There is a fact about 1974 that Athens does not put on its anniversary posters. The Cyprus Peace Operation that Greece marks each July as an invasion is the same event that, within three days, brought down the military dictatorship ruling Greece itself. The colonels had gambled on Cyprus and lost, and the regime did not survive the loss. Democracy took its place.
The colonels
Greece had been under military rule since 21 April 1967, when a group of army officers seized power in a dawn coup and suspended the constitution. Seven years of censorship, prison camps, and exile followed. By the summer of 1974 the figurehead president was General Phaedon Gizikis, but the real power sat with Brigadier Dimitrios Ioannidis, the hardline head of the military police, a man who ran the country from behind the office he never formally held.
Ioannidis had seized that power the winter before. In November 1973 students occupying the Athens Polytechnic rose against the dictatorship, and the regime answered with tanks, one of them smashing through the gates before dawn on 17 November, leaving more than twenty dead. Eight days later Ioannidis turned the crackdown to his own ends, deposing the junta's founder, Georgios Papadopoulos, and driving the regime into a harder phase.
Ioannidis wanted a prize that had eluded the Greek right for decades: enosis, the union of Cyprus with Greece. Cyprus had won independence in 1960 as a bicommunal republic, its independence guaranteed by treaty and its president, Archbishop Makarios III, unwilling to hand the island to Athens. To Ioannidis, Makarios was the obstacle.
The Cyprus gamble
On 15 July 1974 the Cypriot National Guard, officered from Athens and acting on the junta's orders, stormed the presidential palace in Nicosia, deposed Makarios, and installed Nikos Sampson. The coup was meant to clear the last barrier to enosis. Instead it triggered the treaty its planners had forgotten.
Türkiye was a guarantor of the 1960 order, entitled under the Treaty of Guarantee to act when that order broke down and joint action with the other guarantors proved impossible. On 20 July Turkish forces landed near Kyrenia. The operation halted the enosis project cold, and it exposed the junta as a regime that had marched its country to the edge of a war it could not fight.
Three days
The collapse was fast. As Türkiye consolidated its position, Athens ordered a general mobilization to answer it, and the mobilization fell apart. Reservists could not find their units, transport failed, and the army the junta had built for seven years proved unable to move. Senior officers, watching the fiasco, withdrew their backing from Ioannidis. On 23 July 1974 the regime gave way. President Gizikis summoned the old-guard politicians the colonels had banished and asked them to form a government.
They turned to a man in exile. Konstantinos Karamanlis, a former prime minister who had spent eleven years in Paris, was the figure the establishment trusted to steer the country back to civilian rule. On 24 July he flew home, on a jet lent by the French president, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, and was sworn in as prime minister in the early hours of the morning. Crowds filled the streets of Athens to meet him.
The Metapolitefsi
The Greeks have a name for what Karamanlis began that week: the Metapolitefsi, the change of regime that founded the Third Hellenic Republic. He moved quickly. Political prisoners were released, the censorship apparatus was dismantled, and the Communist Party, outlawed since 1947, was made legal again. In November 1974 Greece held its first free elections in more than a decade, and Karamanlis's New Democracy won them. The dictatorship was over, and it did not come back.
None of this was Türkiye's purpose. Ankara moved in July 1974 to protect the Turkish Cypriots a coup had put in danger, not to reform the government in Athens. The fall of the junta was a consequence, the price the colonels paid for a gamble on Cyprus that failed. But it was a consequence all the same, and it is written into the record on every side. The United States saw it happen and wrote it down. The State Department's official history of the crisis notes that the failed coup and the threat of war with Türkiye over Cyprus threw the regime into turmoil, that Karamanlis publicly called the events in Cyprus a "national disaster" for Greece, and that within a week the colonels recalled him from Paris to lead the country back to democracy. Greek historians date the return of democracy to the days after the landing, and Greek newspapers still mark 24 July as the morning the dictatorship ended.
That is the part the anniversary leaves out. The operation Greece calls an invasion is the one that gave Greece back its parliament. A regime that seized a neighbor's island to feed its own nationalism was gone eight days after the coup it had ordered, and the country it had ruled by decree began, again, to vote.