during the German occupation with my grandfather who had an illustrious carreer in the Greek Army as well. My father enlisted in the Greek Army -Artillery- in 1946 and saw action against the communist guerillas after which -1948 - he entered the Military School of Medicine and gained his commision in 1952 where he briefly saw action in Korea.
	In 1958 he studied Radiotherapy in London in Guy's Hospital where he met my mother Joan Hutcheson, a nurse then. They of course came back to live in Greece. He pioneered Radiotherapy for cancer treatment in Greece, not just in the Army but as a medical practitioner as a whole. During the turbulent years between 1964 and 1974 he was frequently mobilised due to the Cyprus issue. Shortly after his retirement he was in the Greek MoD committee on chemical weapons defence studies as the greek army never delt with the issue seriously until the Gulf War. Sadly my father passed away in 1993. Although the Greek Army never got involved directly in the Cypriot struggle against the British, Grivas was still hailed as a hero in Greece. Given that my father studied freely in England from 1958 till 1963 I guess the British government didn't have much of a bone to pick with the Greeks!
	Now my grandfather was involved in five wars altogether! He fought almost continually from 1912 till 1944. I am not making this up! He enlisted as an infantry private for the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, WWI, then he went into Military Academy in time to fight from 1919-22 in nowadays Turkey. Amongst that he joined the Allied expedition to suppress the Bolsheviks in the Odessa operation of the Greek Army. Unfortunately he got involved in politics too much and as an officer he was expelled from the army in 1936, only to gain his commision back in 1940 during mobilisation against the Italian invasion. When Greece fell to the German he assisted Allied and Greek troops out of Athens towards Crete and the Middle East. Then he carried on with helping covert radio signallers and general transport duties and safe-houses.

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Museum Curator : Peter Jordan