Joanna Eleftheriou
Martyrs, Heroes

“He’s a Communist, you know,” Fay yelled into my ear over an electric guitar, as we swayed to the music of Vasilis Papakonstantinou. Her face was lit intermittently by swirling lights from the stage. She may have taken a drag from her lit cigarette before adding “They all are.” We were fifteen, both born abroad to Greek and Cypriot parents, and still new to Cyprus, to Greek rock music, and Greek politics. Only a few years before, I had been living in New York City, where I’d learned to fear Gaddafi, the USSR, AIDS, a nuclear holocaust, and drugs. I heard Greek in church, at family gatherings, and at home when my parents didn’t want my brother and me to understand. Of course, I knew enough to say things like θέλω σοκολάτα so my request wouldn’t trigger the toddler to lobby for chocolate, or είμαι γουρουνάκι. Getting little Dino to say “I am a piglet” is probably the meanest big-sister thing I ever did.

But once I was in middle school and Dino was in pre-K, everything turned upside down; my immigrant father made us (my mother, brother, and me) into American immigrants to his native Cyprus; Dino went to public school and learned to speak Greek with perfect Cypriot inflection; I became fluent because Greek was all around us, and I listened attentively—especially to the radio. I had found the Papakonstantinou-Dalaras at Herodion cassettes in my dad’s car when I was fourteen, loved every song, and proceeded to seek channels that would provide more music like that. I found a lot of Papakonstantinou on the left-wing radio station Astra 92.8. Thirty years later, certain words—κατάστρωμα, τανάλια, αρμόδιος, εξουσία, παπιγιόν¹—recall into my mind the Papakonstantinou song that added them to my vocabulary.

I loved the music so much I remained a fan in spite of Fay’s whisper that the artist was a communist. The line χαιρετίσματα στην εξουσία² was everything I sought in a celebrity: sneering at authority, laughing at the bowties of decision-makers with “εξουσία,” or the decision-making authority most teenagers resent adults for wielding. For a few Cyprus pounds, I bought pirated cassettes of Papakonstantinou’s music, such as «Εχθρός Λαός»,³ which included lines by Mauthausen survivor and father of Greek playwriting Iakovos Kambanellis: “Αρνιέμαι, αρνιέμαι, αρνιέμαι / να είσαι συ και να μην είμαι εγώ / που τη δική μου μοίρα διαφεντεύεις… Αρνιέμαι, αρνιέμαι, αρνιέμαι / οι άλλοι να βαστάνε τα σκοινιά / αρνιέμαι να με κάνουν o’τι θένε, / αρνιέμαι να πνιγώ στην καταχνιά.”⁴

As a teenager, I loved those lines for giving words to my adolescent sense that others “held the ropes,” and for expressing the frustration most teenagers feel as they outgrow rules and restrictions designed to keep kids safe. On that same cassette, Ο Εχθρός Λαός, Papakonstantinou sings a mournful ode to Sotiris Petroulas. I wondered about the “martyrs” and “heroes” in that haunting song. The Greek word for hero had only come up when we studied 1821—Karaiskakis, Diakos, Kolokotronis. The word martyr was used for saints: St. Catherine, St. Marina, St. Demetrios, St. John. As an undergraduate at Cornell, I studied with Gail Holst-Warhaft, who introduced me to some of the history behind Mikis Theodorakis’s work. Eventually, I began to understand their larger context—class warfare, western imperialism, and structures of exploitation. I learned about twentieth-century Greeks who gave their lives for bread, education, freedom.

At my Greek American day-school, we had learned a little bit about twentieth century heroism; we had reenacted the heroic “NO” of the dictator Metaxas to Mussolini in 1940 and celebrated the victory of Greek forces against the Italian fascists. But we never learned about the heroes who were imprisoned and tortured for resisting Metaxas’s oppressive regime. We sang many of Mikis Theodorakis’s songs in New York, but we never learned that Theodorakis was jailed, tortured, and exiled for his leftist work. I only gradually began to learn of “martyrs, heroes” who fought for people without wealth, and only this year did I learn of a Greek American who, like them, was martyred in the struggle for equality and justice, especially for people without inherited wealth.

