Helen Vlachos

Helen Vlachos was a Greek journalist, newspaper publishing heiress, proprietor, and anti-junta activist. She was the daughter of Georgios Vlachos, who founded Kathimerini, one of Greece's premier newspapers, in 1919. She worked as a journalist in her father's newspaper and covered the Berlin Olympics in 1936. During World War II, her father refused to cooperate with the Nazi occupation government and closed down Kathimerini. During the war she worked as a nurse. After the war, Helen Vlachos resumed working in her father's newspaper as a columnist. Her column was simply titled "E", for "Eleni", her name in Greek. She became very popular in Greece because she often used to criticise the government from her column. When her father died in 1951 she took ownership of Kathimerini (Daily) and expanded it by publishing the afternoon edition of the paper under the name Mesimvrini (Noon edition). She published Eikones (Pictures), which was an illustrated magazine and the first of its kind in Greece. She also launched Ekdosis Galaxia (English, "galaxy publishers"), a quality paperback imprint, which became collectible. She had been a supporter of the monarchy and the Greek right-wing parties. Helen Vlachos's finest hour undoubtedly came with the establishment of the colonels' dictatorship in April 1967. She dealt the usurpers a crushing blow by immediately and without hesitation closing down her presses in protest against the coup and the ensuing censorship, thereby delivering a devastating blow to any hopes the junta may have entertained of co-opting elements of the constitutional Right in their support. Although the presses were silent, Vlachos continued to hold court in the Kathimerini building in Socrates Street, in Athens, and to ridicule the pretensions of the military usurpers who proceeded to misgovern Greece by means at once brutal and absurd. Her description (wholly deserved) of Brigadier Stylianos Pattakos as "a clown" and other outspoken criticisms of the regime led to her being placed under house arrest in October that year. From this she made a daring escape in December 1967, a few days after King Constantine's abortive counter-coup. She dyed her hair with shoe polish and travelled on a false passport; her arrival in London was the occasion for a further blast of anti-junta publicity throughout the world. Unlike the leading politician of the Right, Konstantinos Karamanlis, who, while making his distaste for the junta clear, for the most part chose while in exile to keep his own counsel during the seven years of the dictatorship, Helen Vlachos immediately immersed herself in a non-stop publicity campaign against the colonels, a struggle in which she was joined by two other redoubtable women opponents of the regime, Melina Mercouri, the actress, and Amalia Fleming, the Greek widow of the discoverer of penicillin, Sir Alexander Fleming. For her refusal to acquiesce to the Greek junta's demands that she censor her publications, her resistance against the regime of the colonels, and her contributions to freedom of the press, she was posthumously recognised as one of the World Press Freedom Heroes by the International Press Institute. She died on 14 October 1995 in Athens, aged 84. She received a state funeral attended by political leaders and hundreds of journalists.