Markos Vafiades

Markos Vafiades was a prominent figure of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) during the Greek Resistance and the Greek Civil War. He was born in Tosya, Ottoman Empire (now in Turkey) in 1906 to a family of Greek refugees from Chios. He moved to Thessaloniki in 1923 and joined the Young Communist League of Greece (OKNE) in 1928. He was arrested and exiled several times by the Greek authorities for his political activities. He escaped from the island of Gavdos in 1941 and became involved in the underground resistance against the Nazi occupation of Greece. He rose to the rank of general and commander of the Greek People's Liberation Army (ELAS) in Macedonia. He led the liberation of Thessaloniki in October 1944 and saved thousands of Greek Jews from the Nazis. He also became the head of the Provisional Democratic Government, a communist-led rival administration to the Greek government, in December 1947. He fought against the Greek army and the British and American forces in the civil war that followed the liberation. He was forced to retreat to the mountains of northern Greece and Albania, where he faced internal opposition from the KKE leadership. He was dismissed from his posts in February 1949 and exiled to Tashkent, Soviet Union. He returned to Greece in 1961 and was arrested again. He was released in 1963 and became a critic of the KKE's Stalinist policies. He supported the democratic transition of Greece after the fall of the military junta in 1974. He became a political supporter of Andreas Papandreou and the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK). He was honorarily elected to the Greek parliament in 1989 and 1990. He died of heart failure in Athens in 1992. He is remembered as a hero of the Greek left and a symbol of the resistance and the civil war.