In 2025, I was looking for recent fiction for a lesson on characterization that I’d be teaching, when I came across the short story “The Mountains Are Black” by Natalie Bakopoulos. That short story led me to her sources, most importantly Zeese Papanikolas’s Buried Unsung: Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre, with a foreword by Wallace Stegner.⁵ I learned about Louis Tikas (born Elias Spantidakis in Ottoman Crete in 1886), who fought as a labor organizer for workers to have health, food, freedom, safety, and rest. He was killed in 1914 by the Colorado National Guard, a hero and a martyr who died fighting for the same values of freedom that other heroes had—values I’ve only espoused from the comforts of my writing desk. In the hundreds (thousands?) of hours I ’ve spent in Greek American churches, schools, ceremonies, and festivals, I’ve never heard of martyrs for the collective good like the Greek American hero Louis Tikas. I have heard repetition. I have heard men praised for “working hard” when the work resulted in wealth and influence, as if that mattered the way freedom, peace, and equality matter—as if Jesus Christ had preached personal responsibility rather than wealth rejection. As if Jesus Christ had extolled the moneylenders instead of destroying their tables and giving out free healthcare, free bread, and free educational sermons.

As a teen, I’d loved Vasilis Papakonstantinou’s song «Πόρτο Ρίκο» for its protagonist’s determination to bring the world στα μέτρα μας πριν να μας φέρει εκείνος στα δικά του.⁶ The song’s “I” states the speaker doesn’t recall if the dead man’s name was Ernesto or Niko. Only this year did I learn that he means Ernesto Che Guevara or Nikos Beloyiannis, linking up the Greek fight for worker rights and justice with the fight for freedom, equality, and justice in the Americas.

Vasilis Papakonstantinou’s 1995 concert was the first concert I ever attended. The king of Greek rock sings the same songs still, along with new ones. Thirty years (almost to the day) after I first swayed to “Che Guevara” and “So long, Power!” I attend again, and I don’t love the music in spite of the artist’s political beliefs, but because of them. His words express the person I want to be, the person who seeks a way to be Greek in America as a lesbian leftist who aspires not to wealth but to justice, not to ethnic supremacy but to equality.

I know there are Greek Americans who resist imperialism, who resist corporate oppression and oligarchy, and who prioritize relief for oppressed people like the people of Palestine, and who fight for those who suffer injustices in Greece and in the United States. Who believe in bread, education, freedom. I don’t yet know where they are.

January 23, 2026

Joanna Eleftheriou is the author of the essay collection This Way Back.Her essays, poems, and translations appear in such publications as Crab Orchard Review, Arts & Letters, The Journal of Modern Greek Studies, and Sweeter Voices Still: An LGBTQ Anthology from Middle America. She teaches at Christopher Newport University and the Writing Workshops in Greece.

Notes

¹ Deck, pliers, authority, power, bowtie.

² So long, power! Or Greetings, authority!

³ The Enemy People.

⁴ I refuse, I refuse, I refuse / for it to be you rather than me / who commands my fate / … I refuse, I refuse, I refuse / for others to hold the ropes / I refuse to drown in the mist.

⁵ While writing this essay, I learned that other artists, like the visual artist Lindsay Hand, have also produced important work building on Papanikolas and others. But none of it reached me until 2025. This caused me to reflect on how hard I worked, in Greek class in New York before I left, to follow the teacher’s instruction about history—εικονομαχίες (iconoclast disputes), and names like Diocletian and Justinian, and the mutual excommunication of the Pope and Patriarch. I still recall some of the nuances of their fights about the bread in holy communion and the filio que. I remember the classroom I was in back in the 1980s, and how hard I worked looking up several words in every paragraph I read in the textbook from Greece, struggling to comprehend and retain the history of the Byzantine Empire over a thousand years ago. I think I would have been better served learning the history of Greek Americans and their fight for labor rights.

⁶ Into our dimensions before it changes us, to fit its own dimensions.